Civilization, complexity and the limits of human cognition - another attempt at explaining the 21st century

The 70s were pretty weird, but I was too young to notice. (Not coincidentally, the Toffler/Farrell Future Shock book was written then.) By comparison the 80s and 90s more or less made sense. In 1992 Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" and that seemed about right for the times.

Things got weird again in the late 90s. I was in a .com startup and I remember valuations getting crazy about 1997, 3 years before the .com crash. We were still picking ourselves up from the crash when 9/11 hit. (A year later, on a purely personal note, my youngest brother vanished.) In the early 00s came Enron and other frauds almost forgotten now. Then in 2008 the real estate collapse and the Great Recession. We were barely recovering from the Great Recession when Trumpism hit. Followed by COVID (which was expected and not at all weird) and the Great Stupidity of the American Unvaccinated (which we did not expect and is perhaps weirdest of all).

Each time the world went off kilter I have tried to figure out a root cause:

In Feb 2009 I tried to figure out the crash of 2008:

At last count my list of contributing factors to the crash of '09 included ...

1. Complexity collapse: we don't understand our emergent creation, we optimized for performance without adaptive reserve
2. Mass disability and income skew: The modern world has disenfranchised much of humanity
3. The Marketarian religion: The GOP in particular (now the Party of Limbaugh), but also many Democrats and libertarians, ascribed magical and benign powers to a system for finding local minima (aka The Market). The Market, like Nature, isn't bad -- but neither is it wise or kind.
4. The occult inflation of shrinking quality: What happens when buyers can't figure out what's worth buying. Aka, the toaster crisis - yes, really.
5. performance-based executive compensation and novel, unregulated, financial instruments: a lethal combination. See also - You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.
6. Disintermediating Wall Street: Wall Street became a fragile breakpoint 
7. The future of the publicly traded company: A part of our problem is that the publicly traded company needs to evolve
8. The role of the deadbeats: too much debt - but we know that
9. Firewalls and separation of powers: a culture of corruption, approved by the American electorate, facilitated dissolving regulatory firewalls
10. Marked!: Rapid change and the Bush culture made fraud easy and appealing

I put Marked! pretty low on the list, but maybe I should bump it up a bit. The Hall of Shame (Clusterstock) lists a lot more fraud than has made the papers [1]...

• Fairfield Greenwich Group: quietly complicit in the Madoff fraud?
• Angelo Mozilo: white collar mobster
• Sam Israel: a $400 million fraud. In the old days, he'd have been front page news. I never heard of him.
• Many more, each of which would have been in the news once - including: JS Forte, RS Piccoli, JG Ossie, D Palmer, A Nodel, Marc Dreier.
• Those swindlers who have made the news... Allen Stanford, and, of course, Mr. Madoff.

By 2010 I was focusing on RCIIIT: The rise of China and India and the effects of IT.

... The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible ...

In 2016 and again in 2018 I tried to explain Trumpism by contributing factors (I was too optimistic about Murdoch's health though):

• 65% the collapse of the white non-college “working class” — as best measured by fentanyl deaths and non-college household income over the past 40 years. Driven by globalization and IT both separately and synergistically including remonopolization (megacorp). This is going to get worse.
• 15% the way peculiarities of the American constitution empower rural states and rural regions that are most impacted by the collapse of the white working class due to demographics and out-migration of the educated. This is why the crisis is worse here than in Canada. This will continue.
• 15% the long fall of patriarchy. This will continue for a time, but eventually it hits the ground. Another 20 years for the US?
• 5% Rupert Murdoch. Seriously. In the US Fox and the WSJ, but also his media in Australia and the UK. When historians make their list of villains of the 21st century he’ll be on there. He’s broken and dying now, but he’s still scary enough that his name is rarely mentioned by anyone of consequence.
• 1% Facebook, social media, Putin and the like. This will get better.

That 1% for Facebook et all is pretty small — but the election of 2016 was on the knife’s edge. That 1% was historically important.

A few months ago I listed 3 causes for the post-COVID supply and labor shock economics of 2021:

1. Wealth became extremely concentrated. 

2. Returns on labor for 40% of Americans fell below modern standard for economic life.

3. Good investments became hard to find.

It's almost 2022 now, so we're into almost 25 years of the world not making sense any more. So now I'm digging even deeper for a root cause.

Today I'm going with Gordon's Law: the complexity of a complex adaptive system will increase until it reaches a limiting factor. Our civilization is a complex adaptive system and its complexity increased until it hit a limiting factor -- the complexity capacity of the average human. These days between 40 and 50% of American's can't handle civilization 2021 (sometimes I call this mass disability (see also). Witness among other things, The Great Stupidity of the FoxCovians.

It's a variant of the "Future Shock" Toffler wrote about 52 years ago. I don't have a fix; I don't think the world will get less complex. Our technologies are moving too fast. Maybe we'll just get used to not understanding the world and civilization will stumble on regardless. After all, for most of human history the world was incomprehensible -- and we did manage. Sort of. Mostly without civilization though ...

Understanding century 21 - IT, Globalization and urban-urban migration

In the 90s the world kind of made sense. Since then, not so much. I don’t know if teens truly are experiencing an anxiety epidemic, but any American growing up in the new millennium has reason to be anxious.

I think the root causes of our disruption are globalization (China and India) and information technology (AI, robots, advertising supported web, etc) leading to peak human/mass disability and the collapse of the GOP.

I’m now considering a third factor — namely urban-urban migration (though it may be a consequence of globalization and IT rather than a root cause). The population required to sustain a viable local economy keeps increasing; this is absolutely not what we expected when the net was young. Once a city of 10,000 was viable, then a city of 50,000, then a few hundred thousand. We seem too heading towards a million as baseline.

This is politically potent here because the structure of American government gives disproportionate power to low population density regions. The pain of these communities is politically consequential. This is usually described as a “rural” crisis, but these aren’t “rural” in the traditional sense. They are regions around large towns and small cities that are no longer economically viable.

I was a family medicine resident and a young physician in communities like these. Recent stories feel familiar — they remind me of my desolate drives along the Erie Canal and the IT driven end of the mill town. It’s a worldwide thing.

Humans have been migrating from rural areas to cities for centuries. It’s often been socially disruptive. It still is, particularly because of the way American government works. The dying regions have power, and as they lose their cognitive elite they are ever more desperate and easier to deceive.

See also

• Gordon’s Notes: Crisis-T: What’s special about rural? 2016. Similar ideas from a year ago.

After Trump: information wants to be free, but knowledge is expensive

Fourteen  months ago I wrote that Trump was a sign of a healthy democracy.

That one might rank up with my Peak Oil prediction. I’m really not very good at the precision business. It’s hard to know what the future will be like, it’s harder to know when the future will be.

Trump now looks more like a cardiac arrest. Not a bit of chest pain that inspires healthier living; a full out arrest with defibrillators, chest compression and, at best, a long slow recovery. Whatever Systems we had to prevent something like Trump, they didn’t work. We have a political never event; the worst of America contending for the presidency.

When the plane crashes, when the healthy patient dies, we do a root cause analysis. Usually half a dozen things went wrong all at once; multiple safeguards failed. Some of these we know about. We had the Great Recession. We had home and wealth loss concentrated in the non-college population. We had globalization. We had, have, will have the AI world eliminating jobs — especially for the non-college. We have a demographic transition form white protestant to a mix of peoples. We have rapid evolution of social mores and constant technology churn. We have the secularization of America, the end of a historic religious consensus. We have the collapse of the GOP’s historic coalition of the wealthy and the white working class.

Those are big things. But I think we needed something else to create Trump. We needed to eliminate reality.

In our era it started with right wing AM talk radio and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — not least Fox News. Today it manifests as a torrent of consensual hallucination racing across Facebook. Most of America, especially the non-college, live in world of dreams with only a loose connection to reality. I didn’t see that coming.

How can we correct this? The economics are not good. It takes money to do run the New York Times, almost nothing to create a false news story. The New York Times costs $200 a year — only the elite can read it now. Breitbart is free — supported by AARP ads.

Making knowledge available only to the elite is not a great survival strategy.

See also:

• The Year Knowledge Died. Conservative source, via Clark Goble. 11/2016
• How Social Media Got Weaponized—War in the Digital Age - The Atlantic 10/2016
• Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality 11/2016

Trump explained: Non-college white Americans now have higher middle-aged death rates than black Americans

From today’s NYT Health section:

Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans. Gina Kolata Nov 2, 2015

… middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling…

… two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton… and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven … by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids…

… the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans…

… The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

The article falls apart a bit here. What we want to know is how the absolute death rate for non-college middle-aged white Americans in 2013 and in 1999.  We want to know how the Long Stagnation has changed vulnerable Americans, but Kolata’s article mixes all white Americans with the no-college cohort.

Fortunately the PNAS article PDF is freely available, but unfortunately it explains Kolata’s problem — the data we want seems to be buried in an unlabeled parenthesis in Table 1. From that I think I can reconstruct the key information: [1]. 

Year	White no college	Black (all)	White some college	White BA+	White All
1999	601	797	291	235	381
2013	736	582	288	178	415

For the no-college White American 1999 was a pretty good year; probably the best ever. That was the era of NASCAR America and the candidacy of GWB, champion of the “regular” white guy. Employment demand was high and wages were rising. Yes, as a white guy without any college you had a shorter lifespan than the minority of white (Americans) with a college degree, but at least black Americans were even worse off. It’s always comforting to have someone to look down on.

After 16 years of the Great Stagnation though, things are different. Suicide and substance abuse have pushed no-college white mortality to the level of 1999 black Americans, yet during the same period black American middle-aged mortality has fallen substantially. White no-college Americans are now at the bottom of the heap [1].

This is why we have the inchoate white rage that thunders through the GOP. This is why we have Donald Trump.

A large and culturally powerful part of America is in crisis. A cohort with lots of guns and a history of violence. Maybe we should pay attention. Trump is a signal.

- fn - 

[1] There was no breakdown of black death rates by education; a 2012 census report said 29% of whites and 18% of blacks had a BA or higher. Since 80%+ of black Americans have no BA it’s likely no-college whites now have higher middle-aged mortality than no-college blacks.

See also

• Gordon's Notes: Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really. 8/2015

Update 11/4/2015

There’s been considerable coverage of this story, but it’s been disappointing. Both DeLong and Krugman missed the college vs. no-college white middle-age cohort, and I think that’s the important story. There’s also been some discussion of anger as a defining trait of the GOP base, but no connection to the extreme distress of their core voter.

I’ve seen speculation that this is all about narcotic overuse. I find that very hard to believe, but I admit the use of narcotics for pain relief in America has exceeded my expectations. I remember in the 90s when “pain is the new vital sign” and family docs were berated for inadequate use of narcotics. I guess my peers responded well to that feedback.

It has occurred to me that there’s a potential bias we’re missing. Over the past 40 years colleges have gone from predominantly male to predominantly female. The big story here is increasing mortality in the no-college white cohort. But if there’s been a gender shift in that cohort, say from 55% female in 1999 to 45% female in 2013, that will make the no-college numbers even more dramatic. Since mortality has increased even when college grads are included this isn’t the entire story, but it will make the no-college effect more dramatic.

American economy 2015: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Donald Trump lead to the same conclusion.

Donald Trump as the voice of the non-college 50%. TNC on the mass (black) incarceration society - and reparations. Hundreds of colleges produce no earnings boost (but lots of debt).

There is a common thread. America needs 40 million non-college jobs that pay $30 an hour.

That is our 21st century “Manhattan project” class challenge.

Get creative.

Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really.

I’m a liberal of Humean descent, and I’m a fan of Donald Trump.

No, not because Trump is humiliating the GOP, though he is. Of course I enjoy seeing the GOP suffer for its (many) sins, and it would be very good for the world if the GOP loses the 2016 presidential election, but Trump won’t cause any lasting political damage. Unless he runs as a third party candidate he’ll have no real impact on the elections.

I’m a fan because Trump appears to be channeling the most important cohort in the modern world — people who are not going to complete the advanced academic track we call college. Canada has the world’s highest “college” graduation rate at 55.8%, but that number is heavily biased by programs that can resemble the senior year of American High School (in Quebec, CEGEP, like mine). If we adjust for that bias, and recognizing that nobody does better than Canada, it’s plausible, even likely, that no more than half of the population of the industrialized world is going to complete the minimum requirements for the “knowledge work” and “creative work” that dominates the modern economy.

Perhaps not coincidentally about 40-50% population of Canadians have an IQ under 100. Most of this group will struggle to complete an academic program even given the strongest work ethic, personal discipline, and external support. This number is not going to change short of widespread genetic engineering...

This cohort, about 40% of the human race, has experienced at least 40 years of declining income and shrinking employment opportunities. We no longer employ millions of clerks to file papers, or harvest crops, or dig ditches, or fill gas tanks or even assemble cars. That work has gone, some to other countries but most to automation. Those jobs aren’t coming back.

The future for about half of all Americans, and all humans, looks grim. When Trump talks to his white audience about immigrants taking jobs and betrayal by the elite he is starting a conversation we need to have. 

It doesn’t matter that Trump is a buffoon, or that restricting immigration won’t make any difference. It matters that the conversation is starting. After all, how far do you think anyone would get telling 40% of America that there is no place for them in current order because they’re not “smart” enough?

Yeah, not very far at all.

This is how democracy deals with hard conversations. It begins with yelling and ranting and blowhards. Eventually the conversation mutates. Painful thoughts become less painful. Facts are slowly accepted. Solutions begin to emerge.

Donald Trump is good for democracy, good for America, and good for the world.

See also

• For American adults are poverty and disability the same thing? 10/2013
• The Post-AI era is also the era of mass disability 12/2012
• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2011
• Deficits, climate, BP and immigration: Saving America is suspiciously easy 7/2010
• Dynamic stability: struggle and balance in minds, brains, genomes, pregnancy, politics, ecosystems and economies 1/2015
• Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0 3/2008
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011
• Salmon, Picketty, Corporate Persons, Eco-Econ, and why we shouldn't worry 4/2014
• Civilization is stronger than we think: Structural deficits and complex adaptive systems 5/2010

Tech bubble 2015: Billion dollar acquisitions financed by the "rent" we pay MegaCorp monopolies?

Stratchery claims retail investors are shielded from latest tech bubble because MegaCorp and Finance are buyers, not retail investors.

But why are MegaCorp (0.1 trillion and up publicly traded corporations) paying billions?

Largely, I suspect, to forestall competition and enable monopoly rent earnings. Incidentally sweeping up disruptive talent [1] as well as aborting potential corporate competitors.

We usually think of this acquisition bubble as driven by “paying you to borrow” interest rates, but it’s also being funded by the monopoly rents we pay oligopolies in the new gilded age.

When does it stop?

The ultimate limit is probably the ability of consumers to pay the rent(s)…

[1] Talent doesn’t have to be put to good use, just kept out of job market until threat expires. (*cough* secular stagnation *cough*). The corporate acquisition is intentional, the talent lock is partly an “invisible hand” class “happy accident”.

Google and the Net 2015: The Quick, the Sick and the Dead - 7th edition

I first published a Google Quick, Sick and Dead list in January 2009, at the dawn of Dapocalypse. This was six months after the Battle of Latitude; we were well into the post-Android Google-Apple War I. By then the iPhone was big, but not as dominant as it would get.

Less than two years later, in July of 2011, Google Plus launched. Five months later Google Reader Shares vanished and Google 1.0 was declared dead. Looking back, a lot of software became ill in 2011.

Again with the damned interesting times! Since then many cloud services have been killed or abandoned. We’re growing accustomed to major regressions in software functionality with associated data loss (most recently with Apple’s Aperture). I am sure businesses struggle with the rate of change.

Looking back the 2009+ software turmoil probably arose from 2 factors, one technological and one external. The technological factor was, in a word, the iPhone. Mobile blew up the world we knew. The external factor was the Great Recession (which, in Europe, continues today as the Lesser Depression). 

Of course if you believe the Great Recession has its roots in globalization and IT (including IT enabled fraud and IT enabled globalization) [1] then it’s really all a post-WW II thing. I suppose that’s how it will look to the AIs.

Which brings me back to my Google Quick Sick and Dead series. It’s been more than four years since the 6th edition. I haven’t had the heart to update the list the way I once did — too many old friends have become ill. I’m doing an update today because I started a post on the Google Calendar iPad experience and it got out of control.

As with prior editions this is a review of the Google Services I use personally — so neither Android nor Chromebooks are on the list. It’s also written entirely from my personal perspective; I don’t care how the rest of the world sees Google Search, for me it’s dying.

With those caveats, here’s the list. Items that have effectively died since my last update are show with a strike-through but left in their 2011 categorization, old items have their 2011 category in parentheses. Items in italics are particularly noteworthy.

The Quick (Q) 

• Google Scholar (Q)
• Chrome browser (Q)
• Maps and Earth (Q)
• News (Q)
• Google Drive and core productivity apps - Docs, Sheets, Present (Q)
• YouTube (Q)
• Google Profile (Q)
• Google Translate (S)

The Sick (S)

• Google Parental Controls (D)
• Gmail (Q)
• Google Checkout (S)
• iGoogle (S)

The Walking Dead (D)

• Google Search (S)
• Google Custom Search (D)
• Google Contacts (Q)
• Google Hangout (S): on iOS
• Google Voice (D)
• Google Mobile Sync (S)
• Google’s Data Liberation Front (S)
• Google Calendar (Q)
• Google Tasks (Q)
• Picasa Web Albums (Q)
• Blogger (D)
• Google Books (S)
• Google Plus (Q)
• Buzz (D)
• Google Groups (D)
• Google Sites (D)
• Knol (D)
• Firefox/IE toolbars (D)
• Google Talk (D)
• Google Reader (S)
• Orkut (S)
• Google Video Chat (S) - replaced by G+ Hangout

A lot has happened in four years. I was surprised to see I’d rated Google Search as “sick” in 2011 — but that was the right call. In my personal experience Search has moved into the Dead zone since; I am often unable to locate items that I know exist. I have to find them by other means.

 

I haven’t adopted any new Google Services since 2011. On the other hand hand many services I thought would die have simply remained “Walking Dead”. Google Scholar’s persistence is quixotic; I figure Larry Page is personally fond of it.

 

Google Calendar is the Canary case. Four years ago Calendar was due for some updates, but it looked healthy. My immediate family members each have 1 Google Calendar; with various other family and school calendars and event feeds our total number of subscribed calendars is probably in the mid 20s. We use Google Calendar with Calendars 5.app on iOS and Safari or Chrome elsewhere. We’re Calendar power users.

 

Since 2011 though Calendars has stagnated. Google’s only “improvement” has been a partially reversed 2011 usability reduction. Today, thanks to our school district’s iPad program, I got to experience Google Calendar on the iPad without the benefit of Calendars 5 

[2]. It’s an awful experience; the “mobile” view is particularly abysmal. Suddenly four years of stagnation leapt into focus. Google Calendar is now an Android/Chrome only product.

 

Looking across the list there’s a pattern. Google is abandoning its standards based and internet services, focusing instead on Android and an increasingly closed Chrome-based ecosystem. Presumably those two will merge and Google and Apple will become mirror images. It’s unclear if anything will inherit the non-video streaming internet, or if it will simply pass into history. Maybe our best hope is that smaller standards-friendly ventures like Fastmail, Pinboard, WordPress, and Feedbin may prosper in an ecosystem Google has abandoned.

  

Damn, but it’s been one hell of a ride. The take away for me is that I need to get away from Google, but that’s easy to say and hard to do. Replacing my family’s grandfathered Google Apps services with the Fastmail equivalent would cost over $600 a year and the migration would take a non-trivial chunk of my lifespan. History is better to read than to experience, and we’re still early into the AI age.

 

- fn -

 

[1] It’s a different blog post, but widespread hacking (governments included) and ubiquitous identity theft may yet kill Internet 1.0. As of as Jon Robb predicted in 2007 the Internet itself is ailing.

[2] I haven’t been able to get my own iPad purchase past Gordon’s Laws of Acquisition. Those same laws have stopped my iPhone 6 purchase. Maybe I can justify the iPad by keeping my 5s.

See also:

• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #1 (1/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #2 (11/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #3 (6/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #4 (10/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #5 (5/11)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #6 (9/11)
• AvantGo RIP - memories of the roaring 90s 6/2009
• Software died three years ago. Why? 12/2014.
• Apple kills yet another photo sharing service - and generally screws up iOS photo management 9/2014
• How quickly can businesses adapt? 7/2014
• Apple and the 2013 tech world - in the doldrums 8/2012
• Project Ducky - why I’ve stopped using new Cloud services 3/2013
• Fraud and Globalization: Toy Story III 6/2007

Addressing structural underemployment (aka mass disability)

Thirteen years after the first crash of the post-disruption era the glory days of 1996 are a fading memory. Most people under 40 do not remember a time of American economic confidence and full employment.

Now, in the early days of yet another post-recession "recovery", even more sluggish than our past recoveries, most college graduates are able to find work . It is often not the work they studied for though ...

College Graduates Fare Well in Jobs Market, Even Through Recession - NYTimes.com

... employers are hiring college-educated workers for jobs that do not actually require college-level skills — positions like receptionists, file clerks, waitresses, car rental agents and so on.... 

Unemployment is also relatively low for the 50+ segment, but when these 'elders' lose their jobs involuntary semi-retirement is not rare.

The greatest problem though is concentrated in the young non-college graduate. That is the majority of young Americans; only 32% of "non-institutional" [1] Americans get a Bachelor's degree or higher, 12% of Americans don't finish High School. "Unemployment" in this population is about 16%, and that counts only those looking for work. Much of that work is minimum wage and at risk for automation. [2]

That's why, when I think about our post-distruption economy, I think in terms of relative disability. For the purposes of a thought experiment,  I'll include in the 'mass disability' cohort anyone who doesn't finish High School, and a third of the people who don't graduate from college. By that rough metric, about 18-20% of young Americans are effectively disabled in the world of 2013. They have the same "zero value marginal product" as the traditional (cognitively) disabled [3].

That's mass disability.

Obviously, a society where 20% of adults are "disabled" is not a long-lived society. In the immortal words of Selina Kyle "There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

So we need to do better. Today Bernstein makes a stab at the problem ...

Where Have All the Jobs Gone? - Bernstein NYTimes.com

... We also need a significant, permanent program to absorb excess labor (an explicit part of the Humphrey-Hawkins law). We should consider restarting and rescaling a subsidized jobs program from the 2009 Recovery Act that, though relatively small, made jobs possible for hundreds of thousands of workers.

And we have to reassess our manufacturing policy, including reducing the trade deficit. That means both reshaping our dollar policy ....

Finally, financial deregulation has become the enemy of full employment: it funnels capital to unproductive parts of the economy, and plays a key role in the “shampoo cycle” of bubble, bust, repeat. Less volatile capital markets mean fewer shocks to the job market...

In other words

1. Subsidize jobs. This is the traditional approach to employment for the cognitively disabled, though there are many indirect ways to subsidize labor.
2. Devalue the US currency, increase exports.
3. Make Finance a relatively dull and unprofitable business.

That's a good start, but we can be more imaginative. I'd add

1. Study Germany very closely. They take a very different approach to industrial policy and education. We should learn from it. I don't think sending more people to traditional college is going to help.
2. Revamp our approach to education, training, and retirement. Tax wealth and finance to pay for subsidized low cost training programs for a wide variety of skills. Provide low cost loans and scholarships for people of all ages to train.
3. Separate benefits from employment to facilitate movements between jobs and training and employment and non-employment.
4. Create a program of facilitated entrepreneurship - a nationwide small business creation service for people of all ages and skills. (ObamaCare makes this possible.)

Anything else we should try?

See also

Gordon's Notes

• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2011 and Employment in the Great Stagnation 8/2010. These are two previous versions of this post.
• Managing the Depression: A national small business generation service (again) 8/2011and Gordon's Notes: Antidote to The Great Recession: A national small business generation service. 2/2008. For some weird reason Google steadfastly refuses to index these posts.
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011 - the concept of mass disability is gaining some traction
• Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III. 4/2010. I started out with a longer list of causes, but by 4/2010 I'd decided the root causes were "the great catchup" and the great slow tsunami of the IT transformation.
• Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world 5/2010.
• Baumol's cost disease: medicine, education and post-AI disruption 10/2012 - Baumol's model doesn't get much respect from the economists I read, wish I knew why not.
• On redistribution 6/2004 - I'd forgotten about this Baumol connection.

Other

• College Graduates Fare Well in Jobs Market, Even Through Recession - May 2013 - NYTimes.com
• The $2 trillion shadow economy is the recession’s big winner - April 2013 - Wonkblogs
• Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Three ZMPs and two Co-ordination failures - Jan 2011
• Plan B - Skip College - May 2010 NYTimes.com
• The Speculist - What if the Jobs Are Never Coming Back? April 2010
• The Atlantic | January/February 2004 | Are We Still a Middle-Class Nation? | Lind Even in 2004 we could see this coming.
• The thinning out of the labor market middle Cowen 4/2013
• The Unsustainable Rise of the Disability Rolls in the United States: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Options 11/2011 - Autor, MIT Press

- fn -

[1] This number excludes prisoners, so the real number is less.
[2] Hopefully they are able to earn some money in the 2 trillion dollar underground economy. This is one reason to keep marijuana retailing illegal with minimal enforcement -- it provides a protected labor niche.
[3] College grads now fill unskilled jobs, and unskilled laborer programs are beginning to push out programs for the traditionally disabled... 

Is labor lumpish in whitewater times?

Krugman is famously dismissive about claims of structural aspects to underemployment (though years ago he wasn't as sure). DeLong, I think, is less sure.

Krugman points to the uniformity of underemployment. If there were structural causes, wouldn't we see areas of relative strength? It seems a bit much to claim that multiple broad-coverage structural shocks would produce such a homogeneous picture.

Fortunately, I fly under the radar (esp. under Paul's), so I am free to wonder about labor in the post-AI era complicated by the the rise of China and India and the enabling effect of IT on financial fraud. Stories like this catch my attention ...

Fix Law Schools - Atlantic Vincent Rougeau  Mobile

... the jobs and high pay that used to greet new attorneys at large firms are gone, wiped away by innovations such as software that takes seconds to do the document discovery that once occupied junior attorneys for scores of (billable) hours while they learned their profession..

Enhanced search and discovery is only one small piece of the post-AI world, but there's a case to be made that it wiped out large portions of a profession. Brynjolfsson and McAfee expand that case in Race Against the Machine [1], though almost all of their fixes [1] increase economic output rather than addressing the core issue of mass disability. The exception, perhaps deliberately numbered 13 of 19, is easy to miss ...

13. Make it comparatively more attractive to hire a person than to buy more technology through incentives, rather than regulation. This can be done by, among other things, decreasing employer payroll taxes and providing subsidies or tax breaks for employing people who have been out of work for a long time. Taxes on congestion and pollution can more than make up for the reduced labor taxes.

Of course by "pollution ... tax" they mean "Carbon Tax" [1]. The fix here is the same fix that has been applied to provide employment for persons with cognitive disabilities such as low IQ and/or autism. In the modern world disability is a relative term that applies to a larger population.

If our whitewater times continue, we will either go there or go nowhere.

[1] They're popular at the "Singularity University" and their fixes are published in "World Future Society". Outcasts they are. Their fan base probably explains why the can't use the "Carbon" word, WFS/SU people have a weird problem with letter C. 

See also:

• Slavery, technology, and the future of the weak 2/2012. What do you do with a labor surplus?
• DeLong, Mankiw and the Problem of the Weak 10/2006. When Mankiw was almost readable.
• Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011

Minnesota 2012: Emotional health?

I tend to think bad driving is contagious. Not contagious as in passed from parent to child, but contagious as in a short-lived virus passed from driver to driver. When conditions are right, perhaps in bad weather or after tax filing, one bad driver angers another who angers another ...

So when I'm in my car and I see two people driving badly, I give everyone extra space. The virus is short-lived, typically things are back to normal within a few hours. [1]

Lately, however, it seems as though Minnesota drivers are persistently distracted, irritable, maybe angry. I see it when I'm driving, but especially when I'm walking or bicycling. It's not a mobile device problem; if anything I see less mobile use while driving. It could be demographics; Minnesotans are getting older (certainly I am), and old drivers are not happy drivers.

It's not just drivers though. I watch faces, and pedestrians too seem unhappy and distracted. That would be normal in February, but it's odd in a mild Minnesota spring.

On the other hand, a recent Gallup poll suggests a stable US emotional health index (The difference between 78.3 and 79.8 seems small, but US presidential elections are decided by less margin than that):

... Gallup's U.S. Emotional Health Index score was 79.9 last month, slightly above the previous high of 79.8 recorded in March 2008 and May 2010. Americans' emotional health has generally been improving since September, when it dropped to its lowest level in more than three years (78.3)...

So no conclusions for now, but I do wonder if Americans are starting to weary of economic stress, uncertainty, and increasing inequality. I'll be tracking this meme.

[1] I used to think there were similar epidemics of murder, perhaps with non-linear or chaotic peaks, but so far that theory hasn't held up.

JP Morgan debacle - it's all Krugman's fault

Felix Salmon pins the JP Morgan debacle on the CEO - Jamie Dimon.

Dimon supported Ina Drew's transformation of corporate "checking accounts" into big bets against Europe and the Euro. They turned a risk management fund into a trading operation. It's 2009 all over again.

Dimon's luck with his timing though. The GOP Congress will ensure there are no consequences this election year, and he can put his billions towards a Romney win.

Even better, Dimon can pin the whole thing on the guy traders hate - Paul Krugman. After all, it was Krugman who predicted that Greece would have to drop out of the Euro unless Germany accepted major reforms. 

As it happened Europe made partial reforms, pushing the date of Euro collapse into 2012 and ruining Dimon's week.

Of course Krugman has not really been disproved, but doesn't he make a great scapegoat for Dimon?

In the end, Krugman humbled JP Morgan after all. Just not the way we thought he would.

Sympathy for the federal reserve: Bubble 2.0

In the 90s we excoriated Greenspan for presiding over the dot-com bubble. Why didn't he include bubble management in price stabilization?

We never did recover from the crash of '99; but our real estate bubble made us feel better for a while. Then, of course, came the Lesser Depression.

Now, in the 10s, Krugman beats up on Bernanke for allowing systemic depression to persist and for failing to apply the counter-intuitive hydraulics of Keynes. My other economists stake out varying positions on the structural vs. systemic unemployment spectrum -- with most seeing a mixture of both with systemic causes persisting and structural causes, including technological, growing [1]. My team, generally speaking, favors both fiscal and monetary stimulus until we return to around 6% unemployment and "normal" economic growth. At that point Keynes says it's time to dial the inflow down (alas, that doesn't seem to happen very much. See dot-com bubble, above.)

The GOP, and especially GOP voters, mean that fiscal stimulus such as infrastructure development or government employment isn't a viable option. That leaves macroeconomic policy. Since low interest rates have run up against the famous zero bound, that leaves options like inflation targets.

But what should Bernstein do when, in the midst of the lowest labor force participation since 1984 (amongst white males the lowest since 1939) we see Bubble 2.0?

Mr. Bernstein has my sympathy.

[1] Sadly for my ego, nobody seems interested in whitewater/discontinuity disequilibria theories.

IPO lessons from MySpace

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Shelley

Cleaning spam out of my Yahoo email (it's spam-only), I saw mention of MySpace.

It jogged an old memory. I'd set up an account there in 2006 - mostly to secure a username in case it went anywhere. I still had the old password in my Filemaker web database (it goes back to 1995 or so).

Here's the first entry in my MySpace messages ...

Welcome to MySpace, the best place to connect with friends on the Net! 

I'm Tom, and I'm here to help you with MySpace. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to say Hi, feel free to send me a message! You can also check the FAQ for the most frequently asked questions. 

How do you get started? 

On MySpace you share your profile, photos, blogs, and messages with a fast-growing network of people connected to you by your friends. 

The first thing to do is to invite your friends -- then when they invite their friends you'll all be connected!

There are several hundred subsequent emails, all spam and terms of service announcements as best I can tell. Most of the site UI is advertisements.

Facebook is supposed to go public soon -- in the midst of Bubble 2.0. Investors should remember MySpace.

Why did productivity gains go to the elite after 1973?

After 1973, and especially after the early 1980s, productivity gains went towards the 1%. Media male compensation in particular went flatline... (emphases mine)

Where The Productivity Went - Krugman

Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?

The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. One third of the difference is due to a technical issue involving price indexes. The rest, however, reflects a shift of income from labor to capital and, within that, a shift of labor income to the top and away from the middle.

... Income stagnation does not reflect overall economic stagnation; the incomes of typical workers would be 30 or 40 percent higher than they are if inequality hadn’t soared.

Happily, Krugman doesn't say whether this is "fair" or "just". Those are meaningless words. Obviously one man's fair is another's unfair. No laws need be broken, though many may be bent. Purchasing politicians may speed the inequality process, but even that is probably not essential.

The interesting questions are

1. Why did this happen in the late 1970s? What changed? How much of this is a result of computerization, automation, and globalization?
2. Is this good?
3. Is this wise?
4. Should we do anything about it? If so, what should we do?

My answers are

1. It is technology and globalization, and large corporations changing the ecology of accounting and regulation to perpetuate themselves.
2. It is not good.
3. It is not wise. This is a recipe for social collapse.
4. We should do something. We should tax carbon. We should tax financial transactions. We should institute industrial policies that provide employment to the bottom 60%. We should expect to subsidize employment for the mass disabled of the information age. We should prepare for the AI age.

Your answers may vary.

See also:

• Slavery, technology, and the future of the weak 2/2012
• Life in the post-AI world. What's next? 9/2011
• The AI Age: Siri and Me 11/2011 (Shortly after I wrote this Siri stopped being useful. Coincidence :-)?)
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011
• Attacking Inequality: Redistributing wealth 9/2006
• Opposition to redistribution - two causes 9/2011 - why income subsidies must be invisible
• Occupy Wall Street (OWS): the mass mind masticates 10/2011
• Where has the money gone? To the very American oligarchy. 2/2006
• The Quiet Coup - Atlantic Mobile 5/2009 - Simon Johnson. How America's de facto oligarchs came to emulate Russia's. I missed this one three years ago; it's a classic that deserves a post of its own.
• My Favorite Paul Krugman Essay: Brad DeLong (DeLong on Krugman 1998)

Finance 2.0, Oil and Project Syndicate - entertainment 2012!

My, oh, my, it's still a whitewater world.

Ezra Klein tells us ...

America’s top export in 2011 is refined fuel ...

... UC San Diego economist James Hamilton ...  the glut of new shale oil in North Dakota. Since there’s not enough pipeline infrastructure to get all that oil down to the Gulf of Mexico for export, it’s been piling up in Cushing, Okla. That makes it cheap for refineries in the Midwest to refine it and ship it out than to simply ship the oil directly...

Brad Delong tells us that the business of America is Finance (8.4%, healthcare is about 17%, emphases mine) ...

America’s Financial Leviathan - J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate

... In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP, according to US Department of Commerce estimates. By 1960, that share had grown to 3.8% of GDP, and reached 6% of GDP in 1990. Today, it is 8.4% of GDP, and it is not shrinking. The Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart reports that the 2010 share was higher than the previous peak share in 2006....

... it remains disturbing that we do not see the obvious large benefits, at either the micro or macro level, in the US economy’s efficiency that would justify spending an extra 5.6% of GDP every year on finance and insurance. Lahart cites the conclusion of New York University’s Thomas Philippon that today’s US financial sector is outsized by two percentage points of GDP. And it is very possible that Philippon’s estimate of the size of the US financial sector’s hypertrophy is too small.

Why has the devotion of a great deal of skill and enterprise to finance and insurance sector not paid obvious economic dividends? There are two sustainable ways to make money in finance: find people with risks that need to be carried and match them with people with unused risk-bearing capacity, or find people with such risks and match them with people who are clueless but who have money. Are we sure that most of the growth in finance stems from a rising share of financial professionals who undertake the former rather than the latter?

Perhaps, then, what we need are 'heroes' who can separate foolish rich people from their money?

Saudi America and Finance still amuck; this world would be more entertaining if we didn't live in it.

Speaking of entertainment, Brad's post was the first I'd heard of Project Syndicate ...

Project Syndicate - the highest quality op-ed articles, analysis and commentaries

... Project Syndicate: the world's pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries. A unique collaboration of distinguished opinion makers from every corner of the globe, Project Syndicate provides incisive perspectives on our changing world by those who are shaping its politics, economics, science, and culture. Exclusive, trenchant, unparalleled in scope and depth: Project Syndicate is truly A World of Ideas. As of December 2011, Project Syndicate membership included 477 leading newspapers in 151 countries. Financial contributions from member papers in advanced countries support the services provided by Project Syndicate free of charge or at reduced rates to members in developing countries. Additional support comes from the Open Society Institute...

Lots of the usual suspects there .... Bhagwati, DeLong, Rogoff, Robini, Stiglitz, Joseph Nye, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more names I should probably know. It's not new, Google Reader went back to 10/2010, and there are series posts from 2008. They don't seem to be marketing very seriously.

I don't see any way to explore their archives by date. It's darkly amusing to read Nouriel Roubini's predictions on the Great Recession at the end of 2008 ...

Will Banks and Financial Markets Recover in 2009? - Nouriel Roubini - Project Syndicate

The United States will certainly experience its worst recession in decades, a deep and protracted contraction lasting about 24 months through the end of 2009. Moreover, the entire global economy will contract. There will be recession in the euro zone, the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, Canada, Japan, and the other advanced economies. There is also a risk of a hard landing for emerging-market economies, as trade, financial, and currency links transmit real and financial shocks to them...

... 2009 will be a painful year of global recession and further financial stresses, losses, and bankruptcies. Only aggressive, coordinated, and effective policy actions by advanced and emerging-market countries can ensure that the global economy recovers in 2010, rather than entering a more protracted period of economic stagnation.

The NBER tells us the US left recession in June 2009, though this is a technical determination. I suspect most Americans feel we're still in a recession.

Good thing I don't have enough to read.

Update: Browsing Project Syndicate, I'm finding a fair bit of pompous nonsense (Naomi Wolf?!). I'll probably have to subscribe to individual contributors.

Peculiar consequences of wealth concentration

There is enormous, incomprehensible, wealth in the world. Increasingly, across all nations, it is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

This has obvious consequences, but I'm sure there are surprising consequences too.

Emily and I remember a boat tour of island estates of eastern Florida. Each estate costs millions, but they were empty. Only caretakers visited, though we were told each had owners.

Owners who bought them, but had better things to do. Or maybe nothing good to do at all.

That is a problem with modern wealth. It's easy to spend a few million relatively well. Beyond that -- what is it good for? A yacht is nice if you like boats -- but then it gets boring. You can hire people to manage hassles, but then you have to manage people. A private jet? A mansion? Private artwork? Wild sex and drugs?

It would be different if we could buy lifespan -- and maybe one day that will happen. Not yet though -- at least not much if any more than the average citizen of a wealthy nation.

All that money can be used for is to play, to compete, to make more money. A game in which there is little meaning to losing, and little meaning to winning ...

Greece, America and GOP 2.0

Krugman tells us Germany and the EU must bail out Greece lest the entire EU crash and burn. Germany is unenthusiastic. Michael Lewis makes Germany's lack of enthusiasm understandable ...

Amazon.com: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World Michael Lewis

… government owed … $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek ….

… In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled … The average government job pays three times the average private-sector job ...

… The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against annual wage bill of 400 million ...

… The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is … fifty for women …

… In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year ...

… as estimated two thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year ...

…. Greece has no working national land registry ...

… all three hundred members of the Greek parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value … "every single member … is lying to evade taxes"...

Lewis describes Greece as a "perfectly corrupt society". Greece seems to have hit the limits of corruption; where the only honest people are either perversely oppositional or autistically incapable of deceit.  It's easy to see why Germany wants to put Greece through a world class social reengineering program.

Wow. Good thing we Americans aren't so corrupt. Good thing we don't have vast corporations paying no taxes. Mercifully our corporations aren't hiding trillions of dollars abroad. Our politicians don't use charitable donation scams or generate profits through insider trading that's illegal for all but Congress critters.

No way do we have the kind of widespread fraud and abuse of the weak that can lead to economic collapse.

Seriously though, if Greece is a nine on a ten point scale of democratic collapse and societal bankruptcy, how do we score? Are we a six? Do I hear a seven?

More importantly, how do we get back to a reasonable "four"? Greece is getting schooled by Germany (whose bankers were as stupid as any on earth), but nobody is going to school the US. All of Greece is barely New Orleans; we're too big to be taught.

We are going to have to reform ourselves. Occupy Wall Street can help, but to reform government we need to solve the problem of the Republican Party.

Both our political parties are corrupt, but the Dems are at least connected to science and logic. The GOP is no longer a part of the reality-based community; whatever Romney and the like may really think they have to pretend to be delusional.

We can't salvage our democracy with only one working political party. We need a reformed GOP. Some party has to do the bidding of the powerful -- lest the powerful tear the nation down. We don't need the GOP to become a shining beacon of integrity, but we do need them to be connected to logic and arithmetic and falsifiable predictions.

This isn't inconceivable. I can't imagine voting for a modern Republican, but only fifteen years ago I voted for a Republican Governor named Arne Carlson. Arne is still around, and he represents a faint voice of sanity in the modern GOP (emphases mine, note that "Pawlenty" is considered a "moderate" by modern GOP standards, but to Carlson he's a far right extremist) ...

MinnPost - Gov. Arne Carlson Blog: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?

... the Republican Party went from moderate to what I call “the new Right”. But it was more than a shift in political philosophy. Leaders like Sutton and Pawlenty and numerous others saw the party as representing not only a different and more narrow philosophy but also as having the power to rigidly enforce that philosophy on its elected members. Orthodoxy prevailed over representativeness and the result has been that cooperative governance with Democrats, Independents and Republican moderates is not possible. It is either the way of the “new Right” or not at all.

Politics is no longer a contest of competing ideas with respect for dissent but increasingly the imposition of an authoritarianism that all too often is cloaked in patriotism and religion. In this environment, the party and its beliefs are paramount and elected officials serve the party...

... my memory of Republicanism in Minnesota goes back to a party that was always building a better community … So many of our leaders came out of the progressivism of Harold Stassen while still committed to the conservative virtues of prudent financial management. Policies ranging from consumer and environmental protection to human rights to metropolitan governance bore the fingerprints of an endless array of community oriented GOP Governors from Elmer Andersen to Harold LeVander through Al Quie and on.

In addition, Republicans produced an endless array of truly talented legislators from all over Minnesota who came to our capital city to govern and always with an eye to the future. Simply put, Republicans, like their counterparts, the Democrats, felt that good politics stemmed from the competition of good ideas that produced quality governance.

And in this mix, leaders from every walk of life and every profession from medicine to agriculture participated. There seemed to be a sense of obligation to give something of oneself in order to build a better community for our children….

...The Republican Party both in Minnesota and nationally has a choice to make. Does it want to build a true Bedford Falls with a commitment to the well being of the whole or does it want to lead us to “Pottersville” where the quality of life rests with the privileged few?

We're in a bad place, but we can work our way out. Occupy Wall Street can help with some things, but they can't help with the critical mission. The critical mission is to reform the GOP; and only Republican voters can do that ...

So how do we help them?

Hungary a tyranny?

Krugman delivers an astonishing opinion, almost as a footnote to a blog post ...

Peripheral Stories - Krugman

... And I spent part of yesterday talking with people in Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, who wanted to talk about Hungary. It’s hair-raising — and not just because of the economics. What will the EU do when one of its members slides into dictatorship?...

The comments come quickly ...

... Orban has established the rule of arbitrary tyranny in one and a half years. He appointed apparatchiks to key posts with unchecked authority for 9 or 12 years. These positions are:

1. Chief Prosecutor, who was given the right to select even the judges for trials of his choosing.

2. Chief Judge, with the right to appoint/promote/demote/dismiss judges

3. Chief of the Media, with the right to take away the licenses of radio stations and fine opposition outlets out of existence.

4. Head of the Financial Control Office.

He also stuffed the Constitutional court with Party and Personal faithful, enlarging it with from 8 to 15, and forbidding the Court to review cases that have anything to do with money.

It took a mere 3 weeks for Orban to push through a new constitution that restricts people's right to hold referendums, to appeal to the Constitutional court.

Hungary lives in fear now. You can be put in detention without trial for up to 3 years. You can be fired for political reasons and the unemployment rate is 12%.

and in response ...

As a Hungarian, let me correct the picture of my country as one "sliding into dictatorship." This is far from reality. Our government is indeed concentrating and extending its power as far as possible in a democratic system and is definitely doing so beyond good taste. Bearing a 2/3 majority they can even modify the constitution and they use this weapon without hesitation and without seeking consensus. This truly weakens our democracy somewhat, so harsh criticism is well deserved, but Hungary is not turning into a dictatorship, this is simply nonsense.

But where is all that nonsense coming from? Well, Hungarian politics is difficult to see clearly for a foreigner. The reason is the huge advantage of the Hungarian left (which is practically an alliance of liberals and former communists) of having a well-built international network which gives them an access to foreign media that the right just does not have. Hence, no matter who is in power, the foreign opinions about Hungarian matters are dominated by leftists' views. The key players in this game are renowned Hungarian leftist intellectuals residing in Western-Europe. Whenever it is not their team in power they always scream dictatorship - that is what they did with earlier conservative governments as well! Oh, and if the left were telling the truth, we would have a right-wing military dictatorship for 17 years by now, as this is what they "forecasted” before the 1994 elections...

Meanwhile, back home, Newt Gingrich must now be considered a real contender for the presidency.

Humanity dances on the edge of the knife. It's a habit.

Ants, corporations and the great stagnation

Do the great stagnation failures of the research enterprise and the modern publicly traded corporation have the same roots? Are not both ant-colony-like adaptive entities with emergent agendas of "their" own? An agenda to grow and survive regardless of the interests of their individual members or of their economic and human ecosystems?

See also

• Emergent computation -- the thinking world (Nature) 1/2004
• Malice, incompetence, and happy accidents 5/2011
• Why do corporations (firms) exist? 10/2010
• Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis 11/2010
• Why did medical progress slow after 1984? 12/2010
• Unemployment and the great stagnation 1/2011

PS. Extra credit speculation. Could these longterm trends be an independent contributor to the lesser depression? Independent of the macroeconomic disequilibria of disruptive globalization and IT innovation?