Does anyone see more blood during the course of a professional career than embalmers? Embalmers or at least some of them are reporting they’re seeing some weird stuff in blood that they haven’t seen before: unusual clots. At Politifact Naseem Ferdowsi takes it seriously enough to debunk the claims that the clots have been caused by the COVID-19 vaccines:

Embalmers and funeral home workers say they are noticing an increase in unusual blood clots among the deceased. Some of them, without evidence, are attributing it to the COVID-19 vaccines.

One of the claims comes from an article titled “Embalmers finding ‘strange clots’ in jabbed people” and published by NewsWars, a website run by Alex Jones that has a history of spreading fake news and conspiracy theories.

“I actually pulled this long, fibrous-looking clot out prior to embalming … . At the front end of it, it looks like a normal blood clot, but that white fibrous-looking stuff just isn’t normal,” Alabama embalmer Richard Hirschman was quoted in the article as saying. Hirschman added that “my gut is telling me” it’s caused by the vaccine.

Hirschman shared similar claims on the “Dr. Jane Ruby Show,” and with PolitiFact when we contacted him.

What struck me about the report was that it was so consistent with some of the reported effects of COVID-19. I won’t go so far as to dismiss the possibility of their being caused by the vaccine out of hand but IMO these clots are more likely to be the consequence of the virus than they are of the vaccine. We’ll need more than sporadic anecdotal evidence.

One thing that does concern me is that it has been my experience that being able to see something you’re not looking for is a gift.

The editors of the Washington Post seem convinced that the solution to our labor force issues is more immigration:

Two things are simultaneously true. First, the Biden administration has mishandled immigration messaging by telling migrants not to come even as it pressed for more humane — meaning relaxed — border policies. Second, without a more forward-looking immigration policy, one more closely aligned with labor-force demands in an economy starved for workers, the nation’s long-term economic growth prospects will be stunted.

I am not opposed to increased immigration if it means bringing in the workers we actually need but I think the editors are drawing the wrong conclusions from the data. Consider this graph:

I also went to the trouble of determining the wages of all classes of workers in constant dollars. Short version: wages of individuals with college degrees or better are keeping up with inflation; wages for all other workers are not.

Demand is not determined by “Want Ads” but by willingness to pay. I will purchase every $20 gold piece you care to sell for its face value—$20. That cannot be interpreted as high demand.

If there were a high demand for workers without college degrees, their wages would be rising in real terms. They aren’t. Furthermore, there is a roughly 35% premium paid to legal immigrants without college degrees or better, cf. here. Solving that by legalizing all workers rests on a dLAWassumption: that the five bucks per hour saved by hiring illegal immigrants doesn’t result in more of them being hired. I think it does. Also note the small increase in the slope of the wages for workers without college educations in 2019. You can’t make a trend from a single point but that at least provides some indication that limiting illegal immigration resulted in the wages of the workers with whom they were in competition to rise a little.

My conclusion is quite different from that of the editors. My proposal would be to grow less produce requiring hand labor, have fewer fast food restaurants that demand people working at minimum wage or less, do less construction that depends on workers earning minimum wage or less, let Americans mow their lawns, and so on.

Thinking otherwise is objectively wanting a national economy that depends on a continuing flow of new workers who don’t earn a living wage and orients itself around such an untenable situation.

I strongly suspect that just about everybody thinks that the U. S. could have handled the COVID-19 pandemic better. In his most recent Wall Street Journal column William Galston identifies two particular areas he cites as evidence of that, life expectancy:

A report recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that during the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, life expectancy in the U.S.—the most basic measure of national well-being—declined by a stunning 2.7 years, from 78.8 to 76.1 years, the lowest level since 1996. Put simply, the pandemic erased the effects of a quarter-century of progress in medical innovation and healthier lifestyles.

These losses weren’t distributed evenly across the population. Life expectancy declined by 3.1 years for men but 2.3 years for women. Asian Americans showed the smallest loss (2.1 years), compared with whites (2.4), blacks (4.0), Hispanics (4.2), and Native Americans/Alaska Natives (6.6). For every group, the decline among men was substantially higher than that among women, and the overall difference between men and women widened from 4.8 years to just under 6 years, a gap last seen in the mid-1990s.

Compared with its peers, the U.S. fared poorly during the past two years. In 2020 the U.S. loss of life expectancy was more than three times the average of other advanced nations.

and education:

Public education presents a similar picture. The just-released report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed a historic drop in achievement among fourth-graders. Between 2020 and 2022, overall reading and math scores fell by 5 and 7 points, respectively, to lows not seen in decades. As with life expectancy, groups that lagged behind the national average tended to do the worst. In math achievement, for example, black students lost 13 points and Hispanic students 8 points, compared with 6 points for Asian students and 5 for white students. The differences were even more stark between high- and low-achieving individuals. At the top, NAEP scores in reading and math fell by an average of 2 to 3 points; at the bottom, by 10 to 12 points.

Differences in resources during periods of remote learning accompanied achievement gaps. Students in the top quarter of achievement reported much higher levels of access to computers, high-speed internet, quiet places to work and regular help from teachers than did students in the bottom quarter. Reinforcing these differences, 67% of high-achievers expressed confidence that they could tell when they weren’t understanding a lesson, compared with only 32% of low-achievers. It’s hard to ask for help if you don’t know when you need it.

Here, as with life expectancy, there is evidence emerging that we could have done better. Although overall student-achievement results for our European peers aren’t yet available, a recent academic paper studied Swedish primary school students and found no achievement losses during the pandemic.

Although I agree that we might have done better, I find each of those problematic in different ways and for many reasons. With respect to life expectancy, it was already declining in the U. S. before the pandemic. According to the CDC life expectancy in the U. S. peaked in 2014. I’m not sure how you’d go about disaggregating the declining life expectancy due to whatever led to the peak in 2014 from the declining life expectancy due to COVID-19 from the declining life expectancy due to the policy response to COVID-19.

The situation is slightly different with respect to education. I don’t think comparing the U. S. with Sweden is reasonable for any number of reasons. By comparison Sweden is tiny and highly socially cohesive but, more importantly, Sweden’s policy WRT COVID-19 was quite different from ours and just as importantly quite different from that of Finland, Norway, Denmark, or, for that matter, France.

Like most people I think there are quite a few things we should have done differently. For example, I think that President Trump should have shut down international air travel entering or leaving the United States for at least a couple of months starting in February. I think he should have limited traffic on the interstates early on as well. I think we should have emphasized preventing contagion to those most at risk and that closing schools to in person education was a mistake. Those are local issues not national ones. I also wish that COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against it had not been politicized as it was but I’m honestly not sure how that might have been accomplished.

At that point I’ll throw the matter open to the floor. What could we have done better in dealing with COVID-19?

If you’ve been thinking (as who of us hasn’t?) about what a nuclear detonation would do in your hometown, this post at BigThink explains how to figure it out in simple, graphical terms.

After tinkering with it a bit it was clear to me that nuclear weapons with a yield below 3 MT wouldn’t actually touch me where I’m sitting as I post this.

Of course nobody knows what the yields of the weapon in the present Russian arsenal are.

Have a nice day.

Do you recall that I mentioned “China permabears”, commentators who were reliably anti-Chinese? I singled Gordon Chang out by name. In a piece at 1945 after explaining China’s present economic situation, Mr. Chang provides his prediction for China’s near future:

Most analysts just assume growth will moderately decline in the years ahead. That assessment looks wrong, however. “We would not just be reverting to the sustainable growth rate, but we would also be reversing much of the previously recorded unsustainable growth,” Michael Pettis of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management predicted in a September 3 tweet.

Pettis, also a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has politely suggested with his tweet that China’s economy will begin an extended period of contraction. Given the country’s massive debt overhang, a slowdown in reality means a crisis.

Last fall’s failure of Evergrande Group, which effectively triggered other defaults in the crucial property sector, is a warning of what will happen country-wide.

Mr. Chang has been predicting a catastrophic collapse for China for more than 20 years. This time he may be right.

I honestly don’t know what will happen. What I think should happen is that China should rely more on consumer spending and less on government spending. In particular it should abandon its insistence on food self-sufficiency.

It has been suggested that the reason China has not adopted that strategy is that it would cause the Chinese Communist Party to lose control over the country. I suspect that rather than becoming more like other economies, the Chinese authorities will increasingly centralize authority in Beijing, as Mr. Pettis suggested in a piece to which I linked last week.

Update

I think this post by Christopher Carothers at The National Interest is relevant, too:

Why has Xi led so many policies that directly harm China’s economy? Analysts have often portrayed Xi’s moves as misguided attempts to avoid larger economic ills. Xi’s crackdowns on the technology and real estate sectors aimed to prevent bubbles and rebalance the economy. Zero-Covid is an attempt to protect the country’s weak healthcare system from going overboard. New rules on the education and gaming industries are investments in the health of China’s future workers.

Yet these explanations miss the big picture. Economically costly policies have all served to enhance the regime’s political and ideological control, both over the economy and over society.

Crackdowns on tech giants are driven less by distaste for monopolies, as in the United States, and more by fears that these companies are “insufficiently committed to promoting the goal advanced by the Chinese Communist Party,” as Harvard researcher Josh Freedman found. Similarly, restrictions on real estate borrowing and cryptocurrencies reflect fears that private market forces are too powerful, and that the state is losing its leading role in the economy and its free hand to dictate policy.

Said another way, the objective is continued control of China by the CCP. Economic growth and prosperity are just means to that end.

I agree with the point that Katha Pollitt is making in her piece in The Nation. The Democratic Congressional leadership is too old:

Dianne Feinstein is 89. Steny Hoyer is 83, Nancy Pelosi and Pat Leahy are 82, and Bernie Sanders is 80. Ben Cardin is 78, Richard Blumenthal is 76, Jeanne Shaheen is 75, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden are 73; Debbie Stabenow is 72 and Chuck Schumer is 71. And that’s just the Democrats. In total, 46 percent of Senate Democrats and 40 percent of Democrats in the House are 65 or over. (Republicans in Congress are also way up there, but that’s their problem.) Unlike Europe, where leadership is comparatively youthful, America is a gerontocracy: President Biden is 79, and the average age of current Congress members is the highest it’s been in 20 years. That’s not good!

I had to laugh at this:

Half the US population is under 40. With the best will in the world, someone born during the Truman administration can barely grasp what life is like for them.

How about someone born during Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, like Bernie Sanders or Ben Cardin? Or during his second term like Nancy Pelosi or Pat Leahy? Or during his first term, for goodness sake, like Dianne Feinstein?

To be sure there are problems with her analysis. 22% of the U. S. population is under 18 and ineligible to vote for that reason. If what she’s saying is true, is she advocating the elimination of the age requirement for voting or serving in the Congress or is she saying that representative democracy is inherently flawed?

However, she fails to connect the dots. Why is the Democratic leadership so old?

There are multiple reasons. One of them is that like all presidents, Barack Obama picked and chose the parts of the job he cared to do and one of the things he did not care to do was cultivate a new generation of Democratic politicians. Indeed, the 2002 midterms were a bloodbath for younger members of Congress from which the party has yet to recover.

A second reason is the seniority system in the Congress. There are big benefits to serving a long time.

A third reason is that, like many members of the Silent Generation, the Democratic leadership is very insecure. I’m not entirely sure what they’re insecure about. Loss of livelihood? Loss of power? That everything will collapse without them?

The average age of the members of Congress is a full ten years older than that of the members of the Bundestadt, the French Assembly, or British Parliament. There’s a lot less difference between the average ages of Germans, the French, or people in the U. K. and their elected representatives compared with the U. S. We should ask ourselves why.

At Atlantic Annie Lowrey has a combination of a profile of Brad DeLong and a review of his long-awaited book, Slouching Towards Utopia, the thesis of which, apparently, is that the age of continuing GDP growth and increasing prosperity in the United States which began, according to Dr. DeLong’s reckoning, in 1870, ended in 2010.

It’s not entirely clear to me how the date 1870 was selected other than “after the Civil War” makes a convenient starting point. Here’s a graph of U. S. GDP per capita from 1790 to 2000:

which shows a rather remarkable continuity in growth going all the way back to 1790.

How he picked 2010 is easier:

Here’s my question. Did that growth just “end” or was it killed?

I think the latter and several explanations occur to me, all of which are probably true in varying degrees. For the first imagine a U. S. economy that consisted primarily of financial services and personal service that could not easily be imported. That is the world of the failed experiment called “Chimerica” and 2010 is as good a date as any to place as its beginning. For some that was a utopian vision. For me it was dystopian in the extreme. Just to cite one reason I think it dystopian, that’s a U. S. of extreme inequality in income—a handful of very, very wealthy individuals, some highly credentialed and licensed professionals, and a lot of the working poor.

Another explanation is that 2010 is when it became quite clear that the federal government would bail out big companies however poorly they performed, particularly banks.

A third explanation is that 2010 is when the federal debt went above 100% of U. S. GDP for the first time in our history.

Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray’s New York Times op-ed on the purpose of the public schools begins with a point with which I agree:

Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.

The original purpose of the public schools, as anyone who has read John Dewey who laid their foundation can tell you, was to acculturate the children of immigrants and inculcate American values in them, making them into good American citizens.

I was fortunate that the American history I learned in grade school and high school had considerable continuity with the American history my parents had learned in grade school but, since I was reared in a skeptical household, I also learned that the bowdlerized, mythologized history we were taught was not the entire story. The mythology included Parson Weems—that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and never told a lie and that Abe Lincoln was a rail-splitter and that America was the last best hope of earth. I also knew about racism and the race riots of the 1920s (including the Tulsa riots) and I knew that the Founders and, indeed, no politicians were perfect. My parents taught me that racism was a terrible sin.

The question is not whether public school students will be taught a mythical history. They will be. As Korzybski put it, the map is not the territory. The questions are which mythology will they be taught and who decides?

I agree with the authors that there are aspects of American history to which students should be exposed at age-appropriate points including slavery, racism, bigotry, Jim Crow, and ongoing racism. However, I do not think that students or the country will be well-served by teaching them the mythology of the 1619 Project which includes that slavery is one of the founding principles of the United States, that slavery and racism are basic to American society, or that the United States is distinctive in its racism.

I think they’d be better off learning Parson Weems.

Consider this piece at the Wall Street Journal by Nicholas Eberstadt:

Since Labor Day 2021, unfilled nonfarm positions have averaged over 11 million a month. For every unemployed person in the U.S. today, there are nearly two open jobs, and the labor shortage affects every region of the country. Major sectors are now wide open to applicants without any great skills, apart from the ability to show up to work, regularly and on time, drug-free.

Why the bizarre imbalance between the demand for work and the supply of it? One critical piece of the puzzle was the policy response to the pandemic.

In 2020-21, Washington pulled out all the monetary and fiscal stops to avoid an economic collapse. Those extraordinary interventions may have forestalled world-wide depression. But they also created disincentives for work as never before.

Padded by transfer payments, disposable income in America spiked in 2020 and 2021, reaching previously unattained heights despite the economic crisis. And after the initial steep but temporary plunge in consumer spending from the Covid shock, the stimulus-funded rebound pushed consumer demand well above its pre-Covid trend line.

Americans actually had more money in their pockets during pandemic emergency years than they cared to spend—so their savings rates doubled. In 2020 and 2021, a windfall of more than $2.5 trillion in extra savings was bestowed by Washington on private households through borrowed public funds. That nest egg could supplement earnings—or substitute for them.

Before the pandemic, as my study “Men Without Work” details, work rates for men of prime working age (25 to 54) had already collapsed to late-Depression-era levels, driven down mainly by a half-century-long “flight from work.” For each jobless prime-age man looking for work, another four were neither working nor looking by 2019.

But the current manpower shortage highlights the new face of the flight from work in modern America. With pre-Covid rates of workforce participation, almost three million more men and women would be in our labor force today. Prime-age men account for only a small share of this shortfall: Half or more of the gap is owing to men and women 55 and older no longer working. Strangely, workforce participation rates for the 55-plus group remain lower now than in summer 2020, before the advent of Covid mRNA vaccines. Why?

That can’t be explained by continuing in higher education. Young men are simply dropping out of the economy. It can’t entirely be explained by early retirement since the numbers are too large.

IMO this change is aligned with the increase in suicides:

I’m open to explanations as to why this should be. Something we’re doing isn’t working.