The Daily Chart
January 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I haven’t been able to find the source for this chart, which has rocketed around social media the last few days, but I can think of any number of previous surveys that track with this. And it makes intuitive sense, and sometimes intuition is correct. A nice checklist for which university academic departments to shrink, especially since several of them have declining enrollment. Chaser—the ideological gender gap between young men
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January 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The latest quarterly economic growth report out this morning came in higher than expected (though the expected figure was fairly low—a 1.5% annualize rate). More fuel for the current narrative: the financial press is nearly unanimous—the Federal Reserve are geniuses, and we’re headed for a magical “soft landing” in the current interest rate cycle. That’s what makes me predict a recession for mid year: whenever the establishment crowd says X,
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January 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
This entry could either be a Daily Chart or the Feel Good Meme of the Day. Lots of attention last week to the news that the newly woke Sports Illustrated has laid off its entire staff of writers and may not survive at all, and yesterday brought news of another massive round of newsroom layoffs at the Los Angeles Times (truly a former newspaper), amounting to nearly 20 percent of
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January 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The latest consumer confidence survey shows an uptick in sentiment, which you might think is good news for Joe Biden. Maybe so. But everyone recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous closing question from 1980: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to buy what you need at the store than it was four years ago? This question still looks to be very useful for
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January 22, 2024 — Steven Hayward
With the New Hampshire primary nigh upon us tomorrow, worth noting how the Iowa caucus Republican vote fell out. Trump is most popular with older Republican voters, while a majority of younger voters went for DeSantis or Ramaswamy. Haley—not so much. The younger vote going for more hard core conservatives looks promising for the future.
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December 1, 2023 — Steven Hayward
It is interesting to take in the Gallup trend data on public opinion about immigration. You’ll notice in the chart below that a large plurality of Americans—sometimes a majority—have long wanted decreased immigration, though the number conspicuously dipped during the Trump Administration when—duh—illegal immigration was vastly reduced. Now the number has spiked back up again. Big surprise.
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November 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
You might think, going by the usual stereotypes, that men would be more delinquent on student loans than women, but lo and behold, it turns out that women appear to be much slower in paying down their student loan balances. This from a report from the Jain Family Institute. The study runs the numbers by race, and the result is depressingly familiar:
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November 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The aftermath of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade has concentrated chiefly on its political effects, but has it reduced the number of abortions or increased the birth rate? Abortion with few or no limits remains available in most states, and as most abortions occur early in a pregnancy even those states that have adopted a 15-week ban should not be expected to see significant changes. Is anyone trying
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November 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, this Thursday Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis will square off in a debate on Fox News that is clearly meant to be a proxy for the presidential race a lot of people in both parties wish we would have next year. Think of it as the undercard for the heavyweight bout to follow between the aging champs hanging on past their prime. Don’t underestimate Newsom: he’ll come
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November 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Turns out Germany’s great “energy transition” is hitting the wall so hard that the coalition government might go “splat.” The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend how Germany’s Constitutional Court has ruled that the Scholz government can’t take unspent Covid funds and pour them down the net-zero rathole, but the full dimensions of the cost of Germany’s energy madness was revealed by Bloomberg, who noted that spending for green
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November 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Zach Goldberg strikes again. Goldberg, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has done the fabulous n-grams we have featured from time to time showing the rise of woke jargon in mainstream media “news” stories. His latest dive into the data shows something curious—the upswing in media wokery coincides with the end of the “Occupy Wall Street” moment about ten years back. Occupy Wall Street was not as big a nuisance
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November 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
While populist parties or candidates are surging nearly everywhere around the world, from Argentina to the Netherlands (and polls showing Euro-skeptic and anti-open borders parties surging in France and Germany), one wonders why the British Tory Party, which won its biggest landslide since the 1920s back in 2019 under Boris Johnson, is looking to get wiped out at the next election according to all of the current opinion polls. Maybe
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November 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Israel-hating left—and some on the neo-isolationist right—like to attack American aid to Israel, especially military aid. It turns out American aid as a proportion of total Israeli defense spending has been in decline in recent years. The great Zach Goldberg puts it into perspective with the receipts: Goldberg: “The reason for the decline is NOT because the US is giving less money (due to treaties, including the peace deal
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November 21, 2023 — Steven Hayward
We’ve noted here before that investor enthusiasm for goo-goo “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing is fading fast, but it is good to see the Wall Street Journal certify the point with this headline and story: Wall Street’s ESG Craze Is Fading Wall Street rushed to embrace sustainable investing just a few years ago. Now it is quietly closing funds or scrubbing their names after disappointing returns that have investors
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November 20, 2023 — Steven Hayward
We mentioned earlier today that Argentina a century ago was one of the most prosperous nations in the world, but then it adopted populist socialism (the “good” kind of populism, according to the left), otherwise known as “bad luck.” How bad was it? Dan Mitchell has the goods: A big question going forward is whether the United States will follow Argentina’s path to long-term decline through slow-motion socialism, inflation, etc.
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November 17, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John Kerry has been in talks for months—months!—with the Chinese about climate change. Actually I’m sure it was just an hour or so, but to the Chinese it must have seemed like months. Anyway, Kerry says we’ve making great progress! How much progress? Well, here’s one way to judge Kerry’s hot air alongside energy realism:
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November 16, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The leftism of Pope Francis has been widely noted, and there is currently a controversy about the Pope’s removal of a conservative bishop (Joseph Strickland) in Texas. But there is evidence that while Francis is trying to move the church to the left, the rising generation of Catholic clergy are moving to the right—the effect, perhaps, of the actions and influence of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The current
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