This is an idiosyncratic collection. These charts don't "tell the story of 2022" and they're not the most important things I published all year. They just happened to intrigue me.
First up, naturally, is this chart of PCE inflation. I've posted it about a dozen times this year, so I might as well put it up one final time.
Was 2022 really a year of skyrocketing crime? We'll never know for sure since (a) FBI figures aren't available yet and (b) they'll never be available in comparable form to previous years thanks to a change in FBI methodology. But the evidence suggests nothing all that special happened. The big difference wasn't in crime itself, but in the coverage of crime by Fox News (left) right up until the moment the midterm election was over (right).
It seemed like every time we turned around there was another drug shortage. But there wasn't. In fact, drug shortages were below historical averages in 2022.
Thanks to a poorly executed chart that's made the rounds, everyone seems to believe that Millennials are the poorest generation in forever. But it only looks that way if you don't account for the sizes of different generational cohorts. If you look at wealth per person, Millennials are doing about the same as previous generations.
(As an aside, life looks kind of hopeless to a lot of young Millennials who are still paying off college debt and stuck in entry-level jobs. But guess what? Most of you are on the same track as your parents. When you enter your early thirties, your debt will be paid off and your incomes will be higher. Suddenly everything will look pretty normal.)
Republicans have always disliked Democrats and vice versa. That's normal. But the era of Newt Gingrich and Fox News has sent it spiraling out of control. The technical term for this is "affective polarization," which measures how much we all hate members of the opposite party. It has roughly doubled over the past 30 years.
How many unarmed suspects are shot and killed by police every year? Answer: In 2022 they shot 7 Black suspects and 26 white suspects. Both these numbers are down dramatically over the past seven years. Activism works.
This next chart was just one that surprised me: a third of all children in the US are investigated during their lifetime for possible maltreatment. A third!
Here's a favorite of mine. Lots of people like to say they take climate change seriously, but if you put an actual dollar figure on it their interest suddenly plummets. Even $10 per month is too much for all but a quarter of the population.
In the pre-Fox era, Democrats and Republicans both had about the same level of trust in the scientific community. Democratic trust has stayed high, but Republican trust began to wane in the mid-90s and then plummeted during the Trump era. It just became too difficult for conservatives to keep believing in a community that—for some mysterious reason—always seemed side with liberals.
Finally, here's my annual look at the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere. It still doesn't look like emissions are slowing down, does it?
You know, I WOULD vote for a climate proposal that costs $100/month. And then I would get attacked by both the Left and the Right for being an elitist rich urban liberal who, just because I can afford it, has no right to make other people pay for things I value.
My buddy's mother makes $50 per hour working on the computer (Personal Computer). She hasn’t had a job for a long, yet this month she earned $11,500 by working just on her computer for 9 hours every day.
Read this article for more details... https://payathome.blogspot.com/
It's very good to see police killings of unarmed people go down, but what about killings of "armed" people? Three examples most would agree were unjustified (as I remember them). 1) A black guy with a concealed carry permit goes to a Walmart with his wife and a clerk sees he's got a pistol under his coat. The manager calls the police who confront the couple as they leave the store. One cop tells him to drop to the ground, the other tells him to raise his hands, and he's carrying a big box with the thing he just bought. He doesn't know what to do right away so they kill him. And if you think about it, there was probably nothing he could do that wouldn't get him killed. Anyway, he was armed.
2) White homeless guy was illegally camping in some desert park way the hell on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Four cops came with a dog. One cop had a shotgun loaded with some non-lethal load. When the guy agreed to come with them, he turned to pick up a bag. A cop said now and they tossed a flash-bang grenade at him. He dropped the bag and produced what looked to me to be a couple of paring knives then slowly turned and started walking away. That's when they shot him about 10 times in the back. Once he was lying twitching on the ground they shot him with the shotgun and sent the dog in. Totally justified right? He was armed.
3) Third example was a fellow whose race I couldn't make out in the low light B&W video. The cops broke into his apartment in the wee hours of the morning to serve an arrest warrant on another fellow who had moved out a few months earlier. The sole occupant of the apartment got out of bed and walked to his bedroom door with a golf club by his side. He stood there looking at the cops, who without a word spoken shot him to death. They had to, he was armed and only 15' away.
There's no doubt in my mind that the threshhold for police use of deadly force in the US is far too low. The standard should be immediate and substantial threat of death or serious bodily harm. A guy with a gun doesn't qualify under that standard unless he is actually pointing the gun at the cop or in the process of bringing it onto target.
The ratio in the child maltreatment chart between investigations and substantiated investigations says to me that child protection authorities are mostly doing their jobs. They have to investigate every plausible report of child abuse or neglect, even knowing that many of them are malicious, so not every investigation will be substantiated, but it looks like about 25% of investigations are substantiated (and, one would hope, appropriate action taken). That looks reasonable.
Amazing how smooth the curve of CO2 concentration is. We are like a yeast culture growing in a flask. This number will increase till it can’t.