Kevin Drum

Today the Washington Post runs a story that just never gets old:

A growing number of Americans are relying on dollar stores for everyday needs, especially groceries, as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its 18th month....Analysts say the explosive rise of dollar stores is yet another example of how the pandemic has reshaped the economy and widened the gulf between the wealthiest and poorest Americans. Rising grocery prices — inflation is up 5.4 percent from last year — coupled with disproportionately high job losses among low-income workers have left many of the most vulnerable Americans in even worse shape.

....The pandemic, though, ushered an influx of new shoppers — including many who had previously been able to buy in larger, more cost-efficient quantities at big-box chains. But with smaller paychecks and rising prices, they say it’s no longer feasible to stock up elsewhere.

I've seen this same story during recessions, during expansions, and now during a pandemic. And it seems plausible. But is it true?

There's no way to say for sure since most detailed income statistics take forever to be released. I'm not sure when the numbers for 2020 will be available, but it won't be anytime soon. In the meantime, though, we can make do with what we have. Here, for example, are blue-collar wages:

Technically these are average wages for "production and nonsupervisory employees," which accounts for about 75% of all American workers. It doesn't include zillionaires, however, so it's also a pretty good estimate of median wages for blue-collar and middle-class workers.

As you can see, median blue-collar wages have been substantially higher during the pandemic than before it, which suggests that ordinary workers are not, in fact, falling even further behind.

But this measure includes only people who are working, and plenty of people got laid off or furloughed during the pandemic. So here's a look at poverty levels:

This measures the number of people at the very bottom of the income ladder. It's been falling ever since the end of the Great Recession and it continued to fall during the pandemic.

tl;dr: The average working Joe/Jane is doing fine. And the Joes and Janes at the bottom of the heap are doing OK too. This is tentative, but it suggests pretty strongly that the Walmart demographic has not deteriorated into some kind of grim Oliver Twistian dollar store demographic.

Needless to say, both of these metrics owe their happy results to the massive aid packages put in place during the pandemic. But that was the whole point of those packages: to aim a fire hose of money at the most vulnerable precisely so that they wouldn't lose ground.

And it worked. Of course it worked. If you give people lots of money, then they have more money. So why keep pretending that a huge gulf has opened up when (a) there's no evidence of it, and (b) there is evidence that the poor have done reasonably well during the pandemic? It's just too tempting a story, I guess.

POSTSCRIPT: And one other thing: the story implies very strongly that grocery prices are up 5.4% over last year. They aren't. They're up 2.5%. This is not a hard thing to get right.

Here is Hopper investigating a lizard in our backyard. I wonder what this looks like from the lizard's point of view? I figure a cat must seem about ten times the size that an elephant looks to us.

And every once in a while these cat-things pick you up ever so delicately in their teeth and then toss you around. But you always survive. The monsters seem to have no interest in killing you. Very odd.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its statewide employment data today, which allows us to look at unemployment rates in states that stopped paying expanded UI benefits in June. Did this get people back to work faster? Did unemployment go down more in states that stopped the expanded benefits?

Experts will probably provide us with the results of sophisticated models sometime soon, but I can provide unsophisticated results right now. All I did was calculate the change in the unemployment rate between May and July for all states, and then took two averages: one for states that ended expanded benefits early and one for states that have continued them. Here are the results:

• States that ended benefits early: -0.7 percentage points
• States that continued benefits: -2.4 percentage points

In other words, states that ended benefits early saw unemployment drop only slightly. States that continued paying expanded benefits saw unemployment drop three times as much. (Note: If you calculate the percent drop, rather than in percentage points, the results are pretty much the same.)

UPDATE: The sophisticated models are starting to arrive! Here's a chart from Peter Ganong, an economics professor at the University of Chicago:

Like me, Ganong finds that states which continued UI benefits had higher employment growth than states that cut off benefits early. However, the difference is small. Full explanation here.

UPDATE 2: As I said, my conclusion was the result of the simplest possible calculation. Here's the Excel spreadsheet so you can check my work and tell me if I screwed anything up:

Media Matters reports that Fox News has kept up its drumbeat of anti-vaccine disinformation:

One of the favorite defenses of Fox News is that stuff like this is only part of the prime time opinion programming, not the straight news reporting. But that's not so:

The network’s opinion programming aired 349 vaccine segments during this time period. Of those, 74% included claims undermining or downplaying immunization efforts. Fox’s “news” shows aired 279 such segments with 39% of those undercutting vaccines.

The news shows are less obvious about their agit-prop, but they join in with gusto. In fact, the coordination of news and opinion shows into a smooth whole is one of the unique features of Fox News.

A few weeks ago I was in the checkout line at Barnes & Noble and there was a kid in front of me with a copy of Dune. "I dunno, I guess it's some kind of '60s stuff," he said to a friend, who shrugged back.

This bit deeply into my boomer soul, so I decided to reread it for the fifth or sixth time. It's still pretty good! Then I decided to finally read the next two books in the series. I had never been able to get past the first dozen pages of Dune Messiah, but this time I had no trouble. Then I slogged through Children of Dune, which took forever.

My take: Dune Messiah makes the obvious point that if you know the future perfectly then you have no free will. Uh huh. As for Children of Dune, I don't know. I suppose it had a point, but it escaped me entirely, buried as it was beneath an impenetrable plot and tens of thousands of words of pseudo-profound dialogue. What were these people all talking about?

Sadly, the upshot of the whole thing is that I now think more poorly of the original Dune than I used to. Somehow, knowing how the culture of Arrakis and the Fremen—so stimulating in Dune!—is going to deteriorate into, um, generic '60s blather ruins even the best parts of Dune.

Oh well.

This is a white morning glory "moonflower," an extremely photogenic flower. Unless it's out of focus or something, I don't think I've ever taken a bad photo of one.

Just in case you're curious:

The US military has evacuated 7,000 people from Kabul over the past five days, Pentagon officials said. Maj Gen Hank Taylor said there are now more than 5,200 US troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and the Kabul international airport is “secure and open for flight operations”.

There's still a fair bit of chaos around the airport, with some flights leaving only half full. However, the US has the capacity to evacuate as many as 5,000-9,000 people per day. That's the goal.

Tear down those barriers!

Intuition tells us a plastic shield would be protective against germs. But scientists who study aerosols, air flow and ventilation say that much of the time, the barriers don’t help and probably give people a false sense of security. And sometimes the barriers can make things worse.

....Under normal conditions in stores, classrooms and offices, exhaled breath particles disperse, carried by air currents and, depending on the ventilation system, are replaced by fresh air roughly every 15 to 30 minutes. But erecting plastic barriers can change air flow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation and create “dead zones,” where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated.

There's a restaurant near me that has so many plastic barriers installed that it's literally become a maze. The last time I was there I found myself backtracking two or three times as I ran into large pieces of plexiglass that I hadn't realized were there.

Plus there's another thing: barriers plus masks make it almost impossible to be understood. So everyone does the same thing: after one round of "WHAT?" they poke their heads around the barrier to try again, while the clerk on the other side pokes their head around the barrier in order to hear better. The whole thing is a bit of a joke.

Bottom line: masks are good, barriers are . . . probably a waste of time. Better still is getting everyone vaccinated.

Will the events in Kabul hurt Joe Biden's chances of reelection in 2024? That depends on how things go, of course, but most likely it will be too far in the past to make any difference one way or the other.

However, there's still the question of Afghanistan as a whole. It's possible the Taliban has mellowed a bit over time, but that's probably not the betting line. More likely, they'll terrorize the country, force women out of the public eye, and (maybe) give safe haven once again to terrorists. If that's the case, will Donald Trump be able to make hay out of it? I'm not sure, but that's the question to be thinking about.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, here are the vaccination rates by racial and ethnic group:

Over the past four months the white population has fallen farther behind Asian Americans, who are now 17 percentage points ahead. At the same time, the Hispanic and Black populations have made up some ground. Hispanics have gone from 13 points below whites to only 5 points below. The Black population has gone from 13 points below to 10 points below.