Kevin Drum

This is a really good critique. I would not have thought to read this article as critically as you did, and likely would have accepted it at face value. But now that you mention it, there's more issues I see:

"This is the highest mass resignation the U.S. has seen since 2019, pre-pandemic, and the numbers are still rising. In June, 3.9 million quit. In July, it was another 3.9 million. In August, 4.3 million."

The [3.9M, 3.9M, 4.3M] sequence seems cherry picked. It could just be normal noise for all we know. To me this kind of argument could be easily summarized with simple data visualization, i.e. a line graph with more datapoints (expand 3 month range to a full year, stack more years for context). A histogram of monthly resignations to attach a %-ile to it would also be great, but may not be as intuitive and there's a lot of complexity involved in trying to understand significance.

The author follows the monthly resignation numbers with:
"The numbers are even more notable for young workers: in September, nearly a quarter of workers ages 20 to 34 were not considered part of the U.S. workforce—some 14 million Americans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who were neither working nor looking for work."

You interpret this as them saying 14M is a big number, but I think based on the preceding sentence, it's actually trying to say 14M is "more notable" than the ~3.9M in the preceding argument. I kind of think this is the case, as its a really common data mistake I…

Yeah I think the phenomenon is interesting and important to be aware of, but the berating political take isn't really that helpful or productive in my opinion — even though it ostensibly attempts to be unbiased in its criticisms. It would have been more productive to dive into what is working and what might be irrelevant, and how it might or might not generalize to other places.

There is a kind of implicit spin to it. I think it's worth a read, but it's also worth reading and thinking a bit about some of the sources it criticizes.

For example, in this piece the author admits that some of the sleight of hand can't account for increases in reading per se:

https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississippi-reading-miracle-looks-to-be-real-after-all/

However, if you think about it, the sleight of hand can still make the scores look better than they are overall. So while the improvements might still be valid, the comparisons to other states might not be — which is part of the primary substance of the essay.

I'm often disappointed in discussions about educational policy or curricula because so much of it has this cargo cult feel to it, masking political leanings with "objective" results. I say this about a lot of it, not just left or right-leaning discussions. It's almost like someone needs to make a fill-in-the-blank checklist critique of educational discussions (testing, admissions) like the old ones about email alternatives: focusing on means and not…

I think Kevin Drum (R.I.P.) covered this better than the author of this piece.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/

And, addressing the meta-analysis the New Yorker author places so much weight on:

https://jabberwocking.com/yet-another-look-at-that-lead-crime-meta-study/

The clincher is that competing hypotheses are almost exclusively concerned with phenomena in the U.S. and fall apart as explanations for the same cresting and subsidence of the crime wave in other countries, or even simply in other cities in the U.S. One city does broken-windows policing. Another doesn't. Both experience the same decline in the murder rate.

The author posted a link to an article[1] showing that Mississippi's retention policies were not responsible for the increase in scores.

> But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.

> ...

> In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.

[1] https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississippi-reading-miracle-looks-to-be-real-after-all/

>> Flint was one of the two largest crisis in state government in my life time.

If the Flint water crisis is one of the largest in state government, state governments are doing an exceedingly good job:

"Even at the height of the crisis, testing in children showed blood lead levels that were essentially the same as the Michigan average and far lower than Detroit, which had a safe water supply the entire time. During the whole of the crisis (which encompassed 18 months in 2014-15), the number of Flint children with elevated lead levels was 3.9%. In Detroit it was 8.1%."

-- https://jabberwocking.com/the-tragedy-of-flint-is-not-what-most-people-think-it-is/

I lost interest before I got to his political point (about inflation), but the comments made me go back and while it’s an interesting point, it ignores the fact that the current bout of inflation is almost certainly a consequence of the Covid stimulus plus the supply chain disruptions with a dose of war in Ukraine. And it turns out that inflationary pressures seem to be declining outside of the volatile food and energy sectors (see https://jabberwocking.com/inflationary-pressure-seems-to-be-easing/). I have a bit more faith in domain-specific analysis than abstract mathematical approaches.