The Angry Bear

Ophelia at “Butterflies and Wheels” has a commentary about the protests in front of the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson which makes for a good read along with the comments. Follow the link. It is one thing to write a letter of protest to a politician and quite another to invade the proximity of a person’s home, within shouting distance, and upset the occupants which included a child. Meanwhile the Republican leaders...

Tags: open thread

JOLTS report for October: similar to previous 2 recoveries, but a decline in actual hiring may be a warning This morning’s JOLTS report for October showed a jobs market recovery that, for one month at least, paused. Openings and quits were up (good), but layoffs and discharges were also up (bad) while hires were down (bad). While the JOLTS data is a deep dive into the dynamics of the labor market, since it only dates from 2001, there are only...

Noah Smith wrote a very interesting post on how macroeconomists are behaving very differently in 2020 than in 2008-9 : The new macro: “Give people money” . He notes two differences : first there is little discussing of theory or of the models used in most peer reviewed articles, second there is (as far as he can tell and he would know more than me) a virtual consensus that we need stimulus and that austerity would be a mistake. Or as a tweet...

Four measures of labor market losses in the pandemic Below is a graph of 4 ways of measuring the downturn in the labor market due to the pandemic:1. Payrolls (blue) – this is the headline jobs number from the establishment survey2. Civilian employment (green) – this is the equivalent number from the household survey.3. Aggregate hours worked (red) – tracks hours rather than jobs.4. Aggregate payrolls (gold) – tracks total payrolls rather than...

The libertarian vs. populist trade-off in the 2020 election and beyond A few weekends ago I wrote that  “the Democratic ‘brand’ is ‘socially liberal, economically moderate,’ while the US electorate as a whole is socially moderate and economically progressive” citing a scatterplot graph of the 2016 electorate; and that: The path forward is to embrace, and pass, some simple economic fixes … that materially improve – and are *seen* to materially...

Constructing An Alternative Reality  This has been gradually developing for about the last quarter of a century or so.  While there was some of this going on before, it took off after the Newt Gingrich-led GOP took over Congress in the 94 election and Rush Limbaugh began his radio show.  Not long after Fox News began a more aggressive stance against President Clinton, pushing any and every scandal that would lead to his impeachment for lying about...

I am often critical of libertarian economist Donald Boudreaux. This morning, I sent him an email criticizing a post of his in which he cited a study claiming that pcr tests for covid have a false positive rate of 80% or more. I pointed out that this is obvious nonsense, since overall test positivity rates, which include both false and true positives, have generally been in the 4% to 10% range. I also criticized him quite harshly for passing this...

Reader and poster Coberly updating Angry Bear readers on recent Social Security findings in the 2020 report. Reader Bruce Krasting had alerted Angry Bear to the publication by the Social Security Trustees of a “revised baseline” that includes effects of the Covid recession on their projections otherwise from the 2020 Trustees Report. “Updated Baseline for Actuarial Status of the OASI and DI Trust Funds, Reflecting Pandemic andRecession Effects“...