Month: November 2014

Derek Thompson fingers “invisible unemployment”:

What is “invisible unemployment”? It’s discouraged workers and part-timers who want more hours. The official unemployment rate doesn’t consider them unemployed. So when we talk about the official unemployment rate—now at a lowish 5.8 percent—we’re ignoring these workers. They’re statistically invisible. Here’s a picture of invisible unemployment (in blue) vs. official unemployment (in red). Since early 2010, the number of unemployed Americans has declined by twice as fast as the number of discouraged/part-timers (42 percent vs. 21 percent).

In 2002, official unemployment swamped invisible unemployment. The official unemployment rate was an accurate description of the labor force. But the spread between invisible and official unemployment is shrinking. In the last 20 years, the six months with the smallest gaps between official and invisible unemployment were all in 2014. That means the official unemployment rate is getting worse and worse at describing the real conditions facing American workers.

Ben Casselman focuses on our weak wage growth:

The average worker earned $24.57 an hour in October, up 2 percent from a year earlier. Even as hiring has picked up and unemployment has fallen, wages growth has remained decidedly anemic.

From an economics perspective, modest wage growth isn’t an entirely bad thing. It suggests that employers aren’t struggling to find workers to fill the available jobs, which means employment growth can continue without the economy overheating. For policymakers at the Federal Reserve, it means they can keep trying to boost the economy with low interest rates without worrying too much about inflation.

But for workers, the earnings figures mean that they aren’t seeing the economic recovery reflected in their paychecks. Until that changes, they’re unlikely to take much comfort in jobs-day headlines, no matter how positive.

Greg Ip adds that “productivity is up only 0.9% in the last year, lower than the 1.3% average recorded since the recession, itself none too impressive”:

Both weak pay and productivity might be related to the sorts of jobs growing the most; Steve Blitz of ITG reckons almost 70% of this month’s private sector job growth were in temporary work, health care and restaurants. Manufacturing and construction both rose, but by slim numbers.

But Weissmann remarks that “some, like Moody’s Analytics economist Mark Zandi, are convinced wage spikes are just around the corner”:

Even though the overall unemployment rate is still high by long-term standards, some analysts believe that the millions of the long-term jobless are essentially unhireable—meaning that employers are actually looking at a much smaller labor pool. The short-term unemployment rate is already almost back to normal, and to them, that indicates pay raises are on the way. If they are, we can only hope that the Fed doesn’t overreact and throw cold water on the economy before it ever really gets hot.

In an essay arguing that innovation “has been fueled and sustained by imitation,” Kat McGowan notes that “only humans ‘overimitate,’ copying an action with precision even when it’s obviously a poor technique”:

We overimitate even when told not to – it seems to be part of the way we think. In experiments conducted in 2007 by the psychologist Derek Lyons when he was a graduate student at Yale, children were shown a jar with a toy dinosaur inside.

An experimenter then demonstrated a ridiculous way to open the jar: first tapping it with a feather, then unscrewing the lid. In a video of this experiment, the psychologist emphasises how useless his actions were: ‘Josh, did I have to tap on the jar with this feather to get the dinosaur out?’ he asks. The little boy shakes his head: ‘NO!’ Then the researcher asks Josh to name the gestures that were ‘silly’ and ‘extra,’ and praises him when he answers correctly.

Clearly, Josh gets the point. So when the psychologist tells him to take the toy out however he wants, and then leaves the room, what does Josh do? He picks up the feather, taps the jar, and then unscrews the lid.

In variations of this experiment, children were explicitly forbidden to make any of the ‘silly extra’ gestures that researchers used; even so, between 75 and 94 per cent of the time, they copied the precise sequence of motions. Lyons argues that this is a perfectly rational way to behave, especially for children: puzzling out how something works through casual reasoning requires time, energy and knowledge about the world that they don’t yet have. Copying is heuristic – a smart shortcut that, outside of a psychologist’s lab, usually yields the right answer. ‘Imitation is a remarkably potent learning strategy,’ writes Lyons.

Jack N. Rakove ponders Eric Nelson’s new book The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, in which the political theorist advances a contrarian take on how American colonists viewed the British monarch. Nelson argues that “[r]esistance leaders and the Continental Congress repeatedly urged George III to take their side in the struggle against Parliament’s assertion that it possessed unlimited authority to enact laws governing the colonies” – in short, a number of American leaders had become “patriot royalists.” How this sympathy impacted the presidential office they’d construct after the revolution:

[I]t is important to say “executive” rather than “royal,” because none of the authors of the U.S. Constitution—not even that purported quasi-crypto-monarchist Alexander Hamilton—seriously imagined an American king or hereditary ruler. But the same “patriot royalists” who wanted the king to nullify Parliament in 1774-76 remained advocates of a republican executive armed with independent prerogatives (such as the presidential veto) that hardly conformed to the weak models of executive leadership that Americans had once favored.

Here again, Nelson brilliantly uses 17th-century English sources largely neglected by American scholars to illuminate another critical debate. American ideas of political representation, it is often argued, rested on a belief that election by the people in constituencies mapping the real distribution of the population formed a sufficient basis of political legitimacy. Architects of the revolutionary constitutions conceived of a representative assembly as a “miniature,” “mirror,” “portrait,” or “transcript” of the larger society. If these images were accurate, the demand for active consent was adequately satisfied.

But arguments like that had also appeared during the English civil war of the 1640s, to be countered by the idea that the king also embodied the national interest. If the executive was adequately authorized to serve that function, advocates for this claim held, the theory of exclusive legislative supremacy grew weaker. A space might be cleared in which the claims for executive prerogative—for an independent capacity to recognize and pursue the public interest—would complement, or even counter, the republican orthodoxy of 1776.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy further explains Nelson’s case:

Following the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, colonial authorities, in Mr. Nelson’s telling, began to contemplate the idea of a more powerful and independent monarch at the helm of a re-configured imperial government. The doctor and future spy Edward Bancroft was at the forefront of this movement with a 1769 pamphlet arguing that “Though the King’s Prerogative extends, indiscriminately, to all States owing him Allegiance, yet the Legislative Power of each State, if the People have any Share therein, is necessarily confined within the State itself.” Alexander Hamilton wrote a more expansive version, “The Farmer Refuted,” in 1775, and other important proponents of this royalist ideology included John Adams and two future Supreme Court justices, James Wilson and James Iredell.

Mr. Nelson acknowledges that such ideas about prerogative were for a time overshadowed by Tom Paine ’s assault on the mythology of monarchy in “Common Sense” (1776). But they were revived in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (drafted by Adams), and a broad resurgence of monarchial enthusiasm thereafter culminated in 1787 with the creation of the strong presidency in the “recognizably Royalist constitution for the new United States.” Mr. Nelson concedes that the presidency could never possess all the pomp and trappings of kingship but notes that the Constitution assigned “its rechristened chief magistrate far more power than any English monarch had wielded since William of Orange landed at Torbay in 1688.” He quotes the historian Mercy Otis Warren complaining in 1788 that the new constitution created a “Republican form of government, founded on the principles of monarchy.”

(Image: Allan Ramsey’s portrait of King George III, 1762, via Wikimedia Commons)

It turns out Bruce Springsteen has very Dish-y taste in literature. Here’s how he recently answered an interviewer’s question about the one book that made him who he is today:

One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.

More of his favorites:

I like the Russians, the Chekhov short stories, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I never read any of them until the past four years, and found them to be thoroughly psychologically modern. Personal favorites: “The Brothers Karamazov” and, of course, “Anna Karenina.”

Current favorites: Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford. It’s hard to beat “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “Sabbath’s Theater.” Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” remains a watermark in my reading. It’s the combination of Faulkner and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns that gives the book its spark for me. I love the way Richard Ford writes about New Jersey. “The Sportswriter,” “Independence Day” and “The Lay of the Land” are all set on my stomping grounds and, besides being poignant and hilarious, nail the Jersey Shore perfectly.

Paul Elie offers more on Springsteen’s connection to O’Connor:

Little-known fact: In the last months of his life Walker Percy, prompted by his nephew Will, wrote what he called a “fan letter of sorts” to Springsteen – whom he called “one of the few sane guys in your field.”  He asked the Boss about “your spiritual journey,” and in particular about “your admiration for Flannery O’Connor. She was a dear friend of mine,” he told Springsteen, “though a more heroic Catholic than I.”

In a 1997 interview in DoubleTake (it figures into The Life You Save May Be Your Own) Springsteen told the nephew what O’Connor meant to him in the voice familiar from his long on-mike introductions to songs like “The Promised Land”:

There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation … There was some dark thing – a component of spirituality – that I sensed in her stories, and that sent me off exploring on my own.

And me on mine. And you on yours – as with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which Springsteen likes to read on a summer’s day on the front porch.