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Is Climate Change Pushing Pests into Northern Farms?

by dfonis5 Posted on September 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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In 1996 Colorado received a very unwelcome—and hungry—house guest, the mountain pine beetle, whose voracious appetite for pine has since killed off millions of acres of trees there. A few years later, the beetles came knocking in British Columbia and have now knocked out over half the province’s pine timber. The full-bore invasion of these critters, each no bigger than a grain of rice, is now one of the most pressing ecological disasters in the West, and their spread, scientists believe, is driven by climate change.

The beetles aren’t alone: Rising equatorial temperatures have pushed a menagerie of pests north at an alarming rate of nearly 10,000 feet every year since 1960, according to a new survey out today in Nature. Researchers led by biologist Dan Bebber at the UK’s University of Exeter combed through databases hosted by the non-profit CABI, which aggregates scientific and trade literature on agriculture, for the first documented appearance of over 600 kinds of pests (including insects, fungi, viruses, and bacteria), over a 50-year period in the Northern Hemisphere. They found, averaged across 14 taxonomic groups, a distinctive northward migration, wherein species first noticed at southern latitudes were, at a later date, discovered anew at northern latitudes.

The chart below, from the paper, shows the distribution range of the different pest groups Bebber examined, with the vertical axis indicating distance from the equator (positive distances indicate north; negative distances indicate south) and the horizontal axis indicating time, from 1960 to the present. Overall, the groups show a gradual northward migration over time (up and to the right):

Bebber et al.

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Is Climate Change Pushing Pests into Northern Farms?

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

by tf942pe Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Tesla’s Q2 results.

Tesla Motors surprised Wall Street this afternoon, announcing second-quarter profits of $26 million on $405 million in revenue. Since it reported its first modest profit in May, the electric-car company cofounded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk already had seen its share price more than double, and you can expect it to soar even higher when the markets open tomorrow. Many analysts, after all, were expecting Tesla to take a hit. But so far, the company’s profits have relied on government subsidies and initiatives.

Tesla’s own accomplishments are impressive. The company, founded in 2004, is selling its all-electric cars as fast as it can produce them, even though the baseline price for a Model S sedan is nearly $70,000. Car and Driver says the Model S is possibly the best car it has ever tested. Musk has built a successful company after years of scraping by low on funds while sinking money into researching and developing amazing cars.

In January 2010, as Tesla was developing the Model S, it received a $465 million dollar loan from the Department of Energy (DOE). That’s not to mention other, less direct subsidies, like the millions of dollars in subsidies in Japan that helped Panasonic develop the lithium-ion batteries that are at the heart of every Tesla car. Tesla’s modest first-quarter profit relied on $68 million from zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) credits it sold to other, less environmentally friendly car companies under a California emissions mandate. There’s also the $7,500 federal tax break for people who buy electric vehicles, which makes its pricey cars more affordable.

As for today’s results. Tesla earned $51 million on ZEV credits, without which it would not have been able to report a profit.

Tesla is a model for how government support can help bring ambitious new technologies to market. But you won’t hear Elon Musk saying that. To the contrary, he has tweeted about how he thinks we’d be better off passing a carbon tax instead of the hefty loan that floated Tesla at a key moment. Musk claims the DOE loan was merely an “accelerant” for Tesla. The company was “bailed in, not bailed out,” Musk quipped during an interview with Popular Mechanics last year.

Could Tesla have made it this far without government support? And will the company—not to mention Musk’s other enterprises, SpaceX and SolarCity—stand alone in the future? Let’s take a look at Tesla’s climb to success.

1. Starting in 2004, Tesla drums up millions in private cash so it can build an electric car from scratch. Musk leads several private financing rounds, and dumps in a substantial chunk of his own cash.

2. By 2008, Tesla has spent years designing its first car, the Roadster, but still has nothing to sell to customers. The car is taking years longer to bring to market, and costing a lot more, than Tesla execs had predicted. Tesla slashes its workforce. Musk takes over as CEO and eventually pushes hard for the federal loan, which Tesla receives in January 2010.

3. The loan helps Tesla get the Model S to market. The car gets (mostly) rave reviews, setting the stage for a successful IPO in June 2010, when Tesla raises $226 million selling stock to the public.

4. The IPO and brisk sales of the Model S (made more affordable by that $7,500 federal tax credit) allow Tesla to pay off its loan years early. In May 2013, thanks to $68 million in revenues from selling California clean-air credits to rival car makers, Tesla posts its first profit, a modest $11 million.

5. Profitability sends Tesla’s stock price soaring. Today’s earnings report may boost it even further.

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

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2012: A Year of Broken Climate Records

by dfonis5 Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

2012 was the eighth or ninth warmest year on record, depending on which dataset you look at, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual State of the Climate report, released today. That is just one of many extreme statistics identified in the survey, which pulls together the most recent information from hundreds of researchers worldwide on everything from temperature to sea level to Arctic ice. Taken together, the report’s authors say, the data paint an unmistakable picture of a warming planet.

“In 2012, certainly not every variable we looked at broke a record,” Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA’s climate data center, said. “I think what we’ve learned is one has to take a broad look at the climate system.”

The heat map above, from the report, shows how 2012 temperatures compare to the average baseline of 1981-2010. While Alaska, parts of Asia, and elsewhere saw a cooler-than-average year, it was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States (and, relatedly, an insanely expensive year for natural disasters), and temperatures in the Arctic are increasing twice as fast as the rest of the world. In June, Arctic sea ice minimums reached record lows, and over a two-day period in July more of the Greenland ice sheet was melting at once—97 percent—than ever seen before.

NOAA’s National Climate Data Center

Another landmark was sea level rise: 2012 saw the highest global sea levels ever recorded, the peak of a trend that has seen seas rising just above a tenth of an inch per year over the last two decades. Interestingly, in the last couple years, melting ice (the black line in the graph at right) accounts for twice as much sea level rise as does thermal expansion of warming water (red line). And the sea wasn’t just high, it was hot, too: Heat trapped in the top half-mile of the ocean remained near record highs. At the ocean surface, temperatures were among the 11 warmest on record, despite mostly flatlining since 2000 partly as a result of La Niña conditions that cool the sea.

Carbon emissions for the year were also their highest ever: In 2012, the world released roughly 9.7 quadrillion grams of carbon into the atmosphere, about one-tenth the weight of every living thing on Earth, pushing the atmospheric concentration higher, at least in some places, than at any time in human history. Other key greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide, also climbed from the previous year.

Sadly, all these shocking numbers weren’t much of a shocker to the report’s 384 authors from around the globe, NOAA’s Karl said; they merely offer the latest bundle of proof that climate change is happening: “We see ongoing trends continuing.”

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2012: A Year of Broken Climate Records

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July Jobs Report: More Deceptively Positive Numbers

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on August 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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The economy added 162,000 jobs in July and the jobless rate fell to 7.4 percent, according to new numbers released Friday by the Labor Department. But the drop in unemployment is mostly due to the fact that fewer people were seeking work last month, and thus were not officially counted as unemployed by the government; the total share of Americans with jobs actually shrunk.

As in recent months, employment rose in low-wage jobs like retail and food services. Retail added 47,000 jobs in July, and jobs in food service and at bars increased by 38,000. Employment also edged upward in the financial sector and manufacturing. July was the 34th month in a row in which the economy gained jobs.

But the labor force participation rate—the total share of Americans who are working—declined from 63.5 percent to 63.4 percent. Here is a chart that the liberal nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released recently showing how the drop in unemployment does not translate into a healthier workforce:

Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas explained why this is happening at the Washington Post Friday:

Unemployment has fallen 2.5 percent from its post-recession peak, but the share of working-age adults with jobs has barely budged….The popular (well, popular among depressed econ wonks) image of discouraged workers sighing and deleting their Monster.com account once and for all is wrong. The rate of labor force exit is actually lower than it was in the aftermath of the 2001 recession. It’s labor force entry that’s suffered.

In particular, it’s suffered among women—and it’s really suffered among young women—who are a lot less likely to enter the labor force than they were in 2002 and 2003.

That is, in certain ways, a more encouraging trend: Discouraged workers who leave the labor force typically see their skills erode. Young people who delay entry are often staying in school longer, gathering skills that will ultimately prove valuable to them (and student loan debt that will prove burdensome).

But that comforting possibility surely doesn’t explain all of the drop in entry we’re seeing among younger people. And it doesn’t really explain any of the drop in entry we’re seeing among older people.

If the US economy keeps adding jobs at the current rate, it will take about seven years to get back to the pre-recession jobs level, according to the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

That could be likely, given other economic indicators and expected policy. New numbers show that GDP growth was slower than expected in the second quarter of this year. Personal disposable income declined for the first quarter of the year, according to the most recent report, and average hourly earnings fell in June. Another budget impasse in Washington this fall may mean that sequestration cuts continue through this year and beyond. And the Federal Reserve could soon cut back on its economic stimulus measures given the recent superficially positive jobs numbers.

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July Jobs Report: More Deceptively Positive Numbers

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Charts: Racial Polarization Increasing in Higher Education

by Donekola Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

College attendance rates for African-American and Latino students have been increasing steadily in recent years. But here’s the bad news that comes along with that: those students are mostly attending non-selective four-year colleges and community colleges, while whites are increasingly attending prestigious colleges and universities, the Washington Post reports.

A study released Wednesday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that between 1995 and 2009, college enrollment more than doubled for Latinos and jumped 73 percent for African Americans, while only increasing 15 percent for whites. During that period, 80 percent of white college freshman enrolled in the nation’s top 468 colleges, while only 13 percent of Latinos and nine percent of African-Americans went to those selective four-year schools. More than two-thirds of African Americans and almost three-quarters of Hispanics went to non-selective schools. Look:

It’s not because minority students are less qualified. Thirty percent of African-American and Hispanic students who had an A average in high school attend community colleges, compared with 22 percent of whites, according to the report, which says that unequal educational outcomes for minorities can be attributed to things like family income, and peer expectations, but also to simply not being white.

“The higher-education system is colorblind in theory but in fact operates, at least in part, as a systematic barrier to opportunity for many blacks and Hispanics, many of whom are college-qualified but tracked into overcrowded and under-funded colleges, where they are less likely to develop fully or to graduate,” Anthony Carnevale, one of the report’s authors, told the Post.

Here’s how unequal college paths for whites and non-whites contributes to growing inequality in America, via the Post:

Students at the nation’s top 468 colleges are the beneficiaries of much more spending—anywhere from two to five times as much as what is spent on instruction at community colleges or other schools without admissions requirements. And students at top schools are far more likely to graduate than students at other institutions, even when they are equally prepared, according to the report. In addition, graduates of top schools are far more likely than others to go on to graduate school.

The financial implications of those differences are huge: A worker with an advanced degree is expected to earn as much as $2.1 million more in his or her lifetime than a college dropout, the report said. Also, the report said graduates of selective colleges earn an average of $67,000 a year 10 years after graduation, about $18,000 a year more than their counterparts who graduate from non-selective schools.

The report’s authors say that in order to combat growing racial polarization in higher education, more resources need to be directed to improve students’ academic experiences at non-selective schools, which often struggle with over-crowded classrooms and outdated materials. The authors say that colleges and lawmakers should also do more to bring black and Hispanic students into top schools.

The report comes just as the Supreme Court recently dealt a blow to affirmative action. In June, the high court allowed affirmative action to survive, but made it harder to institute as part of the admissions process, ruling that schools must first prove there are “no workable race-neutral alternatives” to achieve diversity on campus.

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Charts: Racial Polarization Increasing in Higher Education

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Fast-Food Workers Strike in 7 Cities to Demand Higher Wages

by Felixct7yh Posted on July 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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In a major address at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., last week, President Barack Obama launched a push to “deliver on behalf of those people that are still struggling” in this recovering economy. Some of his priorities include investing in green jobs, focusing on education and training, and raising the minimum wage. On Monday, in what will likely be the largest fast-food strike in US history, workers in seven cities are lending him a hand in the effort by walking off the job to demand higher wages.

Thousands of fast-food workers in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Flint, Mich., will strike at joints like McDonald’s and Wendy’s, calling for a wage increase to $15 an hour and the right to join a union without retaliation. (Although all American workers are legally allowed to join unions, many who try to organize are fired or punished with reduced hours.)

Many fast-food workers are paid at, or just above, the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage is $7.25, though it’s higher in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Fast-food wages have fallen 36 cents an hour since 2010, even as the industry has raked in record profits.

This is part of an economy-wide problem; the bottom 20 percent of American workers—some 28 million employees—earn less than $9.89 an hour, or $20,570 a year for a full-time employee. Their income fell five percent between 2006 and 2012. Meanwhile, average pay for chief executives at the country’s top corporations leaped 16 percent last year, averaging $15.1 million, the New York Times reports.

The Times has a great chart showing what low-wage America looks like. Here are the demographics of the 21 million workers who make between $7.25 and $10 an hour:

The mobilization of fast-food workers is a pretty new thing, because the industry has traditionally had high turnover. But the slow economic recovery, which has been characterized by growth in mostly low-wage service sector jobs, has resulted in a growing population of adult fast-food workers who can’t find other work.

Fast-food workers can work in the industry for years without more than a dollar or two raise. In his story on the strikes at Salon Monday, Josh Eidelson points to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project that explains why: “Opportunities for advancement in the fast food industry are significantly limited compared to other industries,” the report says. “Only 2.2 percent of jobs in the fast food industry are managerial, professional, or technical occupations, compared with 31 percent of jobs in the overall US economy.”

The strikes today follow waves of fast-food worker strikes across the country this past spring and last fall. And they are part of a string of recent strikes in other industries too. In recent weeks, federally-contracted workers in Washington walked off their jobs; and there has been growing worker discontent at Walmart over the past year.

As City University of New York labor expert Ruth Milkman told Eidelson of the Monday strikes, “As a consciousness-raising strategy for the United States, it’s really great.”

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Fast-Food Workers Strike in 7 Cities to Demand Higher Wages

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Here Is a Video of One Lobster Eating Another Lobster

by Unacoomt Posted on July 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Noah Oppenheim’s plan was simple: Rig a young lobster underneath a waterproof, infrared camera; drop the contraption overboard off the coast of Maine; and see who comes along for a bite to eat. The takers, he expected, would be fish: cod, herring, and other “groundfish” found in these waters that are known to love a good lobster dinner. Similar experiments conducted in the 1990s showed that apart from being snatched up in one of the thousands of traps that sprinkle the sea floor here—tools of this region’s signature trade—fish predation was the principle cause of lobster death. Instead, Oppenheim, a marine biology graduate student at the University of Maine, captured footage that looks like it comes straight from the reel of a 1950s B-grade horror movie: rampant lobster cannibalism.

Tim McDonnell

Warming waters can cause lobsters to grow larger and produce more offspring, and the last decade has been the warmest on record in the Gulf of Maine. That, combined with overfishing of lobster predators and an excess of bait left in lobster traps (see info box below), has driven the Maine lobster harvest to thoroughly smash records that stretch back to 1880. One of the side effects of this boom, Oppenheim says, is cannibalism: There are countless lobsters down there with nothing much to eat them and not much for them to eat, besides each other.

Tim McDonnell

Lobsters are known to chomp each other in captivity (those rubber bands you see on their pincers are more for their own protection that the lobstermen’s), but Oppenheim says this is the first time this degree of cannibalism has been documented in the wild (oh, yes, we’ve got the footage; check out the video above). From his remote research station on rocky Hurricane Island, floating in the lobster-grabbing chaos off nearby fog-shrouded Vinalhaven Island (one of Maine’s top lobstering locales), Oppenheim has seen that young lobsters left overnight under his camera are over 90 percent more likely to be eaten by another lobster than by anything else.

Tim McDonnell

While the lobster boom is clearly a terror for the lobsters themselves, it’s no picnic for the people here whose families have made their livings off lobster since before the Revolutionary War. Lobster prices are down to lows not seen since the Great Depression, taking a serious pinch out of profit margins already made slim by high labor and fuel costs. Even more unsettling is the prospect that the boom could go bust: Southern New England saw a similar peak in the late 1990s, followed by a crash that left local lobstermen reeling for years. Maine’s lobster experts worry that their state is next.

A crash here could have devastating results. Starting in the late 1980s, lobsters began to dominate Maine’s seafood catch: In 1987, they made up 8.6 percent of the total haul; by last year, that number had climbed to more than 40 percent. In part, the industry’s dependence is due to the fact that, increasingly, there’s an abundance of lobsters and a deficit of anything else. But at the same time, the state’s fishing permit system favors single-species licenses, so many lobstermen are locked into that product, a change from earlier decades where fishermen changed their prey from season to season.

In order to survive, experts say, Mainers will need to get creative with their tastes. For that, maybe they can take a cue from the lobsters themselves.

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Here Is a Video of One Lobster Eating Another Lobster

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Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos

by DenaeTina858 Posted on July 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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World map vector: Antun Hirsman/Shutterstock

More Mother Jones coverage of fracking.


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Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos


The Surprising Connection Between Food and Fracking


Mark Ruffalo, The Fracking Foe


WATCH: “It’s the Wild F*ing West Out There”


Meet Harold Hamm, Oil Tycoon and Romney’s Top Energy Advisor


The Texas Fracking Billionaire Who’s Bankrolling National Politics

Major earthquakes thousands of miles away can trigger reflex quakes in areas where fluids have been injected into the ground from fracking and other industrial operations, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday.

Previous studies, covered in a recent Mother Jones feature from Michael Behar, have shown that injecting fluids into the ground can increase the seismicity of a region. This latest study shows that earthquakes can tip off smaller quakes in far-away areas where fluid has been pumped underground.

The scientists looked at three big quakes: the Tohuku-oki earthquake in Japan in 2011 (magnitude 9), the Maule in Chile in 201 (an 8.8 magnitude), and the Sumatra in Indonesia in 2012 (an 8.6). They found that, as much as 20 months later, those major quakes triggered smaller ones in places in the Midwestern US where fluids have been pumped underground for energy extraction.

“The fluids kind of act as a pressurized cushion,” lead author Nicholas van der Elst of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University explained to Mother Jones. “They make it easier for the fault to slide.”

The finding is not entirely surprising, said van der Elst. Scientists have known for a long time that areas with naturally high subsurface fluid pressures—places like Yellowstone, for example—can see an uptick in seismic activity after a major earthquake even very far away. But this is the first time they’ve found a link between remote quakes and seismic activity in places where human activity has increased the fluid pressure via underground injections.

“It happens in places where fluid pressures are naturally high, so we’re not so surprised it happens in places where fluid pressures are artificially high,” he said.

The study looked specifically at Prague, Oklahoma, which features prominently in Behar’s piece. The study links the increased tremors in Prague, which has a number of injection wells nearby, to Chile’s February 27, 2010, quake. The study also found that big quakes in Japan and Indonesia triggered quakes in areas of western Texas and southern Colorado with many injection wells. The study is “additional evidence that fluids really are driving the increase in earthquakes at these sites,” said van der Elst.

Animated GIF: fracked Up?

Drillers inject high-pressure fluids into a hydraulic fracturing well, making slight fissures in the shale that release natural gas. The wastewater that flows back up with the gas is then transported to disposal wells, where it is injected deep into porous rock. Scientists now believe that the pressure and lubrication of that wastewater can cause faults to slip and unleash an earthquake.

Illustration: Leanne Kroll. Animation: Brett Brownell

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Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos

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These Numbers Show the Obama Administration Isn’t Following Its Own Deportation Policy

by epxxatlw Posted on July 9, 2013

Mother Jones

In August 2011, the Obama administration announced that it would no longer devote the scarce resources of the federal government to deporting undocumented immigrants whose only real crime was entering the US to find a job. Instead, the administration promised smarter enforcement, focused primarily on criminal aliens. “It makes no sense to spend our enforcement resources on these low-priority cases when they could be used with more impact on others, including individuals who have been convicted of serious crimes,” wrote Cecilia Munoz, the administration’s director of intergovernmental affairs, in a White House blog post. “This means more immigration enforcement pressure where it counts the most, and less where it doesn’t.”

Fast forward two years. New data crunched by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which uses the federal Freedom of Information Act to collect massive amounts of federal records, shows that little has changed since the administration announced the change in policy. In the current fiscal year, through June, only 14.7 percent of deportation filings have been related to criminal activity. Most of the rest have been for garden variety immigration offenses. TRAC points out that this is slightly worse than in the last year of the Bush administration, when 16 percent of deportation filings were criminal-related. And it’s far different from what was going on in 1992, when nearly 30 percent of deportation filings involved allegations of criminal activity. Of course, back then, the US was deporting far fewer people, just shy of 90,000 compared with more than 212,000 in 2012. Even so, the alleged criminals make up a pretty small percentage of the deportation docket.

The numbers vary radically by state, too. Out of the 700 deportation filings from Tennessee, only 11 were for alleged criminals. But in Hawaii, where 108 people were hit with deportation filings this year, 51 were alleged criminals, nearly 50 percent and the best record in the country for focusing primarily on criminal aliens.

TRAC’s numbers, taken from official federal data, have consistently undermined the president’s assertions that he’s trying to ease up on Latino communities by focusing only on criminals and not all the other immigrants in this country. The administration has insisted that past TRAC reports on this issue are wrong because they don’t have all the information on the criminal cases at the root of some of the deportations. TRAC, though, has asked the administration for more data, and the administration hasn’t been forthcoming.

The new immigration numbers offer one other interesting data point: Thirty-one people supposedly have been slated to be deported for terrorism or national security reasons this year. The vast majority of them were Cubans, Mexicans, or other Central Americans. Perhaps TRAC, or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, need some other way of categorizing these people, because it’s really hard to believe that they’re all alleged terrorists. After all, only Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) believes Al Qaeda has a big Mexican affiliate, and none of the people captured and identified as real potential terrorists are going anywhere, much less back home.

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These Numbers Show the Obama Administration Isn’t Following Its Own Deportation Policy

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There Was Some Surprisingly Good Economic News on Tuesday

by sseerss4tr Posted on June 25, 2013

Mother Jones

There was lots of economic data released Tuesday. We’ll start with the good news:

The 2008 bailout has largely been repaid: The US government has recovered most of the bailout funds it disbursed to financial institutions and auto companies under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) launched in 2008. The Treasury department has just unveiled a new interactive that tracks those funds so you can see for yourself.

The Treasury has recovered all of the $68 billion it disbursed since 2008 to AIG (the giant insurance corporation that insured a bunch of top-rated mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be junk):

The government has regained almost all of the $245 billion injected into banks since 2008:

And taxpayers have gotten back 62 percent of the $80 billion in bailout funds distributed to GM and Chrysler:

Consumer confidence is up: Despite the fact that Wall Street is freaked out about the Federal Reserve lightening up on its stimulus efforts, consumer confidence—the measure that gives investors a sense of how freely Americans will spend in coming months—rose for the third month in a row, far beyond what was forecasted. Economists have credited much of the increase to rising house prices; new numbers released Tuesday showed that April home prices were up 12 percent over last year.

But not everyone gets to be part of the recovery: Even though unemployment ticked downwards last month, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that “there are signs the job market is splitting into two” as the long-term jobless are being left in the dust:

Close to 25% of the short-term unemployed—those out of work for six months or less—find jobs each month, a figure that has shown steady improvement since the recession, though it remains below its long-term average of 30%.

The nation’s 4.4 million long-term unemployed haven’t seen similar gains. Only about 10% of them find jobs each month, a number that has hardly budged in the past two years. In a recent experiment, economist Rand Ghayad sent out mock résumés for about 600 job openings; those that showed six months or more of unemployment generated far lower response rates from employers, regardless of the other skills or experience.

And a final downer: the current share of the population that is employed is still far below what it was at the before the recession.

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There Was Some Surprisingly Good Economic News on Tuesday

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