Kevin Drum

Tyler Cowen points to a new paper today that reminds me of something:

We argue that workers must take costly actions (“conflict”) to have nominal wages catch up with inflation, meaning there are welfare costs even if real wages do not fall as inflation rises.... The impact of inflation on worker welfare is determined by what we term “wage erosion”—how inflation would lower real wages if workers’ conflict decisions did not respond to inflation.

This is the usual understanding: inflation erodes wages and then workers struggle to catch up. But that's not what happened this time around:

After the pandemic, wages outpaced inflation substantially. Inflation later clawed back some of the increase, but wages never fell behind CPI. And thanks to a tight labor market, after 2022 wages quickly started outpacing inflation again. There was never any wage erosion.

In any case, I'd offer a different and more obvious explanation for dislike of inflation: rising prices stare you in the face but rising wages are quickly forgotten. Plus people are bad at math. And higher wages always seem like the well-deserved fruits of hard work, while higher prices are the demons constantly trying to take them away.

NOTE: I'm using the Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker for wages because it's more accurate than the usual BLS numbers, which suffered in the early stages of the pandemic from composition effects (i.e., low-wage workers were laid off more, which removed them from the average and made it look like wages were spiking upward). The Atlanta tracker compares the same workers from year to year, and also provides median figures, which eliminates outlier effects.

Right about now, Marian and I have been married for exactly one-third of a century. Not bad!

Here is the simplest possible story of the price of oil:

1. Up until 2001, it hovered around $41 per barrel.
2. We invaded Iraq.
3. The price has been volatile ever since, averaging about $100 per barrel.

Will we ever manage to get the price of oil back down to $41 on a durable basis? Unless we can hop in a time machine and uninvade Iraq, probably not.

Elon Musk and his Twitter army are on the warpath tonight:

This is all over the conservo-sphere: California wants to ban memes!

But this whole thing is bizarre. On Tuesday Gov. Gavin Newsom signed some laws regulating deepfakes. One of them is election related and goes into effect immediately.

But California already has a law against deepfakes in political campaigns. We've had it since 2020. The new law, if I'm reading it correctly, does two things. First, existing law takes effect only during the 60 days before an election. The new law is in effect 120 days before and 60 days after an election. Second, the old law allowed a candidate to sue for removal of a deepfake. The new law allows almost anyone to sue.

Both old and new laws apply only to "materially deceptive content" that's distributed with malice. But content is exempt if it's clearly marked as either parody or manipulated.

So . . . I'm not sure what the fuss is about. Campaign deepfakes have been illegal in California for four years. They're still illegal, and the new law has only slightly sharper teeth. What am I missing here?

Here's the headline of the day:

Possibly involved sabotage? Ya think?

A standard liberal plaint goes like this:

How is it possible that Donald Trump still has a chance of winning November's election? He lies constantly! He says crazy stuff! He wants revenge on everybody! He seemingly has no knowledge of anything.

This is totally fair. But it doesn't matter. All of it has been priced in for a long time and something like 45+% of the electorate plans to vote for the guy anyway. Pointing this out over and over isn't going to change things.

The better question is why, given Trump's obvious faults, many non-insane people are still reluctant to just go ahead and vote for Kamala Harris. I understand the general problem: if you're a conservative, you don't like Democratic policies. And it doesn't help that Democrats have moved left over the past decade. I don't think Bill Clinton or Barack Obama (or Al Gore or John Kerry, for that matter) would have had much trouble besting Trump.

So this is the question: which deal breakers are still bothering center-right voters? Bret Stephens is a good bellwether for this crowd, and here's what he says he'd like to know about Harris:

What does Kamala Harris think the United States should do about the Houthis, whose assaults on commercial shipping threaten global trade, and whose attacks on Israel risk a much wider Mideast war?

....A few more questions for Harris: If, as president, she had intelligence that Iran was on the cusp of assembling a nuclear weapon, would she use force to stop it? Are there limits to American support for Ukraine, and what are they? Would she push for the creation of a Palestinian state if Hamas remained a potent political force within it? Are there any regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build three million new homes in the next four years? What role, if any, does she see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans? If there were another pandemic similar to Covid-19, what might her administration do differently?... How about interest-rate policy, federal spending and the resilience of our supply chains?

There's nothing unfair here, except for the fact that virtually no presidential candidate is ever quizzed about stuff this detailed. More to the point, what's the alternative? Does Stephens have any idea what Trump's views are on any of this? Of course not. He's never said, and the odds are vanishingly small that he knows anything about any of it.

Here's how Stephens put it yesterday:

A Harris victory puts an untested leader in the White House at a moment of real menace from ambitious autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran. A Trump victory means the country is again going to go crazy with all the cultural furies he unleashes, both for and against him. A Harris victory means four more years of misbegotten economic policies, like the threat to put controls on prices some federal bureaucrat deems to be too high. A Trump victory is dreadful for Ukraine. A Harris victory could be terrible for Israel. A Trump victory empowers people who don’t accept the results of an election. A Harris victory empowers a candidate who has never won a presidential primary and whose supporters want to jail their political opponent.

I get this even less. Untested? Sure, but that's better than Trump, who's been tested and found sorely wanting. Misbegotten economic policies? I don't know what those might be, and the price gouging thing is trivial. Israel? Harris has supported Israel her entire career. Jail for Trump? Sure, a lot of us would like to see Trump in an orange jumpsuit, but Jack Smith is prosecuting him because he broke the law, not out of any political retribution.

So I'm still a little puzzled. If you're a single-issue abortion voter, fine. If you want to deport every illegal immigrant in the country, fine. If you like the idea of putting a 20% tariff on everything that comes into the country, fine. But if this doesn't describe you—and you're moderately right of center and already loathe Trump—what precisely is it about Harris that still gives you pause? Roughly speaking, we know that she's a fairly ordinary Democrat. Beyond that, surely a bit of uncertainty is of little account against the sure certainty that Trump would be terrible?

My rule of thumb is that Kamala Harris needs to win the popular vote by 4-5% in order to win the election. According to the Economist tracker, she's there:

If Harris can expand her popular vote lead by another point or two, I think she'll be the very likely winner. If she expands by three points or so, she'll win by enough of a margin that even Donald Trump will have a hard time spurring his minions into a repeat of January 6.

Hey! Donald Trump is right about something. Sort of:

Auto insurance has been getting steadily more expensive for a long time, but it's skyrocketed recently. Premiums have gone up by half over the past couple of years, and they're up by a third even after accounting for overall inflation.

I don't really know why. I've read a couple of explanations that left me no wiser than before, but apparently there's no fakery here. Even California's insurance commissioner, who's usually pretty tough on rate increases, approved a big one this year and said it was because payouts really had gone up.

So is this because of the great pandemic spree of bad driving? Are we still driving like lunatics? Why?

This is sunset over the Harbor Patrol building at the far end of the East Basin at Dana Point Harbor.

This is a little down in the weeds, but Josh Marshall today points to another analytic estimate of how many Haitians actually live in Springfield, Ohio. We all agree that various data points suggest a moderate population increase up through 2022, but what if the big surge was in 2023? David Jarman at The Downballot presents a few data points for Clark County:

• The school district reports an increase of 317 ESL students in 2023,¹ and the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 7% of all Haitian immigrants are under the age of 18. This suggests a total increase of about 4,500 Haitian immigrants in 2023 if we assume that every ESL student is Haitian. More likely, if we assume half are Haitian and they make up 10% of the population in Springfield, the increase in the total Haitian population comes to about 1,500.
• Medicaid rolls show an increase among Black enrollees of about 4,500 above expectations. Maybe a quarter of that is Haitians who identify as Black?
• The total population increase in Clark County among those with a race of "Other" is about 2,000.

Meanwhile, we do have data through last month for the total number of employees in the Springfield metro area:

It's up by 1,000 in 2023 and 1,300 through 2024, which suggests a total population increase of about 2,200. This is pretty reliable data, but it doesn't tell us how many of those are Haitian. Certainly no more than 2,500, even if the white population has declined a bit. And you can cut that in half for just Springfield city. Call it 1,300.

These are all super rough, but taken together we might take a horseback guess of 2,000 additional Haitians in Clark County in 2023. That's maybe 1,500 in Springfield? Add that to my guess of 2,000 through 2022 and we get to 3,500 total.

Jarman, for reasons I don't quite get, nonetheless estimates the Haitian population at 10,000. I'm genuinely unsure where this comes from. For now, though, it looks to me like the Haitian population of Springfield city is unlikely to be above 4,000.

¹This has been corrected. Jarman incorrectly reported a 12.5% increase in ESL students but it was actually an increase from 8.5% of all students to 12.5% of all students. That works out to 317 students, an increase of more than half.

But this data point is especially shaky. There's no reason to think all, or even a majority of ESL students are Haitian. Nor is it likely that only 7% of Haitians in Springfield are children. The makeup of Haitians who move to Springfield is probably quite different from Haitian immigrants in general.

I would take this derived statistic with a big grain of salt.