Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Over the weekend, the New York Times wrote yet again that “extraordinary turnout among black voters” pushed Doug Jones to victory over Roy Moore in the recent race for Alabama’s open Senate seat:

That turnout, in which registered black voters appeared to cast ballots at a higher rate than white ones, has become the most recent reference point in the complicated picture about race and elections laws….Exit polls are preliminary, but the ones available in Alabama suggest the share of blacks who cast ballots — roughly 41 percent of the African-Americans voters — exceeding the 35 or so percent of whites who turned out. The divide likely reflects a robust black turnout and modest participation from whites who were unenthusiastic about Mr. Moore, whose already-controversial candidacy was dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct.

I don’t want to get obsessed by this, but I continue to wonder where this meme is coming from. It’s hard to put the 2017 race into any kind of context since exit polls usually aren’t available for Alabama, but they are available for some years. So after dredging up all the relevant data, here’s what I came up with for turnout rates in 2008 and 2017:

Compared to 2017, absolute turnout was higher across the board in 2008 since it was a presidential race. But it also had higher relative black turnout. In 2008, black turnout was 13 percent higher than white turnout. In 2017 it was only 8 percent higher. Since my turnout rate for blacks in 2017 is different from the Times calculation of 41 percent, I figure I should show my work:

• Alabama population (thousands): 4,874
• Population over age eighteen: 77.4 percent = 3,772
• Black population over age eighteen: 26.8 percent = 1,011
• Total turnout: 1,344
• Black share of turnout: 29 percent = 390
• Black turnout = 390 / 1,011 = 38.6 percent

Now, in 2008 Barack Obama was on the ballot and you’d expect black turnout to be especially high. So even if black turnout in 2017 wasn’t better than 2008, maybe it’s remarkable that black turnout was almost as good.

That could be. If we had other midterm elections to look at, we’d have a better idea of what black vs. white turnout rates normally look like in Alabama.¹ But as far as I know, we don’t. That means there’s no real basis for saying black turnout was extraordinary in 2017, and at least some basis for saying it wasn’t. If anyone has some kind of reliable turnout data by race in Alabama midterm elections, that might change the story. But unless we get that, there’s just no evidence that black turnout was unusually strong when Doug Jones won on December 12.

Or maybe I’m just missing something. But what?

¹If I had to guess, I’d say that black turnout in Alabama Senate races is usually lower than 29 percent because everyone know who’s going to win: it’ll be the white Republican guy. Why bother rousing yourself to vote for some Democrat who’s just going to get stomped anyway? Needless to say, this makes turnout comparisons even harder. What you really want to do is find other elections that feature close, well-funded races, and see how high black turnout is in them. Good luck with that.

When your best buddy’s whole life is about making data easily available to people, what kind of Christmas present do you expect from him? Data, of course. So that’s what FRED gave us. Seriously. But the festive presentation of the data is all mine.

Merry Christmas from Marian and me, and from Santa’s little helpers, who are always eager to supervise the gift wrapping phase of the holiday season. There’s a little piece of them in every present.

It is 70 degrees. The weather is perfect. No cats were harmed in the making of this documentary.

Here’s the price-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 since World War II. Right now it’s hovering a little above 25. In the past three decades, it has never reached that point without leading quickly to either a deep correction or a full-blown recession.¹ Of course, we just passed a big tax cut even though the economy is running at 100 percent of its potential. So maybe that will inflate it even more, leading to an even bigger correction/recession than usual. Fun times.

¹If you’re wondering why the PE usually spikes upward during a recession, it’s because earnings crater faster than stock prices. When the denominator goes down, the PE goes up.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Under the new Republican tax law, big corporations will get a permanent tax cut of 14 percentage points. You will get a tax cut of about 1 percentage point—until it expires, that is, at which point your taxes will be higher than they are today.

That is all.

Lucasfilm

Warning: spoilers ahead.

I saw The Last Jedi earlier this week, and my reaction was a little different from the others I’ve seen. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it, and I couldn’t care less about the allegedly massive backlash from true-believer fans. My main gripe was something else entirely.

Any ongoing series, especially one that’s explicitly space opera, has to periodically introduce unexpected twists and turns. That’s what keeps people coming back to soap operas. In the original trilogy we got that. Empire introduced Yoda; we learned more about the Force; and Darth Vader was revealed as Luke’s father. Return of the Jedi delivered too. We finally met the emperor and learned just how powerful the Dark Side is. Leia was revealed as Luke’s sister. And Darth Vader turned at the end.

The prequels, no matter how much you like or dislike them, also delivered on this score. Phantom Menace showed us the origin of both Anakin Skywalker and the future emperor. Midichlorians, even if you found them ridiculous, were brand new and, potentially, interesting. Clones was weaker, but Boba Fett fans finally got an origin story and we learned all about the clone wars briefly mentioned in the very first movie. Revenge finally revealed why Anakin Skywalker turned to the dark side and how the Jedi order was wiped out.

Then we get to The Force Awakens. The fact that it’s all but a scene-by-scene remake of New Hope was bad enough, but it was also a plodding, by-the-numbers remake. There’s a new Sith lord and his apprentice. Been there, done that. Han Solo is flying around the galaxy with Chewie. Sure. The empire First Order builds another Death Star and the rebel alliance Resistance destroys it. Yawn.

But then, at the very end, we finally get thrown a bone: Luke Skywalker is exiled by his own choice on Ahch-To, and we don’t know why. That’s enough to keep interest alive in the next movie.

And that brings us to The Last Jedi. There is literally nothing new or unexpected in this movie. Luke, it turns out, is just on Ahch-To sulking over his own shortcomings. The backstory for Snoke could have been interesting, but he was summarily killed off and forgotten. Ditto for Rey’s backstory, which is casually deep-sixed. The relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren might have turned into an intriguing plot twist, but no. They turn into standard-issue enemies. In the meantime, we get the usual space battles in which an entire fleet of Star Destroyers apparently carries fewer fighters than a World War II-era aircraft carrier. Plus a 30-minute subplot designed to do nothing except resolve a completely invented crisis of cowardice from Finn.

I was not a big fan of The Force Awakens. But I guess I can say that at least the ending kept me waiting for the next episode. The Last Jedi is similar in one way: it’s well crafted, decently plotted, and lacking any real soul. But it’s worse because it doesn’t provide even a shred of anything resembling an interesting new twist. For the first time ever—even including the prequels—I don’t have much interest in seeing the next movie. Why would I?

The Washington Post writes today about seniors being forced to work forever thanks to the end of the traditional pension:

The way major U.S. companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labor force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.

….The notion of pensions — and the idea that companies should set aside money for retirees — didn’t last long. They really caught on in the mid-20th century, but today, except among government employers, the traditional pension now seems destined to be an artifact of U.S. labor history….In place of pensions, companies and investment advisers urge employees to open retirement accounts….The trouble with expecting workers to save on their own is that almost half of U.S. families have no such retirement account, according the Fed’s 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances.

None of this is wrong, but it presents far too rosy a picture of the past. Traditional pensions never covered more than half the workforce, and until the 70s more than a quarter of all men worked past 65:¹

The long mid-century decline in the number of working seniors was due to increasingly generous Social Security payments for the poor and the working class, not to traditional pensions that most of them didn’t have in the first place. That decline ended around 1990 and the number of people who continued working after 65 started slowly increasing—but again, this uptick had little to do with the end of pensions. It began in an era when traditional pensions were still pretty widespread among men aged 65+, whose working years spanned 1950-1990.

So what’s reponsible for the increase? Part of it is voluntary: as we’ve become healthier and longer-lived, some people just don’t want to retire. They like their jobs. The other part is involuntary: some workers can’t survive on Social Security and have to work to make ends meet.² There’s no firm survey data about this that I’m aware of, but roughly speaking it’s probably split about 50-50. This means that since 1990, the number of seniors who are working because they have to has increased about 4 percentage points.

Given what I’m about to say, there’s probably nothing I can do to persuade everyone that I think this is a bad thing. But it’s a bad thing. America has grown richer over the past three decades, and the number of seniors who work because they have to shouldn’t be increasing.

That said, the increase is small, and it’s almost certainly not related to the end of traditional pensions. The kind of people who are forced to work beyond 65 didn’t have pensions back in the day and they don’t have 401(k) plans today. They just have Social Security and whatever they’ve managed to save. The idea that a crappy economy and an end to traditional pensions means that everyone has to work forever just isn’t true and we should stop pretending otherwise.

And that said, the best solution to this problem is to increase Social Security payouts to the bottom third of the income spectrum. This could be done at relatively modest cost, and it would be by far the most effective way of making sure that everyone who wants to retire at 65 is able to.

¹Data for 1949-2007 here. Data for 2007-2017 here.

²A bit of this is also due to the increase in the full Social Security retirement age. There’s no data on how big an impact this has had, but it’s probably fairly small.

Twitter is all over the LA Times today:

very impressed by their commitment to diversity by including a redhead pic.twitter.com/Be6oM1zcu9

— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) December 22, 2017

It’s not just an all-white cover, it’s a jarringly all-white all-blond cover (with one redhead). Even Donald Trump would probably look at it and shake his head.

Is this a frequent thing for The Envelope? I don’t have their covers for the past year, but a quick scroll through their most recent stories shows that 8 out of 30 are about people of color (or a roundtable that includes at least one POC). That’s 27 percent. Is that bad? OK? Good but could be better? I’m not sure. It’s better than the Oscars, at least.

But what I’d really be interested in is a story about how a cover like this happens. Obviously every magazine wants big stars who are likely to win awards. But I assume that you can’t always get everyone you want. Agents make their clients available depending on whether they have a movie to promote; whether they happen to be in town on the day of the shoot; whether they feel like doing it; etc. Did the Times invite some black actresses, but by chance they didn’t accept so they were stuck with an all-white roundtable? Or what? Once thing I know for sure is that it didn’t happen just because no one noticed it. At the very, very least, the photographer, Kirk McKoy, who’s shot a million of these things, certainly noticed it.

Somebody at the Times should write this story! Not in a defensive, apologetic way, necessarily, but more as a sort of explainer about how things work in the entertainment biz. It would be a good read.

This is Hopper playing hide-and-seek in the Australian willow tree in our backyard. She did this for a couple of minutes as I moved the camera from one side of the trunk to the other, and then climbed higher up the tree to get a better look at things. Satisfied, she scrambled back down and jumped into our neighbor’s yard. They know our cats almost as well as we do. Luckily, they like cats.