The Daily Chart
October 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Gallup is just out with its latest annual survey of public trust in the news media, and finds public esteem for the media is still in the toilet. Here’s another look: As recently as 2000, the partisan divide over the media was not that large: So how had the media responded? By cranking up their mentions of “disinformation,” which means any fact or claim that departs from the liberal party
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October 16, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Earlier this week California’s King Canute, better known as Gavin Newsom, signed legislation imposing price caps on oil refineries in the state, in an obvious attempt to deflect attention away from how bad policy and high taxes have given California the highest gasoline pump prices in the nation. What will he do when the law proves unavailing, or when gas lines out of the 1970s start to form when gas
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October 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
No sooner do I post a chart yesterday on some select fertility trends around the world than along comes the Wall Street Journal today with a major feature about how pro-natalist policies are falling significantly short of their goal of boosting fertility rates. First, nothing so clearly demonstrates that Paul Ehrlich’s famously wrong “population bomb” hypothesis is deader than the dodo bird than the major media’s newfound fascination with falling
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October 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Falling birthrates are suddenly mainstream news, even though leading demographers have been raising the alarm for years now. What population bomb? Population implosion is now the most likely long-term future for the earth if people don’t get busy again. Here’s the U.S.: Now here’s a curious subset: Israel versus Turkey and Iran: Israel’s higher birthrate tends to be concentrated among conservative and orthodox Jews, which is why Israel’s political and
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October 11, 2024 — Steven Hayward
There has been a move lately to ban smart phones in K-12 schools, and its sounds like an excellent idea. I wonder if we might contemplate some kind of jamming system to keep people off their smart phones while they are walking down the street? First: Could this trend reversal be related to this:
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October 10, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The most startling turnaround in recent months is the sudden revival of nuclear power. Three Mile Island is going to re-open (and put Jane Fonda in her grave), and Michigan is going to reopen a recently shut down nuclear plant. I’ll bet New York will revisit its bad decision to close down Indian Point (after which carbon emissions from New York’s electricity predictably went up). And then there’s Biden energy
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October 9, 2024 — Steven Hayward
With Hurricane Milton bearing down on Tampa Bay right now, the usual chorus of climate change fanatics are using the occasion once again to throw up the familiar unfounded claims. The UN’s IPCC climate change project repeatedly says scientists are unable to attribute frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, or other extreme weather events to climate change or greenhouse gas levels. Here’s Roger Piekle Jr’s. able short summary of the
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October 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward
There was a brief flurry, and also some hand-wringing amongst the hand-wringing left that hates manliness, that young American males think almost daily about the Roman Empire. Apparently nostalgia for ancient Rome is the first step on the slippery slope to the Handmaid’s Tale, or some other horror from Project 2025. Well, the YouGov pollsters decided to inquire, and while their headline here points to admiration for Rome, the data
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October 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In the midst of all the ongoing cheerleading for “net-zero” and the fabulous “energy transition,” a reality check is in order. Coal-fired power is still growing very fast. And guess where?
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October 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Let’s have some additional fun with everyone’s favorite federalism parlor game—contrasting California and (the free state of) Florida. Florida’s electricity prices are far below California’s and have remained steady for quite a while, while California’s electricity rates have doubled. Maybe the differing sources of power each state has decided to use explains most of this:
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October 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
A few weeks back we noted here that profit margins for large grocery chains like Kroger, always very small to begin with, were flat over the last decade or two, contrary to what demagogic Democrats were saying to try to distract blame for inflation away from their own monetary malpractice in office. Democrats know better, but Democrats count on the gullible and ill-informed to maintain their electoral power, so they
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October 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
A group called “More in Common” likes to survey Americans to bolster the finding that political polarization is exaggerated, and their latest report on “The Perception Gap” has lots of whiz-bang charts and tables showing how widely different groups of Americans misperceive other groups or ideological viewpoints. Try to stifle a yawn. One finding in particular, however, is notable: Democrats have a wider perception gap than Republicans. One reason for
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October 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Readers may recall Thomas Frank’s curious book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in which he wondered why working class people in the red states of “flyover” country voted Republican, presuming that Republicans favored the rich and not the working class. Why are they voting against their (presumed) economic self-interest? Somehow no liberal ever seems to ask What’s the Matter with the Upper West Side?, where rich liberals vote for the
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September 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
We noted here about 10 days ago that several elite universities are boasting about achieving their “diversity” (meaning racial) goals for admissions of this year’s incoming class—the first since the Harvard decision outlawed using race as an admissions factor—and concluding that these universities either lied to the Supreme Court that racial preferences are essential, or are cheating by disguising their continued but now unlawful practice of using racial preferences. One
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September 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we got the news that China’s latest advanced nuclear submarine . . . sank. At the dock, apparently. And now China is trying to cover it all up like it was a virus as at a Wuhan lab. Is China also covering up its sinking economy? Chinese economic growth has been slowing, and lately the Chinese government has been doing its own form of quantitative easing to try to
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September 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
John noted yesterday that the commercial real estate market (especially downtown office buildings) is in considerable distress, and might well get much worse before it gets better. But there are other signs that all may not be well with our overall economy. The first clue is Democrats who tell us not to believe our lying eyes (and supermarket prices). But there is also data, especially about consumer confidence, which is
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September 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The progressive left, in another of its typical toddler temper-tantrums, wants to pack the Supreme Court, by means of getting rid of the Senate filibuster if necessary. (But never forget that Trump is the violater of “norms” and a “threat to democracy.”) Bruce Mehlman’s weekly “Age of Disruption” Substack points to some interesting graphics that can tell us a lot about judicial politics today. First, you can see from Gallup
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