Kevin Drum

Elon Musk, as is his wont, casually endorsed a tweet last night saying there were now 83 levels from top to bottom in the federal bureaucracy. ZOMG! Is that true?

No. This is based on a study by Paul Light of Brookings, and if either Musk or the original poster had bothered to read past the charts they would have discovered that Bright says there are an average of 30 layers. And even some of those are horizontal, not vertical. The real number of layers from GS-5 worker bee up to cabinet secretary is probably something like ten or fifteen.

That said, there sure a lot of titles in federal departments. Since they can't pay the executive levels very much, I suppose title bloat is all they have. In any case, I laughed as I plowed my way through all the titles, so I'm reproducing them here for your amusement. I'm not sure which is my favorite.

Secretary
Deputy secretary
Deputy to the deputy secretary
Principal associate deputy secretary
Associate deputy secretary
Assistant deputy secretary
Under secretary
Principal deputy under secretary
Deputy principal deputy under secretary
Deputy under secretary
Associate deputy under secretary
Principal assistant deputy under secretary
Deputy principal assistant under secretary
Assistant deputy under secretary
Deputy assistant deputy under secretary
Associate under secretary
Deputy associate under secretary
Assistant associate under secretary
Deputy assistant under secretary
Assistant under secretary
Associate deputy assistant under secretary
Assistant secretary
Principal deputy assistant secretary
Associate principal deputy assistant secretary
Deputy assistant secretary
Principal deputy assistant secretary
Deputy deputy assistant secretary
Associate deputy assistant secretary
Assistant deputy assistant secretary
Associate assistant secretary
Deputy associate to the assistant secretary
Deputy associate deputy to the assistant secretary
Assistant to the assistant secretary
Associate assistant deputy assistant secretary
Deputy assistant assistant secretary
Principal associate deputy assistant secretary
Deputy assistant deputy assistant secretary
Senior deputy assistant secretary
Assistant deputy assistant secretary
Deputy assistant deputy assistant secretary
Senior associate assistant secretary
Deputy principal assistant secretary

From the Wall Street Journal:

Donald Trump is considering naming Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow to a senior economic policy role in his administration.... possibly the Treasury.

You heard it here first.

Retail sales continued to hold up in October, rising at an annual rate of 1.3% after adjusting for inflation:

Retail has been pretty flat for the past year, but it's still above its pre-pandemic trend. There's no sign of weakness yet.

Here it is: the distilled wisdom of 66 years on planet Earth. The list is numbered so you can mock them in comments more easily. Enjoy.

1. Crime didn't skyrocket in the '70s and '80s because of drugs or poverty or family breakdown. It skyrocketed because of an increase in lead poisoning that had begun decades earlier.
2. Over the past half century, Democrats have been remarkably successful at building a durable safety net for the poor. We spend more than a trillion dollars per year on social welfare, and it raises the average income of the poor from about $25,000 to $50,000.
3. Tax cuts don't boost economic growth in any meaningful way.
4. Among the non-affluent, college tuition hasn't risen over the past 30 years.
5. Generally speaking, the public can tolerate immigrant flows equal to about a quarter percent of the population. Above that, a backlash becomes more and more likely.
6. On average, Black students graduate from high school at a 9th grade level in both reading and math.
7. The annual federal deficit is starting to look genuinely dangerous. Like it or not we're going to have to raise taxes sometime soon, and not just on the rich.
8. Social Security can be made fully solvent forever fairly easily.
9. Millennials are doing fine.
10. There's been no particular increase in airplane mechanical malfunctions lately.
11. The real dietary villain of the modern era is refined sugar.
12. It may turn out that social media is bad for teens, but so far the evidence is fairly thin.
13. One out of seven people have no interior monologue.
14. Always adjust for inflation. There are rare exceptions, but you're not likely to ever run into them.
15. Always disaggregate student test data by race. If you don't you'll frequently get badly misleading data due to demographic shifts. Always disaggregate poverty data by age. If you don't you'll be largely just capturing the reduction in elderly poverty thanks to Social Security and Medicare.
16. There is no retirement crisis.
17. The 2021-22 inflation surge was caused by the COVID pandemic and the bipartisan $2.2 trillion CARES Act. That's it. Nothing else had more than a minor effect.
18. Despite lots of publicity saying so, maternal mortality has probably not increased. It turns out this was just a statistical artifact.
19. During a pandemic, social distancing is good but three feet is probably enough. N95 masks are beneficial, but other masks aren't.
20. Domestic discretionary spending hasn't increased in more than 60 years. It is currently below its long-term average of 3.8% of GDP.
21. Half of all people have two-digit IQs.
22. According to the Washington Post, a total of nine unarmed Black people were killed by police shootings nationwide in 2024 (through the end of October).
23. In 2023, median family income in the US was $101,000. In 1980, adjusted for inflation, it was $70,000. In 1953 it was $40,000.
24. Most people seem to have no idea what the racial makeup of America is. For the record, it's 58% white, 20% Latino, 14% Black, and 6% Asian.
25. 93% of all abortions are done in the first trimester. 99% happen in the first 20 weeks.
26. Of the top 50 software companies, 47 are American (22 in California). Roughly 21 of the top 25 AI companies are American.
27. The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. AI will make smart people even smarter but will probably make dumb people a little smarter too.
28. The life expectancy of the affluent (top 10%) is about 89. The life expectancy of the poor (bottom 10%) is 77.
29. On a huge range of measures—economic, social, cultural, technological, and recreational—life in America is stupendously good. We should all feel a lot better about things than we do. One of the reasons we don't is that both liberals and conservatives have a vested interest in claiming that the country is on the precipice of imminent collapse due to moral decay.
30. Vaccines do not cause autism.
31. To the extent that environment affects children's development, it's mostly environment outside the home: playmates, teachers, shop clerks and so forth. Parents have a good deal less influence than they think. Needless to say, most people resist this conclusion strenuously, but consider: do immigrant kids grow up speaking with the accent of their parents or the accent of their friends? It's always the accent of their friends.
32. A lot of famous studies have turned out to be wrong, but most people never hear about it. The Stanford prison experiment showing that even fake guards became abusive toward fake prisoners? Probably exaggerated. The marshmallow test showing that kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes? Nah. Saturated fats are bad for you? Mostly a misinterpretation of the Framingham Heart Study. Orchestras that audition players behind curtains are more likely to hire women? Not really.
33. Here's approximately how the federal budget breaks down (as of 2024): Social Security = 22%, Means-tested welfare = 17%, Medicare = 13%, Defense = 13%, Domestic = 13%, Interest = 13%, Veterans = 5%.
34. Strange but true: COVID vaccines reduce death rates from non-COVID causes. Possibly this is because the vaccines prevent Long COVID.
35. Roughly speaking, intelligence is 70% genes and 30% environment.
36. It's true that correlation doesn't automatically imply causation, but it's a helluva strong clue. The proper response to a well done correlation study isn't knee-jerk skepticism, it's "That's interesting! We should to more studies to confirm it."
37. Probably every sentence being served for every crime in the US should be cut in half. Our sentencing policies are ludicrously punitive and accomplish little.
38. Half a century ago corporate profits were about 10% of the economy. Today they're 14%.
39. Medical inflation is largely under control. Since 2000 it's been only about one point higher than overall inflation, and over the past three years it's been considerably lower.
40. Fear of losing status is a far greater motivator than the prospect of gaining status.
41. Human beings are fundamentally kind of shitty. But that's what civilization is for: it's a compact among ourselves to keep the worst of our excesses under control as long as everyone else has to as well. It's a bit of a miracle that this mutual surveillance agreement works, but it does, after a fashion.
42. Fox News is a cancer. It should be burned to the ground and the earth salted behind it.
43. The United States is the greatest economic powerhouse in history and looks set to continue this for a while. It's genuinely mysterious why this is so.
44. It's unlikely we will be willing to make the carbon cuts necessary to rein in climate change. Geoengineering is probably in our future.
45. AI is going to take your job away, no matter what your job is. Not today and probably not tomorrow, but it's not too many decades away.

How has the incidence of cancer risen over the past half century? Not the death rate from cancer, which has gone down because of better treatments, but the actual number of new cancers. Here it is:

Between 1975 and 2020, cancer has risen by about 20% in women but only 5% in men. However, men showed a huge rise from 1975 through 1990 and then a big decline. What's up with that?

It's all about prostate cancer and it's all about detection. When PSA tests were approved and became widely used, prostate cancer diagnosis surged—but then dropped. Why? Too many harmless, asymptomatic cancers were being detected, so doctors became more rigorous about how high a PSA score needed to be before they suggested treatment.

Then, in 2007, new recommendations were published that advised against screening in men over 75 in order to reduce harms from overdiagnosis and overtreatment. So the detection rate dropped again.

This is apropos of nothing. It's just an example of how raw data can be misleading if you don't know the history behind the data collection. Cancer in men didn't really rise starting in the early '80s, we just got better at detecting one particular variety. Then we decided we were overdiagnosing and pulled back. Underneath it all, the actual incidence of cancer was about the same all along. You could draw a straight line from 1985 to 2015 and the chart would probably be more accurate.

Yesterday I happened to come across a tweet bemoaning the state of reading among fourth graders. Pretty standard stuff. But as things so often do, it got me curious. Here are reading proficiency scores for fourth graders over the past 50 years:

I'm showing this for white kids so it isn't affected by demographic changes over the years. The main problem is that to go back so far I had to look at the NAEP's long-term test, and the LTT doesn't use normal language like proficient or advanced to describe reading ability. It shows only bands of scores, and then describes those scores using incomprehensible gobbledegook. It's truly weird. I did my best to convert this into words that seemed like reasonable translations.

In any case, the thing to notice is that there's been hardly any change—and what there is suggests a slight improvement. Whether it's phonics or whole language; books or iPads; and through all the change from TV to texting to social media—nothing changed. On average, the kids turned out the same no matter what.

And maybe that makes sense. About 25% of kids have an IQ above 110. They're probably all pretty proficient readers. Likewise, about 25% of kids have an IQ below 90. They're probably all either very weak readers or just flatly illiterate. And then you have the 50% in between who end up at various levels of "OK."

And maybe that's that. Maybe the fads and the trends and the quality of teaching only matter at the margins. About a quarter of the population is always going to be barely functionally literate.

The results for Black kids are a little different. Black students score significantly lower than white kids overall, but their proficiency levels have improved somewhat over time. Not a lot, but enough to suggest that changes in teaching have some effect.

With that in mind I began to wonder which states do the best job of teaching Black children to read. Looking at raw scores isn't very helpful since states differ widely on poverty levels and we know that poverty affects school outcomes. But we can control a bit for that by looking at how close Black scores are to white scores in each state:

There's a huge range. Vermont's Black kids are only 9 points behind, which isn't too bad. In Washington DC they're an astonishing 54 points behind.

Even if you remove those two outliers the range is 24 points. That's a helluva lot, roughly equivalent to 2½ grade levels.

Nor does it shake out the way you might think. Plenty of Southern states do fairly well: Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and North Carolina. And plenty of northern states do poorly: Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. It's not clear what the differences are, but it's not much related to ancient patterns of slavery and racism.

Former Georgia Rep. Doug Collins is Trump's pick to head the VA. Collins is a hardline abortion opponent; opposes Obamacare; thinks climate change is a hoax; opposes gay marriage; signed onto a lawsuit contesting the 2020 election; and. . .

. . .has no experience even remotely related to the VA.

However, he has two sterling qualities: (a) he thinks the sun rises and sets in Donald Trump's ass, and (b) he's really good on his Fox News hits. He should be confirmed easily.

So it's officially RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services—which includes the CDC, NIH, FDA, the Surgeon General etc. But it could have been worse, right? Trump could have nominated Martin Shkreli. Or he could have staged a competition: whoever silences Dr. Fauci with extreme prejudice gets to be HHS secretary.¹

We're still waiting on the Treasury Department. Let's see. Trump likes people with loose ethics and good TV skills. Maybe he'll pardon Sam Bankman-Fried and nominate him. Or maybe Larry Kudlow, a Fox News mainstay. Or Maria Bartiromo. Or the reanimated corpse of Lou Dobbs.

WTFK?

¹Totally legal, in case you're wondering. Since the lucky winner is acting under presidential orders, the feds can claim jurisdiction and Trump can issue a pardon. And this is plainly within the scope of the president's constitutional duties, so the Supreme Court says Trump himself would also be immune from prosecution.

This is a Joshua tree at sunset.

Matt Gaetz is getting all the attention as the Trump appointee most likely to be turned down by the Senate, but what about Tulsi Gabbard? Fair or not, she's widely considered to be practically a Russian asset. Will the Senate seriously consider her for the nation's top intelligence job even so?

And who's next in Trump's parade of freaks and geeks? Marjorie Taylor Greene? General Mike Flynn? Kash Patel? Mike Lindell? Tucker Carlson? Alina Habba? Lee Greenwood? Laura Loomer? David Rem? Donald Jr.?

Probably none of them. I never would have guessed Hegseth, Gaetz, or Gabbard, and I imagine his upcoming appointments will be completely out of left field too.

UPDATE: Oh come on:

I didn't even mention RFK Jr. in my list because it seemed too ridiculous. More ridiculous than Mike Flynn! This is just God level trolling from Trump. I suppose he's figuring that even if they grow a spine, Senate Republicans can't vote down all his picks.