Forced binaries, etc.
I’ve been hating on the Democratic party in public for almost 35 years, in private for longer than that. But I have to say, and I don’t see how anyone could deny this, if a Democrat were president now there just wouldn’t be anywhere near as many dead and doomed people. The CDC might not have been richly funded, but it certainly wouldn’t have been eviscerated, with talented people not wanting to go anywhere near it. The pandemic task forces wouldn’t have been disbanded, and probably would have been listened to from… Read More
Biden by 20
Based on historical patterns going back to 1948, Biden should beat Trump by almost 20 points in the popular vote. Of course, if anyone could blow this, it would be Biden. Back in 1996, when I was still doing Left Business Observer, I came across a 1993 paper by Andrew Gelman and Gary King, “Why are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls so Variable when Votes are so Predictable?” It cited research showing that despite all the volatility in the opinion polls during the campaign, the results were fairly easy to foresee months… Read More
Miserable employment report
This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 701,000 jobs disappeared in March. Economists had been expecting about a third that number. Hardest hit were bars and restaurants, accounting for 60% of the loss. Also hit hard: retail, temp work, and, shockingly, health care. One reason job loss expectations were relatively low was that the survey of employers on which the count is based is done during the week containing the 12th—in this case, between March 8 and 14. (No one is expecting anything but a torrent of bad news in… Read More
The hits keep coming
Goldman Sachs attracted a lot of attention with its forecast that US GDP will be off 34% in the second quarter of this year. That is a very big number. It’s three-and-a-half times the worst quarter in US economic history since quarterly GDP stats began in 1947. (That quarter, by the way, was the first of 1958, the onset of a sharp recession, which featured, among other things, an “Asian flu.”) Here’s a little perspective on that number. That 34% figure is annualized, meaning it’s what the total decline would amount to… Read More
Why UI isn’t enough
I’m going to be posting a series of commentaries on the current crisis. Here’s a quick first It’s odd to see Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer objecting to Republican schemes to send everyone a check for $1,000, maybe two. Of course, one- or two-off checks for $1,000 won’t pay many of the the bills for very long. But talk of means-testing right now looks mean, cheap, and politically suicidal. Schumer says that rather than write checks, we should expand unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. It would have to be some expansion. Benefits are low,… Read More
No robo
You can hardly look at Twitter without reading something about the impending AI revolution: robots are coming for your job. I’m a skeptic. By that I don’t mean to argue that IT and AI and all the other abbreviations and acronyms aren’t changing our world profoundly. They are. Tech affects everything—work, play, love, politics, art, all of it. But the maximalist version, where robots, equipped with artificial intelligence, are going to replace human workers, is way over done. No doubt they will replace some. But not all. Back in 1987, ancient history… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 13, 2020 Yasha Levine on Chrystia Freeland, Ukrainian Nazis, and the proxy war against Russia • Lizzie O’Shea, author of Future Histories, on fake techno-utopianism and imagining a better future
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): January 30, 2020 John Clegg, co-author of this article, on the economic roots of mass incarceration • Tobita Chow & Jake Werner, authors of this paper, on the US–China trade war
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): December 26, 2019 Adam Kotsko, author of “The Evangelical Mind,” on the life and thought of that tendency • Shailja Sharma on India’s new citizenship law and protests against the country’s drift into fascism
RIP, Paul Adolph Volcker
Paul Adolph Volcker is dead at the age of 92. (Most accounts of the man suppress the middle name, though it was often pointed out with bitter glee by builders and others who were undone by his high interest rate policies in the early 1980s.) As I wrote in LBO when he left office in 1987, if capitalism gave out a Hero of Accumulation award, he would have been first on the honors list. Let’s recall what he did, because all the worshipful obits will almost certainly sanitize the history. Volcker was… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 