Kevin Drum

The American Association of University Professors has issued a new policy that supports the mandatory use of "DEI statements." These are written accounts by faculty members of how they advance the goals of diversity in the workplace, often used as part of the decision to promote or grant tenure:

Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service.

....Some critics contend that such policies run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as “ideological screening tools” and “political litmus tests.”

I don't think DEI statements infringe on academic freedom any more than, say, a required statement about how you try to be an effective teacher. With or without them, professors remain free to say anything they want, including the opinion that DEI statements are stupid.

My problem is wholly different: I think it's clear DEI statements are a charade that strips the dignity from everyone involved. Nobody takes these statements seriously and everybody knows it, but grown men and women are nevertheless forced to submit vapid boilerplate to any committee with power over their careers. Not only is this vaguely humiliating, it sends an active message that it isn't really something to be taken seriously. Just check the box and move on.

But there's another problem too:

In the past two decades the share of Black professors has barely budged, increasing a grand total of 0.8 percentage points. Considering that the overall Black population share has also increased by 0.8 points during the same period, this is essentially zero progress.

In other words, whatever else you can say about them, DEI statements clearly aren't doing much good. Insisting on a transparent charade is bad enough, but insisting on one that doesn't even work makes no sense at all.

Over at New York, John Herrman voices a common complaint: Twitter used to be a decent place to get news about breaking events but it's now just a cesspool.

If, yesterday, you found yourself in the path of Hurricane Milton or were concerned about friends or family in Florida, you might have logged on, out of habit, to see what was happening. You would have encountered something worse than useless. On a functional level, the app is now centered on the algorithmic “For You” page, a sloshing pool of engagement chum in which a Category 5 hurricane gathering power in the Gulf is left to compete with videos of car crashes, posts from Elon Musk–adjacent right-wing maniacs, and a dash of whatever poorly targeted interest-based bait the platform thinks you might engage with, all collected from the past couple weeks.

Genuine question here: If you care at all about what you see on Twitter, why would you ever use the "For You" feed? Of course it's garbage. But no one with a room temperature IQ should ever go near it.

And yet I hear endless complaints about the "For You" feed even though Twitter is by no means "centered" on it. If you simply curate who you follow normally and then use the "Following" feed, Twitter will be fine. And if you want breaking news, hashtags and trending feeds still seem to work OK.

Of course, this assumes that Elon doesn't do away with the "Following" feed someday. I wouldn't put it past him. But he hasn't done it yet.

BY THE WAY: Elon has reportedly lost upwards of $30 billion on his acquisition of Twitter. Given that he now uses it primarily as a forced firehose of support for Donald Trump, should this be considered the biggest campaign contribution in the history of the world?

Let's see. In his grand giveaway tour, Donald Trump has now casually proposed making the following tax free:

• Tips
• Overtime
• Social Security benefits
• Auto loans
• "Double taxation" of overseas income

How about no taxation of crypto profits? Or lottery winnings? That's not fair, is it? Or maybe yard sale profits? Or anything sold on eBay? Or Christmas bonuses? Come on. There's lots of fertile ground left here.

This is all ridiculous, the Cheyne-Stokes breathing of a dying fealty to tax cuts uber alles. As for me, I'm not a politician so I don't have to worry about pandering to voters. Instead I can just say the simple truth: I'm no deficit hawk, but it's still become obvious that the deficit is out of control and needs to be reined in. So forget all the tax breaks. What we need to do is return to the tax rates we had in the late 1990s—which was a pretty prosperous time, as I recall.

This is approximate but pretty close. If we simply returned to the tax rates of 2000 we'd increase revenue by about $850 billion—and cut the deficit by half. Add in some moderate payroll tax increases to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and you'd be up to $1.2 trillion. There's not much scope for budget cuts, but you could probably find another $100 billion there if you tried.

This reduces the deficit to $600 billion or so, and that will mechanically reduce interest rates and therefore interest payments too. The deficit would be all but gone in a few years.

Easy peasy, except that no one is willing to do it despite the fact that our experience during the Clinton era suggests it would work great and not overburden anyone. To summarize:

• Return personal and corporate rates to 2000 levels.
• Increase Social Security taxes from 6.2% to roughly 7.2% and Medicare taxes from 1.45% to maybe 1.75%. This is an inevitable consequence of demographics and everyone knows it.
• Find about 5% in budget cuts to the military, domestic programs, and welfare spending.
• Bank a few hundred billion dollars in interest payments as a result of reduced interest rates.

We could literally do this tomorrow with very little pain if we felt like it. We're not Greece, after all. We're the most powerful economy in the world with loads of leeway to do what we need to. Instead we seem dedicated to running ourselves into a ditch and eventually being forced to make genuinely painful choices. Stupid.

Sunset behind a rock formation at Joshua Tree National Park.

According to the Census Bureau, the average household income of the poorest quintile is roughly $23,000.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, that increases to $49,000 after you account for taxes and government benefits. This compares to about $80,000 for the average middle-class household.

Along with CPI, we also got September readings for real wages today. Hourly wages were up slightly, but because hours worked dropped there was a fall in weekly wages:

All employees in September (adjusted for inflation)

• Hourly: +2.2% (annualized)
• Weekly: -1.2% (annualized)

Blue-collar workers in September (adjusted for inflation)

• Hourly: +1.2% (annualized)
• Weekly: +1.5% (annualized)

A quick note on inflation: my favorite measure happens to be quarterly CPI, which smooths out a bit of the monthly volatility but still provides a more current measure than the usual year-over-year reading. The downside, of course, is that you only get a quarterly update every three months—although there are times when I think we'd all be better off with this less frenetic frequency.

In any case, three months have gone by and we now have CPI for Q3 of 2024:

It doesn't get much better than that, does it?

CPI inflation fell slightly in September to 2.2%:

Core CPI increased a bit to 3.8%. On a year-over-year basis, CPI came in at 2.4% and core CPI at 3.3%.

Back in the day—i.e., 2022—crypto in politics was all about Sam Bankman-Fried, who lavished his millions on politicians under the guise of altruistic giving. It was a lie, of course, but everyone pretended to accept it for a while.

Bankman-Fried is warming a prison cell these days and the crypto industry has moved on. Alexander Sammon explains:

This time, there’s no grand political theorizing. No time to waste on utopian futures or societal aspirations. In fact, Coinbase’s billionaire CEO Brian Armstrong, the closest thing to a leader of this political formation, has openly declared that the United States is a society in “decline” and that “backup” options for existing nation states must be pursued. No, the 2024 crypto money machine has been reborn out of a cold, hard determination to do one thing and one thing only: put politicians in power who will stay out of crypto’s way.

And the crypto money machine is huge beyond imagining. Here's an estimate of corporate political contributions by sector for 2024:

Crypto is massively outspending everyone else combined, and this money is being wielded for one specific purpose: to gain passage of a bill that would only lightly regulate crypto. And it is being wielded ruthlessly:

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who has advocated for stricter regulation of the crypto industry in the past, is firmly in the lobby’s crosshairs. The group is spending an astronomical $40 million to oppose Brown, the chair of the Senate Banking committee.... That wild spending makes his victory look much more difficult. (“Money moves the needle,” Armstrong told Axios. “For better or worse, that’s how our system works.”)

Now, there's a lot more to the political world than direct corporate contributions. In fact, it's a fairly small share of the billions of dollars in total political spending this cycle. Nevertheless, this is a very impressive figure for an industry that contributed approximate zero in 2022. They want to be left alone to continue scamming the American public, and they're willing to spend eye-watering amounts to insure that.

So if you're wondering why practically everybody is either friendly or at least not hostile to crypto these days, this is it. They're facing too big a war chest to risk saying anything directly about regulating crypto. The $40 million flame thrower aimed at Sherrod Brown is all the warning they need.

Apparently the latest hotness is to air minor differences with people you normally agree with. I'm in! Noah Smith argues today that our current economy is the best in a very long time, and overall I think he's right. But there's one thing I think he's wrong about: wage growth.

Unfortunately, it's been pretty lousy over the past three years:

This is wage growth for nonsupervisory workers, but it doesn't really matter. Every measure of wages shows roughly the same thing.

This is all bound up with inflation. Wages have kept up with inflation over the past three years, so there's been no drop in living standards. But there's been virtually no gain, either. This kind of sluggish real wage growth is great for the Fed, since it means there's little chance of a persistent wage-price spiral, but not so good for workers, who are just treading water.

Now, some of this is a bit of an artifact, since a three-year span includes the big drop of early 2022 but not the corresponding big spike of early 2020. Still, even accounting for that doesn't change things much. There just hasn't been a lot of wage growth lately, and that's probably one factor in the overall sour feelings about the economy.¹

¹But not a big factor. As I've pointed out repeatedly, this is mostly a purely partisan effect: only Republicans think the economy is horrible, a view that took hold at nearly the instant Joe Biden won the election. Since then, both Fox News and Donald Trump have hammered away at this, and Republicans believe them.