The American economy gained 206,000 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 116,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 4.1%.
This was a fairly ordinary employment report with no special gotchas to report. It's basically an extension of the gradual slowdown in the labor market that we've seen over the past couple of years.
Average weekly wages were up 3.5% on an annualized basis even though there was no inflation in May. I don't imagine the Fed will be excited by this.
The exit polls are in and it looks like it's finally Independence Day for Britain's Tories:
Labor: 410 (63%)
Conservatives: 131 (20%)
Liberal Democrats: 61 (9%)
SNP: 10
Reform UK: 13
Plaid Cymru: 4
Greens: 2
This is very close to Tony Blair's historic landslide Labor victory in 1997. A couple hundred Conservative MPs now have the independence to pursue other interests.
And good luck to incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He's going to need it.
Has the press been covering for Joe Biden over the past few months? Until now I've considered this to be little more than typical Fox News nonsense, but I'm beginning to wonder. Here is Olivia Nuzzi:
This April, at a reception before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I joined a sea of people waiting for a photo with the president and First Lady in the basement of the Washington Hilton.... The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady.... I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …
I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.... My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile.... He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.
The whole story has much, much more. Nuzzi says she's been hearing questions about Biden's mental state since January, always sort of whispered and always anonymous:
They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record).... Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
....Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.... Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”
As Nuzzi acknowledges, she's been skeptical of Biden's stamina for years, and is hardly a Biden family favorite. Still, there's no reason to believe she's making this up.
I've known older relatives who have shown some slippage over the years and it's genuinely hard to know if it's really gotten bad enough that something needs to be done. A misstep here or there might mean they're declining or it might just be a misstep here or there. How bad do they have to get before you have The Conversation? How often do the missteps have to occur? Anyone who's dealt with this—and that's a lot of us—knows this is hard.
But it sure sounds as though Biden's debate performance has finally given everyone permission to say what they've been thinking for the past half year or so: Yeah, it's bad. Someone needs to have The Conversation.
The Supreme Court term is finally, really and truly over. So I can just eat hot dogs today without constantly looking over my shoulder in case some horrible new ruling drops.
There's no change after 2012, when smartphones became widely used. Now here are negative emotions:
Negative emotions did start to rise around 2012. However, this was a broad trend that had nothing to do specifically with young people. Everyone is becoming more negative. Also, this peaked in 2020 and has been declining ever since. If smartphones are the cause, why would that be?
This is a very limited look at things since it includes the whole world, not just the US or even just rich countries. Nor does it break things down by gender, which might be important. However, we do have individual country ratings for certain emotions, and they tell us that overall the US is about average on most things—including sadness—with the exception of stress, where we rate high, and loneliness, where we rate low.
Gallup has all the detailed data necessary to produce annual charts by age for just the US. In fact, it's available to anyone who subscribes to their service, which doesn't include me. But whether it's Gallup or a subscriber, it would sure be nice if someone could replicate the two charts above just for the US, broken down by gender.
According to preliminary estimates from the Border Patrol, it looks like total illegal border crossings in June were down to about 84,000:
This doesn't include requests for asylum, which usually amount to about 50,000 per month.
Is this decline because of summer or because of President Biden's recent crackdown on border crossings? That's impossible to say. We'll know in a few months.
Here is YouGov's weekly tracking poll of the presidential race:
After Joe Biden's disastrous CNN debate, he lost a grand total of two points of support. Trump gained nothing.
Among independents Biden lost four points and Trump, remarkably, lost one point. Their support mostly went to RFK Jr. and Jill Stein. This suggests that Trump really does have a ceiling on his support.
On average, other polls also show Biden losing a net of 2-3% after the debate. This is remarkably little, probably due to a combination of low viewership and high partisanship.
This is world famous Melk Abbey, about halfway between Linz and Vienna in Austria. At any given time, its population is 22 monks and about two thousand tourists. Those 22 monks do a helluva job raising funds.
This was a fairly ordinary employment report with no special gotchas to report. It's basically an extension of the gradual slowdown in the labor market that we've seen over the past couple of years.
