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.
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:
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.
According to the CDC's latest survey release, we set a record in the first quarter of 2022. Only 9.6% of Americans under 65 lacked health insurance:
This is probably due to increased Medicaid coverage and the expanded subsidies in the 2021 COVID stimulus bill. Note that 9.6% represents 26 million people.
Have you heard about the new 6th Street Bridge Viaduct in Los Angeles? It opened a couple of weeks ago and everyone loves it. This includes a huge number of people who have effectively shut it down by doing donuts in their muscle cars, climbing the arches, and strolling across the bridge viaduct in mass numbers.
Naturally I wanted to see that, and on Sunday I finally got up to LA to take a look. Unfortunately, the LAPD had announced that morning that they'd be out in force to bring back law and order. This is good for drivers who want to get to the other side, but not so good for photographers looking for compelling pictures.
But I was up there and I took pictures anyway. It turns out there's a pedestrian spiral down at the bottom that will take you up to the bridge viaduct, but it was too long a walk for me. However, I did go about halfway up and took a panorama shot right at sunset.
I was in Boyle Heights at that point, so I drove west across the viaduct and took pictures through the windshield of my car with the LA skyline in the background.
At the other side I found a parking space and puttered around a bit. It was too much of a hike to get anywhere interesting, so instead I returned to my car and drove east back to Boyle Heights, taking more pictures through my windshield. Note the skid marks on the roadway.
You may have seen pictures of the viaduct lit up in red and blue, but on Sunday it was lit in boring old white. So that's what you get.
Last night I posted a chart showing that housing prices had moved up and down a lot in the past 50 years and had often been higher than they are now. But you have to adjust for both inflation and mortgage rates to see this.
But what about rent? That data is a little harder to come by, but here's a decent estimate:
In real terms, average rent has gone up from around $900 in the early '80s, when my segment of boomers was graduating from college, to $1,300 today. (Then again, the annual earnings of 25-34 year-olds have increased too, which makes up a lot of the difference. Basically, rents have gone up 45% and earnings have gone up about 30%.)
This, of course, is a national average. Rents are quite a bit higher than this in Southern California, where I live, and I assume they're lower in states like Montana or Alabama. According to the Census Bureau, rents in the West right now are about 60% higher than they are in the Midwest. According to these guys, California rents are 80% higher than in the lowest-rent state, North Dakota. But that's if you use Census data (which you should). If you use Zillow data, the difference is 260%.
By the way, this is where some of the most fantastical numbers come from. Outfits like Zillow and CoreLogic deliver numbers that are monthly and up to date. This is great for the news industry, which wants to know what's happening right now. The Census, by contrast, delivers fewer numbers and they do it less frequently, so they get relegated to a blurb in the back of the business pages. But it's really the Census numbers that are more accurate, based on good survey design and not cherry picked from limited data.
Kansas had a measure on its ballot yesterday that essentially allowed the legislature to overrule a state court decision from a few years back that had protected abortion. There wasn't much else on the ballot to interest Democrats, but it didn't matter: they turned out in droves to defeat the initiative by a whopping 59-41%. Turnout was about 900,000 voters compared to 500,000 in the previous midterm election.
And this is despite the fact that Kansas remains a pretty conservative state. According to 538.com, they're the 14th most conservative state in the country, right below Mississippi and Louisiana.
It's still early days and I don't know if I'd draw any strong conclusions from this. That said, it's got to be good news for us pro-choicers that this initiative (a) got Democrats out to the polls, (b) lost in a landslide, (c) in a pretty red state. That doesn't mean we can win in Alabama or West Virginia, but it suggests that in most places abortion is an issue that Democrats can campaign and win on.
While these voters are frustrated by Washington’s slow action on climate change and student debt, there’s another, often overlooked reason for their growing pessimism: The surging cost of housing has hit them harder than anyone else.
The combination of record-high home prices and escalating mortgage costs — rates have nearly doubled in the last seven months — threatens to price a generation of would-be buyers out of the market, cratering home sales.
I know everyone is tired of this particular chart of mine, but I was alive in 1981. In fact, I graduated from college that year. Here's what the housing market looked like back then:
It's true that the average house costs twice as much today as it did back then (adjusted for inflation). But 1981 was part of the big Volcker war on inflation and mortgage interest rates peaked at 17%. This means that the average mortgage payment back then was over $3,000 (again, adjusted for inflation). That's a lot more than it is today.
Those were bad times, but we made it through and bought plenty of houses. Our entire generation wasn't priced out of the market, and neither is this one. Interest rates will fall and the effective price of homes will likely return to its average of the past few decades.
This is also a chart for all the Millennials who think that boomers snapped up cheap housing back in the day and now want to pull up the ladder on younger buyers. But it ain't so. It was our parents who got cheap houses in the '50s and '60s, along with some of the older boomers. But most us faced mortgage payments over—sometimes well over—$2,000 a month. That lasted 14 years. For today's grads, it's lasted less than a year so far.
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.
