The Daily Chart
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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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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