Two important data considerations this week: (1) for the first time, some YoY comparisons – e.g., restaurant reservations – are compared with data after the onset of the pandemic. The distortions will intensify next week and last at least through the end of April; and (2) long-term interest rates, in particular for Treasury bonds, have considerably affected the long leading forecast.
As usual, clicking over and reading brings you up to the virtual moment, and rewards me just a little bit for the effort I put in to generating the forecasts and nowcast.
Usually, lies are told for purpose. So, in most cases, if we can determine whose purpose is being served, we will know who is behind the lie.
Whose interests were being served by the Confederacy during the American Civil War? Sure as heck wasn’t those of the yeomen farmers who did most of the fighting and dying. There’s a good chance that it was the planters who told the lies that got so many killed. Heady stuff; people knowingly and willingly telling lies to people that were willing enough to believe in enough to die for those lies.
Whose interests are being served by American Capitalism? Free Markets? Who’s putting up the perpetuating? Sure as heck isn’t the lower fifty-percent.
Who in America’s interests were best served by the Vietnam War, the Invasion of Iraq? Sure wasn’t all those dead and wounded. Wasn’t the rest of the lower fifty, either.
The lower fifty is constantly being admonished to work hard and do the right thing? Who says what is the right thing. Who benefits most from all the hard work?
Who in America’s interests were best served by offshoring all those jobs? Certainly wasn’t in the interests of all those who died from Methamphetamine and Opiates.
In whose best interests is America’s ‘worst in the advanced world’ healthcare system? The dead can’t talk? Too bad.
In whose best interests is America having a lower than living minimum wage? Whose are they that are getting more than their fair share and want to keep it that way?
In whose interests was it to take America back fifty-sixty years? Those whose support system is based on white supremacy, maybe?
Speaking of Trump: Trump lied impulsively with purpose; the purpose being his own interests.
The Big Lie is such a big part of America, where would we be without it? What would we do without it?
This is something I used to pay a lot more attention to back around the time of the Great Recession. How stretched were American households in paying their monthly bills? The Federal Reserve publishes a quarterly update tracking this issue. Two of the metrics in that quarterly update are debt service payments and financial obligations, respectively, as percents of household disposable income. The last update was in December, for Q3 2020. The Q4 figure should be released later this month.
And the story is how strong of an impact the pandemic stimulus has made on household balance sheets. Here’s the graph, that pretty much speaks for itself: Both measures were by far at all-time lows in Q2, and increased slightly in Q3.
Probably not I am afraid. Indeed, this label is a recently cooked up one, to replace an earlier one that used “Islamist” instead of “Muslim.” The group claiming this apparently failing and declining label is the Ennadha Party of Tuinisia, founded in 1981 and still led by al-Ghannouchi, currently Tunis’s Speaker of the House, although he and his party, which has led Tunisia for the last decade, may be about to be removed from power.
This is the 10th anniversary of the “Arab Spring,” which began a decade ago in Tunisia, widely viewed as the one national “success story” of that pitiable affair. All the others: Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and others, ended up with dictators or endless war. Tunisia has a democracy! An informal economy merchant was hit up for bribes in the old regime of Ben Ali. He set himself on fire, setting off the whole Arab Spring.
Another big event is on the United States horizon, in Alabama, and its occurrence portends a potential seismic shift in the contours of our political parties.
Amazon workers at an in Bessemer, Alabama facility are going to vote on unionization. And of course, Amazon opposes unionization. Amazon has a lot at stake if the Bessemer facility unionizes as it employs more than 400,000 warehouse and delivery workers. It is shaping up to be the biggest fight over unionization in American history.
Unionization of workers at an Amazon plant “may” (and I say may) be the beginnings of a political party shift in Alabama favoring Democrats. Democratic President Biden is messaging his support of unionization.
Amazon warns the unionization of its workers may increase costs and slow growth. To counter the effort, it has staged mandatory company meetings flooding workers with anti-union messaging and literature and gone as far as to post signs in bathroom stalls. Workers have complained about working conditions and mandatory overtime and in response, Amazon points out Bessemer workers benefits are good and the starting pay of $15.30/hour and exceeds the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour.
I am going to comment on two smart guys who believe that they disagree about the optimal political strategy for Democrats.
Brian Beutler wrote an interesting essay criticizing what he calls “issue polling essentialism”. It includes the text
The topic occurred to me after I recorded last week’s Rubicon with my friend Matt Yglesias, where we took different sides on the question of how determinative issue polling should be in setting progressive priorities. We are no longer friends. (Just kidding. Unless…? Better listen to the episode!)
I trust they are still friends, but Yglesias is a bit peeved. He wrote this Thread beginning “I think this piece does not describe the position it is critiquing accurately.”
In fact, after mentioning Yglesias, Beutler goes on to critique a poll obsessed straw man. I trust they are still friends, but that was sloppy.
I have comments on both.
I agree with Yglesias’s non obvious tweet “2) Issue activists associated with the Democratic Party (and more to the point, those who fund their activities) should care more about raising the salience of topics that are likely to help Democrats win, and less about raising the salience of the specific issue they work on.”
The implicit claim is that, whatever they care most about, they won’t get if Republicans are elected, so issue activists should help Democratic party candidates by sticking to the party line *then* press them on the specific issue they work on (with implicit threat to make trouble ?). I agree. This is psychologically difficult — people talk about things they care most about and it involves other than complete frankness and being a hack. There is a conflict of material interests as advocacy groups which echo the party line don’t get attention and donations. That’s why the appeal is directed at “those who fund them”. The tweet is cynical (Yglesias introduced the phrase “the hack gap”). Also, I find it very convincing.
MedPage Today has a good article detailing each of the approved Covid drugs as of today. The information includes company name, vaccine name, efficacy, trial participation, type of vaccine, dosage, and patient side effects.
There is other information which is not necessarily needed for a typical or curious patient. If still interested, I included a link above. I think it is always good to educate people. The more you know, the better your decisions.
Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game?
For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at best precariously employed. True, the destitute, the homeless, the unemployed and the precarious are indeed treated as disposable but most disposable people pursue respectable professions, wear fashionable clothes, reside in nice houses, and keep up with the Jones.
Disposable people are defined by what they do not produce. They do not grow food. They do not build shelters. They do not make clothes. They also do not make the tractors used to grow food, the tools to build shelters or the equipment to make clothes.
Although disposable people do not produce necessities what they do is not unnecessary. It is simply that the services they provide are not spontaneously demanded as soon as one acquires a bit of additional income. One is unlikely, however, to engage the services or purchase the goods produced by disposable people unless one is in possession of disposable income. Disposable income is the basis of disposable people. Conversely, disposable people are the foundation of disposable income.
Sometimes, disposable people have been called “unproductive.” It sounds harsh but it is only meant in a technical sense. In the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s debate raged in academic Marxist circles about the distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labour. The main issue had to do with the distinction between labour that produced surplus value for capital and labour that didn’t, whether or not the product or service was useful or necessary. One further refinement had to do with whether the labour produced reproductive surplus value in the form of wages goods (or services) or machinery. In this view, labour performed producing luxury goods would be unproductive, even though it appeared to produce surplus value for the employing capitalist. In fact, though, it only assisted in appropriating surplus value produced elsewhere.
I suspect these debates could have been illuminated by Marx’s Grundrisse or even more so by the 1821 pamphlet by Charles Wentworth Dilke, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. That pamphlet explicitly excluded the manufacture of luxury goods from the process of capital accumulation and clearly explained why. The production of luxury goods destroys reserved surplus labour rather than establishing the conditions for its accumulation and expansion. Jean-Baptiste Say would have agreed:
Misery is the inseparable companion of luxury. The man of wealth and ostentation squanders upon costly trinkets, sumptuous repasts, magnificent mansions, dogs, horses, and mistresses, a portion of value, which, vested in productive occupation, would enable a multitude of willing labourers, whom his extravagance now consigns to idleness and misery, to provide themselves with warm clothing, nourishing food, and household conveniences.
So much for supply creating it own demand.
Dilke contended that if capital was allowed to actually accumulate, the rate of interest paid for its use would rapidly fall to zero because the accumulation of capital was very limited, “if the happiness of the whole, and not the luxuries of a few, is the proper subject for national congratulation.” When that limit was reached, the hours of labour could be drastically reduced, “where men heretofore laboured twelve hours they would now labour six, and this is national wealth, this is national prosperity.” “Wealth… is disposable time, and nothing more.”
Dilke’s disposable time may well have been an oblique rejoinder to Thomas Chalmers’s (1808) concept of disposable population. Chalmers was as upbeat about the expansion of disposable population as Dilke was wary about the increase of unproductive labour. Dilke was an ardent follower of William Godwin, as had been Chalmers until he was converted by Thomas Malthus’s polemic against Godwin on population. In the Grundrisse, Marx appears to have been enchanted by Dilke’s concept of disposable time.
Nearly a century after publication of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Stephen Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice was serialized in the New York Times. At its core was the same dilemma at the heart of Dilke’s pamphlet, with all the vast improvements of productive machinery, why weren’t ordinary people better off and why were the hours of work still so long?
If the ability to produce goods to meet human wants has multiplied so that each man accomplishes almost thirty or forty times what he did before, then the world at large ought to be about thirty or fifty times better off. But it is not. Or else, as the other possible alternative, the working hours of the world should have been cut down to about one in thirty of what they were before. But they are not. How, then, are we to explain this extraordinary discrepancy between human power and resulting human happiness?
Leacock imagined an observer looking down from the moon on a production process that stopped short of producing enough necessities, and then again stopped short of producing enough comforts to shift, “while still stopping short of a general satisfaction, to the making of luxuries and superfluities.” Leacock was a student of Thorstein Veblen at the University of Chicago and was clearly influenced by Veblen’s philosophy. A passage in Dilke’s pamphlet that imagines the “last paragraph” of a future historian uncannily anticipates Veblen’s concept of pecuniary emulation:
The increase of trade and commerce opened a boundless extent to luxury:—the splendour of luxurious enjoyment in a few excited a worthless, and debasing, and selfish emulation in all:—The attainment of wealth became the ultimate purpose of life:— the selfishness of nature was pampered up by trickery and art:—pride and ambition were made subservient to this vicious purpose…
Inspired by Leacock’s Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, Arthur Dahlberg’s Jobs, Machines and Capitalism was described by Louis Rich in the New York Times as “one of the most valuable, both theoretically and practically, since the writings of Veblen.” Dahlberg’s argument influenced Senator Hugo Black’s legislation for a thirty-hour work week.
I saw this bit of news on Steven Colbert’s show last night. Seems Nevada’s Democratic Governor thinks tech companies need to be their own town. The thinking is that this is a way to attract business development without spending money. What could go wrong?
“Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.
The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.”
I am surprised that a Democratic governor would think this is a good way to attract commercial development. Is he not familiar with history and the mill housing? The company stores? The lyrics of “Sixteen Tons”?
How much further are we going to push the idea that corporations are people as referred to in our Constitution. This appears to be the Republican “emergency manager” without the emergency. The layers of legalities is stunning. We would have a democracy national government on top of a democracy state government on top of a non-democracy corporation on top of a sort of democracy town government? Which state’s laws would oversee the corporation?
