Calculated Risk
Read the Bill McBride interview.
Jobs
The best summary of the state of our economy is the graph (below) of employment as a fraction of population for people over 16 years old. The decrease is large, but the most troubling feature of the graph is the flat trend .
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
June Payroll Employment
The slowndown in employment growth over the past few months is starting to become more apparent in the graph below.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Focus on the Problem
U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million jobs in February 2001. For April 2012, U.S. payroll employment had reached 133.0 million jobs, marking the third month in a row above the February 2001 level.
Click on the image to get a bigger version.
Graph-of-the-Year Candidates
Donald Marron likes European interest rates. Click on the image to get a bigger version. Can you find three distinct subperiods?
Brad DeLong favors the U.S. gdp gap.
Finally, it's hard to argue against the payroll employment graph below (straight from FRED) and the comparison across recessions (courtesy of Calculated Risk).
Looking Up At 2001
In February 2001, U.S. payroll employment peaked at 132.5 million. The November 2011 figure of 131.7 million still falls 800,000 jobs short of the earlier peak.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Remember M1?
Money Supply M1 growth is now over 20% per year over a 12 month lag. M1 growth has touched 20% before, but not with excess reserves of $1.6 trillion. Where is M1 headed?
Click on the chart for a larger version.
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Environmental and Urban Economics
June 17, 2013, 5:33 pm, 1109052
I didn't know the answer until
I read this.
June 17, 2013, 1:33 pm, 1108902
Unlike many of my colleagues, I teach summer school. While UCLA faculty can be paid 1/9th of their salary for teaching summer school, I choose to collect $6,000 in extra salary. My 9 month salary at UCLA isn't $54,000. The "profit" (total tuition - 6000 - payment to my ...
June 16, 2013, 7:33 pm, 1108533
Today was graduation at UCLA's Institute of the Environment.
Steve Westly gave an excellent and inspired graduation day speech. It was short, uplifting and honest as it focused on offering some advice to the Class of 2013. I plan to follow his advice and I'm part of the class of ...
June 15, 2013, 11:33 am, 1108312
Suppose that you own a Montana coal mine and you have millions of tons of coal that you would like to sell to Asia's energy hungry cities. As the U.S environmental rules discourage new coal fired power plants, you need to find new customers and send them the product. You ...
June 12, 2013, 1:33 pm, 1106877
The NY Times's obituary for
Robert Fogel is worth reading. He was a great man and a kind man. That's a rare combination!
June 11, 2013, 5:33 pm, 1106431
Mike Bloomberg provides a
tutorial here. How much do these public investments reduce risk exposure by? Could perceived risk exposure reduction nudge people to live in risky areas that they otherwise wouldn't have selected? When moral hazard lurks, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of government policy?
June 6, 2013, 7:33 pm, 1104439
I haven't been posting much because I'm focusing on finishing a draft of my new book "Blue Skies" co-authored with Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University. We have signed a book contract with the University of Chicago Press. Our book will we raise that Press' average sales and quality!
For ...
June 3, 2013, 1:33 pm, 1102409
Back in 2000, my wife and
I wrote a paper about Power Couples that interested many people. We argue that big cities solve the co-location problem so that in an age of ambitious working women that such couples will increasingly cluster in such cities as they meet and ...
June 2, 2013, 11:33 pm, 1102063
The NY Times
profiles the last working person in Los Angeles. She tracks down celebrities as they land at LAX or cruise the Sunset Strip and then she takes their picture.
June 1, 2013, 11:33 pm, 1101802
This piece reports that many poor kids attend urban schools that do not have air conditioning and this is affecting their ability to learn. This example highlights why we need more economic growth to help us to adapt to climate change and more hot days. To paraphrase a Nobel ...
