I’ve deleted this post. I didn’t notice that there was a technical change to the CPS data starting in 2017, and that accounts for the changes in income shares between 2017 and 2018. I thought it was probably due to the Republican tax act, but apparently it had nothing to do with that.

Serg Glovny/ZUMA

While I was busy creating charts of income growth, Donald Trump decided to fire his latest National Security Advisor:

I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2019

….I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2019

This has to have something to do with Afghanistan, right? There was no particular reason for Trump to declare Taliban negotiations dead simply because a recent attack killed a US soldier. But Bolton used it as a pretext to build support for the policy he wanted all along: staying in Afghanistan forever. Trump was too naive to see how Bolton was playing him, but apparently someone clued him in later. And that was that for Bolton.

I’m pretty sure that Trump can’t name a new NSA worse than Bolton, who has a long record of wanting to maintain hostile relations with practically everyone in the world. But we’ll see. Has any president ever plowed through four NSAs in a single term?

Oh glorious day! The Census Bureau has finally released its income figures for 2018. These are not the most comprehensive income estimates around, but they’re good measures of basic money income and they use CPI-RS-U, a good measure of inflation, to show real income over the years. Here’s the basic data going through 2018:

Incomes continued to increase in 2018, but the rate of growth slowed down to a bit less than 1 percent. This is yet another sign that our current economic expansion may be running out of steam.

There are plenty of other things in the Census data, one of which I’ll get to later, but it’s useful right away to break this down by sex:

Interestingly, personal income for men was up only slightly, by 0.6 percent. However, personal income for women remained strong, growing at 4.0 percent. Over the past four years, men’s income has grown 2.3 percent per year while women’s income has grown 3.3 percent per year.

A Taliban car bomb in Kabul killed ten last week, including one American serviceman. Shortly afterward, President Trump cancelled a meeting with the Taliban to sign a completed peace treaty.La Hematula Alizada/Xinhua via ZUMA

As you know, we’ve been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for 18 years with very little to show for it. Negotiations have been ongoing for years, with progress slow for the obvious reasons, but also because the Taliban is interested only in negotiating US troop withdrawals. They have consistently refused to include the Afghan government in negotiations, since after the Americans leave they plan to continue their civil war and take over the country. In other words, the violence continues apace, with both sides killing each other in large numbers. The New York Times reports:

On Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said American forces in Afghanistan had killed over 1,000 members of the Taliban over the last 10 days.

This is the context. Fighting was intense and our coalition was killing hundreds of Taliban fighters every day. However, we had finally completed a deal and Trump planned to hold a three-way negotiating session at Camp David to finish it. So why did he suddenly cancel it? Let’s go to the Washington Post:

Far from listening to his advisers, he said Monday, “it was my idea to terminate it. I didn’t even discuss it with anybody else.” The reason, he said, both in the Saturday tweet and Monday’s comments, was the death Thursday morning of a U.S. service member killed in a Taliban attack. “You can’t do that. You can’t do that with me,” Trump said. “So, they’re dead as far as I’m concerned,” he said of the negotiations.

But others noted that 16 Americans have been killed by hostile fire this year in Afghanistan, including one just a week before the most recent death — after Trump was briefed on the peace agreement and sent Khalilzad back to the region to finalize it.

Let’s summarize. Fighting, as always, was heavy. More than a dozen Americans had been killed in 2019, including one a week ago. Thousands of Taliban forces had been killed. But that was OK: negotiations were continuing and Trump was ready to sign a deal. Then one more American gets killed and Trump declares the whole peace process dead. Why? Because he actually heard about this one. “You can’t do that with me,” he said. This killing he apparently took as a personal insult, and therefore called off the whole thing. But then what? Trump, after all, has never had any interest in continuing the Afghanistan war. Back to the Times:

Mr. Trump now faces a difficult choice: He can go ahead without a negotiated agreement and reduce the number of American forces in Afghanistan from the current 14,000 to about 8,600 — the bare minimum the Pentagon has said is necessary to maintain enough of an intelligence-gathering presence to detect threats to the United States. But he then risks forfeiting negotiating power in future talks with the Taliban by withdrawing troops without first securing concessions for peace.

So after years of negotiation, there’s still a possibility that we’ll unilaterally give the Taliban what they want without getting anything in return? If it were anyone else I’d say that sounds bonkers. But Trump? You never know. If he somehow decided it might help his reelection changes, he’d probably do it.

Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post/Getty

Sharpiegate continue to get ever more contemptible:

The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk….Officials at the White House and the Commerce Department declined to comment on administration involvement in the NOAA statement.

“Declined to comment”? Not even an outraged denial or a FAKE NEWS twitterstorm? In the Trump White House, that’s nearly as good as an official confirmation that it happened.

Remember that pink trumpet tree I posted a picture of a few months ago? A few days later I took a similar picture of a golden trumpet tree on the UC Irvine campus. I like the pink one better, but it’s always nice to have a little variety.

Jonathan Franzen has pissed off a lot of people by writing in the New Yorker that we should just admit the obvious: we’ve lost the war on climate change. He says that the conditions for success are simply unacceptable for most people:

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy….The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets….Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting.

….Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

Franzen goes overboard in his piece, but that’s a time-honored way of getting attention. And he does have a point. Here is worldwide electricity capacity since 1990, when climate change first became a serious topic of conversation:

The good news is that use of renewable energy has increased, from 19 percent of total capacity to 22 percent. That’s genuine progress, and the use of solar and wind continues to accelerate.

The bad news is that this doesn’t even make up for the loss of nuclear power over the same period, let alone cut our dependence on fossil fuels. All told, our reliance on fossil fuels has increased from 62 percent to 65 percent. Here are the results:

We haven’t even managed to stabilize carbon emissions, let alone reduce them. Even a huge global recession made only a tiny dent.

Franzen’s prescription is wrong: we shouldn’t give up hope. Success is still possible, even if it’s hardly certain. However, his assessment of human nature is something to be taken seriously and it should illuminate the way we approach climate change. Working with human nature is far more likely to produce results than fighting it, and that means finding new ways to make green energy cheap and plentiful instead of fruitlessly pleading with people to use less of it.

In the meantime, it makes a lot of sense to also put a lot of work into growing our use of wind and solar, two technologies we have already. It’s not enough, but it will reduce the amount we have to do when we finally do come up with real solutions. That’s well worth it.

This guy probably didn't even get a foul call, let alone opioids.Magics/Action Press via ZUMA

Keith Humphreys reports that although opioid prescribing is down in the US, it’s still enormously higher than any other country in the world. However, taking opioids away from existing users can harm them, so the best way to reduce the use of opioids is to stop prescribing them in the first place:

U.S. dentists, for example, do not need to continue initiating prescribed opioids after dental procedures at 70 times the rate of English dentists. Nor should one in eight Americans seeking treatment for a sprained ankle continue being started on opioids.

What? I know that different people have different tolerances for pain, but opioids for a sprained ankle? That’s as ridiculous as it sounds, isn’t it? Speaking from frequent experience, the pain just isn’t that bad. Why would opioids ever be prescribed?

Today our kitchen remodel finally starts. Francesco Marciuliano captures my mood of giddy optimism:

And so my kitchen remodeling continues at its swift pace…#mondaythoughts #MondayMotivaton pic.twitter.com/opefQ18egE

— FrancescoMarciuliano (@fmarciuliano) September 9, 2019

Of course, by “starts” I mean that people with sledgehammers are going to come in and destroy everything in their path. The actual start, as in constructing a replacement for everything that’s been destroyed, will begin someday. I shall keep you apprised.

As it turns out, I’m going to miss the demo since I’ll be lounging away the morning in the comfy confines of the Kaiser Permanente infusion center. However, I have already transferred the nerve center of this blog upstairs, so my loyal readership will notice no disruption in service. I bought a new desk from Ikea and everything:

Zalmay Khalilzad, our chief negotiator in Afghanistan, reached a final agreement with the Taliban a week ago. The New York Times tells the story of what happened next:

Leaders of both teams initialed their copies and handed them to their Qatari hosts.

Before the end of the meeting, Mr. Khalilzad brought up the idea of a Taliban trip to Washington. Taliban leaders said they accepted the idea — as long as the visit came after the deal was announced.

That would become a fundamental dividing point contributing to the collapse of the talks. Mr. Trump did not want the Camp David meeting to be a celebration of the deal; after staying out of the details of what has been a delicate effort in a complicated region, Mr. Trump wanted to be the dealmaker who would put the final parts together himself, or at least be perceived to be.

Trump couldn’t accept a limited but workable deal that had been negotiated by someone else. So without any prep, he insisted on inviting both Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan to Camp David to negotiate a bigger, more expansive deal that he could triumphantly announce himself. Instead, everything fell apart. President Deals, yet again, had made any deal impossible.