The Washington Post reports that a bipartisan group of 370 former federal prosecutors say that President Trump obstructed justice. No kidding. But here’s the key part:

“We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,” they added. “Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here . . . But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.”

It’s not even a close call. That’s obviously correct to anyone who’s actually read the Mueller report—and Mueller himself made it pretty clear that he would have recommended obstruction charges if not for the fact that he felt it would be unfair since DOJ wouldn’t prosecute and therefore the president wouldn’t have a chance to defend himself.

This is the mirror opposite of what happened to Hillary Clinton. In his press conference, James Comey said that case also wasn’t a close call. Clinton might have made some mistakes, but it was clear that she didn’t knowingly violate any laws.

But that made no difference to Republicans. They chanted “Lock her up” regardless, just as they’ll refuse to do anything about Trump even though he is guilty. Hell, Trump is straight-up retweeting white nationalists these days and Republicans won’t even suggest that maybe he should stop.

Still, if DOJ won’t prosecute, Congress can still initiate impeachment proceedings. What else should be done in the case of a president who, unquestionably and deliberately, has serially violated the law and shows no signs of stopping?

MONDAY NIGHT UPDATE: Now we’re up to 450 prosecutors. Impressive!

Huh. I see that Donald Trump doesn’t want Robert Mueller to testify before Congress. I wonder why?

A few days ago I wrote a post about the rise in maternal mortality in America, and in particular the stunning difference between black and white mothers in the rate of maternal death. Using a back-of-the-envelope look at patterns of racial bias vs. racial differences in maternal mortality, I found little reason to think that racism among delivery doctors was the likely cause of this. I got some pushback about this on Twitter, mostly saying that the delivery room was too narrow a focus. At the very least I needed to look at the entirety of prenatal care, and beyond that the differences in black-white lifetime medical care.

That was fair enough, so I decided to look into this. Fair warning: this post is longish and chart-tastic and doesn’t come to any firm conclusions. Read on at your own risk. To start, here’s the basic problem we’re dealing with:

Not only is the maternal mortality rate going up, but the difference between black and white mothers has been widening. Nor is this something that’s been recognized only recently: there are papers going back more than 20 years on the subject. That said, there are shockingly few rigorous studies trying to tease out the causes of this disparity. Last year, for example, the New York Times Magazine published a long article about black maternal mortality written by Linda Villarosa, a journalist who’s been following the subject for many years:

The reasons for the black-white divide in both infant and maternal mortality have been debated by researchers and doctors for more than two decades. But recently there has been growing acceptance of what has largely been, for the medical establishment, a shocking idea: For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.

“Growing acceptance” is correct, and the toxic stress hypothesis is intuitively appealing. It’s also theoretically appealing, since there are known pathways for stress to affect pregnancy and childbirth. But for all its length, the article provides no real evidence for it. One reason for this is the “Hispanic paradox”: Hispanics certainly encounter systemic racism too, but the maternal mortality rate for Hispanic mothers is about the same as for white mothers.

Consider the following chart. It comes from a study that measured the average “allostatic load” for blacks, whites, and Hispanics. There’s no firmly accepted definition of allostatic load, but generally speaking it’s a combination of factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and inflammation that are thought to be strongly influenced by long-term stress. The problem is that if you accept both the AL theory and the toxic stress hypothesis, they don’t seem to correlate well. Here are results from a large-scale study using NHANES data:

The differences in allostatic load are tiny—about the equivalent of one IQ point on an intelligence test—and Hispanics have a higher allostatic load than either blacks or whites but the lowest maternal mortality rate. Note that although this is highly suggestive, it’s still a comparison of groups, so it doesn’t prove anything firmly. What you’d really like to see is a study that measures allostatic load in individuals during pregnancy and then analyzes whether it’s predictive of later maternal mortality. But that study doesn’t seem to exist.

However, there are multiple studies confirming that racial differences in allostatic load are small. One study—also with large sample sizes—reviewed three different measures of allostatic load. Using standard deviations to normalize them, the three measures showed that blacks had a mean allostatic load that was 0.1, 0.2, and 0.29 SDs higher than whites. Taking the average, this suggests that blacks have an AL about 0.2 SDs higher than whites—roughly the equivalent of three IQ points. A third study, unfortunately, doesn’t report standard deviations, but the results that were reported are consistent with a black-white difference of perhaps one-quarter of a standard deviation. Taken together, then, the black-white difference in allostatic load appears to be the equivalent of 1-3 points on an IQ test. That’s barely enough to be noticeable.

Finally, a fourth study in New Orleans found that black mothers had a lower allostatic load than white mothers. This result is probably a fluke, but it’s consistent with the other studies, all of which showed that racial differences in allostatic load are quite small.

What about other measures of stress? They’re hard to come by, but Arline Geronimus, who originated the “weathering” theory to explain black-white differences, has studied the length of telomeres in black and white women. Telomeres are the stabilizing caps on chromosomes, which shorten with age. Geronimus found that in middle-aged women, the telomeres in black women suggested an “age” about 7.5 years higher than in white women. It’s impossible to say what this means about the telomeres in younger women, but certainly the aging difference would be less, perhaps 2-3 years at most. Again, this suggests a fairly small difference between black and white women.

Perhaps even more puzzling for the toxic stress hypothesis, self-reported stress among the poor is lower for blacks than for whites:

Poor blacks report less stress and higher levels of optimism than both poor whites and poor Hispanics. Put all this together and the toxic stress/weathering hypotheses look shaky. The racial differences are modest and don’t seem to correlate well with maternal mortality anyway. The problem is that every other hypothesis seems wrong too. Researchers have looked at poverty, education, drinking, smoking, and genetic causes. None of them appear to be the answer. Highly-educated black women, for example, experience maternal mortality at much higher levels than highly-educated white women. So lack of education isn’t the cause. Another possibility is the timing of prenatal care, which differs moderately between black and white mothers, but studies suggest that it doesn’t explain the difference in maternal mortality either.

This mystery is what makes the toxic stress hypothesis appealing: it seems reasonable, since black women of all incomes and education experience stressful incidents of racism throughout their lives, and nothing else seems to account for their higher rate of maternal mortality. But if toxic stress turns out not to be the answer, what is? The first thing to look at is the causes of maternal mortality:

The three causes with the biggest black-white differences are cardiomyopathy (heart disease), embolism (blood clots), and eclampsia (a pregnancy-related illness that produces swelling and high blood pressure). All of these are related to the circulatory system. We can also look at black-white differences in diagnostic indicators during and after delivery. The following chart from a CDC study is complicated, so take a look at it and then read the explanation:

In this study, the researchers grouped hospitals as those that primarily served whites and those that primarily served blacks. The question is, are there differences in how black mothers are treated or diagnosed depending on the type of hospital? As you can see, the black-white differences (black bars) are fairly small for most indicators. They’re truly large only for two: PCD (problems with blood vessels in the brain during the six weeks following delivery) and IHM, or in-hospital mortality

The reasons for both of these are unclear. The white hospitals, in general, provided better care, but it’s not obvious why they’d diagnose post-delivery cerebrovascular disorders in black mothers so much more often than black hospitals. Is it because of a genuine difference, or simply due to better diagnostics?

Then there’s the startlingly high in-hospital mortality rate in white hospitals vs. black hospitals. However, this isn’t about the general fact that black mothers die at higher rates than white mothers. We already know that. What it seems to tell us is that there’s a difference in when black mothers die. Any pregnancy-related death within a year of delivery is counted as maternal mortality, and the difference in IHM rates suggests that in white hospitals black mothers die at high rates in the hospital, while in black hospitals they die at high rates after going home.

What we’re left with is this: Poverty, education level, drinking, smoking, and genetic causes don’t seem to explain the black-white difference in maternal mortality. The timing of prenatal care doesn’t explain it. Medically, the cause of the difference appears to be related to the circulatory system, which is sensitive to stress. This makes the toxic stress hypothesis intuitively appealing, but it has little rigorous evidence supporting it. There’s some modest evidence that wider use of doulas could reduce both infant and maternal mortality, but no evidence that it would reduce the black-white gap.

This is shocking: we still have almost no idea of what’s going on even though this has been a well-known problem for more than two decades. Even California, which has cut its maternal mortality rate in half over the past ten years—mostly by reducing the use of cesarian sections—has cut it equally for both black and white mothers. The enormous difference in black-white maternal mortality persists even in the state with by far the most success at addressing it.¹

But there’s finally some good news on this front. The reason we know so little is that there’s hardly any funding for research into the causes and prevention of maternal mortality. That changed a few months ago when Congress passed a bill that authorizes $58 million per year for the next four years to study maternal mortality. Hopefully a portion of this funding will be used specifically to study the black-white gap. For example, instead of looking at group differences in stress as measured by allostatic load—which is cheap but tricky to do right—we really need a study that measures allostatic load in individuals during pregnancy and then analyzes whether it’s predictive of later maternal mortality. With any luck, that’s the kind of study we’ll now be able to conduct.

¹California has recently added a specific program to look into the black-white gap, but it’s fairly new and hasn’t yet produced any results.

A couple of days ago somebody asked me why my wildflower pictures look different than most pictures you see. The answer turns out to be that my camera is weird—but mostly in a good way.

Typically, if you want to take a close-up shot, you set your camera to its widest angle setting because that’s where you can focus the closest. Here’s what this looks like:

That’s OK. But my camera’s lens is an odd one. Normally, the more you zoom, the farther away you have to be. But on the Sony, the closest focus is at the longest zoom setting. It’s also tack sharp. Here’s what that looks like:

The top picture is cropped, and I modified the exposure of both images slightly to make them look more similar. On the normal shot at the top, the angle of view is wide and the depth of field is deep, which means the background is only moderately out of focus. On the bottom shot, taken at 600mm, the angle of view is very narrow and the depth of field is shallow, which means the background is way out of focus. This makes the flower pop out of the background.

On the downside, that shallow depth of field also means that sometimes parts of the flower itself are out of focus. In the example above, the stamens of the flower are sharp but the edges of the petals are a little soft. This may or may not be an effect you like, but you can always use a smaller f-stop if you want a little more depth of field. Like this:

In this one, the entire flower is sharp but the background is still pleasantly out of focus. You can decide for yourself which of these you like better, but I generally prefer the middle picture: mostly sharp and with excellent bokeh in the background. But this is only possible with a camera that focuses closely even at its maximum zoom. In 45 years of on-and-off photography, I’d never come across a lens like that until I got the Sony.

POSTSCRIPT: As usual, none of this applies to professional photographers, who would probably use a 100mm macro lens on a top-of-the-line camera with a full-frame sensor to take pictures like this. That will get you a sharp focus, a fairly narrow angle of view, and a shallow depth-of-field. It will also set you back $5,000 or more.

Let’s give Hopper and Hilbert a break this week and check in on my mother’s cats. This is a rare sighting of Luna, who does not usually allow strangers to get within camera distance. As you can see, she’s keeping a close eye on me even though I was about 30 feet away at the time. After I took this picture I moved very carefully a couple of feet toward her and sat down in a chair. That was too much and she took off like a shot. But at least I got this picture.

From the New York Times, reporting on President Trump’s description of a phone call today with Vladimir Putin:

Mr. Trump also gave no indication that he warned Mr. Putin against Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election.

Don’t be silly. Why would he do that when it worked out so well last time?

Since I mentioned blue-collar earnings this morning, I thought you might be interested in a longer-term look at what’s technically called the “production and nonsupervisory hourly earnings” series:

The light green at the end shows how much wages will increase in 2019 if they keep up the pace of the first four months. Just think: after a mere 40 years, blue-collar hourly wages have finally made up their losses from the short (but sharp) Iranian oil-embargo slump followed by their grim decade-long slide during the Reagan-Bush era. Thanks to increases during the Clinton and Obama presidencies—interrupted only by the stagnation of the Bush 43 presidency—blue-collar workers are finally making as much as they did in the mid-70s.

The latest iteration of infrastructure week ends today, and as usual the prospect of new infrastructure has ended too. Also as usual, it was Republicans who killed the idea:

Every few months, President Donald Trump gets in the negotiating room with Democrats and everyone leaves happy — except for the president’s own party.

….This time, Republicans had to rein in the president from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue since they didn’t have a seat at the table. But the message was basically the same: Trump’s tentative infrastructure agreement with Democrats is little more than a pipe dream that won’t go far in the GOP-controlled Senate. “A lot of us enjoy watching … the trial balloons he floats. And oftentimes they’re extreme and aspirational,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “And then the pushback comes, oftentimes from his own party.”

….Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) emphasized that any legislation needs to be fully paid for and sought to put some perspective on the massive price tag. “Two trillion is really ambitious. If you do a 35-cent increase in the gas tax for example, index for inflation, it only gets you half a trillion,” said Thune, a former commerce chairman.

Well, fine, let’s do a 35-cent increase in the gas tax and settle for half a trillion. We’d get more infrastructure and a little less gasoline use. What’s not to like?

Just kidding, of course. That’s a tax increase. We all know that’s unpossible. Really, the only way to fund infrastructure is to cut Medicaid and food stamps and then privately finance all the construction, to be paid for by tolls on its usage. No serious person really entertains any other possibility.

The American economy gained 263,000 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 173,000 jobs. The unemployment rate declined to 3.6 percent.

It’s an odd jobs report this month. The size of the labor force dropped by almost half a million, and both the number of employed people and the number of unemployed people went down. The employment-population ratio remained unchanged from last month. Still, job growth was pretty strong, and our economic expansion appears to be rolling along without any letup.

Average hourly earnings of blue-collar workers went up at an annualized rate of 3.8 percent compared to March, which is very good considering that the inflation rate is very low. Here’s the year-over-year growth in blue-collar wages over the past few years:

The last six months have all seen wage growth higher than 1 percent. That’s pretty good if we can keep it up.

I like to keep track of incarceration rates, and the data for 2017 is now available. The good news is that the black imprisonment rate has dropped 40 percent from its peak in 2001:

The rate of black incarceration is still 4.7x the rate of white incarceration, but that’s down from 7.1x in 2001. Progress on this front is slow, but at least it’s going in the right direction.

The full 2017 report is here. Keith Humphreys has more to say about it here.