Kevin Drum

Former MoJo colleague Ben Dreyfuss writes about Twitter:

The proliferation of super large accounts is quietly the biggest problem on this site. Everyone is one retweet away from being seen out of context by millions of people with a completely different timeline.

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) February 8, 2021

Are super large accounts the biggest problem with Twitter? I don't know that I'd go that far. But Ben is right that it's a big problem.

Here's why. All of us on Twitter follow a different set of accounts. That means each of us is responding to a different version of reality when we tweet something. I read my timeline and may feel that it represents "what Twitter is thinking," but all it really represents is what the people I follow are thinking. Anything I tweet has to be understood in that context.

But if my post is retweeted by a big account to a couple million people with an entirely different view of reality, then I can be in big trouble. The real issue might be that Mr. Big and I just have a slightly different view of what's really happening out in the world, which is fairly trivial. But this won't even occur to Big's followers. They'll just immediately pile on, with consequences that are hard to predict.

In a sense, this is nothing more than another example of the fact that we're all increasingly trapped in little news bubbles of our own making. We have such different views of the world that it's all but impossible to agree on even a basic set of facts to start from. And often we don't even really know it.

This is from a story in the Washington Post a few weeks ago about the rise in homicides in 2020:

The grim body count isn’t quite over yet, but the data collected so far is stark — a 20.9 percent increase in killings nationwide, in the first nine months of the year, according to the FBI.

....Experts agree the pandemic has played a huge role in the rise in killings, but it has also probably contributed to a significant decrease in nonviolent crimes, which the FBI data shows fell by more than 8 percent in the first nine months of the year, possibly because there were fewer people on the street, fewer stores open for business and fewer crimes of opportunity available.

A huge rise in the murder rate is obviously bad news, but it's paradoxically good news too. The trendline for national crime rates never changes by more than a few percentage points a year, which means that a 20.9% increase is plainly a huge outlier. Maybe it was prompted by the George Floyd protests. Maybe it was prompted by the pandemic. But whatever it was, there's no chance that it represents a genuine change in long-term crime trends. This is confirmed by the fact that nonviolent crime was down and—if I remember this correctly—that violent crime other than murder was also down (or at most very slightly up.)

Crime rates have been unusually spiky over the past few years, and it's hard to extract much of a signal from all the noise. We need to figure out why the murder rate is up, but we should also expect that in 2021 it will probably go right back down.

In honor of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers winning the Super Bowl, here's a picture of the Pirate Tower in Laguna Beach. It's a 1-second exposure near sunset, which gives the ocean surf a misty look.

Needless to say, this is not actually a pirate tower. It's a stairway. There's a house at the top, and the eccentric dude who built it decided he wanted more than just the usual set of wooden steps when he went down to the beach. He decided on a French chateau look, and back in 1926 I guess there was no one around to tell him he couldn't do it.

One of my favorite political parables comes from the 1980 election. What happened is that Ronald Reagan loudly and persistently promised that a big supply-side tax cut would get us out of the recession and supercharge the economy. A few years later the economy recovered—as it was bound to do eventually—and Reagan was able to loudly and persistently take credit for it. The result was morning in America and a landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984.

The lesson here is not that tax cuts supercharged the economy. They were probably #4 or #5 on a list that includes Paul Volcker lowering interest rates; oil prices coming down; big deficit spending; and devaluation of the dollar. The lesson is to loudly claim that you're doing something to save the economy and then wait around for the economy to recover. Then you can credibly claim that it was your policies that rescued the country.

Democrats don't do this much, and it's nice to see that change this year. Joe Biden and the liberal commentariat are pretty united in their insistence that the economy is in dire shape and the Democrats' $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill will rescue us. Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't. But if the economy is doing well in 2022, Democrats are well set up to take credit for it. Ditto for 2024.

And if the economy isn't in great shape in 2022? Then it probably doesn't matter. In other words, talking up the coronavirus bill has a big upside and no downside. So talk away.

There's nothing like a shiny new report from the Congressional Budget Office to start off the week. Today, CBO released its analysis of raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and it's a dog's breakfast.

Why? Because some of the analysis is for the cumulative effects through 2031 while other parts are for the one-year effect in 2025. The best I can do is to divide the cumulative effects by ten which should roughly produce one-year estimates for 2025 that are comparable to each other. Here you go:

• 20+ million people will receive $51 billion in higher pay. That's about $2,000 per person.
• 1.4 million people will receive $17.5 billion in lower pay due to reduced employment. That's about $12,000 per person.
• 0.9 million people will be lifted out of poverty.
• The budget deficit will grow by $5 billion.
  
• Effects on GDP, interest rates, and the labor-capital income ratio would be tiny.

This is roughly comparable to the consensus of recent literature in the minimum wage field. Basically, a large number of people get a small increase in pay while a small number of people get a large decrease in pay. This is the basic tradeoff, and there's not a lot more that economic analysis can tell us. At this point, it's strictly a matter of values. Do you think the overall benefit is greater than the overall loss? Or not?

I was a little disappointed that CBO didn't produce a table showing these figures for various changes in the minimum wage. I know that's not their job (their job is to analyze legislation as written), but I would have been interested in their guess at the tradeoffs at different levels of the minimum wage.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I went to one of my favorite takeout places for lunch today. Normally, the drive-through line takes about 20 minutes on a Sunday afternoon, but today it was empty. I was the only person there.

From this single data point I conclude that (a) Super Bowl parties are in full swing this year, and (b) we will see a modest uptick in COVID-19 cases in a week or two.

(Why modest? Because Super Bowl parties are only a few hours long, not a whole week or even a weekend.)

It's hard to believe that I find myself rooting for Tom Brady in the Super Bowl, but there you have it. There's just something I can't resist about old folks proving they still have it.

Speaking of, Serena Williams isn't quite in her 40s yet, but she'll be looking once again for her 24th grand slam singles title starting tomorrow at the Australian Open. Hooray for us fall chickens!

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 6. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How much government debt is too much? This is once again a live subject because President Biden's coronavirus bill will cost $1.9 trillion—on top of the $3.5 trillion we've already spent—and at least a few economists worry that we're adding to our debt too fast, which could bring on a bout of high inflation.

Now, even the cautious economists mostly agree that the risk of doing too little is greater than the risk of doing too much. So if we're unsure, then the full $1.9 trillion is the way to go. Progressive pundits pretty unanimously agree.

And so do I. On the other hand, I'm a little nervous about the seemingly casual attitude among some progressives about government debt. It's one thing to (maybe) overspend during an unprecedented pandemic, but it's another thing to shrug your shoulders and basically say that debt doesn't matter and we should all get over it. And if inflation heats up, hey, all we have to do is engineer a recession to show it who's boss, just like Paul Volcker did. This all seems just a little too world-weary to me.

On the third hand, there's this:

Japan has had massively higher debt than the US for the past two decades, and the price they've paid for this is . . . close to nothing. Japan, like the US, issues its own currency, which helps, and they have a culture of saving that supports their debt. The US, however, has not just its own currency, but the best, most desirable currency in the world. Also, our debt service is low; we have no trouble selling all the treasury bonds we want; and not only is inflation low, but inflationary expectations are low too. So, if anything, it seems we're even better placed than Japan to support a far higher debt load than we currently have.

Beyond this, there are lots of econometric arguments about what levels of debt are sustainable, and obviously I don't have the chops to referee this. Still, while I retain an old-school feeling that we should take the national debt seriously, there's always Japan sitting around telling me not to worry so much. We have a very long way to go before our national debt becomes a serious problem.