The Angry Bear

Where is the puzzling growth in service jobs coming from? Continuing with my week of follow-up stories based on last Friday’s jobs report, I noted last Friday that there was a completely anomalous upwards revision of nearly 100,000 jobs in the last 8 months of 2019. This after a -500,000 decrease, based on full data, in the previous 12 months! So I took two approaches: a bottoms-up micro view, and a top-down macro view — and got contradictory answers....

What to Do about Amazon I think Farhad Manjoo gets it right about Amazon: while the company’s sheer size, not to mention its often shady business practices, call out for public intervention, “Amazon is pushing a level of speed, convenience, and selection in shopping that millions of customers are integrating into their daily lives.” Breaking it up would be wrong, since the essence of what Amazon offers is its potential universality.  For me, shopping on...

December JOLTS report continues the trend of confusing jobs data The December JOLTS report came out this morning, and it continues the streak of confusing employment data. To recapitulate, the JOLTS report decomposes the jobs numbers into openings, hires, quits, layoffs and discharges, and total separations. Since the series is only 20 years old,  however, it only covers one full business cycle, so is of limited forecasting use. The order in which the...

Do Dirty Tricks Make 2020 Like 1972? The dirty tricks in 1972 were sustained attacks based on faleshoods by the Nixon CREEP against the most popular possible Dem opponent, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, who was finally brought to tears in public, which fatally damaged his campaign, opening the way for George McGovern to get the nomination and take only DC and Massachusetts in the general election.  Today Trump and his many allies, both in Congress and on...

I have suggested (here and here) that idealism is leading progressives astray.  Idealism leads progressives to ignore the political opposition that their proposals will encounter, and the need to win over reluctant allies through policy design, messaging, and – yes – compromise. A clear example of the pitfalls of progressive idealism is provided by the current debate over Medicare for All. The case for single payer health insurance in the United States is...

Why I expect further declines in manufacturing jobs This is the week I highlight further information from last Friday’s jobs report. One thing that struck me is that we’ve now had two months of declines in manufacturing jobs. This is something I have been anticipating since about the middle of last year, because the manufacturing work week had been declining significantly, and it has a reliable 80+ year history of leading manufacturing jobs. Here’s the...

December 2012,  Robert Reich wrote about America’s children   .   .   .    Remember the Children. “America’s children seem to be shortchanged on almost every issue we face as a society. Not only are we failing to protect our children from deranged people wielding semi-automatic guns. We’re not protecting them from poverty. The rate of child poverty keeps rising – even faster than the rate of adult poverty. We now have the highest rate of child poverty in...

I hang around some pretty intelligent people who have smart friends commenting on their facebook pages. The first part of this post is from a comment on Claude Scales’s Facebook page by William R. Everdell. I think it fits with the NYT article Claude referenced. The second part of this is a shorten version of the NYT Opinion article “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE,” Matthew Connelly, Professor of History, Columbia. George Orwell in “‘1984’,...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 3 – 7 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There were some changes in all of the timeframes this week. Of particular note, the coincident indicators of rail and steel, which were negative for almost all of 2019, have switched over to positive. As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me a little bit for my efforts, as well as bringing you up to date about the...