Kevin Drum

This is a really good critique. I would not have thought to read this article as critically as you did, and likely would have accepted it at face value. But now that you mention it, there's more issues I see: "This is the highest mass resignation the U.S. has seen since 2019, pre-pandemic, and the numbers are still rising. In June, 3.9 million quit. In July, it was another 3.9 million. In August, 4.3 million." The [3.9M, 3.9M, 4.3M] sequence seems cherry picked. It could just be normal noise for all we know. To me this kind of argument could be easily summarized with simple data visualization, i.e. a line graph with more datapoints (expand 3 month range to a full year, stack more years for context). A histogram of monthly resignations to attach a %-ile to it would also be great, but may not be as intuitive and there's a lot of complexity involved in trying to understand significance. The author follows the monthly resignation numbers with: "The numbers are even more notable for young workers: in September, nearly a quarter of workers ages 20 to 34 were not considered part of the U.S. workforce—some 14 million Americans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who were neither working nor looking for work." You interpret this as them saying 14M is a big number, but I think based on the preceding sentence, it's actually trying to say 14M is "more notable" than the ~3.9M in the preceding argument. I kind of think this is the case, as its a really common data mistake I…

Nice charts. These are great too: https://jabberwocking.com/top-20-charts-of-2024/

I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_michigan_con…

I'd like to read more about the accusations about Biden, especially the debanking allegations but so far I just find stuff from some Andreesen (?) appearance on "joe rogan" which wouldn't count as reliable information in my opinion. Course that could also be because internet search sucks nowadays lol the best I can find only reinforces my suspicions that if its on "joe rogan" then miss me with that mess haha https://jabberwocking.com/choke-point-2-0-a-primer-on-the-rights-lates…

well, something is happening[0] for the paltry sum of 42B USD, it's just _ridiculously_ slow, and this targets those whose vote is worth a bit more than those who live in more economically serviceable areas. the sprawlophilia is strong with the US. (though by now it would have been made sense to throw some fiber on poles here and there ... so probably a lot of anti-competitive fuckery also helped to keep folks on uber-expensive ADSL and whatnot.) [0] https://jabberwocking.com/39961-2/

Yeah I think the phenomenon is interesting and important to be aware of, but the berating political take isn't really that helpful or productive in my opinion — even though it ostensibly attempts to be unbiased in its criticisms. It would have been more productive to dive into what is working and what might be irrelevant, and how it might or might not generalize to other places. There is a kind of implicit spin to it. I think it's worth a read, but it's also worth reading and thinking a bit about some of the sources it criticizes. For example, in this piece the author admits that some of the sleight of hand can't account for increases in reading per se: https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississippi-readin… However, if you think about it, the sleight of hand can still make the scores look better than they are overall. So while the improvements might still be valid, the comparisons to other states might not be — which is part of the primary substance of the essay. I'm often disappointed in discussions about educational policy or curricula because so much of it has this cargo cult feel to it, masking political leanings with "objective" results. I say this about a lot of it, not just left or right-leaning discussions. It's almost like someone needs to make a fill-in-the-blank checklist critique of educational discussions (testing, admissions) like the old ones about email alternatives: focusing on means and not…

Any "aggregate" statistic needs to be broken out until it is understood. Is everyone dropping, or is it a certain subset of poor, etc that is dropping? E.g., does the Mississippi Miracle translate into something notable? https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississippi-readin…

Yeah, reading scores are about how well you teach reading. In terms of NAEP 8th grade reading scores, New York, Georgia, Utah, Illinois, Rhode Island, and California cluster together in the top half, in that order: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/blog_naep_states_…

Let’s see some data: https://jabberwocking.com/we-dont-have-a-housing-shortage/ Housing construction exceeds the population growth for the past 20 years. But housing prices are skyrocketing especially the last 10 years.

https://jabberwocking.com/clarence-thomas-has-received-a-ton-of-gifts-… There is a lot of suckage on the Supreme Court to talk about.

I think Kevin Drum (R.I.P.) covered this better than the author of this piece. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline… https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-r… And, addressing the meta-analysis the New Yorker author places so much weight on: https://jabberwocking.com/yet-another-look-at-that-lead-crime-meta-stu… The clincher is that competing hypotheses are almost exclusively concerned with phenomena in the U.S. and fall apart as explanations for the same cresting and subsidence of the crime wave in other countries, or even simply in other cities in the U.S. One city does broken-windows policing. Another doesn't. Both experience the same decline in the murder rate.

I looked for older suicide rate data and it doesn’t support what I think is your view above. At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago. https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-1900/

The author posted a link to an article[1] showing that Mississippi's retention policies were not responsible for the increase in scores. > But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything. > ... > In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform. [1] https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississippi-readin…

Musk said that part of the launch licensing was a requirement to estimate the potential damage to whales in the ocean. He said that the odds turned out to be so low that in his opinion if a whale gets hit it had it coming. https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study-whether-h…

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-1900/ And today the rate is higher than in 1900 and raising. Sounds like whatever we did in the 1950-1980 worked extremely well and what we've been doing since hasn't.

At least as measured by suicide rates in the US your grandmothers likely generation new quite well what depression was even if the word didn’t matter. Between the 1920s and the end of WW2 the suicide rate per 100000 was lowest at 15 but reached almost 22. The pandemic rate which caused (rightly) lots of angst and introspection was 14.3. We should investigate what is causing increased levels of depression currently but we shouldn’t assume it was absent in other generations when we do it. https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-1900/

>> Flint was one of the two largest crisis in state government in my life time. If the Flint water crisis is one of the largest in state government, state governments are doing an exceedingly good job: "Even at the height of the crisis, testing in children showed blood lead levels that were essentially the same as the Michigan average and far lower than Detroit, which had a safe water supply the entire time. During the whole of the crisis (which encompassed 18 months in 2014-15), the number of Flint children with elevated lead levels was 3.9%. In Detroit it was 8.1%." -- https://jabberwocking.com/the-tragedy-of-flint-is-not-what-most-people…

There is very little evidence that right on red creates any sort of danger to pedestrians. Yes, it's annoying to cyclists and pedestrians, but we'd be better off investing in many other traffic calming and pedestrian safety tactics. https://jabberwocking.com/right-on-red-works-fine-theres-no-need-to-ba…

Kevin Drum has a chart or two for that: https://jabberwocking.com/yes-of-course-big-deficits-are-due-to-tax-cu…

Looking at the block diagram at the top of here - https://jabberwocking.com/warning-the-nif-fusion-facility-didnt-really… there's a lot more energy needed to get net positive

> high median wage growth Wages are noticeably down since 2020. WSJ and others prefer to report nominal wages (unless the article is about business costs), but you don't have to fall for the scam. https://jabberwocking.com/wages-continue-to-plummet/

I lost interest before I got to his political point (about inflation), but the comments made me go back and while it’s an interesting point, it ignores the fact that the current bout of inflation is almost certainly a consequence of the Covid stimulus plus the supply chain disruptions with a dose of war in Ukraine. And it turns out that inflationary pressures seem to be declining outside of the volatile food and energy sectors (see https://jabberwocking.com/inflationary-pressure-seems-to-be-easing/). I have a bit more faith in domain-specific analysis than abstract mathematical approaches.

The right has moved further right, and the left has moved further left. Moreover, the left has moved further left than the right has moved right. https://jabberwocking.com/if-you-hate-the-culture-wars-blame-liberals/

From what baseline? The pandemic dip? Or pre-pandemic levels? Here's some actual journalism: https://jabberwocking.com/the-price-of-bacon-is-up-8-1/