Kevin Drum

Diane Ravitch points us to a new study from Paul Peterson and Danish Shakeel that takes a look at student achievement over the past 50 years:

Our data consist of more than 7 million student test scores on 160 intertemporally linked math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. student cohorts born between 1954 and 2007.

....We estimate trends separately by testing program, subject, and grade level and report the median rather than average result to avoid giving undue importance to outliers.

We report changes in student achievement over time in standard deviation units....We interpret a difference of 25 percent of a standard deviation as equivalent to one year of learning.

That's all fine, but the news is not quite as good as their study suggests. As usual I'll focus on reading since that's more representative of general learning:

Here's the key thing to look at: gains in elementary school don't matter unless they're sustained throughout the entire 12 years of primary schooling. In the end, the only thing that matters is how well kids are doing by the time they graduate and enter the workplace.

So take a look at high school. Over the course of 50 years, white kids have improved by 0.6 grade levels. That's barely noticeable.¹

The results for Black kids are more impressive at first glance: they've improved by 2.2 grade levels. However, the bulk of that improvement came in the first two decades of our 50-year period. Peterson and Shakeel don't present their data over time, but of the five tests they use in their analysis only one goes back 50 years: the long-term NAEP. Here's what that test shows:

Black students made big gains in the '80s, but since 1990 the Black-white gap (shown by the green bars) has been nearly flat.²

And in case you're wondering, ending the chart at 2012 is not a typo. For some reason the NAEP folks haven't conducted the long-term test for 17-year-olds since then. I don't know why. However, in 2020 we got results for 13-year-olds and the Black-white gap had widened compared to 2012. There's every reason to think the same thing happened among 17-year-olds.

¹Though it's certainly better than a decline, which is what an awful lot of people believe has happened in primary education ever since the hippies took over.

²Since 1990, the average score for white kids has gone down two points and the average score for Black kids has gone up two points. That's basically nothing.

Here is Joe Biden's approval level compared to the three most recent presidents:¹

Biden looks pretty average for this point in time. Of course, all three of these other presidents got whomped in their first midterm election, so Democrats might not consider this a huge morale booster. On the other hand, Biden's recent triumphs seem to be helping him: he's gone from 38% approval in July to 44% in August. Can he leverage Dark Brandon and semi-fascism into a 50% approval rating in September?

¹I excluded George Bush from this list because his approval rating at this point in his presidency was still artificially sky high thanks to 9/11.

Novak Djokovic is the best male tennis player in the world. He would very likely win the upcoming US Open if he were able to play in it. But he can't. US immigration rules require that foreigners can enter the country only if they've been vaccinated against COVID, and Djokovic has steadfastly refused to do that.

Vinay Prasad says this is ridiculous:

Djokovic is one of the best tennis players of all time. He is currently vying for most majors of any champion (21 to date), competing with Rafael Nadal (22) and Roger Federer (20). But there will forever be an asterisk next to those comparisons because Djokovic is banned from entering the U.S. to compete in this year’s U.S. Open because of a byzantine rule that non-U.S. citizens cannot enter the country without proof of vaccination.

This rule makes no sense from a medical or public health standpoint. Consider the facts. Djokovic is 35 years old, and he is in terrific health. He has had and recovered from Covid-19 twice. This—and the fact that current variants are less lethal than prior strains—means that Djokovic’s odds of doing well were he to get sick with Covid-19 again are remarkably good, and lower than his risk of seasonal influenza.

....Now consider Djokovic’s risk to others. At least 140 million Americans have had and recovered from Covid-19 as of January (this number is higher today), and both vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the disease. Data shows, when infected, that vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals shed virus at similar rates and for similar durations. Forcing Djokovic to get vaccinated won’t protect others. Sars-cov-2 will circulate in the United States for a thousand years whether we let Djokovic in, or keep him out forever.

Then, there are the absurd contradictions in our current rules. Unvaccinated American citizens can move freely in and out of the country without testing. Unvaccinated people can pack the stadium to watch this year’s U.S. Open, where face masks are optional. There is no vaccine or testing requirement to attend. Worst of all, Novak Djokovic competed in last year’s U.S. Open, where he made the finals before the travel rule barring his entry was in place.

Some of this is a little iffy, but let's go ahead and accept it all as true. It's close enough. In fact, there's an additional consideration that makes Prasad's case even stronger: Djokovic is OK with daily testing, which means that in practice he'd probably be safer than folks who have been vaccinated.

But despite all this, Prasad is still wrong. Whether it makes sense or not, the US has a rule in place. Nor is this rule byzantine in any way. It's simple: if you want to enter the country and you aren't a US citizen, you have to be vaccinated. Everyone is required to follow this rule.

So the real question is whether a celebrity like Djokovic should get a special exemption, and the obvious answer is no. Just because you're famous doesn't mean you get a pass on obeying the law, even if you think the law is stupid.

POSTSCRIPT: And the law is stupid. Most likely we should just suspend it. At the very least we should follow the lead of most other countries and require either vaccination or testing for entry. That would put the whole thing to rest and wouldn't endanger anyone.

I've been occupied with other stuff all day, so I haven't written anything for the blog. There's more to it than that, though: The news continues to be dominated by our village idiot and his chamber of secrets, and I hardly feel like there's much to say about that. At this point, the only thing I'm really curious about is why Trump was so intent on keeping all this top secret stuff in the face of repeated demands to turn it over. But I suspect we'll never find out for sure.

Anyway, a reader asked how COVID-19 was going these days, so here you go. To make up for my laziness today, I have charts for both COVID and monkeypox. You're welcome.

First up is COVID. After the big Omicron surge at the beginning of the year, the COVID death rate plummeted to just under one per million. Since then it's slowly climbed to 1.5 per million:

Our cumulative death rate from COVID is one of the highest in the world, but our current death rate (shown in the chart) is sort of middling. COVID isn't going away, but it isn't getting any better, either.

Monkeypox doesn't kill people, so we have to look at cases instead. Our current case rate is pretty much the highest in the world, but our cumulative case rate is . . . also pretty bad:

Take this chart with a big grain of salt since it depends on how much testing is being done in different countries. We don't know that, which is bad enough, but we do know that the testing rate is fairly low, which is even worse. It's quite possible the United States is considerably better or considerably worse than this chart shows.

This is Hilbert on the second-story balcony looking down upon all that he surveys. And do you know who's king of it?

According to Penn Wharton, the distribution of benefits from President Biden's student loan forgiveness program looks like this:

About three-quarters of the benefit goes to working and middle-class families. One-quarter goes to the upper middle class.

Because it's paid for out of the general fund, which is mostly individual income tax receipts, the loan forgiveness program is funded almost entirely by the top quintile. The cost amounts to roughly $50 billion per year, or about 0.8% of the entire federal budget.

The latest from Texas:

A federal judge in Texas on Thursday struck down a state law barring adults under 21 from carrying handguns, ruling that the age limit violated the Second Amendment. U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman said the Constitution didn’t put an age restriction on the right to bear arms, meaning adults 18 to 20 shouldn’t be prevented from carrying handguns outside the home.

Even the lunatics who run Texas didn't want teens carrying handguns around, but a Texas court told them that this was too damn sensible. There was just no good reason not to let teenagers pack all the heat they want.

So even Texas now has to live with the crackpottery of the courts they've created. I guess that's fully deserved, but still. Who will rid us of these turbulent jurists?

The PCE inflation rate for July was released today and it showed that inflation has slowed almost to zero:

The change from June was -0.8% at an annualized rate. The change in core PCE was +1.0%. As usual, since these are volatile numbers, the trendline gives the best indication of what's really going on.

On a year-over-year basis, the PCE inflation rate was 6.3% and the core PCE inflation rate was 4.6%.

Consumer spending remained pretty flat last month. Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending has increased only about 0.6% over the past six months.

This is a bit of Queen Anne's Lace along the road to Laguna Beach.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports today that corporate profits in the second quarter were up 8.1% compared to 2021. That's true as far as it goes, but nominal thinking doesn't get you very far. Like all of us, corporations are affected by inflation, and when you account for that profits were down 0.4%:

In better news, GDP growth in the second quarter was revised upward a bit. If you use an average of GDP and GDI, economic growth is now estimated at 0.1% in the first quarter and 0.4% in the second quarter. No negative growth quarters at all!