Kevin Drum

This is off the beaten path, but there's been some Twitter conversation recently about "great man" theories of history and how you can, for example, figure out the IQs of historical individuals in the first place.

As it happens, there's a very famous study of historical figures written a century ago by IQ pioneers Catharine Cox and Lewis Terman. They use various ways of estimating IQ without directly measuring it, and if you're interested in how they do it the best bet is to read their book. In short, though, they rigorously investigated childhood precocity, schoolwork, and the nature of later accomplishments to make their estimates.

Cox's original book included 300 historical figures. A complete list is here. I chose 50 fairly randomly for the chart below. Note that the IQs have been adjusted from Cox's original estimates to reflect what they'd be on a modern IQ test rather than on the older scale originally used by Cox.

There are some interesting things here. It's not surprising to find Leibniz and Newton with stratospheric IQs, but who would have guessed a British prime minister would match them?

Byron, Dickens, and Hugo are surprisingly brilliant writers. Ditto for Madame de Staël of salon hosting fame. Beethoven was smarter than I would have guessed, while my personal favorite Benjamin Franklin was less so. Many generals and political leaders (Bolivar, Napoleon, Washington, Lee, Cromwell, Grant) have pretty pedestrian IQs but obviously it didn't matter. IQ might make the mathematician, but not the leader, who needs more than just IQ to succeed.

In case you're wondering just how rare high IQs are, here's a quick summary:

For example, this means there's about one person in the US with an IQ above 190 and perhaps a dozen in the entire world.

On the other hand, if you have a piddling IQ of 145, there are more than 300,000 just like you in the country. Don't get cocky.

Justin Glawe points out today that DOGE has so far identified $0 worth of fraudulent spending:

A month into Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s much-hyped efforts to root out fraudulent and wasteful spending by government agencies, not a single instance of fraud or waste has been discovered.

....None of this has stopped Trump, Musk, congressional Republicans, and their allies in rightwing media from breathlessly highlighting millions of dollars’ worth of spending as examples of fraudulent government programs.

Nowhere in those lists of programs — like the USAID initiatives that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been lambasting for weeks, including the tortured and incorrect claim that US taxpayers funded “condoms for Gaza” — is anything that even Musk or Trump themselves have identified as “fraud.” Instead, the goalposts for DOGE have silently moved from finding fraud and corruption to simply pointing out and cancelling government programs that Trump and Republicans simply don’t support.

This is actually a little surprising. Fraud as a percentage of federal spending is pretty small, but it still amounts to a lot of dollars. If you wanted to highlight fraud, it wouldn't be hard to find. There are new real cases of Medicare and Medicaid fraud all the time, along with some lesser known programs, and it wouldn't take much to dig them up and flog them hard on Fox News. You only need two or three to make it look like we're drowning in fraud.

So why not do it? First off, Trump and Musk probably don't really care. Second, it does require actual work to root out real fraud. And third, even the MAGA crowd might be a little cynical these days about "waste fraud 'n abuse." Maybe it's just been overused.

Did you know that Donald Trump plans a $200 million anti-immigrant ad campaign in the US and overseas? Trump says the ads will tell the real story of what he's doing on the border. They star Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota and currently Secretary of Homeland Security:

Noem said that Trump instructed that he didn’t want to be in the ads himself, telling her: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”

She recalled: “I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.’ So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border.”

Here's the ad, though it's so incompetently loaded and served you probably won't be able to play it:

I wonder where the money for this came from? Apparently we can't afford to fully fund medical research at CDC or NIH these days, but we can find a few dollars under the sofa cushions to thank President Trump for closing the border. Imagine that.

E-commerce sales continue to stay above their pre-pandemic trend:

The growth rate isn't stronger than it was before COVID. It's just above trend and growing at the trend rate. But it shows no signs of slowing down.

I won't pretend to be a huge fan of James Carville, but he happens to have said something that's been on my mind ever since Donald Trump won the election:

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told Mediaite’s Dan Abrams that the Trump administration would “collapse” within 30 days and advised Democrats to sit back and let it happen.

...."What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. It doesn’t need Elizabeth Warren and somebody screaming to pacify some progressive advocacy groups in Washington".... “It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks,” he said of opportunities for Democrats. “Just lay back.”

I'm not sure Trump is near collapse, but he might be. His net job approval numbers are certainly crashing fast:

But Trump aside, I agree that Democrats should play possum. They have loads of time before the midterm elections, and in the meantime it's impossible to figure out what their best strategy ought to be. Trump and congressional Republicans control everything anyway, so just let them. They'll eventually need to make a deal over the budget, and that's plenty soon enough to start up a bit of bargaining.

Then sit and wait to see how things shake out. Allow Republicans to create their own problems and then attack. By then Dems will know what to do and can energetically go out and do it.

I read a piece a few hours ago suggesting that although the hard-right AfD did well in today's German election, they actually underperformed their polling. So I checked:

Not only did AfD not underperform, there wasn't a single party that differed from its final poll figure by more than one percentage point. That's good polling!

Now, I used the German YouGov poll for comparison to the final results, and there were other polls that had AfD at 22-23%. So I think you can safely say that AfD didn't exceed expectations. But most likely they didn't fall very short either.

POSTSCRIPT: Some of this has to do with whether endorsements from J.D. Vance and Elon Musk helped or hurt the AfD's cause. My read of the evidence is that it most likely had no effect one way or another.

Today is Election Day in Germany. Here's what they're up against:

Since the middle of 2019, Germany's GDP is down by 0.16%. By comparison, over the same period US GDP is up 13%. That's 80 times more.

It's remarkable how much conflict of interest Elon Musk has with the federal government he now so strongly controls. A few examples:

1. Musk has been fighting with the FAA for years over regulation of SpaceX, culminating in a couple of large fines levied against SpaceX last year. Musk wanted administrator Michael Whitaker out and said so in no uncertain terms. And guess what? After the election Whitaker announced he would resign years early before Trump could fire him.
2. The NHTSA is America's premier highway safety agency. Among other things, this makes it the agency in charge of investigating crashes of driverless cars—like Elon Musk's Tesla. But unlike Google's Waymo, which cooperates with the NHTSA, Tesla decidedly doesn't:
   

   Musk has accused NHTSA of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations and recalls.... NHTSA has mandated that Tesla and other automakers using self-driving technology report crash data on vehicles, a requirement that Tesla has criticized and that watchdogs fear could be eliminated.

   No matter. Musk is in charge of firing workers, so he decided to slash nearly half the jobs at the specialized unit overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles:

   “If the question is, will this affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles, then yes, it will,” said one terminated engineer. “The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small. Now it’s almost nonexistent.”

   It must be nice to complain about over-regulation and then actually do something about it by firing half the regulators.

3. Donald Trump has ordered the removal of all 8,000 EV chargers installed at government buildings nationwide. Why? It's one thing not to build any more, but why demolish the ones that are already there?
   This might just be part of Trump's baffling animus toward electric cars, which has also manifested itself in his order to "pause" construction of a nationwide network of charging stations being built with infrastructure funding. But it's also worth pondering who else has a profitable network of high-speed chargers that doesn't need any competition. That would be Elon Musk and Tesla.
4. When he took office, Donald Trump promised to end the federal $7,500 subsidy for electric vehicles. Once again, this may just be part of Trump's jihad against EVs, but it's worth noting that it would likely help Tesla:
   

   “Take away the subsidies. It will only help Tesla,” Musk wrote in a post on X as he campaigned and raised money for Trump in July. Auto industry experts say the move would have a nominal impact on Tesla — by far the largest electric vehicle maker in the U.S. — but have a potentially devastating impact on its competitors in the EV sector since they are still struggling to secure a foothold in the market.

   It's all a zero-sum game. Subsidies might benefit Tesla, but they benefit smaller EV companies a lot more. Getting rid of them now would be a big net positive for Tesla.

5. When the Ukraine war started Elon Musk immediately activated his Starlink network for use by Ukraine's military. But that turns out to be a two-edged sword:
   

   The US has threatened to cut off Ukraine’s access to Starlink — the global satellite network that has proven essential on the battlefield — if Kyiv does not accept the White House’s deal to exchange its rare earth minerals for continued security guarantees, according to anonymous sources.... “Ukraine runs on Starlink. They consider it their North Star,” the source told Reuters. “Losing Starlink... would be a massive blow.”

   This is less an example of Musk benefiting from his control over government than it is the opposite. The government, it turns out, can benefit by knowing Musk will cooperate with them since he doesn't want to lose his access or inadvertently annoy his patron Trump.

6. Musk has long promised to make X into a payment app. If he does this he would be regulated by, among others, the CFPB, the consumer protection bureau created in the wake of the financial crisis and long loathed by Republicans. Can you guess what Musk wants to do with the CFPB? Cut staff? Nope. He wants to eliminate it entirely, and he might just be able to do it.

Donald Trump keeps prattling about how the Gilded Age from 1870 through 1913 was the richest era in US history. Why? Tariffs.

Nobody with a room temperature IQ should buy this obvious foolishness, but just in case you need evidence, here it is:

The most prosperous era in American history is . . . right now. We are ten times richer than we were during the Gilded Age.

You don't even need to bother engaging with women's disenfranchisement; Jim Crow; widespread poverty; poisonous food; rampant political graft and corruption; the Panic of 1873 and again in 1893 and yet again in 1907; child labor; and 12-hour workdays under foul conditions. Just forget about all that stuff. We were ten times poorer back then than we are today. That's enough to know.

There's not a lot to report. My oxygenation continues to be good and my colon virus appears to be gone. I'm eating more, which makes my doctor very happy. Marian even brought me a Sausage McMuffin from McDonald's this morning, along with some lovely orange juice.

But—who cares? My breathing is still so shallow I can barely move in bed, and there seems to be no improvement in either the flu or the pneumonia. That's what really matters, and none of my doctors has any clue how long they're likely to last. Another week? Two weeks? No one knows.