Month: August 2022

I had a thought today. I don't know that it matters much, but here it is.

You may recall that I wrote a post a few days ago explaining which metrics are used by NBER to date the starting points of recessions. GDP is not one of those metrics for the monthly dating, but it is used by NBER for their quarterly dating. Or, to be more accurate, they use an average of real GDP and real GDI (Gross Domestic Income).

You may also recall that although GDP and GDI are theoretically equal, in practice they differ due to real-world measurement errors. This difference is called the "statistical discrepancy" and it's been unusually large lately. Here's the average of the two over the past few years:

For what it's worth, the average of GDI and GDP was positive in the first quarter, not negative. This means that, as far as NBER is concerned, we haven't had two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Depending on what gets reported for the second quarter, we might not have any quarters of negative growth.¹

I have no special insight about what this means, if anything. I just thought it was interesting.

¹GDI for the second quarter will be released on August 25.

Oh man, not this again:

It was once the most popular boy’s name in France, inspired in part by Hollywood films and boybands. But for the more than 150,000 French Kevins, the name has become so targeted by mockery, comic sketches and class prejudice that a new documentary is hoping to set the record straight and “save the Kevins”.

....Now — as many French Kevins reach their early 30s — there is a move to fight back against the national jokes associating the name with the stereotype of an airhead in a bad-taste shirt with a souped-up car or appearing on reality TV shows.

First there was the whole We Need to Talk About Kevin thing (i.e., why did Kevin commit a school massacre?). Then there was Germany with "Kevinism," then Britain with Kevin the Carrot, and now France. Apparently the big push is to get people to stop associating Kevin with "Gros Beauf":

For God's sake. My sister's name now stands in for an entitled white bitch. My name stands in for some kind of lowlife bonehead. My brother's name—

Well, I'm not even going to tell you his name. It's safe for now, I think. But for how long? And what did my family do to deserve this?

Charlie looks so well balanced in this picture, doesn't he? But in real life he looked as if he was about crash belly first into Hilbert. He didn't, though, and Hilbert just kept on napping.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to support the latest version of Joe Biden's spending bill, but only if . . .

. . . the provision that places limits on the carried interest loophole is removed.

All I can do is laugh at this point. The CIL is now officially the cockroach of tax law. If you tossed a nuclear bomb at the entire tax code, it's the one thing that would survive. When the world ends, hedge fund bros will crawl out of the ashes, throw their fists to the sky, and laugh at the fools who thought they could take away their beloved carried interest.

Anyway, Democrats are now on the verge of passing a $400 billion spending bill. Hooray, I guess, but less than a year ago Sen. Joe Manchin (and probably Sinema too) were willing to pass a $1.5 trillion bill. If Dems had just gone along with that instead of playing endless stupid games, they would have gotten a lot more and they would have gotten it a lot sooner.

But they didn't. So $400 billion it is.

The monthly jobs report has loads of stuff in it, and I like to highlight something different each time. This month, it's average weekly hours worked:

Riddle me this: We supposedly have millions of job openings that companies can't fill. That being the case, you'd think that in the meantime they'd be giving their workers more hours. And yet, for the past year the number of hours worked has gone steadily down.

So: Four million more job openings than usual and half a million new jobs this month, but real wages are down and hours worked are down. How does this make sense?

The American economy gained 528,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 438,000 jobs. Not bad! The headline unemployment rate went down to 3.5%.

Average weekly wages increased 0.47% from last month, an annualized rate of 5.8%. Adjusted for inflation, this amounts to either -3% or -10% depending on how you count.

So: Lots of new jobs. High nominal wage growth. Terrible real wage growth. And declining GDP. Anyone who wants to smush all this together and decide if we're in a recession is welcome to do so. But I'm just going to keep my mouth shut for a while.

This is the Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery in Normandy. It's near Juno Beach, the D-Day landing site that was under the command of Canadian forces. Like all the war cemeteries in Normandy, it's quite beautiful and meticulously maintained.

I've long been intrigued by the fact that poor and non-poor people have such different relationships to noise. I'm not talking about Victorian silence or library shushing, just about normal life. Poor people tend to live loudly, throw parties, play music, and squabble with each other. Middle-class folks don't, and they don't want their neighbors doing it either. They really, really don't want to live in the middle of cacophony.

This is not just a sociological curiosity, either. Why is it that so many middle-class folks hate the idea of Section 8 vouchers being available for nearby apartments? Sure, some of it is racism, some of it is fear of drugs. But a large part of it is noise. Middle-class apartment dwellers are convinced that if poor people move in next door they're going to have to put up with nonstop yelling, whooping, partying, loud music playing, and so forth. Their lives will be ruined.

That's one side of the story, anyway, and it's one I empathize with since I'm a middle-class guy who prefers that my neighbors wind down their parties by midnight. But what does it look like from the other side? In the Atlantic this month, Xochitl Gonzalez talks about his freshman year on an Ivy League campus:

Within a few weeks, the comfort that I and many of my fellow minority students had felt during those early cacophonous days had been eroded, one chastisement at a time. The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. A boisterous conversation would lead to a classmate knocking on the door with a “Please quiet down.” A laugh that went a bit too loud or long in a computer cluster would be met with an admonishment.

....I had taken the sounds of home for granted. My grandmother’s bellows from across the apartment, my friends screaming my name from the street below my window. The garbage trucks, the car alarms, the fireworks set off nowhere near the Fourth of July. The music. I had thought these were the sounds of poverty, of being trapped. I realized, in their absence, that they were the sounds of my identity, turned up to 11.

I imagine that if you were brought up in a noisy neighborhood, this feels natural. By contrast, a quiet, middle-class neighborhood seems a little creepy, as if you were living in a library. Where is everybody? What are they doing? Why is it so damn silent?

The folks raised in quiet families feel just the opposite, of course. How can I think with all this crap going on? It's maddening! Will everyone please just shut up? Gonzalez again:

I find many city noises nerve-racking and annoying: jackhammers doing street maintenance, the beeping of reversing trucks, cars honking for no good reason. Yet these noises account for a small minority of all noise complaints. Nearly 60 percent of recent grievances center on what I’d consider lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. But one person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy. As my grandmother used to say, “I’m not yelling, this is just how I tawk!”

I'm not sure what to say about all this. Except for one thing: Don't constantly shush people around sleeping babies. Let them learn to sleep with a normal amount of noise surrounding them. They'll thank you when they grow up.

The Washington Post is anticipating the upcoming new school year with alarm. Today's headline warns us that "America faces catastrophic teacher shortage."

As usual, I'm suspicious of stories that are all anecdote and no data, so let's take a look at some basic data. This was released yesterday and takes us through June:

"Net hires" is the number of teachers who have been hired minus the number of teachers who leave (fired, quit, retired, furloughed, etc.). Oddly enough, that number has been about zero for years. At the same time, openings for new teachers have gone steadily up. This means that unfilled openings (shown as a trendline for ease of presentation) have also been rising for years. Let's zoom in on that:

There are a lot of unfilled openings, but the good news is that it's declined a little bit in the past few months. The number of unfilled openings is almost down to 2%, which is roughly what it was just before the pandemic.

I guess my conclusion is that the teacher situation is bleak but not catastrophic. But I suppose it all depends on where you live.

Monmouth has a new poll out showing Democrats with a 7% lead on the generic congressional ballot. They call this a "slight gain" from the dead heat they measured in June, and I guess that's fair enough. Still, here's what things look like:

The blue dots in September are all the recent results at 538.com from high-quality pollsters. It shows an average Democratic lead of about four points.

That's not enough. Dems probably need something like a seven or eight point lead to feel like they'll be truly competitive in November. Nonetheless, things are looking up for them.