The Dish

The headline number on this morning’s jobs report – 288,000 jobs added in April – looks pretty good on its face:

The hiring spree surpassed most analysts’ expectations and is the strongest showing in more than two years. Businesses added workers across a broad array of sectors, including business services, retail and construction. The unemployment rate plunged to 6.3 percent — the lowest level since 2008 — though part of that was due to workers leaving the labor force.

The upbeat report provided a convincing counterpoint to data released earlier this week that revealed economic growth was virtually flat during the first quarter. Many analysts attributed that weak reading to the unusually cold winter and argued that a spring thaw is already underway. The Labor Department also increased its estimates of hiring during the previous two months by 36,000 net jobs. Wall Street opened higher on the news.

The chart above, via Joe Weisenthal, shows that we have almost made up the job losses from the recession. But as Neil Irwin points out, there’s a huge downside:

The number of people in the labor force fell by a whopping 806,000, wiping out the February and March gains and a bit of January as well.

The labor force participation rate fell by 0.4 percentage points to 62.8 percent, returning to its December level. And the number of people reporting they were unemployed fell by 733,000, which sounds good on its surface, but paired with the similar-sized decline in the labor force points to job seekers giving up looking rather than finding new employment.

It would be irresponsible to draw any definitive conclusions from a single month’s data, but this isn’t the only area in which this report has some soft underbelly. Both hours worked and wages were unchanged. If the economy is to ever expand more robustly, it will require workers to make more money, giving them the income to buy more goods, services and houses; in April at least, there was no progress on wages.

David Leonhardt adds that the business and household surveys are extremely divergent:

The monthly survey of businesses showed that the economy added 288,000 jobs last month — and 238,000 on average over the last three months, the best such pace in more than two years. The monthly survey of households showed that the economy actually lost 73,000 jobs; the only reason the unemployment rate fell is because people dropped out of the labor force, no longer looking for work and thus not counted as officially unemployed.

It’s tempting to try to combine the two surveys into one neat package and claim that the economy added jobs, albeit not enough to bring people back into the labor force. But that’s not right. If you believe the household survey, the economy lost jobs. If you believe the business survey — which is much larger than the household survey — job growth was quite strong. They cannot both be right.

Drum advises against freaking out about the declining labor force participation rate:

[T]here are two things to keep in mind: (a) the participation rate has been shrinking steadily for a long time, and (b) it’s a pretty volatile number from month to month. The chart below shows both things. The participation rate has been steadily shrinking since 2000, and it’s been shrinking even faster ever since the end of the Great Recession. And the big drop in April? As you can see from the tail end of the chart, the participation rate hasn’t actually changed since October. It’s just been bouncing up and down.

Bottom line: Don’t take the April numbers too seriously. The long-term trends are important, but there’s so much noise in the month-to-month numbers that you can’t draw too many conclusions from them.

What’s to explain the decline? Patrick Brennan thinks it could be Obamacare:

If the early-February CBO report that predicted that in a few years, 2.5 million fewer Americans will be working than otherwise would because of the Affordable Care Act is right, that’s going to start showing up in a big way this year. In one sense, this is a good thing: Many people have access to affordable health insurance outside of holding a job for the first time. But when we’re worried about a secular decline in labor-force participation, this is a worrying trend.

Another explanation: We could be seeing the delayed effect of the expiration of unemployment benefits for those out of work for (about) 27 weeks or more. You might expect that to be the argument laid out by supporters of extending those benefits, though I haven’t seen much of it.

In response to Matt K. Lewis’ “conservative case” for the death penalty we posted yesterday, Balko points out that the practice is “susceptible to the same problems Lewis points out when criticizing the things governments do that he believes aren’t legitimate”:

When it comes to the trappings of public choice and political economy, the corruption of power and tunnel-visioned public officials, the criminal justice system is no different than, say, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Actually, there is one important difference: The consequences of government error in the criminal justice system are far more profound. …

Lewis makes clear that he only supports the death penalty for the most heinous of crimes, and only for those crimes for which the defendant’s guilt is certain. At first blush, it’s hard to quarrel with that position. The rub is that we’ll always need to draw that line somewhere. How heinous must the crime be? And how certain of guilt must we be? There have been more than a few exonorations in cases in which it seemed unimaginable that the accused people could possibly have been innocent. And yet they were. We now know that prosecutors and police are capable of fabricating and planting evidence. Not that it’s necessarily common, but it happens. That means that even DNA cases aren’t necessarily iron-clad. The science behind the testing may be certain, but the gathering and testing of evidence will always be done by humans and be subject to all the biases, imperfections and temptations to corruption that come with them.

Meanwhile, Max Ehrenfreund finds little reason to think the death penalty acts as a deterrent:

In fact, research suggests than criminals are mainly concerned about whether they’ll be caught, not what might happen to them afterward. “It’s the certainty of apprehension that’s been demonstrated consistently to be an effective deterrent, not the severity of the ensuing consequences,” said Daniel Nagin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Nagin led a committee at the National Research Council that reviewed the evidence on executions and crime and concluded that the existing research is inconclusive. In any case, he argues, effective law enforcement is most important in preventing crime. People are more likely to break the law when they feel they can get away with it. “The police are really at the center of the action in terms of deterrence,” Nagin said.

Readers turn their gaydar on:

Yes, you definitely sound gay. But not super gay, if that makes sense. Somewhere between Neil Patrick Harris and Dan Savage on a scale of zero to George Takei.

Another:

You don’t sound “stereotypically” gay.  You sound … British.  Which to American ears is a touch fey.

One way of testing this was to ask my old high school friends whether they knew I was gay in my teens. I reunited with a few dear old friends last year. They all told me they had no idea. But I think for them, my nerdiness obscured my gayness. Another reader:

“Poohsticks”! That isn’t gay so much as just twee as fuck. The biggest straight creepers I knew in the ’80s were indie boys who would wear their cardies to cakewalks and go on the pull.

Ah, yes, those were the days … Another reader:

You don’t sound gay; you sound European. Yes, I realize this might be even worse for a Brit.

It is. Another shifts focus:

Yep, I have a gay voice. And I hate it, but I don’t worry about it too much, unless I’m watching video of myself. Straight people have acknowledged my voice sounds gay. When I worked for a French oilfield services company, I met a woman who had me figured out, though she didn’t realize it, when she commented that I sounded gay when I spoke French. I was startled, given that I wasn’t really out then. It dawned on me that my voice simply sounded Southern and American to her when I spoke English, but the gay came out when I spoke French. So apparently my voice is definitely gay in any language.

Many others sound off:

Thanks for starting this discussion! I’m straight, but I’m a musician/artist and tend to move among gay circles a bit more frequently than others at my day-job or in my family. As a singer, and a vocal pedagogist, this topic has always fascinated me.

I know gay men with no perceptible lilts or lisps, and others that are ostentatious caricatures of that type of diction. The well-trained gay singers I know don’t tend to bring their accents into sung music in their native language (almost exclusively English, since I’m in the Midwest), possibly because in voice study, diction is part of the regimen. During the course of an art song or choral piece, you often have a long time to plan how that “s” is going to sound, and the melodic line obscures any lilt. Even with those who maintain sibilant s’s in sung English language music, it will often disappear when they’re singing in a non-native language.

I hope you get input from speech pathologists or other singers on this thread. As I said, I’ve long been fascinated by why sexual orientation in men leads to this unique set of accents/dialects.

Something else that occurred to me: there’s no “lesbian” accent, and few women sound anything like the effeminate-ish brogue of some gay men like Tim Gunn. So these men are not affecting a female cadence; it’s something else.

Another is on the same page:

I know your post was focused on the voices of gay men, but I believe that many lesbians have a unique tone, timbre, or whatever you call it to their voice as well. I would love to see someone do a study that does a technical analysis of the voices of straight and gay women to see if there’s a quantifiable difference.

And another:

The “gay voice” issue is utterly fascinating to me. I’m a (straight, female) bankruptcy attorney and part of my job involves meeting with a fairly large number of new clients each week for consultations. It’s an interesting and unusual interaction because I get to ask complete strangers about some pretty intimate details of their personal lives, including a lot of things people generally don’t tell their family members and best friends, within a few minutes of meeting them. One of the things I’ve discovered is that I always, ALWAYS know that a guy is gay before we get to the section of the questionnaire where I ask for the names of any “spouses or significant others” residing in his household. I usually know it within about a second of the time he walks through the door. It’s both something in the voice and also something in the whole way gay guys move that is different from straight guys. I’ve never been able to pinpoint exactly what it is, but I instantly know it when I see it.

But ironically, I have absolutely no clue when it comes to lesbians. I went to lunch three times with an attorney friend who talked nonstop about her “partner” Susan and I honestly thought she was talking about her law partner (who she oddly seemed to really enjoy taking cooking classes with), until she actually posted something on Facebook starting with “As a lesbian…” So much for my A+ gaydar.

One more:

Thank you for addressing the issue of gay voice. Growing up gay and full of shame, I realized early on that I could consciously avoid overtly acting like a sissy. At age three my aunt, when I asked her to paint my toenails red like hers, informed me that “little boys don’t do that, only little girls.” So I never asked again. It was a bit like a conscious and successful attempt to improve my left-handed handwriting after getting bad marks in penmanship.

After hearing my own recorded voice for the first time, however, I was stunned. It not only sounded like a sissy but, to my ultimate horror, it sounded like Liberace. I don’t mean to bash poor Lee, but realizing that I could only grow up to be like him moved me to suicidal ideation at age 11. I did try hard to sound less queer, even acting in high school plays so I could be someone else, but with only partial success. I knew my voice gave me away.

Since I hated and feared this type of voice, when I matured sexually I found it a total sexual turn-off in others. I didn’t know that there were gay men with a “normal” voice and for years limited myself to anonymous casual sex with no tell-tale speaking. Ultimately, some sort of inner strength I didn’t know was there, coupled with changing times, enabled me to come out and seek a relationship with a man. (And I share your experience of the universe shifting with that first kiss – it felt like falling backward through infinite bliss.) But it had to be someone who sounded straight. And I did find someone. I entered a relationship with him because I liked him and because of his boring, straight-sounding, Midwestern voice. He was not my “type” physically and the sex was never the greatest, but we’ve been together for 35 years and, partially thanks to lovely you, we were married in New York in November.

I know this may sound rather sad and pathetic and self-loathing coming from a 66-year-old retired physician, but there it is. By the way, I don’t think you sound gay, but it may just be the residual British accent that obscures deeper indications. Patrick in “Looking” has total gay voice, but his British boss (with the delectable ears) does not. The mysteries of sexuality are infinite and fascinating.

The World Health Organization has issued a lengthy report (pdf) rounding up the best available international data on drug-resistant bacteria and warning that the post-antibiotic era of our nightmares could be coming soon:

The WHO report, “Antimicrobial resistance: global report on surveillance”, collates data from 114 countries, looking at the seven most common bacteria responsible for serious disease and regional levels of resistance.  … Avoiding the proliferation of antibiotics resistance should have been easy. WHO’s recommendations are, as ever, for people to use their prescriptions as instructed by their physician and to not share antibiotics. We know that not finishing a course of antibiotics can leave bacteria in the body and help it towards building a resistance. It should be avoidable. But there are other issues, such as overuse with livestock. In all cases, WHO is urging for “harmonised global standards”.

Another problem is that drug companies don’t put much effort into developing new antibiotics:

[R]esearch in this area has largely stalled, and only a handful of new antibiotics have been created over the past decade. That’s partly because it isn’t as profitable for pharmaceutical companies to invest in creating new drugs. Last year, the U.S. government formed a partnership with a pharma giant in the hopes of spurring innovation. Some infectious disease experts are urging Congress to pass tax credits to encourage the development of new antibiotics.

Susannah Locke reminds us why this is a really, really big problem:

It’s easy to forget what the world was like before the first antibiotic was discovered in 1928. Diseases like pneumonia and simple scrapes and infections could often cause death. Today, antibiotics have become indispensable for modern medicine — they’re used for surgeries, transplants, kidney dialysis. Without antibiotics, giving birth would be much more dangerous. Without antibiotics, an estimated one in six hip replacement patients would die.

The short story is that we really, really don’t want this to happen. You can read more about what the post-antibiotic world would look like in Maryn McKenna’s story here.

Russell Saunders, a pediatrician, can’t imagine “what it would be like to practice medicine without recourse to antibiotics”:

I get immensely frustrated when I encounter lazy medical providers who scribble out a prescription for a Z-Pak for every patient who smiles the right way. Even though I know it makes some people happy to leave my office with a script, I am professionally obligated to be parsimonious with a resource as precious as effective antibiotics. Hopefully, with increasing awareness of the antibiotic-resistance problem will come less pressure on providers to err on the side of treating disgruntled patients.

Previous Dish on antibiotics here, here, and here.

Brian Doherty praises William Easterly’s Tyranny of Experts for how it tackles the follies of the international development industry:

Easterly is particularly sharp on the looseness of much of the “data” that development experts rely on. He mocks Bill Gates, the Uncle Pennybags of modern development econ, for crowing about a five-year improvement in Ethiopian child mortality rates. Easterly convincingly describes a confusing data landscape, marred by lack of well-kept vital records in shoddy states, and wildly varying estimates from different independent sources doing the best they can with the bad source material they have to deal with. In fact, we have no way to get an accurate picture about infant and child death in the Third World. Our macro data on the economies of the poorer parts of the world are too unreliable and inconsistent to use as much of a measure of anything.

But he sees flaws with the book:

[F]or a book trying to make the case that poor, autocratic governments harm their citizens’ rights with the connivance of western development experts, Tyranny of Experts lacks sufficient specifics of how and why that is so, or enough vivid stories demonstrating the specific human costs of development hubris. It’s almost as if Easterly thinks his claims are so obviously true that he doesn’t have to get bogged down in the details of proving them.

The Economist is not so sure about Easterly’s big-picture ideas:

Mr Easterly is at his trenchant best when demolishing various bits of received wisdom about development, whether about the role of strong leaders or the idea that policymakers actually know how to choose the right policies. Often they do not; nor do economists. This makes it harder to share his confidence that securing individual rights will do the trick. Rights clearly matter, but there is also a lot of evidence that individuals, like policymakers, do not make efficient use of all the information available. Instead they often rely on quick, flawed rules of thumb to guide their decisions. Securing rights may be necessary, but it is unlikely to be sufficient.

Mr Easterly claims that the “difference between individualist and collectivist values” is one of the great divides that explains why Western Europe prospered in the early modern age as the rest of the old world fell behind. True, Westerners today stress things like self-reliance, where East Asians might value group loyalty. Yet history surely matters here.

Eric Posner came to similar conclusions in a review he wrote last month:

Which rights should we advocate? How should we insist that they be implemented? What should we do to governments that refuse to take our advice? I suspect that if he gave these questions some thought, he would realize that any serious effort to compel or bribe poor countries to recognize rights would look like the development activities that he criticizes. Indeed, his bête noir, the World Bank, famously tried to implement “rule of law” projects that were supposed to enhance rights. These projects failed for all the reasons that all the other development projects failed.

In March, the Dish highlighted an excerpt from Easterly’s book.