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"Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

by AntoniettaHuie Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Tracy Treu worked at Mother Jones from 1998 to 2006 and is married to former Oakland Raiders center Adam Treu, who played 10 seasons in the NFL.

I’m so fed up by people blaming Janay Rice. We’re asking for incredible bravery, and we’re giving little compassion to this woman. Because it’s so easy to say: “Well, she’s the fool who married him. Why doesn’t she just leave?” There are just so many components to it that people aren’t aware of.

The NFL is a culture that values secrecy. When you’re with an NFL team, the message to you is clear: Don’t fuck anything up for your partner, and don’t fuck anything up for the team. Don’t be controversial. Don’t talk to the media. Stay out of the way. Support the player and be quiet.

I saw this firsthand. The Raiders didn’t formally sit us down—they’re not structured like that as an organization to sit the wives down and school them, and say, “This is what we ask of you.” But it is definitely passed down by the veteran wives in the league. The veteran wives will talk to the rookie wives. So will the administrative or coaching wives. It’s made very clear to you, and not in a hateful way, by any means: “Let’s work together for this one common goal: to win the Super Bowl.” That will mean, for the coaches’ families, that you’re not going to get fired and you’ll get to stay here for another year. And that might mean, for some of the marquee players, that they’re going to get a better contract.

They really don’t want anything to be a distraction from that goal. I remember getting a lot of grief for planning my first pregnancy poorly because I had our daughter during the season. You only have babies in the offseason. There are lots of informal rules like that.

And the media is the devil—the enemy. I had my husband come home and tell me, “Don’t ever talk to the media.” Guys would get teased; they’d rib each other if they were in the news, or if the wife got mentioned. There was a sportswriter for the Oakland Tribune whom I’d sometimes see at games, and Adam would be like, “What’d you say to him? Were you talking to him? Don’t talk to him.” And that’s not just Adam’s personal preference; that’s what he’d been told. I don’t know everything that was said in meetings, but that’s how it came down to me: “Did he call you? What did he say to you? What did he ask you? Don’t tell him anything.”

It’s motivated by this you-versus-the-world mentality. You know: People are going to try to take us down. People are going to try to distract us. Do not let anybody distract us from our singular goal. Looking through past notes and playbooks, a lot of coaches use a lot of war analogies and wartime quotes—they liken it to going to war. They use that to build camaraderie, and they want the wives to build camaraderie amongst each other to support the players.

Adam was the kind of player who was just hoping to make the team year to year. So it was like, don’t fuck this up for him in any way. “Don’t give them any reason to cut you,” he’d always say. But my husband was never a marquee player—he was the long snapper. So, you know, he was very anonymous. Ray Rice is in a premier position. He’s not a long snapper. He’s a running back.

And I’m sure that sort of thing was going through Janay’s mind: If I tell, and if I take away their best running back, and they lose on Sunday, that’s my fault. I did that. I set that ball in motion. This is what she was risking: embarrassing the Ravens, embarrassing her family, screwing his teammates out of their prized running back, losing money, losing security. Janay was under an incredible amount of pressure. She probably thought to be quiet was to make this go away. Because she needs it to go away.

Janay met Ray in high school. They have a daughter together. So we’re asking her to walk away from this, and it’s like, “How?” This is all she’s ever known. A lot of these wives don’t work. They can’t. They’re only living in a place for six months. Maybe the guy is playing on a new team every two or three years. He wants her home. You know, he’s not coming home and cooking himself dinner. When Adam played, I don’t think any of the wives worked. So what’s she going to leave and go do?

To be blunt, the money pads that a little bit. You get this paycheck coming in every week and you suck it up. I worked at Mother Jones when he played, and I needed that totally separate outlet. But many of these women move into town for six months during the season, and they do whatever they need to do to help their spouse win. (Which, you know, you really can’t do much. It’s not up to you.) Then they go back to wherever they’re from for the offseason. Then they repeat.

I don’t really think that’s changed much over the years. If a player has a partner, that partner needs to not be controversial. I don’t know if teams do research on players’ partners—I’d assume they do, but I don’t know. “Be seen and not heard.” That’s the assumption. Well, that and, “You’re just lucky to be here, so shut up.” He’s making great money, so you support him and shut your mouth. You’re put in a subservient position financially. He’s the star. Keep him happy.

And, in the end, why not just show up and shut up and be supportive? After all, Adam and I felt damn lucky to be in the NFL. He was a walk-on at Nebraska. Playing pro football was a dream. It made me incredibly happy to watch him play.

Most of the girlfriends and wives feel the same gratitude and happiness, and I encourage them to be supportive of the team. But that quiet support stops the second you are abused. Speak up. It’s not a secret worth keeping.

I wonder now what the Ravens will do for Janay and her daughter. And I wonder, with the league’s new, stiffer penalties for domestic violence, how many abused women will stay quiet—because that means the end of a career, the end of the insurance, the end of it all.

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"Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the 1930s, a Duke University botanist named Joseph Banks Rhine was gaining notoriety for focusing a scientific lens on the concept of extrasensory perception, or ESP. His initial research, which he claimed demonstrated the existence of ESP, consisted of case studies of exceptional individuals who seemed to be able to predict which cards a research associate was holding—even when sitting 250 yards away and separated by physical barriers like a wall—with greater accuracy than simple guessing would yield.

But case studies can only take you so far.

One night, Rhine met with Eugene Francis McDonald Jr., the CEO of the Zenith Radio Company. McDonald offered up his technology for what promised to be the largest and most impressive test of ESP yet: a nationwide experiment showing that telepathy is real.

“The idea was that they would have a bunch of people in a radio studio, and they would try to transmit their thoughts to the nationwide radio audience,” explains science writer William Poundstone, author of the book Rock Breaks Scissors, on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast. “And then people at home could write down what they think they received and send that in, and scientists would look at it and decide if they had shown ESP or not.” The hope, says Poundstone, was that the participation of millions of radio listeners would produce results that were supposedly “much more statistically valid” than earlier ESP studies.

The first few broadcasts were a dramatic success. Most listeners were correct in their guesses of what the “senders” in a radio station in Chicago were thinking. On one episode, writes Poundstone, the thought-senders attempted to use their brains to transmit a series of five Xs and Os—OXXOX—and a majority of the audience members sent in the right answers. “So this seemed very impressive, and the head of Zenith put out big press releases saying that, you know, there’s no way this could be a coincidence,” says Poundstone.

But while it wasn’t a coincidence, a young psychologist named Louis D. Goodfellow figured out that the experiment wasn’t really measuring telepathy. Rather, it was demonstrating something far more interesting about human nature: our inability to behave randomly. It turned out that Goodfellow, who had been hired by Zenith to work on the show, could predict listeners’ guesses even before they had a chance to make them. He started out with the hypothesis that there is no ESP. In that case, the radio audience had to come up with a random sequence themselves. “And he realized that it’s not so easy for a person to make up a random sequence.” says Poundstone. “When people try to do that they fall into certain unconscious patterns, and these patterns are really very similar for everyone.”

In his own laboratory experiments, Goodfellow found that his subjects preferred certain types of sequences when they’re trying to come up with random ones. When he asked people to make up the results of five imaginary coin tosses, for instance, “he found first of all that the most popular first toss was heads,” says Poundstone. How popular? Seventy-eight percent of the study participants selected “heads” as the first result in their supposedly “random” sequences.

What’s more, explains Poundstone, Goodfellow discovered that “people liked sequences that were very well shuffled.” Indeed, the most common sequence chosen by Zenith audiences was heads, heads, tails, heads, tails (or its equivalent in Os and Xs)—they picked it nearly 30 times more frequently than tails, tails, tails, tails, tails. “It’s not too surprising that the least common ones were just five heads in a row, or five tails in a row,” adds Poundstone. “People figured that just wasn’t random.”

So, mystery solved. When the Zenith program transmitted thoughts that matched sequences that were popular with its listeners, “it suddenly looked like the public had a great deal of ESP,” says Poundstone. “But when the sequences were not so popular, then suddenly the telepaths were off their game.”

More recently, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed the so-called Law of Small Numbers, a theory that accounts for human misunderstandings of randomness. Specifically, we wrongly expect small samples to behave like very large ones. So if you toss a coin five times, you assume that you’ll get some variation of a pattern that includes two or three heads and two or three tails. If your coin lands on tails five times in a row, you tend to believe that it can’t be a coincidence. But in fact, the odds of five tails in a row are 1 in 32—not especially common, but not terribly rare, either. “So we have all these sort of false positives where we figure there must be something wrong with that coin, or maybe the person’s got some magic hot-hand in tossing coins,” Poundstone says.

Understanding these pitfalls can actually help you predict, with accuracy above chance, what someone else is going to do, even when he or she is trying, purposefully, to act randomly. These predictions are at the core of Poundstone’s book, which offers a practical guide to outguessing and outwitting almost anybody—in activities ranging from Rock, Paper, Scissors (men tend to go with rock, so you can beat them with paper) to investing in stocks.

Naturally, the larger the dataset, the more accurately a person—or a computer—can predict behavior. With access to Big Data, large corporations like Target have developed analytics that can predict our behavior with remarkable accuracy, even when we think we’re making decisions in the moment. Siri, your iPhone’s talking app, learns about you and the behavior of all the other iPhone users and uses that information to predict what you’re going to ask her even as you are evaluating your own needs.

And sometimes, the Big Data machine is more observant than even the people closest to us. In his book, Poundstone cites the story of a Minnesota dad (first reported by the New York Times) who complained to a Target manager that his teenage daughter was being encouraged by the company to engage in unprotected sex. The store, he noted, had sent her a mailer littered with photos of cute babies, baby gear, and maternity clothing. As Poundstone writes, the manager apologized and promised that he’d suss out the source of the error. In doing so, he learned that Target analyzes purchases made online and in stores that are predictive of the behavior of an expectant mother. When he called the angry father once again to apologize, he realized just how powerful these algorithms can be. As it turns out, this time the customer was apologetic: Apparently Big Data noticed his daughter’s pregnancy well before he did.

Poundstone draws a direct line between Goodfellow’s debunking of ESP and modern efforts to predict consumer behavior. “It basically demonstrated that a lot of the little everyday decisions we make are incredibly predictable, provided you’ve got a little bit of data to work from,” he says. “And that’s become a very big business today, needless to say.”

But does this predictability apply to everyone? Poundstone knows of at least one person who defies the odds. Computer scientist Claude Shannon built the first computer to predict human behavior. And of all the people tested, he was also the only one who could beat the machine at its own game. When asked how he managed to do this, “he said that he had a very simple secret,” reveals Poundstone. “He essentially mentally emulated the code of the machine and did the algorithm in his head, so he knew what the machine was going to predict, and then he did the opposite.” But Shannon is a special case. “For almost everyone else, mere humans,” says Poundstone, “I think it is pretty easy to predict, at least a good deal of the time.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

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These Climate Scientists Are Telling You What They Really Think

by FlorineEarnest Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Angry. Worried. Frustrated. Anxious.

Such are some of the words that Australian climate scientists use to express their feelings about the dysfunctional climate debate (which, in Australia, has recently seen the repealing of a carbon tax, a chief objective of the current Liberal Party prime minister Tony Abbott). Their writings appear on a new website, entitled “Is This How You Feel?,” run by Joe Duggan, a master’s student in science communication at the Australian National University’s Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Reached by email, Duggan explained that he “wanted to give scientists the chance to step away from the dry data and clinical prose that laypeople find so hard to engage with.”

Here are some particularly striking emotional expressions from the researchers, expressions that the climate “skeptic” blogger Anthony Watts has said make him want to “hurl”:

I feel a maelstrom of emotions.

Life would be so much simpler if climate change didn’t exist.

I am infuriated. Infuriated we are destroying our planet.

I often feel like shouting…But would that really help? I feel like they don’t listen anyway. After all, we’ve been shouting for years.

It makes me feel sick.

I feel betrayed by our leaders who show no leadership and who place ideology above evidence, willing to say anything to peddle their agendas.

We have so much to lose.

And, perhaps most memorable of all:

I see a group of people sitting in a boat, happily waving, taking pictures on the way, not knowing that this boat is floating right into a powerful and deadly waterfall.

You can read all of the letters here. People often allege that scientists can’t communicate, but as these letters show, that’s not really true.

When they’re actually speaking or writing in the language that they use with other scientists, then yes, scientists can seem incomprehensible. But when they’re speaking simply as people, freed up to express emotions, they share thoughts and feelings that we can all instantly understand.

“This is not the only way to communicate climate change, but it is one way,” says Duggan. “We need to kill apathy through death by a thousand cuts. Maybe this can be one cut.”

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These Climate Scientists Are Telling You What They Really Think

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Fundraising Effort for Ferguson Cop Who Shot Michael Brown Gets Ugly

by LacyVachon Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Comments left on a GoFundMe crowdfunding page in support of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Compiled by Jon Hendren

The comments seen in the image above were written by donors to the online fund set up to support Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown six times in Ferguson, Missouri, last week. Wilson has since been placed on paid administrative leave and is in an undisclosed location. The GoFundMe campaign to assist him was set up earlier this week by an unnamed supporter. “We stand behind Officer Darren Wilson and his family during this trying time in their lives,” the page reads. It has since raised nearly $150,000.

Among the comments left by donors:

“Ofc. Wilson did his duty. Michael Brown was just a common street thug.”

“Waste of good ammo. It’s my privilege to buy you a replacement box.”

“Black people can be their own enemy and I am not white…He was shot 6 times cause the giant wouldn’t stop or die. Evil people don’t die quick”

“All self-respecting whites have a moral responsibility to support our growing number of martyrs to the failed experiment called diversity.”

“I am so sick of the blacks using every excuse in the book to loot and riot.”

“I support officer Wilson and he did a great job removing an unnecessary thing from the public!”

The collection of comments above was compiled by Jon Hendren, a comedy writer in San Jose, California. Hendren told Mother Jones that he took screenshots of the comments on the page that seemed especially offensive and compiled them into one image using Photoshop. “There were maaaany more that were borderline or ambiguous or a small dollar amount that I would’ve also captured, but I got so annoyed that I began to get a headache, so I stopped when I did,” he explains.

“A couple folks have asked me to wait until we know all the facts before passing judgment, which is kind of absurd,” says Hendren. “People are donating money with racist sentiment and to celebrate a killing—I’m not sure what other facts I should be waiting for. The vast majority expressed disgust and revulsion though.”

I’ve asked the creator of the GoFundMe page to comment. I’ll update this post if I hear back; she told The Daily Beast earlier this week that she is not speaking with the press.

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Fundraising Effort for Ferguson Cop Who Shot Michael Brown Gets Ugly

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National Briefing | West: Drought Said to Claim Trillions of Gallons

by Myrna Posted on August 21, 2014

About 63 trillion gallons of groundwater have been lost across the West since the start of last year because of a severe drought, a study found. Taken from:  National Briefing | West: Drought Said to Claim Trillions of Gallons ; ;Related ArticlesOn Books Since 1988, Ohio River Dam Project Keeps Rolling AlongDot Earth Blog: From Tree Planting Along a Dirt Road to Car-Free Village LivingSide Street: In the Bronx, an Unlikely Sanctuary for Birds, and People ;

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National Briefing | West: Drought Said to Claim Trillions of Gallons

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Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?

by SCUMagaret Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published on Grist.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers
The mountains and the endless plain –
All, all the stretch of these great green states –
And make America again!
– Langston Hughes, 1938

I really didn’t want to have to address this. While reading through University of Michigan professor Dorceta Taylor’s latest report, “The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations,” and thinking about what I would write about it, I had hoped to focus on the solutions. Those solutions—confronting unconscious and subconscious bias and other subtle forms of discrimination—are the parts I had hoped environmentalists would be eager to unpack.

I thought they’d read about the “green ceiling,” where mainstream green NGOs have failed to create a workforce where even two out of 10 of their staffers are people of color, and ask themselves what could they do differently. I thought, naively, that this vast report, complete with reams of data and information on the diversity problem, would actually stir some environmentalists to challenge some of their own assumptions about their black and brown fellow citizens.

I was wrong.

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Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

by Adam Stossel Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

So what are Republicans in the House of Representatives up to these days? According to Danny Vinik, they just passed a bill that would reduce taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.

I know, I know: you’re shocked. But in a way, I think this whole episode is even worse than Vinik makes it sound.

Here’s the background: The child tax credit reduces your income tax by $1,000 for each child you have. It phases out for upper middle-income folks, but—and this is the key point—it phases out differently for singles and couples. The way the numbers sort out, it treats singles better than couples. This is the dreaded “marriage penalty,” which is bad because we want to encourage people to get married, not discourage them.

So what did House Republicans do? Naturally, they raised the phase-out threshold for married couples so that well-off couples would get a higher benefit. They didn’t have to do this, of course. They could have lowered the benefit for singles instead. Or they could have jiggled the numbers so that everyone got equal benefits but the overall result was revenue neutral.

But they didn’t. They chose the path that would increase the benefit—and thus lower taxes—for married couples making high incomes. The bill also indexes the credit to inflation, which helps only those with incomes high enough to claim the full credit. And it does nothing to make permanent a reduction in the earnings threshold that benefits poor working families. Here’s the net result:

If the House legislation became law, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that a couple making $160,000 a year would receive a new tax cut of $2,200. On the other hand, the expiring provisions of the CTC would cause a single mother with two kids making $14,500 to lose her full CTC, worth $1,725.

So inflation indexing, which is verboten when the subject is the minimum wage, is A-OK when it comes to high-income taxpayers. And eliminating the marriage penalty is also a good idea—but again, only for high-income couples. Which is crazy. I don’t really have a firm opinion on whether the government should be in the business of encouraging marriage, but if it is, surely it should focus its attention on the people who need encouragement in the first place. And that is very decidedly not the upper middle class, which continues to get married at the same rate as ever.

So we have a deficit-busting tax cut. It’s a cut only for the upper middle class. It’s indexed for inflation, even though we’re not allowed to index things like the minimum wage. And the poor are still scheduled for a tax increase in 2017 because this bill does nothing to stop it. It’s a real quad-fecta. I wonder what Paul Ryan thinks of all this?

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

by BeatrisPerrett Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent points us to an interesting new CNN poll about Obamacare. It asks the usual question about favoring or opposing the law, with the usual results. The basic question shows that Obamacare is unpopular by 40-59 percent, but when you add in the folks who “oppose” it only because they wish it were more liberal, it flips to 57-38 percent. In other words, if you confine yourself to garden variety conservative opposition to Obamacare, there’s not nearly as much as most polls suggest.

But then there’s another question: Has Obamacare helped you or your family personally? About 18 percent say yes. How about other families? Do you think Obamacare has helped anyone at all?

And guess what: A huge majority of Republicans and conservatives don’t think the law has helped anybody in this country.

Among all Americans, the poll finds that 18 percent say the law has made them and their families better off….Meanwhile, 44 percent say the law hasn’t helped anybody — a lot, but still a minority.

Crucially, an astonishing 72 percent of Republicans, and 64 percent of conservatives, say the law hasn’t helped anyone. (Only one percent of Republicans say the law has helped them!) By contrast, 57 percent of moderates say the law has helped them or others. Independents are evenly divided.

Perhaps these numbers among Republicans and conservatives only capture generalized antipathy towards the law. Or perhaps they reflect the belief that Obamacare can’t be helping anyone, even its beneficiaries, since dependency on Big Gummint can only be self-destructive. Either way, the findings again underscore the degree to which Republicans and conservatives inhabit a separate intellectual universe about it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little more dismayed by the news that even a large number of moderates and independents don’t think Obamacare has helped anyone. In a way, that’s more disturbing than the dumb—but predictable—knee-jerk Republican view that automatically produces a “no” whenever the question relates to something positive about Obamacare.

I guess the lesson is that liberals still haven’t done a very good job of promoting the benefits of Obamacare. Maybe that’s an impossible task since, after all, it’s not as if you can expect the media to run endless identical stories about local folks who finally got health insurance. Still, it’s a funny thing. If you passed a law that gave cars to 10 million poor Americans, pretty much everyone would agree that some people benefited from the program. But if you pass a law that gives health insurance to 10 million poor Americans, lots of people think it’s just a gigantic illusion that’s helped no one. What’s more, the number of people who believe this has increased since last year’s rollout.

Why? Certainly not because they think health insurance is worthless. Just try taking away theirs and you’ll find out exactly how non-worthless they consider it. Is it because they don’t think Obamacare policies are “real” health insurance? Or that all these people had health insurance before and the whole thing is just a scam? Or what? It’s a peculiar view that deserves a follow-up.

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

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Watch John Oliver Explain the Insanity of Our Prison System With Puppets

by BessMEIF Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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The United States imprisons too many people for too long for too many things. As John Oliver summed it up last night, “We are doing a terrible job taking care of people that it is very easy for all of us not to care about.”

Oliver outlines a few of the prison system’s flagrant injustices:

African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of white people, despite similar levels of drug use.
Solitary confinement, which Mother Jones has covered extensively, is “one of the most mentally excruciating things prisoners can be subjected to.” Yet when a senator asked the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons about the size of the average isolation cell during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this past February, the prison official had no idea, stalling awkwardly before making a wildly incorrect guess.
One in 25 prison inmates reported being sexually victimized in the past year, yet prison rape is culturally-acceptable joke material that crops up in pop culture regularly: from SpongeBob to Friends to Puss in Boots.
In an effort to cut costs, many states outsource food, health care, and even prison operations to private contractors. These cost-saving techniques have lead to maggot-infested food in Michigan prisons and 50 inmates dying in one 8-month stretch in Arizona.
Prisoner rehabilitation isn’t exactly the system’s focal point: Publicly-traded private prison giant Corporate Corrections of America (CCA) actually touted “high recidivism” as a reason private prisons are a “unique investment opportunity.”

He closes the segment by recapping the horrors of the US prison system with mock Sesame Street puppets: The PBS show has recently made efforts to reach out to the 1 in 28 US children growing up with a parent behind bars.

The segment’s bottom line: Prisoners are not treated humanely in the United States. They’re viewed as a nuisance, a problem to be tucked away in a cell and never thought of again. But when nearly 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars, our broken system of mass incarceration is a human rights abuse that should not be ignored.

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Watch John Oliver Explain the Insanity of Our Prison System With Puppets

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Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

by AdellRomeo Posted on July 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via James Hamilton, the Atlanta Fed is now making its GDP forecasts publicly available. As you can see, they’ve gotten steadily more pessimistic since April and are now predicting a growth rate of 2.6 percent in the second quarter.

Now, there are two way to look at this. The glass-half-full view is: Whew! That huge GDP drop in Q1 really was a bit of a blip, not an omen of a coming recession. The economy isn’t setting records or anything, but it’s back on track.

The glass-half-empty view is: Yikes! If the dismal Q1 number had really been a blip, perhaps caused by bad weather, we’d expect to see makeup growth in Q2. But we’re seeing nothing of the sort. We lost a huge chunk of productive capacity in Q1 and apparently we’re not getting it back. From a lower starting level, we’re just going to continue along the same old sluggish growth path that we’ve had for the past few years. All told, GDP in the entire first half of 2014 hasn’t grown by a dime.

I am, by nature, a glass-half-empty kind of person, so feel free to write off my pessimism about this. Nonetheless, the GHE view sure seems like the right one to me. It’s just horrible news if it turns out that during a “recovery” we can experience a massive drop in GDP and then do nothing to make up for it over the next quarter. It’s even worse news that the unemployment rate is going down at the same time. I know that last month’s jobs report was relatively positive, but in the longer view, how can unemployment decrease while GDP is flat or slightly down? Not by truly decreasing, I think. It happens only because there’s a growing number of people who are permanently left behind by the economy and fall out of the official statistics.

But hey. This is just a forecast. Maybe the Atlanta Fed is wrong. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks.

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Economic Growth Looks Pretty Grim These Days

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