The Daily Chart
November 15, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I have written here (also here) before about envy as a motive force for the left that social scientists assiduously avoid studying because it would cast a shadow on their egalitarianism, and one of these days I’ll get around to revising the paper on the topic “Lucretia” and I presented at an academic conference last winter (and perhaps making a podcast out of our portion of the panel), but for
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November 14, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis are still on to debate each other at the end of the month in what is widely understood to be the “undercard” of the 2024 presidential contest, and what might yet come to pass depending on whether we might otherwise have two major party nominees who will campaign from a basement in Delaware and a jail cell. In any case, I hope Gov. DeSantis brings
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November 13, 2023 — Steven Hayward
We noted here once before that the Harvard faculty statement deploring anti-Semitism on campus was overwhelmingly signed by faculty from STEM fields, with very few coming from the humanities and social sciences—more evidence of my thesis that higher education is slowly bifurcating into two separate universities—STEM, and humanities/social science, the latter of which is doomed to wither. (Evidence for this coming in a future Daily Chart.) Turns out Columbia University
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November 10, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Last week the stock market enjoyed a strong rally, and one part of the good news was the Treasury’s announcement that they didn’t have to borrow as much money as they had expected, which, given our $1.7 trillion budget deficit this year (up $300 billion over last year), is hardly great news. But the markets bought it anyway. Then yesterday the results of the latest Treasury bond auction came in,
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November 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The inverted yield curve is usually a reliable predictor that a recession is on the way, but so far the lag is at the longish end of previous patterns. On the other hand, some other indicators suggest things are definitely slowing down, and keep in mind that unemployment statistics are usually a lagging indicator of an economic downturn. Let’s start with falling demand for truck drivers: Maybe there are fewer
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November 7, 2023 — Steven Hayward
El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has announced his intention to run for re-election, and he’s likely to win in a landslide, to the dismay of right-thinking progressives everywhere. His crime against humanity? He rounded up and jailed violent gang members in huge numbers. Did everyone get due process of law? Likely not, but I suggest it is better than getting no process of law like many criminals in blue cities
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November 6, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The latest polls look terrible for Biden, with the CBS/YouGov poll showing Trump winning a majority of likely voters. And while Biden keeps telling us “Bidenomics” is working, the people sure don’t seem to think so. You can almost feel the panic building in the New York Times newsroom: Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in
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November 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
DEI—the campus acronym that someone has suggested really means “division, exclusion, and ideology”—really does follow the principle of the cancer cell, as its malignant influence on campuses grows by sucking up blood and infecting the cells around it. Most campus DEI departments have been conspicuously silent since October 7, in most cases because they are fully on the side of the campus anti-Semites. (Berkeley’s vice chancellor for DEI, Dania Matos,
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November 2, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Given that the family is the greatest source of inequality, which explains why every utopian since Plato has suggested that achieving equality requires nationalizing the children, it is no wonder that the left is hostile to the family, and why the campus left in particular breaks out in hives when you present social science data (ordinarily the coin of the realm) showing that children from intact, two-parent families outperform children
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November 1, 2023 — Steven Hayward
According to one estimate I have seen, in 1973 there were only about 13,000 children being homeschooled. Today the number is over 5 million—and may be much higher, as many states do not track the numbers very carefully. The Washington Post has noticed, and you can tell they are worried about it. (The left has always hated homeschooling, and the teachers unions rightly understand what a threat homeschooling is to
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October 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
News out today is that federal government borrowing for the month of October may yet top $600 billion (officially it’s at $517 billion, but that was several days ago), and this year’s deficit will come in around $1.7 trillion. Good thing Joe Biden has been so successful in cutting the deficit! (/sarc) But then there was the robust economic growth report last week, showing the economy growing at a nearly
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October 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Business Insider has assembled the latest Census data on where Americans are moving from and to, and it appears the exodus from blue states to better-run red states continues to accelerate: More than 8.2 million Americans moved to different states between 2021 and 2022, 100,000 of whom moved from California to Texas. New US Census migration data showed that thousands of Americans are leaving California and New York in favor
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October 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we noted here the green energy fiasco of Siemens and a couple other renewable energy companies, but it turns out the damage is being seen across the board. Just a couple years ago everyone piled into green energy companies because they were said to be the future, while traditional oil, gas, and coal companies were doomed to long term decline, and who would want to have “stranded investments” in
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October 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Siemens, one of the premier German manufacturers of wind turbines, saw its stock price crash by nearly 40 percent today, after revealing mounting losses on wind power equipment sales. This, after the stock already crashed over the summer. (See chart below.) Siemens is now begging the German government for more subsidies. Funny—I thought green energy was now cheaper than conventional energy sources (coal, gas) that don’t need subsidies to be
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October 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As Scott noted, the White House had to clean up the mess that Karine Jean-Pierre made in saying the White House had heard no credible threats of anti-Semitism but remained worried about Islamophobia. As the saying goes (except at the White House apparently) let’s have a look at the data for 2022, and lay down your bets on how the 2023 data will come out:
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October 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
“Net-Zero” is the term of art used for the supposed “great energy transition” away from fossil fuels. The term “net” contains all the “we-don’t-really-mean-it” mischief of this whole scam, as it means governments will resort to all kinds of Enron-style accounting to claim compliance with “Net-Zero.” Just a few years into this crusade and it is already failing. But “Net-Zero” might actually apply to the related world of ESG (environmental,
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October 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
So the United States has shoveled close to $4 billion of taxpayer money to the UN find for Palestine (meaning chiefly Gaza), with only a two-year respite under the Mean Tweeter. (Another reason to bring him back.) Cutting aid to “Palestine” ought to be a first-day item for the next Republican president, and on Day 2, cutting off the rest of our support for everything else at the UN.
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