June 14, 2020
"Recessions", polling on BLM, anti-racist reading lists, SCOTUS
A note for the reader: Before this newsletter moved to Substack it was an email thread between friends. I’m posting the previous emails here for completeness, and so that if I invoke a previous comment readers can refer to them.
Hi all,
Short list this Sunday, as I’ve had to work more than I had hoped. I hope you’re well!
1. ICYMI/Shameless Plug: Here’s a post I wrote about the May jobs report, and why most news around the word “recession” is vacuous.
2. Follow-on: A different slice of why the headline unemployment is a bad measure.
3. Polls, polls, polls: BLM has gained widespread support…demographically, where did it come from and how does the movement compare with other changes in public opinion? This importantly highlights two different types of “misses” a well-conducted poll can have: 1) sampling error (the sample taken was not representative of the population sampled) and 2) temporal error (the poll was accurate at the time it was taken, but no longer is representative of public opinion.
4. Books: Incredible take on all the “anti-racist reading lists” bouncing around. I don’t have any intelligent commentary so I’ll just copy this excerpt that I found particularly striking: “Aside from the contemporary teaching texts, genre appears indiscriminately: essays slide against memoir and folklore, poetry squeezed on either side by sociological tomes. This, maybe ironically but maybe not, reinforces an already pernicious literary divide that books written by or about minorities are for educational purposes, racism and homophobia and stuff, wholly segregated from matters of form and grammar, lyric and scene.”
5. SCOTUS: something good to hate-read about Brett but also gives some hope that Roberts is not such a clown. It seems at this point that attempts to shame him from the right have largely fallen on deaf ears. I wonder if they might not even push him further towards his institutionally-protective ways.
6. Government Spending: With the launch of the SpaceX rocket this past month I have been thinking a lot about the role of the government in planning and investing in R&D. While this article is a little confused in its analysis, the graph on the changing composition of US research and development (graph “Profit Power”) and its coinciding with the Reagan Revolution is quite interesting.
Harrison