Tag Archives: people

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in April

by NewtonAJXrv Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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The American economy added 288,000 new jobs in March, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at 198,000. The headline unemployment rate plummeted from 6.7 percent to 6.3 percent.

This is a decent result except for one thing: the unemployment rate went down because a ton of people dropped out of the labor force and are no longer counted in the totals. Nearly a million people dropped out, causing the labor force participation rate to plunge from 63.2 percent in March to 62.8 percent in April. The participation data is fairly volatile on a monthly basis—it went up 0.4 points during the first three months of the year and then dropped 0.4 points in April—but this is nonetheless a large and disconcerting decline that puts a serious damper on the otherwise good unemployment news.

Why? Well, some of the decline in the participation rate is just due to older workers retiring, but probably not that much of it. Rather, the BLS suggests that it’s mostly due to an unusual dip in the number of new entrants to the labor force, which is hardly good news. In addition, I suspect a big chunk of it is due to unemployed workers who have given up looking for jobs, though I acknowledge that the data doesn’t support this.

So: a mixed result. The jobs number is fairly decent. The labor force number is troubling. We’re still puttering along, but not much more.

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in April

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Consumption Doesn’t Matter. Income Does.

by OsvaldoTozier Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

The BEA reports that consumer spending increased sharply in March. Business owners are pleased:

Consumer spending rose in March at the fastest pace in nearly five years, providing fresh evidence that the U.S. economy gained strength with the arrival of spring. Personal consumption—spending on everything from electricity to sliced bread—surged a seasonally adjusted 0.9% from February, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That was its largest gain since August 2009.

….Paint sales are up from a year ago at Koopman Lumber Inc., a Whitinsville, Mass.-based chain of six hardware and lumber stores. “People are starting to spend some money on their houses. They’re saying, ‘We’ve put it off long enough,’ ” co-owner Tony Brookhouse said. “There are definitely signs of improvement.”

Maybe. But look: consumers can only spend money they have, and the only way for consumer spending to rise steadily is for personal incomes to rise steadily too. But that’s not happening. Here’s the chart since the beginning of the recovery:

There’s a small uptick in February and March, but it’s nothing special. A few months from now, if we’re still seeing a sustained increase in personal income, then we should expect a sustained increase in personal consumption too. But without that, this is just a bit of catch-up spending due to low levels in the previous few months.

Don’t pay attention to consumption. Pay attention to income. That’s what matters. A sustained recovery won’t be based on drawing down savings or cash-out refis or running up the credit card. It will be based on steadily rising incomes. So far we haven’t seen that.

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Consumption Doesn’t Matter. Income Does.

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Donald Sterling is a Creepy Egomaniac

by Glenn10Daxplpsh Posted on April 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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I don’t have much to add about the whole Donald Sterling affair. The appalling nature of his comments is pretty obvious, after all. But for those of you who don’t live in Los Angeles, I thought I could at least acquaint you with a tiny tidbit about the guy’s titanic level of egotism that you might find fascinating. Sterling is a major advertiser in the LA Times. I don’t mean Sterling’s companies. I mean Sterling, himself. He gives away lots of money, and when he does he makes sure everyone knows about it. Ads thanking Sterling for his good deeds simply litter the Times.

The one below, from today’s paper, is typical. They’re all the same: they have terrible, amateur production values; they all use the exact same cutout portrait of Sterling; and they all feature photos of the people honoring Sterling that look like they were taken with a 60s-era Instamatic. These ads appear multiple times a week. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sterling is constantly being honored for something or other, and every single honor is an occasion for him to advertise the fact in the LA Times. And always with the exact same cutout photo of himself. It’s kind of creepy.

Sterling’s vanity ad today happens to be on a page facing an ad that features Kobe Bryant pitching Turkish Airlines. The irony was amusing enough that I figured I’d share.

UPDATE: More here from Franklin Avenue, who’s been tracking Sterling’s ads for years.

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Donald Sterling is a Creepy Egomaniac

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The Housing Market Is Stalling, and Stagnant Wages Are to Blame

by GeorgiaLZS Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Although the economy has shown signs of life lately, growth is still pretty sluggish. The primary culprit appears to be housing: as Neil Irwin points out today, even after recovering from its Great Recession nadir, investment in residential property remains anemic compared to its average level over the past few decades. People just aren’t buying new houses—or refinancing old ones—fast enough to power a serious recovery.

The proximate cause for this is twofold. First, median incomes have been pretty sluggish: household income today is only about 2 percent higher than it was before the start of the recession. That’s just not enough income growth to get young couples confident enough to move out from their parents’ basement and strike out on their own. Second, as the Wall Street Journal reports, rising interest rates have killed off the refi market:

Mortgage lending declined to the lowest level in 14 years in the first quarter as homeowners pulled back sharply from refinancing and house hunters showed little appetite for new loans, the latest sign of how rising interest rates have dented the housing recovery.

….The decline in mortgage lending last quarter stemmed almost entirely from the slide in refinancing. Loans for home purchases were basically flat from a year earlier and down from the fourth quarter.

Mortgage loans were basically flat, which is bad enough. But refinancing is important too, since it puts money in people’s pockets, which they can use to either pay down debt or spend on consumer goods. Either one is good for an overleveraged economy. But now that’s coming to an end.

Housing is the single most important driver of economic growth. In the past, pent-up demand for new housing following a recession would eventually overwhelm financial trepidation, causing young families to start buying new houses. This time that hasn’t happened, and sluggish median incomes are almost certainly to blame (along with high debt levels among college grads, who are one of the prime markets for starter homes). The virtuous circle of rising incomes leading to new home buying—which in turn stimulates the economy and raises wages further—simply hasn’t happened. We are learning the hard way that there’s a stiff price to be paid when virtually all of the economic gains of a recovery go to the well off. Life may be good for them, but without broadly shared prosperity, the larger economy is stuck in a rut.

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The Housing Market Is Stalling, and Stagnant Wages Are to Blame

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Is the Crisis in Ukraine About to Wind Down?

by DedraFreee Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve been watching the unfolding events in Ukraine with the usual rising mix of apprehension and horror, but I haven’t blogged about it much since I don’t have anything to add in the way of insight or analysis. So instead I’ll turn the mike over to Fred Kaplan, who does:

Contrary to appearances, the crisis in Ukraine might be on the verge of resolution. The potentially crucial move came today when interim President Oleksandr Turchynov said that he would be open to changing the country’s political system from a republic, with power centered in the capital Kiev, to a federation with considerable autonomy for the regional districts.

That has been one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key demands….If Putin can win this demand—and the political, economic, and cultural inroads it would provide—an invasion would be not just be unnecessary, it’d be loony. War is politics by other means, and a revamping of Ukraine’s power structure would accomplish Putin’s political aims by less costly means.

….Sending NATO fighter aircraft to Poland and the Baltic states, mobilizing warships to the Black Sea, ratcheting up sanctions with threats of more to come—all this sends a signal that the West won’t stand by. In fact, Putin has done more to rivet the NATO nations’ attention, and perhaps get them to boost their defense budgets, than anything in the past decade.

But Obama and the other Western leaders also know they’re not going to go to war over Ukraine. Putin knows this, too. At the same time, if he’s at all rational (and this is the worrying thing—it’s not clear that he is), Putin would calculate that escalation is not a winning strategy for him. He could invade the eastern slices of Ukraine, especially around Donetsk, but he couldn’t go much further. The move would rile the rest of Ukraine to take shelter under the EU’s (and maybe NATO’s) wing, and it would rouse the Western nations to rearm to an extent unseen in 20 years (and to a level that the Russian economy could not match).

I keep thinking that even from a nationalistic Russian point of view, the cost of invading and holding eastern Ukraine is simply too large. The game isn’t worth the candle. And yet….who knows? Rationality is sometimes in short supply. I’d still bet against a Russian invasion, especially if Putin can get much of what he wants without it, but it would be a pretty iffy bet.

In any case, I wonder how long this “federation” will last? If Putin is smart, he can bide his time and just wait. A federated Ukraine could organically turn into eastern and western Ukraine with a bit of patience and without firing a shot. In the end, that would probably suit Russia’s interests better than outright annexation.

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Is the Crisis in Ukraine About to Wind Down?

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Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

by w0ujpysd Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Like a lot of people, Ed Kilgore is distressed at the outpouring of support on the right for Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy:

Call it “individualism” or “libertarianism” or whatever you want, but those who declare themselves a Republic of One and raise their own flags are in a very literal sense being unpatriotic.

That’s why I’m alarmed by the support in many conservative precincts for the Nevada scofflaws who have been exploiting public lands for private purposes and refuse to pay for the privilege because they choose not to “recognize” the authority of the United States. Totally aside from the double standards involved in expecting kid-glove treatment of one set of lawbreakers as opposed to poorer and perhaps darker criminal suspects, fans of the Bundys are encouraging those who claim a right to wage armed revolutionary war towards their obligations as Americans. It makes me really crazy when such people are described as “superpatriots.” Nothing could be more contrary to the truth.

The details of the Bundy case have gotten a lot of attention at conservative sites, but the details really don’t matter. Bundy has a baroque claim that the United States has no legal right to grazing land in Nevada; for over a decade, every court has summarily disagreed. It’s federal land whether Bundy likes it or not, and Bundy has refused for years to pay standard grazing fees—so a couple of weeks ago the feds finally decided to enforce the latest court order allowing them to confiscate Bundy’s cattle if he didn’t leave. The rest is just fluff, a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorizing that led to last week’s armed standoff between federal agents and the vigilante army created by movement conservatives.

The fact that so many on the right are valorizing Bundy—or, at minimum, tiptoeing around his obvious nutbaggery—is a testament to the enduring power of Waco and Ruby Ridge among conservatives. The rest of us may barely remember them, but they’re totemic events on the right, fueling Glenn-Beckian fantasies of black helicopters and jackbooted federal thugs for more than two decades now. Mainstream conservatives have pandered to this stuff for years because it was convenient, and that’s brought them to where they are today: too scared to stand up to the vigilantes they created and speak the simple truth. They complain endlessly about President Obama’s “lawlessness,” but this is lawlessness. It’s appalling that so many of them aren’t merely afraid to plainly say so, but actively seem to be egging it on.

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Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

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Q&A: Ken Burns on Why Memorizing the Gettysburg Address Matters

by DeanneWlhblej Posted on April 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Since it was founded in 1978, the Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, has required its students to memorize and publicly recite the Gettysburg Address every year. In his new film, The Address, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns follows the students at this small, all-boys school as they grapple with internalizing Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute speech. The twist: All the kids have learning disabilities, including speech and language deficits, that make their struggles and—spoiler alert—triumphs all the more poignant.

Think of it as Ken Burns’ Spellbound. The 90-minute film, culled from three months of footage of classes, dorm life, and kids goofing off, is not a typical Burns project. Though, he explains, “You’ll know it’s a Ken Burns film: It has all the old photographs, it has the ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’ playing, but it’s something different.” Instead of enlisting actors, Burns got students at the school to narrate the film, speech impairments and all. “It’s not full-on cinema verité,” he says. “But for 320 hours of footage reduced to an hour and a half, it’s cinema verité!”

Making the film inspired Burns’ side project, Learn the Address, which is encouraging as many people as possible to learn Lincoln’s words by heart. So far, the project has collected hundreds of videos from everyday and celebrity orators.

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Q&A: Ken Burns on Why Memorizing the Gettysburg Address Matters

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An Economist Answers Some of My Questions About "Capital in the 21st Century"

by BoydWooreycu Posted on April 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday I posted a couple of very rudimentary comments regarding Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster new book, Capital in the 21st Century. I had questions about Piketty’s estimates of r (return on capital) and g (economic growth) in the past and—much more importantly—how they were likely to play out in the future. But all I had were amateur musings because I am, after all, only an amateur.

However, yesterday Brad DeLong tackled some of the questions I asked in a far more rigorous and disciplined way, teasing out a lot of unstated implications along the way—including the importance of various measures of r and how they relate to the probability of increasing future wealth concentration in the real world. It’s a long post, and complex in places, but highly recommended. If you’re willing to work your way through it, DeLong provides a framework for thinking about Piketty’s model that helps you start to make sense of both the book and its conclusions.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve gotten a couple of questions about why I seem unduly skeptical, or even harsh, about Piketty’s book. It’s obviously a landmark work, I don’t really mean to be unfair. But it’s a book with innovative and untested ideas that has obvious appeal to anyone left of center, and I think this is precisely the time to avoid unquestioning hosannas. Affinity bias makes us all sympathetic to Piketty’s arguments, and that’s why we should instead question it carefully and thoroughly.

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An Economist Answers Some of My Questions About "Capital in the 21st Century"

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Bloomberg’s Michael Riley reported that the NSA was aware of the Heartbleed bug from nearly the day it was introduced:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said….Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Henry Farrell explains just how bad this is here. But later in the day, the NSA denied everything:

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,” NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told The Post. “Reports that say otherwise are wrong.”

The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence echoed that statement Friday, saying neither the NSA nor any other part of the U.S. government knew about Heartbleed before April 2014….The denials are unusually forceful for an agency that has historically deployed evasive language when referring to its intelligence programs.

You know, I’m honestly not sure which would be worse. That the NSA knew about this massive bug that threatened havoc for millions of Americans and did nothing about it for two years. Or that the NSA’s vaunted—and lavishly funded—cybersecurity team was completely in the dark about a gaping and highly-exploitable hole in the operational security of the internet for two years. It’s frankly hard to see any way the NSA comes out of this episode looking good.

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

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Friday Cat Blogging – 11 April 2014

by Amilianp2t Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here she is, the Queen of Sheba, keeping a watchful eye on her domain and her loyal subjects. Soon she will take a well-deserved nap.

But before you take a nap, how about donating a few bucks to our investigative reporting fundraiser? Our goal is to raise $100,000 over the next three weeks. As you all know, we’re a reader-supported nonprofit, so those dollars aren’t going to come from big corporations or super-rich political donors. They’ll be small contributions from regular people who read Mother Jones. If you value our reporting—or hell, even if you only value our catblogging—please donate $5 to the Mother Jones Investigative Fund. If you can afford it, make it $10. We’ll put it to good use. Here’s how to make a contribution:

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Friday Cat Blogging – 11 April 2014

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