My mini-vacation to the Eastern Sierra produced many pictures, but most of them will have to wait until I get home to edit and process them. However, here's one that I took on my first day. I was facing east, away from the Sierras, as the sun was going down. It turns out there's a few minutes just before the sun dips below the mountains when it's shining brightly on the trees in the foreground but not at all on the hills in the background. This produces a wonderful contrast.
The Eastern Sierras practically beg for black and white, and this picture in particular is far better in black and white than in color. That's true for a lot of the photos I took, though not all of them.
Now that the GameStop fiasco has finally settled down, how did things turn out for everyone?
If you bought GME in early January and then ignored everything and just held onto it, you've done OK: your stock has doubled in value. Congratulations!
But what if you played the bubble? Then it worked out just like every other bubble in history. If you bought low and sold at the peak, you made a fortune. But if you bought into the mania in late January, you lost your shirt.
So now the question is: what kind of people mostly profited from the huge runup? And what kind of people mostly lost everything when the bubble burst? The answers to those questions, if we ever get them, will tell us whether this was a "people's revolt" or something a little less salutary.
This morning the Census Bureau released numbers for retail sales in January, and the news is good: they're up 5.3% compared to last month.
I don't really understand why anyone would care about how the January numbers compare to December, though. It would be better to compare them to January 2020. Or, better still, just take a look at the raw numbers over time:
After the big dip in 2020, retail sales recovered immediately. Since June of last year they've been consistently above trend—and in January they were way above trend. If my arithmetic is correct, this means we've nearly made up completely for the spending collapse in March-May of last year. This is all thanks to the coronavirus rescue bills that we've passed so far, with the one wending its way though Congress right now set to finish the job.
Despite the pandemic, spending is high; savings are high; and earnings are high. There are still legitimate fears about whether employment will rebound completely this summer, but that's true of nearly all recessions. Overall, we have good reason to be pretty optimistic about the state of the economy.
This is why I hate Fox News. I'm sure everyone there knows perfectly well that wind turbines played only a minor role in the recent Texas blackouts, but they don't care. Anyone watching their broadcasts will come away believing that the whole thing is the fault of woke environmentalists and the stupid green power that they somehow forced Texas to use.
That's millions of people who will believe this, and they'll pass it along to millions and millions more. Fact checkers will earnestly explain what really happened, but no one will hear them. Within a week or so it will be part of conservative legend that green power wrecked the Texas power grid and forced millions of people to freeze their asses off until fossil fuels came to the rescue.
So forget QAnon. There aren't that many true believers, and the few who exist don't have the brains or the organizational power to do very much harm. Fox News is just the opposite: they have both serious brainpower and a huge audience at their beck and call. They're the ones responsible for the election of Donald Trump, not a bunch of pathetic conspiracy theorists.
We've all seen a million giraffes, so I know that my giraffe needs to offer a little extra. No problem. Behold the tongue action as this giraffe munches on a branch of some kind at the San Diego Zoo.
October 9, 2021 — San Diego Zoo, San Diego, California
Apparently Johns Hopkins decided they had misreported the numbers for the past week or so. They've been updated, and the new numbers show a clear and ongoing decline in the COVID-19 death rate in the US.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Yesterday I came across an article about some group or another that was upset about the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. It felt like about the hundredth article I'd read along those lines, and I've finally had it.
Listen up. We were hit by a brand new virus that spread like wildfire throughout the world. Lots of people made lots of mistakes because this was a brand new disaster we were facing. Nevertheless, the actions we took have kept the US death toll down to 0.15% so far, an astonishingly low number. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies employed brand new technology to develop, test, and manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine within 11 months. Most likely, the entire country (or close enough) will be fully vaccinated within six months even though distribution of the vaccines is wildly complicated thanks to super low temperature storage requirements.
We are living through a damn miracle. But all I ever hear is endless bitching that boils down to whether someone will get a vaccination a week from now vs. four weeks from now. It's stupid not to focus solely on old people first. No, wait, what about essential workers? And what about Black people, who have the highest infection rate? Oh, so now we're going to get all woke about it? I've been trying to get my grandma vaccinated and it took forever! We should be giving people just one dose and not worrying about the second—and everyone at the FDA should be shot for not immediately agreeing about this. Did you know that bus drivers are especially vulnerable to the virus? They should be put at the top of the list. No, teachers should. No, single mothers should. No, poor countries should.
I know this is just human nature, and maybe it's pointless to fight it. But for God's sake, can we stop obsessing over every single thing we think has been unfair, or been done badly, or just gone wrong? Mistakes are part of human nature too. For my money, though, our response to the pandemic—even including all the blunders, all the backtracking, and all the Trump idiocy—has been nothing short of exceptional. If we had managed the Iraq War this well, Iraq would be a fabulous oasis of democracy and economic opportunity blooming in the desert.
UPDATE: I changed the headline from "spectacular" to "pretty good." I admit that "spectacular" was a wee bit too strong.
To add a little more detail, I'd stick to my guns on the vaccine side, which really has been pretty spectacular all the way around. It has suffered from only minor mistakes along the way, mostly of the kind that are inevitable in a big, complex project.
On the general subject of pandemic control, I continue to think we did better than most people think. However, there's no question that we made some serious errors that increased the death toll considerably.
I may write about this again. The reason is that part of my position here came after reading an article in which Lawrence Wright all but said that our pandemic response was the biggest FUBAR in the human history of FUBARs. But his evidence was so laughably weak that it prompted me to write this post.
Plus, of course, the hundredth article in which someone was griping about some group or another being unfairly treated by ignorant and blinkered distribution policies.
Guess what? I'm on vacation for a few days. I'm still online, and I'll post on topics of national importance when they pop up, but mostly I'll be driving around scenic places and taking photographs.
So where am I? This picture is the clue. The more precise your answer, the more genius points you'll rack up.
UPDATE: The mountains gave it away. I spent Monday driving up US 395 to photograph the Eastern Sierra, and stopped along the way at Manzanar, formerly home of a World War II internment camp for Japanese American citizens. It is now a national historic site.
I've said before that we will never make serious progress toward eliminating racism until Black students are educated on a par with white students. Half a century ago that would have been an uncontroversial statement, but after 50 years of trying and failing to close the Black-white education gap it's become tiresome to many people, little more than a cheap excuse for doing nothing. But tiresome or not, it's still a huge problem. Here's a chart that demonstrates the scope of what we're up against:
Black students who graduate from high school score about 30 points worse than white students on the NAEP reading test. Ditto for the math test. That's roughly three grade levels, which means that, on average, Black high school grads perform at about the same level as 9th grade white students. And this hasn't gotten any better over the past 30 years. In fact, it's gotten worse.
This is bad enough on its own. But it turns out that education is associated with a host of other problems. Not every problem, but a lot of them. Today I want to go through a few of them in an effort to persuade you to join the education cause. The evidence isn't perfect—in the real world it never is—but it's surprisingly consistent.
Income
About a decade ago Jay Zagorsky, then at Ohio State, wrote a paper comparing the incomes of various educational groups. He used the language of IQ because that was the data available to him, but don't let that throw you: An IQ of 85 is roughly equivalent to an 18-year-old performing like someone three grade levels lower. What Zagorsky found was simple: that person earned about 25% less than a person performing at age level. And according to recent census figures, the median income of Black workers is 21% lower than white workers.
Put these numbers together with the NAEP test results and they suggest that the average Black worker (a) performs at about the same level as a white worker with a 9th grade education, and (b) earns about as much as a white worker with a 9th grade education.
And of course there's a corollary: Education is also tightly bound up with Black wealth, both directly (higher income ---> higher wealth) and indirectly (higher income ---> higher death bequests and higher inheritances). There are other things that affect Black wealth too, but education is clearly one of the strongest.
Unemployment
As we all know, the unemployment rate of Black workers is substantially higher than it is for white workers:
On average over the past three decades, the Black unemployment rate is about five points higher than the white unemployment rate. But take a look at this:
When you compare the unemployment rate for Black workers to the unemployment rate of all high school dropouts, the difference almost disappears. Once again, the average Black worker is being treated like a white worker with roughly a 9th grade education.
Incarceration
Moving on from jobs-related research, here's a paper that looks at incarceration. The main result is shown in this pair of charts:
White people with a 9th grade education are incarcerated at the same rate as Black people who are just shy of a 12th grade education. These numbers plummet so steeply between 9th and 12th grade that they aren't very precise, but once again we find that the average Black person with a 12th grade education is treated very much like a white person with a 9th grade education.
Back in 1990, the life expectancy of Black people with a high school diploma was almost identical to that of white people who had dropped out of high school. This is very much in keeping with our thesis.
Interestingly, things have changed since then. White women with no high school diploma have lost nearly three years of life expectancy while Black men with a high school diploma have added about four year of life expectancy. Put together, it means that Black people with a high school diploma are now doing a bit better than white people who dropped out.
This is evidence that things can change even without a change in educational differences. Education has a big impact, but it's not everything.
Children's Health
This one is a little tricky because, obviously, it can't be based on the child's education. However, it can be measured relative to parental education. Here's the chart:
The red dot on the gray line shows the health of Black children whose parents have a high school education. (Poor health is indicated by having "activity and school limitations.") It's equivalent to the health of a white child whose parents have about a 10th grade education.
Summary
Nobody claims that education is the sole determinant of Black well-being. Studies over the years have consistently found that even after you adjust for education there's still a significant residual effect due solely to being Black. Most often, the residual is the impact of straight-up bigotry, both personal and systemic.
What's more, the evidence I've presented here isn't 100% consistent. It never is in the real world. In most of the studies the effect of education has stayed constant over the years, while in the case of life expectancy Black men have made large improvements. Sometimes a Black person with a 12th grade education is equivalent to a white person with a 9th grade education, while in others it's closer to a 10th grade education.
And of course there's a famously circular argument to address: We know that poor education is one of the causes of poverty, but we also know that poverty (especially concentrated poverty) is one of the causes of poor education. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? I think the evidence is fairly clear that education is the primal cause here, but there are plausible arguments in the other direction.
Taken as a whole, the evidence is strong that Black people in the US who graduate from high school perform, on average, at about a 9th grade level and have outcomes that are similar to white people with a 9th grade education. What's more, this disparate performance starts long before high school. Some of it is visible by kindergarten or earlier, and the full effect is generally in place by the end of elementary school. To close the gap, we need to address it as early as pre-K and keep it up all the way through the end of high school.
Our inability to educate Black kids as well as we do white kids is one of our great national shames, and until we turn this around there's no chance of making substantial progress on the racial equality front. It's the frustrating but necessary minimum effort necessary for anyone who's serious about fighting racism.
