In the past I’ve mentioned that sometimes I encounter one sentence in an article which I simply cannot move past. Although I found Jessica Guynn and Jayme Fraser’s piece at USA Today on I guess racial inequities in businesses interesting I simply could not get past this sentence:

One sobering data point: The overwhelming majority of executives are white, while only 1 in 443 Black or Hispanic employees have an executive job.

Do you see why I have a problem with that sentence? Or should I spell it out? I’ll give one example. It should be obvious that there are 500 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Roughly 158 million people are employed in the U. S. It’s a matter of simple mathematics that 1 in 316,000 workers is a Fortune 500 CEO. Is that something about which we should be upset? Is it “sobering”?

I wanted to share some thoughts on how I think that our struggle with COVID-19 is unfolding, using Illinois as an example. I think the evidence is that in Illinois at least the pandemic is over or, more precisely, has entered a new phase and is now endemic. Consider the increase in hospitalizations and deaths due to the latest COVID-19 variant:

But surely deaths aren’t the only metric we should be considering. What about the overburdened healthcare system.

If Illinois’s healthcare system is in danger of being overwhelmed, it isn’t by COVID-19.

Also, consider the inoculation rate, widely quoted as 60% having received at least one dose. I think that’s grossly misleading. 15% of Illinois’s population consists of children under 12 who aren’t eligible to receive the vaccine, at least not yet. Then add the percentage of people who’ve had the disease and recovered. That’s at least 12% of the population and possibly considerably more. Now you’re starting to talk 80-90% of the population with at least some resistance to the disease.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that more people should be vaccinated. I also have no problem with making wearing masks mandatory when you go to the store or to work or even among children in school. Something I haven’t heard mentioned: there are social reasons for that. If everyone is wearing a mask in school—no problem. If some kids are wearing masks including those with suppressed immune systems and others aren’t kids being what they are there will be bullying.

One more point. Increasingly, the stats I’m seeing on severe disease seem to show a pretty close correlation between serious COVID-19 and obesity. How far would that go to explaining the racial disparities in contracting the disease? I think it’s worth considering.

My preliminary conclusion from all of this is that this is what things are going to look like for the foreseeable future. The disease will continue to circulate among the population, new mutations arising, and we’ll have yet another seasonal disease with mortality somewhat above the flu and another annual inoculation. It’s not a particularly appealing prospect but it’s something we can get used to.

I’m a bit puzzled by this article in the Washington Post by Heather Long, Alyssa Fowers, and Andrew Van Dam. The question they’re considering is clear enough:

A mystery sits at the heart of the economic recovery: There are 10 million job openings, yet more than 8.4 million unemployed are still actively looking for work.

The answer they’re putting forward is, basically, that things are different now:

At heart, there is a massive reallocation underway in the economy that’s triggering a “Great Reassessment” of work in America from both the employer and employee perspectives. Workers are shifting where they want to work — and how. For some, this is a personal choice. The pandemic and all of the anxieties, lockdowns and time at home have changed people. Some want to work remotely forever. Others want to spend more time with family. And others want a more flexible or more meaningful career path. It’s the “you only live once” mentality on steroids. Meanwhile, companies are beefing up automation and redoing entire supply chains and office setups.

The question they don’t address is whether the federal government should be subsidizing that reassessment. For some, e.g. the editors of the WSJ, the answer is obvious—bring in foreign workers willing to take the jobs that are remaining unfilled at the wage being offered. IMO the ROI on that is terrible. There are incremental costs associated with more people and a workers earning $10 or $12 an hour doesn’t pay enough in taxes to cover those incremental costs. Bringing in workers who are willing to work for wages that don’t cover the freight doesn’t make that freight go down. The people who are already here are one thing; bringing in more is something else entirely. I think that we have altogether too many jobs paying low wages and, indeed, there needs to be a reassessment but of a different sort than being discussed in the article. I’m not anti-immigrant. I’m anti-‘low wage immigrant” and anti-“immigrant who is being brought in to keep wages low”. If you don’t think the latter situation is actually happening you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in technology in the U. S. over the last couple of decades.

Here’s an interesting passage from the article:

Nationwide, most industries have more job openings than people with prior experience in that sector, Labor Department data show. That’s a very different situation than after the Great Recession, when the number of unemployed far outstripped jobs available in every sector for years. To find enough workers, companies may need to train workers and entice people to switch careers, a process which generally takes longer, especially in fields that require special licenses.

That reminds me of the famous “Help Wanted” ad that appeared in 1982: “Wanted: IBM PC Programmer. Five years experience required.”. The IBM PC was first released in 1981. Do the math. I can’t tell whether they’re hiring or fishing. Is there actually a skills mismatch or are employers trying to see what’s out there and at what wage they’re willing to work?

Here’s the conclusion of the article:

The White House and many business leaders hope a combination of rising vaccination rates, reduced unemployment benefits and more time will lead more unemployed Americans to find new careers — and to be excited about them.

Sarah Henrie, 39, from the San Francisco Bay area, lost her corporate job at Bloomingdale’s in June of 2020 and struggled to find any job openings in her area of expertise: International marketing and tourism. Initially, she was shocked to find herself unemployed for the first time in her career.

But after her daughter was born, she decided she wanted a more flexible career. She’s about to take the real estate exam in California. If all goes well, she will start as a Realtor early next year working with her brother.

“It’s been a crazy year and we’re still kind of navigating,” Henrie said. “The nice thing about real estate is it’s flexible and you’re not commuting and going into an office. I think it will allow me to work and also be able to have more time with my daughter than I would have if I had been in my old role.”

The key to this great reallocation will be ensuring some workers aren’t left behind.

which sounds quite a few warning notes to me including how unrepresentative Ms. Henrie is of those looking for work, that real estate is notoriously gig work particularly for women with children, that contacts matter, and that California real estate is rather obviously in a “greater fool” bubble.

At Crain’s Chicago Business Greg Hinz analyzes the census results for Chicago and sees trouble on the horizon:

If math is destiny, then a new set of numbers shows Chicago is in for a potential realignment of political power unlike anything it’s seen in decades.

I think what he found is pretty interesting and it comports well with what I have observed:

The story is the rise of the central area of Chicago as a booming population center in the past decade, the simultaneous decline of many African American neighborhoods (especially on the South Side) and Latino growth that appears to be occurring all over the place but does not appear as overwhelmingly concentrated as it has been in the past in neighborhoods such as Humboldt Park and Pilsen/Little Village.

Said another way “Hispanics” are not a cohesive interest group as blacks have been for the last 50 years. Here are some of the details:

Downtown, largely white wards have seen significant population growth. Latino growth is up, too, but more dispersed, while many Black-dominated wards on the South Side saw sizable drops.

Some may be inclined to try to dilute that by grabbing portions of that downtown population and shifting it to other, more outlying wards. Good luck with that. The next outlying wards with a combined population gain of roughly 19,000 residents all abut those downtown wards: the 4th, 43rd and 44th. As 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett puts it, “I’m not going to give up” Black residents in his ward to help build population of some people-short wards elsewhere. If anything goes, he adds, it will be part of his largely white east end, the portion of his ward that’s part of downtown.

Now, despite what Burnett said, I don’t yet have detailed demographic breakdowns ward by ward. But based on the 2000 census and later American Community Survey data, it’s clear that the only predominantly Black wards that gained people overall are either downtown (the 3rd and 27th) or on the reviving South Side lakefront (the 3rd, 4th and 5th). Interior wards, especially on the South Side, each lost thousands of people in the last decade. Most were intentionally kept smaller than average in the last remapping 10 years ago in an effort to help Black aldermen retain their numbers. It’s far from clear that can happen again.

That positions Latinos as the big potential winner this remap cycle.

and the Latino population is not concentrated but dispersed. Ray Lopez’s 15th Ward, the most Latino ward in the city which includes West Englewood, Brighton Park, Back of the Yards, and Gage Park, actually lost population while the Hispanic population in Chicago actually grew.

What will complicate matters is voter turnout. Even though the numbers of Hispanics have grown it doesn’t mean that the number of likely Hispanic voters has grown as well.

In a piece at RealClearPolitics professors Chad Flanders and Kevin Vallier do a pretty good job of identifying the problem:

Indeed, we seem to be locked into a kind of a death spiral in election reform, where anything that changes how we run elections is looked at in terms of which side will benefit. Bills being considered – and passed – in many states, justified as improving election “integrity” and “security,” seem almost transparently designed to shrink the electorate to a more GOP-friendly core. The goal is not making elections more trustworthy but electing more Republicans.

In essence, this is results-oriented tampering with the election process. Long term, it can only increase cynicism about our elections while stifling other, more sensible, reforms. The same phenomenon plays out in debates over redistricting, where each side jockeys to draw districts not in pursuit of better representation, but to ensure more districts “lean” their way. That’s nothing new, although we may be entering an era of exceptional brazenness in this regard. Using increasingly sophisticated computer programs to design districts that maximize partisan advantage has become a perverse art form.

To restore trust in elections, we have to find policies that are not simply tilted in favor of one political party. Policy that increases trust in elections has to benefit both sides. This will not be easy: Election reform never occurs in a vacuum, and many reforms do help one side more than the other – much of the time, in fact, we know in advance which side will benefit more. This colors and corrupts debate over the policy. We must work hard to assess reforms on the merits, and not in terms of partisan advantage.

Like many such plaints, despite being able to see the problem clearly they fail to offer any solutions. I think there is no solution as long as the stakes are so high. Those at the top of the pyramid depend on winning for their cushy livelihoods, the media need to maintain a constant state of unhappiness to preserve their livelihoods, and so on.

Also the most transparent and fair election process is moot in the face of tortured electoral districts, carefully constructed to benefit one party or group and disadvantage others. I don’t remember which Chicago pol said it (probably the late Mayor Daley) but one map drawer is worth 10,000 precinct workers.

Finally, opinion being as closely divided as it is makes all elections look unfair. There is always a margin of error in tallying election results. Always. When the margin of error exceeds the margin of victory the winner of an election is actually indeterminate.

At RealClearMarkets Nicholas Eberstadt observes that we’re about to conduct a real world experiment:

A natural experiment in the US labor market commences next week as pandemic benefits (including pandemic unemployment insurance) are scheduled to end on Labor Day.

The US labor market suffered a terrible shock from the COVID19 pandemic in early 2020, and experienced a remarkably rapid initial recovery — a snap back of unprecedented speed and magnitude. Curiously, however, the return to pre-pandemic employment rates seemed to stall out last fall. While employment rates for men and women 20 and over remain below their Great Recession nadir, they have risen only by a mere one percentage point since October 2020.

Yet, while no one was vaccinated in October 2020, today, thanks to the advent and rollout of three highly effective coronavirus vaccines over 60 percent of the US adult population — over 160 million men and women — are fully inoculated. So what is constraining the return to paid work?

We’ve been doing a lot of that lately. He proceeds to make his case that a presumably unintended effect of pandemic policy was to reduce the willingness to work.

We’ll see. The real world is peculiar. However convincing the argument what matters is what actually happens.

The infographic above is courtesy of No Labels from this post at RealClearPolicy. I found point #2 particularly interesting.

The $1.5 trillion “infrastructure bill” includes $27 billion for electrical grid improvement. That’s 1.8% of the total.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are grimly amused by the dialogue between Chinese State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry:

Foreign Minister Wang Yi made this leverage explicit in a Wednesday lecture to U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, who is back in China pleading with its leaders to reduce the country’s carbon consumption. “The U.S. side wants the climate change cooperation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-U.S. relations,” Mr. Yi said, according to a Foreign Ministry readout of the meeting. But he insisted that “China-U.S. cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations.”

In other words, Beijing wants to extract concessions from Washington before it further indulges Mr. Kerry’s climate show. Mr. Yi told Mr. Kerry, according to the document, that “the United States has made a major strategic miscalculation about China.” America should “attach importance to and actively respond to the ‘two lists’ and ‘three bottom lines’ put forward by China,” he instructed.

The “List of U.S. Wrongdoings that Must Stop” includes sanctions on Communist Party figures (the State Department has restricted travel to the U.S. by some officials, including those connected to China’s violation of its treaty obligations on Hong Kong). The list also complains of American efforts to shut down potential Chinese espionage operations in the U.S.

The most significant of the “three bottom lines,” meanwhile, is that the U.S. back off its defense of Taiwan—the island democracy that Beijing wants to absorb, potentially by force. If the U.S. backs away from its Pacific alliances, the pitch seems to go, perhaps China will sign up for more putative cuts to CO2 emissions in the future.

For the Communist Party, climate change is secondary to China’s immediate strategic interests. Yet it hopes the U.S. is woolly-headed enough to trade away its security priorities for unenforceable climate promises.

That mirrors the way China has been treating American businesses for 40 years, holding out promises of access to the enormous Chinese market and getting them to, very nearly literally, trade the store. My contention has long been that their leaders are smarter and tougher than ours and that our political leadership has practically no notion of how to negotiate with the Chinese leadership. Their assumptions, based in a career in American politics, are invariably wrong.

It’s always nice to be recognized and in his latest Washington Post column Henry Olsen identifies the Illinois legislative leadership as the heavyweight champions of gerrymandering:

The new map is so brazen that progressive elections analyst Drew Savicki found it would create up to 85 districts expected to be Democratic in the 118-seat state House, even though only 69 Democrats would be elected in a map that fairly reflected the proportional strength of each party. So while Democrats would naturally win a majority because they dominate the state, the Democratic plan would net them nearly 80 percent of the seats from less than 60 percent of the votes.

It’s true that Republicans also pass egregious gerrymanders that use all the same techniques. I focus on the Illinois Democratic plan because it is the first plan to be finished after data from the 2020 Census was fully released in August, and because it demonstrates that no party has a lock on political virtue.

I’m still searching for a definition of “democracy” that would encompass this sort of sleight-of-hand while distinguishing democracy from oligarchy.

There is one thing missing from Mr. Olsen’s account. Gerrymandering is a strategy by which those who have the power to do so help themselves and their allies and injure their political opponents regardless of to which party or race those opponents belong.