Cats, charts, and politics
The FBI has been a roll against politicians lately. Here's the roll call of national figures under investigation, indicted, or convicted of federal crimes this year:
Democrats
Republicans
Who am I missing?
The third quarter is almost over, which means the Atlanta Fed's GDPnow estimate is probably pretty reliable by now. They're forecasting Q3 real GDP growth of 2.9%:
Not bad. They'll have an updated forecast tomorrow.
Something popped into my head this morning that reminded me of the golden rule of student testing: Always disaggregate by race.
So I did. I took NAEP reading scores for 2019 and 2022 and then added an estimate for 2023 from a Harvard/Stanford report earlier this year. Here's the result for 4th grade:
Everyone except Asians dropped during the pandemic and only made up a fraction of it in 2023. But now let's look at 8th grade:
Except among white students, losses were minuscule and had recovered almost entirely by 2023.
As I've pointed out frequently, score changes among young students often wash out. Scores for older students are more reliable. I would have checked 12th graders if the data was available.
In any case, the takeaway here is that reading ability has probably recovered almost entirely from the pandemic except among white kids, who are dragging down the average.
Why? One thing to always keep in mind is that the pandemic drop wasn't due to remote learning. The evidence is pretty clear that the effect of remote learning was quite small. It was something else that caused most of the problem, and it seems to have affected white kids the most.
FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: If you look at SAT scores by race you see something similar: Scores dropped for some but not for others. However, the SAT is self-selecting and the data isn't recent, so you probably can't make much of it.
The Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2023 came out today. Here's how we've been doing since the pandemic:
This is a direct survey of how much money we've been spending. Short answer: After inflation, we're still spending more. And it's not because of debt. Since 2019, total debt per adult has increased a grand total of $99 (adjusted for inflation). That compares to increased spending of more than $2,000 per adult.
And the spending numbers are the same by income level. Spending has increased for the poor, the rich, and the middle.
Stimulus money has run out. Savings have been depleted. But they worked when we needed them: employment has gone up; prime-age labor force participation has gone up; wages have gone up; and over the past year inflation has quieted. As a result, we have more money and we're spending more money.
Bottom line: The economy is good and things are better for everyone.
I almost forgot again that Wednesday is YouGov poll day. I guess maybe I have an excuse this week. Anyway, here it is:
Harris is now three points ahead nationally and things have been bouncing around that level for weeks within the margin of error. There's just nothing much to say about this except the banal "It's gonna be a close one!"
Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp has a piece today headlined "The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term." The gist is that the people surrounding Trump would no longer be establishment figures who try to rein him in, but true believers who will egg him on. And those true believers are all being influenced by the six intellectuals on Beauchamp's list.
I dunno. Maybe. You can read it and decide for yourself—though I'm especially skeptical that Curtis Yarvin has any true influence. But maybe I'm out of touch.
In any case, one of the six is Patrick Deneen, and for some reason this paragraph provoked me:
Deneen’s first big book, Why Liberalism Failed, argued that the shared philosophy of the American center — a liberalism focused on rights and individual freedom — had produced a miserable world. While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability. Americans were depressed, lonely, and immiserated — and they had their governing consensus to blame.
Maybe "provoked" is the wrong word. It's just that this critique is so common and so banal. Deneen focuses on the right-wing version: we need more religion, more local control of politics, and less centralized bureaucracy. Robert Putnam gave us the centrist version in Bowling Alone, which argues that social interaction and civic engagement have declined over the past few decades. And then there's the traditional lefty version, which focuses on the destructive influence of late capitalism and consumerism at the expense of what really matters in life. It's all the same thing. No less a lefty than Barack Obama recommended Deneen's best known book.
In other words, this idea that there's a spiritual hole in our lives has been a loud and persistent critique of modernism since at least World War II. Examples abound. The "rat race." Future Shock. Downshifting. The Whole Earth Catalog. Naomi Klein. God and Man at Yale. Social media panics. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
And maybe the modern world does leave a hole in our lives. Or maybe not. The World Happiness Report, which admittedly should be taken with a grain of salt, provides this list of the happiest and unhappiest places:
(The United States ranks 23rd out of 143 with a score of 6.73.) You will immediately notice something obvious. Generally speaking, the happiest countries are all rich, nonreligious, bureaucratic, peaceful, consumerist, well educated, and high tech. The unhappiest places are generally poor, traditional, badly educated, violent, corrupt, low-tech, and full of strong family bonds.
Now, happy is not the same thing as fulfilled, but this is still a helluva comparison. I suspect that our obsession with purpose and fulfillment is mostly possible only because we're rich and comfortable. People in those bottom ten countries don't have the time or energy to even think about it. They just want to make it to the next day, and religion and family bonds don't really do much to lighten their misery.
Beyond this, even if the hole is a genuine problem I keep wondering what people think we ought to do about it. On an individual level, sure, there are things that can help: therapy, self-help, meditation, religion, etc. But on a societal level? We're just not going back to the 19th century. Technological progress has boomed over the past century, so we're going to have lots of technology. Technology means complexity, so we're going to have big centralized bureaucracies to manage it. Big, complex bureaucracies require high levels of education, and education is pretty highly correlated with the decline of religious belief. Finally, we plainly prefer being rich to being poor, so we're going to have big corporations and a consumerist culture.
This is all way, way too big to be turned around by mere government policy. It just is. So while we can gripe about this stuff all we want, there's not a single person on earth who has any concrete idea what to do about it. Our only solution is better adaptation, not wholesale cultural revolution.
POSTSCRIPT: As a side note, it's especially nuts to think Donald Trump is going to do anything about this. He's rich, educated, nonreligious, in love with technology, runs a huge corporation, and couldn't care less about social bonds. If there's a single person on the planet who embodies the alleged hole in our souls, it's Donald Trump.
We all know about judge shopping, right? It's the practice of filing lawsuits in districts with only one or two judges, which guarantees you a friendly face if you pick the right district. It's most prevalent in north Texas, which has several districts that are helmed solely by business-friendly, anti-government, right-wing judges, usually chosen by Donald Trump.
This crossed my eyeballs today via a post by Stephen Vladeck responding to a recent defense of judge shopping by Reed O'Connor of.......the northern district of Texas. So I read through O'Connor's defense, and it turned out to consist of only two things:
The first one is plain dumb, and also wrong. Judge shopping in patent cases caused a huge fuss a few years ago and ended up being banned in its epicenter of Waco, Texas.
The second defense doesn't even parse. O'Connor hears most of his cases in Fort Worth but holds hearings in Wichita Falls if the litigant is local. There's no reason this couldn't continue for genuinely local cases even if most Wichita Falls filings were randomly assigned throughout the northern district (which is virtually all located in Dallas/Fort Worth).
Stephen Vladeck's response is generally polite because, you know, lawyers. But I don't have to be: This is the flimsiest, most ridiculous defense of judge shopping imaginable. Unless there's truly something I don't understand about how much travel judges would have to do under a new regime, I think we can safely say that there's no justification for Texas-style judge shopping. It's a purely partisan Republican thing.
This is the new Gerald Desmond bridge in Long Beach. It's not really that new anymore, but this is the first time I've captured it at sunset.
Two things of note. First, the view is better now that they've demolished the old Gerald Desmond bridge. Second, there were a whole bunch of electrical wires spanning the entire image horizontally, but Photoshop's AI-powered generative fill eliminated them. I'm still sort of awestruck by this even though the effect isn't perfect.
The bottom photo is the uncropped original for comparison.
The Wall Street Journal reports today about a massive Chinese cyberattack on US broadband suppliers:
The hacking campaign, called Salt Typhoon...is the latest in a series of incursions that U.S. investigators have linked to China in recent years.
....Last week, U.S. officials said they had disrupted...a China-based hacking group called Flax Typhoon. And in January, federal officials disrupted Volt Typhoon, yet another China-linked campaign that has sought to quietly infiltrate a swath of U.S. critical infrastructure.
OK, I get the "typhoon" part. Destructive storm, Asian origin, etc. But what's with salt, flax, and volt?
Finally the preliminary steel import numbers for August are here. They're down 2.4% from July. And whether you care or not, you are going to see who we get our steel from:
