Kevin Drum

Exciting news today, class! After a four-year wait we finally have new NAEP test scores for 12th graders. Without further ado, here are reading and math test scores from the early '90s all the way to 2019:

These are the most important test scores we have. It's nice when 4th and 8th grade scores are up, but what really matters is the end point. It doesn't matter if you're leading in the 200th lap if you end up behind ten other cars when the flag comes down after the 300th.

In general, test scores in 2019 were down slightly compared to 2015. The most tragic part of this is the continuing slide in test scores for Black students. In both reading and math, their test scores are now more than 30 points below those of white students. This means that, on average, Black students who graduate from high school have reading and math abilities similar to a 9th grade white student.

This has to get turned around. Short of existential global crises like climate change, it's perhaps the most important problem our country has. But what should we do?

What do I think of the impeachment trial so far? And why haven't I bothered to write anything about it?

The first question is easy: I think the House impeachment managers have done a great job. In fact, their video presentations have been exactly what I've wanted to see for a while: a dramatic tick-tock showing Donald Trump's minute-by-minute reaction to the violence at the Capitol. Kudos to them for an effective presentation.

Unfortunately, the second question is also easy. If there's anything I've come to loathe over two decades of blogging it's bad faith arguments. They're just endless these days, and they've gotten to the point where no one even bothers to hide what they're doing. It's such an insane waste of everyone's time and it drives me nuts.

And that's the entire story of the impeachment. The House managers could have video of Trump texting directions to the insurrectionists and it wouldn't matter. Republicans have decided to pretend that they have a deep constitutional objection to impeaching a president who's out of office, and that's that. The rest is just theater.

This is a bad faith argument, of course, and everyone knows it. Republicans don't want to convict a president of their own party, but they also don't want to force their members to cast a vote implicitly approving of insurrection. So they groped around for some kind of technicality that would eliminate their dilemma and came up with the out-of-office dodge. This allows them to vote to acquit but to claim it was solely because of their deep commitment to constitutional norms.

There's no point arguing about this since it's not meant seriously. It's just a bad faith argument designed to get Republicans out of a dilemma and waste lots of Democratic time.

But this is the world we live in. It's full of bad faith arguments like this, designed solely to produce a plausible explanation for the rubes and to waste everyone else's time. And it works. The rubes obediently parrot it back and the rest of the world earnestly explains why the argument is wrong. Nobody really cares, though. And then we move on.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is kind of interesting.

Fed chair Jerome Powell gave a speech yesterday that was mostly music to liberal ears. Powell said there was lots of room to push the unemployment rate down further than we used to think, and because of that the Fed won't put the brakes on the economy unless inflation clocks in well above 2 percent for an extended period of time. In other words, he thinks we should let the economy run hot for a while.

Powell also warned that the labor force participation rate had been declining, which is true. But he also said this:

Also concerning was that much of the decline in participation up to that point had been concentrated in the population without a college degree. At the time, many forecasters worried that globalization and technological change might have permanently reduced job opportunities for these individuals, and that, as a result, there might be limited scope for participation to recover.

Fortunately, the participation rate after 2015 consistently outperformed expectations, and by the beginning of 2020, the prime-age participation rate had fully reversed its decline from the 2008-to-2015 period. Moreover, gains in participation were concentrated among people without a college degree.

I don't get this. First off, here's the basic labor force participation rate for people with only a high school diploma:

Just as Powell said, it's been on a downward trend for several decades. It's also true that during the 2010-2015 period it declined a little bit more than the LFPR for college grads. Fine. But Powell went on to say that the LFPR for high school grads rebounded in the 2015-2019 period, so let's zoom in on that:

I see no gains here at all. It's close to flat for both men and women. Here it is for people with less than a high school diploma:

Once again, almost dead flat.

What gives? If you haul out your microscope you can just barely make out tiny gains during the 2015-2019 period, but certainly nowhere near enough to draw any conclusions from. So why does Powell think there's something here that suggests blue-collar workers were being pulled in from the sidelines during the late stages of the Obama recovery? What am I missing?

(It's worth noting that Powell used the age 25-54 workforce while I'm using the age 25+ workforce. This is because the BLS does not make the 25-54 numbers available to mere mortals like me. Powell, conversely, has a staff of statisticians who can give him whatever he wants at the touch of button. It's possible that this is the source of our disagreement, since his figures don't include retirements and mine do. I don't think that should make a huge difference, especially when you're comparing one time period to another, but you never know.)

POSTSCRIPT: Just as an aside, you might be interested in a long-term look at how high school dropouts have fared in the workforce:

There's a bit of an uptick during the late '90s, but it's been flat since then. For the past two decades, through recessions and recoveries, exactly the same share of the high school dropout workforce has been employed.

This is a dame's rocket, also known as a damask-violet, dame's-violet, dames-wort, dame's gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, queen's gilliflower, rogue's gilliflower, summer lilac, sweet rocket, mother-of-the-evening, and winter gilliflower. Does it win some kind of award for the flower with the most nicknames?

Marian got the call for her COVID-19 vaccination a couple of days ago, so this morning we headed off to Soka University to get her jabbed. The line to get in looks long...

...but it wasn't. In fact, the whole thing was extraordinarily efficient. There were about a million traffic folks guiding the cars around and it took only ten minutes or so for us to get from the start of the line to the parking structure. Check-in took another ten minutes and then maybe another ten to get the shot. Then there's a 15-minute wait to make sure you don't have a severe reaction and that was it. The whole thing took less than an hour from start to finish.

The folks there said they gave 3,500 shots yesterday, the most ever. Obviously this is just one site, but if it's at all representative then it sure looks like California is starting to get its vaccination act together.

Last night I wrote about a Morning Consult poll which showed that only 2% of Americans were QAnon true believers, with another 4% saying they thought QAnon's theories were "somewhat accurate." This prompted two questions on my Twitter feed:

1. What the hell does "somewhat accurate" mean?
2. Isn't 6% a lot of people?

On the first question, I beg ignorance. That was the wording of the poll, and that's how some people responded. Presumably it means they think there might be something to this whole QAnon thing but they aren't sure.

The second question is easier: 6% of all US adults is about 15 million people. Because of this, many tweeters thought I had made a mistake by headlining my post, "Barely Anyone Believes In QAnon’s Conspiracy Theories." Is 15 million people really "barely anyone"?

This is an excellent question, and the answer depends a lot on context. For example, if 15 million people go to bed hungry every night, that's a lot of people. We should see that they have more food to eat. But the reason it's a lot is that it's a standalone number that's not relative to anything else. It's just 15 million hungry people, and that's a lot regardless of whether everyone else is doing OK.

Conversely, when you talk about public opinion the only thing that matters is how one group compares to another. Is 74 million people a lot? Not if it's relative to 81 million people in a presidential election. Likewise, 15 million people is a lot only if it represents a widespread belief that can move the public. But if it represents only 6% of the country, with the other 94% believing that it's nonsense, then it's not a lot of people.

Now, is 15 million enough that it could represent real trouble? Sure. Pizzagate was also a tiny conspiracy theory, but it still ended up in tragedy when Comet Ping Pong got shot up. Its big brother could cause more trouble.

Nevertheless, in the context of public opinion 15 million is just not a lot of people. In fact, it's barely anyone. This is important because QAnon gets quite a bit of attention from the press and it probably shouldn't. It's just another low-level conspiracy theory of the type that's nearly always simmering away among the bored and gullible in the US. It doesn't really deserve much of a spotlight.

Lots of studies have demonstrated the power of Fox News. For example, here's one from June of 2020 showing that in places where Fox News is easier to get (by having a lower position on the cable dial), more people ignored advice about staying at home and wearing masks in the early stages of COVID-19. This was the period in mid-March when Fox News was telling everyone that the pandemic was nothing to worry about.
Future studies will undoubtedly find that in places where Fox News is more widely available, more people also believed that the 2020 election had been stolen. Nick Kristof gets it:

Fox helped sell Trump’s lie about a stolen election, propelling true believers like Ashli Babbitt — a fan of Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson — to storm the Capitol. Babbitt died in the attack, while this week Fox Corporation merrily reported a 17 percent jump in quarterly earnings.

....We can’t impeach Fox or put Carlson or Sean Hannity on trial in the Senate, but there are steps we can take....The Fox News business model depends not so much on advertising as on cable subscription fees. So a second step is to call on cable companies to drop Fox News from basic cable TV packages. The issue here is that if you’re like many Americans, you: A) don’t watch Fox News, and B) still subsidize Fox News.

If you buy a basic cable package, you’re forced to pay about $20 a year for Fox News. You may deplore bigots and promoters of insurrection, but you help pay their salaries.

I've talked about this before, and I'm still skeptical about whether this could work. At the very least it would be very slow since even if big cable companies fought back against Fox, the earliest it could happen is whenever their current contracts come up for renewal.

Still, it does seem like the only tactic with much likelihood of success. And if it takes a few years, that just means we have lots of time to make Fox a pariah.

Fox News is the reason I can never join in the mockery of rank-and-file Republicans who believe in stuff like stolen elections and socialists coming to take over America. They don't believe this stuff because they're idiots, they believe it because they hear it over and over and over from folks on TV who wear suits and ties and act like news anchors. It's the suits and their bosses who are to blame, not anything about the cultural pathologies of the white working class.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 10. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.