Real world............................

 

...................................................truth.

Us history majors...............

 

...........typically spend little time thinking about the interplay between comparative advantage and competitive advantage.  But, we are pleased that people like Noah Smith do.

Don is not afraid of........................

 

.............. AI causing massive unemployment:

Jobs in market economies will disappear only when unmet human desires disappear – an impossible outcome that, were it miraculously to occur, would be cause for unprecedented rejoicing rather than handwringing.

Based on activity....................

 

...............in our county, this boom is very real. Real enough that push back has started.

Facebook's data center in western Licking County

a bull market...................

 Here’s the thing about the pandemic experiment: It worked too well.

Everyone had money. Everyone had options. There was a bull market in people forming their own LLCs and starting companies. A bull market in sitting on their asses and doing nothing too. A bull market in quitting their jobs. A bull market in whatever they felt like doing. Indulging their hobbies, accepting flexible hours, moving their residence, taking college classes while being employed, secretly having two full time employers, quitting without quitting, being paid for waking up in the morning, taking extended periods of time in between gigs, making a big career change. Whatever people wanted to do, they could do. Freedom on a previously unimaginable scale.

Young know-nothings from all walks of life were investing in digital art and SPACs, trading options on their phones, starting their own companies, selling their own weed and launching their own crypto projects. Older ordinary people found themselves accidentally wealthy overnight, their houses instantly worth 30 to 50% more almost regardless of condition or geography, the values of their 401(k)’s bursting at the seams, potential buyers for their small businesses and real estate holdings coming out of the woodwork with blank checks ready to be signed at the conclusion of a Zoom meeting. You could sell anything to anyone for any price at any time. We were minting millionaires by the minute.

Capitalism felt like it offered possibilities for everyone for the first time ever. Influencers fluent in the language of entrepreneurship and personal finance had a potential audience in the millions for their messaging. The world was ripe with possibility and people felt emboldened. They were liquid and ready to maximize their own opportunities. It was an exciting moment in time. No one was left out.

And that was the problem.

Widespread prosperity, it turns out, is incompatible with the American Dream. The only way our economy works is when there are winners and losers. If everyone’s a winner, the whole thing fails. That’s what we learned at the conclusion of our experiment. You weren’t supposed to see that. Now the genie is out of the bottle. For one brief shining moment, everyone had enough money to pay their bills and the financial freedom to choose their own way of life.

And it broke the fucking economy in half.

The authorities are panicking. Corporate chieftains are demanding that their employees return to the way things were, in-person, in-office, full time. The federal government is hiring 87,000 new IRS employees to see about all that money out there. The Federal Reserve is trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube – the fastest pace of interest rate hikes in four decades and the concurrent unwind of their massive balance sheet. Everyone is scrambling to undo the post-pandemic jubilee. It was too much wealth in too many hands. Too much flexibility for too many people. Too many options. Too much economic liberation. “Companies can’t find workers!” the media screams but what they really mean is that companies can’t find workers who will accept the pay they are currently offering. This is a problem, we are told. After decades of stagnating wages, the bottom half of American workers finally found themselves in a position of bargaining power – and the whole system is now imploding because of it. Only took a year or so.

-Josh Brown, from this Reformed Broker post

Hey, that's Ohio he is talking about................

 Heartland Manufacturing Renaissance | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Joel Kotkin points to good things (from an economic development point of view) happening in Ohio.  The Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority gets a nod:

The Buckeye State, notes Rick Platt, president and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority, “never skipped a beat on funding development.” More than 60 such authorities in Ohio work to attract industry with capital financing, infrastructure investment, land preparation, and speculative building development. Such efforts often tend to be largely expensive money-wasters, but in Ohio they have proved more successful. For the past quarter-century, Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority has transformed the former Newark Air Force Base into a hotbed of more than 20 companies with a total of 1,650 jobs. The companies operate in fields as diverse as aerospace, medical products, automotive and energy-related products, and even the world’s first organic baby food company, located in the industrial city of Heath (population 10,000), one of four plant-based food firms in the area. Licking County’s manufacturing workforce has expanded by 10,000 this decade.

Opening paragraphs...................

The world was going mad in the spring of 1939, or that's how it seemed to Joan Bright.  A jaunty twenty-nine-year-old with swept up hair and a button-down dress, she had travelled to London in search of secretarial work, having just turned down a job in Germany as governess to the children of Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich.

-Giles Milton:  Churchill's Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare:  The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat

Growth...............................

     The unceasing pressure for federal jobs that confronted Grant at every step mirrored a far larger phenomenon:  the vast transformation of American government wrought by the war.  Federal power had expanded immeasurably, testing the president's ability to manage the change.  The National Bank Acts, the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act setting up land-grant universities—such wartime measures dramatically broadened Washington's authority.  Boasting fifty-three thousand employees, the federal government ranked as the nation's foremost employer.  Before the war, it had touched citizens' lives mostly through the postal system.  Now it taxed citizens directly, conscripted them into the army, oversaw a national currency, and managed a giant nation debt.  As James M. McPherson has pointed out, eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution constrained governmental power: starting with the Thirteenth Amendment, six of the next seven enlarged it.  The war also centralized power, welding states closer together and forging a new sense of nationhood.  As Grant told a relative, "Since the late civil war the feeling of nationality had become stronger than it had ever been before."  When the first transcontinental railroad, aided by land grants and government bonds, was completed two months after Grant took office, it heralded a new geographic unity in American life.

-Ron Chernow,  Grant

Priced out of the housing market.............?

......................Choices people, choices.  Try something radical, like moving to Ohio where housing is affordable and jobs are aplenty.   Just saying.

This is mostly true.........................

There are no bad jobs when you’re just starting out. Most young people starting out in the workforce are miserable because they’re not working for their dream company or doing exactly what they’d like with their career. Sometimes this stage in your career is where you learn what you don’t want to do or the types of people you don’t want to work with. The process of elimination can be useful early on in your career.

-Ben Carlson, as copied from here

The heading says "mostly" because of the second sentence.  My first three jobs in the three years after I graduated from college were house painter, grill cook and sandwich maker, and a newspaper deliverer.   I don't remember ever being miserable.

Can I get an Amen..............................?

Number of Private Jobs Created By all Past Presidents Combined: Zero

So the headline reads at the Coyote Blog.  We would all do well to remember that people, small businesses, corporations, partnerships (collectively known as risk taking entrepreneurs) create private jobs.  The government does not. The president does not.  Private enterprise does.  We forget that at our own peril.

Wondering if their feelings are hurt..........

via Ka-Ching

Opportunity........................

     I think one of the greatest disgraces in this county is the fact that in a lot of inner-city schools, 50 percent of the kids don't graduate high school.  And even those kids who graduate are not necessarily job-ready.  That's a crime.  That's America at its absolute worst.  We are allowing that to happen, and these kids don't have the opportunity we all had at one point in life.  We have to fix it.  It's not whether something's free.  It whether it ends up where you're properly trained for a job.

-Jamie Dimon, as culled from this interview

Just hoping those job-stealing.....

.................robots don't learn how to sell real estate anytime soon.

This time it’s different, I hear you cry. Those were just peasants or factory hands: now it’s software developers, accountants and perhaps even lawyers who face obsolescence through automation. Or academics and journalists! People – oh horror! – like us. But if we could lose most of the jobs in farming and manufacturing to automation and still have a record proportion of the population in employment, even while bringing women into the workforce in vastly higher numbers, why should we be unduly alarmed if some white-collar folk now suffer the same fate?

The argument that artificial intelligence will cause mass unemployment is as unpersuasive as the argument that threshing machines, machine tools, dishwashers or computers would cause mass unemployment. These technologies simply free people to do other things and fulfill other needs. And they make people more productive, which increases their ability to buy other forms of labour. “The bogeyman of automation consumes worrying capacity that should be saved for real problems,” scoffed the economist Herbert Simon in the 1960s. 

-as excerpted from this post from my favorite optimist

Cultivate.........................

      The bottom line is that you are not your job.  I remember attending a leadership conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and walking into the bathroom, only to receive a profound teaching on this topic.  Written on the bathroom stall were the words, "This is your life and it is ending second by second."  Sure I thought, life is impermanent.
     Then I noticed that right below that scrawl were these words, "This is not your life.  This is a bathroom stall.  If you think this is your life you should be concerned."   Brilliant!  In the same way, your job is not your life.  If you thing your life is your job, you should be concerned.  Your life is what you make of it and what qualities you want to cultivate during your time here on earth.

-Lodro Rinzler,   The Buddha Walks Into The Office:  A Guide to Livelihood for a New Generation

One war that is going quite well.....................

........................................................................Unfortunately.

Think I'll just keep the one I have...........................

via

Impossible.............................

We could talk for hours.........................

..............and not get to all the factors influencing these charts.

via

Ouch............................

via