On the one hand I’m as saddened by San Francisco’s woes as Lee Ohanian of the Hoover Institution is:

No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.
Detroit’s fall was primarily driven by the relocation of the US auto industry to southern, right-to-work states, where auto producers, including foreign firms who build autos here, have avoided the union conflict that was endemic in Detroit. San Francisco’s decline is driven by absurdly bad local economic policies. How bad? As some city blocks have been taken over by drug gangs selling fentanyl in open-air superstores (think of an opioid version of Costco, without the membership card), city supervisors have spent their time talking about defunding police, abolishing rent, abolishing prisons, and demanding that if Whole Foods is to be allowed to develop a grocery store in a vacant building in the city, it must include affordable housing.

Some blame San Francisco’s high cost of living for the exodus. San Francisco housing costs have contributed to this loss, but many of those leaving the city are those with very high incomes who can afford to live in San Francisco. Instead, they are choosing to move to locations, many of which are also expensive, that have much more sensible city governance.

They are moving to destinations that do not have San Francisco’s drug and crime issues, its poorly performing public schools, its homelessness, its extremely high cost of doing business, and other issues that people have tolerated for so long, only because San Francisco was once one of the world’s great cities. As someone who loved San Francisco, it pains me to say it no longer is. And I suspect that those who departed San Francisco, whose exits left the city with 60,000 fewer taxpayers, feel the same way.

However, I differ from him in that I don’t think that San Francisco’s problems are much like those of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or St. Louis in that San Francisco’s problems are completely reversible. Without the manufacturing and related jobs that Detroit and many other cities have lost, as sad as it is to say it, no one would want to live there. St. Louis has a particularly beastly climate. From June 15 to about September 15 both the daily high heat and humidity hover around 100. As I’ve said before I’ve lived through many a St. Louis summer without air conditioning including one working in a steel mill so I know what I’m talking about. None of the cities in that list are garden spots. I doubt that anyone moves to Detroit for the scenery.

San Francisco on the other hand would have people wanting to live regardless of the employment situation. Its problems have been created by reckless governance and are completely reversible by better governance. Whether it will see better governance is another question.

Will tanks be decisive in the upcoming Russian winter and spring offensives? I’m seeing opinions in both directions.

I doubt that the Leopard and M1 tanks will be decisive for reasons I’ve already given: their utility has been overstated, they may not be suitable to task, and, most importantly the enemy always has a vote.

Please persuade me I’m wrong.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Bjorn Lomborg writes about polar bears:

The official assessments from the leading scientists who study these animals—the Polar Bear Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature—peg the global population today at 22,000 to 31,000. That’s higher than the 5,000 to 19,000 polar bears scientists estimated were around in the 1960s.

The main reason has nothing to do with climate. An international agreement enacted in 1976 limits polar-bear hunting, always the key threat to polar bears’ numbers. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period, 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now.

He makes haste to clarify:

None of that means climate change isn’t real or doesn’t affect people or the planet. But to deal effectively with these problems, we need to use good data rather than defaulting to ideologically inspired narratives. It does more good for polar bears, and the rest of us, if those trying to help them use accurate facts.

As I see it there are several different views on climate change. First, there are those who think it’s primarily caused by human action, is a dire emergency, and any data that detracts from that is to be denied and fought. Then there are those who think that climate change is a hoax and anyone who thinks anything differently is either a fool, a crook, or being deceived. Then there are those who may think it’s either true or not but that human action is not the primary agent of climate change and there isn’t much we can do about. If I’m interpreting Dr. Lomborg’s position correctly he believes in anthropogenic climate change, does not think it’s a dire emergency, and thinks that good policy requires looking at the actual data with clear eyes. I think that view approximates my own. The nuance I would add is that IMO anthropogenic climate change is more pronounced in some places than others, local climate change may be a serious problem in some places, but that those places are frequently politically inmconvenient.

Dr. Lomborg concludes:

Relying on the data I referenced used to be uncontroversial. When a CNN science journalist did an investigation similar to AFP’s in 2008, he spoke to numerous scientists and they agreed “that polar bear populations have, in all likelihood, increased in the past several decades.” When polar bears in 2008 were listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, the decision noted that the population “has grown from a low of about 12,000 in the late 1960’s to a current worldwide estimate of 20,000-25,000.” The data here haven’t changed, only the media’s willingness to disregard annoying facts.

The result is that the public is denied access to accurate data and open debate about these very important topics. Ridiculous points on one side are left standing while so-called fact-checking censors inconvenient truths. If we’re to make good climate policy, voters need a full picture of the facts.

Besides, even today some 700 polar bears are killed by hunters each year. If we want to help polar bears, why not stop shooting them?

I only have two remarks to make about the killing of Tyre Nichols. The first is that it doesn’t reflect a race problem. It reflects a police problem. I honestly don’t know what to do about that. As I think I’ve mentioned before my college roommate, somewhat surprisingly, became a police officer and I attended a number of cop parties. My observation was that there is a tremendous temptation among police officers to divide the world into two groups: police officers on the one hand and perpetrators on the other. Not a police officer? You’re a perpetrator.

Policy isn’t the problem. I haven’t heard of any police department that had a policy of rousting out innocent people and murdering them. Is it who they’re recruiting as police officers? Is it inherent? That would be tragic.

My other observation is that to whatever extent anyone is making the killing of Tyre Nichols about race, they’re making a grave error if not engaging in active mischief. Any pullback in policing in black neighborhoods will hurt black people the most.

The editors of the Washington Post want a “reset” of the CDC:

How the CDC reached this point is clear. Political pressure and manipulation by the Trump administration early in the pandemic played a role, as has deep polarization in American politics, which has fostered greater skepticism about science and debate over whether public health interventions infringe on personal freedom. But the trouble also lies in how the CDC is structured, funded and directed. These deficiencies can be fixed in the wake of the pandemic, and the CDC could come out of it stronger and more nimble. The nation needs a more robust CDC — not a smaller one, as former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently called for in a Post op-ed.

They point to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Every bureaucracy, public or private, has many of the problems they identify. The larger the bureaucracy the more endemic the problems. Can the CDC by improved? Definitely.

IMO there are three umbrella objectives:

1. Focus
2. Reduce overlap with other agencies
3. Increase accountability

The CDC originally began as a mosquito abatement agency. While I don’t think it needs to go back that far, it should focus more narrowly on domestic public health. It shouldn’t have international programs—that should be under the State Department. It shouldn’t do research or issue grants for research except as it relates directly to public health. Basic research should be within the province of the National Institute of Health. It shouldn’t be in the approvals business—that should be the Food & Drug Administration.

Professional management might help.

I don’t have insider knowledge on how to increase accountability but that’s obviously an issue. The CDC isn’t alone in this regard.

One last observation. If they’re looking for rapid response, IMO they may want to try the military (although I’m beginning to have doubts). Large civil bureaucracies just aren’t built for rapid reponse.

I guess the big news today is that Germany and the United States will be shipping tanks to Ukraine. I have read tactical, logistical, and strategic arguments that is a mistake.

The tactical argument is that both the Leopard and M1 are too heavy for Ukrainian bridges or pontoons so their utility will be limited. The logistical argument is that both tanks require substantial training and specialized support. It has been suggested that if the tanks are to be of any use in the near term, they will be operated and maintained by NATO forces. The strategic argument is that is a substantial escalation of the war. Stay tuned.

The Commerce Department announced 2.9% growth in GDP in the fourth quarter of 2022, faster than expected, but not all of the news is good:

The Commerce Department’s advance fourth-quarter gross domestic product report on Thursday showed half of the boost to growth came from a sharp rise in inventory held by businesses, some of which is likely unwanted.

While consumer spending maintained a solid pace of growth, a big chunk of the increase in consumption was early in the fourth quarter. Retail sales weakened sharply in November and December. Business spending on equipment contracted last quarter and is likely to remain on the backfoot as demand for goods softens.

It could be the last quarter of solid GDP growth before the lagged effects of the Federal Reserve’s fastest monetary policy tightening cycle since the 1980s are fully felt. Most economists expect a recession by the second half of the year, though a short and mild one compared to previous downturns, because of extraordinary labor market strength.

James Billot has a pretty good post on the total number of military casualties in the war in Ukraine at UnHred. Here’s a snippet:

Gathering and assessing accurate casualty data, however, is a fiendishly difficult, and fraught, topic. I spoke to five prominent military analysts, some of whom did not even want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the subject. Most agreed that both Kristoffersen and Milley were likely downplaying the number of Ukrainian casualties while overestimating Russia’s — something that has been a constant fixture of this war.

“There are somewhere approaching 100,000 casualties for Ukraine,” Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at RAND, says. But for the Russians, “the number is somewhere around 100,000-130,000 casualties (wounded and killed)— of that number, conservatively, probably 20,000-25,000 are killed in action”. Massicot believes that Milley is being “provided with the best possible information available to the US government”, but her Russian casualty figure is lower than both the U.S. and Norwegian estimates.

In part, this is because of the way information is recorded and delivered: journalists, intelligence services and governments regularly confuse kills with casualties, the latter of which includes those killed, died-of-wounds in hospital, wounded, missing and captured. It is different from KIA (killed in action). We also tend “to take government claims of other people’s losses at face value,” according to military historian Christopher Lawrence. He refers to the Ukrainian claim that 121,480 Russians have been killed, yet their own announced total losses as of 21 August was only 9,000 killed.

Russia, meanwhile, has only provided two casualty reports since the February invasion, the last of which was on 21 September when Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said that 5,937 Russian troops had been killed. Mediazona, working with the BBC News Russian service and volunteers collecting data based on open source material, puts the figure at 11,662 deaths, with the caveat that it is likely much higher. “Russia underreports deaths to a significant extent and has made discussing combat deaths a state secret,” says Massicot. “To a lesser extent, Ukraine is believed to underreport losses as well”.

Both Russia and Ukraine are clearly incentivised to undercount their losses, both for domestic and international propaganda purposes. But even countries that are not directly involved in the conflict do not want to be seen to be highlighting their ally’s war losses. As such, there is a tendency to emphasise (and even inflate) the statistics that put their enemy in a bad light. “If it’s going to paint a bad picture about Ukraine, the U.S. will downplay the figures or talk about it obliquely,” says Bill Roggio, a military analyst.

The numbers being reported by the BBC seem to be those reported by the Ukrainian government without comment, citation, or editing. I think the actual answer is that we don’t know.

Scott Grannis has a characteristically good post on the federal debt. The TL;DR version is that he’s not particularly worried about it:

The “burden” of debt is not the nominal amount, nor is it the size of the debt relative to GDP. The true burden is the cost of servicing the debt, which is a direct function of the level of interest rates. As Chart #3 shows, the size of our debt is indeed huge, but interest rates are historically low. Let me point out a curious fact: a rising debt/GDP ratio tends to coincide with falling interest rates, and a falling debt/GDP ratio tends to coincide with rising interest rates. Not what you’ve been led to believe, I’m sure.

That’s my concern. His chart #6, reproduced at the top of the page, offers the best perspective. Here’s my interpretation of it.

Fiscal policy has been out of whack, out of touch with reality since the mid-1970s. Not coincidentally, that’s when healthcare spending went off to the races. Since the early Aughts it has become significantly worse which is precisely what I said was happening at the time. Obama’s policies made it worse again as did Trump’s tax cuts and COVID spending.

Attributing Biden’s spending to more COVID spending is just making excuses. The necessary relief had already been given; his additional spending has precisely the effect one would have expected and that theory dictates—it produced inflation. And you’ve got to recognize that debt overhang makes growing past it that much more difficult. And for goodness sake we’re not going to accomplish that by importing entry level workers who require more public spending than they produce in tax revenues.

The only way not to be concerned about servicing the debt is if you belief that higher interest rates will be transient. They will be but only in the sense of sic transit gloria mundi. Everything is transient. We’re saddling the kids who’ve been born in the last 30 years with high interest payments that will be increasingly difficult for them to bear.

If I’m a “debt scold” I’m an equal opportunity scold: I criticized Bush’s tax cuts, Obama’s increase in healthcare spending, Trump’s tax cuts, and Biden’s spending as fiscally irresponsible. Now we’ve got to pay the bills which are a lot higher than they would have been with greater responsibility.

I think that Chris Pope’s plea at City Journal for entitlement reform belongs in the “we just have to” school of public policy thought. Here’s a sample:

After three years of record spending, the federal government will soon face decades of steadily rising entitlement costs. Some Republicans believe that they can force reform by obstructing an increase in the federal debt ceiling, but doing so would more likely force House leaders to accept proposals crafted by Senate Democrats. Yet as interest rates rise and fiscal constraints tighten, the longer-term prospects for entitlement reform become more propitious. Balancing the budget by increasing taxes is even less popular with voters and both parties than doing so by reforming Medicare and Medicaid, because tax hikes would represent a greater disruption to the status quo.

Congress has given up trying to hold the line on Medicare spending. After a decades-long charade of “sustainable growth rates” in Medicare and annual “doc fixes”, Congress gave up. In theory it might raise marginal tax rates on the rich but in practice I believe that increasing revenue by doing so is beyond Congress’s reach. The only group on which it can impose taxes is the middle class and it has refused to do that.

At this point I don’t believe anything will be done by either party until the whole thing goes splat.