The new AB commenting and posting has been up for at least a week now. I would like to hear what “you” the commenters are seeing or experiencing when you comment. Please let us know so we can correct or improve what has been changed. Letting us know what you like is helpful also. Some […]
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 […]
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 […]
Our friend Donald Boudreaux is at it again, dispensing misleading statistics that just so happen to favor libertarian outcomes. Two days ago Boudreaux posted some data on hospital capacity that seem to suggest that we do not need to worry about hospitals getting overwhelmed with COVID patients because capacity utilization over time is flat. As […]
Jobless claims rise: a break in the trend? This week’s new and continuing jobless claims all rose off of last week’s pandemic lows, but while I suspect the downward trend has broken, I don’t think we can say so decisively yet. On an unadjusted basis, new jobless claims rose by 228,982 to 947,504. Seasonally adjusted […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]