Crazy Eddie on the Jobs Report: 2 Out of 3 Ain’t Bad
Dana Perino and Edward Lazear were sent out by the White House to tell the press that there was more good news in the jobs report than bad news:
The jobs report contains a variety of information in it, and one of the pieces of information, and only one of the pieces is the jobs number. In addition to that, there are also numbers on unemployment, wage growth and weekly hours. And it’s important to recognize that those numbers were actually good numbers; the unemployment rate actually went down; the wages continued to grow; and weekly hours stayed stable. All of those things are strong indicators that the economy is continuing to move.
We noted that the dip in the unemployment rate masks the fact that the household survey showed an even more significant drop in employment (see here and here). Menzie Chinn has some impressive charts that show that both the payroll and household surveys show employment falling over the past few months.
So we are to the claim that wages are rising. Nominal wages are indeed rising but at a slower rate than are consumer prices. Real wages have been falling and it turns out that the net change in the real wage rate for production and nonsupervisory workers over the past five years is zero. Edward Lazear gets this point but it would seem that the White House thinks it is appropriate to send these two out to just flat out lie to the press. OK, we are used to the fact that Bush’s press secretary lies to the press on a daily basis, but the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers should avoid this behavior.
Footnote: If you are wondering about weekly hours, it did stay stable at 33.7 hours. This compares to 34.2 hours as of January 2001. At worse since then, it bottomed at 33.6 hours. So why Crazy Eddie even bothered to mention this as great news beats me.
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Though not mentioned, “Crazy Eddie” is a term from an alien culture in a Larry Niven SF novel, “The Mote In God’s Eye.”
“…Let us consider, in detail, the Crazy Eddie symbol from “The Mote in God’s Eye.”
Within the Motie culture there is a form of silliness so common that it is represented by a legendary being. A Motie goes “Crazy Eddie” by trying to keep things as they are when they are clearly about to change. He sacrifices long-term for short-term goals.
When a city is so heavily populated that all available vehicles are engaged in moving food and water in and garbage out, and none are left even to evacuate the inhabitants, then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions.
Crazy Eddie fights population pressure by killing off all the nonsentient Doctor forms — except that Masters who hid their own Doctors will afterward find them priceless.
Obviously the Moties have their own name for him. But when speaking to humans, the Mediators called him Crazy Eddie…
Crazy Eddie is ubiquitous. He’s always been there, throughout the culture, back to the dawn of time.
His intentions are always good. Crazy Eddie is not a monster, and his existence is tolerated…”
In our culture, we are currently suffering a plague of Crazy Eddies, putting short-term or limited-context benefits ahead of long-term necessities. As sentient creatures, we stand on the brink of our first great challenge — how to act for the long term and stay within the limits of our planet’s carrying capacity. The Moties in the book didn’t solve this problem, resulting in repeated collapses of their civilization, death and destruction.
“…Attempts at population control through chemicals or infanticide have always failed for the Moties, because those who breed uncontrollably eventually swamp those Moties who comply. Once the population pressure rises high enough, massive wars inevitably result.
[…]
Each war typically ends in the complete destruction of the current civilization on Mote Prime…
The cycles of civilization, war, and collapse have apparently been repeating for hundreds of thousands of years….”
Of course, the “Eddie” in this post cannot carry the whole burden of Eddieness in our current crisis. There are plenty of Eddies around, and what we are able to do about them will determine which future we pursue – extinction via total war or sane compliance with the limits of reality.
Noni