NBC 5 Chicago reports that Chicago lost population last year:

New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week showed Chicago losing approximately 8,200 residents in the span of a calendar year, which could not only drop the Windy City behind Houston in terms of America’s largest cities, but could also have big consequences in a variety of other ways.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Chicago lost approximately 0.3% of its population between July 1, 2022 and July 1, 2023. The city’s population is still the third-highest in the U.S., but Houston is rapidly gaining, growing by 0.5% to 2,314,157.

According to an analysis by the Illinois Policy Institute, Chicago could be overtaken by Houston by the year 2035 as America’s third-largest city.

A shrinking population (and fewer kids in school) will not persuade the CTU to reduce its demands. That’s one of Chicago’s biggest problems today. A population of 2.75 million is struggling to honor the commitments made by a population of 3.5 million.

In a piece at The Hill Jessica Carpenter expresses conviction that young people want dialogue about Israel and Palestine:

We’re seeing a vocal minority on campus take control of the conversation — or lack thereof — around Israel and Palestine. These voices are being aided by “outside agitators” taking advantage of student anger. While universities grapple with how to navigate these protests, they’re missing the fact that students want spaces to talk and be heard.

In fact, these students are the majority. Understanding this will help us navigate this conversation, and other contentious issues, going forward and pave a better path for finding solutions.

I wonder if dialogue is even possible. For dialogue to take place you need a common language and a common basis of understanding. I don’t believe either of those exist. What we have today are little cliques of people, many formed online, who develop their own meanings for words that used to have common meanings and everyone has their own facts. I was shocked today when I did a search for something and received a torrent of propaganda, things I knew not to be true.

To the best of my knowledge the first mention of “Palestine” was by Herodotus in his Histories roughly 450 BC, an area between Egypt and Phoenicia. He makes no mention of either Jews or Arabs there but does write of Syrians. He mentions Arabs as inhabiting the Arab Peninsula and Bedouins in the Sinai. The archaeological and genetic evidence seems to suggest that the Maronites of Lebanon are most closely related to the early inhabitants of Palestine.

The Israelites had a clear presence in Judea (which is what the Romans called it) from about Herodotus’s time and maintained a continuous presence right down to the present day. Today’s Jewish population of Israel has three main components: Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa), Sephardic (Jews from Southern Europe, mostly the Iberian Peninsula), and Ashkenazi (Jews from Central and Eastern Europe). Arabs first show up in numbers in Palestine about the time of the Arab expansion.

In other words it is not true of either the Jews or Arabs that “they have always lived there”. Neither the Old Testament nor the Qur’an says that.

When you can’t agree on that even, possibly, rejecting discussion of it, how can dialogue be possible?

Now that the Congress has passed a supplementary aid package for Ukraine and its significance as a political football has diminished, Ukraine isn’t nearly as much in the news. I have no idea what’s actually going on there. Some sources tell me that Russia’s offensive is on the verge of collapse. Other sources tell me that Ukraine’s defense is on the verge of collapse. One source will say that the Ukrainians have halted Russia’s advance on Kharkiv. Another source tells me that Russia has already accomplished its objective in Kharkiv.

It does seem to be the case that Ukrainian drone attacks are wreaking havoc on Russian facilities in Crimea and nearby Krasnodar.

I found this analysis by Benjamin Jensen and Elizabeth Hoffman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies somewhat depressing, calling as it does for Ukraine’s maximalist objectives which I believe to be out of reach. Even more depressing has been Robin Brooks’s analysis of how our European allies are keeping Russia’s war effort humming, redirecting what were formerly exports to Russia to Kyrgyzstan where they are, predictably, shipped to Russia. Looks like they’re working both sides of the street to me.

Meanwhile, Ruy Teixeira sees President Biden’s bad polling numbers and interprets them quite differently. Rather than focusing on independent voters he advises President Biden that without working class voters his re-election is doomed and that to woo back the working class the president needs to stop emphasizing character, biography, or background in favor of this strategy from Blueprint:

Blueprint’s latest survey, conducted in partnership with The Liberal Patriot, showed that many of the policies that are most popular with voters can be used to make the case that Biden is the candidate for average Americans while Trump is the candidate who advocates for the interests of the very rich. Among the 40 policies we tested, the most popular ones are those that crack down on corporations, lower the prices of health care and other things, and protect Medicare and Social Security.

Just as the most effective tax and economic policy messages in the poll centered on those topics, none of these stances are particularly sexy or novel; instead, they are positions that are easy to imagine any Democrat supporting over the last decade. Trump has many qualities and vulnerabilities that make him distinct from run-of-the-mill Republicans of the past and present, which are tempting to focus on in paid and earned media. But our polling shows that ahead of November, Biden would be wise to highlight boring-but-popular policy distinctions that he supports in order to drive home the overall contrast between himself and Trump on tax policy and economic fairness.

Will President Biden and his campaign heed that advice? I’m skeptical. I think that for the next six months we’ll see a flood of negative advertising, emphasizing how terrible Trump is.

I have encountered quite a number of posts, editorials, etc. fretting, lamenting, or chortling (depending on viewpoint) over President Biden’s approval rating. There are claims that his campaign team are panicking over it. Personally, the approval rating doesn’t particularly concern me—as some, particularly the president’s supporters, take care to point out, the election is more than six months away. What I think should concern them is the trend or lack thereof. The president approval rating despite some noise has been remarkably stable for well over six months with a floor of about 40% approving and 55% disapproving. Whether that can actually be changed is an open question. However, plenty of people are offering advice.

For example, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove offers advice to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. For President Biden:

Mr. Biden can turn things around only if he figures out how to take down Mr. Trump with undecided voters, especially those who don’t like either candidate—and soon. The president is running out of time to convince these voters that Donald Trump is worse than he is. Other incumbents were successfully attacking their challengers long before this point in their re-election race.

Biden strategists also have to get it through their heads that swing voters aren’t left-wing Democrats. They don’t want a “transformational” Democratic president but the reassuring, transitional figure they believed they were backing in 2020.

Mr. Biden does, however, have a financial advantage that he’s using to build an aggressive get-out-the vote effort. While this won’t give him 8 or 10 more points, it could boost him enough to win some states that are close today.

He needs it. If you consider the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, the Clinton campaign outspent the Trump campaign nearly 2:1 and lost while the Biden campaign outspent the Trump campaign by a little less than 2:1 and won. The constant is that Democratic campaigns cost more. Why that might be is material for another post.

Here’s his advice for President Trump:

To stay ahead he too needs a message correction. Mr. Trump should spend much less time talking about his legal troubles and more offering a compelling second-term vision. As he entered the courtroom Tuesday, he devoted a minute and a half to issues voters care about, such as electric vehicles and tariffs on China, but spent seven minutes complaining about his courtroom treatment. By failing to realize this election is about America’s future and not his present, Mr. Trump is providing Mr. Biden an opening. We’ll see if the president takes advantage of it.

I also wanted to pass along this piece by Tim Martin at Breaking Defense:

BELFAST — German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius used a Thursday speech in Washington to call for both Berlin and Washington to hit 3 percent GDP spending on defense, while also stating his support for reintroducing conscription to the German armed forces.

Both statements may raise hackles back in Berlin, as Germany continues to debate how it should rearm itself following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“I’m convinced that Germany needs some kind of military conscription,” Pistorius told a crowd at the American-German Institute. “We need to ensure our military staying power in a state of national or collective defense.” (He did not specify what that would look like, but elsewhere emphasized “some kind” of conscription is needed.)

I must admit my skepticism that Germany will do anything of the sort. Getting Germany to spend 2% of GDP on defense has been a heavy lift. I also wish that there were some attempt to estimate the requirements for achieving force readiness. As I’ve said before, it might be 2% of GDP; it might be 10% of GDP. They’ve enjoyed a long period of underinvestment.

As for the United States, mission accomplished. Some estimates place U. S. military spending at 3.4% of GDP.

I wanted to pass this post by David Weaver at RealClearMarkets along. It actually makes two very interesting points:

1. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just updated its classification of job titles for the first time in 50 years (!)
2. There aren’t many jobs with low educational requirements that aren’t physically demanding

While many jobs are “easy” along one dimension, it is much less common for jobs to be easy along two or more dimensions. This has major implications for policy debates about the retirement and disability programs in the U.S., as well as efforts to prepare younger Americans for the workforce.

Physically demanding jobs often require standing for much of the workday and higher skill jobs often require some minimum level of education. Figure 1 displays the relationship of these two measures using the new BLS data for the 22 major group civilian occupations in the U.S. The figure illustrates the inherent physicality-skill tradeoff that typically characterizes U.S. jobs. Jobs with low physical demands tend to have higher skill requirements.

For example, virtually all workers in a legal profession have minimum education requirements, but are required to stand, on average, for only about 15 percent of the day. At the other extreme, workers in food preparation and serving jobs are required, on average, to stand for 97 percent of the workday, but generally do not have to meet minimum education requirements.

In a slight digression a couple of years back I spent several weeks in Italy during a heatwave performing what was, indeed, a physically demanding job. I was pushing a cart up and down the aisles of a warehouse mapping the locations of shelves and bins. It also required substantial education and skill. Consequently, it was that rara avis a job that was difficult in both dimensions. I suspect that the people I was working with would have been horrified if they had known how old I am—I look a lot younger than I actually am.

I’ve expressed my views before. I see no earthly way that physically demanding jobs with few educational or skill requirements will ever pay a living wage without reducing the number of workers who fit that bill so that ordinary supply and demand pushes their wages up. Furthermore, I think that boosting the wages of such workers by providing some sort of stipend is bad policy—it’s providing a subsidy for companies to pay low wages.

Stories like this are becoming a daily or even multiple times daily occurrence. From ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — A series of armed robberies happened to at least four businesses around the city from Monday into Tuesday night.

On Monday night, around 9:44 p.m. in the 100-block of Halsted Street a man entered a business with a steel hammer and threatened to batter the employee.

The offender then took some items off a shelf and fled the business southbound on Halsted Street

About 15 minutes later in the 4500-block of Kedzie Ave two men entered the business with handguns and demanded cash.

The offenders were seen getting into a light colored sedan with the items they stole and fled the business in unknown direction.

These all took place on the Northwest Side of Chicago. It is not known whether they are related. In some cases as many as 20 robberies have taken place in a single evening, all perpetrated by a single armed crew.

At RealClearInvestigations James Varney remarks on the discrepancies among the FBI crime data, city/local crime data, the reports of declining crime rates, and the popular percept of increasing crime:

From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had an average of 16,641 homicides a year. In 2021 and 2022, however, the country saw considerably more bloodshed, with an average of more than 22,000 annual homicides. Even if the 2023 number drops slightly, it will still represent a large increase over the recent past, before the pandemic and racial upheaval set in motion in 2020.

Many criminologists say this illustrates one of the problems with the official numbers that are at the center of public debate: They give a distorted impression of true levels of crime. They note that crime stats have become notoriously incomplete in recent years. In some years many big cities did not report their numbers to the FBI, and there are such wide discrepancies in these tallies that the picture they provide has more blur than clarity.

Declining arrest rates and slowing police response times to 911 calls also help explain why polls show Americans believe crime is rising. The experts say the numbers only give some sense of lawbreaking, while most Americans – the vast majority of whom are not crime victims in a given year – are influenced by their largely media-driven perception of whether society feels orderly.

It’s not just “response times to 911 calls”. As I have mentioned here at least in Chicago a very high percentage of 911 calls that require a police response never get a police response. That means those calls will never appear in the police statistics or in the FBI’s data which depend on those statistics. Shorter: the Chicago crime states are bogus, far below the actual crime stats.

Here are some examples of the discrepancies:

There have also been problems with the data that was submitted, including the news in 2022 of major problems with the St. Louis Police Department data, and more recent revelations that figures for sexual crimes provided by the New Orleans Police Department were wrong.

In Baltimore, the Police Department and various news reports put the total for 2022 homicides between 332 and 336, but the FBI’s dataset puts the number at 272. Baltimore police officials did not reply to RCI’s inquiries about the wide spread in the reported numbers, and if anyone in the city’s police department had brought the matter to the FBI’s attention.

The Baltimore department acknowledges its numbers may not be the same as those it submits to the FBI, but states on its website that “any comparisons are strictly prohibited.”

Similarly, the police departments in Milwaukee and Nashville did not respond to questions about divergences between their stats on robberies and those from the federal bureau. Milwaukee police reported a 7 percent increase in robberies in 2023, but the FBI recorded a 13 percent decline.

A considerable amount of slack is cut in the post for the FBI and the other law enforcement agencies:

Criminologists cite other discrepancies in the official measurements they use to assess the situation. While FBI stats show declines in violent categories, the Department of Justice’s survey reports more people saying they have been victims of such crimes. The Centers for Disease Control figures for homicides, which have long moved in the same direction as the FBI’s, started exceeding the FBI’s in 2020 and the gap has widened since then.

“I wouldn’t say the FBI is cooking the books, but that the data they are putting out is half-baked,” said Sean Kennedy, the executive director of the Coalition for Law, Order and Security, which has pushed back against recent media reports that crime is falling noticeably in the U.S.

“So it’s not a conspiracy but a rush job, and it’s giving people a false picture,” he told RCI. “They infer something is true, and then because it’s politically expedient they don’t bother correcting it.”

I can’t help but speculate everyone is responding to the incentives they have. When the number of police officers decline as illustrated in this graph:

there are bound to be fewer responses. When the higher-ups demand that you do something, the line of least resistance is to change the statistics rather than change your policing practices.

I also wanted to call attention to this, from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It depicts the real per capita income in the United States over time. I wish it included 2023 so we could see if the trend continues.

One more point: I wish that it broke the real per capita income down into income quintiles or deciles. The graph above is bad enough but I suspect it’s worse when you separate the population and income into segments.

So, what’s happening? I doubt it is just inflation.