QTRS July 17, 2025
Graphs, commentary, and interesting content for the curious
As I see it…
I introduced this data rule a few weeks ago: An analyst uses data that contradicts their worldview to adjust it, while an advocate disregards or explains away such facts; be an analyst first. I should clarify that this dichotomy is not binary but rather a continuum. So, how do you know if someone is more an activist than an analyst? It isn’t always so clear, as we never know if someone is purposefully leaving out information or just doesn’t know it. Here is a wonderful example from this week.
Noah Smith wrote, Trump is enabling Chinese power - An incompetent, selfish, inwardly focused administration is making America less of an obstacle to China's rise. (7/16/2025) The title alone suggests that the author is more of an activist than an analyst, but several key statements are missing context or information.
First is the notion of China’s rise and general threat. He does eventually in the last paragraph add a caveat.
This doesn’t mean that China is going to rule the world. Ruling the world is a very hard thing to do, and there are many obstacles other than American power — China’s own internal power struggles and the limitations of its authoritarian system, opposition from its neighbors, long-term economic and demographic challenges, and the personal flaws of Xi Jinping. But with Trump making America more and more of a geopolitical nonentity, chaos agent, and wild card, the path to hegemony looks a lot smoother for China than it did nine months ago.
This all looks reasonable, but one of these issues for China is not like the others. Demographics. You can’t change policy or identify some technological solution to creating more 5-year-olds. China is likely at its peak now. Meanwhile, the link related to this term in the quote is also from Noah Smith. Fair enough, but the data he is using for China’s demographics is questionable. Peter Zeihan addresses this issue in a post dated May 26, 2025, where he notes that China recently discovered it has overcounted its young population by at least 100 million. Watch the video to discover how. Here is a good two-year-old video from him about China and the issue of demographics both the consequences and issues China has in counting people. It is difficult to rule the world while your country is in demographic decline.
The whole issue of China as a big threat and Trump screwing everything up is more rhetoric than anything.
But there is a bigger mistake. A key paragraph (bold mine)
Why did Trump cave on H20 chips and design software? The most obvious reason is that Trump has simply chickened out yet again. China has been hurting the U.S. with its own export controls on rare earths — minerals for which China controls the global mining and refining, which are key to the creation of powerful electric motors and lots of electronic components. Much of America’s economy, including the defense industry itself, has become dependent on Chinese rare earths. The Trump administration has been frantically searching for alternative sources of rare earths, but these will take a lot of time to develop; in the meantime, China has discovered an incredibly effective way to threaten America’s economy.
Did Trump just “chicken out,” and did China just “discover” a way to threaten America? For this we go to Doomberg (I consider Doomberg as very much an analyst, as with Zeihan)
Nearly two years ago, we coined the term Geopollutical Warfare™, an expression meant to describe the synergy between China’s geopolitical ambitions and its willingness to degrade its local environment in pursuit of them.
To put it succinctly, China has deliberately monopolized the market for rare earth metals by way of lax environmental standards. They didn’t just discover a tool to threaten the U.S.; they have purposefully done this. The control over rare earths is no small thing and is considered a national security issue. I’d chicken out over this too, although maybe I wouldn’t have started the trade war to begin with knowing this.
The administration hasn’t ignored this issue either. Again from Doomberg, which is a quote from the Washington Post (7/11/2025):
“The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare-earth mining company MP Materials by buying $400 million of its stock and helping it build a new processing facility to sidestep the Chinese market, the company said Thursday. The deal underscores how far the Trump administration is willing to go to subsidize production of high-powered magnets, a field dominated by Chinese firms although the materials are critical for U.S. weapons systems.
Las Vegas-based MP Materials owns the only rare-earth mine in the United States, at Mountain Pass, California, near the Nevada border. MP Materials CEO Jim Litinsky said the company aims to restore the full rare-earth supply chain in the U.S. and eliminate a ‘single point of failure’ in the country’s military-industrial base.
As for Trump’s trade war, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution quotes the FT (7/16/2025) and adds some context:
America’s trading partners have largely failed to retaliate against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, allowing a president taunted for “always chickening out” to raise nearly $50bn in extra customs revenues at little cost.
He notes this even though his view on tariffs is, “To be clear, I do not think this is good.” Short and worth reading.
In my opinion, the article downplays China’s demographic issues, overlooks how China has leverage over us with rare earths, omits the recent deal aimed at addressing this problem, and includes excessive derogatory language, which makes it seem more like advocacy than analysis. It may be worth reading, but one needs to read other voices.
I’ll add that regardless of where you stand on any president, endless name-calling reduces credibility and is only there to signal clearly whose side you are on—in other words, virtue signaling.
A longer As I see it this week, so I’ll keep the data light today.
Waste exporters
From the World Population Review Newsletter (7/10/2025). Apparently we are good at sending our garbage elsewhere and bad at recycling. We should and could do better.
The decline in coal plants
The eia reports on planned retiring of coal plants by region. I’m betting that we won’t see this many coal plants retired by 2028. Even if we did it isn’t enough to have a big impact on CO₂ emissions.
Bad graph of the week
USA Facts (6/26/2025) provides us with this graph of the 2026 proposed budget with changes from 2025. The idea is good, but it is really hard to see the difference between a $49.1B cut and a $1.78B cut. The problem is that the Defense Department is such an outlier that the scale for all other departments is too small.
Data center news
Data centers are increasingly controlling their energy supply. Meanwhile, data centers, which contribute to global warming, are increasingly at risk from the consequences:
Today in history
From the Library of Congress
On July 17, 1754, King’s College opened in New York City. The Anglican academy would later grow into the venerable Columbia University. The ten students of the college met for their first classes, in Latin and Greek, in a schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall treets.
The spinning CD
The band Ok Go is known for its creative and interesting music videos. Worth hitting play just for that.
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Please let me know if you think I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I would rather know the truth and understand the world than simply be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. I encourage you to share article ideas, feedback, or any other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.
Bio
I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College, holding a PhD in math (stochastic processes), an MS in applied statistics, an MS in math, a BS in math, and a BS in exercise science. I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I am a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations, and I’m open to job offers.
That plastic waste chart really needs to be normalised - your "compared to what?" question.
It makes Germany, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada look appallingly bad by comparison to the US on a per-capita basis.
Edit: agree about Smith. Excessive use of adjectives just makes it appear that the writer is not thinking clearly. And so can be safely ignored on that topic.