Class Segregation

 Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

David Brooks at NYT:

This experience has produced in me one central conviction about what ails America: segregation. Not just racial segregation — which at least in schools is actually getting worse — but also class segregation. I’m constantly traveling between places where college grads dominate and places where high school grads dominate, and it’s a bit like traveling between different planets.

Back in 2003, Theda Skocpol of Harvard published a book called “Diminished Democracy.” One of her arguments was that more Americans used to join cross-class community organizations like the Rotary or the Elks clubs. But gradually, highly educated people left them for professional organizations filled with others more like themselves. Skocpol wrote: “Once highly educated Americans would have been members and leaders of such cross-class voluntary federations. Now many barely know about them.”

That self-segregation was symptomatic. Many college-educated people were at the same time segregating themselves in neighborhoods where nearly everybody had college degrees into professions where everybody did, into social circles in which you can go weeks without meeting somebody from the working class. Last year a group of researchers published a study in the journal Nature in which they surveyed leaders in 30 fields, including law, media, politics and so on. They found that not only had nearly all of society’s power brokers gone to college, 54 percent of them went to the same 34 elite schools. That’s segregation on steroids.

Those of us in the college-educated class are good at segregating ourselves from others, but we’re astoundingly good at segregating our kids — simply by equipping them to join our ranks. Before kindergarten, the children of the affluent are much more likely to be in preschool. By sixth grade, students in the richest school districts are four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts. By high school, richer kids’ average reading skills are five years ahead of poorer kids’. By college, according to a 2017 study led by Raj Chetty, children from the richest 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to go to Ivy League schools than children from families making $30,000 a year or less. In his 2019 book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits writes that the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white Americans and Black Americans in the final days of Jim Crow

Measuring Gerrymandering

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting -- much in the news now because of looming gerrymanders in Texas and California.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer at NYT:

After months huddled around a whiteboard with a sharp graduate student, Richard Holden, fueled by too much bad Harvard Square coffee, we created a measure we call the “Relative Proximity Index.”

Picture every voter as a dot on the state map. First, we pin down the geometric minimum — the most compact way to bundle those dots inside the state’s jagged borders into its exact number of congressional districts, each with equal population, whether that means wrapping around Florida’s panhandle or hugging Georgia’s slanted shoulder. Then we compare the map the legislature actually draws to that floor. The ratio is the Relative Proximity Index. An R.P.I. of 1 means you’ve hit the geometric ideal; an R.P.I. of 3 means voters within a district would live — on average — three times as far apart than necessary.
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Since compactness isn’t the only legitimate redistricting criterion, we shouldn’t expect maps to hit 1.0. Lawmakers need room to respect county and city lines, comply with the Voting Rights Act and keep real neighborhoods intact. But compactness should be the starting point because it is neutral, measurable and easy to audit.

It subsumes contiguity (tight districts are, by construction, connected), discourages gratuitous splits of counties and cities, and helps protect genuine communities by forcing mapmakers to justify every detour. Start with the tightest lawful plan; if you deviate, say why, in public. As a rule: the bigger the R.P.I., the heavier the mapmaker’s thumb on the scale.

Our 50-state census of the 106th Congress — from 1999 through 2001 — turned up five of the least-compact maps: Tennessee (R.P.I. = 2.91), New Jersey (2.27), Texas (1.90), Massachusetts (1.87), and New York (1.83). To see what a strict maximal compactness rule would change, we looked at seat-vote curves — a standard political science tool showing how a party’s share of the statewide vote translates into seats — comparing current maps with compact redraws in California, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

DOGE Failed

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.

 Jessie Blaeser at Politico:

The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new POLITICO analysis of public data and federal spending records.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.

Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.

DOGE’s latest figures on contract cuts ticked up to $54.2 billion in an update posted on Tuesday.

POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.

David Lawder at Reuters:

 The U.S. government's budget deficit grew nearly 20% in July to $291 billion despite a nearly $21 billion jump in customs duty collections from President Donald Trump's tariffs, with outlays growing faster than receipts, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday.

The deficit for July was up 19%, or $47 billion, from July 2024. Receipts for the month grew 2%, or $8 billion, to $338 billion, while outlays jumped 10%, or $56 billion, to $630 billion, a record high for the month.

Violent Crime Is Down

  Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.

From the FBI:

The FBI released detailed data on over 14 million criminal offenses for 2024, reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by participating law enforcement agencies. More than 16,000 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies, covering a combined population of 95.6% United States population, submitted data to the UCR Program through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Summary Reporting System.

The FBI’s crime statistics estimates, based on reported data, show a violent crime occurred, on average, every 25.9 seconds in 2024. The breakdown shows on average a murder occurred every 31.1 minutes and a rape occurred every 4.1 minutes. National violent crime decreased an estimated 4.5% in 2024 compared to 2023 estimates:

• Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2024 estimated nationwide decrease of 14.9% compared to the previous year.
• In 2024, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.2% decrease.
• Aggravated assault figures decreased an estimated 3.0% in 2024.
• Robbery showed an estimated decrease of 8.9% nationally.

In 2024, 16,419 agencies participated in the Hate Crime collection, population coverage of 95.1% of the U.S. population. Law enforcement agencies submitted incident reports involving 11,679 criminal incidents and 13,683 related offenses as being motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.

To publish a national trend, the FBI’s UCR Program used a dataset of reported hate crime incidents and reported zero incidents submitted by participating agencies reporting six or more common months of hate crime data to the FBI’s UCR Program for both 2023 and 2024. According to this dataset, reported hate crime incidents decreased 1.5 percent from 11,041 in 2023 to 10,873 in 2024.

“Reported Crimes in the Nation” comprises five parts—“Crime in the United States, 2024,” “NIBRS, 2024,” “Hate Crime Statistics, 2024,” Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted 2024 assault tables, and “UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024.” The compilation’s name has been changed to best reflect the UCR Program’s products, which are based on data reported by participating law enforcement agencies to the FBI.

The violent crime estimate published as part of “Crime in the United States” comprises murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault offenses. For the first time, the 2013 through 2024 violent crime estimates are based on the rape offenses reported using the 2013 revised rape definition. The violent crime figures will still be based on the legacy rape definition for years 2005 to 2012. The revised rape definition (https://le.fbi.gov/cjis-division/cjis-link/ucr-program-changes-definition-of-rape) encompasses additional circumstances beyond the parameters of the legacy definition. In 2016, the FBI Director approved the recommendation to discontinue the reporting of rape data using the UCR legacy definition beginning in 2017. Since 2017, table one of the “Crime in the United States” was the only table using the legacy definition to publish the historic trend. This year’s change streamlines the publication of reported rape.

The complete analysis is located on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.

AI and Campaigns

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

Bruce Mehlman:

In the business world, AI is making campaigns more targeted, efficient & effective. AI chat-bots are more persuasive than humans 64% of the time when provided with minimal demographic information. AI-powered campaigns show 131% increase in click-through rates and a 41% increase in overall engagement vs non-AI. Of course, campaign communications were already personalized to specific voters before AI models arrived. But AI-enabled messaging will leverage individual search histories in unprecedented ways, bringing cutting-edge brain science to the art of political persuasion.

...

Truth is in the AI of the Beholder, Further Marginalizing Mass Media. The era of “choose your own reality” and “fake political news” preceded AI models by at least 200 years. AI is not the reason trust in mass media has declined for most of the past half century, with voters increasingly turning to non-mainstream media sources to get their political information. But AI will surely make it harder to detect, and far easier to mass-produce, misinformation, disinformation & “pink slime” (partisan advocacy posing as legit media). In the age of AI, an increasingly-atomized electorate will choose among candidates based on increasingly-divergent perceived realities.

The Need for Trustworthy Data

Many posts have cited the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At WP, Former CEA chairs  N. Gregory Mankiw and Cecilia Rouse explain why it was a mistake to fire the head of the BLS:

The collection and analysis of federal statistics is complex. Often, the first numbers produced are revised as more information is gathered. And sometimes the revisions are quite large. This can lead to questions about the process, so it is crucial that the users of the data (which is really all of us!) trust that those collecting and analyzing these statistics are not swayed by politics. After all, if data are only considered “good” when they support a particular politician’s worldview and “bad” when they do not, why should anyone believe them? And if we don’t believe them, we know less about what is happening in the economy.

Economists such as Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University have documented that uncertainty about economic prospects and policy reduces economic growth. Further, Nobel Prize winners Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have identified the strength of a nation’s institutions as a source of economic growth. We have little doubt that part of the success of the U.S. economy over the past century is due to its strong and independent federal statistical agencies, which generate the kind of information leaders need to make smart decisions.

Federal statistics may seem like an arcane topic that interests only econ wonks like us. But the truth is that these statistical agencies have made it possible for business leaders and policymakers alike to analyze credible data and plan for the future. And that is something everyone should care about.

Politicians spin — it is what they do. But when their spin undermines the integrity of the numbers we have come to rely on, the consequences are real. We will all pay the price.

 

Polarization and Approval of Institutions

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Republicans’ and Democrats’ evaluations of both the Supreme Court and Congress have never diverged more than in Gallup’s latest update.

Seventy-five percent of Republicans versus 11% of Democrats approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing, according to a July 7-21 poll. This 64-percentage-point party gap exceeds the prior high of 61 points, recorded after the high court overturned Roe v. Wade in its 2022 Dobbs ruling.

At the same time, 55 points separate Republicans’ (61%) and Democrats’ (6%) approval of Congress. That ties with another 55-point party gap from March as the largest in Gallup’s trend dating back to 1974.