10 Items from the week | 30 Mar 25
News from the past week, and a few other things.
👋 Hello Reader, I hope you had a great week.
Here are 10 items that stood out to me this week.
1. Big Changes Ahead for Voting Maps After Next Census (Brennan Center)
New population estimates from the Census Bureau point to significant changes in the composition of the House after the 2030 census. Using the new data, the Brennan Center estimates that if trends of the last two years continue, the South will gain nine seats in the reapportionment of congressional districts after the next census — the largest single-decade gain for the region in history. Florida and Texas could see especially large increases of four seats each, with Texas within striking distance of adding a fifth seat. North Carolina would also see its congressional delegation increase by a seat. These potential gains are driven overwhelmingly by communities of color. Census data released over the summer shows that between 2022 and 2023, more than 84 percent of population growth in the South came from increases in the region’s Black, Latino, and Asian populations, with more than half of overall growth coming from Latinos. The majority of this growth, moreover, was in just four states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas.
2. Parcels make up over 40% of USPS revenues, but account for just 6% of what the agency actually sends (Sherwood)
DeJoy’s five-year tenure has been eventful. Besides overseeing two elections where mail-in voting took an unprecedented role, DeJoy rolled out a modernization plan in 2021 to reverse USPS’s losses — amounting to a cumulative ~$87 billion across the 14 years to August — in the hopes of saving the agency from insolvency. However, since then, the plan has hit several obstacles, causing delays, backlogs, and mounting expenses. In FY24, revenues reached $79.5 billion, up 2% year over year, but net losses still clocked in at $9.5 billion, up 47% from 2023, as inflation weighed on operating costs. As mail’s fallen out of favor — the volume of mail handled by the service has almost halved since 2008 — USPS has become more dependent on its lucrative package business. Indeed, packages accounted for over 40% of its revenue last year, despite making up only 6% of total volumes.
3. Federal Reserve Posted Loss of $77.6 Billion in 2024 (WSJ)
The Federal Reserve ran an operating loss of $77.6 billion last year, the second straight year of large losses. Those losses are a side effect of the central bank’s campaign to aggressively support the economy during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and its subsequent decision to jack up interest rates to combat high inflation in 2022 and 2023. They don’t require the Fed to ask for any money from the Treasury Department and don’t affect the Fed’s day-to-day operations. The figures were disclosed [Mar 21] when the U.S. central bank published audited results of its 2024 financial statements. The Fed reported a loss of $114.3 billion in 2023. Generating profits and interest income isn’t a specific goal of the Fed but rather a byproduct of its conduct of monetary policy, which aims to keep inflation low and stable with a healthy labor market. Until 2022, the Fed almost always turned a profit, and it often returned hefty sums to the U.S. Treasury last decade when interest rates were low. But over the last two years, when rates were high, the central bank’s costs exceeded its income due to some complex monetary plumbing it uses to set short-term interest rates. When the Fed raised interest rates rapidly in 2022, it steadily had to pay financial institutions more money on those reserves. By September of that year, the Fed was paying more on interest than it was earning from its portfolio of securities.
4. Taxpayers Spent Billions Covering the Same Medicaid Patients Twice (WSJ)
Health insurers got double-paid by the Medicaid system for the coverage of hundreds of thousands of patients across the country, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in extra payments. The insurers, which are paid by state and federal governments to cover low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for patients who were enrolled—and paid for—in other states, a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data found. The patients were signed up for Medicaid in two states at once, in many cases following a move from one to the other. Most were getting all their healthcare services through one insurer in one state, even though Medicaid was paying insurers in both states to cover them. Private insurers oversee Medicaid benefits for more than 70% of the about 72 million low-income and disabled people in the program. The companies get paid each month for each person they cover. They aren’t supposed to get paid if a patient leaves for another state.
5. American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage (WSJ)
American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like. Stories of women complaining about the lack of quality men have long infused pop culture—from “Pride and Prejudice” to Taylor Swift’s oeuvre. Yet women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood. This seems to be changing. Over half of single women said they believed they were happier than their married counterparts in a 2024 AEI survey of 5,837 adults. Just over a third of surveyed single men said the same. A 2022 Pew survey of single adults showed only 34% of single women were looking for romance, compared with 54% of single men, down from 38% and 61% in 2019. Men were also more likely than women to say they were worried that nobody would want to date them. A rise in earning power and a decline in the social stigma for being single has allowed more women to be choosy. “They would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back,” Cox said. For young women especially, who tout their “boy sober” and off-the-market status on TikTok and other social media, the focus has shifted toward self-improvement, friendship and the ability to find happiness on their own. Surveys show a decline in teenage relationships, and Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Marriage rates for both men and women are in decline, in part owing to less pressure to pair off and higher expectations for a would-be match. “Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option,” said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They view looking for a marriage partner the same way that you view looking for a job candidate.” But men seem more satisfied with their options than women. A 2023 AEI survey of college-educated women found that half blamed their singlehood largely on an inability to find someone who meets their expectations. Less than a quarter of single men said the same.
6. How Prevalent Are Dyes in Foods? We Crunched the Numbers. (WSJ)
Across the country, lawmakers in states from Connecticut to Utah have introduced bills to restrict artificial dyes in supermarkets and schools, or require warning labels. In West Virginia, the governor is poised to sign a bill soon banning seven dyes from foods sold in the state. Removing them won’t be easy. A Wall Street Journal analysis of a federal database detailing food and beverage ingredients found that more than one in 10 products contain at least one artificial dye. More than 40% of items with the dyes use three or more, including popular pantry items such as some Pop-Tarts and Doritos.
7. Don’t get surgery on a Friday (VOX)
If you have any say, you might want to avoid scheduling your next surgery on a Friday. The most comprehensive analysis of what happens to patients who have surgery on Fridays versus Mondays, published this month in JAMA by more than a dozen US and Canadian researchers, is unequivocal: The people who underwent all kinds of procedures before the weekend suffered on average more short-term, medium-term, and long-term complications than people who went under the knife after the weekend was over. The study was based in Ontario and included more than 450,000 patients who received one of the 25 most common surgeries between 2007 and 2019. Canada’s universal health care program allowed the researchers to more easily track patients over time and it eliminated finances as a variable in how patients fared.
8. Drug Overdoses Are on the Decline, in Charts (WSJ)
The U.S. is making progress against one of its most devastating public-health threats: drug overdoses. Over the 12 months ended in October 2024, the country saw a 25% decline in overdose deaths compared with the same period the year prior, according to the latest preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 82,000 overdose deaths were reported. The leading factor? A falling number of fatalities involving synthetic opioids, a drug class in which bootleg fentanyl is the big killer.
9. Lessons from the happiest countries in the world (Economist)
The World Happiness Report is more a study of life satisfaction than smiles and laughter. It is based on a survey by Gallup, a pollster, where participants are asked to rate their lives out of ten. Finns are not known to gloat (or, for that matter, smile much). But in the latest survey they said their lives were a solid 7.7 on average—well above the global country average of 5.6. At the very bottom of the ranking, people in war-torn Afghanistan rated their lives just 1.4 out of ten. Various other organisations have found the Nordics to be some of the most stable, progressive and safe countries in the world. They dominate the high positions in The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, which measures the role and influence of women in the workforce. Deaths of despair, including suicides and unintentional overdoses, are quickly decreasing in the region, albeit from a historically high baseline (life-evaluation scores alone do not capture all of the factors that can lead to deaths of despair). The Nordics are also some of the wealthiest countries in the world per person, which typically has a significant effect on life satisfaction (see chart 2). On this measure countries in Latin America also stand out, reporting happier lives than their incomes would otherwise suggest. These countries have also outperformed the Nordics in other studies of happiness, such as how often people laugh or feel a sense of enjoyment. The researchers offer a possible explanation. They found that eating with people, compared with eating alone, was a surprisingly strong indicator of subjective wellbeing—as statistically significant as income and employment status. That holds true even when accounting for other factors, such as age and education. This might also explain why happiness in America and some other rich countries is falling (see chart 3). Americans increasingly eat alone, live alone and—when given the choice—work alone. In one survey 18% of young adults in America reported that they did not have anyone that they felt close to (although there are signs that the relentless increase in mental-health problems among young Americans has stalled or even gone into reverse). In many other countries, too, an erosion of meaningful connections is leaving people feeling lonely and glum.
10. The World Happiness Report Is a Sham (FP)
Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. America, despite being one of the richest large countries in the world, persistently underperforms: this year, the United States only comes in 24th out of the 147 countries covered in the report, placing it behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica. News reports about the World Happiness Report usually give the impression that it is based on a major research effort. Noting that the report is “compiled annually by a consortium of groups including the United Nations and Gallup,” for example, an article about last year’s iteration in The New York Times warned darkly that “the United States fell out of the Top 20” without a hint of skepticism about the reliability of such a finding. In light of such confident pronouncements, and in the absence of any critical voices in most of these news stories, you might be forgiven for thinking that the report carefully assesses how happy each country in the world is according to a sophisticated methodology, one that likely involves both subjective and objective criteria. But upon closer examination, it turns out that the World Happiness Report is not based on any major research effort; far from measuring how happy people are with some sophisticated mix of indicators, it simply compiles answers to a single question asked to comparatively small samples of people in each country: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you feel you personally stand at this time?” The obvious problem with this question, commonly known as the Cantril Ladder, is that it doesn’t really ask about happiness at all.
Have a great week!
The Curator
Two resources to help you be a more discerning reader:
AllSides - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Media Bias Chart - https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
Caveat: Even these resources/charts are biased. Who says that the system they use to describe news sources is accurate? Still, hopefully you find them useful as a basic guide or for comparison.