Most of these charts are intriguing, not literally the most important trends of the year. But some of them are! Enjoy.
1. Abortions are up
The data now broadly agrees: ever since Dobbs the overall abortion rate has gone up, not down. Telehealth across state lines and pharmaceutical abortions have driven the increase.
2. Extremist killings are a right-wing phenomenon
Virtually all killings done by political extremists are right wing. This explains why that's what the media reports.
3. It was a bad year for incumbents
This was the first year ever in which every single election worldwide went against the governing party. Perhaps Kamala Harris did pretty well under the circumstances?
4. Partisan differences drive institutional mistrust
Generally speaking, it's not true that "Americans" have lost trust in institutions. It's mostly just Republicans, driven by the constant barrage of outrage from Fox News.
5. US government efficiency is pretty good
According to a World Bank measure of government efficiency, the US is one of the best big countries in the world. See also here.
6. Gender dysphoria is (sometimes) fleeting
Lots of young teens say they have feeling of being the wrong sex, but by age 19 it mostly goes away on its own. Only about 3% of people in their twenties continue to feel gender dysphoria if it's not treated.
7. Inflation happened everywhere
Inflation wasn't due to Joe Biden's stimulus bill. It happened everywhere in the world in exactly the same way and at exactly the same time. It was caused by pandemic supply chain shortages and government aid to keep people whole, almost all of which in the US was spent under the Trump administration.
8. Red states are not low-tax states
They generally tax rich people at low rates, but the working class doesn't do so well.
9. Illegal immigration is all about the jobs
Illegal immigrants come to America to work. The ups and downs of the illegal immigration rate can be explained almost entirely by job demand in the US.
10. Maternal mortality isn't up.
Last year, along with everyone else, I reported that maternal mortality was skyrocketing. But it turns out this is entirely a statistical artifact due to changes in the way maternal mortality is reported. When you correct for this, it turns out there's been no change at all since 2000.
11. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a model of great performance under terrible circumstances
Contrary to its usual description as "chaotic," the Afghanistan withdrawal mostly went well. The first day was indeed chaotic, which set the tone for all subsequent reporting, and ISIS killed a lot of people with a single suicide bomber. But for the most part the Army managed to airlift a stunning number of people to safety in only a couple of weeks.
12. Kids have given up on drugs
Teens continue to use marijuana a lot, but their use of cigarettes, alcohol, and hard drugs has plummeted over the past two decades.
13. Yes, we're building electric charging stations
The plan to build 100,000 charging stations across the US was always meant to take until 2030. The numbers start out small because you have to plan before you can build, but they're basically on track.
14. We need more doctors
Do you wonder why it's so hard to get an appointment with your primary care physician? This is why.
15. We sure are building a lot of offices
Despite the fact that we're supposedly not working much at the office anymore, we're building office space at the same rate as the peak of the housing bubble. This is all part of the mystery of just how prevalent teleworking really is.
16. Business formation is way up
In 2021 the rate of small business formation surged and has stayed high ever since. No one has ever explained this.
17. Overdose deaths are finally dropping
Starting last September, drug overdose deaths suddenly began to fall steeply. On a monthly basis they're now down a stunning 40% from their peak.
18. SNAP benefits have gone way up
I'm putting this one up because so few people seem to realize that Joe Biden permanently and substantially raised food stamp benefits for poor people. Since he took office, he's raised SNAP benefits by 43% compared to food inflation of only 20%.
19. Teen suicide attempts aren't rising
Over the past three decades, the number of teens who attempted suicide has been completely flat. This is one of several markers suggesting that we've overreacted to the notion that today's teens are existentially unhappy and stressed thanks to social media.
20. The Hispanic vote decided the 2024 election
Under normal circumstances, a 2% Republican presidential victory would predict a 33% winning margin for Democrats among Hispanics. In 2024 it produced a 5% margin. This is far and away the most crucial element of Kamala Harris's loss. The big question now is whether this is a permanent shift or a weird one-off, as in 2004.
21. Americans make a lot of money
According to the CBO, even the poorest Americans earn about $56,000 per year once you take into account taxes and government benefits. That's a pretty fair amount
I don't want to put words into Mr. Drum's mouth, but just as the subtext of #19 is one of his long-established hobbyhorses, so it seems like the subtext of #6 is part of a subtle movement into the realm of "trans people are faking it", I certainly hope he'll say this is not the case.
I've repeatedly provided links to studies and discussions showing that child gender dysphoria does persistent into adulthood for well over 95% of kids, but Kevin refuses to listen and keeps referring to the same debunked study.
Add your links please.
https://open.substack.com/pub/erininthemorn/p/new-study-trans-youth-satisfied-6?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4mup1v
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/
Here's a couple on trans health care in general:
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf
https://open.substack.com/pub/erininthemorn/p/landmark-systematic-review-of-trans?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4mup1v
Enjoy!
One more:
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/fact-check-no-a-new-study-does-not?utm_source=publication-search&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
It’s not even a debunked study — Kevin just can’t read. The study clearly states that they are looking at gender non-contentedness (“I wish I was the other gender”) and not gender dysphoria (“I *am* the other gender, my body is wrong”). Needless to say, the former is *not* what gender-affirming care is used for.
Kevin keeps on publishing his own version of their data on a graph where he mislabels the axis as gender dysphoria. Even if it’s just an honest mistake on his part it’s such a fundamental misreading of the paper (they explain the distinction in the very first paragraph FFS) and he’s repeated it so many times that I really have to question every other chart he puts out there.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02817-5
Sylvia is helpful indeed, but I'd distrust Kevin's conclusion anyway. For one thing, it might be unwise to draw conclusions too fast on such a topic, where polls may fail at honest responses given closeness to one's person, bigotry, shame, and more. (Think of measuring support for Trump.)
But also, it doesn't even purport to measure how many have second thoughts after. And I'd need firm counts of a serious number of such, since you can find a minority in polls attesting to darn near anything. One could reason that if people "get better" without transitioning, then maybe they shouldn't transition. But that's a value judgment, too, and besides, if people did get over it, wouldn't that actually RAISE the incidence of dysfunction after early teens, not reduce it?
Last, bear in mind that it's showing that teens quite generally feel lousy about themselves. And yet it's wrong to say then, oh, this will pass. We still look for signs when teens quite apart from this issue need help. And we should.
Who defines a killing as "political", as "extremis", and as "right wing"?
To take a recent example, was Luigi Mangioni "politically" motivated? Was he "extremist"? And was he "right wing"?
How about Thomas Matthew Crooks (the first would-be Trump assassin)?
Both of these are good test case because everything about them seem incoherent, as we learned in realtime in both cases. Ultimately both seem to show that the primary element in these sorts of shootings is mental illness, and whether you code them as left vs right seems primarily about what you want to "prove".
Going back further, how about Ted Kaczynski?
My GUESS is that most of the cases in their lists take this form: deluded souls with no coherent ideology, who land up coded as right PRIMARILY because they have some sort of gun background (owned a lot, were in the military, etc) and that's a lazy way of defining ideology that gives you the results you want when you want particular results.
It's a lot of white supremacists. They are right wing. Anti-government folks can be right or left, but it's the right-wing sovereign citizen types that kill people now. The leftwing anarchist types were busy a century ago. The anti-abortion extremists are also right-wing.
A lot of the "deluded souls" these days are big into the manosphere and incels. That is right wing.
You would be surprised how many people motivated by political ideas like to make it clear the reasons they are engaging in violence. Dylan Roof, the Tree of Life shooter, Tim McVeigh, various militia types, the 2022 buffalo shooter, 2019 El Paso mass shooter, various acts of violence targeting abortionists, people motivated by incel ideology. The list goes on. These are all from the top of my head while the only clearly left wing shooter I can think of off the top of my head is the guy who shot up the republican congressional softball game.
Ted Kazinsky while at a glance might have seen leftist (environmentalist) was steadfastly anti-left wing and fit neatly into a long history of far right environmental thinking (look at the nazis and their environmental preservation efforts).
I can’t say it’s 100% of the people who make up these numbers are 1000% clearly right wing but there is enough evidence without even doing any research that there is far more memorable clearly right wing violence than left wing violence.
Right. I give three names that don't fit your profile and you just ignore them.
Same with Shamsud-Din Jabbar today. I assume in a month this is going to 100% ignore the name, ignore the ISIS flag, focus on the fact that he was from TX and was in the military so must be put in the rightwing column.
I didn’t ignore Kacksynski. As I said he was very clearly based on his views of the left and his adherence to a version of environmentalism and anti-modernism that has a long history on the far right I very happily consider him a right winger.
Regarding Crooks and Mangioni who appear to have confused ideology or other motives but targeted political figures do you have any evidence that these kinds of figures are included as right wingers in the research? Hinckley tried to assassinate Reagan but no one would considers his motives as being political.
Also from what I understand Islamic terrorists are not included in either the left or the right for this research. Despite almost all Islamic terrorists adhering to an ideology that could only be described as highly conservative / right wing - even if the right in the west don’t like it.
You might get a few outliers being included in the right or the left for that matter who shouldn’t be there but as per my point above - besides the guy who shot up the republican congressional baseball game what over left wing violence comes to mind? While you ignore the significant number of right wing terrorrists I was able to name off the top of my head which you ignored.
So why is homocidal mental illness so much more common in the US than in any other industrialized nation on the planet?
I doubt that it is. What is more common is that those people can easily get military grade weapons.
The ADL gets these numbers by treating murders by right-wingers (e.g., white supremacist gangs) as "extremist killings" regardless of motive. So if one Aryan nation thug kills another over drugs or women, it gets listed as an extremist killing. So in one sense, it is a killing by an extremist, and therefore an extremist killing. But as a measure of political violence, it is utter horseshit.
They also don't try very hard to tie inconvenient deaths to left-wing groups. For example, from their 2020 report:
"The one 2020 murder not committed by a right-wing extremist was the fatal shooting of Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right Patriot Prayer, by antifa activist Michael Reinoehl during a protest in Portland, Oregon, on August 29, 2020. Antifa is the name used by a loose network of anti-racist activists who focus on physically confronting white supremacists and some other right-wing groups on the streets, as well as on doxing their identities online. In recent years, right-wing media have demonized antifa, exaggerating the amount of antifa-related violence and frequently labeling them as “terrorists.” However, the killing of Danielson was the first murder linked to antifa since 1993, when Eric Banks, a racist skinhead and singer in a white power band, was shot to death by John Bair, an anti-racist skinhead."
So what about the 16-year-old boy killed by the CHAZ militia in July 2020? Shouldn't that be attributed to left-wing extremists? And how about the people who shot Secoriea Turner, also in July 2020? And that's just off the top of my head.
How do you know that those murders were not counted? I don't quite follow.
The 2020 report is available here:
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2022-05/Murder%20and%20Extremism%202021%20v15.pdf
They count 17 murders in 2020 attributable to domestic extremists (as an aside, 10 of those murders are attributed to "non-ideological reasons" -- i.e., they are killings by extremists, but not killings in the furtherance of extremism).
The two killings I listed above are not included in the 17 murders.
The report includes the details of the murders. I suggest you read the details--it should be instantly clear to you why the ADL numbers are horseshit.
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re: Top 20 charts of 2024
If a baker's dozen is 13
Drum's score is 21
(Or does "Kevin's score" scan better?)
if a baker's dozen is 13 what is 21
ChatGPT said: A "baker's dozen" refers to 13 items, but the term "21" does not have a specific term like that. In general, 21 simply refers to the number itself.
If you're asking whether there's a special term for a set of 21 items, there isn't a commonly used term like "baker's dozen" for 21. [...]
But in terms of well-known phrases or terms, there isn't a specific one for 21.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
There should be. Let's get "Drum's score" in the common parlance.
In the old British system of coinage, for roughly 250 years a "guinea" denoted 21 shillings, even though there was no coin or bill in that denomination after 1816. (Yes, I had to look up that last part.) But no, I'm not advocating reviving that terminology. Agreed, let's go with "Drum's score."
Great observation. I forgot about guinea, which is embarrassing since my parents are English.
I'm surprised ChatGPT didn't present it, and perhaps other 21s that may exist in sports or card games (blackjack is 21 but only in the specific case of 10 + 11, so I consider it ineligible).
They say 21 is gonna be a good year ...
Thanks to my frequent purchases of Punch in the 1960’s, I can report that advertisements for luxury goods in that era still quoted prices in guineas, despite there being no notes in that denomination either. This was of course the old sterling, twenty shillings to the pound.
Looks like the Dems are starting to catch up with the GOP on partisan distrust of media, I assume thanks to the media’s atrocious sanewashing of Trump and endless attacks on Biden and Harris.
Can I share this on other media? TPM, BlueSky?
i’ve asked this before, but does anyone know if data centers are considered office space? That might explain the continued surge in construction.
With regard to the Hispanic vote deciding the 2024 election, are we sure about that? Certainty it decided the popular vote, but what about the electoral vote? Changes in the Hispanic vote in places like California, Texas and Florida were pretty meaningless electoral vote wise. What states would a typical Hispanic vote have changed? Would that have changed the outcome?
Drum is sensible on a lot of issues, but I suppose it should be no surprise that when he is biased on an issue he is an immune to evidence as any Trump supporter. This occurred to me with the utterly unsurprising chart showing that people who question their identities as children often outgrow it. This should be unsurprising to anybody who has given it any thought. And gives no reason whatsoever to believe that such children are being overtreated.
If they were being overtreated then one would expect a lot of regret from people who got serious treatment for transient feelings. But every study presented, even those presented by Drum, show the opposite. The regret rate is low, even for a procedure handled responsibly. And it is impressive the knots that people who want to be worried about this are willing to go through to maintain their worry in the face of evidence that they don't have to be worried.
In one study that Drum presented the authors note the small regret but in a footnote point out that the people who go through treatment are atypical. He seizes on this as if it is a problem with the study when really it is a statement that the date he gives above is uninteresting because most children who question their gender do not get this kind of treatment.
An early paper that Drum commented on, by a woman who was apparently supposed to be objective because she did not actually work with children questioning their gender identity, in much the way that RFK Jr is objective on vaccines because he doesn't work with vaccines, tried to handwave away a study showing that children who got puberty blockers because of gender dysphoria then went on to get further treatment. Her argument was that the puberty blockers did not work as a way to put off making the decision to get further treatment because the number of people who got the puberty blockers and did not get further treatment was insignificant. But this is like the politicians who pass abortion waiting periods so that women can think about their abortions, and then say the waiting periods don't work because the women still want an abortion after a month. But of course they thought about the abortion, they just wanted it more desperately a month later.
What all of this evidence has in common is that it is evidence that gender dysphoria is not being overtreated. It is amazing that Drum can look at this evidence and come away with confirmation that there is a problem that gender dysphoria is being overtreated.
Someone in another note claims that Drum is directly misrepresenting the chart above by mislabeling it in a way that is clear from the very beginning of the article that Drum took it. She is right. The relevant passage is "Gender dysphoria can for example be characterized by a strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender) and a strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). A broader concept is gender non-contentedness, referring to unhappiness with being the gender aligned with the birth-assigned sex (Egan & Perry, 2001; Potter et al., 2021). To illustrate the relation between these concepts; a young adolescent girl who mostly likes things seen as typical for boys and who dislikes the changes she goes through during puberty, might (temporarily) experience gender non-contentedness, although she might not experience gender dysphoria or wish to transition from female to male."
That is pretty clear, and if Drum read that and still presented gender discontentment as gender dysphoria he really is being dishonest. If he didn't bother to read the article and made an honest mistake, which I hope is the case, he really should correct it. To get even the appearance that this chart is interesting he has to play on this distortion. And doing so is beneath him.
It is also odd that Kevin used "attempted suicide requiring treatment" as his measure. This is a far less concrete statistic than completed suicides.
From the CDC data for completed suicides (age 14-19, rate per 100K):
2001 7.88
2002 7.34
2003 7.15
2004 8.06
2005 7.51
2006 7.13
2007 6.71
2008 7.22
2009 7.52
2010 7.53
2011 8.32
2012 8.34
2013 8.25
2014 8.72
2015 9.77
2016 10.01
2017 11.8
2018 11.41
2019 10.49
2020 10.1
2021 10.86
2022 10
Here's another source worth looking at:
https://www.nber.org/bh/20232/what-accounts-rise-suicide-rates-us
Also consider this increase in the context of the decrease in other impulsive behavior in the same age range (e.g., drug use, sexual activity, etc.). And the decrease in access to guns. Suicide is an impulsive, opportunistic act. A decrease in impulsivity and a decrease in access to guns should result in a decrease in suicides. But that is not what we see.
You see, an increase in suicide rates, particularly with this timing, is consistent with the notion that social media is harmful. And Kevin has decided that social media is not harmful, and cannot accept contrary evidence.
Kevin unfortunately cannot stop fighting the battles of the 1980s and 1990s. He pattern-matches the opposition to social media to Christian Coalition attempts to restrict sex and violence on TV and in music. And based on that pattern matching, he concludes that the opposition to social media is a "moral panic." And that's it.
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