🍿 Re-watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) both for palate-cleansing after a not-so-good attempt and to set stage for the sequel.

My gosh, what an outstanding movie, never mind the nitpicks. They swung for the fences like Pixar shuld have, had they listened to Hypercritical.

Yet again, The Washington Post is not letting facts get in the way of a good story. This time, under the headline “Credit card debt tops $1 trillion, trapping even six-figure earners” they spin a yarn of high-earners keeping their credit card debt for years as “pet rocks”, not having the discipline to pay them off even as the economy is recovering.

Bankrate found that 72 percent of cardholders with credit card debt and annual household incomes of $100,000 or more have been in debt for at least a year. The percentage drops to 70 percent for households with credit card debt and incomes between $80,000 and $99,999; 63 percent for people earning between $50,000 and $79,999; and 53 percent for folks making under $50,000.

But what do they mean by “credit card debt”?

“More people [are] carrying more debt for longer periods of time,” Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate, said. “The stats that we see from the New York Fed and elsewhere, they don’t distinguish typically between what’s paid in full at the end of the month and what’s not.”

The emphasis is mine, and to be clear this is the gist of their story: more households with incomes >$100,000 carry a balance than those who earn less. But why wouldn’t they? Between credit card rewards (cash back, travel points, etc.) incentivizing use even for daily purchases on one end, and the current ≥4% annual yield on low-risk high-interest savings accounts on the other, why wouldn’t high-earning and — let’s speculate — more financially literate households hold off from paying off the balance to $0 and earn 4% interest on what they held off from paying? There is an important distinction between paying off the balance and paying down to zero which the article never makes.

So, how many households have a revolving credit card balance, the one that actually charges interest? The article has some of that information, burried in the lead and with no context:

Overall, nearly half (47 percent) of credit cardholders have revolving debt, meaning they don’t pay off their balance in full.

They, of course, omit the most important part of the story: proportion of households paying of their balance grouped by income. Because — and I’ll speculate some more — there are two stories here, one of lower-income households saddled with debt that’s not a pet rock but a rock tied to their neck, paying off just enough to stay afloat; and the other of some (many? who knows — they didn’t give that data) higher-income households playing the credit card game, which would account for the first quoted paragraph.

James Fallows had a good story about framing in journalism and this is not a direct example — the boo boos are in the story itself, not the headline and positioning — but it rhymes. Spin it in a way that sells, I guess. Simplify to the point of enough ambiguity to support your preordained, attention-grabbing conclusion. Vague phrases and undefined terms, FTW.

Craig Mod reviews Oppenheimer:

Strauss and his kangaroo court and Oppenheimer’s philandering all become (quite frankly) sort of meaningless things in the greater context of quantum matter, in the context of splitting the atom, in the context of briefly running a nuclear reactor beneath a football field in Chicago, in the context of somewhat arbitrarily vaporizing a few hundred thousand civilians. I couldn’t but feel heartbreak that the miracle insights of our consciousness (we are the eyes of the universe looking back at itself and all that), the ingenuity of our skull-protected meat-lumps, played a distant second fiddle to (an admittedly well-acted) Downey Jr. as Strauss and his bafflingly pea-sized ego.

Could not have said it better myself, and not for a lack of trying.

Economists do occasionally publish papers with which I agree: ⊕ For the other ones, look here.

…I find that vaccines saved 748,600 lives through June 2023. That is, without vaccines, cumulative mortality from COVID-19 would have been closer to 1.91 million over this time period. In answering the second question, I find that behavioral efforts to slow the transmission of the virus before vaccines became widely administered were critical to this positive impact of vaccines on cumulative mortality. For example, with a complete relaxation of these mitigation efforts, vaccines would have come too late to have saved a significant number of lives. Earlier deployment of vaccines would have saved many lives.

Which yet again shows that out of the two extremes, John Snow and GBD, Snow was the more correct one both ex ante and ex post. Yet instead of taking an “L”, GBD proponents keep saying that we should not have locked down. Yes, shutting down outdoor playgrounds for a full year was ridiculous, but stopping mass gatherings and any goings on in tight public spaces until we get a working vaccine? Absolutely! Only next time, Operation Warp Speed should be set at Warp 5, not 0.1.(ᔥTyler Cowen)

The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam on the average US doctors' salaries:

The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that.

I will write more about this later but for now I will just note how frustrating it is to read an article that has a premise and conclusion that I completely agree with (America doesn’t have enough doctors so the ones that it does have are compensated way above average) backed up by mishandled and misreported data (first the article doesn’t say whether the “average” is mean or median — it is the median, which is actually good — then doesn’t explicitly mention that the median in question is of the adjusted gross income at the household level, not of individual compensation: the median total individual income is $265,000).

At least the article linked to the NBER paper with all the data, which in turn completely validated my recent quip about economisits. Frustrating throughout, especially if you try reading the comments.

A tornado warning for DC, and another day of 80mph winds. The one las week was a doozy! What was the micro.blog climate emoji, again? 🧨?

Update: It was fine.

Tylerton, Smith Island, Maryland. Yes, that Smith Island.

I’ve been down on D.C. recently so I’d like to make one thing clear: it is a great city to live in, work in, and visit, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (you know who they are).