Biden job approval, more Census graphs, and an increase in financial hardship in red states 📊 August 22, 2021
Three things in a short newsletter after a busy, busy week
Last week was a very busy week. Seriously one of the busiest of my life. I need to take back some time this evening and finish the copy edits for STRENGTH IN NUMBERS, which is out next July but entering the final editorial stages in the next couple of weeks. So today’s post will be a short recap of what I wrote and read this last week.
Posts for subscribers
Subscribers received two extra articles this week:
One post with a bunch of graphs on Census data:
And another post looking at Joe Biden’s approval polling in the wake of the fall of Kabul:
On deck: I have been sketching some ideas recently on mid-term forecasting and (as always) our general political predicament, and should have something more refined to say soon.
Assorted links
My writing:
Please click through and read this Economist piece from me where I analyze Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data to determine that states that ended their pandemic unemployment benefits early this summer did not actually see an increase in employment relative to other states. Instead, they just increased the percentage of people who reported difficulty meeting typical expenses. Here’s the lead image, but there are more in the article.
I also wrote about public opinion towards the war in Afghanistan. People still oppose the war and favor withdrawal, but not the way the troop decline has gone so far. There has also been a (predictable) increase in partisan polarization around the issue.
Recommended links:
An old Journal of Politics article by Jon Bond, Richard Fleisher, and B. Dan Wood shows how an increase in elite partisanship from 1950-2000 decrease the correlation between a president’s legislative successes and his approval rating. I imagine the two have become even more completely unmoored in the nearly two decades since the article was published. One reason I like this article is because it highlights how partisanship introduces a time-varying parameter to lots of our models of institutions/outcomes/etc, something I’ve embraced in my political journalism but which other people (especially polling journos/forecasters) have tended to resist.
More reading: The most recent issue of The Atlantic has an ode to non-morning people written by James Packer that includes the obvious truism “Morning people fizzle. They front-load the day, they burn all their energy before 10 o’clock, and the remaining hours are just a kind of higher zombiedom. By mid-afternoon, a morning person is wan and sugar-starved.” He’s right. After I send you this email, I’m off to take a nap before supper.
Recommended reading:
What’s on my reading list this week? Now it’s time for something completely different: I’ve recently gotten obsessed with algorithmic stock trading (not actually putting any money into this, just think it’s a fun application of my forecasting and machine learning knowledge) and came across this book: THE MAN WHO SOLVED THE MARKET: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, by Gregory Zuckerman. It's worth checking out if you’re into the history of this sort of thing. Also: TWILIGHT IN HAZARD, a book about the corporatism that catalyzed a general decline of social wellbeing and living standards in Appalachia, by Alan Maimon.
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That’s it for this week. Thanks so much for reading. If you have any feedback, please send it to me at this address — or respond directly to this email. I love to talk with readers and am very responsive to your messages.
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