Mark Rightmire/The Orange County Register via ZUMA

What is this supposed to mean?

Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2017

Does this mean that Trump’s promise to revoke DACA isn’t for real? That maybe after six months he’ll extend it for another six months if Congress hasn’t acted? Or what?

I’m a little puzzled about why anyone thinks Congress will act anyway. Back in 2010 every single Republican voted against the DREAM Act. Every one. Today a few of them are saying that DACA should be preserved, but how are we supposed to interpret this? As evidence that they’ve changed their minds? That they voted against it originally just because Obama proposed it? That they were OK with not enacting it in the first place, but not with taking it away once a million people are depending on it?

And even if a few Republicans really have changed their minds, does DACA now have majority support in the Republican caucus? If it doesn’t, why would leadership even allow a vote?

Nothing really makes sense here. I can’t figure out why there’s supposed to be a chance of Republicans agreeing on a new DREAM Act when they unanimously opposed it just seven years ago. What am I missing?

People are really pressing my buttons these days on the subject of robots. The latest is Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal:

Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse

Belinda Duperre, who sold jewelry at Sam’s Club…earns $2 more per hour at Amazon than at Sam’s, in part because she’s a lot more productive. At Sam’s, she served perhaps one to 20 customers a day. At Amazon, she packs 75 to 120 boxes an hour that are then whisked via high-speed automated conveyor belts to fleets of trucks that fan out across the region.

….The brick-and-mortar retail swoon has been accompanied by a less headline-grabbing e-commerce boom that has created more jobs in the U.S. than traditional stores have cut. Those jobs, in turn, pay better, because its workers are so much more productive. This demonstrates something routinely overlooked in the anxiety about the job-destroying potential of robots, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys.

This is not the greatest productivity argument in the world, but my real gripe is something different. Here’s a passage later in the article that really highlights it:

“Robot apocalypse” is a modern expression, but the underlying anxiety goes back centuries….Those fears have repeatedly proven baseless. James Bessen, an economist at Boston University School of Law, has found in numerous episodes when technology was supposed to annihilate jobs, the opposite occurred. After the first automated tellers were installed in the 1970s, an executive at Wells, Fargo & Co. predicted ATMs would lead to fewer branches with even fewer staff….Today, banks employ more tellers than in 1980 and their duties have expanded to things ATMs can’t do such as “relationship banking.”

People who write about this stuff need to be very clear on the difference between automation and artificial intelligence. You can’t just casually refer to “the job-destroying potential of robots, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation.” These are totally different things.

Plain old automation does indeed usually produce more jobs than it destroys. This applies to more than just steam engines and electricity, and an ATM is nothing special in this regard. It’s ordinary, old-school automation even though it relies on microchips and communications networks. Of course ATMs can’t do relationship banking. How could they?

Artificial intelligence is entirely different. If you don’t believe we’ll ever get it, that’s fine. Make your case. But if you do believe it’s coming in the near future, then you need to treat it as a completely different thing. Pretty much by definition, true AI will be able to do anything a human can do. So no matter what new jobs you think AI will create, then by definition AI will be able to do those jobs too. If true AI is in our future, the robot apocalypse is very much something we should worry about.¹

So please: can we retire the stale old ATM story? It has nothing to teach us about what AI can and can’t do, and that’s the thing we should be interested in. If you want to write about automation, then feel free to go on at length about how it produces more jobs than it destroys. But if you want to write about AI, historical analogies will get you nowhere. This is something very, very different.

¹Not me, of course. I’ll be retired or dead by the time it happens. But if you’re in your 20s or 30s, a little bit of healthy anxiety might be in order.

So how much will Donald Trump’s sabotage of Obamacare actually affect enrollment? Over at the Incidental Economist, a team of researchers looked to Kentucky for answers. In late 2015, Republican Matt Bevin became governor and he immediately cut back on advertising and outreach for Kentucky’s version of Obamacare. In 2016 he cut back even further. The researchers crunched the numbers and concluded that each week without television ads resulted in 450,000 fewer page views, 20,000 fewer visits, and 20,000 fewer unique visitors per week during the open enrollment period.

But what about actual enrollment? Did that go down too? Or did it turn out—as Trump suggests—that everyone already knows about Obamacare, which makes expensive advertising campaigns a waste of money? As public service, I’ve added enrollment data to the chart the researchers produced. It’s the light pink bars:

When the previous administration cut back modestly on advertising, enrollment went down from 106,000 to 94,000. Then, when Bevin took office and cut advertising way back, it plummeted to 81,000. Apparently advertising works! Who knew?

That’s a drop of 14 percent, which is huge. But this might still understate the problem. Trump is planning to stop advertising and outreach at the same time he’s shortening the open enrollment period. A lot of people who think they can wait to enroll until the end of December—or even the end of January—are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they head over to healthcare.gov on December 27th and discover that they’ve missed the brand new deadline of December 15. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up affecting half a million people or more, who find themselves unexpectedly unable to buy health insurance for 2018.

The remarkable thing about all this isn’t just how callous it is, but how obviously callous it is. The cutbacks will save a little over $100 million, which is a pittance for a $100 billion program. There’s plainly no reason to eliminate this spending except as a way of deliberately trying to undermine the program and keep poor people from signing up. But Republicans don’t care if everyone knows it. Voters probably won’t figure it out, after all.

Now, it’s possible that this will backfire. Liberal groups may go into overdrive working to make sure people know about the new deadline. There’s an analogy here: in states that passed photo ID laws for voting, the backlash got so much attention that the laws had only a minor effect.

But even if that happens, it’s still a win for Republicans. After all, if liberals are busy with this, it means they’ll have less time to spend on whatever new atrocity Trump is working on during November and December. Merry Christmas, folks.

UPDATE: The original post was unclear about the dates of the Bevin administration, and I also miscalculated the percentage drop after Kentucky’s advertising stopped. It was 14 percent, not 24 percent. The post has been corrected.

I don’t remember what this is anymore. It’s a plant of some kind, something I took pictures of but didn’t really care for once I got home and looked at them. At some point, however, I got bored and started futzing around with a whole bunch of Photoshop filters and color settings, and eventually it turned into this. I propose that either (a) it should get an exhibition spot at MOMA or (b) Hallmark should buy it as a wrapping paper design. Alternatively, Steve Schafer can try to figure out what plant it originally was. I betcha he can’t do it.

One of the great things about FRED is its unpredictability. There are lots of things you’d think they’d have, but they don’t. For example, apparently the Census Bureau doesn’t play nice, which means FRED has no Census data on wages or trade deficits. This is especially annoying because the Census data is an unholy pain in the ass, especially for trade data. Bad Census Bureau!

On the other hand, it’s also got great stuff you can find by accident. I happened to do a search with the string “coin” in it, and got back total orders for $1 coins from the US Mint:

No one wants $1 coins. There are over a billion of them in reserve, just waiting for banks to order them. But total orders add up to only about 60 million per year—mostly for birthday presents to small children, I imagine. Until we get rid of the one-dollar bill, the one-dollar coin has no audience.¹

On a more serious note, I also ran into this chart showing the velocity of money:

I don’t really know what this means. More accurately, I know what it means—a single dollar circulated an average of 2.2 times per year in 1998 but only 1.4 times in 2017—but I’m not sure what it implies. Certainly it corresponds to lower inflation. But what else? And why has velocity been slowing down pretty steadily for nearly 20 years? This is yet another economic variable that took a sharp downward turn right around 2000, and that always interests me. There’s an awful lot of these inflections in 2000, and I really want to know what happened in 2000 to cause it.

¹On the bright side, the “Cheerios” version of the 2000 dollar coin is extremely valuable. Why is it called “Cheerios”? Because 5,500 of them were included in boxes of Cheerios, dummy. But that’s not enough to make them valuable. It turns out that the Cheerios giveaways were struck from a slightly different master die, which means they’re easily identifiable and there are only 5,500 of them. If you got one and tossed it into a drawer, get it out and sell it. You’re rich!

Via Keith Humphreys, here’s the result of Washington State’s legalization of marijuana in July 2014:

Humphreys adds this comment:

Prohibition imposes huge costs on drug producing industries that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. These higher prices are one of the principal reasons (the others being stigma and fear of punishment) that illegal drugs are used so much less frequently than legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. Marijuana is a rare example where we can see the impact of legalizing a drug in real time, which shows that were the production and sale of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine also legalized, those drugs would also become dramatically cheaper to consume.

This is a two-sided coin, of course. Advocates for legalization of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin will hail it: if we stop the drug war, prices will fall and drug users will be less likely to resort to crime to raise money for their next hit. Conversely, drug warriors will point out that this shows just how effective drug prohibition is: it keeps prices high and therefore reduces overall consumption.

So which do you want? Higher consumption but (maybe) lower crime? Or lower consumption with (maybe) higher crime? Marijuana doesn’t cause much crime or much societal damage in the first place, so it’s a relatively easy case. But how about meth? Or opioids? That’s a little harder.

D. Myles Cullen/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Zack Beauchamp has an interesting piece today about the lack of a robust Democratic alternative on foreign policy. Democrats and Republicans differ pretty clearly on social and economic issues, but when it comes to foreign affairs and national security the differences are pretty minuscule. Why?

On issue after issue, from the war in Afghanistan to the rise of China, Democrats have little exciting to offer. Democratic members of Congress are happy to give fiery speeches condemning Trump’s policies on terrorism or Russia, but that’s not very different from what Republicans did on health care while President Barack Obama was in office.

….Why are Democrats so bereft on foreign policy? To find out, I talked to a half-dozen people with experience in the liberal foreign policy world, ranging from congressional staffers to professors to former White House officials. Most of them pointed the finger at something that might not seem obvious: Think tanks.

….Another part of the problem appears to be liberalism itself: The liberal base is highly divided over the use of American military power and Washington’s place in the world. No one seems to know how to overcome this. But there’s a clear consensus in liberal circles — even at the highest levels — that the lack of think tank firepower is a real problem.

This is not really news. The fact that there’s a fairly broad bipartisan consensus on foreign policy is pretty well known—and frequently bemoaned by lefty critics of American military intervention.

But I think this view understates the problem by looking for uniquely American causes like think tanks. Take a look around the world. There are obviously differences in foreign policy among rich countries. Germany is less hawkish than the US. France is more interested in Africa. Small countries don’t even pretend they have much influence over foreign affairs.

But those are mostly small differences. Everyone hovers around a fairly similar approach to foreign affairs, mostly following a fairly simple rule: the bigger the country, the more likely it is to throw its weight around. Take a look at the Big Six: the US, Russia, China, Britain, Germany, and France. Is there really much difference? Only Britain joined us in the Iraq War, but others were happy to join us in Afghanistan. Britain voted against intervention in Syria, and that started a chain reaction revealing that America wasn’t really very excited about it either. President Obama was reluctant to take the lead in Libya, so France did so instead. Russia has been aggressive along its border (Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics) and China has been aggressive along its border (India, the South China Sea). Nobody is really in favor of North Korea having nuclear capability, but no one is really willing to do much about it either. America has a huge spying apparatus that gets a lot of attention, but it turns out that plenty of other countries do too—and our allies work hand-in-glove with the CIA and NSA even if political expediency forces them to occasionally denounce us in public.

In other words, to say that consensus American foreign policy is American foreign policy is probably wrong. It’s basically just the way big countries work. We tend to be on the aggressive end of the consensus, but that’s more because we’re the biggest, not because Americans are uniquely belligerent.

So look beyond think tanks. Look beyond America. Look beyond the 21st century. Just ask yourself this: how different is the United States today from powerful countries over the past few centuries? Not much, really. The technology has changed a lot, but the basic worldview hasn’t.

This is why it’s hard for Democrats to form a really robust counterweight to “right-wing foreign policy.” It’s because consensus foreign policy isn’t really all that right-wing. All the yelling and shouting mostly serves to hide the fact that substantive differences between the parties are fairly modest. Even the biggest foreign policy disagreement of recent times, the Iraq War, was supported by about half of all Democrats. Interventions like Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have fueled plenty of partisan sniping, but hardly any substantive disagreements at all. Democrats and Republicans can switch their views toward Russia with hardly a blink because their views weren’t all that different to begin with. In other words, the reason mainstream think tanks don’t produce a lot of alternatives is because there aren’t many customers asking for them.

The Trump administration is urging the rest of the world to sanction North Korea harshly in response to their recent missile launches and nuclear tests. There’s only one problem:

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Monday that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, is “begging for war,’’ and called for members to exhaust all possible diplomatic measures and impose urgent economic sanctions to prevent it.

….The Trump administration is also moving to cut off from the international financial system Chinese banks and trading companies that supply Pyongyang, however, those cases are moving slowly because of the hiring freeze at the State Department and personnel shortages at the Justice and Treasury departments, according to Stanton. “The government has made some of the right policy decisions, at least in sanctions, but they are not putting enough people on task,’’ he said.

Typical Trump. He’s too incompetent to implement even policies that are straightforward and have broad bipartisan support. This is, simultaneously, my greatest hope and my greatest fear for the next three years.

Happy Labor Day! Let’s have lunch early today, shall we?

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Newscom via ZUMA

I’ve now had a similar conversation three separate times in three completely different contexts—most recently last night—and that’s enough times to make me think it’s something worth writing about.

It’s pretty simple. Liberals of all stripes were, obviously, pretty upset when Donald Trump won the election. It’s not just that he’s conservative. It’s also because his victory was so unexpected and because Trump is such an ignorant, loudmouthed cretin. It’s far worse than 2000, when George Bush won.

But apparently there’s a big difference in the way men and women reacted. Generally speaking, men were upset. They were unhappy. They were resolved to fight back.

So were women. But they were also far more emotionally affected. They were distraught. They went on crying jags. They were seriously depressed. They found it hard to concentrate at work.

Why the difference? Last night’s theory is that lots and lots of women have had to put up with various kinds of sexual molestation since they were very young. This includes everything from random pervs to unwanted advances to wolf whistles to wandering hands to groping to more extended assault—especially during their childhood and teenage years. This has happened to many of them far more often than men think because women usually don’t dredge up this stuff and tell us about it. But it leaves serious scars.

And now one of those guys is in the White House. It causes all the old stuff to bubble up, and when it’s added to everything else it produces a pretty serious and long-lasting bout of depression.

It’s worth noting that although this has now come up in three very different settings, the conversation is always with people I know. This spans a lot of ages, but it’s mostly well-educated white folks who are pretty politically aware. So I don’t know if this is also true of other demographics.

I’m not really sure how to report on this, or how many people are willing to talk about it publicly. But it sure seems like a real thing. I’d like to find out more about it.