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Recent EconLog Posts and Old EconTalk Podcasts

It’s been said there is nothing new under the sun. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but still, much of what’s discussed today can be seen in past discussions as well. Recently, a memory fired off in my brain reminding me of an EconTalk podcast from 2008 that touched on two themes I’ve posted about over the last month. The guest of that episode was Mike Munger (because of course it was Mike Munger), and the subject was the bus system in Santiago, Chile. In the episode, Munger and Russ Roberts discuss how Santiago used to have a bus system that was purely privately run and operated. And, as Munger points out early on, the bussing system operated profitably, making an industry wide profit of about $60 million per year. As Munger described it: There were no public subsidies of any kind. Thousands of people, every day, went from where they were to where they wanted to go, and nobody had to pay except the person who was taking the trip. Then, a new leftist government outlawed private bussing and implemented a government-run bussing system. And as a result of this reform, total travelers using busses for transit decreased, average transit times tripled from forty minutes to two hours, and the new system operated at a loss of $600 million per year. You read that right – it was annually losing ten times as much money as the previous system was making while taking three times as long to transport fewer people.  The whole episode is worth listening to, but there are some themes that come up in the discussion that are also reflected in some of my recent posts. For example, while unpacking some of Alexander Field’s work in this post, I talked about how one of the reasons wartime planners often made such inefficient and wasteful choices was because they lacked any kind of feedback mechanism for the decisions they made. Munger identifies the same problem with the publicly run transit system as well.  At one point, Russ brings up the idea of comparing the routes the old system used to provide with the new system’s routes. Munger explains that the new system “eliminated almost all the routes” used previously, in order to replace the organically grown system with a rationally planned system. Thus, Munger says,  They didn’t use that information. There was a lot of information in the previous system. So your first thought, Russ, because you’ve read Hayek and you know about markets, was to say “Let’s look at a map of the old system.” That was not their first thought. They said, “What should the map look like?” And they drew it from a planning perspective, rather than from a perspective of serving the demand of commuters.  And using the planning perspective cut them off from two of the great things markets can provide: Markets provide two things. One is information about demand and cost and the other is the incentive to do things in a particular way rather than in some other way. So, we take those two things out. Now, we don’t have any information about where people want to go, or when. And it’s hard for planners to say, “Let’s have a route here.” Well, why? Why there and not somewhere else? “Let’s have a route at this time.” How would you know? Without competition to winnow out which of these is better, there’s no way you could know. Additional themes touched on in this podcast came up in my recent discussions about Nathaniel Robinson’s rather odd takes on the education system. For example, Robinson assured his readers that as a good leftist, he sees profit as a “dirty word.” And Munger points out this mindset was present among the new government implementing the reforms. While the idea of a bus system operating profitably might seem like a good thing to some, to the leftist government, Munger says, “the very fact that anyone was making profits on this meant that the system was inherently flawed.”  Robinson’s arguments also reflect a similar flaw in judgment motivating these reforms. To see that, let’s briefly reconsider a worry Robinson expresses about private schools subsidized by vouchers. He says, “if we have a school district comprised in total of three for-profit elementary schools, and all of them simply pocket most of the voucher money while failing to educate the children, then no matter what ‘choices’ among schools parents make, they won’t be able to improve the quality of the schools. One might expect new operators to enter the market, but if the only way to make any real money on the children is to neglect them, then new operators won’t be any better than the old ones.” One wonders why Robinson doesn’t generalize this concern to public schools. After all, what if instead of having a choice of three elementary schools, you’re simply assigned one based on your zip code. And if the administrators of that school district “simply pocket most of the [tax] money while failing to educate the children,” then there won’t even be an option for most parents to take their kids to a better school, nor will there be any opportunity for a new operator to “enter the market” and try to provide a better option. This possibility seems even worse than what Robinson describes. So why doesn’t he consider it?  It’s because Robinson, like the reformers of the Santiago bus system, seem to think that if you just take something away from the market, and take away profits, then there will be what Munger calls “a sort of human transubstantiation. They’ll be different, and they’ll just work for public service.”  Robinson doesn’t seriously consider the alternative scenario I described above because in his mind, people would only ever behave in such a way as private citizens seeking to make a profit. But if teachers and administrators are public employees operating in an unprofitable enterprise, then they will just do what he sees as the right thing, because as when acting as agents of the state they will just “see children as an ends.” Pocketing money for personal gain at the expense of others is just something government employees would never do – the only people who would do such a thing are people who are making profits! And since government agencies are unburdened by the need to be profitable to operate, Robinson sees no reason to consider the possibility I described – he can rule it out a priori.    Munger points out the flaw in this thinking with an example of how bus drivers’ behavior changed when buses no longer operated in the market. In the previous system, bus drivers who wanted to make as much money as possible did so by transporting as many people as they could from where they were to where they wanted to go. The more people I help, the more money I make. The new system changed the incentive – drivers weren’t paid according to how many passengers they transported. They were paid according to how closely the stuck to their schedule. As a result, a bus driver with a nearly empty bus could be coming up on a bus stop with fifty people waiting, but if he was three minutes behind schedule, he’d simply drive past the stop without picking anyone up. Leaving those people behind at the bus stop wouldn’t cost him anything, since he wasn’t paid by the traveler anyway. Picking them up would actually cost him money because the time letting people on the bus would push him even further behind schedule. So why would he stop?  Munger brings this all together by pointing out what happens to people’s thinking when they fail to understand the role markets play in generating information and incentivizing responses to that information, and who fail to understand that human nature isn’t changed by government diktat. In the absence of these insights, when people see a public system that seems to be failing in every conceivable way, they only solutions they can think of is to spend even more money on it, or to pass some kind of reform. Is the local public school doing a poor job? Don’t respond by giving people the ability to seek alternative options – just solve the problem by using reforms to improve the quality of all the public schools! And you end up in a situation where public programs become ever more costly each year, with new bundles of reforms and regulations being thrown at them every so often, without the fundamental problems ever really being fixed, or outcomes ever getting any better.  Which, unfortunately, sounds like a pretty accurate description of how the political process actually works.    (0 COMMENTS)

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Gravity and wage stickiness

Imagine you have a team designing a new bridge.  One guy suggests that cost could be reduced if you used less steel.  Of course that might make the bridge more susceptible to collapse, so he also suggests reducing the force of gravity in the area of the bridge.  Obviously, the idea would be viewed as highly impractical.This is roughly how I feel about proposals to end wage stickiness.  There are a few types of wage stickiness that could be addressed by economic reforms—notably the minimum wage laws.  But the vast bulk of wage stickiness is an inevitable part of a free market economy, not subject to public policy. David Beckworth has an excellent podcast with Jonathon Hazell, which discusses important new research on the topic.  Some economists had argued that wage stickiness was actually not much of a problem, as the wages or new hires was quite flexible, and it was new hires that mattered for decisions to change output at the margin. Research by Hazell and his co-author Bledi Taska found that even the wages of new hires are quite sticky, at least in the downward direction: In the end, the finding is very simple, which is that, surprisingly, wages for new hires are, in fact, quite downwardly rigid, though flexible upwards. . . . I think, probably, it’s to do with internal equity, as originally conceived of in this very famous book by this Yale professor, Truman Bewley, which is called, Why Don’t Wages Fall During Recessions? It’s an amazing book. Bewley imagines the following, that, I think, probably applies to my analysis. He says, “Look, the first logic, the simple logic, that you might have, is that wages for new hires would fall during recessions,” exactly because of the LSE professor example. I become a new professor, I’m willing to accept a lower wage, because I have no reference point. Then Bewley says, “Not so fast.” What about this idea that he calls internal equity? Internal equity works like the following. I arrive at LSE, and I go around the hallways, and I say, “I just got hired, great job, I’m on $10 an hour.” Then, my colleague, who’s the same rank as me, he’s not a tenured, chaired professor, he’s just another assistant professor who got hired just the year before, he says, “Well, you’re only being paid $10 an hour, I’m being paid $20 an hour, they’ve screwed you.” People occasionally ask me why we need to stabilize nominal GDP growth.  Why not instead try to eliminate wage rigidity, and let the free market determine NGDP? First of all, it’s not clear exactly what the “free market” means in reference to money, which due to network effects is a natural monopoly.  The monopolist that controls the supply of money will always need some sort of policy regarding the value of money, even if by default.  So why not a sensible policy, which avoids aggravating the distortions caused by wage stickiness? As in so many areas of life, the pragmatic solution is often the best solution. (0 COMMENTS)

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Milton Friedman on Government as the Problem

  Both David Boaz and Bryan Caplan recently sent a link to a YouTube audio recording of a talk that Milton Friedman gave in the early 1990s. After his talk came a back and forth between Milton, moderator David Boaz, Hannes Gissurarson, Sally Pipes, and me. Milton was his usual cogent and clear self, surveying the landscape and focusing on ways that government messed things up in area after area. I won’t bother giving play by play but I will highlight a few things with a rough estimate of where they appear in the 1 hour and 19 minute audio. There is an interesting discussion starting at 38:00 about the low quality of programming on TV, with me advising Hannes to get cable and Milton pointing out that the FCC had banned pay TV for years. It reminded me of my first major trip in United States when my friend Clancy Smith and I hitchhiked and took buses from Rockford, IL to Philadelphia and then went on to New York. In the midwest, we saw ads on movie theatre marquee saying “Stop Pay TV.” In New York, as Clancy noted, it was slightly more subtle: “Save Free TV.” Good discussion of medical care at around 47:00. At the 58:00 point, Milton says, “No one believes in majority rule as a general principle.” He makes his case well with his 60/40 example. At the 59:38 point, in a discussion of how you get change that undercuts special interest legislation, David Boaz says, “Mancur Olson’s book The Rise and Decline of Nations made it look like you have to lose a war.” Interesting discussion around the 1:03:00 point about whether Milton is right that changing the personnel in government doesn’t work. David Boaz gives the Alfred Kahn counterexample. One argument Milton uses a couple of times in his talk and in the discussion has less force than it used to: he objects to taxing poor and low-income people to help middle- and higher-income people. Given the way the federal tax system has evolved, poor people pay no income tax and even lower-income people pay little or no income tax. It’s a little different at the state level. Note: The picture in the featured image is from that day. Milton is at the head of the table, Hannes and David Boaz are on the left, with Hannes closest to Milton, and I’m on the right. I assume it was Sally who took the picture. In those days, I don’t think we had timers on cameras and, even if we did, no one had bought a tripod.   (0 COMMENTS)

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Marijuana Legalization and Econ 101

Last year, Minnesota became one of 24 states which have legalized recreational marijuana. Research suggests that neither the horrors that opponents conjure up nor the benefits touted by supporters will, in fact, appear in a range of areas including use of other substances, health and suicides, crime, road safety, or the economy.  But the majority of the consequences of any action are unintended ones. Two papers indicate some changes the Gopher State – and its neighbors – can expect to see, as well as illustrating a pair of key concepts from Econ 101.  Sales of munchies increase. It is said that the consumption of marijuana gives the consumer a desire for ‘munchies.’ Is this true? If so, how strong is this effect? In a 2019 study titled ‘Recreational Marijuana Laws and Junk Food Consumption: Evidence Using Border Analysis and Retail Sales Data’, economists Michele Baggio and Alberto Chong collected monthly sales data from supermarkets, drug stores, and other retailers in more than 2,000 counties across 48 states covering the period from 2006 to 2016. By comparing sales figures from neighboring counties located along state borders—some where marijuana was legal and some where it was not—they were able to estimate the effect of marijuana legalization on junk-food sales.  They found that after recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, the only states for which 18 months of sales data were available, sales of ice cream rose by 3.1%, sales of cookies increased by 4.1%, and sales of crisps jumped by 5.3% in the years after the laws were passed. This is good news for Kwik Trips in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas.    Sales of alcohol fall. If someone chooses to relax with a joint rather than a beer, we might expect sales of alcohol to decline after the legalization of recreational marijuana. Again, is this true and, if so, how strong is this effect?  In a 2018 paper titled ‘Marijuana and Alcohol Evidence Using Border Analysis and Retail Sales Data’, Baggio, Chong, and Sungoh Kwon used “retail scanner data on purchases of alcoholic beverages across US counties for 2006-2015 to study the link between medical marijuana laws (MMLs) and alcohol consumption.” They found that “counties located in MML states reduced monthly alcohol sales by 12.4 percent.” This is bad news for the liquor stores of Minnesota. Complements and substitutes. Together, these two papers illustrate a couple of basic economic concepts. First, marijuana and ice cream, cookies, and potato chips are ‘complementary goods’. As my old undergrad textbook describes them, these are: A pair of goods consumed together. As the price of one goes up, the demand for both goods will fall.  Bread and butter are the classic textbook examples, but Baggio and Chong’s research suggests that we can add marijuana and ice cream to the list.  Second, marijuana and alcohol are what is known as ‘substitute goods’. Again, from my old textbook these are: A pair of goods that are considered by consumers to be alternatives to each other. As the price of one goes up, the demand for the other rises.  Once again, thanks to Baggio, Chong, and Kwon, we can add to the classic examples of butter and margarine marijuana and beer.  This research serves a purpose more serious than simply freshening up the examples in textbooks. This substitution effect accounts, in part, for the muted effect of marijuana legalization on road safety found in the research: high drivers don’t only add to drunk drivers, they replace them as well. Econ 101, much derided, remains an indispensable grounding for sound public policy.     John Phelan is an Economist at Center of the American Experiment. (0 COMMENTS)

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Is blogging effective?

Given how much time I spend writing blog posts, it would be good to know if blogging has any impact on the real world.  A recent article in The Economist suggests that the answer is yes: To wangle £11bn ($14bn) out of the British government, it helps to write a blog post. “Full expensing”, which allows firms immediately to write off their spending on machinery, plant and computer equipment from their taxable profits, was the costliest part of Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement on November 22nd. A long-standing policy in America, the idea of full expensing first wormed its way into British politics in 2017 via blog posts from Sam Dumitriu and Sam Bowman, both then of the Adam Smith Institute, a small think-tank known for its staunch neoliberalism and deranged internet memes about its Scottish namesake. A few years back, I started to see lots of blog posts advocating “YIMBY” policies, which means deregulating the construction of new housing.  More recently, many local and state governments have begun “up-zoning”, which means allowing more housing to be built in any given area: Posting influences oppositions as well as governments. YIMBYism, once a niche idea reserved for a few very-online activists, has taken over the Labour Party. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, insists he is a builder, not a blocker. It is a bold move. In a constituency-based system, the diffuse benefits of building often come second to the concentrated inconvenience of development. Even if his specific plans are unclear, talking-points lifted straight from the posts of YIMBY activists now litter Sir Keir’s speeches . . . YIMBY versus NIMBY is now a key dividing-line at the next election. It is difficult to know exactly how much any given blog post, or even blogging in general, impacts the policy world.  Blog posts often discuss ideas that are also widespread in academia.  Even so, blogging can bring ideas to real world policymakers that lack the time or inclination to read dense academic papers. One example is the idea of using aggressive forward guidance in monetary policy when the economy is stuck at the zero lower bound.  This general idea was discussed in academic papers by people like Paul Krugman, Michael Woodford and Gauti Eggertsson.  But blogging may have made policymakers more aware of the usefulness of this approach. Although blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon, economists have always been willing to use the media to promote their policy views.  Milton Friedman’s influence on policy was partly due to his academic work, but the greatest impact may have come from his skill at clearly explaining economic concepts in outlets such as Newsweek magazine.   (0 COMMENTS)

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What Palestinians Are Thinking (with Dahlia Scheindlin)

[ANNUAL LISTENER SURVEY: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZGY3G9W. Vote for your 2023 favorites! Last day to vote: Feb. 1st.] Pollster and political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin has worked extensively with public opinion polls of both Palestinians and Israelis. Listen as she talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the dreams, fears, anger, and frustration of both sides. Along the way she analyzes […] The post What Palestinians Are Thinking (with Dahlia Scheindlin) appeared first on Econlib.

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A Rainforest of Opportunity

My brother, who is an assistant professor of economics, and I were talking one night.  The conversation went through the usual range of topics for siblings: baseball, hockey, etc.  I had made some off-handed observation about where I live and my brother said something that struck terror into my heart: “You should write that down.  I have some folks that might like to hear it.” So here we are.  An airline pilot who has never written anything more interesting than a technical manual attempting to find two creative brain cells to rub together and express an idea in a field I know nothing about.  Good thing I’m a pilot.  Where we lack expertise, we make up for it in raw, unfounded confidence. I live in Small Town Middle America(™).  You know: the kind of town that has more churches than restaurants and more gun shops than churches.  I married a wonderful woman from here whom I love dearly and, for reasons I’ll never understand, loves me, too.  Her family is locally famous: her grandfather and his brother owned several apple orchards and a successful farmer’s market/general store.  Her grandmother worked for the county archives and is well versed in the history of the place.  I love sitting around what was formerly the storage shed of the orchard listening to my wife, her aunts, uncles, and grandparents tell stories of growing up.   When her grandparents sold the market, they  also sold the orchard so they could live comfortably in retirement.  What once was a peaceful orchard is now a subdivision, filled with McMansions and every street cleverly (at least in the developer’s mind) named after varieties of apples.  Big Box Store moved in and some small businesses shut down.  You know what?  There’s a certain convenience to the big box stores.  You can get your milk, eggs, underwear, picture frames, dancing Santa statues, and fishing rods all in one place now.  Widgets and Whatsits galore.  Then other Big Boxes moved in to try and capture a piece of the pie. The phrase I said that got me into this mess was, “I love watching markets evolve.”  What I meant was this: yes, Big Box has made things more convenient, but it also took away a lot of the individuality of each aspect of the market.  Big Box has what is generously called a bakery, but all the food is prepackaged and realistically, you have very limited choice in variety.  Where did the market for specialty breads go?  Did it die?  Does it only live on in nostalgia?  For years, I was told, there were no real bakeries in town.  But then, slowly, like moss growing after a volcanic eruption, they started to show up again.  People still demanded that experience and those products.  Eventually, someone was willing to cater to that niche.   Today in town, we have bakeries full of delicious things, outdoor shops that offer specialty gear and expert advice, craft breweries specializing in the mundane but also the weird, wild, and wonderful (two weeks ago I had frankincense beer; it smelled like a funeral but tasted delicious!).  Do they pull in the kind of business that the Big Boxes do?  Not by a long shot.  They don’t need to; they fill the wants of people. To me, it’s kind of like the rainforest.  You have the big trees that soak up lots of sun, but there’s still enough room for everyone else in the ecosystem.  The demand didn’t disappear.  Suppliers just evolved to face a new reality.  I can’t help but think that Charles Darwin and Adam Smith are both somewhere shedding a tear of happiness.     Dennis Murphy is a professional airline pilot with a background in aviation safety, accident investigation, and causality. When he’s not flying 737s, he enjoys the company of his wife, their dogs, cats, and bees. (1 COMMENTS)

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Many of Us at Some Point Did Something

The popularity of Donald Trump among Republican voters tells something about their naivety before a presidential candidate who wants the president to enjoy “total immunity” against criminal prosecution. How can we explain that what was the party of law and order closes ranks behind a guy facing 91 criminal charges in four different trials, even admitting that some of the charges are questionable? Perhaps a reflection by 54-year-old Jocelyn Kanan, a New Hampshire fan of Trump who works for an industrial building company, points to one of the factors at play (quoted from “Trump’s Legal Woes Splinter GOP Unity,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2024): “All of us at some point we did something. Nobody is an angel,” Kanan said. In the United States 8% of adults have a felony conviction, that is, are felons for life (except for expungements, which depend on state laws and have many exceptions). This 8% is composed of 23% in the black population and 6% among the non-blacks. More than 1 American adult on 12 you meet in the street is a convicted felon. Moreover, one-half of black males have been arrested at least once before they reached adulthood, and 39% of white males too. (Sarah K. Shannon et al., “The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948-2010,” Demography, vol. 54 [2017]. The data quoted above are for 2010.) Not “all of us” but very many “at some point we did something” very bad according to some law. This is due to the criminalization of so many actions by so many laws. Some of those who “did something” are husbands or sons but also wives or daughters of other people, which adds up to lots of individuals. Many ordinary individuals have been continuously bullied by the powers in place. Who would be surprised that so many people are furious with the system? Significantly, Mr. Trump does not advocate against the criminalization of minor youth errors and trifles of ordinary people; he wants “total immunity” for himself. (0 COMMENTS)

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My Weekly Reading, January 28, 2024

Princeton’s Matthew Desmond Gets Everything Wrong About Poverty’s Root Causes Aaron Brown, Reason, January 23, 2024 Excerpt: Desmond gets more specific about what doesn’t cause poverty. He dismisses cultural explanations, such as single-parent households and declining marriage rates. He quickly dismisses the idea that the welfare state traps people in cycles of dependency, claiming that these arguments rely on anecdotal evidence, even though there’s a vast systematic literature on the subject. Desmond doesn’t take up political scientist Charles Murray’s basic challenge to explain why it is that between 1949 and 1964 the American poverty rate dropped by 22 percentage points before the government did practically anything to help. After President Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, the decline leveled considerably. Desmond approaches his firsthand investigations with the preconception that poverty is a byproduct of capitalist exploitation. Prices aren’t set in a competitive marketplace, in his view; they’re just a projection of greed. It’s “tempting,” he writes, “to blame rising housing costs on anything other than the fact that more than a few of us have a god-awful amount of money and are driving prices higher and higher through bidding wars.” A chapter on the real estate market titled “How We Force the Poor to Pay More” argues that it’s twice as profitable to be a landlord in the inner city. Desmond doesn’t bother explaining why even more unscrupulous people don’t tap into this lucrative business opportunity.   The Truth About Tariffs by Phillip W. Magness, Law & Liberty, January 24, 2024 In his rendering, Marshall comes across as something of a skeptic of comparative advantage who allegedly “chastised the Ricardians” for their theories about trade. To argue his point he excerpts a passage wherein Marshall allegedly condemned comparative advantage for having “laid down laws with regard to profits and wages that did not really hold even for England in their own time.” Turning to Marshall’s original text, we quickly discover that Cass has either misread or misrepresented the economist’s words. The passage in full reads: And though this did little harm so long as they were treating of money and foreign trade, it led them astray as to the relations between the different industrial classes. It caused them to speak of labour as a commodity without staying to throw themselves into the point of view of the workman; and without dwelling upon the allowances to be made for his human passions, his instincts and habits, his sympathies and antipathies, his class jealousies and class adhesiveness, his want of knowledge and of the opportunities for free and vigorous action. They therefore attributed to the forces of supply and demand a much more mechanical and regular action than is to be found in real life: and they laid down laws with regard to profits and wages that did not really hold even for England in their own time.(emphasis added) We accordingly find that Marshall’s grievance is not with Ricardian comparative advantage, but rather Ricardo’s other writings on the economics of labor and the conditions of the working classes in early nineteenth century England. Indeed, when Marshall penned a more detailed work on trade economics in 1919, it offered a conventional Ricardian account of comparative advantage.   Thomas Piketty’s Motte and Bailey by Vincent Geloso, City Journal, January 18, 2024 Excerpt: Whenever Piketty and his collaborators are confronted with these criticisms, they retreat to a motte position, arguing that there is such a thing as too much inequality and that inequality is higher now than in the 1970s. Both statements are defensible; they are also uncontroversial. Feds Will Try Backpage Co-Founder Michael Lacey for a Third Time by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, January 24, 2024 Excerpt: The first trial, back in 2021, was declared a mistrial after prosecutors and their witnesses couldn’t stop suggesting that Lacey and his co-defendants were charged with child sex trafficking. They were not, and efforts to suggest as much could have seriously prejudiced a jury.   Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 by David J. Bier, Cato at Liberty, January 24, 2024 No, the data are equally clear: recent immigration trends are benefiting Republicans in states where they control the legislature and manage redistricting. About 62 percent of the three‐​million increase in the total immigrant population from March 2019 to March 2023 has occurred in GOP states, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.   Unions: Facts and Fluff by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, January 25, 2024 Remember that during this “banner year for labor actions and unions,” the share of US workers who actually belong to a union was shrinking–and has been shrinking for decades, including last year and in fact during the entire presidency. It’s true that in general, public attitudes seem more supportive of unions. But some of the union successes in the last few years, like the first success in unionizing an Amazon warehouse (on Staten Island), have since become mired in controversy and seem in danger of failing. But [Suresh] Naidu also points to an even more fundamental issue that US unions face: they need to organize one company at a time. In a dynamic US economy, where some companies are always shrinking or going out of business, this means that unions are running on a treadmill: they need to keep organizing new unionized companies just to offset the typical year-to-year loss of previously organized companies.     https://feedly.com/i/entry/yz8OnKgEHTt6OIkH/U1FnhKMojac9MbQokcC+g8YWxU=_18d43cf6a8a:2cb99b:33ffab25 (0 COMMENTS)

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