On my regular morning walk with Kara this morning I ran into a neighbor walking his two Great Pyrenees who I happened to know was a dentist. I had received an email from my dentist a few days ago advising me that they were seeing patients again so I asked him if he were back at work and how he was finding it. In short it’s difficult. Observing the proper precautions is expensive, he can’t treat as many patients, and everything is more expensive.

Where’s that deflation that some economists were predicting? I certainly haven’t seen it. Food and other consumables are more expensive. Gas prices are holding steady as is insurance. I expect the prices for medical care to rise sharply.

In my stores at least toilet paper and paper towels remain in short supply with off brands continuing to be sold rather than the brands we’re accustomed to seeing and buying. That’s after three months. Does anyone take the panic-buying, profiteering, or consumer/commercial arguments that were brought forward when the shortages first materialized seriously any more?

I think that supply chain problems remain the only credible explanation left. Wood pulp for TP is imported from Brazil, something of a scandal in itself. Additives are imported from God knows where, presumably China.

The same may be true for bleach although it’s possible I’m looking in the wrong place for it. I hear it’s been moved to the beverage section. No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the people.

I think that Jason L. Riley’s Wall Street Journal column has it about right:

So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies while making up only 13% of the population, and so long as almost all of their victims are their neighbors, these communities will draw the lion’s share of police attention. Defunding the police, or making it easier to prosecute officers, will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that most need protecting.

There’s nothing wrong with having a debate about better policing strategies, how to root out bad cops, the role of police unions and so forth. But that conversation needs perspective and context, and the press rarely provides it. People are protesting because the public has been led to believe that racist cops are gunning for blacks, yet the available evidence shows that police use of deadly force has plunged in recent decades, including in big cities with large populations of low-income minorities. In the early 1970s, New York City police officers shot more than 300 people a year. By 2019 that number had fallen to 34.

Part of the confusion stems from attempts to equate any racial disparities with racism, which is as mistaken as equating age and gender disparities with systemic discrimination. Young people are incarcerated at higher rates than older people, and men draw more police attention than women. Is something fishy going on here, or do such outcomes simply reflect the fact that young men are behind most violent crimes? When journalists break down police behavior by race but don’t do the same for criminal behavior, you’re not getting the whole story.

Advocates of “defunding the police” are quick to point to success stories but less eager to note that after the police were defunded in Baltimore five years ago black homicides shot up. In Chicago murders of black people are inversely correlated with the number of black people shot and killed by police, not that I’m advocating it.

But you would almost think that black genocide were the objective of those imagining a U. S. with more social workers and fewer police officers. I guess you can’t make an omelet with breaking black eggs.

If the description of the Justice in Policing Act provided by the editors of the Washington Post and in the section-by-section summary here actually are fair summaries of the bill’s provisions, it sounds pretty good to me. From the editorial linked above:

Holding life-and-death powers over American citizens is a high trust; it is not anti-cop to demand high levels of responsibility and accountability. In fact, it is in the interest of the thousands of police officers who do their difficult jobs with integrity and honor.

The devil, of course, will be in the details. If you have ever been directly involved in the oversight of grants (I have), you will recognize how frequently they are a license to steal. I also think that, if you’re going to expose police officers to more legal jeopardy, you need to shield state and local governments when police officers act contrary to state or local laws or regulations. I’m fine with personal accountability. I’m less fine with my own personal accountability for things over which I have no control.

I missed this when it actually took place last week. The State of Illinois has secured a reprieve from its fiscal crisis. From Truth in Accounting:

On April 9, amidst plunging economic conditions, the Federal Reserve announced a set of lending policy initiatives that included a new “Municipal Liquidity Facility” for state and local governments. For legal authority, the Fed cited the emergency lending provisions in section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act.

Normally, a central bank lends to banks, but emergency provisions have historically been used by the Fed to justify direct lending to “individuals, partnerships and corporations” in “unusual and exigent circumstances.” Section 13(3) is titled “Discounts for individuals, partnerships, and corporations,” raising questions whether the Municipal Liquidity Facility is actually authorized under Section 13(3).

The new facility is unprecedented. It is available to cities and counties meeting population requirements, and all 50 states. Smaller cities and counties may be supported by state borrowing through the facility. The lending facility is operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The facility may lend as much as $500 billion.

The State of Illinois became the first entity to use the facility, under a transaction that closed last Friday.

The balance of the post considers whether a) the Fed has exceeded its authority in extending a loan to Illinois (it has) and b) whether the Fed is being reckless in extending credit to Illinois (it is).

Note that securing a short term loan from the Federal Reserve doesn’t change the fiscal, political, or behavioral basis of Illinois’s problems. It is almost literally just kicking the can down the road.

Oh, well. The caliph may die, the donkey may die, or I may die.

In a piece at Bloomberg dripping with nostalgia but which fails to take the actual New York City of today into account, Brian Chappatta and Elaine He confidently declaim that the rest of the country needs New York City too much for it to decline:

The most difficult question confronting the nation’s elected leaders is how to balance the health and safety of the citizenry on one hand and preventing unnecessary damage to the world’s largest economy on the other. The New York City metropolitan area looms large in that calculation. Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis put in stark relief just how much New York powered the U.S. economy during its longest expansion in history and provide a crucial starting point to understanding how a lasting bite to the Big Apple could hinder hopes for a swift nationwide recovery.

What they fail to grasp is the dominance to which they point (financial sector, consumer spending) has never been connected so tenuously not just to the rest of the country but to New York City itself as it is today. Let’s consider just one factor: income inequality. Income inequality In New York City is the fifth highest in the U. S. Higher than Chicago. Higher than Washington, DC. And when you consider the metro area (rather than the city itself) the situation is even worse. That is lopsidedly due to the financial sector and the financial sector has never been more portable than it is now. It doesn’t need the infrastructure. It doesn’t need the people. It doesn’t need the city.

What that means is that those big spenders can pick up and leave New York City behind and all of that spending will go with them, leaving a lot of much poorer people behind.

Dig deeper into New York and you find that the other sectors on which New York’s economy depends, e.g. the apparel industry, have taken an enormous hit from the lockdown. It’s far too early to predict how much or whether the sectors will recover.

There were two more predictions I neglected to work into my earlier post this morning.

First, although initially they may support the demonstrators after a moment’s consideration and a bit of throat-clearing, the public employees’ unions and by “public employees’ unions” I mean the firefighters, teachers, and the SEIU will all rally to the support of the police officers. I don’t know how they’ll rationalize it but rationalize it they will. Defunding the police is an existential threat to all public employees’ unions. The only factor that might stand in the way of that leads to my second prediction.

In a contest between political affiliation and cognitive dissonance affiliation will win every time. It doesn’t make any difference that the system the demonstrators are unhappy about was put into place and supported, in some cases acerbically, by the very politicians they’re going to vote for in November. Vote for them they will.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Texas Congressman Will Hurd makes some suggestions about what Congress can do to reduce police abuse:

While marching in solidarity with George Floyd’s family and 60,000 others in Houston, I saw that you can be outraged by a black man getting murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement is enabling our First Amendment rights, and angry that criminals are treading on American values by looting, rioting and killing police.

His suggestions are:

• Ensure that federal law-enforcement grants go only to departments following best policing practices.
• Empower police chiefs to fire bad officers and keep them off the force permanently.
• Clarify federal law to ensure officers can be held accountable in court for violating civil rights.

While I agree that there is a problem I don’t think is a silver bullet for solving it. Certainly not the “defund the police” mantra being promulgated by BLM. It will need to be remedied jurisdiction by jurisdiction, police force by police force, maybe even police officer by police officer.

We had best hope that the issues about which people are protesting are not systemic. If they are I have no confidence that they are amenable to change.

In her most recent Washington Post column Megan McArdle expresses optimism about the future of American cities:

Hell is other people, wrote Sartre, and especially on the crosstown bus. They’re hellacious indeed with a deadly virus running around. Such inconveniences drove the middle class out in mid-century, hastened by rising crime and, yes, the riots. Why shouldn’t we expect to see a second exodus now, when software is making it easier than ever to work where you please?

In the short run, perhaps we will; San Francisco rents dropped nearly 10 percent in May, after tech giants announced that they’d be making their work-from-home arrangements permanent. But of course, falling prices make cities more attractive despite declining amenities; that’s why people stayed in Detroit even when the jobs left.

Nor are the problems of the cities quite as dire as they were in the 1960s. Zoom simply isn’t as revolutionary as the automobile. The car was better than the buggy on almost every dimension. But Zoom strips out vital social cues and skips the casual conversations at the office coffee pot that can spark new ideas or solutions to old problems. It might ultimately augment smaller offices; it is unlikely to substitute for them entirely.

Nonetheless, some will no doubt pick up and leave for the immediate future. But eventually the viral threat will most likely fade, either because we all got a vaccine or because we all got covid-19. Would-be rusticators will remember that you still cannot easily drink a cocktail, find a mate, groom a sales prospect or eat a meal over Zoom. And then cities will grow again, as they have over the millennia, despite even more daunting threats than covid-19 or abusive cops: because what’s there isn’t anywhere else except, maybe, in another city.

That suggests that I make some predictions about the aftermath of this annus horribilis:

• Cities whose populations have been declining like Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit will see the declines accelerate.
• Cities whose populations have increased due to greater numbers of immigrants like New York and Los Angeles will see declines.
• The operating costs of cities will increase sharply while revenues decrease.
• 2020 has been what the insurance biz calls a “capital event”. Some insurances companies will not survive and will be acquired by other, larger companies.
• The stockholders of large publicly-held companies will not be eager to invest in declining cities. That includes grocery chains, drugstore chains, and big box stores, many of which have been looted during the recent upheavals.
• For some who’ve lost their jobs during the lockdowns unemployment will become permanent.
• For some remote work-from-home will become permanent. That will tend to reduce the value of office space, real estate values, and taxes that can be realized from real estate.
• Most sit-down restaurants will not be able to survive with legally mandated social distancing. Or on carry out alone. That will have a run-on effect on property taxes.

Said another way COVID-19, government fecklessness, mass demonstrations, looting, and uncertainty will accelerate pre-existing conditions.

Over the last half century archaeologists have learned an enormous amount about the Maya civilization. They preserved their history with a writing system that has only recently been recognized as a writing system and deciphered. They had sophisticated mathematics and astronomy as well as complex systems of trade and law.

By and large their cities were not destroyed by war or famine or environmental change. The people just walked away leaving empty cities. They just walked away.