Kevin Drum

In news that comes as a shock to everyone who hasn't actually been paying attention, evictions haven't skyrocketed since the eviction moratorium ended last month:

In major metropolitan areas, the number of eviction filings has dropped or remained flat since the Supreme Court struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium on Aug. 26, according to experts and data collected by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In cities around the country, including Cleveland, Memphis, Charleston and Indianapolis, eviction filings are well below their pre-pandemic levels.

....The overall picture has confused experts who had grim warnings for the looming crisis once the federal ban was no longer in place. Those same experts are hesitant to say the wave won’t come. After all, recent Pulse Survey data by the Census Bureau suggests that some 3 million households have reported concerns of imminent eviction.

Yes, the Household Pulse survey suggests that about 3 million families fear that they may be evicted in the next couple of months. However, this is a pretty worthless statistic. First, it includes only families that are renting homes, not apartments. Second, it's based on the number of people surveyed, which changes from week to week. Third, what we want to know is not the raw number anyway, but whether it's going up or down as a percentage of all home renters. Here's the answer:

I wouldn't take this very seriously, but just for the record it shows that fear of eviction has been pretty stable for the past year and actually dipped a bit at the end of September.

Here's a better set of data from the survey:

This includes all renters and goes back further than the eviction question. It shows that trouble making rent has trended generally downward, but with a small blip upward at the end of September. Is that meaningful? It's too early to say. The next release of the Household Pulse survey will give us our first true look at things in the weeks following the end of the rent moratorium.

In any case, there's no mystery here. The reason that evictions aren't skyrocketing is because the rescue packages passed by Congress kept poor people whole during the pandemic and even allowed them to save a little. Those benefits have now ended, but people are mostly as current on their rent as usual and are now back to where they started before the recession. There's really no special reason why they should be any farther behind on rent than they've ever been.

It's striking to me that this isn't more widely recognized. The big pandemic rescue packages were a victory for liberals, and we should be celebrating the fact that they allowed low-income workers to survive the pandemic recession mostly intact. The rent figures are pretty good evidence that we did the right thing.

Thank God for Joe Biden:

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified Thursday that U.S. military officials did not give President Biden a “unanimous” recommendation to leave Afghanistan until 10 days after the fall of its capital city of Kabul.

This is the work of the infamous Blob, the foreign policy establishment made up of the Pentagon, Congress, think tanks, intelligence services, and private contractors. They always lobby for hawkish policies and their combined influence is all but impossible for a president to stand up to.

So it's notable that Biden did stand up to them. He knew what he wanted, and he stuck to his guns even in the face of intense contrary lobbying from both the domestic and foreign versions of the Blob. Any other president probably would have caved in—the generals are only asking for 2,500 troops!—but Biden understood the difference between zero and any other number, no matter how small. It's the difference that keeps forever wars going forever.

We're now out of Afghanistan, as we probably should have been years ago. I doubt that anyone else would have had the spine or the self confidence to get us out. Three cheers for Joe.

It's true: I bought a drone last week. It's a DJI Mini 2, which is a very nice, compact, and fairly cheap drone (about $500). It turns out to be butt-easy to operate thanks to very good internal firmware, and I got pretty good at flying it almost immediately. On the downside, the camera is OK but not great.

The drone controller connects to my phone, which provides real-time video of what the camera is seeing. Among other things, the phone app also includes an internal map that tells you what areas are off-limits. Most of these are airports, and it turns out that I live right on the line of the restricted area for John Wayne Airport. Literally. I can't operate the drone at home, but if I walk a few doors down it works fine.

The only real problem I've had so far is that the controller seems to randomly lose contact with the drone on a regular basis, even when it's fairly close. Or, maybe it's more accurate to say that only the video goes out. It seems as if the drone continues flying in whatever direction it was going but refuses to update the video, which is obviously very bad. When that happens, the drone could be anywhere and you don't know it.

On one occasion, the controller app not only lost contact but froze up so completely that I had to reboot my phone to get control back. On the bright side, once I rebooted everything went back to normal.

Anyway, just as I showed you lots of panoramic photos after I learned about Photoshop's photo stitching function, I'm sure I'll be putting up a fair number of drone photos now that I have this new toy. Today's top photo is a picture of the Chase building on El Toro Road near the 5. I was looking for a tallish building to illustrate what the drone could do, and it happened to be the closest one around in legal airspace.

After I took that picture I turned the drone around and puttered around a bit. Then, as I was about halfway home, I turned the camera back around and discovered a plume of black smoke nearby. Apparently a motor home caught on fire, but the flames were extinguished within a few minutes. That's the lower picture.

While we're on the subject of the poorly named "$3.5 trillion bill," I notice that the latest round of negotiations is centered on the shiny new idea of means testing the various programs that are funded by the bill.¹ Why didn't anyone think of that before?

Snark aside, I'm not opposed to means testing. If your goal is explicitly to help the poor while keeping costs under control, means testing is a good way of doing it. It has drawbacks, the biggest of which is added complexity, but in some cases that's worth it.

But it's a poor idea if you want programs that also benefit the middle class. In that case, the limit for means testing needs to be so high (probably around an income level of $150,000) that hardly anyone is left out. Is the added complexity of means testing really worth it just to reduce the number of recipients by 10% or so? Probably not.

So we need to be careful with this. If you truly want to limit a program to the poor, go ahead and means test. But if you want to benefit the middle class as well—something that Democrats should pay way more attention to—then means testing is just not worth it. Off the top of my head, I'd say that none of the programs in the spending bill should be means tested. If we really and truly need to reduce the cost of the bill, we should eliminate a couple of programs entirely and leave the rest alone.

¹Just in case you're not up with budget jargon, a program is "means tested" if it's available only to people with low incomes. Speaking very roughly, things like food stamps and Section 8 housing are available only to families who earn less than $30-40,000 or so, which accounts for about a third of the country. If there were no means testing these programs would cost about three times as much.

A few days ago Joe Biden said that the $3.5 trillion omnibus spending bill "costs zero dollars." Since then outrage has flown from conservatives and earnest defenses have issued forth from liberals.

Please just stop it. Biden obviously misspoke, but only slightly. All he meant is that the bill won't raise the deficit because it's paid for by higher taxes. That's it. This has absolutely no effect on whether you should support or oppose the bill, so how about if we ditch all the dumb arguing about it?

In addition, I continue to find it unfortunate that DC convention continues to force us to refer to things by their ten-year cost. Sure, you can write "ten year cost" every single time you mention the bill, but most people only pay attention to the headline number itself, especially if it's in the, um, headline. The reality is that this bill, in its current form, would increase spending by about $350 billion per year out of a federal budget of $5 trillion. That's an increase of 7%. You may decide for yourself if that's too much, or if the programs funded by the bill are worth that kind of spending.

I'm sure I'm not the only person so disgusted with yet another debt ceiling standoff that I sort of wish we'd just go ahead and default and see what happens. But no. We are Responsible People™ around here, so the feeling soon passes.

But how about this instead? The latest estimate of when we'll really and truly run out of money is October 18. So starting around, say, October 15 the House passes a bill to raise the debt ceiling and sends it to the Senate. It will be filibustered by Republicans, of course, and fail.

So do it again the next day. And the next. And the next.

Every single day make Republicans filibuster a simple, clean debt ceiling bill while the government slowly gets shut down. Eventually they'll cave, and it will put an end to debt ceiling hostage taking forever.

No one's ever done this, so I assume there are technical reasons it wouldn't work. You'd think they could be overcome, though. Does the majority leader have the authority to send bills to the floor immediately without going through the usual committee process? What else would get in the way of doing this?

I have two questions for the statistically savvy hive mind.

First: Suppose I have a comparison of two groups that shows one group differing from another by 0.3 standard deviations. Obviously normal people have no idea what this means, or whether 0.3 SDs is a lot or a little. What's the best analogy to make this comprehensible?

In the past I've used IQ because it's one of the few scales that's familiar to most people. So 0.3 SDs would be "about equivalent to four or five IQ points." Unfortunately, this can be confusing if it seems like I'm literally bringing IQ into the conversation for no particular reason. So what's a better way?

Second, take a look at this chart that I posted yesterday:

The point of this chart is to show that homicide and violent crime generally move in tandem. However, they have very different scales (0-15 for homicide, 0-900 for violent crime) so I made the chart with dual scales.

This has never been a well-loved solution, and there's no question that it confuses some people. I have several thoughts:

• Just ignore the complaints. There aren't really very many of them.
• Use some other way of displaying different scales, such as percent growth rates. Like this:
  The obvious problem with this is that you lose the absolute numbers, which are often handy to have. But perhaps you gain clarity?
• Add some annotation to make everything crystal clear. It's a little clunky, but it's best to be clear even if Edward Tufte wouldn't like it.
  

Any preferences? Or other ideas? Remember, the idea behind both of these questions is to keep things as clear as possible for people who aren't especially savvy about statistics.

UPDATE: A reader suggests using height to illustrate standard deviation. In the US, the mean height for men is 70 inches with a standard deviation of 3 inches. So 0.3 SDs would equal about one inch in height—the difference between 5'9" and 5'10". This probably gets the point across fairly well: namely that 0.3 SDs is noticeable but not huge.

Tyler Cowen points to a new paper that says this in the first sentence of its abstract:

A central paradox in the mental health literature is the tendency for black Americans to report similar or better mental health than white Americans despite experiencing greater stress exposure.

This is indeed a well-known paradox, and the authors are naturally on the lookout for explanations. Since we know that Black people experience greater stress, there must be something that helps ameliorate it. In this case they opt for one of everything: higher levels of self-esteem, family social support, religiosity, and divine control.

But what if there's no paradox to begin with? What if it simply isn't true that Black people on average experience greater stress than white people? There's actually a fair amount of evidence for this, but it seems to be something of a taboo to say it out loud. Why? I suppose it's because no one wants to open themselves to charges of downplaying the effect of systemic racial bigotry, even if it's only by implication.

Republicans voted today to filibuster a bill that would raise the debt ceiling and avert a government shutdown. Let's see how the nation's press described things. First up is the New York Times:

The Washington Post:

The LA Times:

The Wall Street Journal:

And finally, Fox News:

One of these is not like the others. And it's the one that millions of conservative voters will see and hear about.

I have a new toy. Can you guess what it is? Well? Can you?