A team of researchers at Brookings and the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has a new white paper out that says virtually all the growth of high-tech jobs during the past decade has happened in five metro areas: Seattle, San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston. The big blue circles in the map below tell the story:

In addition to the Big Five, there are also a Medium Five: Salt Lake City, Denver, Atlanta, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh. Beyond that, there are lots of small cities that are treading water and a vast number of large cities that are losing tech jobs. The authors believe this is something of a catastrophe, and they have an idea:

Such high levels of territorial polarization are a grave national problem….Whole portions of the nation may now be falling into “traps” of underdevelopment—and that is creating baleful social impacts….Regional divergence is also clearly driving “backlash” political dynamics that are exacerbating the nation’s policy stalemates.

….The nation should counter regional divergence by creating eight to 10 new regional “growth centers” across the heartland….Along these lines, the federal government should:

• Assemble a major package of federal innovation inputs and supports for innovation-sector scale-up in metropolitan areas distant from existing tech hubs. Central to this package will be a direct R&D funding surge worth up to $700 million a year in each metro area for 10 years. Beyond that will be significant inputs such as workforce development funding, tax and regulatory benefits, business financing, economic inclusion, urban placemaking, and federal land and infrastructure supports.

A rough estimate of the price of such a program suggests that a growth centers surge focused on 10 metro areas would cost the federal government on the order of $100 billion over 10 years. That is substantially less than the 10-year cost of U.S. fossil fuel subsidies.

• Establish a competitive, fair, and rigorous process for selecting the most promising potential growth centers to receive the federal investment. A new growth center program would select for awards the eight to 10 metropolitan areas that had best demonstrated their readiness to become a new heartland growth center.

The authors think they have identified 35 candidate for this slush money, and they would all compete via a “a rigorous competition characterized by an RFP-driven challenge, goal-driven criteria, and an independent selection process.” I’m willing to bet it would be driven more by which cities are favored by powerful congressional committee chairs, but perhaps I’m being too cynical about it?

In any case, is it really possible to create thriving tech centers with a modest incentive budget of $700 million per year per city? That doesn’t strike me as an awful lot, especially when you consider that Amazon turned down cities offering upwards of $7 billion just to build a second headquarters there. Plus there’s the problem that a lot of states are left completely out of this money hose: Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Oklahoma, Colorado, and nothing in either New England or the vast upper Mountain states.

I guess it will all get worked out. But first we need a congress where a majority of the members are aware of what an “app” is and why there’s more to building a computer in the US than just ordering up the right parts from Best Buy. It also might help if they had even the dimmest understanding of what Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Google actually do.

There are three pieces of legislation pending that Democrats are currently deciding what to do with. For all three, the tradeoff at hand is policy vs. politics. That is, is the policy valuable enough that it’s worth supporting even though it gives a Republican president a political win in an election year? Here are the three:

• USMCA trade agreement (aka NAFTA 2.0). This one is peculiar. As policy, it’s barely different from our current NAFTA agreement. What’s more, I’m not aware of any significant Democratic constituencies that are begging for it. And yet, the Democratic leadership seems to be working hard to come up with compromise language that will allow it to pass. I’m at a loss to explain this.
• Surprise billing. This is a bill that would prevent hospital patients from getting huge bills when it turns out that one of the doctors who wandered through their room wasn’t part of their insurance network—even though the hospital itself is. This would be a win for Trump, but it’s also something that would truly help a lot of people. I can see Democrats deciding that it was worth supporting even if it helps Trump.
• Space Force. Democrats are apparently willing to support creation of Trump’s Space Force in return for parental leave for federal workers. This one also leaves me shaking my head. On the one hand, Space Force strikes me as bad policy. Nobody in the military community seems to think much of it, and I can also envision it being the foundation of some pretty sketchy activities that might not pass muster in the more traditional service branches. On the other hand, parental leave for federal workers is not only small potatoes, but could be explicitly bad for Democrats. There are lots of Trumpish-leaning voters who believe that federal workers are coddled, and a new benefit just for them might be greeted pretty coldly. Potentially, then, it’s both bad policy and bad politics.

I wonder what I’m missing here? It sure seems as though congressional Democrats aren’t playing the political game very astutely.

Isn’t this a cute little guy? He’s a San Esteban island chuckwalla, part of the iguana family of lizards. And you’d probably think he/she was cute if you were another chuckwalla.

A Justice Department report has concluded that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s links to Russia was entirely justified:

Investigators uncovered “no documentary or testimonial evidence” of political bias behind official actions related to the investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, said the report, which totaled more than 400 pages. The F.B.I. had sufficient evidence in July 2016 to lawfully open the investigation, and its use of informants to approach campaign aides followed procedures, the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, determined.

So that’s that, right? Of course not. Because there’s also this:

Mr. Horowitz also uncovered substantial dysfunction, carelessness and serious errors in one part of the sprawling inquiry: the F.B.I.’s applications for court orders approving a wiretap targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser with ties to Russia, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. He found that one low-ranking F.B.I. lawyer altered a related document and referred the lawyer for possible prosecution.

Carter Page is a goofball who never had any actual influence with the Trump campaign. On the contrary: he was nothing more than one of the five names that Trump hurriedly came up with after promising to reveal his “foreign policy team” in early 2016, at a time when no one in the foreign policy community with a room-temperature IQ wanted anything to do with Trump. The FBI could have ordered a mob hit on Page and it would have had zero effect on Trump and his presidential campaign.

But that doesn’t matter. Page was one of Trump’s five names, and the FBI badly mishandled its application for a FISA warrant to wiretap Page. What makes this even juicier is that there’s a connection—modest but real—to the Steele dossier, the wellspring of conservative conspiracy theories about deep state attempts to sabotage all things Trump.

So it doesn’t matter that Page was a negligible part of the whole FBI investigation. The conservative goal, after all, is merely to manufacture doubt about it. And now they can. On prime time Fox News, it’s unlikely that true believers will hear anything about this report aside from the fact that the FBI relied partly on the Steele dossier in order to justify a wiretap on a member of Trump’s foreign policy team. They will hear nothing about this being evidence mostly of broad FBI mendacity and incompetence, not anti-Trump animus.

And the non-true-believers? They’ll rely on normal news sources which, like the New York Times above, will report honestly about the Page warrant being a massive screwup. A week from now, when the dust has settled, all they’ll remember is that there was a report that suggested . . . something. Wasn’t there something about a wiretap? And a dossier that turned out not to be true? Or something like that?

And with that, the conspiracy theory will live on forever in conservative lore, alongside the Benghazi “stand down” order, the IRS’s jihad against tea party groups, and Hillary Clinton’s erasure of 33,000 incriminating emails.

POSTSCRIPT: The genuinely unfortunate thing about all this is that the partisan bickering will overshadow the real conclusion we should probably draw from the OIG report: that FBI agents routinely file FISA wiretap warrants that, either deliberately or through incompetence, are neither fair nor truthful. And the FISA court just as routinely accepts them.

A staff sergeant from the Alaskan National Guard stands guard as workers build a bazaar in KandaharUS Air Force

The original Pentagon Papers showed that lots of people knew we were failing in Vietnam but lied in public about it. Today, the Washington Post has published a followup, the Afghanistan Papers, which show that lots of people knew we were failing in Afghanistan but lied about it in public:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

….Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

It’s unbelievable that we’re still in Afghanistan a full generation after we first invaded. Unfortunately, no one has the guts to simply pull out and accept the fact that they will then become the president that lost Afghanistan. So they keep on pretending to fight. And that’s the biggest lie of all.

Today we have two pictures. The top picture is of Hilbert in his natural habitat lurking on the fence. The bottom picture shows the rare Hilbert duck in its natural habitat floating peacefully in our little lake.

Over at the Washington Post, Heather Long is scratching her head:

By just about any metric this is the best job market since the late 1990s. The economy has been adding jobs for 110 straight months — a record streak. Jobs are plentiful. Unemployment is at a half-century low. And the unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Americans with less than a high school education are all at the lowest levels since the Labor Department began keeping track. There’s a lot to cheer.

But one of the few head scratchers in this strong jobs picture is why wages aren’t growing as fast as they did in the late 1990s, when yearly wage growth routinely topped 4 percent.

Many hoped this would be the year wages really accelerated. After all, business leaders have been complaining for months they can’t find enough workers — both highly skilled and not — and the natural response to that is usually to bump up pay. But wage growth peaked in February at 3.4 percent and has pulled back since then, puzzling economists. “From late 2017 through late 2018, it looked like wage growth was picking up. That ended. Wage growth has been backsliding this year,” tweeted economist Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Do I even need to write the rest of this post? Long presents a couple of charts that show nominal wage growth even though inflation was a point or two higher during the late 90s than it is now. Accounting for inflation, here is wage growth for blue-collar workers:

The six-year stretch from 1994-2000 showed wage growth almost identical to the six year stretch from 2014-2019. Wages today are continuing to grow at about the same rate that they’ve been growing during the entire period since 2014.

What makes this especially bizarre is that Long suggests a few reasons for the wage “slowdown,” and one of them is inflation! But then she sort of poo-poos the whole idea, acknowledging only that “Some say wages do not need to rise as much if inflation remains low.” Some? How about every single person in the world who understands what inflation is?

It’s at times like this that I wish I were a drinker, because I could use a stiff belt right now. How does this stuff keep happening?

NOTE: THIS STUDY HAS BEEN RETRACTED. Click here for more details

Today is turning out to be chart day. Here’s a pretty fascinating study by Harvard’s Joscha Legewie of 3.9 million births in California. The question is: do nearby police shootings have any effect on the birthweight of babies born nine months later? The answer turns out to be yes, but only for black babies and only if the victim is an unarmed black man:

As usual, I have added both color and rough trendlines to make the chart more readable. There are two things to see here about the birthweight effect. First, the more nearby the shooting, the bigger the effect. Second, the effect is seen only in shootings that happen during the first and second trimesters. Shootings during the third trimester don’t have any impact. This is not too surprising since the obvious mechanism for all this is increased stress in the mother, and stress is known to have stronger effects early in pregnancies.

Neither whites nor Hispanics show any effect at all. And oddly, although African-American babies react negatively to police shootings of black men, they actually react positively to police shootings of non-blacks. The most obvious conclusion from these results is (a) black mothers are especially sensitive to nearby police shootings, and (b) if it turns out that a non-black man was shot, it provokes a sense of relief that is sometimes good for the pregnancy.

The birthweight effect of police shootings ranges from about 50 grams to 25 grams, which is 1-2 ounces. That may not seem like much, but it’s a fair chunk of the average difference in infant bodyweight that’s long been observed between black and white mothers. Here is Legewie:

Exposure to a single police killing of an unarmed black individual during pregnancy accounts for as much as a third of the black-white gap in birth weight. This finding indicates that police violence is an environmental stressor that contributes to the stark and enduring black-white disparities in infant health and therefore the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage at the earliest stages of life. Birth weight and gestational age are not only related to infant death in the short term; the consequences are long term with implications for cognitive development, test scores, ADHD, and others.

….The study also has important research implications….By estimating the effect of police killings on birth outcomes, this study highlights how the criminal justice system can adversely affect disparities in health. Linking vital records with incident-level event data showcases an innovative approach to study the health consequences of acute environmental stressors. This approach encourages future studies based on vital records, medical claims data, or other administrative health records to examine the impacts of an array of events on population health including the persisting black-white disparities in infant health.

More research, please!

Uber has released its long-awaited report on the prevalence of sexual assaults in its ride-sharing business:

Note that this is per billion rides. In 2018 there were a total of 3,045 sexual assaults reported over 1.3 billion rides. This amounts to a little over 2,300 reports per billion rides, or about 2.3 per million. In percentage terms, that’s 0.0002 percent.

I don’t know how this compares to ordinary taxi rides, since no one seems to compile that information. However, a recent YouGov poll finds that 55 percent of women sometimes or always feel unsafe taking a taxi by themselves.

The American economy gained 266,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 176,000 jobs. This seems like a very robust number, but unfortunately most of it was a statistical artifact of a lot of people exiting the labor force. In real life, the number of employed was up modestly and the number of unemployed was down modestly. The employment-population ratio stayed the same as last month. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5 percent.

Hourly wages for blue-collar workers were up a very healthy 3.7 percent. With inflation running at roughly 1.8 percent these days, that’s a real hourly wage increase of about 2.1 percent. That’s a great number, and it would be even better if we could sustain it for several months running.