U.S. Birthrates For Women Under Age 30 Fell To Record Lows In 2019

There has never been a time in U.S. history when women in all age ranges under the age of thirty were less likely to give birth. The birth rate is now highest for women aged 30-34, although this rate too is low by historical standards. The absolute number of births has not been this low since 1985 (despite significant population growth since then).

The decline has been quite dramatic and continues to be particular rapid for teens. While the provisional statistics don't show it, from prior years statistics we can safely predict that the decline has been particularly dramatic for black and Hispanic teens, even though for women in their 20s and early 30s birth rates have been falling faster for white and Asian-American women than for black and Hispanic women.

Meanwhile, birth rates have continued to gradually increase for women aged 35-44. This is partially due to women postponing child bearing to obtain educations and pursue careers, and is partially because fertility treatments have made this possible.

Birth rates have been essentially unchanged for girls aged 10-14 (at a record or near record low reached in 2015), and women aged 45 and older (which are at historically high levels, but still very low).

We can also safely predict that this is due almost entirely to reduced pregnancy rates and not due to increased abortion rates. The abortion rate per pregnancy has remained fairly constant, or has declined, in all recent years, and thus, the U.S. has also approached record low post-Roe v. Wade abortion rates.

To maintain a constant population, the U.S. needs to admit approximately one immigrant per four children born each year.

The provisional number of births for the United States in 2019 was 3,745,540, down 1% from the number in 2018 (3,791,712). This is the fifth year that the number of births has declined after the increase in 2014, down an average of 1% per year, and the lowest number of births since 1985. 

The provisional general fertility rate (GFR) for the United States in 2019 was 58.2 births per 1,000 females aged 15–44, down 2% from the rate in 2018 (59.1), another record low for the nation. From 2014 to 2019, the GFR declined by an average of 2% per year. . . .  

The provisional total fertility rate (TFR) for the United States in 2019 was 1,705.0 births per 1,000 women, down 1% from the rate in 2018 (1,729.5), another record low for the nation. The TFR estimates the number of births that a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have over their lifetimes, based on the age specific birth rate in a given year. The TFR in 2019 was again below replacement—the level at which a given generation can exactly replace itself (2,100 births per 1,000 women). The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971 and consistently below replacement since 2007.  

… 

The birth rate for teenagers in 2019 was 16.6 births per 1,000 females aged 15–19, down 5% from 2018 (17.4), reaching another record low for this age group. The rate has declined by 60% since 2007 (41.5), the most recent period of continued decline, and 73% since 1991, the most recent peak. The rate had declined an average of 8% annually from 2007 to 2018. . . . The birth rates for teenagers aged 15–17 and 18–19 in 2019 were 6.7 and 31.1 births per 1,000 females, respectively, down by 7% and 4% from 2018, again reaching record lows for both groups. From 2007 to 2018, the rates for teenagers aged 15–17 and 18–19 declined by 10% and 7% per year, respectively. 

The birth rate for females aged 10–14 was 0.2 births per 1,000 in 2019, unchanged since 2015.

The birth rate for women aged 20–24 in 2019 was 66.6 births per 1,000 women, down 2% from 2018 (68.0), reaching yet another record low for this age group. This rate has declined by 37% since 2007. The number of births to women in their early 20s fell by 3% from 2018 to 2019.

The birth rate for women aged 25–29 was 93.7 births per 1,000 women, down 2% from 2018 (95.3), reaching another record low for this age group. The number of births to women in their late 20s declined 2% from 2018 to 2019.

The birth rate for women aged 30–34 in 2018 was 98.3 births per 1,000 women, down 1% from 2018 (99.7). The number of births to women in their early 30s was essentially unchanged from 2018 to 2019. 

The birth rate for women aged 35–39 was 52.7 births per 1,000 women, similar to the 2018 rate of 52.6. The number of births to women in their late 30s increased by 1% from 2018 to 2019.  

The birth rate for women aged 40–44 in 2019 was 12.0 births per 1,000 women, up 2% from 2018 (11.8). The rate for this age group has risen almost continuously since 1985 by an average of 3% per year. The number of births to these women increased by 2% from 2018 to 2019.  

The birth rate for women aged 45–49 (which includes births to women aged 50 and over) was 0.9 births per 1,000 women, unchanged since 2015. The number of births to women in this age group was also essentially unchanged from 2018 to 2019.

From here. 

Historical Birth Rates In North American and the World

Birth rates records are not comprehensive back all of the way to Colonial era, and mostly don't exist at all in Pre-Columbian times.

But, in all of world history prior to the 19th century, birth rates for women aged 15-29 were higher than they are today in virtually all cultures, except for subcultures of nuns and pagan vestal virgin priestesses. The technologies that facilitate reducing births per woman, the economic forces that encourage that approach didn't exist until more recent times, and high child mortality rates made having many children a necessity to prevent population collapse.

There were cultural differences within these parameters, however. With regard to the regional and cultural differences, as I noted in an October 6, 2012 post at this blog:

The differences in adolescent sexuality and family structure we see in "Red State/Blue State" comparisons in the past decade were deeply ingrained already in colonial New England, Pennsylvania, Appalachia and Virginia by the 1770s and have clear British antecedents which have faded to near irrelevance to some extent where they originated. By then, 10% of women in the Delaware Valley (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Northern Maryland), 15% of New England women, 30% of women in Virginia and 40% or more of women in Appalachia (one contemporaneous source put the figure as high as 94% in one county) were pregnant when they married. 

On that wedding day, the average Delaware Valley woman was 24, the average New England woman was 23 years old, the average Virginia woman was 18, and the average Appalachian woman was 19. 

About 33% of the Delaware Valley women were literate, as were 50% of the New England women, 25% of the Virginia women, and a smaller percentage of the Appalachian women.

The average age of women at first marriage in the U.S. today is 28 years old. 

The regional differences between different early American subcultures probable had its roots in differences in child mortality rates historically in those cultures. Child mortality was probably higher in Appalachia and Virginia than it was in the Delaware Valley and New England in the 1770s.

Of course, these averages also conceal a considerable age spread even in the Delaware Valley and New England where the average age of first marriage was relatively high and relatively few women were pregnant when the got married. Far more women would have had children at a young age than do so today, even though teenage marriage and child bearing wasn't as common in pre-modern times as often assumed.

From the U.S. Census Bureau. See also here.

Thus, for a full century of the time period in which we have data, from 1890 to 1980, the median age for women at their first marriage in the U.S. as a whole was between 20 and 22. 

The increase in the age of women at their first marriage since 1950s coincides with increasing percentages of women going to and completing college, and also to graduate and professional schools. Men are also much more likely to go to college (although women are now significantly more likely to be college graduates than men).

The percentage of law school students who were women didn't exceed 4.1% until 1965 when it hit 4.3% and increased steady thereafter (after having been between 2.8% and 4.1% from 1947 to 1964) and has been in excess of 50% since 2016.

The increasing age of marriage is a global trend, worldwide: "The average age of marriage for women increased from 21.8 to 24.7 years from the seventies to the mid 2000s, with the average age for men rising a comparable amount."

The average age gap was about four years in 1890, narrowed slightly during the Great Depression, was back to four years after World War II ended, to about 2.5 years in the 1960s, and has held stead at about two years since 1980. As countries grow richer, the difference in marrying age tends to narrow (the gap is about 5 years in Egypt but only 1.6 years in France and only 1.4 years in Japan); quite a bit of this difference is driven by younger ages of marriage for women ("According to U.N. reports, 39 countries have data showing that 20% of women married by age 18. In twenty countries, a full 10% of women married by age 15. In only 2 countries, however, are 10% of men married before the age of 18.").

The marriage age trends are more consistently higher now than they were in the late colonial era in the U.S., with the state with the lowest average age matching the Delaware Valley high at that time. But, women in New England and the Delaware Valley now marry about three years later than Appalachia (compared to a gap of five to six years in the colonial era), although the gap between these regions and Virginia is now just one or two years, instead of four or five years in the colonial era. 

The U.S. state with the lowest median first marriage age is, unsurprisingly given its predominantly Mormon religious affiliation, Utah at 24.2 years old for women and 26.2 years old for men, with Idaho which is also heavily Mormon as a runner up with 25.1 years old for women and 26.7 years old for men. The oldest average age of first marriage in a U.S. state is in Massachusetts, where the median age of first marriage for women is 29.7 and for men is 30.9 years. The District of Columbia has the highest median age of marriage for women, at about 30, which is also about the median age of first marriage for men (in part, this is because it has the lowest percentage of the population ever married, mostly because a large percentage of the D.C. population is African-American than in any U.S. state or in Puerto Rica, since the African-American marriage rate is much lower than the marriage rate for other races designated by the Census bureau, a trend that has emerged in the post-Civil Rights era).

The District of Columbia is the only place in the U.S. without a significant age gap between median age of first marriage for men and for women. The gap is about two year in most of the U.S. but closer to one year in the Northeast (where median ages at first marriage tend to be on the high side). The age gap is about twice as large (3.0 years v. 1.5 years) in couples where both are foreign born v. those where both were born in the U.S.; there is a similar gap for high school dropouts v. high school graduates (3.1 years v. 1.6 years) some of which is due to non-native born people making up a disproportionate share of high school dropouts.

Data from 2005 to 2009 show basically same regional trends with slightly lower actually ages (Puerto Rico is in the mid-range at 38th oldest):

The U.S. Census Bureau keeps track of when Americans get hitched. Here is the median age at first marriage for women in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as of 2005-2009: 

1. Idaho: 23.2
2. Utah: 23.3
3. Wyoming: 24.2
4. Arkansas: 24.3
5. Oklahoma: 24.4
6. Kentucky: 24.8
7. West Virginia: 25.0
8. Kansas: 25.0
9. Tennessee: 25.2
10. Texas: 25.2
11. Alaska: 25.2
12. North Dakota: 25.3
13. Alabama: 25.3
14. Iowa: 25.4
15. Nebraska: 25.4
16. Missouri: 25.6
17. Nevada: 25.6
18. South Dakota: 25.6
19. North Carolina: 25.7
20. Montana: 25.7
21. Colorado: 25.7
22. Indiana: 25.7
23. Mississippi: 25.8
24. Arizona: 25.8
25. New Mexico: 25.8
26. Louisiana: 25.9
27. Washington: 25.9
28. Georgia: 25.9
29. Oregon: 26.0
30. Minnesota: 26.3
31. Wisconsin: 26.3
32. Ohio: 26.3
33. Maine: 26.4
34. South Carolina: 26.4
35. Florida: 26.4
36. Michigan: 26.4
37: Virginia: 26.4
38: Puerto Rico: 26.5
39. Delaware: 26.6
40. New Hampshire: 26.8
41. California: 26.8
42. Hawaii: 26.9
43. Vermont: 26.9
44. Illinois: 27.0
45. Pennsylvania: 27.1
46. Maryland: 27.3
47. Connecticut: 27.6
48. New Jersey: 27.7
49. Rhode Island: 28.2
50. New York: 28.4
51. Massachusetts: 28.5
52. District of Columbia: 29.7

Marriages tend to be at a younger age where Mormon (and to a lesser extent Evangelical Christian) religious affiliation is more common, and in rural areas.

The percentage of women enrolled in law school tracks median age of women at first marriage rather closely (although not perfectly):

The methodology used by the Census Bureau to compute marriage ages changed in 1990. 

Historical American Total Fertility Rates

There were high pre-industrial levels of total lifetime fertility for married women (i.e. typically more than six children per lifetime for women who lived for all of their child bearing years) in Colonial and Pre-Columbian times, although this had abated by the time of the Great Depression.

From Statistica.com citing Aaron O'Neill, "Total fertility rate of the United States 1800-2020" (January 22, 2020).

The U.S. total fertility rate fell below the replacement rate briefly around 1940 and again in the early 1970s.

These birth rates exceed those of pre-modern societies discussed below, and gave rise to rapid natural increase (i.e. excess of births over deaths without regard to immigration) in the total population.

We also have decent data on pre-1790 total fertility rates in Europe, where total fertility rates ranged from 4.5 to 6.2, with mean ages at first marriage of 25-26 years old for women (suggesting that women in that era had on average, 2.5 to 4.2 children who died before having children of their own). 

Colonial era American women married earlier than their European counterparts, and population growth was greater in North America (even apart from massive amounts of immigration) than it was in Europe, so Colonial era American women very likely had more children per lifetime than their European counterparts of the same era, with a total fertility rate that was probably more than 7, and birth rates of more than 250 per 1000 women of child bearing age.

Pre-Colombian Birth Rates In North America

Birth rates at a given age were probably as high as they were in 1800 in Colonial populations among Pre-Columbian North Americans, if not higher. At that time, life expectancies for women were lower (about 23 years at birth and about 20 years at age 15), and that reduced the total fertility rate. See, e.g. Pre-Columbian North America can be found in S. Ryan Johansson, "The Demographic History of the Native Peoples of NorthAmerica: A Selective Bibliography", 25 Yearbook Of Physical Anthropology 133-152 (1982).  

Birth rates inversely track child mortality rates, because people have more kids (and generally overcompensate) when there is a significant risk that some of their children will not live to adulthood, and must do so out of mathematical necessity when the total population size is stable.

Another source surveying pre-modern mortality rates globally and in pre-modern history notes that:

Across the entire historical sample the authors found that on average, 26.9% of newborns died in their first year of life and 46.2% died before they reached adulthood. Two estimates that are easy to remember: Around a quarter died in the first year of life. Around half died as children. What is striking about the historical estimates is how similar the mortality rates for children were across this very wide range of 43 historical cultures. Whether in Ancient Rome; Ancient Greece; the pre-Columbian Americas; Medieval Japan or Medieval England; the European Renaissance; or Imperial China: Every fourth newborn died in the first year of life. One out of two died in childhood. . . . 

There is another piece of evidence to consider that suggests the mortality of children was in fact very high in much of humanity’s history: birth rates were high, but population growth was close to zero.

The fertility rate was commonly higher than 6 children per woman on average, as we discuss here. A fertility rate of 4 children per woman would imply a doubling of the population size each generation; a rate of 6 children per woman would imply a tripling from one generation to the next. But instead population barely increased: From 10,000 BCE to 1700 the world population grew by only 0.04% annually. A high number of births without a rapid increase of the population can only be explained by one sad reality: a high share of children died before they could have had children themselves.

Estimates of infant mortality rates in the Pre-Columbian agricultural Inca and Aztec societies (from a chart in the article quoted above) ranged from 27% to 35% of children who were born. Estimates of all deaths before age 15, in those societies, ranged from 48% to 53% of children who were born, well in line with estimates from other pre-modern societies with similar levels of technology.

This implies that a woman who lived long enough to have children had to have at least four children per lifetime, on average, to prevent population decline, and those children had to be squeezed into what was, on average, a shorter than modern reproductive lifespan, because more women died before menopause in pre-modern times. Directly measured total fertility rate data suggests that these child mortality rates were actually underestimates, because total fertility rates were probably higher than four children per woman per lifetime.

The birth rate for women aged 15-35 would have had to be about 200 per 1,000 women in that age range to prevent the population from declining (and we known that, in the long run, ancient populations were stable or increasing). 

This is about double the birth rate of modern American women aged 30-34 who have the highest birth rate of modern American women of any age, and birth rates in the U.S. are higher than those in most other developed countries.

International Comparisons

The U.S. is still far from the bottom in total fertility rate of 1.7. The world average total fertility rate is 2.4 which isn't far above the replacement rate of 2.1, and 90 out of 200 sovereign states and dependencies are below the replacement rate. 

The World Bank estimate of 2018 puts the U.S. at 145th, out of 185 sovereign states and 15 separately listed dependencies (Puerto Rico, however, is in 199th place at 1.0). There are 55 other countries or dependencies have lower total fertility rates. 

Total fertility rates via Wikipedia (the map reflects some rounding).

Today, Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Oceania are predominant among countries with high total fertility rates. 

Niger at 6.9 is at the top, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 1800. 

Somalia is the runner up at 6.1, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 1840. 

Afghanistan at 4.5 is the highest out of Africa, followed by the Solomon Islands at 4.4 which is the highest in Oceania, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 1890.

Yemen at 3.8 is the highest in the Middle East, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 1900.

Pakistan is the highest in South Asia at 3.5, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 1915 and again at the peak of the Baby Boom in the U.S. in 1960.

India is at 2.2 (with immense regional variation within the country), at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the years 1933, 1944 and 1972.

Bangladesh, Bhutan, Vietnam and Malaysia are at 2.0, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 1975.

France at 1.9 is the highest in Europe, at about the same total fertility rate as the United States in the year 2015.

China, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the U.K. at 1.7 are about the same as the U.S. today.

Russia, Germand and the Netherlands are at 1.6. 

Thailand, Switzerland and Canada are at 1.5. 

Japan is at 1.4. 

Italy and Spain are at 1.3. 

South Korea at 1.0 is at the bottom. 

To Do

A lot of my blogging, both here and at Dispatches from Turtle Island, is basically reactive. I see or experience something, or a few related things, and I think to them and react to them. But, I also have subject that I think in passing about discussing or looking into that don't have a specific trigger and that I often never get around to doing. Some are blog management things, and some are potential posts. This post identifies some of them for both blogs combined:

* Make a list of current physics experimental groups and anthropology groups (often known by acronyms or by the name of the principle investigator) with a brief description of them in terms of what the name stands for, where they are physically located, what kind of research they are doing and links to them.

* Expand, at both blogs, my list of links to periodicals (especially trade and academic ones) and to primary sources of data (experiments, polling firms, government agencies). 

* Create an RSS feed or something similar to journals in my areas of interest.

* Create a glossary of somewhat technical terms that I use and reexplain or have to look up when I see them (for each blog).

* Finish tagging old posts at Wash Park Prophet.

* A post on 2020 U.S. Senate races.

* A post on new developments regarding how much gerrymandering there is.

* More thinking about institutional changes that are achievable to improve the quality of U.S. electoral democratic process.

* A post on the desirability of Deep State institutions and how to strengthen them.

* A post on fiat currency, the money supply, modern monetary theory and why it is overrated in importance.

* A summary of policy changes big and small that can address law enforcement misconduct.

* An idea development post on how to fix foster care and how to think about what expectations for it are realistic.

* A post about the inherent limits of public education as an academic achievement leveling tool and exploration of other valuable roles that public education serves or can serve including improving the socialization of young people.

* A post about policies that impact marriage formation and stability and about whether we really do want what it would take to have more marriage formation and more stable marriages, and if so, how badly we want that.

* A post on recent developments in military technology and the sensible design and missions for our military in light of those developments that is more integrative and wide thinking pointing to a fairly comprehensive picture instead of bits and pieces.

* A post on littoral naval issues in choke points that an essay contest is soliciting essays upon, whether or not I submit an essay itself.

* A post on the Church of the East when I finish a book on it that I recently bought.

* A post imagining what physics looks like in a future where my guesses on the future of fundamental physics discoveries pans out.

* A post on what can be used to change the political culture of the U.S. and the political identity of people in it, also discussing the potential shifts in major party coalitions.

* A post explaining my views on the progressive anti-corporate movement and my attitudes towards capitalism, which acknowledge a problem, but also thinks that the movement fails to give credit where credit is due to the benefits of market economies and big businesses.

* A post taking a deep dive into interstate migration and what it says about the nation's future.

* A post on sensible changes to land use law and urban planning and related transportation, energy, environment and public health issues.

* A post on opportunities, trends and the likely future in a post-industrial economy and its structure. Is that term an excuse and euphemism for decline or is it sustainable and inevitable.

* A post on how to achieve a post-neo-feudal economy and why this would be a good thing.

* Posts with more detailed analysis about how to make our economy more robust.

* A post on the spiritual future of the "nones" - what will capture their hearts, minds and souls? Does a vacuum invite some new belief movement to sweep in, and if so, why and driven by what?

* A post on what wider drug legalization would look like and why it would be desirable?

* A post proposing restructuring of mental health care.

* A post on lessons from COVID-19 that can be carried forward once it ceases to be a crisis.

* Update my page on efforts to develop theories to explain the physical constants of the Standard Model.

* A post reviewing the latest developments in dark matter, dark energy and modified gravity in an integrative way that focuses on combined constraints on different theories.

* A page discussing my take on MOND (a toy model modified gravity theory that is well known and predictive despite having obvious and recognized flaws and limitations).

* A post on lessons learned on what not to do from comparative political experience.

* A post on ways to restructure the legal system on the civil side to address its flaws like high cost, delay, and undue emphasis on settlement, and how arbitration is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

* A post reviewing the state of West Asian prehistory.

* A post reviewing the history and prehistory of the Middle East in the BCE era.

* A post on what I've learned about food choices and exercise from Noom.com

* A post on the medical and biological research progress in understanding COVID-19.

* A post with a tech, economics and environment oriented look at the future of agriculture.

Spurious Accuracy

I haven't mentioned it a lot, but I have been actively trying to lose weight for the last twenty-six months or so, after hitting a peak BMI in excess of 40 (which is "severely obese" a.k.a. "morbidly obese" a.k.a. Class III obesity), and being diagnosed with Type II Diabetes in April of 2018.

I've made great progress since then. I lost about 60 pounds, gained about 25 pound back, and using Noom.com since the lockdown, I am back to being down about 65 pounds from my peak weight. I am no longer diabetic (and probably not even pre-diabetic), and my other blood and urine test chemical markers for cholesterol, triglycerides, and other stuff that you get too much of when your overweight and don't exercise are back to the good range. 

Mostly this has been a result of dieting, and exercise options have been greatly limited during the lockdown, but I'm walking more than I have since I was a precinct committee person, walking blocks in the neighborhood several times a year to distributed political fliers, something that a back injury prevented at that level for many years.

I've lost more than 20% of my body weight, and I am currently on track to bring that to 25% and to reach a weight at which I am merely "overweight" rather than obese by sometime in July when I conclude the weight loss program I started on March 21, 2020. I am less than 5 pounds away from weighing less than I have at any time that my college aged children have been alive (that was for a month in the summer of 2009, from much higher weights before and after that episode of weight loss, probably associated with a South Beach diet effort).

Anyway, back to the point of this post.

When you are on a weight loss program, one of the things you do is weigh in regularly. I do it every morning right after I wake up and have gone to the bathroom, before breakfast, and record it in an app.

My bathroom scale provides a weight with a 0.1 pound precision. It probably isn't actually that accurate, but it's close. 

But, when it comes to measuring weight, a bathroom scale has spurious accuracy. The frustrating reality is that a person's body weight at any one time, even if calories in equals calories out exactly, every single day, isn't that stable or constant. Not even within an order of magnitude of that.

Your body weight varies during the course of the day, and from day to day, in a manner that is more or less random. When you last pooped, peed, ate, or drank something matter, as well as other factors I can't really explain at all. 

Since I'm a big guy, even with my weight loss progress to date, the raw numbers are pretty significant. I haven't actually crunched the numbers (yet), but I'm numerate enough and work with data sets, probability, and statistics enough (mostly in my hobbies), that I have a pretty good feel for what a margin of error in a data set looks like. In my case, one standard deviation of random noise in my day to day, and hour to hour, weight is about 1.5 pounds. This means that over the course of a couple of months, I'll see about three days with a random noise weight change of more than 3 pounds, while I much more frequently will see a day to day random noise weight change of one or two pounds.

You have to look at a longer term charge and smooth out the day to day noise to see the long term shift in the midpoint of your regular daily noise fluctuations in weight. 

It takes about 3500 dieter's calories (kilocalories) of eating less and/or exercising more than you need to in order to maintain your existing weight to lose a pound. A pretty strict diet and exercise regime aimed at rapid weight loss has you eat about 500 to 700 calories a day less you burn through daily activities and exercise combined, which means you should lose an average of 1 to 1.3 pounds a week (I personally have been losing a bit more than 3 pounds a week during the lockdown so far, although I'm well aware that plateaus can and will interrupt that progress.)

So, psychologically, this means that weighing in sees you routinely move as much as three weeks backward or forwards on your planned long term weight loss pace in a single day. This makes it much harder to cling to the (well founded) faith that you have in your plan that if you stick to it that the long term results will arrive in due course, despite the confusing day to day random weight noise.

COVID-19 Drives Unemployment To 14.7% With Another 5% Temporarily Laid Off

The only other time in U.S. history that the unemployment rate has been this high was in the worst part of the middle of the Great Depression. 

The jobless rate was pushed higher because 20.5 million people lost their jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, wiping out a decade of job gains in a single month. The staggering losses are roughly double what the nation experienced during the 2007-09 crisis, which used to be described as the harshest economic contraction most people ever endured. . . . Analysts warn it could take many years to return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate the nation experienced in February.

From the Washington Post.

The April report was the worst monthly report ever in terms of job losses and the increase in the unemployment rate. . . . 

"If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to "other reasons" (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical April) had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been almost 5 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally adjusted basis)." . . . 

The number of persons at work part time for economic reasons nearly doubled over the month to 10.9 million. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. . . . 

[T]here are 939 thousand workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job. This was the lowest level since 2001, probably because many long term unemployed just gave up looking in April.

From Calculated Risk. 

The previous record for monthly job losses since 1939 was September 1945 when 1.959 million jobs were lost due to the wind down after WWII. The runner up was October 1949 with 838,000, and then March 2009 with 800,000 (part of a several months streak of record high monthly job losses in the Great Recession). The unemployment rate in March was 4.4%.

There have been 33 million unemployment claims in the U.S. since COVID hit, including 420,000 in Colorado.

At the worst of the Great Recession, continued claims peaked at 6.635 million, but then steadily declined. Continued claims have already increased to a new record high of 22.647 million (SA) and will increase further over the next few weeks - and likely stay at that high level until the crisis abates.

From Calculated Risk. 

Quotes of the Day

With essentially no conventional naval combat in the past 70 years, and with the last credible attack on an aircraft carrier coming at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, it is hard to know when the aircraft carrier might pass into obsolescence. Whenever that moment does arrive, it will behoove us to act on our own terms. We will not like the alternative—Admiral [William] Sims again:

"It may be stated in general terms that most arguments in favor of fundamentally new weapons have failed, except those that resulted in shedding the blood of the unbelievers; that defeat alone has been accepted as a final demonstration."

- Lieutenant Commander Jeff Vandenengel, "100,000 Tons of Inertia" Vol. 146/5/1,407 Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute (May 2020) citing Armstrong, 21st Century Sims (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015), 105 (Mr. Sims was a U.S. Navy Admiral in the 1920s).

A Comprehensive Tally Of Presidential Race Polling

I've updated my May 4, 2020 tally of Presidential polling on a state by state basis below to reflect new Colorado polling and to add polls from all states where 2020 polling is available.

Analysis

Florida and four Rust Belt states are poised to flip from their 2016 support for Trump (all by more than the margin of polling error). Texas and North Carolina are also now toss ups. South Carolina and Iowa have gone from being safe states for Trump to merely leaning in his direction.

One striking point in the polling is that there is a huge and widespread shift away from Trump, even in safely blue and safely red states. Only California (+4.1), Georgia (+2.4), Massachusetts (+0.2), and New Mexico (+0.3) buck that trend, and then only by modest amounts and in safe red or blue states that won't affect the outcome of the election.

Updated Data

Biden leads Trump in national polling by 5.3 percentage points. In the 2016 election, Clinton received 2.1 percentage points of the popular vote more than Trump, but lost the electoral vote.

The 2016 election election results follow the current state polling average in parenthesis. The shift from the 2016 election to the 2020 polling follows that result. Polls older than February 2020 are specifically annotated to reflect the fact that these polls are stale.

Massachusetts (11) . . . . . Biden + 38 (Clinton + 38.2) R+0.2

New York (29) . . . . . . . .  Biden + 28 (Clinton + 21.3) D+8.7

California (55) . . . . . . . .  Biden + 26 (Clinton + 30.1) R+4.1

Washington State (12) . . . Biden + 23 (Clinton + 16.2) D+6.8

Colorado (9) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 19 (Clinton + 4.9) D+14.1

Connecticut (7) . . . . . . . . Biden + 18 (Clinton + 12.2) D+5.8

New Jersey (14) . . . . . . .  Biden + 17.5 (Clinton + 12.8) D+4.7

Delaware (3) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 16* (Clinton + 11.5) D+4.5

Minnesota (10) . . . . . . . . Biden + 12** (Clinton + 1.5) D+10.5
Maine (3)**** . . . . . . . . Biden + 10 (Clinton + 2.9) D+7.1

New Mexico (5) . . . . . . . Biden +8 (Clinton + 8.3) R + 0.3
Virginia (13) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 7.3 (Clinton + 5.4) D+1.9
Pennsylvania (20) . . . . . . Biden + 6.5 (Trump + 0.7) D+7.2
Michigan (16) . . . . . . . . Biden + 5.5 (Trump + 0.3) D+ 5.8
New Hampshire (4) . . . . Biden + 4.6 (Clinton + 0.3) D+4.3
Arizona (11). . . . . . . . . . Biden + 4.4 (Trump + 3.3) D+7.7
Nevada (6) . . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 4.0* (Clinton + 2.4) D+1.6
Ohio (18) . . . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 4.0 (Trump + 8.1) D+12.1
Florida (29) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 3.2 (Trump + 1.2) D+4.4

Wisconsin (10) . . . . . . . . Biden + 2.7 (Trump + 0.7) D+3.2

North Carolina (15) . . . . Trump + 0.3 (Trump + 3.7) D+3.4
Texas (38) . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 1.4 (Trump + 9.0) D+7.6

South Carolina (9) . . . . . . Trump + 4 (Trump + 14.1) D+10.1
Iowa (6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 4.6 (Trump + 9.5) D+4.9

Georgia (16) . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 7.5 (Trump + 5.1) R+2.4

Utah (6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 10.3 (Trump + 18.1) D+7.8

Kansas (6) . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 12.0 (Trump + 21.0) D+9.0

Indiana (11) . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 13.0 (Trump + 19.0) D+6.0

Mississippi (6) . . . . . . . . . Trump + 15.0 (Trump + 18.5) D+3.5

Tennessee (11) . . . . . . . . . Trump + 16* (Trump + 26.2) D+10.2

Alabama (9) . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 20.0 (Trump + 27.7) D+7.7

Kentucky (8) . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 20.0*** (Trump + 29.8) D+9.8

* Last polling from January 2020.
** Last polling from October 2019.

*** Last polling from June 2019.

**** Excludes Maine's Second Congressional District in electoral vote total. Maine's Second Congressional District is treated as an unpolled safe Republican electoral vote in this tally.

The following seven safe blue states are not including in polling tally because no polls are available: Washington D.C. (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maryland (10), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), and Vermont (3).

The following thirteen safe red states (and Congressional Districts) are not including in polling tally because no polls are available: Alaska (3), Arkansas (6), Idaho (4), Louisiana (8), Missouri (10), Montana (3), Maine's Second Congressional District (1), Nebraska except Nebraska's  2nd Congressional District (4), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Dakota (3), West Virginia (5), and Wyoming (3).

Nebraska's Second Congressional District casts its one electoral vote separately and is more liberal than the state as a whole (as a whole Nebraska is a safe red state) and viewed by Cook's Political Report as a "toss up". Five of the six states classified that way by Cook's Political Report are currently polling in favor of Biden by more than the polling margin of error; the sixth, North Carolina, is Trump + 0.3. So, I assume that NE-2, if polled would have polled in favor of Biden.

Electoral Vote Analysis

Total Electoral Votes For Biden Based On Polling: 337

Total Electoral Votes For Trump Based On Polling: 201

It take 270 electoral votes to win. In the event that each candidate receives 269 electoral votes or there is a tie for some other reason, the outcome is decided by Congress in a special process set forth in the U.S. Constitution that has never been used.

So, Biden can lose states and Congressional Districts with a combined 67 electoral votes currently in his column and still win the Electoral vote. For example, if he won either Nebraska's Second Congressional District or Maine's Second Congressional District, he could afford to lose Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio and still win the Electoral Vote.

Assuming that state polling percentages near the margins are perfectly correlated with national polling percentages, Biden needs to be polling nationally with a 1.3 percentage point lead or less for Trump to win the electoral vote based upon the polling totals above.

New Colorado General Election Polling

The Presidential Race

The latest Presidential poll in Colorado was Biden 55% and Trump 36%.

The U.S. Senate Race

In the U.S. Senate race, the poll was John Hickenlooper 54% and Cory Gardiner 36% (an 18 percentage point lead for Hickenlooper). 

The poll pointed did not ask about Andrew Romanoff and ask about the upcoming Hickenlooper and Romanoff Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate in a pretty overt effort to boost Hickenlooper, whom the national party has already taken the side of, over Romanoff, even though both men have a very good chance against Gardiner in the general election. 

Methodology

The poll was by Keating Research, OnSight Public Affairs and Mike Melanson – Democratic firms and a former Hickenlooper campaign staffer – polled 600 Coloradans in an online survey between May 1 and 3, with a margin of error of ±4%. Cross tabs.

Tropes

One of my favorite websites is having a short story contest in which reader votes play an important part in who wins. 

There will be 20 winners and there are at least 700 entries. Two of the winners get $15,000 each, are included in a published anthology, and have an animated short made based on their story. Six more winners get $5,000 each and are also included in the anthology. The remaining twelve winners get $3,000 each and are included in the anthology. In all, there are $96,000 of prizes to be awarded and the recognition puts the winners on their way to a career of story telling.

Reader voting isn't random, however. As elusive and seemingly subjective as it may seem, "quality" as Robert Pirsig described it in his signature novels, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Lila", is still something real, even if it may be intersubjective, rather than objective. And, it is much easier to recognize it, than to create it.

The best stories tread a fine line. 

On one hand, they can't be stale and cliched. It has to be fresh, with some elements that are novel or unexpected. Also, the execution and delivery have to.be good from a technical mastery perspective. 

On the other hand, a story has to tread close enough to established tropes that the audience has some sense of where the story is likely to go and finds some elements of the story comfortably familiar. To say that there are true "universals" may go to far, but there are characters, settings, situations, and plot devices that are proven winners if done well, and a story teller's job is to assemble a good mix of them in a competent manner the works.

Yet, a story teller doesn't have to adhere to any particular stylistic convention (even within genre writing there is room to develop a distinctive take on the genre or a sub-genre), the style just needs to be distinctive. The creative arts reward someone who has an identifiable style and trademark, not a jack of all trades who is competent is a wide variety of styles and genres. Maybe, if you are very, very accomplished, you can branch into two or three different styles that have overlapping aspects to them.

U.S. Navy Awards Next Generation Frigate Contract

An artist's conception of the FFG(X). 

In an atypical move, the U.S. Navy has commissioned a next generation frigate based upon a European design that entered service in 2012, scorning U.S. based proposals. 

At 6,000 tons, the next generation U.S. Navy frigate (not yet assigned a name for the class) will be about midway in size between the previous and now decommissioned Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate (4000 tons), and the Arleigh Burke class destroyers (up to 9,700 tons) which are the main stay of U.S. Navy surface combatants. It will have a crew of about 145 sailors (compared to 329 for an Arleigh Burke class destroyer). The diesel-electric propulsion system has a blue sea ship range (11,000 kilometers) and its top speed (50 km per hour) and cruising speed (29 km per hour) are comparable to existing U.S. surface combatants. It will be marginally slower than the Arleigh Burke class destroyers, but have a somewhat longer range.

The ship would be more modern, less expensive, and come on line quickly (i.e. in six years) with only modest development costs or technology risk. But it does not represent any breathtaking innovations or capabilities relative to existing U.S. and NATO warships. 

The French design carries 40 guides missiles customized for anti-air (16), surface to surface (16), and anti-submarine (8) missions, a 3" naval gun, two torpedo tubes, two or three 20mm grenade canons, defensive anti-torpedo, decoy ordinance and electromagnetic jamming systems, and a small, armed helicopter. The French design also has advanced air, surface and submarine sensors. The U.S. version would carry a comparable complement of weapons and sensors and aircraft from designs used on other U.S. warships. 

The most notable difference in capabilities between the FFG(X) and the Arleigh Burke destroyer appears to be that the frigate will have about half as many missiles as the destroyer, although I am not aware of any situation in which an Arleigh Burke destroyer has ever needed to fire anywhere close to half of its missiles before having an opportunity to resupply.

The anticipated total cost of this new warship (including development costs amortized over the total purchase) is about $795 million U.S. dollars for the first frigate and $525 million for each of the next nine ships in the class (compared to about $1,843 million per new Arleigh Burke class destroyer with a design that entered service in 1991).

UPDATE May 6, 2020:

According to Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition James Geurts, the first hull will cost $1.281 billion, which includes the design money for both the ship and for the work needed at the shipyard to set up a production line. It also includes all the government-furnished equipment, including things such as Raytheon’s AN/SPY-6-derivative radar and Lockheed Martin’s Aegis Combat System. 

Of that $1.281 billion, $795 million will go to the shipyard. The next hulls in the buy should cost significantly less. The Navy is aiming for a price tag of $800 million in 2018 dollars, with the threshold at $950 million. But Geurts thinks he can beat both numbers. An independent cost estimate found the follow-on hulls should cost about $781 million if all 20 are built. 

“The study shows this ship as selected and the program as designed delivering underneath our objective cost per platform,” Geurts said on a May 30 phone call with reporters. 

2) The timeline. Detailed design of the future frigate, known as FFG(X), starts right away, Geurts said, and construction will begin no later than April 2022. The first ship should be delivered in 2026 and should be operational by 2030, with final operational capability declared by 2032, Geurts said. 

The contract should be wrapped up — all 10 hulls — by 2035. The intention is to buy 20 hulls, though it’s unclear whether Marinette will build all 20 or if the Navy will identify a second source.

From here.

END UPDATE

* The U.S. Navy has selected a Franco-Italian frigate design as the basis for its next generation guided missile frigate, FFG(X). 

* The ship will be European in basic design but with U.S. made weapons and sensors. 

* The Navy will buy an initial 10 ships with up to 40 or more purchased over the next two decades. 

The U.S. Navy officially selected Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri to produce the service’s first guided-missile frigates in more than 30 years. The service awarded the company $795 million to begin construction on the first of at least ten frigates, with the lead ship entering service in 2026. The new, unnamed ship will fill a hole in the U.S. Navy’s fleet structure for an armed, small surface combatant capable of tackling both low- and high-end missions. 

Fincantieri beat out three other companies, including Austal USA, a partnership of General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Spain’s Navantia, and Huntington Ingalls Industries, to win the FFG(X) (fast frigate, guided, “experimental”) contract. The winning ship design is based on the FREMM class of European missile frigates, with variants of the design already in service with the Italian, French, Moroccan, and Egyptian navies. . . . 

An Aquitaine class FREMM in French service from the link below.

Fincantieri’s frigate is based on the FREMM “Fregata europea multi-missione” design operated by France and Italy, with exports to Egypt and Morocco. FREMM weighs 50 percent more than the Perry-class frigates, tipping the scales at 6,000 tons. The ships use a hybrid electric drive system that gives them a top speed of 30+ knots and a range of 6,800 miles. As multi-mission ships, the FREMM ships carry anti-air, anti-ship, and anti-submarine weapons, though some are optimized for anti-submarine missions. French FREMM frigates carry MdCN land attack cruise missiles and launched them against Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles in April 2018.

Although a foreign design, the American FREMM will be thoroughly Americanized, with U.S.-made sensors and weapons installed throughout the hull. The new Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR), developed by Raytheon for the new USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, will be the primary air sensor. The EASR will be coupled with the Aegis Combat System, a computer system that allows surface ships to detect, track, and engage a variety of surface and air threats, from high-flying ballistic missiles to low-flying cruise missiles.

From Popular Mechanics.

Does It Make Sense?

The U.S. military's sense of itself, and what it devotes a huge amount of its resources to doing, has only a dim connection to what it actually does. 

The U.S. Navy, to a great extent, is operating on a replacement cycle for a structure put in place in World War II and never really seriously rethought since then. As I noted in a June 11, 2018 post:

Notwithstanding the fact that D-Day was an Army operation, the Marines see massive amphibious assaults in the image of D-Day as core to their mission and acquire ships, amphibious armored vehicles, landing craft, helicopters, STOVL fighter aircraft and more to carry out that mission. Never mind that the last time that a large scale amphibious assault was important to the outcome of an armed conflict for the U.S. military was more than sixty years ago during the Korean War. And, neither has anyone else.

In World War II, the U.S. Navy fought a lot of battles in which one blue sea warship tried to sink another blue sea warship. You can count on your fingers the number of times that has happened since then with any military force in the world. But, the U.S. still has a fleet of blue sea warships designed to dominate and vastly outnumber of handful of blue sea navies in the world that still exist. Never mind that aircraft and submarines and cruise missiles and long range missiles and sea mines are almost always better at sinking warships than other warships, which are to a great extent sitting ducks that have avoided catastrophe mostly because no one has wanted to be so definitively at war with the nuclear armed United States. The Navy, like the Air Force, has not given as much attention as it should to sealift, sea basing and coastal firepower support for coastal ground troops.

Another important role of the U.S. Navy is anti-piracy, smuggling interdiction, for which billion dollar destroyers, are expensive overkill, but littoral combat ships may not be very effective.

The Navy, of course, isn't the only Department of Defense bureaucracy at fault, as I also noted in the same post:

The Air Force's elite ranks are disproportionately made up of fighter pilots who trained to engage in air to air combat, and so those are the missions it focuses on preparing the Air Force to carry out, whether that is really what we need to carry out the foreseeable missions the military might be called upon to carry out. Never mind that the U.S. military has had only about two instances of air to air combat in the last twenty years. Other missions have atrophied. The Air Force has again and again tried to shirk its responsibility to provide close air support to ground troops. The Air Force has underinvested in transport aircraft and failed to coordinate with other services to make sure that the planes that carry troops and weapons systems are optimized to the needs to the troops and weapons systems that they carry and likewise ground troops have insufficiently tailored their resources to the aircraft available to carry them.

Wikipedia sums up the post-World War II history of naval warfare as follows:

World War II had seen the United States become the world's dominant sea power. Throughout the rest of the 20th century, the United States Navy maintained a tonnage greater than that of the next 17 largest navies combined. 

The aftermath of World War Two saw naval gunnery supplanted by ship to ship missiles as the primary weapon of surface combatants. Two major naval battles have taken place since World War II.  

In the 1982 Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, a Royal Navy task force of approximately 100 ships was dispatched over 7000 miles from the British mainland to the South Atlantic. The British were outnumbered in theatre airpower with only 36 Harriers from their two aircraft carriers and a few helicopters, compared with at least 200 aircraft of the Fuerza Aérea Argentina, although London dispatched Vulcan bombers in a display of long-distance strategic capacity. Most of the land-based aircraft of the Royal Air Force were not available due to the distance from air bases. This reliance on aircraft at sea showed the importance of the aircraft carrier. The Falklands War showed the vulnerability of modern ships to sea-skimming missiles like the Exocet. One hit from an Exocet sank HMS Sheffield, a modern anti-air warfare destroyer. Over half of Argentine deaths in the war occurred when the nuclear submarine Conqueror torpedoed and sank the light cruiser ARA General Belgrano with the loss of 323 lives. Important lessons about ship design, damage control and ship construction materials were learnt from the conflict.  

The Indo-Pakistani Naval War of 1971 was the first major naval war post World War II. It saw the dispatch of an Indian aircraft carrier group, heavy utilisation of missile boats in naval operations, total naval blockade of Pakistan by the Indian Navy and the near total annihilation of almost half of Pakistan's Navy. By the end of the war, the damage inflicted by the Indian Navy and Air Forces on Pakistan's Navy stood at two destroyers, one submarine, one minesweeper, three patrol vessels, seven gunboats, eighteen cargo, supply and communication vessels, large-scale damage inflicted on the naval base and docks located in the major port city of Karachi. Three merchant navy ships; Anwar Baksh, Pasni and Madhumathi; and ten smaller vessels were captured. Around 1,900 personnel were lost, while 1,413 servicemen (mostly officers) were captured by Indian forces in Dhaka. The Indian Navy lost 18 officers and 194 sailors and a frigate, while another frigate was badly damaged and a Breguet Alizé naval aircraft was shot down by the Pakistan Air Force. 

At the present time, large naval wars are seldom-seen affairs, since nations with substantial navies rarely fight each other; most wars are civil wars or some form of asymmetrical warfare, fought on land, sometimes with the involvement of military aircraft. 

The main function of the modern navy is to exploit its control of the seaways to project power ashore. Power projection has been the primary naval feature of most late-century conflicts including the Korean War, Suez Crisis, Vietnam War, Konfrontasi, Gulf War, Kosovo War, the War on Terrorism in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War.  

A major exception to this trend was the Sri Lankan Civil War, which saw a large number of surface engagements between the belligerents involving fast attack craft and other littoral warfare units.

There have been some small skirmishes in addition to these involving warships in the Persian Gulf, and with pirates near Somalia and in Island Southeast Asia. But, the last time a submarine sunk a full sized warship, a warship sunk a submarine, or two full sized warships engaged each other in anger, anywhere in the world, was 38 years ago, and the conflict before that was 49 years ago.

The United States hasn't engaged in the kind of blue sea naval warfare against a naval near peer, i.e. the kind of conflict that its navy is designed around, since World War II ended 75 years ago. 

One could imagine a conflict with Iran in the Persian Gulf, with North Korea or China near the coast of East Asia, or with Russia in variety of places in the Northern hemisphere. But, after that, it is increasingly difficult to imagine a military conflict involving real naval warfare.

WWI Helmets Better Than Current Ones At Preventing Concussions

Helmet b was most effective against concussions. 

The modern helmet is d and e is a bare head.

Surprisingly, modern helmets for soldiers are worse at preventing concussions than World War I helmets, a design problem with modern helmets that, in theory, should be pretty easy to fix.

Since World War I, helmets have been used to protect the head in warfare, designed primarily for protection against artillery shrapnel. More recently, helmet requirements have included ballistic and blunt trauma protection, but neurotrauma from primary blast has never been a key concern in helmet design. Only in recent years has the threat of direct blast wave impingement on the head–separate from penetrating trauma–been appreciated. 

This study compares the blast protective effect of historical (World War I) and current combat helmets, against each other and ‘no helmet’ or bare head, for realistic shock wave impingement on the helmet crown. Helmets included World War I variants from the United Kingdom/United States (Brodie), France (Adrian), Germany (Stahlhelm), and a current United States combat variant (Advanced Combat Helmet). Helmets were mounted on a dummy head and neck and aligned along the crown of the head with a cylindrical shock tube to simulate an overhead blast. Primary blast waves of different magnitudes were generated based on estimated blast conditions from historical shells. Peak reflected overpressure at the open end of the blast tube was compared to peak overpressure measured at several head locations. 

All helmets provided significant pressure attenuation compared to the no helmet case. The modern variant did not provide more pressure attenuation than the historical helmets, and some historical helmets performed better at certain measurement locations. The study demonstrates that both historical and current helmets have some primary blast protective capabilities, and that simple design features may improve these capabilities for future helmet systems.

Joost Op ‘t Eynde, et al., "Primary blast wave protection in combat helmet design: A historical comparison between present day and World War I" PLOS (February 13, 2020)

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228802

The conclusion states:

All tested helmets provided significant protection against primary blast brain injury compared to a bare head scenario. . . . 

While the helmets also provided protection against eardrum rupture based on current eardrum injury risk assessments, the resulting pressures were still injurious even with the helmets with extended brims. 

Major improvements made in helmet technology to increase ballistic protection do not provide the same increase in blast protection. At certain measurement locations, some historical helmets provided more blast attenuation than the modern helmet even though the modern helmets based on modern fiber composites are far more protective from typical ballistic threats. Specifically, the French 1915 Adrian helmet produced a lower peak pressure at the crown of the head compared to the Advanced Combat Helmet and the other historical helmets. These results show that there is considerable overlap in materials that have good qualities for ballistic and blast protection, but the protection mechanisms are different. Protection against primary blast focuses largely on impedance mismatches that reduce the amplitude of the transmitted waves to the head. The introduction of steel helmets during World War I reduced the toll of both blast and ballistics injuries at the front. 

In the future, helmet protection against primary blast might be improved by material choice, multiple material layers with different acoustic impedance, or the geometry of the helmet.

The 2020 Presidential Race Six Months Out

Donald Trump has incumbency going for him going into the general election, as well as a deeply divided Democratic electorate that has only lukewarm support for former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats' presumptive nominee. 

But, Trump who as recently as February had a strong economy in his favor, now has the worst economy since the Great Depression. While facing a crisis can help a Presidency and briefly gave Trump a boost, his utter mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic thus far seems to be doing him no favors going into the general election. 

He is doing so poorly that he could easily take the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate down with him (the subject of other posts) and there seems to be no real likelihood that the Republicans will retake the U.S. House.

In national polling, Biden leads Trump by 5.3 percentage points.

Cook's Political Report summarizes the Electoral College Outlook as follows:

The current polling in all states not solidly Democratic or solidly Republican per Cook's Political Report is as follows (with 2016 results in parenthesis, followed by the swing in percentage points):

Minnesota (10) . . . . . . . . Biden + 12* (Clinton + 1.5) D+10.5
Colorado (9) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 10** (Clinton + 4.9) D+5.1
Maine (2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 10 (Clinton + 2.9) D+7.1
Virginia (13) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 7.3 (Clinton + 5.4) D+1.9
Pennsylvania (20) . . . . . . Biden + 6.5 (Trump + 0.7) D+7.2
Michigan (16) . . . . . . . . Biden + 5.5 (Trump + 0.3) D+ 5.8
New Hampshire (4) . . . . Biden + 4.6 (Clinton + 0.3) D+4.3
Arizona (11). . . . . . . . . . Biden + 4.4 (Trump + 3.3) D+7.7
Nevada (6) . . . . . . . . . . .  Biden + 4.0*** (Clinton + 2.4) D+1.6
Ohio (18) . . . . . . . .  . . . .  Biden + 4.0 (Trump + 8.1) D+12.1
Florida (29) . . . . . . . . . . Biden + 3.2 (Trump + 1.2) D+4.4
Wisconsin (10) . . . . . . . . Biden + 2.7 (Trump + 0.7) D+3.2
North Carolina (15) . . . . Trump + 0.3 (Trump + 3.7) D+3.4
Texas (38) . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 1.4 (Trump + 9.0) D+7.6
Iowa (6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 4.6 (Trump + 9.5) D+4.9
Georgia (16) . . . . . . . . . . Trump + 7.5 (Trump + 5.1) R+2.4

* Last polling from October 2019.
** Last polling from August 2019.
*** Last polling from January 2020.

Biden's lead exceeds the margin of error in the polling in Florida and all states where he has a stronger lead. But, not in Wisconsin, where the margin of error exceed Biden's lead. Trump's lead is less than the margin of error in North Carolina and Texas.

If Trump's relative support in current polling stays the same, he needs to win all of the solidly Republican states, Georgia, Iowa, Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Arizona. He also needs to win either Nevada, or both Maine's Second Congressional District and Nebraska's Second Congressional District to win the Presidential election in the electoral college.

This would be a 4.5 percentage point swing from the current polling against Biden from current polling (which exceeds the polling margin of error) six months from today, if all polling was perfectly correlated, and on that assumption, this swing would correspond to a Biden lead of 0.8 percentage points in national polling.

The status quo is that Biden wins the Electoral College 352-186 (assuming that Trump wins both Maine's Second Congressional District and Nebraska's Second Congressional District).

A 1.5 percentage point swing from the current polling against Trump would probably swing Nebraska's Second Congressional District to Biden in addition to North Carolina and Texas, giving rise to a landslide Biden win in the Electoral College of 406-132. 

Clinton fell short of Trump by less than one percentage point in the polls in three key states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin), and by just 1.2 percentage points in Florida. Trump won the 2016 election by a nose.

Of sixteen states that are even remotely in play in 2020, Georgia is the only one that has swung in Trump's direction, rather than away from him. Trump support in Ohio has fallen by more than 12 percentage points, where the incumbent Republican Governor has clashed with Trump on his handling of the COVID crisis.

The swing away from Trump is consistent with the fact that his favorability rating was last positive on January 26, 2017 (when it was positive by 0.1 percentage points), six days after he took office. By January 29, 2017 and every day thereafter in his Presidency, Trump has had negative approval ratings. On December 15, 2017, at his low point, his disapproval rating was 21 percentage points in excess of his approval rating. Currently polling disapproves of him rather than approves by 6.5 percentage points, just a little bit more than the amount by which he trails Biden in the polls.

The only measure by which Biden in not the clear front runner going into the November 3, 2020 general election against Trump is the betting odds which favor Trump by 8.8 percentage points.

Biden certainly has the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the campaign and has a history of being absolutely miserable on the campaign trail. But, this election is primarily a referendum on Trump's performance in his first four years in office. So, if Biden can simply keep his mouth shut and refrain from making any unforced errors, there is a very good chance that Trump can be limited to a single term in office and that the United States can start to rebuild itself from the mess that Trump has left behind.

Up And Running

When my old laptop received a terminal diagnosis, after starting to crash once or twice a day without warning, I ordered a new one. It arrived, and three days later, I've finally managed to get all of my main applications in place and the lion's share of my files transferred over. There may be a few straggler files, or a password or two that needs to be put in place, but basically, I'm up and running again.