From the Economic Policy Institute:
The total number of job openings fell slightly to 5.0 million in March and the number of unemployed workers fell slightly to 8.6 million. Taken together, the result was a job-seekers-to-job-openings ratio that held steady at 1.7. This ratio has been declining steadily from its high of 6.8-to-1 in July 2009, as shown in the figure below.
Paul Waldman poses questions for 2016 presidential candidates:
Number 7 is of particular interest to me. “If I knew then what I know now…” is all well and good but how will the candidate approach complex issues where there’s inherent uncertainty? Do they acknowledge downside risk? If so then how do they try to get a handle on it?
Must Read
Should Read
Excellent article by Natasha Geiling, “California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food System“:
In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.
“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”…
Brad DeLong has a recent post, The Debate Over the TPP. Commenter Nils:
Can anyone detail the *actual problems* facing international trade, which would be fixed all or in part by TPP? And I don’t mean “my pharmaceutical company isn’t getting to charge as much as it wants to for every dose of its patented products sold in the world.” That’s not a trade problem, it’s a whine.
The end of the human race will be that it will
eventually die of civilisation.– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.
The Dark Mountain Project recently published a paperback edition of their 2009 Manifesto. You can order a copy here or read it on-line. (I bought the paperback.) In case you’re not inclined to follow the link, I’ll post sections over the coming days and weeks. It starts with a poem:
These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.
Robinson Jeffers, 1935
From his column in today’s NY Times:
It has been disheartening to see some commentators still writing as if poverty were simply a matter of values, as if the poor just mysteriously make bad choices and all would be well if they adopted middle-class values. Maybe, just maybe, that was a sustainable argument four decades ago, but at this point it should be obvious that middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-class jobs.
The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.
And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.
So it is, as I said, disheartening still to see commentators suggesting that the poor are causing their own poverty, and could easily escape if only they acted like members of the upper middle class.
… there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the evils of poverty in America. Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute it all to values is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t have to be as unjust as they are.
Related reading: Monica Potts, What’s Killing Poor White Women?
I’ll add that wider availability of middle-class jobs wouldn’t mean that everyone who works one will adopt “middle-class values” but without the former expect that life will be pretty rough.