Dining Alone

Many posts have discussed social capital, volunteering and civic virtue.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.

In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.

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Poverty and Housing Costs

A number of posts have dealt with poverty.

According to the most accurate measure, California does poorly.

Alex Horowitz, Liz Clifford, and Linlin Liang at Pew:

Housing costs are usually the largest item in a household’s budget and can determine a family’s financial stability. In the United States, a housing shortage estimated at 4 million to 7 million homes has driven rents so far above historical norms that these costs have become a significant cause of poverty. Zachary Parolin, a professor at the University of Oxford in England, examined 2023 housing costs in the U.S. and identified the states (counting Washington, D.C., among them) where the greatest share of poverty is attributable to high rent. They are Hawaii, California, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire.

This analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts explores Parolin’s work and examines the ways housing supply and costs affect poverty. As cities and states move to address high housing costs and increase supply through changes to zoning codes, building codes, and permitting processes, a key question is who will benefit from those changes. Parolin’s research, building on his earlier work focused on California and published by the Niskanen Center, bolsters evidence that housing costs have a direct impact on poverty and that policies to enable more housing will help reduce poverty and benefit low-income households in particular.

Key takeaways:

• In Hawaii, California, D.C., New Jersey, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire, 16% to 34% of poverty is attributable to above-average housing costs.
• High housing costs are offsetting some of the anti-poverty effects of measures such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food assistance to low-income households.
• Removing regulatory barriers to housing increases supply and lowers rents.
• In the states examined in this analysis, a drop of approximately 20% in inflation-adjusted rents—as happened in Austin, Texas, and Minneapolis after those cities made reforms—could reduce poverty by 18% to 26% and child poverty by 21% to 38%.

Oppo Fail

Inaccurate opposition research can backfire very, very badly.  Senator Eric Schmitt demonstrated the idea yesterday.

A phenomenal moment in the Senate.

Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., claims he has evidence Jack Smith went to a HAWKS game in Atlanta.

Smith denies it.

Schmitt declares he has busted Jack Smith for perjury.

Smith, vexed, says he went to HAWKEYES game in Maryland.

Watch the whole thing: pic.twitter.com/J07o5Uwfxi

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 29, 2026

From Jack Smith's opening statement:

The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence.  Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned.  Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.  The evidence showed that President Trump attempted to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force his own Vice President to act in contravention of his oath and to instead advance President Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then exploit the rioters’ 1 violence to further delay it.  Over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted that day, a fact we should never forget.    

And, as set forth in the original and superseding indictments issued in the Southern District of Florida, President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.  Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.  Tens of thousands of people came to the social club during the time period when those classified documents were stored there.

Ballot Campaigns and Generative Engine Optimization

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

RACHEL BLUTH and WILL MCCARTHY at POLITICO write that AI presents a challenge and an opportunity to campaign strategists who work on ballot measure campaigns.

“Its completely revolutionized how we’re looking at messaging,” said Amanda Malo, the president of BASK Digital Media, a strategy agency working on a number of ballot measures in the state. “Whatever that thing spits out, you take as truth — even though you may have seen advertising about the measure for months.”

Research suggests chatbots can sway voters, sometimes more persuasively than conventional campaign messaging. That’s making it increasingly important for campaigns to understand where large language models are pulling information from, and how to make their arguments more likely to appear in their results.

To do so, Malo’s group developed a tool it’s calling GEO, or generative engine optimization, which models what types of messaging and narratives voters might receive. Based on those simulations, the campaign can then rewrite its website, trying to answer word for word the questions voters might ask LLMs.

Another strategist for a major advocacy group, granted anonymity to describe the organization’s tactics, said the ballot guide they produce now uses the exact title and summary of initiatives as they’ll appear on the ballot, so it gets properly scraped by AI crawlers.

...

Malo and Kunal Basu-Dutta, the founder of Modern Bay Strategies in Oakland, said adapting to AI is the next evolution of search engine optimization, or SEO. In the old days of Googling, when people clicked on links, the goal was to drive voters to a website, where strategists had full control of a message’s presentation.

...

“You have to write with the understanding that if someone takes this out of context or if someone sees it just by itself, does it still stand?” Basu-Dutta said. “Can people understand this with the 10 words they’re able to pull, as opposed to ‘can we drive them to a website so that they can fully digest it?”

That calculation is leading to what Basu-Dutta called a “flattening and simplification of language” in the messaging.

Instead of long paragraphs on a website, he goes for four short sentences. A long caption on an Instagram carousel has become several short ones under each photo. One webpage with a lot of text is getting broken up into several pages. Infographics, a favorite of political posts on Instagram, are being de-emphasized because it’s unclear what a large language model will scrape from an image.

CBO Tax Data

 As many posts have pointed out, the federal tax system is more progressive than many people believe.  Higher-income people do pay higher rates and bear a larger share of the tax burden than people with lower incomes.

Once again, CBO stats make the point:

Data tables here.

The share of federal taxes paid by households in the top quintile of the income distribution increased from 55 percent in 1979 to 70 percent in 2023. Most of that increase was due to the change in the share of federal taxes paid by the top 1 percent of the distribution, which grew by 12 percentage points—from 14 percent in 1979 to 26 percent in 2023.

Fraud and Funny Numbers

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

Linda Qiu at NYT:

Since the White House formed a task force in March intended to combat fraud, top administration officials have repeatedly heralded its work, pointing to huge amounts of recovered payments and graft stopped in its tracks.

“We found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar,” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the task force, said in a speech this month at the Republican midterm convention.

Yet some of the numbers Mr. Vance and his task force have promoted are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Trump’s second term, according to a New York Times analysis of documents released by the administration. The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.

In August, the White House published a so-called fraud ledger chronicling its work. It singled out three categories of fraud identified and eliminated since January 2025 — not, as Mr. Vance said, since this March, when the task force was established. As of Wednesday afternoon, the task force asserted it had found, or “uncovered,” $245.7 billion in fraud through data analysis, “stopped” $62.9 billion annually through actions like suspending providers and enacting rule changes, and “enforced” $59.1 billion through indictments, settlements and financial fines.

It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total. A senior White House official said the task force chose not to itemize fraud schemes and actions to avoid compromising current law enforcement investigations.

The task force ledger’s chronology and a White House news release from August offer some details about $47 billion of the more than $300 billion the task force asserts it has identified or eliminated. But even that information falls short, leaving unclear how that amount is spread across the three categories.

Undoubtedly, the federal government loses vast amounts of money to fraud: $233 billion to $521 billion annually, equal to about 3 to 7 percent of federal spending, according to one estimate from the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency that has scrutinized how the government spends taxpayer funds for more than a century.

Mr. Vance and his task force have ferreted out real cases of fraud, and their efforts to draw attention to the problem and recover taxpayer funds are laudable, experts said. But the task force’s unverifiable claims may undermine efforts at transparency and obscure the actual scale of the work it is performing.

 

Two Cheers for Socialism

 A number of posts have discussed socialism.

 Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Forty-three percent of Americans now have a positive view of socialism, marking the first time this figure has exceeded 39% in Gallup’s trend since 2010. Socialism still trails capitalism and free enterprise in public favorability but now ranks ahead of big business. Small business remains the clear leader among the five economic concepts tested, with 95% viewing it positively.

Gallup has measured Americans’ overall views of these five economic concepts periodically since 2010, with the latest update conducted Aug. 3-24.

Over the longer term, Americans have become less positive about most of the market-oriented concepts Gallup tracks. Since 2010, positive views of big business have fallen by 14 percentage points, free enterprise by nine points and capitalism by six points. Small business is the exception, with views of it unchanged. Meanwhile, positive impressions of socialism have risen by seven points.