Kevin Drum

Today in the New York Times, Pamela Paul introduces us to Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion. He thinks we have a problem:

“We disagree badly: Our arguments are painful and useless.” We spend more time vilifying, undermining and nullifying those we disagree with than opening or changing their minds. If more people took their cues from the world of competitive debate, he argues in a recent book, it would be easier to get people to reconsider their views or at least consider those of others.

You may think I have no standing to disagree with this. Au contraire! It so happens that both my parents were university debate champions back in the day, and I'm quite sure that both of them would disagree with Bo Seo in the strongest possible terms.

(What do you say about that, mom? Give me a call.)

Formal debate is all about introducing facts—as many as possible—and then refuting them. In real life, this is not called debate, it's called the most boring thing in the entire world. It persuades no one. I've been doing it for 20 years and, as far as I can tell, have persuaded virtually no one of anything.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, almost literally doesn't know any facts. Nor can he refute them in any rational way. But he is practically a cult leader.

Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview. They are persuaded by "arguments" that are beneficial to them—perhaps monetarily, perhaps in conferring status, perhaps in vilifying people they already didn't like. This is how you win in real life.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're the exception. Oh, you might be. The odds are a thousand to one against, but there are a few of you. The other 999, however, from PhDs down to ninth-grade dropouts, have no interest in dull facts and have no way of evaluating them anyway. They just want their biases confirmed and their status in the world elevated. Do that, and you too can win the presidency.

Via the New York Times, here's a chart from Child Trends that shows how much the social safety net has reduced child poverty over the past 35 years:

Before 1986 the social safety net was almost nonexistent for children. Altogether, it reduced child poverty by only 1%.

• In 1986, Ronald Reagan's Tax Reform Act increased the Earned Income Tax Credit, and by 1993 the safety net was responsible for a reduction in child poverty of 9%.
• In 1993, Bill Clinton increased the EITC again, and by 1996 the safety net was responsible for a reduction in child poverty of 18%.
• In 1996 Clinton passed welfare reform and by 2017 the safety net was responsible for a reduction in child poverty of 36%.
• In 2017 Donald Trump passed the 2017 Tax Act, which included an expansion of the Child Tax Credit. By 2019 the safety net was responsible for a reduction in child poverty of 44%.

There were other things along the way, some permanent, some not. But the bottom line is simple: today about 11% of children live in poverty. Without the social safety net erected over the past 35 years, that number would be 21%. That's 7.6 million children who no longer live in poverty thanks to federal and state safety net programs.

POSTSCRIPT: The "poverty line" is strictly a cash measure, so it's worth pointing out that tens of millions of children have also been helped by Bill Clinton's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Free health care doesn't get counted in the poverty calculations, though.

I never know how seriously to take these things, but for what it's worth here are how the ten biggest countries in the world fared on the latest Economic Freedom ratings from the Fraser Institute:

Here are the 25 biggest countries:

Thanks to the pandemic everybody's scores took a bit of a hit in 2020. But I'm sure that next year we'll find out that after shaking off all the COVID-19 lockdowns the world will once again be a freer place.

A few months ago Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton in federal court for—

Well, for being mean to him, I guess. This is decidedly not a federal crime, but Trump hoped to get a favorable hearing anyway by filing his suit in a Florida district where the only judge was Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who recently ruled for him in his plea for a special master in the Mar-a-Lago case. But through a quirk of scheduling the case ended up instead with a non-Trump judge who was decidedly not amused by Trump's filing. Here are a few of the best lines from Judge Donald Middlebrooks' dismissal of the entire case:

What the Amended Complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances.

To say that Plaintiff’s 193-page, 819-paragraph Amended Complaint is excessive in length would be putting things mildly.

Knowledge that Florida is a state in the United States does not equate to knowledge that Defendants’ actions will have consequences in Florida.

It is not simply that I find the Amended Complaint “inadequate in any respect”; it is inadequate in nearly every respect.

At its core, the problem with Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint is that Plaintiff is not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm; instead, he is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him.

I wonder: Is Aileen Cannon at all embarrassed by the fact that Trump apparently expects her to rule in his favor like an old time machine pol no matter how stupid his case is? Because this was a pretty stupid case indeed.

Even in sad times, you always have to keep a lookout for giant cats. When you least expect them, there they are.

Remember last week that Michigan Republicans were refusing to put an abortion-rights initiative on the ballot because of supposed problems with "formatting and spacing"? This was as ridiculous as it sounds, little more than a fuck you to liberals.

Well, the Michigan Supreme Court has put the initiative on the ballot by a vote of 5-2.

So hooray, right? Sure. But keep in mind that this was practically a party-line vote. The four Democrats all voted to put the initiative on the ballot, and two out of three Republicans voted against. There was one (1) crossover out of seven justices: Elizabeth Clement, a Republican who voted in favor of the initiative. However, Wikipedia reports that "Clement was booed at the Michigan Republican Convention in August 2018," so I have some doubts about how much of a Republican she really is.

Larry Summers makes the case on Twitter that inflation is stubbornly here to stay unless the Fed takes aggressive action. He has six arguments:

1. Inflation expectations may still be anchored, but this is largely based on the belief that we're headed toward a recession.
2. Core inflation is robust and the labor market is tight.
3. The economy is overheated.
4. Historically, it's been impossible to produce a "soft landing."
5. Risk management suggests that inflation is our biggest problem. If anything, we should err on the side of aggressive action to bring it down.
6. Nobody really understands inflation anyway.

Let's take these one by one.

1. Maybe! There aren't very many good recession predictors, but the good ol' inverted yield curve seems to do the best job. Here it is:

The inverted yield curve has correctly predicted the past four recessions, and right now it's predicting another one in the early part of next year.

2. Here is core inflation:

It seems to have peaked at the beginning of 2022 and is now slowly receding.

As for the labor market, the data is inconclusive. Unemployment is at 3.7%, which suggests tightness. On the other hand, the labor force participation rate is still below its pre-pandemic level; weekly hours have been declining; and real wages have been falling for two years. This all suggests a little bit of looseness. Overall, the labor market appears to be close to full employment, but perhaps not quite there.

3. Here is GDP vs. potential GDP:

We have not yet hit potential GDP, let alone crossed it. This suggests the economy isn't overheated. On the other hand, we're pretty close. And inflation is high, which is the other classic sign of an overheated economy.

4. Soft landings are indeed difficult to pull off. On the other hand, it's not clear how hard we've ever tried to engineer one. The Fed tends to respond to inflation and only inflation. That's always likely to produce a hard landing.

5 & 6. Which side we should err on depends a lot on which side of the economic divide you're on. If you're old and rich, then yes, we should kill inflation wherever it appears. But if you're young and in danger of losing your job, maybe you think inflation is not the worst thing in the world.

FINAL SCORE: Really, Summers only made testable statements in 1, 2, and 3. And they're close calls. #1 supports his guess about anchored inflation expectations. #2 doesn't support his statement about core PCE being robust, and is half right about the tight labor market. #3 doesn't yet support his belief that the economy is overheated, but it's close. #4 is hard to argue with, but why not try anyway?

So it looks to me like we're on a knife edge. We probably are headed for a recession, but it's not clear to me that the rest of the data supports the notion that the Fed needs to engineer a deeper recession than we're already going to have anyway. They should pull back a bit and let the economy lose steam on its own.

From the Consumer Expenditure Survey, here is the growth rate of every product category from 2019 through 2021:

A little surprisingly, there are several categories that are still way below their pre-pandemic levels: restaurants, apparel, personal care, and education.

I understand why restaurants and education might still be trying to claw their way back up, but what's the deal with apparel and personal care? Why are people still spending way less on clothing than they used to? Is this just a consequence of having fewer cocktail parties and concerts and so forth? I guess we'll find out a year from now when the 2022 numbers are released.

Queen Elizabeth II has died, which means that Prince Charles finally becomes King Charles. But what number will he be?

We've already had King Charles I, who got into a fight with the Trumpists of his time and was eventually beheaded by their rump in 1649.

After a few years had gone by the Brits began to feel a little bad about what they'd done to Charles, so in 1660 they texted his son an invitation to come back if he'd promise to be nice. He did, and became King Charles II a few days later. Charles II presided over the founding of the Royal Society, the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, the discovery of gravity, his wife's inability to produce an heir, his long affair with Nell Gwyn, and just generally a period of merriment and good times.

By the end of his reign, however, the British people were exhausted by kings named Charles, so they took a little break and then decided to have a run of Georges. This means Prince Charles is now King Charles III.

However, what's really important is how we can use the queen's death to stick yet another fork into Prince Harry. Here is the Daily Mail:

Flight data shows that Harry didn't make it to Balmoral in time to say goodbye! Take that, Harry!

In other news, the Mail tells us all about the code names that have now been activated:

Operation Unicorn will transport the queen's coffin back to London, with Operation Overstudy held in waiting in case the journey is made by air. This will be followed tomorrow by Operation Spring Tide, which spells out the details for Prince Charles' accession to the throne. These are all subsumed under the master plan named Operation London Bridge, details of which have been obtained EXCLUSIVELY BY POLITICO.

By the way, Prince William, now the heir to the throne, inherits his father's title of Duke of Cornwall, along with an income of about £20 million per year.

So there you have it. The queen is dead, long live the king. Plus we need to change the title of the national anthem.

This picture was taken at La Defense in Paris. Stop me if I'm wrong, but it's the starship Enterprise, right? And it's connected to the building via part of the Starfleet emblem. Or am I losing my mind?