As I geared up for this week’s column, a variety of forces interfered with my peace of mind. I found myself perpetually starting on an idea only to find that another idea shot in from an unseen direction to wreak havoc on my concentration. I pondered this state of affairs for a while and realized that my mental state was in some sense reflecting the state of country and the economy as a whole. It was at this point that it seemed most prudent to take up blog space this week to rant about the many little things weighing on my mind and on the nation’s recovery.
Since this is going to be a rant, I’ll excuse myself from the usual rule of trying to produce a logical flow and a clean narrative. Who knows perhaps it will work better. It may even make me feel better, but I doubt it.
First let me point out that the state of the economy is hardly in recovery mode. A recent trip to a nearby mall left me feeling depressed and deeply concerned. The mall in question contains about 200 separate slots for storefronts. Despite being relatively upscale, it was, in my estimation, doing quite poorly. As I walked up and down in front of the various shops I noticed that a large number of storefronts were vacant. By the time this observation had wormed its way into my conscious mind I was conveniently at one end of the building. I decided to turn around and make a careful count of the vacancies. When I reached the other end, my tally was 18 store fronts boarded up and idle, corresponding to about a 9 percent vacancy.
A short trip later found me at a strip mall a notch or two down the glamor ladder from my previous visit. Even this bastion of thriftiness was not left unmolested by this so-called recovery. Of the 30 storefronts, about 4 were vacant and the local RadioShack was sporting banners reading “Store Closing!” and “Everything Must Go!”, all in an attempt to lure shoppers in to take advantage of the liquidation.
The next set of ‘good news’ came in the form of a seemingly never-ending set of statistics being pushed at my face, some correctly interpreted and worrisome, some poorly interpreted and annoying.
On the worrisome front, all indications on the horizon showed that the April jobs numbers were going to be disappointing. This news comes hard on the heels of a March report that showed that job growth failed to match population growth. It seems that period of time in which job creation was out-pacing population growth in the fall and early winter has evaporated and the new trend is the same old jobless recovery we've seen for the prior 5 years.
In addition, both IMF Chairman Christine Lagarde and Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen and spoke at length of the risks that still face the economy in this post fiscal-crisis world at a joint conference at the Institute for New Economic Thinking on May 6, 2015. Lagarde warned of continued distortions in the incentives for the financial markets that focus on short-term profits over sustainable gains. A few rays of sunshine did poke through from this discussion, including Yellen’s assertion that improvements in the financial markets, mostly occurring before the start of the financial crisis in 2008, were mostly aimed at helping the poor. But mostly it was the same type of ‘doom and gloom’ about stability, liquidity, and ‘too big to fail’ that we’ve been hearing over the past 6 years.
On the poorly interpreted and annoying statistics front, society, as a whole, and journalists, in particular, can’t seem to get over the hump in their understanding to realize that correlations in data don’t imply causation – no matter how fervently they want it to. Just to frame the frustration I feel on this point consider the following two statistical statements.
First is a statistic about America’s energy usage, courtesy of Washington State University, that states:
The message being conveyed is that American’s consume profligately and waste so many resources that could be used by the poor. However, this message is only supported by the statistic itself and not with any of the usual machinery by which we make inferences. That is not to say that America doesn’t ‘waste’ energy – if by waste we mean that we leave lights on when they could be turned off, that we are casual with our energy consumption because the cost of energy is relatively cheap. But it also needs to be recognized that we consume more energy than the rest of the planet because we are more productive. On the same page, the anonymous compiler of statistics points out that each American uses the same energy as two Japanese. But Japan has about 1/3 the population of the United States, implying that the per capita usage of the average Japanese citizen is about 1.25 times more energy than the average US citizen. So much for this statistic.
Equally interesting, is what is missing from the WSU statistical diatribe against the very country this so-called academic calls home. In his audio lectures entitled ‘The History of Moral Thought’, theologian Peter Kreeft notes the following statistic.
This per capita wealth of lawyers doesn't seem to even raise an eyebrow in the academic circles. But if the common belief that the economy is a zero-sum game is true, then surely we in the United States have taken lawyers from other, less fortunate people. I say, let’s give them back.
Sigh…