Kevin Drum

Here's a headline from today's Wall Street Journal:

Higher Prices Leave Consumers Feeling the Pinch
Rising costs for everything from fresh fruit to freezers are shaping purchase decisions

The text of the article is the usual nonsense, so I won't bother describing it. Instead, here are actual inflation rates of nine broad categories of goods:

We already know that these inflation rates are artificially high because they're being compared to March 2020, which was artificially low. But even at that, they're in the range of -4% to 4% with the sole exception of transportation (primarily cars). Food at home is up 3.3%, which isn't enough to "feel the pinch" even if it were real.

But there's also another way of looking at things. Here's a list of 30 randomly chosen detailed items:

So here's what happens: Everyone notices that bacon, apples, ground beef, and whole chickens are noticeably more expensive than they used to be. But they don't notice that bananas and butter and tomatoes are less expensive. Homo sapiens being what we are—i.e., bad at on-the-run arithmetic—we conclude that prices are skyrocketing. Did you see what I had to pay for a pound of bacon!

(And even that's a mirage. Remember that these prices are artificially high because the base year for comparison is 2020. A closer look using 2019 as the base year reveals that bacon is actually up only 3.5% annually over the past two years. The entire category of food at home is up 2.2% annually over the past two years, about the same as overall inflation.)

So what explains the media's endless focus on allegedly skyrocketing prices? I don't really know. I have an old-fashioned belief that the media should be informative and truthful, knocking down popular beliefs if they turn out to be wrong. In this case, the popular belief that prices are skyrocketing is wrong. And yet instead of explaining why, the media produces story after story pandering to the misguided beliefs of its readers. Why?

POSTSCRIPT: It's possible, of course, that prices really are skyrocketing and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is miscalculating it. But if that's the case, there's a great story to be written about the BLS and I haven't seen it yet.

POSTSCRIPT 2: Plus there's this:

Personal income has soared! It's up by $13,000 over last year. So who cares if bacon is up a few cents? I wonder why no one reports this?

(Answer: Because it's as fake as the supposedly skyrocketing food prices. The apparent increase is due to benefits from the January rescue bill that have been annualized, not permanent income from salaries. This is what happens when you can cherry pick starting and ending points.)

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 8. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

You may not be aware of this if you lead a normal life, but the latest anti-woke jihad from Fox News is about Snow White. (I know. Snow White. It could hardly be more perfect, could it?) In particular, the new Snow White ride at Disneyland ends with Prince Charming kissing Ms. White to wake her from the spell of the evil queen, and we liberals are in an uproar over this depiction of kissing "without consent." How ridiculous!

It may surprise you to know this. Has it been plastered all over Rachel Maddow's show? Has it gone viral on progressive Twitter? How have you missed this?

It turns out that it comes from one (1) place: a review of the ride in SFGATE (which is not the San Francisco Chronicle, in case you're interested). The two reviewers do indeed point out that the kiss is problematic in view of Disney's history, but they sensibly concluded that it wasn't really a big deal:

Still, with the twinkling lights all around and the gorgeous special effects, that final scene is beautifully executed — as long as you're watching it as a fairy tale, not a life lesson.

So that's that. An pair of online reviewers mentioned the kiss but then told everyone not to worry about it. And no one did. But it is now canon among the Fox News set that liberals are up in arms about this and are pressuring Disneyland to change it. Thus are myths and legends born.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, I think the reviewers have it wrong anyway. I am, needless to say, opposed to kissing without consent, but if I knew for a fact that a quick peck could cure you of cancer or wake you from a coma, I would conclude that the quick peck wins this contest of competing values. So I think Prince Charming is in the clear.

Is there much question that Shelby County v. Holder is the worst Supreme Court opinion of the 21st century so far? I'm not claiming that it's in the same league as Dred Scott or Plessy, but John Roberts explicitly overruled the nearly unanimous will of Congress for no good reason and has since watched as, first, North Carolina introduced an anti-Black voting bill literally on the day after the decision was announced, followed by an increasing number of Southern states that have enacted increasingly bold anti-Black voting bills. In 2021, voter suppression bills have become an avalanche.

I wonder what Roberts thinks of all this? Is he happy that this will be his legacy? Does he still believe that he was right? Would he write the same opinion today? Or a narrower one?

I wonder.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Cathy Merrill is the publisher of Washingtonian magazine, and she is in big trouble over an op-ed she wrote on Thursday for the Washington Post. Here is a typical response from a staff member:

As members of the Washingtonian editorial staff, we want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor. We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today.

— Jane Recker (@janerecker) May 7, 2021

So what was the problem with Merrill's op-ed? Answer: it urged people to think twice before insisting on working from home after the pandemic has lifted. The first few paragraphs are basically some throat clearing about the difficulty of building a corporate culture if older workers are at home and not available to mentor and manage new hires. Then the fun started:

While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like. I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.” Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes — benefits that in my company’s case add up roughly to an extra 15 percent of compensation. Not to mention the potential savings of reduced office space and extras such as bonuses and parking fees.

....People considering just dropping into their office should also think about FOMO, fear of missing out. Those who work from home probably won’t have FOMO, they will just have MO. The casual meetings that take place during the workday. The “Do you have three minutes to discuss X?” These encounters will happen. Information will be shared. Decisions will be made. Maybe if you are at home you’ll be Zoomed in, but probably not. As one CEO put it, “There is no such thing as a three-minute Zoom.” Being out of that informal loop is likely to make you a less valuable employee.

There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is that Merrill is an unbelievable idiot and intended to threaten her own employees in the pages of the Washington Post.

The second is that she was genuinely trying to offer some career advice that she's afraid a lot of workers might not consider. In this case, I suppose, her sin lies in being a little too blunt, contrary to modern standards that require lots of tip-toeing and invocations of "this would be wrong, of course, but..." It so happens that I've become a sworn foe of this style of writing, but that's just me.

In any case, I vote for #2 unless someone provides evidence that Merrill is not just stupid, but a sociopathic Trumplike monster.

UPDATE: The inevitable apology tour has begun:

Merrill issued a statement to this blog: “Washingtonian embraces a culture in which employees are able to express themselves openly. I value each member of our team not only on a professional level but on a personal one as well. I could not be more proud of their work and achievements under the incredibly difficult circumstances of the past year. I have assured our team that there will be no changes to benefits or employee status. I am sorry if the op-ed made it appear like anything else.”

She gave a more piercing self-evaluation via phone: “Everyone needs an editor," she told us. "I wish I had run my piece by mine.”

I assume that Merrill's op-ed was, in fact, seen by an editor at the Washington Post before it ran. And presumably that editor didn't see anything especially wrong with it. Still, Merrill's update is welcome. As I mentioned, I'm not a fan of nuancing pieces to death, but sometimes a little bit of diplomacy goes a long way.

This is Hopper at one of her favorite watering holes, the frontyard birdbath.

Hopper is rather particular about the water she drinks, and my latest theory is that she doesn't like drinking out of any vessel that Hilbert has defiled with his touch. The evidence on this score is a little shaky, partly because Hopper sometimes has no choice but to drink from a Hilbert dish. This makes rigorous data collection difficult.

On the other hand, when she is unhappy with her hydration choices she has started yowling loudly, which makes data collection easier. Life is kind of strange around here these days.

Consider the chart below, showing the price of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin:

As you may know, Dogecoin was created as a joke and rather plainly has no value. And yet, in the past year it has appreciated 22,624% and has an alleged market cap of $78 billion. How can that be? CNET asked its founder:

What problem did Dogecoin solve?

"I don't think it solves anything," he says. "If anything, it exists as an educational tool. It's a reminder that we can't take this stuff seriously.

"I hope people see Dogecoin and say, I'm not going to put all my money into this. Because right now there's a dog on a coin and it's worth half a billion dollars."

This is, obviously, a cautionary tale that suggests cryptocurrencies aren't actually worth anything. But it's really just a tiny part of a cautionary tale that encompasses the entire cryptocurrency space. It would be one thing if Bitcoin were unique and somehow had a good story to tell about its value. But even if that story were true, could it also be true that literally any old somebody can start up a new cryptocurrency and suddenly become a millionaire? Or hundreds of somebodies?

This is the tell, and it's hardly a subtle one. There is no rational economic system in which this can happen. Whatever problem cryptocurrencies allegedly solve, it was solved long ago. There is no conceivable way that hundreds more cryptocurrencies could be created literally out of nothing—no capital, no labor, no intellectual development, no raw materials—by anyone who felt like doing it. This could happen with a collectible item that suddenly gets hot, but not with any form of money.

The total value of all cryptocurrencies in existence is about $2 trillion. This is roughly the value of Denmark. That is, you could supposedly buy the entire country of Denmark by swapping it for all the cryptocurrency in existence. That's in theory. In practice you probably couldn't buy Pitcairn Island—though I suppose you could ask them. Just don't bother asking the Danes unless you want to get slapped upside the head with a delicious pork roast.

Here's an odd thing about today's jobs numbers. If you take a look at job openings vs. hires, you get a chart like this:

A job only counts as an official "job opening" if an employer is "actively recruiting" for the position. In normal times, and during recessions, there are plenty of workers to go around, which means there's little need for active recruiting. As a result, official job openings are low and there are fewer job openings than hires.

But if the economy is running hot, companies have lots of job openings they can't fill. This means they start actively recruiting and the job openings get counted. That's what you see in the shaded red area. Starting around 2015, the economy started hitting on all cylinders and there were more job openings than hires. In 2019 things started to slow down a bit, and then the pandemic hit and jobs disappeared.

Anyway, starting last September the difference between hires and job openings began to widen steadily until it hit nearly 2 million, which is where it was at its high point pre-pandemic. So that means the economy is doing well and employers are eager to hire more workers. Hooray?

Maybe, but now we view things differently. Back in 2017, the fact that companies wanted to hire more people than they could find was a good thing. It meant the labor market was tight and workers would get paid more. Today, it means . . . what?

• The labor market is tight because there are lots of people who are afraid to go back to work while COVID-19 is still loose.
• The labor market is tight because many women with children can't find childcare and are staying out of the labor force.
• The labor market is tight because workers are figuring they'll use up their unemployment benefits before they bother getting a job.
• The labor market is tight because employers are being stingy about pay and benefits. In April, average hourly earnings actually went down compared to a year ago.

All four of these are plausible reasons. In fact, all four of them could be true at the same time. We just don't know. But only if we get an answer will we have any idea whether the labor market is truly in good or bad shape.

The American economy gained 266,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate increased slightly to 6.1 percent.

There's no way around it: this sucks. Service jobs increased by an anemic 234,000 while goods-producing jobs actually fell by 16,000. Aside from that, there was nothing special going on. The participation rate was up a little bit. The number of unemployed was up a little bit. About 330,000 people dropped out of the labor force, which is nothing special. Long-term unemployment was down. Unemployment for economic reasons was down substantially. The April report has the basic shape of something good, aside from the fact that it was so small.

It's hard to know what to make of this. Maybe it's just the calm before the storm, and May will be the first month when businesses really start to open up now that vaccination rates are high.

Alternatively, it's possible that continued unemployment benefits are keeping workers on the sidelines, figuring they might as well take another couple of months off while they can. Maybe someone ought to do a survey about that?