1. Chart of the Day I (above) shows the encounters at America’s southern border, which have exceed one million this year and reached a 21-year high of 212,672 last month. For July, that breaks down to 6,860 encounters every day, 286 every hour and almost 5 every minute. And that’s just counting the actual “encounters” at the border and not the many who likely crossed the Texas border undetected and “unencountered.”

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2. Chart of the Day II (above). Note the striking similarities between the frequently maligned “Income Inequality” in the US, and the “Olympic Medal Inequality” in Tokyo. Should we have “medal taxes” and “medal redistribution” to achieve a more “equitable” distribution of Olympic medals now that America has abandoned the longstanding principle of “equality of opportunity” for the new “equality of all outcomes” (except maybe for the NBA) principle.

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3. Chart of the Day III (above) shows the flattening of the CPI series for “College Textbooks” over the last five years after rising at a rate of about 7% every year from 2002 to 2015, or more than three times the average increase in consumer prices over that period. The traditional “textbook publisher cartel” has finally ended thanks to the increasing competition from low-cost and free “Open Educational Resources (OER)” like OpenStax.

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4. Chart of the Day IV (above). Rising consumer inflation has been getting a lot of attention lately but the even greater increases in average hourly wages not so much. Since 2019, average hourly earnings have increased ~50% more than the increase in CPI (11.7% v. 7.85%).

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5. Chart of the Day V (above) displays US energy production as a share of the nation’s energy consumption back to 1950 and shows that the US went from energy self-sufficiency and being an energy exporter in 2019 and 2020 for the first time since the 1950s back to being an energy importer this year through April.

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6. Chart of the Day VI (above) shows that US job openings exceeded an unprecedented 10 million in June, hitting a series-high more than two times the 4 million monthly average since 2001. Wasssssup with that? Generous unemployment benefits creating disincentives for the unemployed to go back to work? Workers reluctant to move to new opportunities?

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7. Chart of the Day VII (above). The collapse of US newspaper jobs continues – by 77% from the peak of 458,000 jobs in the early 1990s to barely more than 100,000 jobs today. We can thank Hurricane Joseph for those Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.

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8. Chart of the Day VIII (above). According to the National Science Foundation, the share of bachelor degrees in “Science and Engineering” between 2008 and 2018 at US colleges and universities were almost evenly split between women and men (the NSF includes social and behavioral sciences). But don’t we hear all the time about the concern about the “shortage of women in STEM”? And that concern has mobilized ongoing national efforts, funding, scholarships, fellowships, camps, clubs, programs and resources at the K-12 and college level devoted to trying to correct the “shortage” of women in STEM? Seems more like a non-problem to me.

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9. Chart of the Day IX (above) show the growing “racial earnings gap” over time between Asian men and white men. In the second quarter of this year, Asian men earned 32% more on average than white men. Or we could say that white men earned only 76 cents for every $1 earned by Asian men “for doing the same work.” Or to extend the standard gender pay-gap narrative that white men have to work until sometime in April every year to earn the same as Asian men earned in the previous year due to Asian privilege. And that discrimination could be the only reason that Asian men earn more than white men, etc. etc.

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10. Chart of the Day X (above) shows the collapse of Venezuela’s failed socialist policies in one chart. When Chavez was elected president in 1999, energy consumption per capita (as one measure of economic development and a country’s standard in living) in Venezuela was 2X greater than in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. By 2020, Venezuela’s energy consumption per capita had fallen by more than 50% and is now below its South American neighbors.

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