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Month: January 2024

Published on 21 Comments on Here’s how the stock market is really doing

The Wall Street Journal says things are looking up:

Last year’s widespread skepticism proved to be misplaced.... Now, with the S&P 500 within 0.6% of a record high, the crowd is much more optimistic.

I know it's traditional to report stock market indexes in nominal terms, but that doesn't make it right. It's just a scam that allows new "records" to be announced routinely so that things always look more bullish than they really are. Here's the S&P 500 over the past three years in real terms:

The market did fine this year, but it's not within 0.6% of a record high. It's not even close. It's still got 400 points to go.

Published on 9 Comments on Chart of the day: K-12 public school employment in the US

I've forgotten to follow up on this recently, so here is K-12 public education employment through November:

November employment was the highest in the past decade with the exception (barely) of 2019—even though school enrollment has dropped about 6%. There's no apparent teacher shortage.

This comes with the usual caveats. It includes all ed employees, not just teachers.¹ It's national, so it doesn't imply that there are no shortages in specific areas. And it says nothing about the quality of teachers (The percentage of teachers with less than three years experience has been generally declining over the past 20 years. At the same time, the percentage entering teaching through nontraditional routes has been increasing. So....)

¹Teachers fairly steadily account for about half of all ed employees, but this data is annual and lags by a couple of years. It probably hasn't changed recently, but there's no way to say for sure.

Published on 42 Comments on We just keep setting new climate records