The Daily Chart
August 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In the “life imitates art” department (in this case the old Kurt Russell movie), New York is shrinking. Why is it shrinking? Here we might want to cue in Sam Kinison from his peak shouty mood as Professor Turgeson in Back to School: BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE LEAVING! The Financial Times has the skinny: New York is shrinking, and faster than ever. Over the past three years, the population has declined
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August 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
A shocking news story last week that got lost amidst the euphoria of Slay Queen Kamala’s coronation was the Labor Department “revising” job growth estimates from the previous months by a whopping 818,000 jobs. This was not a small miss, and it was even worse when you dropped down below the headline number, and discovered that private sector jobs had been overestimated by a million, while government jobs were underestimated
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August 28, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Going back more than 20 years now the two best predictors of partisan voting patterns have been two-parent marriages, and regular church attendance. It was not always so on churchgoing. Once upon a time the Episcopal Church was known as “the Republican Party at prayer,” while Catholics were heavily Democrat. Today, the Episcopal Church could be called “the Progressive Party not at prayer.” In any case, note the growing party
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August 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Lots of news stories these days about the anemic Chinese economy, which I have been expecting for years: Less noticed is that Germany, usually the 8-cylinder engine of the European economy, is looking rather anemic. The Economist reports on “the sick man” of Europe: Europe’s biggest economy has gone from a growth leader to a laggard. Between 2006 and 2017 it outperformed its large counterparts and kept pace with America.
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August 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Perhaps my favorite headline from the DNC was Dana Bash of CNN noting the obvious “low-t” character of leading Democratic males figures starting with Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff: Democrats are trying to appeal to men who might not be as masculine as their Republican counterparts, Bash said. “But they are doing so in trying to put forward male figures, Tim Walz being one of them, Doug Emhoff last night,
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August 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Completely unreported in the American media, Sweden has quietly closed its border for further “migrants” and “asylum seekers.” The Inquisitive Bird substack tells much of the story: The number of immigrants in Sweden have greatly increased over the last few decades. Between 2002 and 2023, the share of the Swedish population that was either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent increased from 21% to 35% (SCB). This has
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August 22, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard/UNC case banning race-based college admissions, MIT is out this week with the data that tacitly confesses that they had lowered standards for minority applicants. Black and hispanic freshman enrollments went down sharply. Here’s what the chart looks like: Here’s how The Hill describes the scene: MIT: Newest students less diverse due to Supreme Court affirmative action decision The Massachusetts
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August 21, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Chicago is known as the City of Broad Shoulders, and certainly a lot of people have needed broad shoulders to lift and stack all the moving boxes for their exodus from this deep blue state. There is data suggesting the rate of exile has accelerated in 2024, but as of the end of 2023, Chicago’s population is back to where it was 100 years ago.
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August 20, 2024 — Steven Hayward
With Kamalarama doing her level best to deflect and deny the true dimensions and causes of inflation, let’s keep the data front and center: Why isn’t Harris targeting price-gauging by restaurants? Probably because most of the fancy ones she eats at are run by fancy Democrats in California. Memo to Trump: If you re-tweet this message very two hours, you should win: And a reminder from policy history:
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August 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Right now the markets are awaiting news from two fronts: how many more lunatic ideas will Kamala Harris propose this week, and will Fed chair Jerome Powell signal the all-clear for an interest rate cut at the Fed’s Jackson Hole meeting. He may have issued a market-moving statement before the pixels on this post arrive to your screen through the series of magic tubes we call The Internet. Meanwhile, signs
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August 16, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Quick: Which recent U.S. president boasted that he had “quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high” and “opened up millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration”? Obvious, you say: Donald Trump, who is repeating his “drill, baby, drill” view in the current campaign. But in fact that quote comes from Barack Obama. And if you look at the domestic oil production trends under the
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August 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The news last week that Chevron, which has been based in California since the late 19th century, is moving its headquarters to Texas ought to have set off alarm bells about California’s hostile business climate. I suspect Chevron’s departure will leave a meaningful hole in California’s already deteriorating tax revenue. The Financial Times notes that nearly half of the corporations moving to Texas are coming from California—more than the other
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August 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The big news in business yesterday was Starbucks sacking its CEO and poaching Chipotle’s CEO Brian Niccol away to helm the overpriced coffee chain. It got me to thinking about fast food, since I am a yuuge fan. If you asked which chain had the highest proportion of drive-through windows at its locations, you’d probably go with McDonalds. And you would be wrong. Also, which fast food chain generates the
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August 12, 2024 — Steven Hayward
This is a good time to recall the lesson George McGovern learned when he started a boutique hotel after his political career ended, only to learn the bitter lessons of the heavy foot of government regulation. This led McGovern to express a heresy: I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That
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August 9, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The obviously fraudulent/stolen election in Venezuela represents one of the largest foreign policy humiliations of the Biden Administration. The Biden Administration offered sanctions relief to Venezuela in exchange for Venezuela agreeing to a free and fair election. Everyone over the age of six knows that Biden did this because he wanted to allow imports of Venezuelan oil to help keep down gasoline pump prices here in the U.S. (having largely
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August 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It has been a common trope of the media and the commentariat class that Republicans suffer from a “gender gap,” because women prefer Democrats to Republicans. But in fact a closer look at the longitudinal data show that the gender gap opened up because men began shifting more fully to Republicans a long time ago. This is a great example of ideologically-driven narratives. The media fix on the “gender gap”
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August 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Many years back, when people first started to worry about the long-term future of Social Security, I recall hearing Sen. John Heinz offer a simple explanation of why Social Security was headed for trouble: “People are living longer, and The Pill works.” (Back in those days you didn’t get in trouble with “progressives” for noting a falling birthrate.) Another way of understanding the problem is looking at the ratio of
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