Nemo, dos, tres..

Mentioned this before, but this guy  is running a "Best of the Wall Street Journal", day-by-day, from 1930.

Today's issue (July 2, 1930), in the Stock Market Jokes section:

At a recent large corporation's stockholder meeting, the secretary was annoyed to find two men with no proxy forms. "Whom do you represent?" the secretary asked. "The short interest," the gentlemen replied.

Look on the bright side, we're trending towards the end of work. Paid work that is!

Enjoy your debt. And your depression. Thanks Greenspan. Thanks wall street. Thanks CONgress.

Money (mis)managers.

That makes the true numbers - 1,000,000 jobs lost and 22.8% unemployment rate.

That Verus guy was right !

http://desktrader.4localtv.com/truetrend.jpg

we're all part time now

Not all of us. I'm no time. I traded vanity for time. So many of my changes in behaviour are now permanent. None of the changes will help the eCONomy.

Which numbers are more dodgy?

Monetary losses by companies or government statistics...

So, according to table A-6, the workforce has declined from 146.6 million in June 2008 to 140.8 million in June 2009. The only age group not showing a net reduction is those 55 and over. Guess the Boomers can't afford to retire and can't afford to get fired!

Both cannot be more than the other.

shill,
I delved into the jobs lost numbers you post in various sectors/companies... perhaps,
you should spend a bit more time instead of just cutting and pasting and instead see if there is
a back story on some of the larger moves... that's called research... (I checked some areas that I
knew and then their press releases and so on...

how much did the birth death adjustment contribute?

Time to take a shower.... gotta wash all this BLS BS off of me!

Have any of you read Tainter's book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies"?

He lists 11 reasons why it happens:

1) Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2) The establishment of a new resource base
3) The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4) Insufficient response to circumstance
5) Other complex societies
6) Intruders
7) Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8) Social dysfunction
9) Mystical factors
10) Chance concatenation of events
11) Economic factors

Most of the 1st World economies have most of these things going on, even more so in the USA.

Hey CR, one other thing helpful to put into this monthly report is the prior two months revisions. It's one of the few bright spots IMO. This time around, it was a slight lift with April being revised down and May revised up. Previously (on ER) the revisions were quite large and both typically negative. Of course, the 467k lost is still nearly 150k more than the worst month of losses during the last recession (oct 01, 325k)

green shoots!

9) Mystical factors

...Like the BLS birth-death adjustment.

On a per capita baisis, we never recovered from the 2001 recession. Worse still, the trend towards recovery after 2001 was fueled entirely by a ponzi debt scheme. The 2001 recovery was not a recovery at al, it only seemed like a recovery while tens of millions were impoverishing themselves with unpayable debt.

Absent the Fed's shenanigans, it would be clear to all that we are worse off today than in 2001.

How can we lose over 400K jobs but have the unemployment rate basically unchanged? Can anyone explain?

Angry..that is what I was talking about in the comments yesterday. It took two years almost to get any sort of job growth from the Oct 2001 job losses....and that was WITH a housing bubble!

"In lieu of expensive computer graphics, might Hollywood have to turn to such mundane things as plot & dialogue? "

Content? That amuses me, as it would seem that with the exception of "Up," this summers movies are an awful lot of green shoots.

The methods for coming up with the job losses and the unemployment rate are different. I believe the unemployment rate is a survey.

Not One Cent (homepage, profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Thu, 7/2/2009 - 6:08 am

Rob Dawg, I asked in the last thread, how are you able to communicate with us from post-budget-deadline CA? Is that like communicating from the Negative Zone in The Fantastic Four comics?

California hasn't brought in a balanced budget on time in recent memory. Tales of the untimely demise of California are but an artifact of the birth/death adjustment.

How can we lose over 400K jobs but have the unemployment rate basically unchanged? Can anyone explain?

The unemployment rate took a big jump in May, especially if you account for the relatively low number of job losses. I think there is probably quite a bit of error introduced by rounding, since it is possible for a 0.19% increase in June to be reported as a 0.1% change in UE rate, while a 2.1% increase in May could be reported as a 0.3% change in UE rate. Add on top of that the seasonal adjustments which I believe are real tough this time of year due to graduations and summer employment and the like and you can see how the UE rate jumps around a bit. Bottom line though is that if you're looking for a job, good luck and if you're currently employed, count your lucky stars.

GDD9000,

It's not so much the end of work (utopia). It's the end of paying work (distopia).

St. Louis Fed: Series: AWHNONAG, Average Weekly Hours: Total Private Industries

The collective efforts (wealth) of American workers have been stolen (by inflation, shams, outsourcing, etc.) and concentrated in the hands of finance.

Decades ago, eCONomists mused about a utopian society where the masses were prosperous and had lots of leisure time. Didn't happen. No accident either.

The masses will get the time, but not the prosperity. The prosperity has been stolen.

What a system.

Delayed gratification would be better than delayed accounting.

Juvenal Delinquent (profile) wrote on Thu, 7/2/2009 - 6:12 am

RD,
In lieu of a flippant know-nothing response, perhaps you should read the book?

Or perhaps you shouldn't ask for opinions if you aren't interested in opinions that differ from your own. Take #6, intruders. Complex societies always have enemies and parasites. Where's the insight? I don't think we know enough about the Mayan to conclude the causes of their decline with any certainty. We could have benefited on a detailed study of how Europeans actually gained a foothold in North America but that would have messed with his conclusions. The number 1 resource depletion is there to explain Easter Island, IMO complex societies develop in response to resource constraints. Listing characteristics of complex societies and pulling a few to match cases is not a useful exercise.

"It's a seasonal adjustment issue. 400,000 people are typically fired in June."

WTF are you smokeing?

RD,

Not having read a book, and then commenting on it's contents is par for the course for you, sadly.

That hours worked figure is continuing to dig a deep hole.

Which way is the data supposed to move during a recovery anyways ?

I had question in regards to what was left of the mass layoffs in January and previous that have come off the employment stats. Where are these folks tracked? And how does this get figured in the employment stats are they part of U-6?. Your site and Mish's do a good job of fleshing out alternative employment stats especially in regards to part time employment which has been overlooked by many.

One other note, I think what gets lost in many of the forecasters predictions is not just the unemployment but the fact that when most folks get re-employed their salary(purchasing power) is trimmed substantially. I would venture to guess that someone in a manufacturing layoff having to go to work in the Wall-Mart fishing department is probably having there take home pay cut in half. Much of this is also adding to strong deflationary pressures on the economy.
Also, at least half the folks in my family/friend circle that were fully employed are working intermittently and most are not drawing any unemployment benefits. This recession at least as it appears to me is starting to rival what I observed around me in the late 70s early 80s.

Juvenal Delinquent, you appear to have not thoroughly read Tainter's book yourself...

He spends the entire book DEBUNKING those "11 reasons." He is merely describing what other theorists have come up with over the centuries to explain the decline of complex societies. Tainter pretty much demolishes all these reasons, proclaims them inadequate to explain the ultimate processes of collapse, and comes up with his own much simpler, more elegant and more scalable theory ("scalable" in that it applies equally to family groups, small tribes, nations or whole empires). It focuses on social complexity as a response to problems, and the high energy needs of a complex social system, and the declining marginal returns on investments in this complexity.

A brief sum-up of Tainter's "grand theory of collapse" can be found here.

Tainter

RD,

Just admit that you haven't read it, and know nothing about it.

John robb has a lot of commentary the fuses tainter/5GW/chaos theory etc...good read
Global Guerrillas

Reading this...

John Robb's Weblog: Tainter on complex societies

In the comments someone brings up Jared Diamond, who wonders why some complex societies didn't attempt to solve problems they knew about. Well, it's because solving the problems would have been perceived as too costly. Tainter is willing to see collapse as a healthy adaptation to declining returns - which most other commentators don't see as "healthy" since they are in love with the idea of complex societies.

I admire Jared Diamond's work on why some societies became more complex than others ("Guns Germs and Steel") - it's very good. But his thinking on collapse is not as good as Tainter's.

Mal,

The reason I was so harsh on RD, was because of the 11 reasons for societal collapse...

He had no idea that Tainter used it as his groundwork to establish his new way of thinking..

whether you are counted in the labor force is determined on the basis of whether you sought employment in the 4 weeks prior to t the survey. It has nothing to do with whether you are collecting unemployment benefits or not.

the laws of entropy apply to societies as well. The more complex a society the more "energy" it requires to sustain itself- energy defined more broadly than joules. Thus active citizen participation is part of the positive energy flow into maintaining a system. I actually think that the reasons for the collapse of societies is quite simple and quite consistent across history and cultural . Unfortunately it is too simple to make for a book. They squander resources and live off accumulated wealth rather than trying to create new wealth.

crazyv (profile) wrote on Thu, 7/2/2009 - 6:51 am

the laws of entropy apply to societies as well. The more complex a society the more "energy" it requires to sustain itself- energy defined more broadly than joules. Thus active citizen participation is part of the positive energy flow into maintaining a system. I actually think that the reasons for the collapse of societies is quite simple and quite consistent across history and cultural . Unfortunately it is too simple to make for a book. They squander resources and live off accumulated wealth rather than trying to create new wealth.

Societies need to constantly reinvent themselves or are forced to reinvent due to external forces. When they become static they decay. When they fail to adapt to changing circumstances they die. The parallels to our efforts to freeze a dysfunctional financial system and preserve its outdated structure is worrisome.

Complex societies fail because they are in love with complex societies.

BSR,

Regale us with tales of milking a cow again.

The % job loss in post WW2 recession chart, if portentous, is pretty scary from what I infer. Looking at these trends I see the graphs lines generally looking more "U" like than "V" like over the years; especially the last two recessions.

If that holds true, I wouldn't expect to see the current line cross above 0 until well right of what this chart shows.

If I'm reading this right, is this graph showing effects of increasing intervention in attempting to "smooth" out recessions? AKA, kick the can.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this chart?