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Crime Is Down in Los Angeles (And Everywhere Else Too)

Kevin Drum — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:08:19 +0000

With the first quarter of 2013 in the books, crime in Los Angeles has so far continued its decade-long decline, according to statistics released Friday.

OK, first off: can we please stop talking about LA's "decade-long" crime drop? I know I've mentioned this often enough that I sound like a crank on the subject, but it's important. If crime started declining in 2003, it might well be due to improved policing techniques introduced by Bill Bratton in 2002. But if it started declining in 1991—which it did—then the cause has to be something else, unless Bratton invented not just CompStat, but time travel as well. Moving on:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief Charlie Beck announced the early but notable improvement at a press conference that served as a swan song for the mayor, who will leave office this summer after being termed out....Beck highlighted the significant declines in gang-related killings and other crimes — a result, he said, of close cooperation between his department and the city's aggressive anti-gang programs that.

...."There is no other big city in America that can make these claims. I invite any of you to go to Chicago, go to New York, go to Houston ... and see if you can find a replication of this effort. You cannot," Beck said.

Look: the crime decline in Los Angeles has been impressive. More cops on the street have probably been effective. Beck's gang initiatives have probably been effective—maybe even more effective than in other places. But no other city can make these claims? It's exactly the opposite: nearly every big city can make these claims. The violent crime rate in Phoenix is down 52 percent from its peak. Washington DC is down 58 percent. Chicago is down 66 percent. Dallas is down 70 percent. New York is down 75 percent.

In California, San Jose is down 58 percent. San Francisco is down 61 percent. San Diego is down 67 percent.

We should all applaud anti-crime initiatives that seem to be effective. But we should also rigorously question whether they're effective. And we shouldn't mindlessly repeat claims that just flatly aren't true, no matter who or where they come from. The public deserves to hear the full story about crime in America, not just the part that's convenient for politicians singing their swan songs or police chiefs who want funding for more cops.

Yes, Disability Payments Are Up, But It's Nothing to Act Surprised About

Kevin Drum — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 13:25:06 +0000

Last week I blogged about a Planet Money story on the steady increase in Social Security disability payments over the past couple of decades. The story was more nuanced than I think its critics gave it credit for, but there's no question that the big takeaway for most people was the notion that lots of workers with only minor disabilities are being allowed into the program simply because the economy is bad and they probably can't find work after they've been laid off.

Friday night this was a topic of discussion on the Chris Hayes show. One of the guests was Michael Astrue, a former commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and it's fair to say that Astrue was pretty exasperated about the whole affair. One of the points he made was this: Nothing has skyrocketed. Nothing has suddenly spiraled out of control. The program today is spending exactly as much as it was forecast to spend back in 1994, the last time Congress revised the disability law.

That struck me as a pretty strong argument. If we really are exactly in line today with the predictions made 20 years ago, then obviously nothing is out of control. So I checked. I pulled up the 1995 trustees report and the 2012 trustees report and compared the 1995 forecast with the 2012 reality. Here's what it looks like:

Astrue is pretty much correct—though not entirely. In 2012, there were about 10 percent more people receiving disability than was forecast in 1995. Total outlays were about 18 percent higher than forecast.

That's not nothing, but it's not a lot, either. There are two things going on. First, ever since 2000 the number of beneficiaries has been growing slightly faster than the original 1995 forecast. Second, there was a small extra spike starting in 2009, probably due to the Great Recession. This partly vindicates the Planet Money story, which suggested that (a) standards had loosened a bit over time, and (b) people who otherwise might have gutted it out and returned to work in better times decided to go on disability instead when jobs became scarce.

However, it doesn't vindicate it very much. These factors have been responsible for only a small extra blip in the number of people approved for disability payments. The blip in outlays is a bit bigger, but that's mostly a mirage: the recession reduced taxable income below forecast, which artificially inflates the outlay figure because it's calculated as a percentage of income. By far the majority of the growth in the disability program has been due to simple demographics (as the boomer generation ages, more of them go on disability), and it was baked into the forecast two decades ago. We shouldn't act shocked now that the forecast is coming true.

Friday Cat Blogging - 5 April 2013

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:13:50 +0000

Today we have an aerial view of Domino. She's lounging on the very first quilt Marian made, a 1985 crib quilt based on a pattern called Snowball, by Marsha McCloskey.

It also demonstrates one of the great things about quiltblogging: it's really easy. Basically, you just put a quilt somewhere, twiddle your fingers for a minute or two, and suddenly a cat appears. It's like magic. I put this one on the floor just below our second-story hallway, so all I had to do was go upstairs, point the camera downward, and then make stupid noises to get Domino to look up at the camera. Eventually it worked.

CDC Reports That Lots of Kids Still Suffer From Lead Poisoning

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:05:34 +0000

Via Susie Cagle of Grist, here's the latest from the CDC on blood lead levels in young children. We've known for a long time that lead is dangerous in much smaller concentrations than previously thought, and last year the CDC finally adopted a "reference level" of 5 ug/dl for the study of lead in kids. In its latest study, CDC reports that a total of 2.6 percent of children age 1-5 have blood lead levels above 5 ug/dl. That's bad (though better than it used to be), but it's also not evenly distributed. If you're black, or poor, or live in old housing, the odds that your kids have elevated lead levels is much higher. The chart below tells the story.

As the CDC says, "Childhood exposure to lead can have lifelong consequences." This includes cognitive damage that reduces IQ and contributes to poor performance in school. It also produces cognitive damage that increases the propensity to commit violent crime. But you knew that already, right?

Is the U.S. Economy Powered by Dark Matter?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:33:10 +0000

Karl Smith is bullish on America:

“The Great Takedown” [...] is the not yet realized bombshell that the US in general and the US Federal Government in particular made out like gangbusters in the Great Recession. I am still trying to tie this all together but a full accounting of US Treasury “profits” from the Global Financial Crisis look to number in the trillions.

This is based on a theory that if you value assets correctly, based on their financial return, the apparent multi-trillion dollar increase in the U.S. current account deficit over the past few decades hasn't actually happened. It's been offset by exports of "Dark Matter" that aren't included in official accounts:

The US is a net provider of knowledge, liquidity and insurance. As the world became more global financially, the increasing asset value of these services underlies the spectacular increase in dark matter over the last two decades.

As a result, foreign-owned U.S. assets are worth less than official accounts suggest and U.S.-owned foreign assets are worth more. Karl is excited because Paul Krugman kinda sorta endorsed this theory today, but it's worth noting that Krugman leaves open the question of whether there's really been a mis-valuation of assets, or whether this is basically a dangerous leverage play that relies on using cheap U.S. debt to buy risky foreign assets, assuming that those risky assets will pay high returns forever.

Beats me. This is way above my pay grade. But interesting!

Chained CPI and the 2014 Midterms

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:34:19 +0000

Now that President Obama is poised to officially endorse the adoption of chained CPI in his next budget—a change that would cut the future growth of Social Security benefits—Ed Kilgore ponders the political implications:

Could Republican congressional candidates in 2014 actually run against "Obama's Social Security Cuts," after decades of lusting for "entitlement reform" and several consecutive years of demanding that Obama give Social Security benefits a haircut or worse?

Ha ha ha! That's a knee slapper. To his credit, Ed comes up with the obvious answer: Of course they could.

I Doubt That Obama Really Expects a Grand Bargain With Republicans

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 16:14:15 +0000

Greg Sargent tries to explain White House thinking on their decision to embrace entitlement cuts in next week's budget proposal:

They believe a Grand Bargain is good for Democrats in general, because it essentially would lock in a medium-term agreement over core disputes — about the safety net and about the size of government, and who should pay for it — that have produced a debilitating stalemate in Washington.

Yes, Republicans would continue railing about government spending, the thinking goes, but no one would listen, since they would have already endorsed a deal stabilizing the deficit. This would deprive Republicans of the ability to focus attention on one of their core targets — Big Government — as a way to avoid grappling with other issues, such as jobs and long-term middle class economic security, immigration, guns, and perhaps even climate change. Reaching a deal on the deficit will force Republicans to confront those problems more directly and to choose between real cooperation on them or continue to calcify as a hidebound, reactionary party incapable of addressing major challenges facing the country.

Yeah, maybe. Of course, that's also a pretty good reason for Republicans to refuse to cut a deal. Why bother if all it does is pave the way for Obama to spend lots of time on wedge issues that are good for Democrats and bad for them?

The truth is that, for the most part, the deficit isn't a real issue for Republicans. They don't want to raise taxes; they don't want to cut defense spending; they don't want to cut entitlement spending on seniors (the core of their base); and cutting future entitlements doesn't affect the deficit any time soon. The only thing left is cutting spending on the poor, and although Republicans think that's a fine idea, even they can't cut social welfare spending enough to have a serious impact on the deficit.

So it's mostly a charade. And it's a good one! One of the very best, in fact. Cutting the deficit polls well, it lends itself nicely to demagoguery, and it's an all-purpose excuse to oppose any spending proposals they don't like. So why on earth would you cut a deal to take it off the table? That would be crazy. And if they're forced to swallow a tax increase as well, that makes it even crazier. There's literally no benefit at all in this for Republicans.

So they won't do it. Obama's real hope—since I assume he's not an idiot and knows all this perfectly well—is that Republicans will indeed refuse to make a deal, and, as Sargent suggests, this could turn the public against them in the 2014 midterms. I suppose that's possible, depending on how well he plays his hand. It's certainly more possible than assuming that Republicans will voluntarily commit electoral suicide by agreeing to a deal.

Obama Plans to Offer Very Public Entitlement Cuts in Budget Next Week

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:15:07 +0000

President Obama's long-delayed budget will finally make it to Congress next week. Jackie Calmes reports:

In a significant shift in fiscal strategy, Mr. Obama on Wednesday will send a budget plan to Capitol Hill that departs from the usual presidential wish list that Republicans typically declare dead on arrival. Instead it will embody the final compromise offer that he made to Speaker John A. Boehner late last year, before Mr. Boehner abandoned negotiations in opposition to the president’s demand for higher taxes from wealthy individuals and some corporations.

Congressional Republicans have dug in against any new tax revenues after higher taxes for the affluent were approved at the start of the year. The administration’s hope is to create cracks in Republicans’ antitax resistance, especially in the Senate, as constituents complain about the across-the-board cuts in military and domestic programs that took effect March 1.

It's not clear precisely what this means, but it sounds as if it mostly embodies the president's sequester-replacement plan that's been on offer for the past two months, which includes about $1.1 trillion in spending cuts over ten years and $700 billion in new revenue. Among other things, this plan offers to cut Medicare by reducing reimbursement levels and cut Social Security by adopting chained CPI. Presumably, however, it will present those cuts in considerably more detail than Obama has done before.

This will be an interesting test of the theory that one of the things preventing a deal has been simple Republican ignorance of what Obama has offered. Once these things are in the official budget, there's simply no way to ignore them. They'll get a ton of coverage—including massive outrage from the liberal base—and there will be enough detail that even Bill O'Reilly should be satisfied that Obama is offering a "real plan." The fact that Obama is proposing serious cuts in entitlements will finally be impossible to ignore.

Will this pave the way for a deal? I have my doubts, because I never thought that ignorance was truly a roadblock. Any Republican paying even minimal attention knew what Obama was offering earlier this year, and the ones not paying minimal attention simply didn't want to know. Their ignorance was mostly a deliberate strategic choice: it allowed them to continue railing against Obama without having to engage with the facts of what he was offering, and that was pretty convenient for most of them. This option will be taken away next week, but since it was never the true roadblock, they'll simply switch to other objections.

At least, that's my guess. As a strategy to change the media narrative, this might work, but as a strategy to change Republican priorities, it won't. It will simply be the latest in a long line of preemptive concessions, none of which have worked before. Republicans will treat the spending cuts as a new baseline to negotiate down from, while treating the revenue increases as dead on arrival.

But I might be wrong! Certainly it will change the tone of the conversation, and the more outraged liberals get about this the better it will be for Obama. Next week we'll start to find out.

UPDATE: It turns out we don't have to wait until next week after all. All we have to do is read Politico right now:

House Speaker John Boehner immediately dismissed President Barack Obama’s package of significant new entitlement cuts tied to new tax revenues, calling them “no way to lead and move the country forward.....Boehner said he will not consider new revenues as part of the deal, arguing that “modest” entitlement savings should not “be held hostage for more tax hikes.”

Quite a shocker, no?

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in March

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:41:20 +0000

The American economy added 88,000 new jobs last month, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth was actually slightly negative at -2,000 jobs. That's terrible. It's yet another spring swoon, but even earlier than usual. Ever since the end of the Great Recession we've been stuck in an odd pattern where employment growth looks promising in winter and then falls off a cliff in spring, but usually the dropoff doesn't happen until April or May. We're early this year.

Workers continued to drop out of the workforce in large numbers, so the labor force participation rate declined by 0.2 percentage points to 63.3 percent. As a result, despite the terrible jobs numbers the headline unemployment number actually went down to 7.6 percent. The private/public breakdown of the employment numbers followed the same trend as it has for the past few years, with the private sector gaining 95,000 jobs and the public sector losing 7,000 jobs. The size of government continues to decline.

Some of this bad news may have been due to the fiscal cliff deal in January, and the end of the payroll tax holiday, but it's probably too early for any of it to be due to the sequester. However, we can expect that to start biting in April and May. Nice work, Congress.

All in all: yuck.

Obama Proposes Making Food Aid Less Insane

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:34:06 +0000

Jonathan Zasloff writes today about the insane rules governing U.S. food aid overseas. Suppose, says Zasloff, there's a famine in Ethiopia:

The quickest and most effective thing to do would be to find some farmer or group of farmers in other parts of the country, or in neighboring countries, buy their food and get it to the stricken area. After all, one key cause of famine is the lack of money, not lack of crops. But under current law, USAID is basically forbidden from doing that. Instead, it must buy grain in the United States and ship it several thousand miles to the famine area. You can imagine the amount of time that that takes; sometimes, several weeks. it’s a logistic nightmare. In the meantime, thousands die, usually the weakest such as children and the elderly.

But it’s worse than that.

If the food needs to be shipped, then that means that the shipping must be paid for. And it sure is: according to a study done by AJWS and Oxfam, nearly 55% of the cost of American international food aid goes not to food, but to shipping costs. That’s what your tax dollars are going to.

But it’s worse than that.

There are three more repetitions of "it's worse than that" after those two, so read the whole post to see just how bad things are. Needless to say, the reason for this grim state of affairs is that instead of treating food aid as a way to help people who are starving, it's basically treated as a big slush bucket for American farmers. But it would be far more sensible to buy food near the point of famine when possible, so the White House has proposed doing just that. The New York Times reports the unsurprising results:

An Obama administration plan to change the way the United States distributes its international food aid has touched off an intense lobbying campaign by a coalition of shipping companies, agribusiness and charitable groups who say the change will harm the nation’s economy and hamper efforts to fight global hunger.

....Twenty-one senators from farm states also wrote to the Obama administration last month, after being lobbied by the groups, asking that the food aid program be kept in its current form.

As Zasloff points out, even the executive director of the American Maritime Congress, who can probably be trusted to exaggerate the figures as much as possible, claims only that the proposed changes would cost "hundreds" of jobs. Hundreds! As for actual charities, only one is quoted opposing the changes in the Times article, and its opposition is based solely on the fear that Congress would lose interest in overseas charity completely if most of the money were actually used for aid instead of paying off special interests.

In theory, this should be a bipartisan winner. The Bush administration wanted to do it, and now the Obama administration wants to do it. It would be a far more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and it would allow U.S. aid to help far more people. It's a slam dunk. Call your congress critter today and tell them, for once in their benighted careers, to just suck it up and do the right thing.

Can We Talk About the Global Investment Drought, Please?

Kevin Drum — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:45:43 +0000

The topic of the day in the econosphere is interest rates. Why are they so low? How long will they stay low? Ryan Avent comments:

The most common explanation for the drop in real interest rates (one advanced by Ben Bernanke) is the global savings glut. In a sense, the explanation is almost tautological; if a price is falling, a glut (or excess of supply relative to demand) is almost by definition the cause. The more interesting issue is the source of the imbalance. Mr Bernanke points, among other things, to reserve accumulation by emerging markets. More recently, he has also noted that a shortage of safe assets could be contributing to the problem.

For these dynamics to work, there should be an insensitivity, somewhere along the line, to interest rates. The glut occurs when there is too much desired saving relative to desired borrowing, and the interest rate falls in order to bring the two into balance.

I wish I understood this better, because that bolded sentence has always seemed like the key insight to me. In theory, as Avent says, if the savings level is high, then interest rates will go down until it's once again attractive to borrow all that money to invest in real-world production of goods and services. But that hasn't happened, which means the real problem we're facing is the mirror image of a global savings glut: namely, a global investment drought. For more than a decade now, no matter how low interest rates have gone, the appetite for real-world investment has remained anemic. During the aughts, this problem was partly masked by the flow of money into property and related derivatives, but after that blew up nothing was left. Capital is still sloshing around the system and is available at ever more attractive rates, but it goes begging nevertheless.

So forget the savings glut. The real question is why, over the past decade, the world has gotten so bearish on real-world investment opportunities. The answer, almost by definition, is that confidence in future economic growth has waned. But why?

Republicans Embrace Listicles as Key to 21st Century Success

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:30:57 +0000

Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus released an "autopsy" a couple of weeks ago that suggested the party's woes were mostly due to poor optics and weak use of technology. Apparently the NRCC, the committee that funds Republican House races, agrees.

Yep: they're doing the thing that every flailing organization does when they can't think of anything actually constructive to do: redesigning their website. In this case, they've decided that cat videos and mindless listicles are the key to political success:

"BuzzFeed's eating everyone's lunch," said NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing. "They're making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way."....The NRCC's redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts. Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark.

The new site comes a few months into the beginning of a broader strategy to capture more of the social Web's attention. To that end, the NRCC has begun dropping blog posts with headlines like "13 Animals That Are Really Bummed on Obamacare's Third Birthday." A recent image macro the NRCC posted on Facebook featured a photo of President Obama laughing below a caption mocking voters for believing his claims about health insurance premiums.

Well, who knows? It might work. They suckered me into writing about it, after all. Still, I have to say that the screenshots of the new site don't really look all that BuzzFeedy to my professionally trained eye. In honor of the new site, then, I think we should come up with a list of listicles for the NRCC to try out. I'll get us started:

12 Ways That A Capital Gains Cut Will Benefit You
10 Best Tea Party Costumes From CPAC
VIDEO: Republicans Promote Cat, Dog Adoption as "Antidote to Partisan Bickering"
7 Heartbreaking Letters To Obama From Schoolchildren Asking Him Not To Destroy Their Future
GALLERY: Five Gruesome Abortion Photos
17 Ways That Obama Has Made America Less Safe

Your turn. Give the NRCC your best ideas.

Can Computers Teach Students to Write Better?

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:49:13 +0000

I've been fascinated for a long time by the prospect of grading school essays by computer. Just to put my own beliefs firmly on the table, I think it's surprisingly accurate already; is going to get a lot more accurate very, very soon; and the folks fighting it are basically dinosaurs.

This is not, oddly enough, because I think computer grading is all that great. We're still a long way from true AI. It's because I think that most human grading is far more formulaic and pedestrian than we usually give it credit for. That's why I appreciated this comment from Mark Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron, which came at the end of a New York Times piece about critics of using machine feedback to help students write better essays:

“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

Roger that. There's no question that a good reader, given sufficient time, will do a far better job of grading and feedback than any machine. That may change someday, but it's certainly true today.

But the vast majority of grading isn't done by top notch readers given plenty of time. It's done by harried, mediocre readers. Can machines do as well or better than they do? Probably.

In any case, I found the article pretty interesting for its focus on feedback, not just grading:

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers....There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Mr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

....Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

Anyone who teaches writing will tell you about the value of having students write often and with quick feedback. Every day if possible. The problem is that, practically speaking, it's not usually possible. So if an automated system can handle short student essays and provide decent—not great, but decent—feedback immediately, that has huge potential. This software may not be 100 percent ready for prime time yet, but it's getting there. And it could be a game changer.

Christian Roots of School Voucher Movement Still Pretty Obvious

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:20:56 +0000

The hits just keep coming from the Tennessee legislature. This time it's the sudden realization that if you provide state money to religious schools, you can't just limit it to Christian schools:

In Tennessee, [] a plan to transfer taxpayer money to religious academies is running into trouble as GOP lawmakers slowly realize that all religions will be eligible for public funds.

....For voucher proponents, the first thought tends to be, "Never mind the separation of church and state; let's use taxpayer money to finance religious education." Which is then followed by a second thought: "Wait, you mean religions I don't like might get my money?"

Conservative intellectuals like to make the case that they support school vouchers because the free market will produce better educational outcomes, especially for inner-city kids stuck in terrible schools. And I suppose that maybe conservative intellectuals really do support vouchers for that reason. The problem is that those of us who are over the age of 40 and have three-digit IQs remember where this all started: with segregated Christian schools in the South who were denied tax-exempt status in the 70s. This was one of the formative protest issues for the Christian right, and led directly to their campaigns for state and federally funded vouchers for parents who sent their kids to Christian academies.

Have times changed? Sure. There are now more respectable reasons to support school choice. But as Tennessee and other states have shown, the explicitly Christian roots of this movement are still plainly visible to anyone who doesn't deliberately avert their gaze. Outside of the think tanks, the primary motivation for vouchers isn't to help inner-city kids or improve America's STEM pipeline, it's to funnel money into Christian schools.

Demands to denounce your allies are tiresome. I get that. But if voucher proponents want to be taken seriously on their own terms, they need to be far more active about publicly denouncing the kind of shenanigans that are going on in Tennessee and other states. Intellectuals on the right insist that promoting conservative Christianity isn't the real reason for supporting school vouchers. If that's the case, they need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Needed: Clever Economists to Study Benefits of Marrying Early

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:00:10 +0000

Which is better, getting married early or getting married late? Beats me. My mother got married at 21 and everything turned out pretty well. I got married at 32, and that turned out pretty well too. So I have no nifty anecdotal data to share on this. But how about some nifty statistical data instead? Dylan Matthews throws out a caution:

First, some throat-clearing. None of the data we have on marriage are definitively causal. That's a good thing. To have rock-solid evidence that marriage causes anything, we'd need to randomly require some people to marry at one age and others to marry at another age and then compare the results (and even that study design would have plenty of problems). Human Subjects Committees generally consider such studies unethical and don't let them happen.

This is just begging for one of those clever natural experiments so beloved of economists these days. I'm not clever enough to think of one, but somewhere there has to be something. Like, say, a huge natural disaster somewhere that delayed lots of marriages by a year while everyone was busy rebuilding their towns, while two counties away everyone got married at the usual rate. Or a law that lowered the marriage age in one place but not in a similar state a few hundred miles away. There's gotta be something like that around, doesn't there? Where's freakonomics when you need it?

Women Are Dying at Higher Rates in Nearly Half of All Counties

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:47:05 +0000

I don't have access to the original article, but Bill Gardner, a psychologist who studies the mental health service system for children, links today to a map of female mortality published this month in Health Affairs. It turns out that male mortality mostly improved or stayed the same from the mid-90s to the mid-aughts, but female mortality increased in 43 percent of all counties:

The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened. You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006? Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest.

When I look at the graph, however, I am concerned not just about the women, but also about their children. The mental and physical health of mothers is a key determinant in children’s growth and development. What the map shows is that America has regions of communities with high concentrations of women experiencing substantial hardship. When women are not able to maintain their own health, how well can they nurture their children?

The map is below.

Japan Vows to Give the Expectations Channel a Workout

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:14:21 +0000

Japan has been suffering from deflation for most of the past decade, and prime minister Shinzo Abe ran last year on a platform of turning this around. Today, the incoming head of the Bank of Japan announced its new monetary policy:

Following his inaugural policy board meeting, Haruhiko Kuroda said the central bank is pulling out all the stops to get the economy out of deflation, referring to the nine-member panel's unanimous decision to vastly expand government bond purchases, including buying longer-term debt. The BOJ also tossed aside some self-imposed limits that previous leadership had stuck to.

I will not use my fighting power in an incremental manner," Mr. Kuroda told a news conference following the two-day meeting, one of the most closely watched in the central bank's recent history. "Our stance is to take all the policy measures imaginable at this point to achieve the 2% price stability target in two years."

...."I'd give it a 100 on a scale of one to 100, or actually 120," said Dai Sato, a senior dealer at Mizuho Corporate Bank. "In all aspects, the BOJ exceeded our expectations," he said.

There's more in this vein, but the bottom line is simple: Kuroda has made it absolutely clear that BOJ is willing to do anything, and for as long as it takes, to get inflation back up to 2 percent. He's committed to doubling the money supply, and will do even more if that's not enough.

This is a fascinating experiment. One of the cornerstones of the market monetarists who believe the Fed should target NGDP levels—i.e., that it should commit to keeping nominal GDP growing at a preset rate, and should play catch-up if it doesn't—is that the simple act of making that commitment will raise inflation. This is the "expectations channel" of monetary policy.

Well, BOJ has now put the expectations channel into play in about the most dramatic way possible. Its announcement was surprisingly strong, it was unequivocal, it was credible, and it clearly has strong political support. If it doesn't work, it will demonstrate serious limitations for managing monetary policy via expectations. If it does work, it will give a boost to the NGDP crowd. It won't be a decisive demonstration either way, since there's more going on than just expectations, but it will definitely be a strong data point. It should be interesting to watch.

UPDATE: Sorry. My brain abandoned me this morning and I wrote "MMT theorists who believe the Fed should target NGDP levels." I meant "market monetarists who believe the Fed should target NGDP levels." I've fixed this in the text.

Our Math Deficit Doesn't Add Up

Kevin Drum — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:52:56 +0000

Here's a story you've probably heard before: General Plastics Manufacturing of Tacoma, Washington, needs factory workers to make foam products. So they give all their applicants a math test that asks them to convert inches to feet, calculate the density of a block of foam, and a few other things:

Basic middle school math, right?

But what troubles General Plastics executive Eric Hahn is that although the company considers only prospective workers who have a high school education, only one in 10 who take the test pass. And that’s not just bad luck at a single factory or in a single industry.

Hahn, vice president of organizational development, said that the poor scores on his company’s math test have been evident for the past six years. He also sits on an aerospace workforce training committee and said that most other Washington state suppliers in his industry have been seeing the same problem.

OK, now look at the chart on the right. It shows results from the NAEP math test—a national assessment that's generally considered highly reliable—for 17-year-olds. And basically, it shows nothing. If you take a look at the 25th and 50th percentiles, which is where most factory workers come from, scores have been pretty flat for the past two decades. If anything, they're up slightly.

So how do we square this with Eric Hahn's contention that General Plastics has had trouble over the past few years finding qualified workers? I can think of a few possibilities:

Hahn is just wrong. He remembers the past as rosier than it was.
Jobs at General Plastics require higher skills than in the past, but they're refusing to pay any more than they used to. So they're not getting suitable applicants.
Ever since the NCLB "test 'em til they drop" era started, kids have been learning rote math that's good for getting high test scores but not so good for solving actual real-world problems.
Scores have fallen off a cliff over the past five years, but we don't see it in the chart because it only goes up to 2008.
Washington is doing worse than other states.

There's evidence that #3 isn't the answer. To the extent that kids are taught to the test, they're taught to state tests, since those are the ones used to measure performance. The NAEP is a federal test that nobody teaches to because (a) it doesn't count for anything, and (b) it's given to only a tiny fraction of students nationwide (less than 1 percent of all K-12 students). What's more, the long-term NAEP, which is what I showed above, has been carefully constructed to stay the same from year to year. It's testing exactly the same thing today that it tested in 1978.

There's also evidence that #4 isn't the answer. We don't have national results for 17-year olds that are more recent than 2008, but we do have results for 8th graders on the main NAEP. Their math scores rose between 2007 and 2011. A sudden and unprecedented collapse between 8th and 12th grades seems unlikely.

There's also evidence that #5 isn't the answer. In fact, Washington has done a bit better than the national average over the past decade.

I might have missed a possibility. For now, though, my money is on #2.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Democrats on the DC Circuit Court

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:40:30 +0000

As we all know, Republicans filibustered President Obama's nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the DC Circuit Court last month, so now we're moving on to the second of his nominees to fill one of the court's vacancies: Sri Srinivasan, an attorney who's not just respected by both liberals and conservatives, but even worked in the George W. Bush administration. That didn't do him any good when he was first nominated in 2012, but he's back now, and getting a lot of love from right-wingers. Sahil Kapur reports:

Their support would normally bode well for a key judicial pick by a Democratic president. But Senate Republicans have indicated a desire to maintain the court’s notoriously high vacancy rate — at least as long as Obama’s president. Earlier this year, they filibustered a different, widely respected Obama nominee to the same court. And so the broad ideological consensus behind Srinivasan makes it harder for Republicans to oppose his nomination without appearing as though they’re abusing their advise and consent power for partisan purposes.

Harder? Sure. Impossible? No! A while back I was digging into this subject a little bit, trying to find out what the official objection to Obama's nominees was. The party-line answer, it turned out, was pretty straightforward: The DC Circuit doesn't really have a very heavy caseload, so it doesn't need any more judges. As you can imagine, this is a very handy argument indeed, since it means that Republicans don't really need to cast around for a pretend reason to oppose Srinivasan or any of Obama's other nominees. They can just oppose them all.

Now that David Sentelle has retired and the court has four vacancies, maybe this argument won't fly any longer. Then again, maybe it will. Stay tuned.

The Antichrist Is Always With Us

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:20:10 +0000

Ed Kilgore comments on the news that 13 percent of voters think Barack Obama is the antichrist:

Extrapolated to the national electorate, it suggests that over 13 million Americans believe the President of the United States is a demonic supernatural being sent into the world to set up an infernal kingdom until it's all washed away by the End of Days.

This reminds me of something that I sort of accidentally got involved in a couple of decades ago. I'll skip the details, but I ended up learning that among at least a subset of evangelical Christians, there's always an antichrist. For a while it was Muammar Qaddafi. Then it was Saddam Hussein. I assume Osama bin Laden took on the role after 9/11. So the fact that some of them now pin that tag on Obama isn't super surprising. The antichrist is out there somewhere, and with the usual suspects now mostly dead, why not Obama?

Atlanta's Kids Have Done Pretty Well in School Over the Past Decade

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:53:07 +0000

Former Atlanta superintendent of schools Beverly Hall is now the poster child for cheating on standardized tests. But Hall claims that Atlanta schools really did perform better under her leadership, and as evidence she points to gains on the national NAEP test, widely considered to be reliable and not easily gamed. Dana Goldstein comments:

Although NAEP security procedures are generally considered more stringent than those used in state and district-level testing, there are reasons to be skeptical of Atlanta’s gains on the national exam as well. Between 2002 and 2009, the demographics of Atlanta NAEP test-takers changed considerably; the number of white students taking the test doubled, and the number of Hispanic students also went up. In Atlanta, white and Hispanic children tend to score higher than black children, which led Professor Mark Musick, a former NAEP chairman, to estimate that as much as 40 percent of Atlanta’s gains could be due to changes in which students sat for the exam.

I don't quite get this. Why not just look at the NAEP results for black, white, and Hispanic kids separately and see how they did? I don't feel like doing that for every combination of kids and tests, but a quick look tells me that reading scores for black 8th graders increased from 233 to 249 during Hall's tenure, and math scores increased from 241 to 262. That's no defense of Hall, but it seems pretty straightforward to figure out how Atlanta's kids did and how that compares to other big cities. Why estimate?

A Brief Morning Whine

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:22:05 +0000

I've got a problem. I figure nearly everyone is just going to laugh at me for this—though for different reasons on left and right—so I'm a little hesitant to even bother whining about it. But here it is.

I like snark. I'm perfectly happy to trade elbows with the opposition. But really, my preference is to spend most of my time talking seriously (or semi-seriously) about policy, and that means engaging with conservatives. The problem is that it's just flatly hard to see the point of doing that these days. When I read even supposedly serious conservative policy proposals, I find them so egregiously empty that I feel like I'd be demonstrating terminal naivete by even taking them in good faith. So I don't.

Yesterday, for example, I wrote about the Ponnuru/Levin proposal for healthcare. "Wrote" is giving myself too much credit, though. Basically I just sighed. Today, Ezra Klein, who's a nicer guy than me, summarizes it as "less spending on health insurance for poor people, stingier health coverage for middle-class people, and lower taxes for rich people." He then goes on to write a couple thousand words about a similar proposal, which quite plainly wouldn't work, and wouldn't broaden health coverage even if it did.

So which approach is better? My better angels tell me I should assume good faith and spend the time it takes to write a long explanation of why this stuff won't work. But why bother? Does anyone really think that the people who write these plans are unaware of the grade-school level problems with their proposals? Of course they are. They've been pointed out a hundred times, and they keep writing up the exact same proposals anyway. They barely even bother to change the wording.

Or take yesterday. I caught a few minutes of Chris Hayes' new show, and he was talking with his panel about why South Carolina conservatives are apparently willing to forgive Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford. Everyone took the question seriously and offered serious ideas. As a result, they all tap danced around the real reason: conservatives are willing to forgive pretty much any conservative who goes through the whole Christian repentance kabuki. So which is better? To be serious, or to simply state the obvious truth and be taken for a partisan shill?

There are hundreds of examples like this. The annual Paul Ryan budget fest is probably the most obvious one. Every year we comb through his budget and produce lots of charts and tables and trendlines, and every year the bottom line is exactly the same: Paul Ryan wants to cut taxes on the rich and cut spending on the poor. That's it. That's what he wants. That's why his budget never changes, even after hundreds of detailed analyses showing exactly what it would mean for domestic spending. It's because slashing spending on the poor is the whole point of the plan, not merely a bug of some kind that maybe Ryan doesn't quite get.

So which is better? All the charts and tables and trendlines? Or refusing to even pretend to take it seriously?

I don't know. I swing back and forth, depending on my mood and the subject matter. Hell, I'm not even sure why I'm writing about this. I guess I just needed to get it off my chest or something. Regularly scheduled programming will now resume.

Our Brave New World of Employment Background Checks

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:05:20 +0000

With unemployment stubbornly high, even a small problem can be enough to keep you from getting a job. And thanks to modern technology, employers are a lot more likely to be aware of these problems. Obviously a prison record has always made it hard to find a job. A poor credit report can blackball you these days. And today the New York Times reports on a new breed of databases that track retail employees accused of stealing:

Retailers “don’t want to take a chance on hiring somebody that they might have a problem with,” said Richard Mellor, the [National Retail Federation's] vice president for loss prevention.

But the databases, which are legal, are facing scrutiny from labor lawyers and federal regulators, who worry they are so sweeping that innocent employees can be harmed. The lawyers say workers are often coerced into confessing, sometimes when they have done nothing wrong, without understanding that they will be branded as thieves.

....For Keesha Goode, $34.97 in missing merchandise was enough to destroy her future in retailing....She received a letter from Dollar General alerting her that she had been turned down for a job partly because of her listing in Esteem, and a copy of the report showed that she had a “verified admission” for “theft of merchandise.” She wrote LexisNexis, “I was accused of not reporting on a former employee who was stealing merchandise, but I did not steal anything myself.”

The company responded that it had reinvestigated and “verified” the accuracy of the information. Ms. Goode, who now works at a halfway house, has a lawsuit pending against LexisNexis, accusing the company of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Sure they reinvestigated. They probably pinged the original retailer and asked if the charge was true. The retailer sent back a routine confirmation and that was that.

It's pretty easy to understand the retail industry's interest in something like this. If I ran a store, I'd be pretty interested. But these private databases are springing up everywhere; there are no rules to ensure any kind of accuracy; most people don't even know they're in them; and there's usually no effective way to appeal a black mark if you do find out. It's like being caught in TSA hell.

The increasing reach of computer and network technology is making this increasingly widespread. Mistakes are rampant, coercion is likely common, and even where the charges are true, this brave new world means that a lot of people are being effectively shut out of the labor market for minor offenses that they could have put behind themselves in the past. I'm not sure what the answer is, but this stuff is growing like a weed. It needs some rules of the road before it gets entirely out of hand.

NAF Proposes Big Expansion of Social Security

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:30:12 +0000

It's time for liberals to fight back on Social Security! Today, the New America Foundation released a plan that not only declines to endorse any kind of compromise on Social Security that would cut benefits, but proposes that we add a brand new benefit:

We propose to replace most of the country’s current, inadequate, hybrid public and private retirement system with a two-part, wholly public system called Expanded Social Security. Expanded Social Security would have two distinct parts. The first part, Social Security A, would be similar to the current Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program, which provides a retirement benefit related to earnings. The second part of Expanded Social Security would be a new universal flat benefit, Social Security B, to supplement the traditional earnings-related benefit that would continue to be provided by Social Security A.

....If we assume that Social Security benefits are maintained at current levels and that there are no additional cuts to the program, we propose to set Social Security B at $11,669 per year for all elderly earners.

How much would this cost? A little over 1 percent of GDP to fully fund current Social Security with no benefits cuts, and about 3.7 percent of GDP to fund the new Social Security B. Altogether, call it about 5 percent of GDP. That's....a lot. The authors suggest that current Social Security would be fully funded via higher payroll taxes, while Social Security B would be funded by "either general revenues or a new dedicated tax or taxes, which might include portions of a federal value-added tax (VAT)." The chart on the right compares the benefits under current Social Security vs. the NAF plan.

The basic contention here is that old-style corporate pensions are pretty much gone, and 401(k)-style programs are a disaster. So we should just ditch them entirely and beef up Social Security so that it's a sufficient retirement program all by itself. I still haven't been able to quite convince myself that 401(k)s are the disaster area that a lot of people say they are, but the evidence on this score is certainly fairly hazy. It's quite possible that 401(k)s really are failures.

In any case, this is the first serious shot across the bow from the forces who not only don't want to compromise on Social Security, but want to expand it. I expect to hear a lot more along these lines in the near future.

More Education Just Teaches You How to Steal More Efficiently

Kevin Drum — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:40:30 +0000

Lant Pritchett on why improved education doesn't always improve the performance of poor countries:

His research has shown that countries whose education system improves actually grow slower on average. He suggests that one reason for this may be that putting more educated people into a corrupt bureaucracy may result in more sophisticated corruption.

This sounds disturbingly plausible. And not just for poor countries, either.