The two most widely traded oil benchmarks are West Texas Intermediate and Brent Crude. WTI is the benchmark for North American crude oil while Brent is the benchmark for Europe and the Middle East. The two grades are very close in quality, and historically have traded at very similar prices.

However, the spread between WTI and Brent started widening in 2017, and by early this year traders were largely united in suggesting that we’d reached a peak and it was time to become bearish on Brent. They were wrong:

The Brent-WTI spread did indeed start to narrow in March, but only for a short while. In May the spread took off like a rocket and currently stands at nearly 22 percent. This is a historical high aside from the period following the Arab Spring, when fears about Arab oil supply drove Brent prices well above WTI. Today, though, there’s nothing like the Arab Spring to explain what’s happening. There have been some vague notions floating around that Iran might try to close the Hormuz Strait, but nothing that seems very serious. And WTI inventories are up a bit, but not by enough to really explain anything.

So what’s going on? And does it mean anything serious?

Here’s the latest controversy over LA’s growing homelessness problem:

L.A. has estimated that staffing and operating a mobile bathroom can cost more than $300,000 annually — a price tag that has galled some politicians. During budget talks this spring, city officials estimated that providing toilets and showers for every homeless encampment in need would cost more than $57 million a year. “How many single-family homes could you build for that much money?” Councilman Paul Krekorian asked at a hearing at City Hall last month, saying that L.A. had to find a cheaper solution.

This comes on the heels of a report that the interim shelters LA is currently building are coming in both late and vastly over budget.

This is such a peculiar problem. I keep reading about it, and yet the answers seem so elusive. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that when cities house the homeless they aren’t allowed to take shortcuts. Their shelters have to be built to code and they have to provide handicapped access and they have to be supervised and so forth. Especially, in a big city, that’s expensive.  People are often shocked at the cost of building schools in big cities too, but that’s just the nature of a place with high land values.

And yet . . . it sure seems as if you could make fairly quick inroads by focusing at least some attention on merely making things better, rather than making things great. There are, after all, many different kinds of homeless people, and some them actively resist living in conventional shelters. Isn’t it possible to at least provide them something they’re comfortable with, even if it’s little more than a better tent in an area with food and sanitation and just enough supervision to keep it safe? Would this be illegal? Or attract endless lawsuits? I don’t know. But if the only answer is multimillion dollar shelters for every single homeless person, then even LA’s billion-dollar Measure H sales tax won’t be enough to make a real dent. And it won’t attract the folks who simply refuse to live in managed shelters anyway.

I know all this stuff has been thought through a thousand times already, and the biggest problem remains community opposition to homeless shelters in their neighborhoods, but still. It sure seems like there’s something not quite right about all this.

The Wall Street Journal says today that the South, after years of improvement, is now falling further behind the Northeast and other regions. Here’s the chart:

The Journal’s chart starts at 1890, which makes it a little hard to see that, in fact, the South’s convergence with other regions had pretty much stopped by 1980. Here’s a simpler chart that makes this clearer:

There’s not much happening here. The South had a couple of bad years in 2013-15, but aside from that its median income has puttered along for decades at about 85 percent of the level of the West and the Northeast, and it’s actually continued to gain ground on the Midwest. It hardly seems like there’s any real trend here aside from—maybe—a slow drift downward since 2000 vs. the West and Northeast.

That said, I’d be interested to find out what happened in 2013-15. That was a fairly dramatic drop and it happened in comparison to every other region—and it changes the whole character of the trendlines. However, nothing comes immediately to mind.

A reader emails me:

Twice now you have asserted that your “… read of the evidence is that the black-white IQ gap is almost certainly accounted for by environmental factors.” Would you please do me the favor of listing (in either a reply email or in Mother Jones) one or two of the sources for your conclusion so that I too may read them. Thank you.

I’m a little reluctant to do this. Partly it’s because I got bored with this argument years ago. The other is that I really don’t need a big pile of angry tweets and emails from the IQ truthers. Still, I’ll bet this is a common question that a lot of people are too diffident to ask about. So I’ll do it.

Two warnings before I start. First, the evidence isn’t bulletproof on either side. It just isn’t, and I’m afraid we have to put up with that uncertainty until neurobiologists figure out where intelligence really comes from. Second, I’m not trying to prove my side of the argument here. That’s not possible. I merely want to make a few points that should allow you to see that there’s plenty of reason to believe that genes probably aren’t responsible for IQ differences between racial groups.¹ Here goes:

First off, there is a black-white gap in IQ scores.² Nobody thinks otherwise. Nor is it likely that this is due to test bias or other test construction issues. The gap really does exist. The only question is: what causes it? Is it possible that it’s due entirely to genetic differences between blacks of African ancestry and whites of European ancestry? I doubt it for these reasons:

• Modern humans migrated into Europe about 40,000 years ago. That’s a very short time for selection pressures to produce a significant increase in a complex trait like intelligence, which we know to be controlled by hundreds of different genes. Even 100,000 years is a short time. It’s not impossible to see substantial genetic changes that fast, but it’s unlikely.
• Speaking very generally, recent research suggests that the heritability of intelligence is about two-thirds biological and one-third environmental. That amount of environmental influence is more than enough to account for the black-white IQ gap.
• There’s a famous result in intelligence studies called the Flynn Effect. What it tells us is that average IQs rose about 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century. That’s roughly 20 points of IQ throughout the entire period, and it’s obvious that this couldn’t have been caused by genes.³ It’s 100 percent environmental. This is clear evidence that environmental factors are quite powerful and can easily account for very large IQ differences over a very short period of time.
• The difference in average IQ recorded in different European countries is large: on the order of 10 points or more. The genetic background of all these countries is nearly identical, which means, again, that something related to culture, environment, and education is having a large effect.
  

  

• It is very common for marginalized groups to have low scores on IQ tests. In the early years of the 20th century, for example, the recorded IQs of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans and so forth were very low. This was the case even for IQ scores recorded from the children of immigrants, all of whom were born and educated in the US and were fluent English speakers. These IQ scores weren’t low because of test discrimination (at least not primarily because of that), they were low because marginalized groups often internalize the idea that they aren’t intelligent. However, over the decades, as these groups became accepted as “white,” their IQ scores rose to the average for white Americans.
• The same thing has happened elsewhere. In the middle part of the 20th century, the Irish famously had average IQ scores that were similar to those of American blacks—despite the fact that they’re genetically barely distinguishable from the British. However, as Ireland became richer and the Irish themselves became less marginalized, their IQ scores rose. Today their scores are pretty average.
• In 1959, Klaus Eyferth performed a study of children in Germany whose fathers had been part of the occupation forces. Some had white fathers and some had black fathers. The IQ scores of the white children and the racially mixed children was virtually identical.
• Over the past few decades, the black-white IQ gap has narrowed. Roughly speaking, it was about 15 points in 1970 and it’s about 10 points now. This obviously has nothing to do with genes.

I hope this makes sense. You can draw your own conclusions, but my take from all this is that (a) the short time since humans migrated to Europe doesn’t allow much scope for big genetic changes between Africans and Europeans, (b) it’s clear that environment can have a very large effect on IQ scores, and (c) anyone who thinks the marginalization of African Americans isn’t a big enough effect to account for 10-15 points of IQ is crazy. There are counterarguments to all my points, and none of this “proves” that there can’t possibly be genetic differences between blacks and whites that express themselves in noticeable differences in cognitive abilities. But I sure think it’s very unlikely.

¹Nor am I addressing the issue of whether race is socially constructed. There’s enough to talk about already without getting into that.

²In this post, I’m using IQ and “intelligence” interchangeably. Most intelligence researchers believe that IQ scores are a pretty good measure of the cognitive ability that we commonly call intelligence.

³Nothing that changes over a period of decades or centuries can be caused by changes in genes. At a minimum, it takes thousands of years for genetic changes to spread throughout a population.

Yesterday I wrote a post about the latest results of James Stimson’s national mood index, and I had a couple of questions about it. First, I wondered what it meant to say that a lot of people had a “liberal” view on something like inflation or the deficit. Second, I wondered if the increasing liberalness of the index was driven by liberals getting more liberal or by centrists and conservatives moving toward liberal views.

James Stimson himself wrote back with answers, so I thought I’d share. The mood index is based on an aggregation of various surveys throughout the year, and here’s what he says about how the underlying calculations work:

What does it mean that a particular issue or topic is strongly associated with the mood estimate? First, the underlying assumption of the estimation process is that survey questions are comparable to exactly the same question at different times. So take the Gallup question about taxes: “Do you think the federal income taxes that you pay are too high, too low, or about right?” Not surprisingly, the number claiming that taxes are too low is very small. But the number claiming that they are about right varies over time and is highly correlated with other aspects of liberalism. So even though a majority says “too high,” the size of the tolerant minority varies and is highly related to other aspects of liberalism. It is change over time that drives everything. So on this question we have a conservative majority that is moving toward liberalism.

What does growing liberalism mean? The calculation of the index takes each survey question and collapses the possible response into liberal responses, conservative responses, and neutral or uncodable responses. So a score of 69 for 2018 means that for the typical survey question that year (weighted by validity), about 69 percent chose the liberal response options and 31 percent chose the conservative ones. Imagine that on a question on the ACA the responses are:

• Strongly Support 26%
• Support 24%
• Neutral 10%
• Oppose 20%
• Strongly Oppose 20%

Both Strongly Support and Support would be coded liberal while Strongly Oppose and Oppose would be coded conservative. Now the crucial point: moving from Support to Strongly Support has no effect whatsoever on the scale score; they are both liberal responses. So the answer to your question is that increasing liberalism scores mean that more people are choosing the liberal responses than in the comparison year. Thus this is not liberals becoming more liberal, it is more people becoming liberal (without regard to degree).

I was diddling around with some stuff after reading that New Zealand will henceforth be prioritizing happiness—“well-being and life satisfaction”—over economic growth, and came across this scatterplot about perceived happiness vs. actual happiness:

In every single country, the average estimate of happiness is far lower than actual reported happiness. Every single country! In the US, 90% of people say they’re happy, but the average guess is that only 50 percent of people say they’re happy. Is this because:

1. We are really lousy at estimating the happiness of others?
2. We implicitly assume that poor people must be unhappy, and there are a lot of poor people?

         or

3. People lie a lot (or delude themselves) about how happy they are when pollsters ask?

My guess is that it’s a lot of (a) and a little bit of (c).

Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for my representative in the United States Congress!

Wow @RepKatiePorter out-funnied Bill Maher on his own show. Maher said he’s “squishy” on choice because his mom almost didn’t have him, and Porter absolutely brought down the house with this response pic.twitter.com/F6WDDfYSqQ

— Tommy Xtophernobyl (@tommyxtopher) June 8, 2019

I had lunch at Del Taco today, so I decided to try one of their Beyond tacos, made with Beyond synthetic beef. My verdict: I think they made it a little spicier to cover up the flavor of Beyond’s “plant-based meat,” but the result was adequate. I don’t think it would win any blind taste tests, but it was fine—and I say that as a confirmed meat-aholic.

The New York Times confirms what I said last night:

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

….Mr. Trump hailed the agreement anyway on Saturday….It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico.

….Having threatened Mexico with an escalating series of tariffs — starting at 5 percent and growing to 25 percent — the president faced enormous criticism from global leaders, business executives, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and members of his own staff that he risked disrupting a critical marketplace. After nine days of uncertainty, Mr. Trump backed down and accepted Mexico’s promises.

On the other hand, one of my fans emails to say that I just don’t get it:

You really are dumb aren’t you little boy? You have zero knowledge how negotiating works, Trump has effectively put even more pressure on the Mexican govt to adhere to their side of the agreement….etc.

In other words: no, the deal didn’t accomplish much of anything new, but yes, Trump’s base believes him when he says it’s the greatest thing ever. Mission accomplished!

This teaser on the front page of the New York Times tells the story of the current state of women’s tennis:

The winner of the French Open was a woman who gave up the sport a few years ago and is currently ranked #8. The runner-up was a woman ranked #38. Aside from Barty, none of the top twenty seeds even made it to the semifinals.

Serena Williams is 37 and still recovering from childbirth. She’s not playing at the heights she used to and is obviously nearing the end of her career. But no one seems to want to take her place. Here are the winners of the women’s slam titles since 2017:

• Serena Williams
• Jeļena Ostapenko
• Garbiñe Muguruza
• Sloane Stephens
• Caroline Wozniacki
• Simona Halep
• Angelique Kerber
• Naomi Osaka
• Naomi Osaka
• Ashleigh Barty

Naomi Osaka has won twice, and that’s it. She lost in this year’s French Open in the third round. No other woman has won multiple majors since 2017, and even if you go back to 2013 you’ll find only two more aside from Williams (Kerber and Muguruza). It’s not clear if nobody has the talent, or if nobody has the will, but either way there’s nobody who seems like even a remote candidate for future induction into the Hall of Fame.

In a way, I suppose this isn’t surprising. In tennis generally, but especially on the women’s side, everyone plays the exact same game: a big, baseline, power game. There are still a few serve-and-volleyers among the men, but not the women. Nor does anyone play the angles or try to win on consistency or cunning. They just pound the ball from the backcourt, and it’s hard to put together a string of victories when you’re playing the same game as all your competitors. Williams did it by being a better pure athlete than anyone else, but people like that don’t come along very often.

I know that not everyone agrees about this, but it feels to me as if women’s tennis has become sort of gray and monotonous. There’s no clash of styles and no one who seems able to win more than a major or two. It’s kind of dull these days.