I don’t agree with everything in Jason L. Riley’s analysis of the Chicago mayoral run-off in his Wall Street Journal column but I did want to share this:

The good news for voters in the nation’s third-largest city is that they nevertheless have two clear choices on the ballot. Party affiliation is about the only thing the candidates have in common. Mr. Vallas is a white moderate backed by the police union. Mr. Johnson is a black progressive backed by the teachers union. Mr. Vallas has run hard on restoring public safety in a city that saw crime continue to rise in 2022 and that has long been the poster child for big-city mayhem. He also wants to expand school choice for low-income families. Mr. Johnson opposes the creation of additional charter schools and has called for cutting the police budget.

Theoretically, Mr. Vallas ought to win the race handily. But we elect candidates for office based not on theories but on how many votes they can muster. And in Chicago, where white (33%), black (29%) and Hispanic (29%) representation in the population is remarkably balanced, politics are about as tribal as they come.

Paul Vallas being Greek-American, I suppose we should expect John Kass to prefer him over Brandon Johnson but his remarks are harsh even for him:

Chicago is in a tight mayoral election centering on uncontrolled violent street crime and progressive Democratic Party resistance to upholding the law, I half expected raw and ugly race rhetoric from the candidate underperforming and under pressure.

And because this is Chicago, the city of tribes and unforgiven sins, the race rhetoric spewed out. But it didn’t come from some angry pink fellow.

It did not come from his opponent in the race for mayor, Paul Vallas.

Instead it came from one of the historical victims of ugly talk and ugly deeds. It came out in a torrent from the black leftist candidate for mayor Brandon Johnson, on the final days of the campaign, at a campaign debate.

“This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about,” Johnson said, explaining the mayoral campaign in the starkest and most limited terms.

It was a clear appeal to race, but the Chicago media hardly mentioned it.

Few if any of the political reporters bothered to note that the slogan Black Labor White Wealth, came from a Marxist book. It was to be studiously avoided. Why? Because there is nothing more malleable, more easily biddable than a fragile white reporter desperate to avoid the charge of racism.

Speaking of reports not getting much coverage, this seems to have disappeared with hardly a trace:

Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson owes more than $4,000 in unpaid bills and fines to the city.

Johnson owes $3,357 in water and sewer bills as well as $1,044 in unpaid traffic tickets dating back to 2014 and 2015.

He made a $91.08 payment to his water and sewer charges on Feb. 13, his first payment since June 22, 2022.

Johnson’s campaign released a statement to Fox 32 Chicago.

“Like many working and middle class Chicagoans, the Johnson household has received various fines and fees from the City of Chicago over the years. These fines and fees are on a previously established payment plan and are on schedule to be fully resolved before Brandon Johnson takes office as our next mayor,” Johnson’s campaign said.

If Johnson were to win the April 4 election, state law prohibits him from taking office until his debts are paid.

Johnson currently makes $93,500 as Cook County Commissioner and an additional $85,906 as legislative coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union.

I found that report interesting in what it revealed about Mr. Johnson’s view of government.

The election is Tuesday and we are coming down to the wire. This election will largely turn on which candidate brings out his voters. I honestly have no idea who that will be. Vallas is favored to win the Northwest Side of Chicago which is where I live. Johnson is expected to carry the greater number with black voters on the South Side. The election may depend on Hispanic voters and their priorities.

Besides the impending arraignment of Donald Trump, I’m hearing a lot of fulminating about artificial intelligence including the letter, signed by such luminaries as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and many others asking for a pause in training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than ChatGPT-4. Don’t they realize that it’s too late?

Knowledge is international now. There are excellent, capable technologists in many, many other countries, some of them not particularly friendly to the United States. Nothing we do here will have the slightest impact outside of the United States and, in all likelihood, not on all developers within the United States. Not only should we not have the hiatus they’re asking for, from a strategic standpoint we need it to continue.

One more thing that I don’t see being emphasized enough. There’s no guarantee that the guidance being given by these language engines is correct. I’ve been playing around with them and they are quite frequently, verifiably incorrect.

So, yes, ChatGPT-4 is amusing, interesting, and useful. Full steam ahead, O Brave New World!

For the last 30 years every administration, Republican or Democratic, that has gained control of the White House has emphasized the importance of a college education for a happy, secure future. I have been critical of that for several reasons, the most important being that only about 50% of the population can actually benefit from a college education. In the country with the most highly educated population in the world (Canada) about 56% of the people between 25 and 64 have completed some form of tertiary education.

But the worm may be turning. According to a survey taken by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC, an old client of mine) and reported on in the WSJ by Douglas Belkin, American popular opinion on college education has changed:

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, a new low in confidence in what has long been a hallmark of the American dream.

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is a bad bet compared with 42% who retain faith in the credential.

Skepticism is strongest among people ages 18-34, and people with college degrees are among those whose opinions have soured the most, portending a profound shift for higher education in the years ahead.

In 2013, 53% of Americans were bullish on college, and 40% weren’t. In 2017, 49% of Americans thought a four-year degree would lead to good jobs and higher earnings, compared with 47% who didn’t.

Why the change? Some of it is basic economics. The easy availability of college loans has increased the willingness to pay. For any good or service when you increase the willingness to pay while not correspondingly increasing the supply, all else equal the price goes up. As the price of a college education has risen faster than wages, the more difficult it becomes to find a job that college education will get for you that allows you to maintain a middle class lifestyle and pay off your loans. Importing large numbers of college grads from other countries or offshoring the work (particularly when they’re willing to work for less) hasn’t helped either. I would speculate that the United States has more young people saddled with educational loans who haven’t completed a tertiary educational program than any other country in the world.

But if not college, what? I think several things need to happen. First, local, state, and federal politicians need to change their rhetoric. College should be de-emphasized. College prep program in every high school should be phased out in favor of manual arts programs. Emphasis in state and federal policies should be on apprenticeship programs rather than college educations. And, as with so much else, we need to control our immigration and encourage our economy to shift away from low-skill minimum wage work to more skilled but nonetheless manual work. We need to give more respect to people who work with their hands.

I have little confidence that any of those things will happen so I expect the dissatisfaction to grow.

The journal Nature Human Behavior (affiliated with Nature) has published a study by economics doctoral student Floyd Jiuyun Zhang analyzing the effects of political statements and endorsements by scientific publications on opinion. The TL;DR version of the article is the endorsements didn’t do much to change people’s opinions about issues or politicians but they were effective in changing people’s opinions about scientists.

There’s a proverb that covers this pretty well: “Cobbler, keep to thy last”.

The slug in the editors of the Wall Street Journal’s reaction piece to the indictment of Donald Trump about which I posted yesterday is “The first indictment of a former U.S. President is a sad day for America.”. We’ve had a lot of sad days lately. I thought that Donald Trump’s becoming the Republican candidate for president in 2016 was a sad day for America since the very qualities his supporters liked in him would make it difficult for him to be a good president and, indeed, made this day inevitable. I agree with the editors’ conclusion:

Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat.

I would put it more bluntly. I think we should anticipate that every living former president with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter will indicted by somebody somewhere for something.

The news that President Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury is practically everywhere. No details of the charges have been made public as of this writing.

Remember the old wisecrack? A good prosecutor can convince a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if that’s what he wanted them to do. If no felony charges have been filed or if the case isn’t ironclad, I’m afraid that things will get very, very bad. They may get bad anyway.

One of my favorite books is a little pamphlet called “How to Lie With Statistics”. I encourage everyone to read it. It’s what I thought of when I read this article by Paul Overberg, John McCormick, and Max Rust in the Wall Street Journal:

Big cities lost fewer residents last year as more immigrants moved in, fewer people died and more babies were born there, according to new census data that shows the urban exodus that gained steam early in the pandemic is cooling.

That’s one way to look at it. The other way to look at it are that New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are losing population while Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta are gaining population. Another way to look at it is that metro areas in Red States are gaining population while metro areas in Blue States are losing population. In fairness Seattle, Denver, and Riverside did gain a little population. Of the twenty-five largest cities in the country no city in the Northeast or Midwest gained population last year.

I suspect that jobs, taxes, and affordable housing which are interrelated are all factors in the change. Some would say climate but I’ve been to Phoenix. It has a lousy climate—almost unlivable without air conditioning. I would say the same of many of the cities that are gaining in population.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the FSB, Russia’s main security agency, has arrested Evan Gershkovich, one of the authors of the article I cited yesterday, for espionage. Daniel Michaels and Vivian Salama report in the Wall Street Journal:

The Biden administration on Thursday condemned the detention of an American Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia for what Moscow described as espionage, the first such case of an American journalist detained for allegations of spying since the Cold War.

The White House said in a statement that the State Department had been in touch with the Russian government concerning the arrest of reporter Evan Gershkovich and that it was communicating with the Journal about his case.

“The targeting of American citizens by the Russian government is unacceptable,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a separate statement, said that the U.S. seeks immediate consular access to Mr. Gershkovich so that it can provide the appropriate support.

“In the strongest possible terms, we condemn the Kremlin’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish journalists and civil society voices,” Mr. Blinken said.

President Biden was briefed on the detention of Mr. Gershkovich, National Security Council Strategic Coordinator John Kirby told reporters. He reiterated earlier U.S. State Department warnings that Americans are urged to avoid traveling to Russia or to leave immediately.

Russia’s main security agency said Thursday it had detained Mr. Gershkovich in the city of Yekaterinburg, around 800 miles east of Moscow, on Wednesday while on a reporting trip, accusing him of espionage.

“The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the Journal said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

Mr. Gershkovich’s detention and charge on the allegation of espionage mean the case is likely to become a high-level diplomatic issue, and is also expected to heighten tensions between Moscow and Washington.

The Federal Security Bureau said Mr. Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.” Mr. Gershkovich is accredited to work as a journalist in Russia by the country’s foreign ministry.

Authorities took Mr. Gershkovich to Moscow, where he appeared in court with a state-appointed defense attorney and was ordered held in custody until May 29, said the press service of the court, according to state news agency TASS.

I sincerely hope Mr. Gershkovich won’t be used as a pawn in the U. S.-Russia relationship, probably at its lowest point since the old Soviet Union days, but I suspect that’s exactly what will happen.

I wanted to call this piece by Ross Barkan at New York Magazine via MSN to your attention. It’s an analysis of the Chicago mayoral run-off and I think it’s of broader interest than just to Chicagoans, as being published in New York Magazine and MSN should indicate to you. Here’s the kernel of it:

Two wildly divergent candidates vie to replace her in the nonpartisan April 4 runoff: Paul Vallas, the former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and a former public-school teacher. The contest might naturally sort along racial lines — Johnson is Black and Vallas is white — but the starkest difference between the two men, both Democrats, is ideology. Just as the party has undergone enormous shifts at the national level, veering leftward from the ’90s Clintonian consensus while influential moderates simultaneously try to beat back progressive upstarts, Chicago is now the locus of a pitched struggle between the left and center — or even center-right, depending on your view.

Here’s his characterization of Paul Vallas:

Vallas, a 69-year-old who has managed three other school systems beyond Chicago’s, has emerged as the obvious if beatable favorite. In the first round of voting, Vallas took 33 percent to Johnson’s 22 percent — a remarkable finish for a man who placed ninth in the race against Lightfoot four years ago. He is quietly assembling a formidable coalition, branching out beyond his white moderate base to court-reform-oriented liberals disenchanted by Lightfoot and crime-weary Black voters willing to allow the candidate backed by the right-wing president of the local police union to control City Hall.

while here’s his characterization of Brandon Johnson:

Johnson, 47, is the candidate of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Jesse Jackson, and the local affiliate of the Working Families Party.

There are several points on which he is either mistaken, out-of-date, or simply fails to mention.

Whether the race is “bent slightly toward Vallas” as Mr. Barkan avers depends on which polls you read. Some polls show Vallas 46%/Johnson 41% while others show Vallas 46%/Johnson 44%. Still others show the two candidates tied at 44% each. I suspect the results depend substantially on who is being sampled.

The TV spots being run by the Johnson campaign could not be clearer: anyone who doesn’t accept the most radical positions of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is a crypto-Republican. That’s very peculiar since those endorsing Vallas include Jesse White, arguably the most popular Democrat in the state, the senior senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, the Senate majority whip, and many of those who served in the Obama Administration. Basically, Vallas is what used to be called a “regular Democrat”.

Brandon Johnson has no experience relevant to the job of mayor of the country’s third largest city. Zero. He has never managed or administered anything.

Nearly all of Johnson’s campaign contributions come from unions, mostly from public employees’ unions, a lot of it from the Chicago Teachers Union. Most of Vallas’s contributions come from individuals. The majority of Johnson’s contributions come from outside Chicago; most of Vallas’s from within Chicago.

The individual contributors to Vallas’s campaign tend to be more highly compensated and more highly educated.