White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an “economic positive.” “A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive,” Carney said. “This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population”
An unemployment rate doesn’t drop two points in a month because kids are staying in school longer. And the amount of the “aging population” still in the workforce is near historic highs, since they can’t afford to retire. Once again we feel like we’re living in a world where it’s Opposite Day from the politicians and their captive media every single day. HT: GP
Following hard on the heels of the good “jobs” news from the mysterious disappearance of the American workforce, the Washington Post has another cheerleading story for the administration (“improved public confidence in his economic stewardship”) based on a “poll.” There’s just one little problem with the poll. It doesn’t disclose its sample. Cooked books, cooked polls. Ugh. What an ugly year 2012 is shaping up to be. Aren’t the “journalists” who “report” on “polls” and “jobs” like this embarrassed, even a little bit?
The US lost a security council vote on Syria. Russia has a Syrian naval base, among its many other ties to the Assad regime, so it was going to veto the measure all along. China opposed the resolution against Iran’s ally for reasons of its own. And the US response to all this was to complain about being held hostage. We fail to understand what purpose is served by the US losing a diplomatic battle so publicly and then whining about it. Please explain.
West wondered Friday. “Is this dramatic supposed decrease in black unemployment a result of job creation or is someone playing around with the census numbers?” Economists reached by The Hill for comment couldn’t fully explain the unemployment rate change for the black community. William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University specializing in African-American studies and economics, wrote in an email to The Hill that the decline could have been due to a smaller labor force. He called the drop an “unbelievably dramatic drop” but didn’t rule out the possibility of someone tampering with the numbers; he said there was no evidence one way or the other. “If a large proportion of the persons exiting from the labor force were black (and the exists [sic] presumably were due to people giving up on looking for work) that could drop the black rate without any significant new employment,” Darity wrote. “But a one month drop in the black unemployment rate from 15.8% to 13.6% strikes me as somewhat unprecedented.” President Obama hailed the January unemployment news as a sign that the economy is growing stronger.
When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 -– $1.2 trillion in all.
There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.
Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.” They still haven’t done the calculations -– or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet
The Labor Department reported a loss of 2,689,000 jobs in January…In January 2010, as I said, there was an actual, unadjusted job loss of 2,858,000 jobs. To make it simple, the government computers were expecting a bigger unadjusted loss than the 2,689,000 jobs because last January’s decline was 2,858,000. Why weren’t there as many job losses this January? Very likely because the weather throughout the country is a lot milder this year than during the past two Januarys. A loss of jobs that isn’t as bad as expected turns into a job gain. Does that mean there really are 243,000 new jobs out there? Absolutely not.
Let’s say there are rumors in your company that 300 people are going to be laid off. Instead, management decides to fire just 200. Two hundred people, of course, have lost their jobs. But, adjusting it for expectations, 100 people didn’t get fired. Using this analogy, the government would say that, on an expectation-adjusted basis, 100 jobs were created. That’s sort of what happened in the January employment report because of seasonal adjustment.
Let’s get this straight. Jobs went down 2.7 million instead of 2.9 million in January and this is a job gain of 243,000 jobs? Okay. The labor force lost 1.7 million people, which trnslated into a seasonally adjusted 1.2 million people, so the labor force participation rate continued its drop to historic lows among prime age workers.
Meanwhile, the actual non-seasonally adjusted jobs number for December and January is a loss of 2.9 million jobs (which the BLS translated, using a methodology that we were unable to determine, into a job gain of 446,000 jobs). And these jobs losses and labor force losses are a cause for celebration? Huh? It’s all kind of confusing to us, and not in a good way.
Zero hedge claims that 1.2 million Americans somehow dropped out of the labor force in one month. If that’s true, it’s both interesting and very odd indeed. What could be going on?
We used to say that when the Catholic Church discarded the Latin Mass, they threw out the baby and kept the bathwater. But bathwater would be a major improvement over what passes for acceptable language today among the young. If you can believe it, we heard this song on the radio today, and to the best of our knowledge, no one has gone to jail.
when I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it will make the economy stronger for everybody. But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years, and I believe in God’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato.
Words are like the tides. They come and go, nice to watch, with no lasting impact. Who cares if the Golden Rule is something else than represented above? Who cares if Plato said something other than claimed above? No one will check; no one will care. (We’ve seen it all before, over and over again.) Bonus points if you can figure out why Plato was included on the list.
We haven’t had much to say recently of a partisan nature, because really, it’s just awful out there, and boring too. Here’s a change of pace, however, with some cleverness added into the mix. The little sub-messages are a nice touch. HT: Ace
Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases…
In the United States, more than two-thirds of the population is overweight, and half of them are obese. About 80 percent of those who are obese will have diabetes or metabolic disorders and will have shortened lives, according to the UCSF authors of the commentary, led by Robert Lustig. And about 75 percent of U.S. health-care dollars are spent on diet-related diseases, the authors said. Worldwide, the obese now greatly outnumber the undernourished…
Lustig, a medical doctor in UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics, compares added sugar to tobacco and alcohol (coincidentally made from sugar) in that it is addictive, toxic and has a negative impact on society, thus meeting established public health criteria for regulation. Lustig advocates a consumer tax on any product with added sugar…ban the sale of sugary drinks to children under age 17 and to tighten zoning laws for the sale of sugary beverages and snacks around schools and in low-income areas
In a country where the EPA has issued an endangerment finding about a gas that is necessary for life to exist on earth, it is possible to imagine the government requiring a photo ID and a prescription to buy a bag of sugar. How life has changed in the last half century, and in many ways not for the better.
Officials in southern China appear to have averted environmental calamity by halting the spread of a toxic metal that had threatened to foul drinking water for tens of millions of people, the state media reported Monday. Officials said they had successfully diluted the concentration of cadmium, a poisonous component of batteries, that has been coursing down the Longjiang River…
half the nation’s rivers and lakes are unfit for human contact, and news reports of chemical and oil spills are commonplace here. Although the central government has invested more than $3 billion to improve water quality in recent years, officials estimate that more than 300 million people still do not have access to clean drinking water…
10 percent of the nation’s rice crop contained excessive cadmium levels. In several southern provinces, 60 percent of rice samples were found to exceed the national standard for the heavy metal…“Only when fish started dying did they publicly acknowledge there was a problem,” Mr. Ma said.
In China they have Real Pollution. In the US we have not had serious pollution problems in decades; instead we now have pretend pollution, and Americans are so mal-educated that they don’t even know it. 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities in the world are in China. The country’s water is appalling. And how about the great taste of melamine?
Meanwhile, in the US, we have geniuses like this: “Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now.” The US has 20,000 airports, while China has fewer than 200 for civilian use. Some infrastructure! Some genius!
CNN reports on the Vetters getting on a train in Charlotte, NC:
they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…
The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.
To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…
Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…
A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense
Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!
Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America’…Despite telling officials the term ‘destroy’ was British slang for ‘party’, they were held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes’ and had their passports confiscated…
Leigh was also quizzed about another tweet which quoted hit US comedy Family Guy which read: ’3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up! Federal agents even searched his suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming Emily was planning to act as Leigh’s ‘look out’ while he raided Marilyn’s tomb.
Bar manager Leigh, from Coventry, and Emily, 24, from Birmingham, were then quizzed for five hours at LAX before they were handcuffed and put into a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight. They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells…’They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. ‘I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.
Leigh’s charge sheet, alongside a police mug shot and finger print, added: ‘He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.’
NPR reports about a contract among Chinese farmers in 1978:
There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says. “Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.” In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate. So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest…
Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract. The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would get to keep some for themselves. The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18…
by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed. At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined. That huge harvest gave them away…
fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other farmers, at this moment in history, there were powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China’s economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to create China’s modern economy, was just coming to power. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model. Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China’s economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.
In 1623 William Bradford figured out the same thing after the Pilgrims spent two years on their communal farms: “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could…so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number…and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious…The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”
the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted — or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before — for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired
The rush out of the Egyptian pound is so rapid that Egyptian investors refuse to hold debt in their own national currency, even at a 16% yield. After Islamist parties won more three-quarters of the seats in recent parliamentary elections – 47% for the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% for the even more extreme al-Nour Party – the business elite that prospered under military rule is counting the days before exile. The first reports of actual hunger in provincial Egyptian towns, meanwhile, are starting to trickle in…
It seems unlikely that Egypt’s central bank will be able to prevent a banana-republic devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and a sharp rise in prices for a population of whom half barely consumes enough to prevent starvation. The difference between Egypt and a banana republic, though, is the bananas: unlike the bankrupt Latin Americans, who exported food, Egypt imports half its caloric consumption. Meat imports have already fallen by 60% over the past year…
Nearly half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate. Nine-tenths of adult women have suffered genital mutilation. Almost a third of Egyptians marry first or second cousins, the fail-safe indicator of a clan-based society. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day, and must spend half of that on food…It should have been no surprise that the Islamists swept the parliamentary elections, given the desperation of the people and the cupidity of the political system. The Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest secular political entity, polled just 9% of the vote.
Delusional as it was to expect Egyptians to support secular liberal parties that never existed and offered no solution to their desperation, it is all the more delusional to expect the Islamists to stabilize Egypt. The Islamist victory in the first round of voting last year almost certainly prompted the jump in capital flight in December, and the consolidation of Islamist power. Egypt’s middle class will leave and tourism, down by a third over the past year, will virtually disappear
We saw this sort of thing coming a year ago. But the wise ones said, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”
A modest lede from CBS: “A military judge has recommended no time in confinement for a Marine sergeant.” The underlying story can’t have been such a big deal, but then why then did it take seven years to adjudicate? (Bruce Kesler has been covering this story since it began so long ago in 2005. It looked pretty fishy to us too, way back when.) Again, why such a long time to get to a conclusion? Among other things, a US congressman went on the record in November 2005: “they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” And the clock began to tick.
Robert Samuelson discusses why the Fed failed to see the housing bust coming:
Hardly anyone asked whether lax mortgage lending would trigger a broad financial crisis, because America had not experienced a broad financial crisis since the Great Depression. A true financial crisis differs from falling stock prices, which are common. A financial crisis involves the failure of banks or other institutions, panic in many markets and a pervasive loss of wealth and confidence. Such a crisis was not within the personal experience of members of the FOMC — or anyone. Nor was it part of mainstream economic thinking. Because it hadn’t happened in decades, it was assumed that it couldn’t happen. There had been previous real estate busts. From 1964 to 1966, new housing starts fell 24 percent; from 1972 to 1975, 51 percent; from 1979 to 1982, 39 percent; from 1988 to 1991, 32 percent. Declining home construction had fed economic slowdowns or recessions. So the natural question seemed: Would this happen now? The answer seemed “no”…
There’s a paradox to economic policy. The more it succeeds at prolonging short-term prosperity, the more it inspires long-run destabilizing behavior by businesses, banks, consumers, investors and government. If they think basic stability is assured, they will assume greater risks — loosen credit standards, borrow more, engage in more speculation, relax wage and price behavior — that ultimately make the economy less stable. Long booms threaten deep busts. Since World War II, this has happened twice. In the 1960s, the so-called “new economics” promised that, by manipulating the budget and interest rates, it could stifle business cycles. The ensuing boom spanned the 1960s; the bust extended to the early 1980s and included inflation of 13 percent, four recessions and peak monthly unemployment of 10.8 percent. The latest episode was the so-called Great Moderation, largely paralleling Greenspan’s Fed tenure (1987-2006), when there were only two mild recessions (1990-91 and 2001). We are now in the bust. The Fed slept mainly because it overlooked the possibility of boom-bust.
(We certainly did not understand what was happening when we first noticed the sub-prime mortgage market in early 2007. Nor did we understand it well when the Bear Stearns conference call tanked the market in August of that year.) We think there’s another factor that was in play as well: computer models. Recall that the largest investment banks were allowed to write their own capital rules at this time by the government, because they were so smart and had very sophisticated computer models showing that they had excess capital even at ratios as low as 4-5%. GIGO as it turned out.
