Kevin Drum

The Kyle Rittenhouse case was genuinely complicated and could have gone either way. Conversely, the Ahmaud Arbery case is genuinely simple: a bunch of armed white vigilantes chased an unarmed Black guy and then shot him when he fought back against them.

I haven't followed the trial—which, yes, means I should probably shut up—and I've been wondering all along just what the defense could possibly say about all this. Closing arguments are now underway and the Washington Post provides a quick summary:

The defense has argued that the McMichaels and Bryan were carrying out a legitimate citizen’s arrest in a neighborhood on edge about crime. The McMichaels have said they recognized Arbery from surveillance footage and an in-person encounter at an under-construction home that Arbery entered several times in the months leading up to the shooting.

A citizen's arrest? For a guy who was just jogging on the street and never did anything even remotely illegal? I guess those of you who have followed the trial know all about this, but it barely even seems like a defense to me. A jogger can hardly be said to be fleeing the scene of a felony, after all.

All I can say is that these guys better be convicted. There's just no way they can be let off for what they did.

I was—and am—unimpressed with the results of the COP26 climate change meeting, but Bill Gates says there was some genuinely good news to come out of it:

At an event like this, one way I measure progress is by the way people are thinking about what it’ll take to reach zero emissions. Do they think we already have all the tools we need to get there? Or is there a nuanced view of the complexity of this problem, and the need for new, affordable clean technology that helps people in low- and middle-income countries raise their standard of living without making climate change worse?

Six years ago, there were more people on the we-have-what-we-need side than on the innovation side. This year, though, innovation was literally on center stage. One session of the World Leaders Summit, where I got to speak, was exclusively about developing and deploying clean technologies faster.

It took me many years to get fully on the innovation side, but eventually the evidence simply piled up too high for me to ignore it any longer. This is still a matter of massive funding, not just speeches at international talkathons, but if Gates is right it means that at least more people are starting to get the message.

Over at the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom has devoted three separate columns (here, here, and here) to a careful exegesis of Sen. Kysten Sinema's clothes. Sinema has called this "inappropriate," and three of her fellow senators went further on Friday, writing in a letter that it was "demeaning, sexist and inappropriate."

On Friday Cottom responded to her critics. In a nutshell, she said that ordinarily they would be right, but Sinema is a unique case:

It’s important to consider the context when setting the bounds of appropriate discourse. The details of the Democrats’ social spending bill, Build Back Better, are in flux. But it has funds for Pell Grant increases, affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded health care coverage. It contains policy to slow climate change and mitigate its effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives hang in the balance with the fate of the bill.

And Sinema has placed herself at the center of this political drama. So it matters how she marshals her power. It also matters how she manages attention.

Sinema largely allows her performance to speak for her. She avoids interviews, and has been quite guarded about what she wants out of these negotiations.

....That silence puts a curtain between a powerful political actor and the public, who have a lot on the line. It also means it is more than fair to discuss and critique the political rhetoric coded in her performance, and that includes what she is wearing.

Hoo boy. The upshot here is that (a) BBB is an important bill, (b) Sinema mostly works behind the scenes, and therefore (c) lacking better options, it's OK to critique the "political rhetoric coded in her performance," which includes the clothes she wears.

This is a pretty weak pretext for doing something that Cottom knows she shouldn't. After all, there are always lots of important bills and lots of legislators who mostly work behind the scenes. That's hardly a compelling justification for viewing Sinema as somehow unique.

The fact that Cottom is herself a woman—and one who can sling academic discourse with a sure hand—is nowhere near enough to justify the kind of misogynist blather that women have been trying for decades to stop.  Let's leave fashion criticism to the fashion writers, OK?

A few days ago I posted a chart showing the current case rate of COVID-19 in the US and its peer countries in Europe. We look fairly good on this metric because COVID is spiking in Europe right now but not in the US.

In the end, though, what matters is the cumulative number of cases and deaths during the entire run of the pandemic. On that metric, here's where we are so far:

There are two things I take away from this. First, and most obvious, the United States is at the very top of both charts. Obviously our approach to the pandemic looks pretty bad.

Second, though, is that a number of European countries are starting to catch up to us on case rates and there are already several that are very close to us on death rates. We still have a while to go before COVID-19 reaches its endemic stage, but once we get there and look back, I wonder just how much impact all the different approaches to lockdowns etc. will end up having? I think it's obvious that the answer will be "more than zero," but how much more? As time goes by I'm less and less confident that I know the answer to that.

We have a question:

We have known since Keynes that nominal wages are sticky downwards. Are wages also upward sticky? Seems like maybe yes? @lkatz42 @jasonfurman @Austan_Goolsbee @ProfNoto @delong @alexoimas @ATabarrok @DLeonhardt https://t.co/lwTO9jkBca

— Richard H Thaler (@R_Thaler) November 19, 2021

Speaking from the point of view of a practitioner, not a theoretician, I'd hardly be surprised if wages were sticky upward. I can think of at least two reasons for this.

First, there's just plain inertia. Hiring managers use compensation surveys or other forms of past compensation data to figure out what they need to pay, and those are always a year or two behind.

Second, if you start paying new hires more, word gets around pretty quickly and your existing employees start demanding raises. That's expensive.

So there's fear of paying new hires more than experienced workers. There's plain old greed, since obviously employers would prefer to pay their workers as little as possible. And there's lack of knowledge about inflation. Put it all together, and wages are probably slow to respond to both labor shortages and higher inflation, especially when they manifest themselves as sudden spikes.

President Biden is said to be pondering an "inflation offensive" that includes an FTC investigation of anti-competitive behavior in the oil and gas industry. This got me curious, so I took a super-simple look at the average markup for gasoline.

Here's what I did. I retrieved the cost of a gallon of gasoline (regular all formulations) and the price of a barrel of oil (West Texas Intermediate). I divided oil by 42 to get the cost of a gallon of oil, calculated the difference, and then subtracted taxes. The remainder was the refining/shipping/etc. markup for converting a gallon of oil at a refinery to a gallon of gasoline in consumers' hands. Here it is:

Hmmm. The markup has gone up by 20-30 cents since the beginning of the year, which is a little suspicious. On the other hand, this is obviously a pretty volatile series, and the markup today isn't out of kilter with the past few years.

Still, there are two obvious things to look at. First, why has the markup trended upward from 50 cents during the 1992-2010 period to about 80 cents today? Second, why the further spike in 2021?

There's nothing much Biden can do about the price of oil, but investigating the big refiners seems justified. Maybe there's nothing here, but it sure looks as though we should at least be asking why the markup on a gallon of gasoline is so much higher right now than it was a decade ago.

Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian today about the exit of workers from the labor force:

The fact of the matter is that when we speak of the Great Resignation, we are really referring to a great resignation of women. During the pandemic, women have exited the labor force at twice the rate that men have; their participation in the paid labor force is now the lowest it has been in more than 30 years.

This is just not true. If you follow the link, it's nothing more than an NPR host asserting it with no backup at all. Here are the real numbers:

Since the start of the pandemic, 2.31 million men have left the workforce compared to 2.38 million women. The numbers are nearly identical.

Now, there are different ways you can look at this. There are fewer women than men in the labor force, so 2.38 million women represents a larger percentage of the whole than 2.31 million men. And if you look solely at prime-age workers, about 1.4 million women have dropped out compared to 1.0 million men.

But no matter how you measure it, you'll never get women dropping out at twice the rate of men. And the absolute numbers, which are what most people probably think of when they hear about this, are very close regardless of which figures you use.

There are many ways in which women have had a harder time during the pandemic than men. The NPR segment linked above does a good job of going through them. But that hasn't resulted in a huge disparity of lost jobs between men and women. It just hasn't. Everyone needs to stop mindlessly repeating this.

POSTSCRIPT: In the realm of misleading statistics, I'd also include the factoid that women's "participation in the paid labor force is now the lowest it has been in more than 30 years." Technically this is true, but only because labor force participation for both men and women has been declining since 2000. Nearly any year represents the lowest level in the past couple of decades, and any year after a recession is automatically going to represent the lowest level going back even further. This is really a senseless statistic.

Marian and I decided long ago that we were a two-cat family, so we went looking for a new cat pretty quickly after Hopper died. I had already decided I wanted to get a kitten, since we haven't had one around here for a very long time, and we got lucky on our first visit to the Irvine animal shelter.

Meet Charlie, a 9-week-old gray tabby with explosive amounts of kitten energy. He is very sociable and very much a lap cat so far. Uncle Hilbert is wary but doing OK.

Why Charlie? What did we name him after? Charles Dickens? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Prince Charles? Vietnam slang for enemy troops? The masculine version of Charlotte? Perhaps someday I will unravel this mystery for you.

As you can imagine, I've got a million pictures already, which makes it hard to choose just one. So I won't. Here's a whole bunch of photos to show off Charlie's many moods.

I've been paying attention to election events in Wisconsin with only half an eye, but today the New York Times caught me up on the whole sordid affair. In a nutshell, Republicans want to abolish a bipartisan election commission and instead put all voting decisions in the hands of Republicans. Remarkably, there's not even a made-up excuse for this. They just want to do it:

The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.

....And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections....Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.

That's basically it. Democrats are cheaters—even though their own report said otherwise—so Republicans should unilaterally control all election decisions.

Welcome to the modern Republican Party. This is what Democrats should be fighting: not early voting or mail voting or photo IDs or any of that stuff. They should instead introduce a voting bill that focuses solely on the oversight of elections, making it clear that oversight should be nonpartisan and entirely out of the hands of legislatures. Even hard core Republicans are largely taken aback when they hear about this stuff, and it would cost Republicans dearly to fight a common sense bill like this.