Stray Thoughts

Domestic affairs: 

* Back to the issue of the definition of "manhood". This is an intense crisis on the right and not so much on the left. This is because there is a definition of manhood out there, albeit a vague one, and most men on the left can come close to it or aspire to get there. Men on the right are distressed and want a new definition of manhood because they can't even realistically hope to live up to the prevailing definitions of it. They are educational and economic failures. They resort to violence or threats of violence. They are sympathetic to rapists because they can't cause women to have sex with them voluntarily without heavy pressure. They aren't emotionally stable. They can't sustain positive relationships with women. They are either not fathers at all, or are divorce absentee fathers who don't even pay the child support that they owe.

* Maybe someday, we will adapt to warm American summer climes with a world where professionals wear shorts and short sleeves without a necktie in the summer, and maybe even stop their days for siestas, while keeping their offices a bit warmer.

* The GOP base doesn't seem to care that Trump is facing two felony prosecutions and is likely to be indicted on felonies in two other cases with pending grand jury investigations in Atlanta and the District of Columbia respectively. Realistically, Biden's announcement that he will run again will keep viable Democrats out of the race for the 2024 Presidential election. So, we seem likely to have another Trump v. Biden race in 2024, unless Republicans change their mind following one or more felony convictions of Trump (which seem likely). If that does happen, the race is likely to be less close as liberal Gen Z replaces older more conservative voters in the electorate and turns out to vote more than younger voters in the past, and as Trump's legal problems sway swing voters to avoid him and discourage more moderate Republican voters from voting at all.

* The U.S. has seen far more population growth in Southern latitudes, both in the Southwest and the Southeast, than other places. Some of this is chasing jobs, but a lot of it seems to be driving by older people retiring somewhere that they no longer have to deal with snow and cold. As summer temperatures in the Southern U.S. relentlessly rise, water shortages strike some places, and warm temperature bugs and beasts move north, will this trend eventually reverse itself? Insurance companies withdrawing from or limiting their exposure to Florida and California seems to presage these trends.

* The trend towards Florida, Texas, and other Southern states doubling down on their backwardness ought to be had for them in the long run. Will that happen? Will it discourage smarter and more sane people from moving there? Will it at least lead to more political polarization? Is this a strategy to keep liberal migrants out in order to prevent old school conservatives from being diluted away to political irrelevance?

* The coal industry is collapsing. This has to bode ill for the economic futures of Wyoming and West Virginia, the two states most dependent upon coal economically. Oil is used predominantly for transportation, which is transitioning steadily towards electric vehicles. Will that make a dent in the economies of states like Alaska and Texas that are stereotypically dependent upon the oil industry?

* Rural America is depopulating. There have been few decades when Americans haven't been migrating from rural areas to cities to make our nation more urban since the founding. Rural school districts have undergone multiple rounds of consolidation. Rural areas have half the per capita income of urban areas, despite subsidies of rural America. Robots and drones threaten to push the trend further by allowing for the greater automation of farming. When automation facilitates farms with more acres per farmer and more acres per farm, that inevitably depopulates farming communities, but also makes the farmers who remain more affluent.

* Eugenics is an almost taboo word in modern political discourse. But on the soft side of eugenics, it would seem better for our society if college educated couples had more kids and if economic struggling people and felons had fewer kids. It seems like the demographic trends at the bottom are trending that way. But educated people are marrying later and are less likely to have kids at all.

* Another paradigm challenging data point is that homelessness is higher, predictably, in places with higher home prices, but unforeseen, in places with low poverty rates:

A study from the real estate website Home Bay suggests what metro Denver and other regions with high home prices really face is an affordable housing crisis, of which homelessness is the most visible sign.

“Since 1985, housing prices have risen four times faster than incomes, even after adjusting for inflation,” said Matt Brannon, a data analyst with Home Bay’s parent company, Clever Real Estate. “The relationship between homelessness and housing affordability needs to be talked about more.”

The U.S. may be the wealthiest nation on the planet, but last year about 582,000 of its residents were homeless. . . . One of the most vexing problems is that economic prosperity does not improve housing outcomes, but more often than not, worsens them.

An analysis of the 50 largest U.S. metro areas that Brannon conducted found that those with home values above the national average have homeless rates 2.5 times higher than metro areas with below average home values.

Take San Jose, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, which epitomizes the nation’s high-tech prowess and ability to create high-paying jobs. It boasts the lowest poverty rate among the 50 metros studied at 6.9%. Yet it also has the country’s highest typical home values at $1.39 million, and the nation’s highest homeless rate of 637 per 100,000 residents — 3.6 times the U.S. rate. . . .

Right behind San Jose are San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the high rank on home values lines right up with the rank on the homeless rate — second and third. Seattle, Sacramento, Las Vegas, New York, Portland, Ore., and Denver all made the top 10.

Metro Denver had the seventh highest typical home value in the nation at $559,309, and the fourth-lowest poverty rate at 8.4%. It also had the 10th highest rate of homelessness at 231.6 per 100,000, based on 2022 counts from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

. . .

Dallas ranks 38th for its homeless rate and Houston 47th. Even Austin, which like metro Denver has faced rapid home price gains due to strong in-migration, ranked 17th.

Although high home prices typically align with higher rents, renters are more likely to become homeless than homeowners. The Home Bay study also looked at that relationship.

Cities with higher rates of homeless have an average rent of $2,274 a month, while those with below-average homelessness have average rents of $1,596, based on the Zillow Observed Rent Index, which covers a broad range of rental properties. . . . Western states hosted 10 of the 12 metros with above-average homeless rates. New York and Hartford, Conn., were the exceptions.

Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Cincinnati had the lowest homeless rates among U.S. major metros, all below 50 per 100,000 or under a third of the U.S. average of 175.5 per 100,000.

And Brannon points out five metro areas that have done better at bucking the correlation between higher housing costs and more homelessness — Atlanta, Miami, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., and Dallas. 

Of those, Boston is the most comparable to Denver when it comes to home values — $577,160 vs. $559,309. Despite Denver having a slightly lower home value than Boston, its homeless rate is 2.5 times higher. In 2015, Boston’s mayor at the time issued a comprehensive plan to reduce chronic homelessness called “Boston’s Way Home.” The program counts more than 15,000 people without shelter who have been housed. Only one in 50 homeless people in Boston sleep outside on any given night, the lowest rate of any major city and a fraction of the nearly four in 10 estimated nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. . . . 

Despite criticisms that outgoing Mayor Michael Hancock didn’t do enough, Denver boosted spending on homelessness from $8 million when he took office to $190 million authorized last year and another $254 million this year, including $77.7 million in federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act. . . . 

The Home Bay study is based on 2022 numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. A point-in-time count conducted on Jan. 30 across metro Denver and released on July 24 found a 31.7% increase in the number of people living in temporary shelters or on the streets across the metro area. That number went up from 6,884 to 9,065 people.

My go to solutions for homeless are to reduce the shortage of affordable housing with market based housing facilitated by zoning deregulation and to focus on "housing first" solutions. Fully funding (or even more heavily funding) Section 8 HUD spending would do a lot as well.

* Air taxi service, an economic development I incorporated into fictional scribblings in the early aughts, is just about ready for prime time and is getting FAA regulations to go with it. I think it would be a great industry to organize primarily with mutual companies (i.e. consumer co-operatives).

International affairs:

* I still haven't seen a good clear narrative explanation of the riots that swept France a few weeks ago. I'd like to understand it better.

* Islamic terrorism is alive and well in Pakistan, with ISIS allied extremists targeting comparative "moderate" Islamist political and religious movements. The Sahel war is also ongoing. Islamic terrorism seems to have greatly diminished in North America and Europe, however.

* Israel is presenting itself as an example of what happens in a parliamentary political system with proportional representation producing quite pure majority rule, with few institutional checks and balances, and also with a fragmented political culture that can't rely on widely held political and legal norms to prevent abuses. In addition to disturbing reforms to its legal system, it is also continuing mistreatment of people in Palestinian territories unabated. I'm ambivalent. There is a lot of good about Israel which has provided a haven for the Jewish people worldwide, and the U.S. with the other largest group of Jewish people in the world has a unique obligation to protect Israel from genocide at the hands of hostile neighbors. But, Israel, feeling the existential threats it faces keenly, isn't exactly behaving well either.

* Ecuador had record murder rates, among the highest in the world, and rampant gang violence and extortion. It imposed draconian violations of civil rights and massive deployments of law enforcement. This worked. Murders have plummeted, and organized crime seems to have collapsed as well. One would think that it could eventually return to a more normal state. But massive organized crime and murders are a problem that is very rarely broken and they seem to have managed it. It is certainly an instance that calls for "reevaluating of priors." It doesn't disturb, however, the intuition that perceived likelihood of being caught is far more important that perceived punishment severity.

* The Ukraine War continues. The Ukrainian counteroffensive is making only slow gains, but has intruded into Russian territory a few times. Russia is still acting with disregard for basic standards of humanity, calling off its fragile grain shipment deal and attacking civilian centers with no military importance out of spite. The quality of Russia's military force continues to decline, however. Russia narrowly survived an abortive coup by its mercenaries who had been hung out to dry by the ordinary military. Russia has lost so many experienced and often high ranking soldiers and so much equipment that its conventional military capabilities in Europe have been vastly diminished and its neighbors are ramping up their own military might and expanding NATO. This engagement has greatly downgraded Russia's international standing as a military power. Without the economic base of the full Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, it can't maintain a Soviet scale military force as it has tried to.

* The U.S. is inherently in its origin story, a nation of immigrants. Most countries are nation-states. Does that change the legitimacy of anti-immigrant xenophobia in those countries in ways that it does not in the U.S.?