Heavens! Did you really mean to suggest that bankers only lend real money, not the stuff the Fed cooks up in its basement? We need to do a remake of "Mr. 880" but have as the protagonist a balding, bearded Princeton economist who brings his plates to work at a government agency where he was told they would let him just add zeroes to the ledger?
I remember a time in the 1960s when you could take dollar bills (silver certificates) to the Treasury and they would give you real silver in exchange (I think the rate was $1.29 per oz.) There were lines at the Treasury around the block -- speculators and numismatists wanting Morgan dollars. LBJ decided enough was enough and slammed that window shut. People wanted real money that, as Mike Mansfield put it, would ring when you tossed it onto the bar. Well, it was too good to last -- we couldn't legally own gold bullion in those days but the French sure could. Oh, the miracle of imagining that money is real! Your local banker can conjure up a boodle of queer without even having to print it, and can charge you for the transaction.
of most models today, it's all hyper competitive, global. But that's what we need actually, smaller economic "circles". If you think about some of these technology cities, that's a strange phenomenon. Why do, as an example, tech companies "cluster" in the bay area? They offshore outsource like mad, yet for some reason "cluster" and the same can be said in China, there are "clusters" of manufacturing areas (but part of that was by state design)...
Still, CA esp. it's hyper expensive, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "cluster" but they do and their reasons are something to study.
Just my 2¢, but what about we help communities along by also enabling a nation, enabling sovereignty of a democratic nation, by protectionist barriers such as a VAT (Robert Oak) or even a 15% across-the-board tariff? And how about we eliminate fractional reserve banking?
What you are considering is enabling communities - finance is but one aspect of community support and enablement.
For instance the Internet is a very powerful change agent but the change tends to towards consolidation and globalisation. The reality is that we are all physical - our world is what we touch, who we interact with and where we live geographically. Think of this. Suppose I can leverage my local public bank and trade locally (at non rates of exploitation) I can then recirculate income within my local community. Social websites are never going to do this as their business model is based the individual and exploitative (does not return anything to communities). Imagine if you could use Bitcoin to trade within your community - you would not need commercial banks.
Have been working on something that can do this for 6 to 7 years.
The company I work for has eleven employees, plus the owner, we have all been on 32 hrs per week since January 2009. Literally since Obama's inauguration day, coincidence I dunno but the owner is a hardcore conservative, a Texas A&M grad.
Suicide rates may also indicate rates of clinical depression, but more sociological look at charts brings Durkheim to mind. 6 of the 9 countries are former east bloc and have been subject to rapid social and econ change. Japan -- may be confounded with aging population. All I can reasonably infer is that men have much higher rates. For several of these countries, high rates of alcoholism as well (Russia, Hungary, Belarus). Haven't looked in depth at these, but would expect indicators with more latency to be high as well (alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, impulsivity). A fellow at Hopkins did a study a few decades ago looking at cirrhosis in relation to unemployment during the great depression. Country just coming out of prohibition, so international data might have better informed his work.
Sorry, I didn't define "RFP" in my earlier comment, "Request for Proposal". The government calls these announcements "Funding Opportunities" and other terms that escape me now.
In response to Robert's question, "American workers" are eligible for retraining (see description below). In legal-ease, "American worker" simply means a person who works in America, I'm sure that some court of law could find that grant funded retraining may not be withheld from temporary workers just because they are not citizens. I wasn't making an inference as to who receives the retraining, I was making an observation about the timeliness on the distribution of funds. I find it interesting/pathetic that with all of the media attention about a shortage of "qualified" STEM employees (Science Technology Engineering Math), retraining funds for STEM workers are allowed to accumulate for some eight years.
Here's a description of the Funding Opportunity (RFP) from the text.
The Employment and Training Administration (ETA), U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), announces the availability of grant funds for technical skills training for employed and unemployed American workers. These grants are financed by a user fee paid by employers to bring foreign workers into the U.S. on a temporary basis to work in high skill or specialty occupations. As part of the H-1B non-immigrant visa program, this technical skills training program was established under the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 (ACWIA 1998) as amended by the American Competitiveness in the Twentieth Century Act of 2000 (ACWIA 2000) and companion legislation. The grants are a long-term solution to domestic skill shortages in high skill and high technology occupations B raising the technical skill levels of American workers so they can take advantage of the new technology-related, high skills employment opportunities.
This is an even-better-than-usual Saturday round-up of what's out there, but ....
Item about Golden Gate Bridge suicides, interprets relatively high 2010 suicide count, at the notorious Golden Gate Bridge suicide magnet, as "a sign of the times." Citation is to Scott James, columnist for 'The Bay Citizen', published in New York Times (26 August 2011), who goes farther out on the limb to claim "suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge this year are on the rise — a pace approaching records. The economic downturn, some experts say, could be a factor" (Scott James, 'The Bay Citizen', NYT).
The "experts" appear to reduce to one engineering professor, Natalie Jeremijenko. This expert, as part of what she terms the "Bureau of Inverse Technology art collective," created a "Despondency Index" by correlating DJIA with the number of jumpers detected by "Suicide Boxes" that she claimed to have set up under the bridge. There's a methodology problem in that there appears to be no evidence that Jeremijenko ever actually did set up the "suicide boxes" claimed as a data source, or that the "suicide boxes" actually exist. I have to admire this imaginative power in an engineering professor, but that doesn't make her an expert on suicide rates correlating with economic indicators.
See, Wiki article on the Golden Gate Bridge at 'Suicides' --
Numerian effectively raised the question whether anything can be done to resurrect the economy that is required for the SuperAmerica dream. Maybe, like so many Third World countries, there's nothing that anyone can do ... overpopulation, endemic political-corporate corruption, domination by foreign capital, divisive identity politics (modern tribalism) ... and so forth.
The question that I raised, "What CAN a Third World country do?" begs the question, "Is USA becoming a Third World country?" Before that question, however, comes the question, "How would we tell if USA has become a Third World country?"
What are the objective indicators of Third World-ization?
Is suicide rate an indicator ... and, if so, of what?
One notable stat is that for the U.S., (especially if suicide is underreported, as is generally assumed), if we total homicides and suicides together, that category would constitute about the 8th leading cause of death in the USA. Here, as usual, there are the pesky details -- what about deaths due to overdose? Alcohol-related deaths?
The problem is that national suicide rates look to correlate much more with cultural than with economic factors, and presumed cultural factors are generally less than clear.
See, Wikipedia's 'List of countries by suicide rate' --
(WHO data presented at Wikipedia's 'List of countries by suicide rate')
Many in the USA like to suppose that Swedes are world leaders in suicide, as a result of their alleged socialist tendency. Others claim that Sweden's suicide rate should not be compared to the USA rate because Sweden's demographic reporting system is almost incredibly more accurate. (I believe it's true about Sweden's demographic reporting -- the only nation that is probably better in that respect is New Zealand, where they allegedly keep a highly accurate record of every sheep, including the sheep's date of birth.)
It turns out that Sweden's suicide rate is very nearly the same as the rate for the notoriously capitalistic Switzerland! The undisputed grand champion of suicide rates is Lithuania in 1995, continuing to the present day -- but peaking in 1995. That means that suicide correlated with the transition from a centrally planned to a free market economy, including a privatization campaign and pegging of their currency to the US $$$ dollar, subsequent to the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1991. (And Lithuania is a predominantly Roman Catholic country!)
BTW: The champion suicide rates of Lithuania were overwhelmingly for the male population, and it appears that rates for males are universally higher than for females, even in India. (But there's thought to be underreporting of suicides there in the category of 'kitchen fires' that are perhaps not accidental in reality.)
Similarly, there's nothing much to be made of differential national homicide rates. Yes, it's true that USA homicide rate is notoriously higher than that of Canada or Australia (or of Sweden or many other countries). However, USA is hardly the leader in homicides per 100,000.
Nevertheless we will still have to listen to those who claim that if the unemployed and underemployed like these involuntary part-time workers would be good Americans and just get a fulltime job, all their problems would be solved.
I am already so disgusted at the thought of what is sure to be a weasly and wilfully blind address by Obama on Thursday about jobs, words cannot even describe it. Of course the objections to whatever he proposes will be beyond belief too, worse in every way except that none of other people making weasly and wilfully blind statements will be the president of all Americans and the person that I voted for in 2008.
If you are finding it hard to do everything up in one post, it's probably a sign it's time to split it up. Anything you can do to make things easier for you, with all your expertise, will probably have the additional benefit of making things easier for readers like me who never studied economics or higher mathematics.
I will tell you something else that I have just realized that's really scary: We are now in largely uncharted economic territory.
Of course we've had our down periods before. But now we have the many new twists to old problems created by globalization and interference with our labor market and economy. We have never had to recover from a severe recesssion in which foreign currency manipulation, exotic financial instruments, outsourcing, mass migration, etc., etc., were major factors. We also have the problem of denial and obsfucation about the effects of these things. It's a doubly heavy burden (at least) that prior generations did not have to deal with.
It seems to me that our data collection and interpretation systems and methods are not set up to handle this. Adjustments must be made that will take some time -- for one thing, I do not think we even know what should be changed and how yet.
So it's my prediction that if you can stand to continue doing what you are doing, it's going to get harder. The data you can find will seem inadequate to explain what's going on more often. The data that's not collected will cause more noticeable holes in any hypothesis. What you don't know and can't find out will start to take on a greater importance and worry you more.
Please pace yourself. Don't try to do too much.
The road to economic recovery -- are we even on it yet? -- is going to be a very long and bumpy one, I'm afraid.
Remembering the 1970s when there still were working-class heroes -- here's the song that inspired a film in 1981, 'Take This Job And Shove It', by David Alan Coe (1977), famously recorded by the late great Johnny Paycheck.
Snapshot (right) taken at Gilley's Nightclub, 1 March 1978.
Johnny Paycheck with Johnny Lee (left) and Mickey Gilley (right).
(Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)
With all due respect to the late great C & W singer, Johnny Paycheck (Donald Eugene Lytle, 1938 - 2003), here (left) is poster from available-free video at YouTube, 'Take This Job And Shove It', as performed by David Allan Coe and band in 1983.
Excerpts from the lyrics, used here for educational and review purposes, are from LyricsKeeper.com
[David Allan Coe]
(Chorus)
Take this job and shove it I ain't workin' here no more
My woman done left and took all the reason I was working for
Ya, better not try and stand in my way
Cause I'm walkin', out the door
Take this job and shove it I ain't working here no more
Well, I been working in this factory for now on fifteen years
All this time, I watched my woman drownin' in a pool of tears
And I've seen a lot of good folks die who had a lot of bills to pay
I'd give the shirt right off of my back if I had the guts to say...
(Chorus)
The foreman, he's a regular dog the line boss, he's a fool
Got a brand new flat top haircut Lord, he thinks he's cool
One of these days I'm gonna blow my top and that sucker, he's gonna pay
I can't wait to see their faces when I get the nerve to say...
Country music is trauma music, with more booze, drugs, and murder than all other pop formats combined. More rubbed-raw emotions. More take-this-job-and-shove-it worker rage, too. For all its alleged reactionary spirit, country-and-western-lyrics address the indignities of working life far more than any other pop-format.
I think of Johnny Cash gulping down a bottleful of pills a day and tearing down hotel walls. The lonely heart-attack of Hank Williams in the back seat of that taxi. ... Tammy Wynette stumbling down a rural road dazed and covered in bruises. Entertainers, all of them. People who brought happiness to others. Miserable.
(Jim Goad, from the chapter “Playin’ hard” from “The Redneck Manifesto”)
"Who could forget Carly Fiorina's slash and burn of HP along with Compaq?" -- Robert Oak
Apparently some remembered!
Fiorina invested $5.5 Million of her own money in her campaign to unseat Democrat Barbara Boxer. See, New York Times archive.
Plus a few more $Millions ...
"Boxer's re-election Tuesday was not easy. She faced a multimillionaire candidate and a wave of attack ads funded by out-of-state business and conservative groups." -- HuffingtonPost archive (2 November 2010)
_________
True, Ross Perot invested between $60 Million and $70 Million of his own money in 1992 (accepting public financing in 1996), and he did not recoup any of that in personal terms. But Perot's presidential campaigns had a huge effect on politics through the 1990s, and it was Perot's continuing activism with the Congress after 1996 that, arguably, should be given credit for the famous Clinton balanced budget.
I think your style of presenting graphs with commentary is great. A single article, but with main summary point after each graph will work. Use your judgment. Agree the FRED graphs are great. My suggestion was to have headline after each point, which you kind of already do. Bravo zulu!
Of course there are no jobs and guess what corporations won't allow how many jobs they created offshore instead be revealed!
======================
and put it all into one post?
Or do you mean more menus and site organization?
The St. Louis FRED system is absolutely awesome and it enables me to speed up analysis, heavily, configure graphs very quickly. Myself, I can see patterns in numbers but regardless, nothing spells it out better than a visual, a graph.
If I can't make it in FRED then I make the graphs in Excel.
Thanks. I have to take into account this site is a news source too and follow those requirements. They don't like a lot of modifications to an article after publication, so I'll have to think about this.
The name of the game is to translate the cryptic reports into bloggerspeak and English so people can see how screwed we really are, by the numbers.
Very amusing. In a Hail Mary, AT&T said they would bring back 5,000 jobs. Nope. If the merger would be allowed to go through it's more like 20,000 workers would have lost their jobs.
Nice call out and finally even Wall Street is starting to speak out about labor arbitrage and mergers for nice bonuses and offshoring even more jobs.
Who could forget Carly Fiorina's slash and burn of HP along with Compaq.
For us non-economists, I think sections with headings (one for each graph) would be easier to follow. Excellent graphs, BTW. They could be in the same document, but point-by-point presentation with some interpretive comments. Many of us have backgrounds in related fields, but as Chairman Mao said, "When eating sticky candy, take small bites." For example, unemployment rates by month are useful, but also followed by section on part-time or discouraged workers might be useful. Also such indicators as length of work week, average wage, etc. if they become meaningful to interpret presentation. Which to present is your call, but we are nothing if not critical -- so lead on, professor.
I'm doing something new this time and breaking up the unemployment report.
Is it better to break it up or do people want it all in one large post?
The reason I'm breaking it up is frankly it is so easy to make a huge mistake. An assumption error, reading something wrong, the wrong assumption on say civilian non-institutional population, or how part-time affects employment numbers...
the list goes on and on. So, I saw some things in this report I needed to reality check, which I try to do to make sure all of my article ducks are in a row.
Takes much longer so I decided to break up the overviews into subtopics, else nothing would be written and as it was there was a huge delay because I had to go study up and run some more numbers.
The good news is as far as I know this site gets it right much more and better than most in the MSM.
I guess the proof in the pudding would be a call out by some statistician at the BLS themselves or a major economics, con matematicas por favor, but anywho, wondering if it matters.
I don't want to just regurgitate the actual report or simply throw up some graphs to accompany it for that's the entire problem with government reports...
the idea here is to amplify some of the data, plus graph it all up so there are visuals, and make some sense out of it for real people.
BTW: When I make a mistake, it's myself who has to catch it, so if someone sees an error please let me know. I despise economic fiction, intentional or otherwise. ;)
The law used to be, maybe still is, that if you are working in the U.S. and sending money to dependents back home (like in Chihuahua), then you could claim them as dependents on your 1040. BUT that only held for citizens of Canada and Mexico, not China or Philippines or Guatemala, etc.. Guatemalans considered this grossly unfair. These are all presumably legal holders of green cards, but maybe not. For the most part, my impression is that filers such as this generally had records to back up their payments to dependents (wire transfers) and sometimes they even could and do obtain verification (affidavit) from a parish priest in their home town.
The thing is, at the same time, there is so much scamming going on with using SSNs that are somebody else's. Such goings-on have been known to break up families when the real SSN holder in Michigan gets zinged for child support for three children and a woman in Southern California. Usually, the first notice has been discarded as just some kind of computer mistake of no import or consequence, but it turns out that under special Child Support provisions of California law as to legal notification, the non-respondent has been proven guilty in a California court due to lack of timely response (like maybe 10 days - be sure to sent certified with signature required). Then the poor guy's wife in Michigan says "What the heck is this? You dog! I already seen a divorce lawyer!"
Of course, CPAs aren't generally involved. Just your friendly local tax preparer.
Such are the devilish details in this best-of-all-possible "globalized" world.
RFP usually refers to contracting (federal meaning) but apparently being used to announce availability of grants. RFP includes such info as purpose of announcement, scope of work to be done, who is eligible to bid, and how to apply. These grants (Employment and Training) may be limited to certain kinds of applicants such as state agencies, but also may include other parties such as nonprofits, universities, community organizations, etc. Grants also may go to profit-making entities, but the RFP defines who is eligible to apply.
Heavens! Did you really mean to suggest that bankers only lend real money, not the stuff the Fed cooks up in its basement? We need to do a remake of "Mr. 880" but have as the protagonist a balding, bearded Princeton economist who brings his plates to work at a government agency where he was told they would let him just add zeroes to the ledger?
I remember a time in the 1960s when you could take dollar bills (silver certificates) to the Treasury and they would give you real silver in exchange (I think the rate was $1.29 per oz.) There were lines at the Treasury around the block -- speculators and numismatists wanting Morgan dollars. LBJ decided enough was enough and slammed that window shut. People wanted real money that, as Mike Mansfield put it, would ring when you tossed it onto the bar. Well, it was too good to last -- we couldn't legally own gold bullion in those days but the French sure could. Oh, the miracle of imagining that money is real! Your local banker can conjure up a boodle of queer without even having to print it, and can charge you for the transaction.
of most models today, it's all hyper competitive, global. But that's what we need actually, smaller economic "circles". If you think about some of these technology cities, that's a strange phenomenon. Why do, as an example, tech companies "cluster" in the bay area? They offshore outsource like mad, yet for some reason "cluster" and the same can be said in China, there are "clusters" of manufacturing areas (but part of that was by state design)...
Still, CA esp. it's hyper expensive, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "cluster" but they do and their reasons are something to study.
Just my 2¢, but what about we help communities along by also enabling a nation, enabling sovereignty of a democratic nation, by protectionist barriers such as a VAT (Robert Oak) or even a 15% across-the-board tariff? And how about we eliminate fractional reserve banking?
American Monetary Institute
Hi,
What you are considering is enabling communities - finance is but one aspect of community support and enablement.
For instance the Internet is a very powerful change agent but the change tends to towards consolidation and globalisation. The reality is that we are all physical - our world is what we touch, who we interact with and where we live geographically. Think of this. Suppose I can leverage my local public bank and trade locally (at non rates of exploitation) I can then recirculate income within my local community. Social websites are never going to do this as their business model is based the individual and exploitative (does not return anything to communities). Imagine if you could use Bitcoin to trade within your community - you would not need commercial banks.
Have been working on something that can do this for 6 to 7 years.
Iain
The company I work for has eleven employees, plus the owner, we have all been on 32 hrs per week since January 2009. Literally since Obama's inauguration day, coincidence I dunno but the owner is a hardcore conservative, a Texas A&M grad.
Suicide rates may also indicate rates of clinical depression, but more sociological look at charts brings Durkheim to mind. 6 of the 9 countries are former east bloc and have been subject to rapid social and econ change. Japan -- may be confounded with aging population. All I can reasonably infer is that men have much higher rates. For several of these countries, high rates of alcoholism as well (Russia, Hungary, Belarus). Haven't looked in depth at these, but would expect indicators with more latency to be high as well (alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, impulsivity). A fellow at Hopkins did a study a few decades ago looking at cirrhosis in relation to unemployment during the great depression. Country just coming out of prohibition, so international data might have better informed his work.
Sorry, I didn't define "RFP" in my earlier comment, "Request for Proposal". The government calls these announcements "Funding Opportunities" and other terms that escape me now.
In response to Robert's question, "American workers" are eligible for retraining (see description below). In legal-ease, "American worker" simply means a person who works in America, I'm sure that some court of law could find that grant funded retraining may not be withheld from temporary workers just because they are not citizens. I wasn't making an inference as to who receives the retraining, I was making an observation about the timeliness on the distribution of funds. I find it interesting/pathetic that with all of the media attention about a shortage of "qualified" STEM employees (Science Technology Engineering Math), retraining funds for STEM workers are allowed to accumulate for some eight years.
Here's a description of the Funding Opportunity (RFP) from the text.
The Employment and Training Administration (ETA), U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), announces the availability of grant funds for technical skills training for employed and unemployed American workers. These grants are financed by a user fee paid by employers to bring foreign workers into the U.S. on a temporary basis to work in high skill or specialty occupations. As part of the H-1B non-immigrant visa program, this technical skills training program was established under the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 (ACWIA 1998) as amended by the American Competitiveness in the Twentieth Century Act of 2000 (ACWIA 2000) and companion legislation. The grants are a long-term solution to domestic skill shortages in high skill and high technology occupations B raising the technical skill levels of American workers so they can take advantage of the new technology-related, high skills employment opportunities.
This is an even-better-than-usual Saturday round-up of what's out there, but ....
Item about Golden Gate Bridge suicides, interprets relatively high 2010 suicide count, at the notorious Golden Gate Bridge suicide magnet, as "a sign of the times." Citation is to Scott James, columnist for 'The Bay Citizen', published in New York Times (26 August 2011), who goes farther out on the limb to claim "suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge this year are on the rise — a pace approaching records. The economic downturn, some experts say, could be a factor" (Scott James, 'The Bay Citizen', NYT).
The "experts" appear to reduce to one engineering professor, Natalie Jeremijenko. This expert, as part of what she terms the "Bureau of Inverse Technology art collective," created a "Despondency Index" by correlating DJIA with the number of jumpers detected by "Suicide Boxes" that she claimed to have set up under the bridge. There's a methodology problem in that there appears to be no evidence that Jeremijenko ever actually did set up the "suicide boxes" claimed as a data source, or that the "suicide boxes" actually exist. I have to admire this imaginative power in an engineering professor, but that doesn't make her an expert on suicide rates correlating with economic indicators.
See, Wiki article on the Golden Gate Bridge at 'Suicides' --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Bridge#Suicides
_______
Serious look at suicide rate as an economic indicator
At Numerian's 'We Can't Just Sit Here Doing Nothing', posted, 2 September 2011, there's my comment 'What CAN a Third World country do?'
Numerian effectively raised the question whether anything can be done to resurrect the economy that is required for the SuperAmerica dream. Maybe, like so many Third World countries, there's nothing that anyone can do ... overpopulation, endemic political-corporate corruption, domination by foreign capital, divisive identity politics (modern tribalism) ... and so forth.
The question that I raised, "What CAN a Third World country do?" begs the question, "Is USA becoming a Third World country?" Before that question, however, comes the question, "How would we tell if USA has become a Third World country?"
What are the objective indicators of Third World-ization?
Is suicide rate an indicator ... and, if so, of what?
One notable stat is that for the U.S., (especially if suicide is underreported, as is generally assumed), if we total homicides and suicides together, that category would constitute about the 8th leading cause of death in the USA. Here, as usual, there are the pesky details -- what about deaths due to overdose? Alcohol-related deaths?
The problem is that national suicide rates look to correlate much more with cultural than with economic factors, and presumed cultural factors are generally less than clear.
See, Wikipedia's 'List of countries by suicide rate' --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
Top 10 suicide rates by country
(WHO data presented at Wikipedia's 'List of countries by suicide rate')
Many in the USA like to suppose that Swedes are world leaders in suicide, as a result of their alleged socialist tendency. Others claim that Sweden's suicide rate should not be compared to the USA rate because Sweden's demographic reporting system is almost incredibly more accurate. (I believe it's true about Sweden's demographic reporting -- the only nation that is probably better in that respect is New Zealand, where they allegedly keep a highly accurate record of every sheep, including the sheep's date of birth.)
It turns out that Sweden's suicide rate is very nearly the same as the rate for the notoriously capitalistic Switzerland! The undisputed grand champion of suicide rates is Lithuania in 1995, continuing to the present day -- but peaking in 1995. That means that suicide correlated with the transition from a centrally planned to a free market economy, including a privatization campaign and pegging of their currency to the US $$$ dollar, subsequent to the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1991. (And Lithuania is a predominantly Roman Catholic country!)
BTW: The champion suicide rates of Lithuania were overwhelmingly for the male population, and it appears that rates for males are universally higher than for females, even in India. (But there's thought to be underreporting of suicides there in the category of 'kitchen fires' that are perhaps not accidental in reality.)
Similarly, there's nothing much to be made of differential national homicide rates. Yes, it's true that USA homicide rate is notoriously higher than that of Canada or Australia (or of Sweden or many other countries). However, USA is hardly the leader in homicides per 100,000.
See, data360.org bar graph
It's the easiest thing to qualify for.
Nevertheless we will still have to listen to those who claim that if the unemployed and underemployed like these involuntary part-time workers would be good Americans and just get a fulltime job, all their problems would be solved.
I am already so disgusted at the thought of what is sure to be a weasly and wilfully blind address by Obama on Thursday about jobs, words cannot even describe it. Of course the objections to whatever he proposes will be beyond belief too, worse in every way except that none of other people making weasly and wilfully blind statements will be the president of all Americans and the person that I voted for in 2008.
If you are finding it hard to do everything up in one post, it's probably a sign it's time to split it up. Anything you can do to make things easier for you, with all your expertise, will probably have the additional benefit of making things easier for readers like me who never studied economics or higher mathematics.
I will tell you something else that I have just realized that's really scary: We are now in largely uncharted economic territory.
Of course we've had our down periods before. But now we have the many new twists to old problems created by globalization and interference with our labor market and economy. We have never had to recover from a severe recesssion in which foreign currency manipulation, exotic financial instruments, outsourcing, mass migration, etc., etc., were major factors. We also have the problem of denial and obsfucation about the effects of these things. It's a doubly heavy burden (at least) that prior generations did not have to deal with.
It seems to me that our data collection and interpretation systems and methods are not set up to handle this. Adjustments must be made that will take some time -- for one thing, I do not think we even know what should be changed and how yet.
So it's my prediction that if you can stand to continue doing what you are doing, it's going to get harder. The data you can find will seem inadequate to explain what's going on more often. The data that's not collected will cause more noticeable holes in any hypothesis. What you don't know and can't find out will start to take on a greater importance and worry you more.
Please pace yourself. Don't try to do too much.
The road to economic recovery -- are we even on it yet? -- is going to be a very long and bumpy one, I'm afraid.
Wow! Awesome FMN round-up!
Remembering the 1970s when there still were working-class heroes -- here's the song that inspired a film in 1981, 'Take This Job And Shove It', by David Alan Coe (1977), famously recorded by the late great Johnny Paycheck.
Snapshot (right) taken at Gilley's Nightclub, 1 March 1978.
Johnny Paycheck with Johnny Lee (left) and Mickey Gilley (right).
(Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)
Link to Wiki image file
Link to Wiki article "Johnny Paycheck"
And here's the link -- click here to go to YouTube for 'Take This Job And Shove It' by David Allan Coe, as sung by David Allan Coe in 1983
-- courtesy of DavidAllanCoe.com
Excerpts from the lyrics, used here for educational and review purposes, are from LyricsKeeper.com
And here's commentary by Jim Goad, from the chapter “Playin’ hard” from “The Redneck Manifesto", quoted by way of a CRACKED webzine, at webpage titled "Why Country Music Is Better Than Punk pt.2"
Jim Goad's website
Wiki article on The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad (1997)
[All links verified functioning as of posting, 3 September 2011]
"Who could forget Carly Fiorina's slash and burn of HP along with Compaq?" -- Robert Oak
Apparently some remembered!
Fiorina invested $5.5 Million of her own money in her campaign to unseat Democrat Barbara Boxer. See, New York Times archive.
Plus a few more $Millions ...
"Boxer's re-election Tuesday was not easy. She faced a multimillionaire candidate and a wave of attack ads funded by out-of-state business and conservative groups." -- HuffingtonPost archive (2 November 2010)
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True, Ross Perot invested between $60 Million and $70 Million of his own money in 1992 (accepting public financing in 1996), and he did not recoup any of that in personal terms. But Perot's presidential campaigns had a huge effect on politics through the 1990s, and it was Perot's continuing activism with the Congress after 1996 that, arguably, should be given credit for the famous Clinton balanced budget.
I think your style of presenting graphs with commentary is great. A single article, but with main summary point after each graph will work. Use your judgment. Agree the FRED graphs are great. My suggestion was to have headline after each point, which you kind of already do. Bravo zulu!
Do you mean like this:
this is the part time data section
blah blah we are screwed blah blah
This is the payrolls detail section
Of course there are no jobs and guess what corporations won't allow how many jobs they created offshore instead be revealed!
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and put it all into one post?
Or do you mean more menus and site organization?
The St. Louis FRED system is absolutely awesome and it enables me to speed up analysis, heavily, configure graphs very quickly. Myself, I can see patterns in numbers but regardless, nothing spells it out better than a visual, a graph.
If I can't make it in FRED then I make the graphs in Excel.
Thanks. I have to take into account this site is a news source too and follow those requirements. They don't like a lot of modifications to an article after publication, so I'll have to think about this.
The name of the game is to translate the cryptic reports into bloggerspeak and English so people can see how screwed we really are, by the numbers.
Very amusing. In a Hail Mary, AT&T said they would bring back 5,000 jobs. Nope. If the merger would be allowed to go through it's more like 20,000 workers would have lost their jobs.
Nice call out and finally even Wall Street is starting to speak out about labor arbitrage and mergers for nice bonuses and offshoring even more jobs.
Who could forget Carly Fiorina's slash and burn of HP along with Compaq.
For us non-economists, I think sections with headings (one for each graph) would be easier to follow. Excellent graphs, BTW. They could be in the same document, but point-by-point presentation with some interpretive comments. Many of us have backgrounds in related fields, but as Chairman Mao said, "When eating sticky candy, take small bites." For example, unemployment rates by month are useful, but also followed by section on part-time or discouraged workers might be useful. Also such indicators as length of work week, average wage, etc. if they become meaningful to interpret presentation. Which to present is your call, but we are nothing if not critical -- so lead on, professor.
I'm doing something new this time and breaking up the unemployment report.
Is it better to break it up or do people want it all in one large post?
The reason I'm breaking it up is frankly it is so easy to make a huge mistake. An assumption error, reading something wrong, the wrong assumption on say civilian non-institutional population, or how part-time affects employment numbers...
the list goes on and on. So, I saw some things in this report I needed to reality check, which I try to do to make sure all of my article ducks are in a row.
Takes much longer so I decided to break up the overviews into subtopics, else nothing would be written and as it was there was a huge delay because I had to go study up and run some more numbers.
The good news is as far as I know this site gets it right much more and better than most in the MSM.
I guess the proof in the pudding would be a call out by some statistician at the BLS themselves or a major economics, con matematicas por favor, but anywho, wondering if it matters.
I don't want to just regurgitate the actual report or simply throw up some graphs to accompany it for that's the entire problem with government reports...
the idea here is to amplify some of the data, plus graph it all up so there are visuals, and make some sense out of it for real people.
BTW: When I make a mistake, it's myself who has to catch it, so if someone sees an error please let me know. I despise economic fiction, intentional or otherwise. ;)
The law used to be, maybe still is, that if you are working in the U.S. and sending money to dependents back home (like in Chihuahua), then you could claim them as dependents on your 1040. BUT that only held for citizens of Canada and Mexico, not China or Philippines or Guatemala, etc.. Guatemalans considered this grossly unfair. These are all presumably legal holders of green cards, but maybe not. For the most part, my impression is that filers such as this generally had records to back up their payments to dependents (wire transfers) and sometimes they even could and do obtain verification (affidavit) from a parish priest in their home town.
The thing is, at the same time, there is so much scamming going on with using SSNs that are somebody else's. Such goings-on have been known to break up families when the real SSN holder in Michigan gets zinged for child support for three children and a woman in Southern California. Usually, the first notice has been discarded as just some kind of computer mistake of no import or consequence, but it turns out that under special Child Support provisions of California law as to legal notification, the non-respondent has been proven guilty in a California court due to lack of timely response (like maybe 10 days - be sure to sent certified with signature required). Then the poor guy's wife in Michigan says "What the heck is this? You dog! I already seen a divorce lawyer!"
Of course, CPAs aren't generally involved. Just your friendly local tax preparer.
Such are the devilish details in this best-of-all-possible "globalized" world.
RFP usually refers to contracting (federal meaning) but apparently being used to announce availability of grants. RFP includes such info as purpose of announcement, scope of work to be done, who is eligible to bid, and how to apply. These grants (Employment and Training) may be limited to certain kinds of applicants such as state agencies, but also may include other parties such as nonprofits, universities, community organizations, etc. Grants also may go to profit-making entities, but the RFP defines who is eligible to apply.
This is exactly the kind of info we need.
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