QTRS March 13, 2025

Graphs and interesting content for the curious

Mar 13, 2025

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As I see it…

This past week we had the announcement of the cutting of about half the staff of the Education Department. On cue, plenty of folks are hysterical over the cuts. Here is an example of a post that came across my LinkedIn feed:

Make no mistake, mass layoffs at ED will not save regular people a penny. In fact it will cost them thousands if not millions. Trump is closing doors to people’s futures by making it harder to get a good education in an education-driven economy. Here are examples of what will now happen to anyone who seeks education or training beyond high school.

1. You will face much higher prices no matter where you go, including community college.
2. It will be far harder to get grants and scholarships or even work-study to help.
3. If you have to take loans, they will be much harder to pay back.
4. You will learn less thanks to declines in support for classroom learning and services that help.
5. If you get to college, you’ll be much more likely to drop out in debt without a credential of any kind.

Without the federal government’s active support of higher education, regular people lose access. And this is exactly what Trump wants— to discourage you from doing anything other than leaving meek lives run by billionaires.

Tell someone who needs to know about this horrendous and deeply reckless decision. Please.

My first reaction to this list was how much of it might possibly be true. I really didn’t know since I didn’t really know what the Education Department does. I’ll go with a list provided by NPR on Feb. 4, 2025. I figure this will give me a left-biased list.

Send money to U.S. public schools, which is by law created by Congress.
They have no impact or power over what is taught.
Manage college financial aid and federal student loans.
Maintain and collect data on colleges and college students
Track student achievement through the Nation’s Report Card.

Given this list, are 1-5 above possibly or likely to be true?

The only way this is true is if financial aid and student loans stop. I imagine much of this is automated and doesn’t take that many people to manage. Probably not true.
I don’t know why it will be harder to get grants, scholarships, or work-study. Will, for example, Pell Grants be stopped or slowed down due to the cuts? Maybe? Again, I figure much of this is automated and doesn’t take a lot of people, and those left at the Education Department will likely be prioritizing sending out money. Probably not true.
Huh? Why exactly will it be harder to pay back loans? This makes little sense.
Learn less? I don’t buy this. Education changes slowly, and I’m not sure teachers will not notice any changes. Sure, we may lose some education research, but I’m not convinced it has much impact. Probably not true.
Why will you be more likely to drop out? Maybe if your loans or Pell grants don’t come through. Again, probably not true.

Overall, I think most of these statements are more likely not to be true than true.

As I see it, the hysterics by the left based on every last thing Trump is doing or trying to do, as much of it will be challenged and held up in the courts, doesn’t help the left. If you keep saying the sky is falling and it doesn’t fall, you kill your own credibility.

Now, despite my criticisms of higher education, I do think education is, or at least should be, valuable. Every organization generally has more bodies than it needs. Some of the cuts won’t make any difference. 50% will likely mean something doesn’t get done, and it will likely be on the data collection and management side. Although I am concerned about the cuts, I don't believe they are likely catastrophic. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the population, lacking a college degree, remains unfazed by these cuts. My advice if you are on the left: don’t like or repost nonsense like that above. It isn’t helping you.

Now to some data.

Long-term hope by gender

Another interesting post from the American Communities Project: How Men and Women Divide on Hope for the Future of the United States. (3/5/2025) The graph below is long-term hope, and there is another one in the article on short-term hope.

Most groups are more hopeful than not (the yellow bars are positive), except in six cases, and women are generally less hopeful than men. I’ll point out only two cases that got my attention. College towns women are 12 points less hopeful than college town men and are 10 points less hopeful than hopeful. Is this tied to the data that point to liberal women being more depressed than other groups? Maybe.

Only one male group was less hopeful than hopeful: working-class country men. They don’t care about cuts to the Education Department, and the economy isn’t working for them.

It’s ok to diss men

You may have heard about implicit bias, and if you did, it was likely people’s supposedly innate bias against minorities. I ran into the 2023 article Intersectional implicit bias: Evidence for asymmetrically compounding bias and the predominance of target gender (hat tip to Tom Golden’s substack). It is behind a paywall, but a quote from the abstract is enough:

Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consistent pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class biases.

If you stop and think about it, in our current culture, it is acceptable to be negative against men. In fact, colleges have women and gender studies departments that partly make a living doing this, toxic masculinity and whatnot, but no corresponding men's studies department, but I’m sure this is just my white male privilege talking.

The WNBA

If you are a sports fan, you likely have heard that WNBA players are expected to opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement. A good question to ask is how much do you pay workers when you are losing money? In an April 22, 2024 article in the NYT, Can the W.N.B.A. Make Money?, what you won’t find, despite the article title, is this from an Oct 18, 2024 New York Post article:

This season the WNBA will lose $40 million, a bit better than the $50 million forecast and reported by several media outlets months ago but still a loss, sources said.

Basically, the WNBA hasn’t made money, and it depends on the NBA to balance its books. The New York Times is perplexed as to why it is losing readers' trust when it consistently fails to present a complete picture. Certainly, it takes time for a new sports league to money, but the WNBA has been at it for almost two decades. I’m also confident that early NBA players weren’t making much money. If the NBA wants to fund the WNBA, great, but the media should be a bit more honest here. You can’t compare the WNBA today to the NBA today, and the WNBA player salaries are effectively being subsidized by the NBA players or at least the NBA profits.

Our two countries

From Gallup (2/27/2025), we have this graph. Hmm, what happened from Jan to Feb to cause Democrats to drop 25 points on satisfaction with how things are going in the U.S. and Republicans to go up 68 points? I find this silly; maybe a little stoicism would do the country some good.

Issues with electrification

This comes from the iea report Building the Future Transmission Grid (Feb 2025), which notes the challenges to expanding and modernizing the grid. This also means that building, say, offshore wind farms, is getting more expensive because you need to run lines from the turbines and connect them to the grid.

Average lead times for cables and large power transformers have almost doubled since 2021. Some specialised components are even more difficult to source: waiting times for direct current cables – often preferred for long-distance transmission lines – extend beyond five years. High demand has also substantially driven up prices. Prices for individual orders are highly dependent on their complexity and capacity, which vary from project to project, but the results of our survey suggest that prices for cables have nearly doubled since 2019, and the price of power transformers rose by around 75%. Underlying materials like copper, aluminium and grain oriented electrical steel have also experienced price increases.

Deceptive graph of the week

I’m still perplexed that the eia (3/13/2025 and not to be confused with the iea) treats batteries almost as a source of electricity. Look at the rapid growth of battery capacity in this graph. We are saved.

Wait, let’s check the fine print.

Even though battery storage capacity is growing fast, in 2024 it was only 2% of the 1,230 GW of utility-scale electricity generating capacity in the United States.

Even this is misleading. 1,230 GW of generating means that you can generate 1,230 GW every hour provided the wind is blowing, the sun is shining, or the natural gas is flowing. 26 GW of battery can output 26 GW for one hour and then has to be recharged. So, we have enough battery capacity to run 2% of the grid for 1 hour before recharging.

Data center update

A bit of a dystopian report today with this headline Former Google CEO suggests building data centers in remote locations in case of nation-state attacks to slow down AI (3/12/2025). It seems this reliance on AI and data centers is very fragile in that it can be disrupted fairly easily with, for example, drone attacks. Are we effectively building a fragile future?

The Spinning CD

Luke Spiller is the lead singer of the Struts.

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Please let me know if you believe I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

Bio

I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm 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. I welcome any collaborations.