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Monday, August 15, 2011

What We Need Is Boredom

And we're not going to get it quite yet.

Empire State Manufacturing survey came in pretty bad. -7.7%/-7.8% (new orders). Future general business climate xpectations fell an eye-popping 24 points to 8.7, which is almost the lowest on record. This survey has shown an astonishingly steep drop in future expectations in just a couple of months.

This will make you want to puke - From 7/6 to 8/3, Other Deposits rose almost 200 billion:


Say whatever you like, but no QE3 is going to top that performance!


I think oil prices are just a touch too high (sarcasm).








Comments:
"What We Need Is Boredom"

"I think oil prices are just a touch too high (sarcasm)."

Touch Too Much

1. AC/DC!
2. Highway to Hell!
3. Not boredom! D'oh! ;)
 
MOM,

I know how much you like my missing jobs reports.

Seeing as how you are a woman, I think you are going to love this one!

Sigh.
 
Hey cool! Mark, you found the women's lib S-curve! An exponential increasing trend from 1964 to 1990 is women born from 1946 to 1972 entering the work force at age 18. In reality, the relative increase is probably only a behavior change in women born from 1946 to... maybe 1960, and then sticking in the labor pool for a career instead of dropping out to have kids. The exponential increase rolls off after 1990, once all the Baby Boom women are established in careers and it's normal for women to have a job.

That's a really cool graph.
 
Neil,

It sure makes an epic exponential trend failure!

Too bad the ponzi nature of our debt based economy isn't compatible with epic exponential trend failures (much to the dismay of those who attempt to predict the future by extrapolating historic long-term trends). Sigh.
 
Mark,

Y'know, that's just life. Or at least, that's just people.

When I was in grad school, my engineering buddies had a way of classifying people. First-order thinkers, 2nd-order thinkers, and (a rare breed indeed) 3rd-order thinkers.

First-order thinkers are the sort that can easily extrapolate a linear trend. They like to play checkers. 2nd-order thinkers can intuitively take a derivative, and think in terms of acceleration of trends. 3rd-order thinkers are all about the change in acceleration.

The fact is, nearly everybody is a first-order thinker. I find this explains a lot of human behavior. Including bankers and credit card lenders.
 
Neil - regarding thinking I just separate people as to whether they are thinking about the problem and its components, or whether they are thinking about the status quo effects and trying to extrapolate from there. That trend reached its logical conclusion. It's over and we need to adapt to the new reality sums up so much about human life.

Regarding the female jobs graph, I think there are several factors. First, women overall will work less or at least more sporadically. Second, right now we have a shortage of the types of jobs women usually take to balance out economic/family needs.
 
Neil calls it the women's lib S-curve, but I think the story goes back a couple decades. During the war, women were encouraged to work "for the war effort" and then as soon as the war was done they were encouraged to become housewives.

To me, this was all government social engineering - especially the "housewife" effort. The government wanted women out of the workforce so there was someplace to put the returning men.

I also think the increase of women in the workforce has, perhaps subconsciously, encouraged the increase in college students; there isn't really any increased desire to become learned, there simply aren't many job openings for 18-year olds anymore.

(At least not full-time jobs that would afford someone a chance to live on one's own at a somewhat similar lifestyle - plenty of manual labor jobs that pay 22K/year but won't get you anything more than a bad apartment in a bad neighborhood. And after 12 years of self-esteem-based education you aren't going to get many non-immigrants to take those jobs.)
 
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