Unfortunately, Fred Hiatt is right: this is astonishing.

I shouldn’t be astonished, but this is astonishing: The Trump administration withholding military aid from an important ally–apparently for one reason only: to corruptly pressure it to interfere in the 2020 election @postopinions @jacksondiehl https://t.co/vpoUVh4izE

— Fred Hiatt (@hiattf) September 6, 2019

We already knew that Donald Trump had directed Rudy Giuliani to press the Ukrainian president to open an investigation of Joe Biden’s son in an effort to hurt Biden. But apparently he’s doing more than just pressing:

Mr. Zelensky has so far failed to win the backing of President Trump. Not only has Mr. Trump refused to grant the Ukrainian leader a White House visit, but also he has suspended the delivery of $250 million in U.S. military aid to a country still fighting Russian aggression in its eastern provinces.

Some suspect Mr. Trump is once again catering to Mr. Putin, who is dedicated to undermining Ukrainian democracy and independence. But we’re reliably told that the president has a second and more venal agenda: He is attempting to force Mr. Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it.

This week’s obsession with Sharpiegate was all good fun, but today we learned that Trump, as usual, is taking it very, very seriously indeed: he strong-armed NOAA into issuing a late-Friday press release saying, wrongly, that Alabama had been in danger from Hurricane Dorian all along. In the great scheme of things, this doesn’t matter much except as yet another example of how Trump works. On a much bigger, more corrupt scale it’s the same thing that’s happening with Ukraine.

Earlier today I noted that weekly blue-collar wages had increased a lot in August. Unfortunately, this is a series I don’t look at routinely, and I made a mistake I’ve criticized in others: looking at annualized monthly growth, which is often very noisy:

On an annualized basis, blue-collar wages in August did indeed grow 7.7 percent from July. But that’s hardly unusual, and there are plenty of months where wages have declined by that much. It’s better to look at year-over-year growth:

Adjusted for inflation, blue-collar wages were up 1 percent in August compared to last year. That’s decent growth, but nothing astronomical.

Hopper does not care about your dumb tennis match. She has important napping to do.

Here’s an interesting example of misleading with statistics. At least, I think so. Here’s the original chart from Pew Research:

Sure enough, there’s a strong trendline showing that people who say religion is very important also believe that religion has been growing more important since 2000.

But wait. It’s pretty obvious that the test countries are broken cleanly into two different groups, and the slope of the trendline is almost entirely driven by the second group being higher than the first on both measures. But what if you look at the two groups separately?

These trendlines are just eyeball efforts on my part, so don’t take them too seriously. Still, I don’t see much of a trend within either group, and the dots are scattered pretty widely around the trendlines.

So my tentative conclusion is that there’s no correlation at all between religion being personally important and believing that it plays a more important role than it used to. The whole effect is driven by the difference between these two groups, which, roughly speaking, is the difference between high-income countries and low-income countries. That might be an interesting topic, but it’s quite different from what Pew says about this.

He likes me, he really likes me.Chris Szagola/CSM via ZUMA

This looked like good news in the Wall Street Journal today:

This seemed promising. Maybe I’m really more popular than I think. Anyway, it turns out that some researchers studied college freshmen for a year:

They found that participants systematically underestimated how much they were liked. In fact, it wasn’t until May, after living together for eight months, that people accurately perceived how much they were liked. So try to focus your social energy on spending quality time with friends and don’t worry too much about the outcome.

Well shit. Everybody I know has known me for a lot longer than eight months, so I guess my perceptions are pretty accurate after all. I would place myself squarely in the “tolerated” category, along with “but his wife is nice so we should invite them over.” I guess it could be worse.

The American economy gained 130,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a very sluggish 40,000 jobs. A lot of people gained employment (590,000) but a lot of people also dropped out of the labor force (364,000). The headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 3.7 percent.

On the wage side of things, the news was very bright. Hourly wages for blue-collar workers increased at an annual rate of over 4 percent after adjusting for inflation. Weekly wages rose about 8 percent after accounting for inflation. These are quite astounding numbers. I hope I didn’t make some kind of dumb arithmetic mistake here.

So this is a mixed report. Job growth was pretty tepid but wage growth was terrific. Go figure.

UPDATE: Actually, wage growth was good but not terrific. More here.

Apparently the latest fad for influential opinion leaders such as myself is to lash out at our Twitter critics. A literary reference is de rigueur,¹ and Notes From Underground has already been taken. So here goes:

Call me Devin.² Online tantrum throwers have been around forever, and I don’t think anything has changed recently except that instead of being able to bellyache only in the privacy of your own home where I’m blissfully unaware of it, Twitter allows you to direct your flames and shitposting where I can see them. However, I mute you all regularly and rarely see your cutting remarks, so we’re back to you yelling into the abyss but the abyss not caring.³ I recommend this to everybody.

And that’s about it. You may all pretend that I’ve added 750 words of pseudo-anthropological filler to explain the meaning of it all and fill up a column.

¹This is French for “required by etiquette or current fashion.” Don’t you guys know anything?

²If you don’t get this, you are either ignorant of Great American Novels or Great American Internet Memes. Either way, shame on you.

³This is an erudite allusion to Nietzsche’s quip that “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” which was directed at the shitposters of his day.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is feelin’ good:

If you read the story, it turns out that by “delivered” Pompeo means only that we kicked al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, something we did back in 2002. So this is perhaps not as impressive as he thinks it is.

Still, this is a case where Donald Trump might be doing something that only he could do. It’s been obvious for a long time that there’s no good reason for us to remain in Afghanistan, but it’s also been obvious that if we leave the Taliban is likely to take over. No US president is willing to accept that, so we’ve hung around for years accomplishing nothing of any consequence.

The obvious solution has always been to declare victory and go home, but neither Bush nor Obama quite had the chutzpah to do that. Trump does. Not only that, but if the Taliban does eventually take over he’ll loudly blame it on Obama and decline any responsibility. This will lead to hundreds of chin-stroking explainers and think pieces (“Did Obama Lose Afghanistan?” “Is the Taliban Really That Bad?” “Why Afghanistan Was Never Winnable,” etc.) and unanimous support from conservatives. Trump will get away with it in a way that no other president could.

Which is fine. It would be nice if Trump’s moronic bluster finally accomplished something useful.

This is the Washington Monument at dusk, taken from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Another win for the monopod!

Scott Winship passes along a new analysis of the “deaths of despair” thesis made famous a couple of years ago by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. He has a new chart that shows various trends going back to 1900:

Winship’s main point is that, taken on a historical basis, alcohol deaths and suicide aren’t really way out of line. What’s more, there’s little evidence that overall happiness or overall economic wellbeing have changed significantly in recent years. What has skyrocketed is drug-related deaths, which means we should be paying attention to opioids, not to “despair” in general.

That may be, and I don’t want to offer an opinion on this particular topic. But Winship’s chart brought back memories of something that’s nibbled at the back of my mind for a long time: the great year 2000 inflection point. It may be true that suicide and alcohol-related deaths are at historically normal levels, but it’s also true that every single trendline in this chart inflected almost precisely at the year 2000.

And that’s not all. Several years ago I noted a surprisingly large set of economic trends that also inflected in the year 2000. I had a hard time coming up with a coherent explanation for this, and plenty of people thought my list was mostly just coincidental. Maybe so. But although I’ve moved on to other things, I do sometimes notice yet another trend that started right around 2000. And now here’s another one.

I still can’t help but feel that something non-obvious happened around the year 2000 to produce a sea change in both the global economy and our response to it. Whatever it is, perhaps it’s what finally came home to roost around 2016 and gave us Trump and Brexit and Viktor Orban and so forth. But I confess that I’m no closer to an answer today than I was eight years ago.