Stitched in time and place express the lived experience of class as expressed in fiber art and craft in a global economy of abundant availability of commercially produced consumer goods. In some ways the denim “paintings” refer to/remind one of traditional landscapes like “We Are All One People” to the right, or “Border Line” at the bottom of this page.
These paintings use denim both as a pigment and as a canvas.
Stitched to the Earth #8: Migrant Labor
Stitched to the Earth #9: Grandmother's Garden
Stitched to the Earth #10: Day labor
Landquilt Series: The Plains Before Invasion
Landquilt Series: Yellow Horizon Line #2 (The Gold Rush of 1849)
Stitched to the Earth #2: In Memory of the Family Farm Lost to Foreclosure
Stitched to the Earth #1: In Joy and Sorrow
Stitched to the Earth #11: (Sharecropper) 26"H x 18"w x 1" D 2008Landquilt Series: Yellow Horizon Line, Fabric, Denim & Oil, 24"W x 18"H '04 Pieced denim, painted & raw canvas 26"W x 22"H
Stitched To the Earth 12: 20"H x 16"W x 1"D 2008
Landquilt Series: Black Horizon Line, Denim, Fabric, Oil, 28"W x 24"H'04 Pieced denim, painted & raw canvas 26"W x 22"H
Stitched To the Earth# 4: We Leave Traces of Our Lives 36"H x 48"W x 2"D, 2005
Stitched To the Earth # 7 : Miner's Blues 16"H x 18"W x 1"D 2006 (In the collection of Barry & Joan Cotter)
Stitched To the Earth #6: Crossroads, 30"H x 24"W x 1"D 2006
Stitched To the Earth #5: Migrations 2005 (Donation to the Roger Park Health Center 2/08)
Stitched to the Earth #3: Sky, Earth. Water (alternate subtitle: Laundry Hung out to Dry) 40"W x 32"H x 2"D, 2005
Artist Statement
Miner’s Blues and Migrant Labor are constructed from fragments of blue jeans which have been thrown away. Often I have rescued them from dumpsters. Sometime they are give to me by friends who know my work. These used jeans have a beautiful patina in the heavily worn and torn sections.
Miners Blues is a landscape. At the top is a blackened sky, dark with clouds and harsh weather or polluted air. Below the horfizon line we see a cross-section of the scarred and excavated seams of minerals below the earth’s surface. It is mined by men whose work is dangerous, unhealthy and difficult, but necessary to them and their families’ survival. “Blues” has a double meaning, referring both to the jeans they wear and to the hardships endured to earn their daily bread.
Migrant Labor is about the roads travelled in search of work. These fragments are from the bottom of the pant leg, literally where the foot leaves and re-connects to the ground. The opened hems of pant legs have faded to beautiful patterns suggestive of aerial views of railroad ties, roadways, and crop furrows. The impact of the migrant’s footsteps leave behind an imprint of use as a tactile x-ray of the workers’ labor and migrations.
Most people now are stuck in dead-end jobs that they detest and that depress them beyond belief,
people are unsatisfied, unchallenged, bored and literally stuck in jobs they really don’t want to be in, but they have to stay in them for money; to survive.
Psychological experiments and research has proven that people who are unhappy in their work are more likely to become either depressed or become aggressive towards co-workers or family at home.
Work causes so much stress in society you wouldn’t believe it. So many people are unhappy in their jobs either due to quantitative overload, quantitative underload, poor interpersonal relationships, high control or very low control over what decisions are made and what is done in their job.
By not gaining satisfaction out of your job, you can become very bored, frustrated, and lose commitment to what you’re doing, then the reverse of that; by having a lot to do in your job, having too much to do can cause just as much stress as not having anything to do, people become anxious, frustrated and feel like they can’t cope with their responsibilities.
How is this making anyone happy?
How do you make yourself happy in a job you really hate?
Children and teenagers grow up aspiring to be doctors, nurses, police officers, solicitors, teachers etc.
But they don’t actually realized what is involved in the job itself, and how stressful it can be.
Top ten stressful professions
IT
Medicine / Caring Profession
Engineering
Sales and Marketing
Education
Finance
Human Resources
Operations
Production
Clerical
Top ten work stresses
Workload
Feeling undervalued
Deadlines
Type of work people have to do
Having to take on other people’s work
Lack of job satisfaction
Lack of control over the working day
Having to work long hours
Frustration with the working environment
Targets
When you’re young, you can’t wait to grow up, get a job, earn a lot of money, get your own house, have kids etc.
But then when you actually get there…
you want to be young again, free of responsibility and the stresses of everyday life.
How can work make you feel happy and satisfied if you hate your job and are constantly stressed out?
It happens to everyone, not that many people genuinely love their job, I know all of… 1 person who loves his job? But he so happens to be a really lucky guy and does have a great job that isn’t very stressful.
Working everyday gives a person a purpose.
If they’re not a mother or a father, or aren’t married yet or anything along those lines, working gives a person a purpose. Whether the person hates their job or not, it’s something to do, it’s money in their pockets to survive; to pay bills; have a couple of nights out; buy new clothes when they need them etc.
Why does it have to be like this?
It shouldn’t have to be like this.
We go to high school, college, then university, working our way through education with the ideal that at the end of it all, we’ll get the job we’ve always wanted, will earn good money and will be happy.
But that almost never happens!
There are an unbelievable amount of graduates who come out of university with brilliant degrees under their belt, and end up in an office job or a boring part time job. Nothing like the job they origionally wanted.
How and why does this happen?
Just like many others, I really hope that doesn’t happen to me.
Everyone has a plan when they get half way through their college years- about university and what they want to do in the future, but the plan they have in their heads very rarely becomes reality.
It’s incredibly unfair that people are coming out of university, after working really hard for years and years to be the best that they can be, to end up in a crap job with hardly any money coming in, completley different to everything they’d ever hoped for and dreamed of.
No-one has much money now, with the credit crunch and this recession and depression talk, people can’t afford to do anything, which isn’t helping the situation at all.
A lot of people are in multiple jobs, because the salary from their primary occupation isn’t enough for themselves and their family to survive on.
We all know that it’s been difficult getting yourself up and running when you’ve only just started out and you’re young. It’s always been difficult for everyone, of course it is. But it’s only getting harder, not easier. It’s becoming more complicated, with more taxes, more bills to pay out, mortgages etc.
I can’t wait to go to university.
I can’t wait to get a great job, with great money, my own place and start my life properly.
But at the same time, I’m terrified. I’m terrified of becoming just another one of those students who are let down by society and the government.
To be fair, grants and bursaries from universities do help, but then you’re in debt when you leave, and have to pay every penny back. Which must be hard to do when you’re trying to get your own place and are just starting out in a new job.
When will it become easier?
When will things change?
I hope I get to fulfill my dreams, do everything I want to do and be happy.
However, the sour truth is that, I know that a lot of the things I have planned for myself will never happen.
I’m going to fight, no matter what, to get where I want to be in my life.
I just hope it’ll be worth the fight in the end.
And lets hope one day things change, and life becomes easier.
We know life’s not meant to be easy, and if it was, it’d be boring.
But it being easier than it is now, would make the world a much better place for everyone.
If people were satisfied in their jobs, everyone would be happy and things really would be so much easier.
I guess we all just have to grin and bare it though eh.
And it’s all just to survive…
It’s all just for money…
To feel like we have a purpose…
To support our families…
Like Iceland, Dubai tried to expand too fast, until boring old reality caught up with it. Sooner or later, people will not finance debt without reward.
Meanwhile, Israel plods along with its mundane officials ensuring that the essentials are done right. Hence, the encouraging growth predictions from the Treasury, the IMF, Barclays Capital and others for 2010.
So why are most Israeli financiers rather amused at the Dubai fiasco? Well, first of all, because of the malicious Arab Boycott, officially Israelis are not allowed to conduct affairs with Dubai. Just speak to tennis player Shahar Peer, who has been banned from taking part in competitions there.
So, maybe the view from the Holy Land is that these guys are getting what it deserves.
On the other hand, business encourages any politicians, including those from Dubai, to be hypocrites. Today’s Israeli press reports of Kibbutz Afikim and maybe a dozen other agricultural companies that have or are conducting commerce in the country. I have a Jerusalem friend, who regularly travels there to go to exhibitions, where he meets other Hebrew speakers. etc etc etc.
Yes, Israel’s wealthy have bought interests in Dubai and will suffer, at least in the short-term. Lev Leviev has a flagship diamond shop in Dubai. Yes, Israel’s stock market will dip temporarily in sympathy with its rivals around the world.
Actually, the most interesting effect on Israel may come through the back door. It is estimated that up to 100,000 Palestinians are in danger of losing their jobs and being thrown out of Dubai. I wonder where they will go?
Seeking a holiday message to provide a platform for their political grandstanding, Congressman Harry Mitchell and Phoenix Mayor Philly Gordon hit upon the idea of urging Phoenix residents to make “at least one out of three purchases” in locally-owned stores. Teaming with a group calling itself Local First Arizona, the message is to help local businesses weather the Obowma enhanced recession.
“For every $100 that is spent in a locally-owned store, we get to keep $45 of it in our community,” said Gordon, quoting information from a national study of the impact of local buying by an Austin-based organization, Civics Economics.
Interesting that an Austin, Texas based study is being used to advocate for support of Arizona businesses.
A visit to both organization’s websites illustrates they use similar language and figures, customizing their findings for other cities such as Pelosi’s San Francisco and Obowma’s hometown of Chicago.
Remember Harry? The former high school teacher, who should understand basic economics, was nonetheless onboard voting for all of the unsustainably costly Obowma bailouts, trillions in government expansion programs and the socialized fed-med overhaul. But he assists the local economy when he is in town, by getting his haircuts at a local barber, according to the report in the daily.
Gordon oversees Phoenix’s “Sanctuary City” status, compelling taxpaying citizens to fund benefits for the illegal aliens he coddles by providing safe haven from the law. His help consists of supporting illegals who are taking jobs from Arizona workers by accepting substandard wages.
Although support of local businesses is commendable, Arizona’s Wal-Mart spokeswoman Delia Garcia, pointed out that the Arkansas-based retailer employs 32,000 Arizonans, spent $1 billion with Arizona suppliers last year alone, paid $342 million in state sales taxes and donated $10 million to Arizona charities. Information is available here.
One of the most common ways that interest groups work to push their above market levels at the expense of society is through occupational licenses. By raising the legal barriers to entry, workers are able to decrease their competition and drive up their wages.
A common reaction these complaints is that “shouldn’t doctors and nurses be required to have occupational licensing?”. If only it were just doctors and nurses we’d have much less of a problem. The list of jobs requiring licenses is absurd reading. A sample from Klein (2009) includes junkyard dealers in Ohio, auctioneers in several states, beekeepers in Maine, fortune tellers in Maryland, lightning rod installers in Vermont, lobster sellers in Rhode Island, manure applicators in Iowa, movie projectionists in Massachusetts, mussel dealers in Illinois, rainmakers in Arizona.
As this list of absurd jobs suggests, licensing is more widespread than most would imagine. In the 1950s around 5% of the workforce had jobs that required state level licensing. That number had grown to 18% by 1980, and at least 20% by 2000. According to a recent paper by Morris Kleiner and Alan Krueger nearly 35% of workers are now required to be certified or licensed.
What does having a license entail? According to Kleiner and Kreuger, among licensed occupations 85% are required to take an exam, 70% must take continuing education classes, 43% require a college education, and more than 50% require an internship. These requirements do not sound so absurd if you’re thinking about nurses and doctors, but remember that the list includes chimney sweeps and fortune tellers.
The recent trend of occupational licensing for interior designers highlights that it is not just the highly skilled that have steep licensing requirements. A bill recently introduced in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives would require interior designers would require a four-year design school degree, a two-year internship, and the passage of an exam.
Like the majority of occupational licenses, there is no economic justification for this. The sole purpose is a handout to interior designers who already have these qualifications.
The State Department has egg on its face — it backed the wrong horse in Honduras.
It backed a leftist President who tried to abrogate the Honduran Constitution, and the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the Army to depose him — so he went into exile but with public US State Department support for his return.
Then the leftist deposed President sneaked back into the country and into a friendly Embassy, hoping for a popular Chavez-type uprising, but his tree fell in the Embassy and no one heard it.
There will be a new election this next month, there is no leftist opposition because there is no leftist support, the US will have to recognize the newly elected Poresident, and the leftist previously US State Department supported idiot will remain in the embassy.
The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is one of the elixir’s of sustainability and we have been trying to find an easy way to relate its relevance to foodservice.
The UN meeting is the deadline to negotiate the successor to the Kyoto protocol, with the aim of preventing global warming. The biggest and most developed nations emit by far the most carbon thus have a responsibility to cut these significantly. Although emerging markets such as India and China are surging ahead in their emissions; per person emissions are relatively small (by way of example 400 million Indians live without electricity). The argument of these emerging markets is that pollution will be necessary to improve citizens lives. Nevertheless, cuts of 25%-40% rising to further cuts of 80%-95% by 2050 will be the focus of the Summit.
So, the richest nations are going to have to pay and this is exactly where foodservice comes into play. Gordon Brown and other EU leaders are suggesting figures in the realms of $100 billion by 2020.
But who’s going to pay this domestically? One would think those that utilise the Earth’s natural resources the most! Companies operating in the foodservice industry are significant stakeholders of natural resources and therefore will feel the impact of Copenhagen Climate Change Summit over the coming years. Whether by means of taxation or sanctions remains to be seen.
So, those still doubting the significance of climate change should brace themselves!
Regular readers will know that fellow LfD author, John Lewis, has been posting regularly on the subject of remarkable people. I have found them inspiring, to the extent that I’m going to depart from my usual safe area of economics and tell a personal story. It’s a story of family dynamics, the power of sibling bonds and why hope and trust in the future, especially for young people, is so, so important. I have called my story the Power of Words.
—–oooOOOooo—–
I can hear it like it was yesterday, resonating in my head, crowding out the doubts and negative thoughts, filling my mind with possibilities: yes, I CAN do it!
Then ....
I was in my junior year of college and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. It was becoming quite a burden.
Because I had always been good in school, i.e., the “smart one,” everyone had expected so much of me when I went to school. I really envied my older sister; she had always been the pretty one, the popular one, the one who got invited to the prom by not one, but three young men.
And, it seemed to me at the time, she was so lucky because no one expected her to go out and conquer the world after high school. She didn’t go to college; she went to secretarial school and studied to become an airline attendant instead.
I envied her in every way possible! But at least I had something: I was “the smart one,” or so I thought! Years later, my sister went back to school to study psychology. She earned a 4.0 [four straight 'A's. Ed] and was invited to continue on to earn her Ph.D. I’ll be darned if she wasn’t the smart one, too! And she is a wonderful and thoughtful person to boot! But I digress.
Anyway, I was in my junior year of college at the University of Delaware. I went to the University of Delaware largely because I had to pay for college myself and I could only afford in-state tuition. Although it was a perfectly acceptable school, I had dreamt about going to an Ivy League school. After all, my older brother had graduated from an elite private high school and had gone to college on a scholarship. But those things seemed out of my reach, especially for a girl.
My brother was now in graduate school in Chicago, and he and I were talking on the phone one night. Ours was an awkward relationship, particularly in person. It was much easier to talk on the phone or write letters. Less personal maybe. More safe.
The fact that we didn’t speak often and weren’t warm and comfortable in person made his comment to me all the more unexpected and memorable and, as it turns out, life-altering. I was telling him about some academic articles I had studied in class. The articles were about economics and regulation, and were so intellectually challenging but accessible and clear. They were written by Sam Peltzman and George Stigler. My brother said to me, “Sherry, both of those men are professors here at the University of Chicago. You should think about applying to the Ph.D. program. I can see you going here. You can do it!”
Well, you could have knocked me over with the tip of your little finger. My brother, a lifelong withholder of gratuitous compliments or small talk, had just told me, his pesky little sister, that I should pursue a Ph.D. in economics under the professors whose work I so admired, at the school he was currently attending.
After regrouping, I asked him what a Ph.D. was and what one did with a Ph.D. I remember his saying something about research and teaching. I also vaguely remember that by the end of the conversation, I had a plan for cramming in as much math and economics before taking the GMATs [graduate management admissions test -- an aptitude test for graduate school. Ed.]
But what stood out to me then and, every time since when I’ve had doubts about my skills or career, were those words, those glorious, uplifting words: “You can do it!”
.... and now!
So be careful what you say, especially to those who look up to you. Words can cut you to shreds, but they can also fill you with pride and hope and the joy of what is possible.
My brother’s words changed my life; teaching fulfills me; it makes me feel like I am making a small, positive difference in this world. And I often tell my students, with the tangible memory of how it made me feel all those years ago when I first heard it, “You can do it!”
—–oooOOOooo—–
Now just before I close this Post, go to these articles from John and see the power of other people’s words. Watch the videos!
Rush Limbaugh Nov 24 2009 Morning Update
Climate Gate Scientists Would Rather Change Facts Than Their Theories!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RykErh8G4jk
Global warming scientists E mail hacked. 23rd 11th 09
GlennBeck Climategate
Climate Change Hoax – Climate-Gate
Alex Jones Tv: Climate-Gate ” THE E-MAILS ARE REAL!!!”
Infowars.com: Climate-Gate Pt 1 ***EMERGENCY VIRAL TRANSMISSION***
Infowars.com: Climate-Gate Pt 2 ***EMERGENCY VIRAL TRANSMISSION***
Global Warming Reports – Misleading by “Proxy”?
Background Articles and Video
Lord Lawson calls for public inquiry into UEA global warming data ‘manipulation’
Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, has called for an independent inquiry into claims that leading climate change scientists manipulated data to strengthen the case for man-made global warming.
“…Thousands of emails and documents stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and posted online indicate that researchers massaged figures to mask the fact that world temperatures have been declining in recent years.
This morning Lord Lawson, who has reinvented himself as a prominent climate change sceptic since leaving front line politics, demanded that the apparent deception be fully investigated.
He claimed that the credibility of the university’s world-renowned Climatic Research Unit – and British science – were under threat.
“They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth,” he told the BBC Radio Four Today programme.
“If there’s an explanation for what’s going on they can make that explanation.”
Around 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents were stolen from UEA computers by hackers last week and uploaded on to a Russian server before circulating on websites run by climate change sceptics.
Some of the correspondence indicates that the manipulation of data was widespread among global warming researchers.
One of the emails under scrutiny, written by Phil Jones, the centre’s director, in 1999, reads: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Prof Jones has insisted that he used the word “trick” to mean a “clever thing to do”, rather than to indicate deception. He has denied manipulating data.
Another scientist whose name appears in the documents accused the hackers of attempting to undermine the drive for a global consensus at next month’s Copenhagen summit. …”
“…The Hadley University of East Anglia CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine:
The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight …”It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”…
TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….
So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.
This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.
Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:
Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.
But back to the original post – and the most astonishing of the emails so far…
***************
Hackers have broken into the data base of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit - one of the world’s leading alarmist centres – and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps. …”
“…These e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the past decade, one scientist asks, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” They still can’t account for it; see a new article in Der Spiegel: “Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out.” I don’t know where these people got their scientific education, but where I come from, if your theory can’t predict or explain the observed facts, it’s wrong.
More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the “trick” consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature “proxies” from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward “hockey stick” slope.
Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It’s a basic rule of science that you don’t just get to report your results and ask other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and, yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists have refused.
But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the hijacking of the “peer review” process to enforce global warming dogma. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing. …”
“…This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.
The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.
This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.”
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?
James Delingpole
“…If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. …”
Christopher Horner Interview pt.1
Christopher Horner Interview pt.2
Christopher Horner Interview pt.3
Christopher Horner Interview pt.4
Christopher Horner Interview pt.5
Christopher Horner Interview pt.6
Christopher Horner Interview pt.7
Related Posts On Pronk Palisades
Global Warming/Climate Change
Glenn Beck, John Bolton, and Lord Christopher Monckton On Copenhagen 2009 Treaty, Climate Change and World Government–Videos
Lord Christopher Monckton–Climate Change–Treaty–Videos
“We Can Reverse Climate Change”–President Barack Obama–Liar or Fool–Or Both–You Be The Judge!
John Holdren–Science Czar–Videos
John Holdren: Global Warming: What Do We Know and Should Do–Videos
The Obama Depression Has Arrived: 15,000,000 to 25,000,000 Unemployed Americans–Stimulus Package and Bailouts A Failure–400,000 Leave Labor Force In July!
Facing Fundamental Facts
Gore Grilled & Gingrich Gouged–American People Oppose Massive Carbon Cap and Trade Tax Increase–Videos
National Center for Policy Analysis–A Global Warming Primer
Global Warming is The Greatest Hoax, Scam and Disinformation Campaign in History
Global Warming Videos
Global Warming Books
Global Warming Sites
The Heidelberg Appeal: Beware of False Gods and Prophets
Al Gore
Glenn Beck, John Bolton, and Lord Christopher Monckton On Copenhagen 2009 Treaty, Climate Change and World Government–Videos
Lord Christopher Monckton–Climate Change–Treaty–Videos
Cap and Trade Carbon Dioxide Tax: Gore’s and Obama’s Revenge on The American People–Let Them Freeze and Sweat!
Gore Grilled & Gingrich Gouged–American People Oppose Massive Carbon Cap and Trade Tax Increase–Videos
Al Gore 2.0 and The Coming Renewable Energy Ice Age–The Big Chill
Al Gore: Agent of Influence or Useful Idiot of Disinformation
Al Gore: Agent of Influence and Planetary Propeller Head!
Al Gore’s Little White Lie: Man-Made Global Warming Causing Polar Bears To Drown
Al Gore’s Big Whopper–Sea Levels Rise By 2100: Gore 20 Feet vs IPCC 2 Feet?
Tim Haab helpfully points out an article from Time about EnergyHub, a device for consumers to see more, and more timely, information about their energy consumption. I’ve written about EnergyHub here before, and honestly, they have not been among the most forward-looking or impressive of the products I’ve seen for providing consumers with both the information about their energy consumption and the ability to take action and automate changes in energy consumption behavior. Perhaps EnergyHub’s product has advanced since I last looked at them, but I do think Time christening EnergyHub’s smart thermostat one of the best inventions of 2009 is a bit of hyperbole, as well as being incorrect, since companies like Tendril have been working on more informative and communicative “smart thermostat” technology since 2007.
Still, having a publication like Time draw attention to the ability of homeowners to see better energy information and to respond to dynamic price signals autonomously is a positive step toward a more competitive and efficient retail electricity industry.
However, I have one nit to pick with Tim’s post. He states
Typical consumers get a bill at the end of the month reporting total consumption and the total bill. But efficient energy pricing requires the consumer to know the marginal cost of the next unit consumed–how much will it cost me to toast this frozen waffle?
Yes … and no. Think about the other products you consume — do you necessarily pay precisely the marginal cost for every single unit of every single product you consume? No. Electricity is no different from, say, your cell phone — do you know the marginal cost to Verizon of the next minute of mobile communication you consume? No, you don’t, and you don’t pay a price that directly reflects that cost. Why not? Because pricing also reflects preferences, not just costs, and there are differentiated products/service contracts.
However, what all other products you consume have that electricity does not is choice and product differentiation. In a competitive retail market, retailers would offer time-differentiated and quality-differentiated products, or bundled services, but these products and services do not necessarily all have to include real-time retail pricing to lead to efficient retail markets. Here’s an example: suppose I am risk-averse, so I do not want real-time prices, but I am willing to pay a peak-off peak time of use price. Suppose I contract with a retailer for a TOU contract. That retailer is essentially engaging in risk management, so the retailer will either buy from the wholesale market on long-term contracts or from the wholesale spot market (probably some combination of the two). In this case I do not observe the marginal cost of the last unit I consume, but I am choosing between peak and off peak. My retailer sees its marginal cost of the last unit I consume, though, in its engagement with the wholesale market. But the contract that I chose voluntarily reflects my willingness to bear price risk.
Put more simply: an efficient retail electricity market does not require that the retail price for all consumers precisely reflects the marginal cost to the supplier of the last unit consumed, but it does require that consumers have choices that enable them to express their diverse preferences over price risk, generation source, etc. It is also enabled by technology that allows consumers to see how much it’s going to cost them to toast that frozen waffle, and to make more sense of what a price per kilowatt-hour means in terms of actual consumption.
Tim is correct that electricity regulation has led to a world in which consumers pay a fixed, averaged price and only know how much they have consumed when they receive their bills at the end of the month. Given how much communication technology is prevalent in our lives, and how inexpensive it has become, that lack of information is appalling.
Christopher Elliot’s Everything Wired Must Converge is a decade old article predicting most of what has already happened regarding networks and technology. “Convergence…will change the ways in which business is conducted.” By convergence he means the marrying of multiple business systems with the Internet. Imagine a world where your human resources, point of sale, inventory control and financial systems all spoke to each other…oh wait they do now.
A decade ago it was obvious to think that the Internet would play a big role in how we do business in the future. In Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody he talks as if the Internet is second nature and how the power of organizations help us run large businesses as well as maintain complex unmonitored systems like Wikipedia. Today the Internet is second nature, which makes reading Elliot’s account so amusing. Shirky states that “when we change the way we communicate, we change society,” (p 17). The changes Elliot predicts helped streamline communication and bring us close to the point of instantaneous communication. This change increased customer support and brought greater security and flexibility to businesses. No longer would customers would have to call the store to get shipping information, then call UPS to check when it would be delivered. Also, businesses became more condensed and transparent across departments.
The convergence Elliot speaks of is, in essence, the outcome of society evolving to make technology work for us. In doing this we are building organizations and groups of people through connections over a network. Creating a set of branded networks is something that Elliot predicts, although he predicts that we will pay for them. We see the emergence of branded networks in social applications like Facebook and Twitter. Organizations that run on complex connections show that to be social is to be human. Elliot and Shirky both agree that the possibilities of the Internet are worth investing in.
Objectives To estimate the potential economic impact of pandemicinfluenza, associated behavioural responses, school closures,and vaccination on the United Kingdom.
Design A computable general equilibrium model of the UK economywas specified for various combinations of mortality and morbidityfrom pandemic influenza, vaccine efficacy, school closures,and prophylactic absenteeism using published data.
Setting The 2004 UK economy (the most up to date available withsuitable economic data).
Main outcome measures The economic impact of various scenarioswith different pandemic severity, vaccination, school closure,and prophylactic absenteeism specified in terms of gross domesticproduct, output from different economic sectors, and equivalentvariation.
Results The costs related to illness alone ranged between 0.5%and 1.0% of gross domestic product (£8.4bn to £16.8bn)for low fatality scenarios, 3.3% and 4.3% (£55.5bn to£72.3bn) for high fatality scenarios, and larger stillfor an extreme pandemic. School closure increases the economicimpact, particularly for mild pandemics. If widespread behaviouralchange takes place and there is large scale prophylactic absencefrom work, the economic impact would be notably increased withfew health benefits. Vaccination with a pre-pandemic vaccinecould save 0.13% to 2.3% of gross domestic product (£2.2bnto £38.6bn); a single dose of a matched vaccine couldsave 0.3% to 4.3% (£5.0bn to £72.3bn); and two dosesof a matched vaccine could limit the overall economic impactto about 1% of gross domestic product for all disease scenarios.
Conclusion Balancing school closure against “business as usual”and obtaining sufficient stocks of effective vaccine are moreimportant factors in determining the economic impact of an influenzapandemic than is the disease itself. Prophylactic absence fromwork in response to fear of infection can add considerably tothe economic impact.
At last I have some time with a semi decent internet connection to update this. I am now in Mangalore, heading north up the west coast. Only arrived here today and as it is Sunday it seemed pretty much closed. Not that i was too bothered, as the rickshaw from the station to the hotel showed me all i needed to know. No different to Trivandrum really, lots of mad driving, dirty streets with no pavements and small shops with many people standing around outside.
You may note a hint of “over it” in the above and you’d be right. I need to see someting more interesting (or at least different) and that certainly won’t be in Mangalore.!
The 14 hr train journey form Trivandrum was not too bad. I managed to luck out on a top bunk and got some sleep, although the coming and going of passengers all night was annoying. The morning was more fun, as most people had already got off the train and i got 3 hours to look out the window. I saw the rural India passing by and it looked spectacular, very green and wet in Kerela. There were coconut palms all the way, interspersed with small farms and paddies, cows and goats abounding, and people on bikes, walking and working. A lot of the homes looked quite comfortable, some very comfortable mansions as well, but there were also a few shacks that did not look too pleasant to be in. I did not notice any development in terms of industry at all, in 3 hours, which I think is interesting, it is still very much agricultural.
A few days ago I was the most southerly person on the mainland on the Indian Subcontinent! I made sure of it. I sat on the ghats (steps) and had one foot in the Indian ocean and one in the Arabian sea. Looking North, I imagined the whole county spread before me and almost started swimming for Australia . There were some good monuments in Kanyakumuri, and a ferry trip and walk around the bazaar was interesting.
The problem with having such a large, cheap, labour supply, is everywhere is overstaffed. There does not seem to be any desire to be more efficient or modernise, as this would reduce the number of people employed. i have come accross ridiculous examples of people doing completely unnecessary tasks. For example buying ferry ticket one man sold me the ticket and he passed it to the man right next to him, who checked it (how could it be wrong!) ripped a corner and gave it to me. In the restaurant that same night there were different waiters for showing you a table, getting you a drink, taking your order, serving the food; everything was done by a different man. (yes they were all men but that’s another story). There was even one guy, who i think was in charge of opening a window, because he stood there all night in full uniform and that’s all I saw him do. Now while I hear you say, “it gives them an income”, I wonder about the development of the country when the desire seems to be to create as many jobs for people as you can, and don’t consider efficiency! One for you economics scholars to explain.
So i’m looking forward to Goa tommorrow. While I suspect it is completely touristy and unlike the rest of the country, that’s fine by me. A few days of Beech, Beer and Biriyani is called for!
When he was in office, Ronald Reagan looked bad. Now, by today’s standards, he looks like a progressive.
Reagan, Ronald. 1973. “On Spending and the Nature of Government.” National Review (7 December).
“When I took office in 1967, we discovered that the promise of “no tax increases” could not be carried out. California was virtually insolvent, the precious administration having changed that state’s system of budgetary bookkeeping in a way that allowed the spending of 15 months’ revenue in twelve months’ time, thus avoiding a major tax increase in election year 1966. The state government was spending $1 million a day more than it was collecting.”
“California, unlike the Federal Government, cannot print more money or pile up deficits. The governor is required to submit a balanced budget, and if any additional taxes are needed to balance revenues with spending, the constitution requires the governor to propose higher taxes.”
“So our first major lesson in government was painful: for the taxpayers and for us. We had to increase taxes by some $800 million to balance the unbalanced budget we inherited.”
“The belief that government, whatever its size, can be shielded from political pressures is a myth. Some believers in small government seem genuinely to believe that it is possible to run the state into an impartial umpire for establishing and enforcing a framework of laws whose main function will be to enable the market to function efficiently and fairly. But this cannot be done: the scope of the market and the meanings of ‘efficiency’ and ‘equity’ are contested issues, not to be read off from an economics textbook. If other interests get weaker, market interests get stronger. If government is remodeled in the image of the market, a green light is given to market interests. There are certainly dangers of excessive calls on the public purse from too much interest group activity, but the remedy lies in a better democratic process, not the domination of one strong interest.”
Barack Obama said that his recent trip to Asia was a boost to the US economy.
What exactly did Obama do?
“‘I spoke with leaders in every nation I visited about what we can do to sustain this economic recovery and bring back jobs and prosperity for our people — a task I will continue to focus on relentlessly in the weeks and months ahead,’”
So what was the real result of Obama’s trip
He talked.
What did not result from Obama’s trip
New job creation
Reduction in US trade deficit
Reduction of debt held by foreign nations
There was no real, measurable progress made in any area of any significance with any relevance to the US economy or individual Americans.
Obama is blowing more smoke regarding the real outcomes of his actions than any private American business or citizen he and Al Gore want to crush under their “cap and tax”.
Reuters reports that Barack Obowma is issuing warnings about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying that if government debt were to pile up, it could lead to a double-dip recession.
“It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession,” he said.
Obama says this while spending erratically and continuing to push excessively costly programs that will ultimately devastate the national economy, such as his stimulus, cap and trade, industry bailouts, his hallmark federalized health care overhaul and the granting of amnesty to approximately 30 million illegal aliens, who further negatively impact America’s ravaged job market.
Then, during an address in Shanghai, China earlier this week, Obama who has indicated his desire to clamp down on FOX News and curtail talk radio, disingenuously declared: “I’m a big supporter of non-censorship. I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.”
The Examiner has more on Obama’s frontal attack on conservative talk radio. This man thinks the U.S. citizenry are fools who are watching the gauge on the beer keg more than his antics.
I’ve recommended Jonah Lehrer’s The Frontal Cortex blog before, and if you haven’t checked it out, here are two more reasons to do so. His most recent post discusses Bill Belichick’s decision to go for the first down from 4th and 2 in Sunday night’s Patriots game, and ties it to David Gordon’s research on whether or not NFL coaches follow the optimal 4th down strategy:
… it illustrates the difficulty of making rational decisions, even when the evidence supports the call.
I’ve blogged about the research of UC Berkeley economist David Romer before, but his basic thesis, based on an exhaustive statistical analysis of 4th down scenarios, is that NFL coaches are irrationally risk-averse. They punt the ball way too frequently and kick far too many field goals.
Belichick was an econ major, and has expressed a familiarity with Romer’s research.
Lehrer then goes on to discuss this risk-aversion research, with links to other analyses of Belichick’s decision. One of the fascinating aspects of the 4th down decision that Lehrer highlights is that Belichick was statistically correct to go for it, but it’s emotionally difficult for coaches to make that call (and for fans to endure it). The probability part is also interesting — even with a higher probability of making a field goal, this research shows that going for the 1st down on 4th down increases the probability of winning.
On Tuesday Lehrer also remarked on the research of my Kellogg colleague Jennifer Brown, who does some of the most interesting work I’ve seen in a long time. In her new working paper, “Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars“, Jen finds that golfers in PGA tournaments perform more poorly when competing against Tiger Woods, especially when Woods is playing well. She and Lehrer have different hypotheses for this result, as Lehrer notes:
Brown argues that this phenomenon is caused when “competitors scale back their effort in events where they believe Woods will surely win.” After all, why waste energy and angst on an impossible contest?
That hypothesis is certainly possible, but I’d argue that the superstar effect has more to do with “paralysis by analysis” than with decreased motivation. I’d bet that playing with Tiger Woods makes golfers extra self-conscious, and that such self-consciousness leads to choking and decreased performance. The problem, then, isn’t that golfers aren’t trying hard enough when playing against Tiger – it’s that they’re trying too hard.
I wonder if there’s a way to test these two hypotheses? I think given her data that it might be difficult; testing such a hypothesis may require biometric data like heart rate, sweating, etc. I frankly am more inclined toward Lehrer’s hypothesis, based on my reading of neuropsychology and my non-Tiger-Woods-like experience of athletic competition; the “trying too hard” fits with my experience of athlete psychology. But I’d really like to see if there’s a way to discriminate between the two.
Interesting article today in the LA Times – a new light rail system (Gold Line extension) just opened, and guess what?
The ridership “is not meeting expectations.”
Surprise!
When it opened on Sunday, 75,000 people rode it for FREE. By the end of the year they now HOPE that 13,000 will actually pay each day.
Mass transit is just another fiscal scam – always costing more than budgeted, and always being used by fewer risers than predicted but it is just a congenital proclivity like liberalism – letting hope overcome experience while ignoring history.
“If we just jigger it a bit here, modify it a bit there and hire different people then this pig will fly.”
Alan Kirman has contributed another indictment of the standard—Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium—neoclassical macroeconomic model.
One problem is the notion of equilibrium:
Aggregating the behaviour of lots of rational individuals will not necessarily lead to behaviour consistent with that of some “representative agent”. The well-known Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu results show this and undermine the foundations of macroeconomics in general. Despite our heroic assumptions on the rationality of individuals, we can guarantee neither the uniqueness nor the stability of equilibria.
The second problem is the assumption of rationality:
The axioms that are used to define “rationality” are based on the introspection of economists and not on the observed behaviour of individuals. Economists from Pareto through Hicks to Koopmans have long made this point. Thus we have wound up in the weird position of developing models that unjustifiably claim to be scientific because they are based on the idea that the economy behaves like a rational individual, when behavioural economics provides a wealth of evidence showing that the rationality in question has little or nothing to do with how people behave.
But Kirman is not optimistic about neoclassical economists’ willingness to discard general equilibrium models and the assumptions of infinite farsightedness and infinite selfishness on which they are based:
To discard equilibrium in the standard sense and study out-of-equilibrium dynamics is perhaps too big a step.
Too big for those attached to the reigning orthodoxy but not for all the other economists out there who have a long history of analyzing capitalism on the basis of historical change, interacting agents, economic and social structures, and nonequilibrium dynamics.
Two recent posts on this blog (here and here) raise the issue of animal spirits and where macro is headed. I’ve recently completed a draft manuscript saying we are headed for “BRACE” economics. I say the “New Interventionist Economics” will be characterized by five features:
Bubbles
Radical Uncertainty
Animal Spirits
Complexity Dynamics
Extra-Market Control
(giving the BRACE acronym).
My paper includes a look at two contributions to the recent conference asking “What’s Wrong with Modern Macroeconomics?” namely, those of Kirman and De Grauwe. The conference has been discussed at Mark Thoma’s Economist’sView. I think the Kirman and De Grauwe papers represent the likely direction of macroeconomics. I provide some evidence in my paper that central bankers are in the market for this sort of thing. I quote Janet Yellen pushing for a scary form of discretion, by the way. (See page p. 25 of my paper or page 13 of her talk.)
I think there is room to criticize both the analytics and the policy conclusions of the new interventionists. On the analytical level, I think we should push comparative institutional analysis harder than the new interventionists seem to be doing. On the policy level, think we have to push hard on epistemics. On that score, I think K. Vela Velupillai’s “computable economics” could be very helpful, especially this result. I give a user-friendly reviews of computable economics here and here. Getting the history of the Great Recession right is also important. In this regard I would like to see more attention paid to Peart & Levy’s point that the housing bubble was, in part at least, expert induced.
Last week, I presented my group project, The Economics of Educational Technology, along with my two group members, Karen Jones and Bryan Hughes. We decided to host the module in a wiki. Please see http://economicfoundationsdlg9.wikispaces.com/ to view our content.
Some of our discussions took place using VoiceThread. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam).
In addition, we used MindMeister, a collaborative online mind mapping tool. MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, fellow MindMeisters from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map and see each other’s changes as they happen.
As a culminating activity, we used animoto to summarize the major themes of the economics of educational technology. We had asked our classmates to contribute an image related to the Economics of Educational Technology. Here is our finished product:
Overall, the week went very well, with some very good discussions happening within the ETEC 511 course shell in Vista. The project itself was very interesting in terms of content and the tools we utilized in order to moderate the week.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
~George Santayana
“…CONCLUSION:
THE LESSONS OF MR. OBAMA’S RECORD
Mr. Obama met the challenge of the Obama Depression by acting quickly and decisively, indeed almost continuously throughout his term of office, putting into effect “the greatest program of offense and defense” against depression ever attempted in America. Bravely he used every modern economic “tool,” every device of progressive and “enlightened” economics, every facet of government planning, to combat the depression. For the first time, laissez-faire was boldly thrown overboard and every government weapon thrown into the breach. America had awakened, and was now ready to use the State to the hilt, unhampered by by the supposed shibboleths of laissez-faire. President Obama was a bold and audacious leader in this awakening. By every “progressive” tenet of our day he should have ended his term a conquering hero; instead he left America in utter and complete ruin: a ruin unprecedented in length and intensity.
What was the trouble? Economic theory demonstrates that only governmental inflation can generate a boom-and-bust cycle, and that the depression will be prolonged and aggravated by inflationist and other interventionary measures. In contrast to the myth of laissez-faire, we have shown in this book how government intervention generated the unsound boom of 2002-2007, and how Obama’s new departure aggravated the Obama Depression by massive measures of interference. The guilt for the Obama Depression must, at long last, be lifted from the shoulders of the free market economy, and placed where it properly belongs at the doors of politicians, bureaucrats, and the mass of “enlightened” economists. And in any other depression, past or future, the story will be same.”
~Murray Rothbard, America’s Obama Depression
President Obama’s economic policies repeat those of President Herbert Hoover, who the late economist Murray Rothbard was writing about. Just replace Obama with Hoover, Obama Depression with Great Depression, and 2002 to 2007 with 1920’s and you have the original quote. I am sure Murray would be laughing.
“The wavelike movement effecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion.”
~Ludwig von Mises
The Future of Austrian Economics
John Maynard Keynes: Hero or Villain? Part 1
John Maynard Keynes: Hero or Villain? Part 2
John Maynard Keynes: Hero or Villain? Part 3
John Maynard Keynes: Hero or Villain? Part 4
Related Posts On Pronk Palisades
Economists
The Battle For The World Economy–Videos
Frederic Bastiat–The Law–Videos
Yaron Brook–Videos
Friedrich Hayek–Videos
Milton Friedman–Videos
Milton Friedman on Education–Videos
Ludwig von Mises–Videos
The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and The Ideas of Ayn Rand
Peter Schiff–Videos
Schiff, Forbers and Bloomberg Nail The Financial Crisis and Recession–Mistakes Were Made–Greed, Arrogance, Stupidity–Three Chinese Curses!
L. William Seidman on The Economic Crisis: Causes and Cures–Videos
Amity Shlaes–Videos
Julian Simon–Videos
Thomas Sowell and Conflict of Visions–Videos
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.–Videos
Banking Cartel’s Public Relations Campaign Continues:Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke On The Record
The proposed Healthcare Bills from the Democrats are a typical Washington operation – they collect 10 years of taxes but provide only six years of medical care.
That way they get credit for relatively cheap healthcare – but in 10 years when we have to pay for the next 10 years of healthcare with 10 years of taxes there will either be huge taxes required per year, or there will have to be severe healthcare rationing.
This is a financial scam, and they need to be called on it!
Warren Buffet, who called derivatives the “‘financial weapons of mass destruction’” and turned around and made money on these weapons, turned around again and bet the pot on a railroad, a corporation that owns assets and real estate, settling in for the long haul.
Maybe the Oracle is a little leery of the worthless paper floating around Wall Street these days?
Up until a week ago, the prospects for a second round of economic stimulus looked bleak; an ominous coalition of Senate moderates (the same folks who shrank the stimulus and cut out Pelosi’s teacher preservation program, and who’ve tried their level best to stop the health care reform effort in its tracks) threatened to force the U.S government into default unless Congress agreed to a deficit-reduction committee with authority over Social Security and Medicare, and President Obama responded by talking up deficit reduction in his next budget.
And then the October jobs report came out, showing unemployment rising over the magical 10% level that signals political disaster in a midterm election. Suddenly, President Obama began to talk up a December “jobs summit,” and Senator Reid announced that he’s pulling together a pre-election jobs bill.
This sudden momentum is welcome, but if we want to significantly reduce unemployment, and thereby protect our Democratic Congress at the same time, we need to be very careful about what goes into this jobs bill.
Evaluating Options:
To begin with, let’s start by analyzing the policy options that have been widely discussed in the media – a new jobs tax credit for employers, a payroll tax holiday, and a package of infrastructure public works projects.
New Jobs Tax Credit: one of the elements that the Obama administration has repeatedly mentioned, which was initially proposed but eliminated from the stimulus bill back in January, is a tax credit of $3,000 per new worker hired. Economists tend to be rather skeptical of such tax breaks: given that the average worker’s compensation comes to about $X, they argue, $3,000 is unlikely to make much of a difference in hiring decisions.
The historical evidence suggests more of a mixed bag. During the Nixon Administration, a New Jobs Tax Credit was established, providing a 50% subsidy on the first $10,000 in wages (or about $5,000 per head). Taking the average of three different studies’ estimates, the New Jobs Tax Credit created about 468,000 jobs, at a cost of $6,480-$58,000 per job (in 2008 dollars).
While this suggests that a new jobs credit could conceivably create some jobs, given that the current proposal is quite a bit less, we might only see 280,000 jobs for $840 million. While that isn’t bad on a per-dollar basis, it’s still only a .18% drop in the bucket – not even enough to bring us down to 10% even.
(Note: to be completely fair, I should note that Timothy Bartik and John Bishop of the Economic Policy Institute, who have more expertise in these kinds of calculators than I do, estimate that a properly-designed New Job Tax Credit of 10-15% could create 2.8 million jobs in the first year, at a gross cost of $80 billion (net cost of $27 billion. This would give us an unemployment rate of 8.1%, which is pretty good for $27 billion.)
Payroll Tax Holiday: one idea that has an unusual amount of bi-partisan support from progressive economists like L. Randall Wray and conservative anti-taxers is a payroll tax holiday for employers. The strange thing about it is that, when you think about what it does, a payroll tax holiday only differs from Obama’s new jobs credit in terms of scale, not kind, coming out to a $2,500 credit for employers and a $2,500 credit for employees.
This comes out roughly equivalent in scale to the New Jobs Tax Credit of the 1970s, suggesting a potential direct effect of somewhere around 468,000 jobs, which is good, but would only drop the unemployment rate from 10.2% to 9.87%. On the other hand, as Wray and others have pointed out, a payroll tax credit – since it also results in increased take-home pay for workers – would provide additional stimulus of about $685 billion, which might increase the overall effect (if we take the stimulus’ 3.3 million for $787 billion) to 3.339 million jobs. This would bring unemployment down to 8%, which is a significant improvement. (Note: the Center for Budget and Policy priorities is rather more skeptical of the idea.)
The downside of the payroll tax holiday is twofold: first, politically, a $685 billion price tag would be extremely hard to swallow, even in the context of 10% unemployment. Second, there is the issue of timing. As we have seen, the stimulus has shown significant results in terms of turning economic growth around and at least stemming layoffs – but it’s taken 8-9 months, and we still haven’t gotten to the point of substantial jobs growth. It is unlikely that the electorate would see enough in the way of results before November to make this effort worth the political effort.
Public Works/ Stimulus:
Another option that has been discussed, especially since the stimulus package only ended up containing about $275 billion in public works (another $288 billion went to tax cuts and $224 billion to entitlement programs like UI and Food Stamps), is a second round of stimulus. Ideas for said stimulus have been varied – Lawrence Mishel and Ross Eisenbray have recommended $160 billion in aid to the states and another $10 billion in school repair and maintenance, L. Randall Wray has called for $400 billion split between Unemployment Insurance and aid to states, others have called for more money for a “smart” energy grid and other green projects, and so on.
What we have learned from the current stimulus is that your bog-standard Keynesian stimulus does work. Despite being split into tax cuts, entitlements, and public works, and despite the fact that only 58% of moneys have been awarded, and only 13% received (according to recovery.org), we’ve still created or saved 685,000 jobs and created about 2.3% in additional GDP growth. At this rate, we’re on track to hit 3.3 million jobs created or saved overall, which should mean an additional 2.7 million jobs once the public works contracts are fully let and the crews are hired. However, what we have learned is that it takes time. We very likely won’t see the stimulus take its full effect for at least a year.
A new stimulus package would undoubtedly have a significant economic impact; what is more doubtful is how quickly traditional public works and/or stimulus could take effect.
Direct Job Creation:
As I have discussed in my Job Insurance series, the direct creation of jobs is a potentially powerful vehicle for creating a large number of jobs for a relatively low amount of money (compared to traditional aggregate stimulus) quickly.
A youth jobs program, as discussed here, could create jobs at about $22 billion for every million jobs created. An adult jobs program, that seeks to provide a wage that could keep a family of four out of poverty, could create jobs at the rate of about $35 billion per million jobs created. The direct job creation route has certain advantages over the options discussed before: unlike a new jobs tax cut or a payroll tax holiday, direct job creation does not depend on the uncertain reaction of employers in what is a very dicey market. As we have seen, despite the marked improvement in terms of economic growth, employers have been rather hesitant to add employees, and have turned instead to getting more out of their existing workforce – even as average hours worked per week has dropped to about 32, output per hour has risen by 9.7% in the third quarter of 2009. Secondly, direct job creation can be extremely fast (in part because it doesn’t have to wait for the effects of stimulus to percolate throughout the economy) – the Civil Works Administration in 1933 was able to put 4.27 million people to work in three months. A direct jobs creation program would produce visible results well in advance of the 2010 midterm elections.
One of the most positive signs that I have seen recently is that the idea of direct job creation, which wasn’t even mentioned during the stimulus debates, has started to make its way back into the discourse. Both Mishel and Eisenbray call for a “public service employment” program (i.e, a jobs program where workers are tasked to providing public services instead of constructing public goods) of at least $40 billion. It’ somewhat hard to calculate how many jobs that works out to (given that Mishel and Eisenbray call for such jobs to pay the prevailing wage, which varies from state to state), but if we take an extremely rough estimate of $15 an hour, that would come out to at least a million jobs per $40 billion.
Getting Where We Need to Go:
So the question is, how do we build a jobs bill from this range of options? The trick here is to balance our objective of making a significant and fast dent in our U3 unemployment rate of 10.2% and our political constraints here regarding the budget deficit.
Wray and the other progressive economists, as is the wise political move, are arguing for the largest possible package, to push the “Overton window” of this debate as far as it will go, which is why Wray is calling for $400 billion just in aid to the states, and Mishel/Eisenbray call for a package to roughly works out to $293 billion (including $160 billion in aid to states, $40 billion in direct job creation, $80 billion for a new jobs credit, and $13 billion for school repair/maintenance). My guess would be that at the very most, we’re talking about anywhere from $100-300 billion. I certainly don’t think anything larger than that will fly at the moment. Granted, this effort becomes much easier if the jobs bill can be made to be deficit-neutral by raising some revenue. Mishel and Eisenbray’s suggestion for a Tobin tax to generate about $100-150 billion a year is a good one, allowing potentially a quite strong package to be funded without much difficulty.
Taking Mishel/Eisenbray’s $293 billion package as a rough guideline, I think we could create a package that created 8.8 million jobs if we combined a strong direct jobs creation package of 2.25 million jobs for youth (price tag = $49.5 billion) and 3.75 million jobs for adults (price tag = $131.25 billion) with Bartik/Bishop’s version of the New Jobs Tax Credit (price tag = $80 billion), coming in at $281 billion. This would drop unemployment down to 4%, and it would do it well within a year, creating a drastic sea-change in both the larger economy and in the public eye.
Making the package deficit neutral isn’t particularly easy, but it is possible – the suggested Tobin Tax would make it deficit-neutral within 3 years; establishing the youth and adult jobs programs as social insurance would generate enough revenue to pay back the initial cost within 7 years. And as I’ll discuss in my next section, this is only scratching the surface of potential revenue mechanisms.
Conclusion:
Back in January when the stimulus was being debated, a jobs bill was but one element among many, and the political winds favored tax cuts and traditional public works (and let’s not forget, a smaller package than initially proposed).
Now a jobs bill has become a matter of political survival. And this is by no means a bad thing. Because it is when politicians most fear defeat that their traditional fear of the new and the untried becomes weakest. We should take advantage of this sudden change in the winds; it might not come again.
Four years ago, Jamie Oliver convinced a school district in London to let him takeover the lunch program. Two economists tracked that work, and the results have been unambiguously positive:
Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.
As Ezra Klein says, that’s good enough evidence to try this same experiment elsewhere.
I’ve been reading a little bit by/about Slavoj Žižek over the past few days, and find him an intriguing figure, if also an infuriating and incomprehensible one at (quite a lot of) times.
One interesting argument I wanted to share from his essay Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule, though, is his suggestion that an ideology can only flourish in the face of opposition, and only triumph in its apparent defeat. As he puts it:
The true victory (the true “negation of negation”) occurs when the enemy talks your language. In this sense, a true victory is a victory in defeat: it occurs when one’s specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy.
Žižek gives two examples of this (three, if you include his parenthetical remark that “the true victory of science [over religion] takes place when the church starts to defend itself in the language of science”). The first is New Labour’s role in confirming the permanance of the “Thatcher revolution” in the UK:
The Thatcher revolution was in itself chaotic, impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies, and it was only the “Third Way” Blairite government who was able to institutionalize it, to stabilize it into new institutional forms, or, to put it in Hegelese, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into necessity. In this sense, Blair repeated Thatcherism, elevating it into a concept, in the same way that, for Hegel, Augustus repeated Caesar, transforming-sublating a (contingent) personal name into a concept, a title.
Thatcher was not a Thatcherite, she was just herself – it was only Blair (more than John Major) who truly formed Thatcherism as a notion. The dialectical irony of history is that only a (nominal) ideologico-political enemy can do this to you, can elevate you into a concept – the empirical instigator has to be knocked off (Julius Caesar had to be murdered, Thatcher had to be ignominously deposed).
A similar lesson can be drawn from the Communist Party’s introduction of capitalism to China over the past thirty years, so that the truly revolutionary force in China today is capitalism, with its “breath-taking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity” in which “all things solid melt into thin air”. In the Marxist view, this revolutionary dynamism is an ultimately futile attempt to escape the contradictions of capitalism, and Žižek continues:
Marx’s fundamental mistake was here to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.
In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility”: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism – if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates…
In other words, the economic stagnation seen in Communist countries – and, by the 1970s, in countries following the social democratic/Keynesian policies that were swept away by Thatcherism – were the paradoxical result of the apparent removal of an obstacle having the effect of removing the potential which it had appeared to thwart.
But those who long for fully free and unleashed capitalism, released from the remaining constraints of regulation and social provision should be aware that the same principle may apply in both directions:
[I]t is as if this logic of “obstacle as a positive condition” which underlied the failure of the socialist attempts to overcome capitalism, is now returning with a vengeance in capitalism itself: capitalism can fully thrive not in the unencumbered reign of the market, but only when an obstacle (the minimal Welfare State interventions, up to the direct political rule of the Communist Party, as is the case in China) constraints its unimpeded reign.
I’d like to be an economist. But not just that, I want to do good, help out, and make the world a better place. So an organization that sends Economists (kind of like Doctors Without Borders) to places where they are greatly needed would be a great place to work.
There’s one that’s for MBA’s called MBA’s Without Borders and then there’s one firm kind of like that based in Australia; it’s called Ecolarge. (There is no “Economists Without Borders” as such, so starting one, though it would be a daunting task, would be cool.)
Under the House Healthcare Bill, there is the threat of jail time for those who can afford to buy insurance, but don’t.
The Senate Bill removed the threat of jail time.
The President says: “I think the general broad principle is simply that people who are paying for their health insurance aren’t subsidizing folks who simply choose not to until they get sick and then suddenly they expect free health insurance. That’s — that’s basic concept of responsibility that I think most Americans abide by,” Mr. Obama said, “penalties are appropriate for people who try to free ride the system and force others to pay for their health insurance.”
And here I thought the President favored the “Freedom of choice.”
The CIA was charged with accurately assessing the threat to national security posed by enemies of the United States, principally the Soviet Union. The agency was staffed by professionals whose careers were served by having to confront a powerful enemy with armed with lots of tanks. But neither their training nor their general perspective on life equipped those in the so-called intelligence services to see the real real weaknesses of the Soviet system, so they were unable to predict the fall of communism.
The financial services industry in the Anglo-Saxon countries is the most lightly regulated across all the developed economies. The public authorities allowed the leaders of this industry to opt for a self-serving approach dignified with the epithet of “self-regulation.” In fact it amounted to turning a blind eye to imprudent practices which were making many practitioners obscene amounts of money. Everyone, including the regulators, were riding the same bull market, cashing in on the same up-escalator, blowing up the same unsustainable bubble. Nobody stopped Bernard Madoff before he had defrauded billions of dollars using the oldest trick in the book. Nobody thought to point out that lending money to people who would not be able to pay their mortgages could only lead to tragedy. Are you surprised therefore that the financial services industry triggered a global crisis which led to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression?
When you rely for information and clear judgement on those who have a material interest in looking at the world in a particular way, would you expect to get good advice? Why then ask the International Energy Agency to be guardian of truth when it comes to figures about oil production and reserves.? Who stands to gain from pedalling inflated figures for future oil production a reserves? Oil companies? Leading oil producing countries. Dominant oil-dependent economies? So take more than a pinch of salt when you try to digest predictions from the International Energy Agency.
Is pretty much the Mahinda regime’s economic style. Everything is geared to help the farmer, at least in the confines of the silver-tongued one’s silver tongue. Taxes on basic goods that all but cripple the people are said to be tariff protection to ‘protect the farmers livelihoods’. This is of course, utter tosh. And we dont even have to go down the road to discern the long-term damages that tariff protections cause to find out why; most goods that are taxed heavily aren’t even produced here. So which farmers are we protecting then?
This was the answer that was almost violently espoused at last night’s Rupavahini televised press conference when a reporter dared to ask the president why, even after the war was over, were some essential goods still being taxed heavily. The president responded with what i can only say was a babble of words strategically designed to fall directly into the cultivating proletariat’s heart that totally and uncaringly bypassed the intelligent listener in the form of utter BS.
All i could hear were weighty words like ’village’, ‘ farmer’, ‘fertiliser subsidy’, ‘farmer’, ’village’ etc. The question asked bore no relation to the point of the answer. Indeed the answer had no point. It was a surge of propaganda from the leader’s mouth designed to provoke an upsurge of gratefulness in the hearts of villagers who grow things, arguably the class of people the larger majority of the country are affiliated with.
But that same majority are even worse off due to high costs of living. And could they be really stupid enough to be duped by heavy words and disconnected theories to explain away their strife? The president is basically telling us that by increasing our costs of living, he is increasing our wealth. If he is right, then socialist-farmernomics is the end-all revolution in economics. And im a burnt scarecrow.
Turning 46-63 in 2009 and making up about one-third of the US population, America’s vast Baby Boom generation may now be the angriest cohort in recent US history.
If Demographics is Destiny, that fate seems to have turned violently against us recently, as our generation has collectively borne the brunt of a seemingly unending series of social and economic events, from outsourcing and the hollowing out of America’s manufacturing base to the collapse of home equity financing and the recent drop in home prices to last year’s stock market crash and its demolition of a lifetime of hard-earned savings.
Now, a well-organized – and often heavy-handed – propaganda campaign seeks to push Boomers off center stage in our nation’s political, economic, and cultural life, while we are still very much in our prime and in the age range normally considered the peak of one’s capacity for achievement, productivity, and earnings.
Nearly every Boomer I know is angry about this state of affairs – angry at our government, at both major political parties, at the economic and media Establishments which are trying so desperately to marginalize us at the very moment our problems and concerns need to be taken more seriously, if this nation is to regain its footing as the Land of Promise and Plenty it used to be.
This series, Baby Boomers-The Angriest Generation, will attempt to make sense of what our still powerful and influential, but deeply troubled and perplexed generation is feeling right now.
We will seek to hear from, talk to, and present the stories of Baby Boomers from every region and from a range of educational, professional, and political backgrounds – those who believe they’re doing well and those who think they’ve hit a brick wall; those who think things are getting better and those who think they’re getting worse; those who are hopeful and those whose hope has fled.
Some stories in the series will be humorous, others dead serious. We’ll hear from experts and pundits of various kinds. But we’ll also hear from your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues, your brothers and sisters – and maybe from you.
If you’re a Baby Boomer living in the US or Canada, I’d love to talk with you. I’ve set up a new Internet E-mail address just for this series: angrygeneration at optonline.net.
We can correspond by E-mail only, or we can talk over the phone. And while I must be able to confirm your identity and that you’re a Baby Boomer, I will identify you by name in future articles only if you give me your permission. If you care to comment anonymously, I will honor your request to the letter.
I’d be especially interested in talking with people with these specific backgrounds:
**Engineers and others whose jobs and/or manufacturing companies were lost or destroyed because of the “hollowing out” of the US manufacturing base the past couple of decades.
**IT professionals and others whose jobs and/or small to midsize companies were lost or destroyed, as large parts of their sectors were “outsourced” to other countries, either earlier in this decade or within the past few years.
**Anyone believing their jobs or small to midsize businesses have been either hurt or helped by the influx in immigration within the past decade.
**Those whose professional lives and/or life’s savings have been badly impacted by the recent market crash. I’d like to hear from both “passive” investors and from active traders or managers of small funds which have been hurt.
**Financial sector professionals, including attorneys and bankers, whose careers have come to a temporary grinding halt.
**Anyone hurt by the housing debacle, including employees in the real estate, mortgage, or construction sectors.
**People coping with rising college costs, medical emergencies, or the contingencies of aiding aging parents.
**Nonprofit managers, social workers, and local political leaders, coping with the effects of economic distress in their own communities.
If you belong to none of the above categories, but would like to have your voice heard, you are very welcome!
As this series develops, I hope that we will begin to hear The Voice of a Generation, telling politicians and others in positions of influence that far from being willing to settle for less than is our due, Baby Boomers are already fighting back hard to regain our prominent position in national affairs.
We already make up the greatest proportion of US small business owners, and a new burst of entrepreneurial spirit among Boomers is now at hand.
Far from playing second fiddle to younger Americans in technological matters, Baby Boomers are in the forefront establishing companies based on new technologies.
We still dominate managerial positions in sectors crucial to America’s future, from environmental protection and urban planning to senior services and education.
And Boomer politicians hold the majority of legislative and executive positions at the national, state, and local levels.
This last statistic makes the anti-Boomer propaganda push the last several months particularly surprising. For Boomer legislators, Boomer corporate executives, or Boomer media pundits to push for their peers, their brethren, and possibly their former colleagues to retreat to low-paying “encore careers,” so that what they fear is a shrinking economic pie can be served up to the clamoring younger generations behind the Boomer mass . . . Well, to say this is a misguided and cynical effort is a vast understatement.
We cannot and should not accept an intragenerational split between a very few Haves and many Have Nots, particularly if the instigators of this split are working against their own generational peers for what seem to be purely political motives.
Moreover, perhaps it is the very idea of a shrinking economic pie that needs to be turned on its head. Perhaps it is time to embrace a new optimism about this country’s possibilities. And perhaps the best way to do this is by allowing the Generation in its true prime of life – the Baby Boomers – to regain its footing and its prominence as quickly as possible.
Start letting your voices be heard!
For the second article in this series, which focuses on Anti-Boomer propaganda, please go to: http://wp.me/pxD3J-8
For a story on the co-housing movement, which may return Boomers to “Sophisticated Communes,” see: http://wp.me/pxD3J-x
For a story on how Financial Re-Engineering is Turning Erstwhile Corporate Kings into Pawns: http://wp.me/pxD3J-B
A few hours ago Congress demonstrated the fallacy of democracy, mob rule. But what were we to expect other than sodomy from Democrats, and a RINO?
That’s right. I consider this to be as much a rape of the American people by Congress as any rape in any county jail or prison by the stronger inmate.
Note also that those committing the rape will not participate in the same swallowing or forced entry into their lives. Nope, they are, after all, better than thou.
Not to mention, that while this Tijuana donkey show was being presented all sorts of other nefarious things were being played out elsewhere while you were being distracted.
The economy is still in a shambles. For every stupid Biden pronouncement there are are those stubborn facts that get in the way. Unemployment is still way up there, and that is even with the artificial deflated numbers being reported. Figure it out; the statistics only show people that are collecting UIB. A lot of people have dried up any benefits, and don’t get counted.
The stock market is a joke. Sure, a few are up, barely. Those that are seem to have one striking similarity. They are companies that are owned and operated by Obama cronies. Do the names Warren Buffett and George Soros ring a bell? Can you say “Salesman?” The people that are telling us that the economy is better are nothing more than pitchmen whose livelihood depends on you believing that they do indeed have the latest and the greatest.
Sounds a lot like Chicago and New Orleans politics to me. Sounds about like obama respecting dead Americans…
We may not be able to wait until “Judgment Day” 2010.
And people actually wonder why the Militia Movement is growing by leaps and bounds?
Rush Limbaugh Nov 24 2009 Morning Update
Climate Gate Scientists Would Rather Change Facts Than Their Theories!
. There were some good monuments in Kanyakumuri, and a ferry trip and walk around the bazaar was interesting.