Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men

At Amazon, Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.

U.S. Economy Shrank 1.4 Percent in Weakest Quarter Since 2020

Let's Go Brandon!

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. GDP Falls 1.4% as Economy Shrinks for First Time Since Early in Pandemic":

Supply disruptions weighed on the economy, but consumers and businesses continue to spend.

The U.S. economy shrank at a 1.4% annual rate in the first quarter as supply disruptions weighed on output, though solid consumer and business spending suggest growth will resume.

The decline in U.S. gross domestic product marked a sharp reversal from a 6.9% annual growth rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The first quarter was the weakest since spring 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns drove the U.S. economy into a deep—albeit short—recession.

The drop stemmed from a widening trade deficit, with the U.S. importing far more than it exports. A slower pace of inventory investment by businesses in the first quarter—compared with a rapid buildup of inventories at the end of last year—also pushed growth lower. In addition, fading government stimulus spending related to the pandemic weighed on GDP.

Consumer spending, the economy’s main driver, rose at a 2.7% annual rate in the first quarter, a slight acceleration from the end of last year. Businesses also poured more money into equipment and research and development, triggering a 9.2% rise in business spending.

“The most important aspects of the domestic economy held up better than they did at the end of 2021, when growth was soaring,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, in a note.

Two years after the pandemic struck, the U.S. economy faces challenges, including supply disruptions related to the pandemic and Ukraine war, labor shortages and high inflation. Central bank officials lifted their benchmark rate in March by a quarter percentage point from near zero to tame inflation, and they have signaled more increases are likely to follow.

Many economists think that the economy can withstand higher interest rates and return to modest growth in the second quarter and beyond, in part because consumers and businesses are continuing to spend.

Americans are spending more on services amid lower Covid-19 case totals and the lifting of remaining pandemic restrictions. Travel is one key example: Hotel occupancy rates are up from January, and more people are also boarding planes.

George Lewis, co-owner of Brass Lantern Inn in Stowe, Vt., is seeing a surge in demand. Visits to his bed-and-breakfast on Maple Street are running strong with rooms selling out some weekends this spring, a sharp shift from earlier in the pandemic when the inn relied on small-business aid to survive.

“People have called up: ‘Are you really sold out?’ ” Mr. Lewis said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re really sold out.’ ”

Still, Mr. Lewis is more concerned about business next year. For one, it isn’t clear where inflation will be, he said. Prices have already risen briskly for heating oil to warm rooms, as well as for the cheddar cheese Mr. Lewis uses in egg strata, a breakfast casserole he serves up on Saturdays.

Consumer spending is another wild card, he added.

“We don’t know what people’s pocketbooks can accommodate after this year,” he said. “Some people are spending…independent of what the cost is.”

Looking ahead, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimate GDP rising 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2022 from a year earlier, matching 2019 annual growth, but logging in well below 5.5% growth recorded last year.

The labor market is a key source of economic strength right now. Jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—have been near historic lows and fell last week to 180,000 as employers clung to employees amid a shortage of available workers. Businesses are hiring and ramping up wages, supporting consumer spending.

High inflation, though, is cutting into households’ purchasing power. Consumer prices rose 8.5% in March from a year earlier, a four-decade high. Elevated inflation is wiping away pay gains for many workers: average hourly earnings were up 5.6% over the same period.

Fast-rising prices are also challenging many businesses...

 

Several Million U.S. Workers Seen Staying Out of Labor Force Indefinitely

Well that's no good, sheesh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Survey shows many labor-force dropouts plan to maintain social distancing after pandemic, raising implications for economy":

Several million workers who dropped out of the U.S. workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic plan to stay out indefinitely because of persistent illness fears or physical impairments, potentially exacerbating the labor shortage for years, new research shows.

About three million workforce dropouts say they don’t plan to return to pre-Covid activities—whether that includes going to work, shopping in person or dining out—even after the pandemic ends, according to a monthly survey conducted over the past year by a team of researchers. The workforce dropouts tend to be women, lack a college degree and have worked in low-paying fields.

The research team has named this phenomenon “long social distancing” and believes it will be one of the lasting scars of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our evidence is the labor force isn’t going to magically bounce back,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who oversees the survey along with José María Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago. “We still don’t see any change in these long social distancing numbers, which suggests this drop in labor-force participation may be quite enduring.”

Should the researchers’ predictions turn out to be true—that the labor force will be depressed for potentially years after the pandemic recedes—the implications for the world’s largest economy and the Federal Reserve are substantial. A sharp drop in the labor force at the pandemic’s start led to shortages of workers and products that have frustrated households, restrained economic growth and helped push inflation to a 40-year high.

The labor force has recovered significant ground since March and April 2020, when the pandemic put about 22 million people out of work and the labor force—consisting of both employed workers and job seekers age 16 or older—fell by 8.2 million workers, or 5%.

The ranks of employed workers as of this March were 1.2 million shy of their prepandemic level, recovering faster than economists predicted two years ago. The labor force grew to 164.4 million workers, down just 174,000 from its prepandemic level. The rebound has been particularly sharp in recent months as the winter outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 faded.

Even with those gains, the U.S. is still missing about 3.5 million workers, by the team’s calculations. That figure represents the difference between the number of workers in March and how many there would be if the labor force had continued to grow at the pace it did from 2015 to 2019, absent the pandemic.

And their research suggests progress could soon stall. If so, the labor force would remain depressed for longer than the Fed anticipates, potentially helping to keep inflation high.

Chuck Lage, 63 years old, is among those who lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic in spring 2020. The Landenberg, Pa., resident was laid off from his position as a director of business planning for a nonprofit professional association.

Mr. Lage has common variable immunodeficiency, or CVID, a genetic condition that prevents his body from producing antibodies to fight illnesses. Worried about getting sick, he retired early and has avoided almost all of his prepandemic activities such as going out to eat and socializing. He plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

Through a Facebook group for people with his condition, he learned that there are many people like him. One recent member posted a picture of a zebra—an animal that people with CVID have adopted as a sort of mascot—sitting in a car looking out the window.

“The world is moving on,” Mr. Lage said. “We’re not able to yet.”

The fate of people such as Mr. Lage is at the heart of one of the economy’s biggest puzzles: whether certain adults will re-enter the labor market as the pandemic fades. Employers have struggled to find workers to meet strong consumer demand and have bid up workers’ wages as a result, one of several factors that pushed inflation to a four-decade high of 8.5% in March.

For each month over the past year, the team has anonymously surveyed 5,000 people—not always the same ones—age 20 to 64 who earned at least $10,000 in the prior year. The survey asked whether they plan a full, partial or no return to normal activities after the pandemic. Consistently, 1 in 10 have said they plan no return. In the early months of this year, when the Omicron variant was surging, that share rose to 13%.

After controlling for work status—some of those people were working remotely—and other variables such as age and gender, the team concluded that roughly three million people are staying out of the workforce to remain socially distant. The team didn’t ask health details such as whether those people have “long Covid,” to avoid health-privacy concerns.

Other data suggest that fear of Covid remains an issue for some workers but has fallen from higher levels earlier in the pandemic.

The Census Bureau has surveyed adults throughout the pandemic, asking among other questions whether they didn’t work in the past week because they were afraid of getting Covid or spreading it.

That figure peaked at above six million early in the pandemic, fell sharply a year ago after vaccines became widely available and remained around three million for much of 2021. In mid-March 2022, the figure fell to 2.3 million from three million in February....

 Very sad, actually.

As Soon as Political Outsider Takes Office We Have Cheap Gas, Cheap Food, Become Energy Independent, and No Wars

Via Instapundit, "YEAH, PRETTY MUCH":

California's Employment Development Department Was Completed Unprepared for the Flood of New Claims During the Pandemic, And It's a Scandal of Lessons Not Learned During Earlier Crises, Such as the 'Great Recession'

Boy, is it ever a scandal. 

While New York is no doubt the worst state in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, the once-Golden State is so bad that Governor Newsom is nipping at Governor Cuomo's heels.

At LAT, "EDD’s lack of planning deprived jobless Californians of needed benefits amid pandemic, audit finds":

SACRAMENTO — Poor planning and ineffective management left California’s unemployment agency unprepared to help workers left jobless by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it failed to address problems in its system that were known for nearly a decade, according to an emergency state audit released Tuesday.

The report by State Auditor Elaine Howle was ordered by a bipartisan group of 40 state lawmakers who had criticized the state Employment Development Department for large backlogs of significantly delayed claims and its failure to prevent widespread fraud since the pandemic forced many businesses to close, putting millions of Californians out of work.

“Although it would be unreasonable to have expected a flawless response to such an historic event, EDD’s inefficient processes and lack of advanced planning led to significant delays in its payment of [unemployment insurance] claims,” Howle wrote to the governor and Legislature on Tuesday.

Howle said the agency was unable to automatically process nearly half of the claims submitted online between March and September 2020, and was forced to instead have the claims manually processed by staff.

“As a result, hundreds of thousands of claimants waited longer than 21 days — EDD’s measure of how quickly it should process a claim — to receive their first benefit payments,” Howle said. “EDD has begun to modify its practices and processes to increase the rate at which it automatically processes online claims, but the automation it has gained during the pandemic is not fully sustainable.”

The audit recommends the agency develop plans for times of high unemployment and address problems including call centers unable to handle large numbers of phone calls.

“EDD has at times been unable to help virtually any of the claimants that contact its call center and has not answered all web correspondence that claimants submit,” the audit said.

State lawmakers who requested the audit, including Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco), said Tuesday the report confirmed their worst fears about the agency’s preparedness and operations.

“This audit confirms that EDD has known it has been failing Californians for over a decade but hasn’t taken anywhere near the necessary steps to fix its situation,” Chiu said.

EDD director Rita Saenz, who took over the agency from outgoing director Sharon Hilliard on Jan. 1, told reporters Monday that she was working to address the problems in the state’s unemployment system, which has paid out an unprecedented $114 billion in benefits since the pandemic began in March 2020.

“We know that too many Californians are waiting on their payments, and we are working quickly to validate their claims and get their benefits to them,” Saenz said during a conference call.

In a written response to the audit released Tuesday, Saenz acknowledged that there were issues that needed to be addressed but said steps were being taken to improve the department.

“While there are additional improvements that EDD must make,” she said, “the department has taken steps to increase efficiencies, expedite payment processes and prevent fraud.”

The audit said the EDD knew of problems going back to the Great Recession of a decade ago but that in March 2020 the agency “had no comprehensive plan for how it would respond if California experienced a recession” and jobless claims surged.

“The 2020 claim surge was unprecedented and would have presented significant challenges no matter how prepared EDD was, but it failed to act comprehensively to prepare for downturns and to address known deficiencies,” the audit said.

Howle also said that EDD responded to the claim surge by suspending its determination of eligibility for most claimants, “thereby compromising the integrity of the UI program.”

State officials on Monday said they had confirmed that some $11.4 billion in benefits paid out by California involved fraud, and they are investigating suspicious claims involving another $19.3 billion in benefits.

Efforts to block fraud are hindering EDD’s work to get claims paid quickly, Saenz said.

“Security is stopping fraud and unfortunately creates longer waiting times,” she said. “Of course people are frustrated and angry.”

The lawmakers asked the state auditor to evaluate the performance of EDD call centers, the effects of the agency’s outdated technology, and the reasons for a backlog of delayed claims that last week totaled 941,000.

The EDD has made improvements in response to a strike team report by government experts in September, including hiring a contractor who put in place an identity verification system that allows more claims to be approved online, reducing the delays that accompany manual processing...

 

Eat it! Eat It! No One Can Be Defeated, LOL!

At Instapundit, "ONE YEAR AGO":

Pelosi Lashes Out at Judy Woodruff During PBS Interview

At Weasel Zippers, "Pelosi Lashes Out at PBS’ Judy Woodruff During Interview, Suggests Anchor Is a GOP ‘Advocate’."

There's an expectation among Democrat party leaders (created by the media) that the media will never ask them any question that could potentially hold them accountable for anything.

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) August 6, 2020

Louis Hyman, Temp

This book is great!

At Amazon, Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary.

Workers Suddenly Have More Power

At WaPo, the Trump economy is helping the working class proletariat lol.

Workers suddenly have more power to demand higher pay and better jobs as the unemployment rate for workers without high school diplomas fell to 5.3 % last month a record low since ⁦@USDOL⁩ began tracking this 27 years ago https://t.co/WQkc3ESW3i

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) March 9, 2019

Isabel Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Isabel Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation.

What Conservatives Get Wrong About Labor Markets

I've blogged Oren Cass's new book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.

I haven't read it yet, so I can't say if it's good or bad, but James K. Galbraith's got a review up at Foreign Affairs.

Caveat Emptor.

See, "The Trouble With the “Working Hypothesis”":

“In calling attention to the centrality and troubles of working people, Cass has a point. Where he goes wrong is in diagnosis, and therefore cure.”https://t.co/cSWUMGL8rs

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) January 20, 2019

Oren Cass, domestic issues director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and a writer for National Review and other journals, has produced a conservative's treatise on the social and economic ills of America, and what might be done to repair them. The Once and Future Worker, published in November, holds that a social philosophy based on consumption, equality, the welfare state and quality of life achieved through regulation—the essential vision of a liberal century from the Roosevelts through Richard Nixon—should be scrapped for more solid values: work, family, country, one might say. Above all, Cass believes in a society and culture rooted in the pride and pleasures of productive labor. “[The] argument at its most basic," he writes, "is that work matters. More specifically, [the book] offers what I will call the Working Hypothesis: that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity.”

Thus the labor market, in Cass’s view, is the proper medium for delivering a work-friendly world. And the trouble comes when politicians, especially Democrats, “trample” on the market. The Democrats’ “actual agenda,” according to Cass,

centers on the interests advanced by its coalition of labor unions, environmentalists and identity groups. Its policies rely on an expectation that government mandates and programs will deliver what the market does not. This agenda inserts countless regulatory wedges that aim to improve the conditions of employment but in the process raise its cost, driving apart the players that the market is attempting to connect. Better market outcomes require better market conditions. Government cannot command that workers be more valuable or employment relationships be more attractive, but by trying, it can bring about the reverse. The economic landscape is pocked with the resulting craters.

ABANDONING THE WORKER

The vision of a labor market offered by Cass is Deist; it is the idea of the clockmaker, of intelligent design. Its Western roots lie in pre-revolutionary France, which borrowed the theme from classical China and Confucius. In the English language, it owes much to that great figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith. Supply and demand work like Yin and Yang: natural law and celestial harmony prevail in the equilibrium between two fixed and immutable, separate yet inseparable social forces—in this case the employer and the employed, the capitalist and the worker. The latter seeks a job; the former offers one. A bargain is struck at a given wage, when the employer decides that the worker is worth his keep, and the worker decides the wage is worth the leisure foregone. Work and production follow. The “abandonment of the worker” lamented by Cass began when the government intruded in the labor market by, among other things, creating social insurance, supporting unions, and introducing regulations to protect the environment.

Thus Cass criticizes environmental laws, going all the way back to the Clean Air Act of 1970, for killing jobs. He attacks “adversarial” unions and proposes that they be transformed into non-confrontational “co-ops” concerned with how to “optimize workplace conditions.” He finds fault with the U.S. educational system for promising an equal chance for all, and suggests that it should embrace tracking and begin funneling students deemed less able into vocational training at an early age. He supports the exclusion, to a degree, of foreign workers and products. He promotes the big idea of a wage subsidy to persuade employers to take on low-productivity workers whom they might otherwise shun. And he favors decentralizing welfare policies to the states in order to promote experiments, diversity, and local measures appropriate to local needs.

THE NEW JIM CROW

Each of these proposals builds on the mental model of a labor market, in which it is the interaction of supply and demand that set wages and determine levels of employment. Clean air and water (and workplace and product safety) regulations raise costs to business, forcing them to move offshore or close down. Therefore, to cite two examples offered by Cass, standards for particulates or mercury should be rolled back. Unions have already achieved what their members reasonably need, and now only serve to prevent the labor market from reaching its natural balance. The result is wages that are too high and jobs that are too few. And employers should be subsidized to create jobs on the principle that if labor is cheaper, they will hire more of it rather than invest in capital improvements.

These measures would supposedly increase employment. But even if one accepts that premise, one might first ask, “Does America really need more work?” Americans have the highest labor-force participation in the industrial West. They work the longest hours and enjoy the shortest vacations. The United States is, notoriously, a working country. And it has a pretty good record on unemployment too, with by far the fastest recovery to near-full employment from the Great Financial Crisis of any major economy.

Keep reading.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.

The U.S. Financial Crisis, Leading to the Great Recession, Hit Ten Years Ago Today

Here's the story, at LAT, "The financial crisis hit 10 years ago. For some, it feels like yesterday."

And from Adam Tooze, at Foreign Affairs, "The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis: What the World Should Have Learned in 2008":

The risk of simultaneous implosion on both sides of the Atlantic made 2008 the most dangerous financial crisis ever witnessed.https://t.co/corEXXxIbA

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) September 8, 2018

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.” Ben Bernanke, then the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, made this remarkable claim in November 2009, just one year after the meltdown. Looking back today, a decade after the crisis, there is every reason to agree with Bernanke’s assessment: 2008 should serve as a warning of the scale and speed with which global financial crises can unfold in the twenty-first century.

The basic story of the financial crisis is familiar enough. The trouble began in 2007 with a downturn in U.S. and European real estate markets; as housing prices plunged from California to Ireland, homeowners fell behind on their mortgage payments, and lenders soon began to feel the heat. Thanks to the deep integration of global banking, securities, and funding markets, the contagion quickly spread to major financial institutions around the world. By late 2008, banks in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States were all facing existential crises. Many had already collapsed, and many others would before long.

The Great Depression of the 1930s is remembered as the worst economic disaster in modern history—one that resulted in large part from inept policy responses—but it was far less synchronized than the crash in 2008. Although more banks failed during the Depression, these failures were scattered between 1929 and 1933 and involved far smaller balance sheets. In 2008, both the scale and the speed of the implosion were breathtaking. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements, gross capital flows around the world plunged by 90 percent between 2007 and 2008.

As capital flows dried up, the crisis soon morphed into a crushing recession in the real economy. The “great trade collapse” of 2008 was the most severe synchronized contraction in international trade ever recorded. Within nine months of their pre-crisis peak, in April 2008, global exports were down by 22 percent. (During the Great Depression, it took nearly two years for trade to slump by a similar amount.) In the United States between late 2008 and early 2009, 800,000 people were losing their jobs every month. By 2015, over nine million American families would lose their homes to foreclosure—the largest forced population movement in the United States since the Dust Bowl. In Europe, meanwhile, failing banks and fragile public finances created a crisis that nearly split the eurozone.

Ten years later, there is little consensus about the meaning of 2008 and its aftermath. Partial narratives have emerged to highlight this or that aspect of the crisis, even as crucial elements of the story have been forgotten. In the United States, memories have centered on the government recklessness and private criminality that led up to the crash; in Europe, leaders have been content to blame everything on the Americans.

In fact, bankers on both sides of the Atlantic created the system that imploded in 2008. The collapse could easily have devastated both the U.S. and the European economies had it not been for improvisation on the part of U.S. officials at the Federal Reserve, who leveraged trans-atlantic connections they had inherited from the twentieth century to stop the global bank run. That this reality has been obscured speaks both to the contentious politics of managing global finances and to the growing distance between the United States and Europe. More important, it forces a question about the future of financial globalization: How will a multipolar world that has moved beyond the transatlantic structures of the last century cope with the next crisis?

More.

Also, at Amazon, Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.

Our 'Cry Closet' Education System

The University of Utah has installed a "cry closet" for students to let it all out during finals week.

Funny, I don't remember needing to cry during finals. I was ecstatic the semester was coming to an end and I got some time off from school, sheesh.

Here's Mike Rowe, on Facebook, "Our Educational System is Under Attack."

And for Prager University:

America's Extreme Poverty

From Professor Angus Deaton, at the New York Times, "The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem":

This is a horrifying read from Angus Deaton. Alas, I fear he underestimates the ability of Americans to hide from reality. https://t.co/tpODq5u1yc

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) January 25, 2018

You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.

Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.

Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).

As striking as these numbers are, they miss a very important fact. There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.

An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.

The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.

Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as many.

This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.

It is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.

Of course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries. With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt...

Keep reading.

The other day, over at my local Ralph's supermarket on Culver and Walnut in Irvine, I saw a young woman with a baby panhandling for money in the parking lot. The baby was in a chest sling, sleeping; the woman was holding a sign, asking for money, which I couldn't read very well. I didn't even flinch. I walked over to her and asked if she and the baby had enough to eat. She said yes and held out her hand, showing some of the dollar bills folks had given her. I gave her a couple of bucks and urged her to get inside and get some food.

I remember when living in Santa Barbara, the staff at the local homeless mission told us not to give cash handouts to the city's downtown homeless people. The mission gave us food tickets that the homeless could use if they went down the organization's main shelter, which was on the south side of Highway 101. I guess a lot of panhandlers weren't buying food with the cash, but rather alcohol, drugs, or who knows what? But the beggars are persistent and ubiquitous, especially on State Street downtown. You want to help when you can, until you become so tired of the solicitations you give the beggars a wide berth (and I did that sometimes).

In any case, now I've been thinking about the homeless camp in Anaheim, and debating whether I should go over there myself to do a photo-blog. I'm not as motivated on this stuff as I used to be, although I'm just curious to check out the encampments. Many of the people there told the police they weren't moving, and it's a miles-long encampment, so I doubt we've heard the last of the news from that location.

And of course the homeless issue is just one facet of poverty in America; it's the most visible one, and gets a lot of media attention, especially given the current scale of the problem and the community backlash. As longtime readers will recall, I used to live in Fresno, and anyone who drives up Highway 99, and stops by and drives through some of the small migrant farming towns, which routinely have poverty and unemployment rates in the 30 and 40 percent range, knows what I'm talking about. It's hard out there. In California public policy is so bad it's a national disgrace. Remember, the so-called bullet train is scheduled for billions of dollars in cost overruns and may never be completed. How much money is being wasted on these high-theory policy programs, which mostly are focused on combating "climate change" as opposed to making any person's life better, to say nothing of relieving poverty? It makes me mad.

Note something else about Professor Deaton's essay: It reaffirms President Trump's nationalist focus of making our own country great again. We should be working in fact to help our own people more than we're helping other populations in other countries around the globe. Thinking about his findings, and his exhortations for citizens to give more, Deaton writes:

None of this means that we should close out “others” and look after only our own. International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing and our planet habitable.

But it is time to stop thinking that only non-Americans are truly poor. Trade, migration and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.

What to do?

Well, don't rely on the Democrats to make any serious efforts to combat poverty and improve economic performance at home. That's not the agenda of the "intersectional" left right now. This radical intersectionality finds its home among the coastal urban elites in big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. The poster child for the urban elitist mindset is California State Senator Scott Wiener, notorious for authoring legislation decriminalizing HIV-infected blood transfusions. He's also one of state's leaders behind the urban density movement, cosponsoring a recent bill seeking to change California's zoning laws to allow high-density and high-rise housing near urban public transportation centers. The rationale? To reduce "climate change," what else? If you build more units near transportation centers, less people will rely on private vehicles, with less pollution, so the theory goes. But the types of folks targeted by these policies are high-income tech- and cultural-sector workers who help drive up property values, already high property values, and keep low-income workers out and the poor down. Leftist policies are driving the unaffordable housing trends in the state. (See Berkeleyside for more, "Berkeley mayor on Wiener-Skinner housing bill: ‘A declaration of war against our neighborhoods’.")

You're going to have poverty. You're going to have it in a market economy. Those times when we've seen dramatic reductions in the poverty rate have been during periods of robust economic growth. We're currently seeing something of this right now, with the black unemployment rate falling to its historic low in December. (This happened during the late-1990s too, when the first dot com boom pushed national unemployment down to under 4 percent.) A rising tide lifts all boats, I heard somebody say.

Lots more could be added here, but I'll have to save more commentary for later.

RELATED: "A 'Mixed Bag'? Fifty Years Later and That's All to Be Said for 'War on Poverty'?"

Minority Unemployment at the Lowest Levels on Record

If voters truly vote their pocketbook, then President Trump should be a shoo-in for reelection in 2020. Alas, I doubt the economic models of elections have much predictive power in this age of political tribalism.

This is good news either way.

At IBD, "Don't Look Now, But Minority Unemployment is at Record Lows Under Trump."

Paintsville, Kentucky: When Government Tried to Fix a Coal Town (VIDEO)

Here's the lovely Kelsey Harkness, at the Daily Signal, "Underreported: What Happened When Government Tried to Fix a Coal Town."

Challenges for American Workers

At USA Today, "Why does American work feel so bad?"

$15 Minimum Wage Cruelty (VIDEO)

This is great.

Via ReasonTV:

We're Headed for an Economic Civil War

From Joel Kotkin, at the Daily Beast, "Are We Heading for An Economic Civil War?":

Forget that red state-blue state stuff. The real chasm dividing the US is economic, with one economy for industry and one for tech, and the friction between them is getting fierce.
When we speak about the ever-expanding chasm that defines modern American politics, we usually focus on cultural issues such as gay marriage, race, or religion. But as often has been the case throughout our history, the biggest source of division may be largely economic.

Today we see a growing conflict between the economy that produces consumable, tangible goods and another economy, now ascendant, that deals largely in the intangible world of media, software, and entertainment. Like the old divide between the agrarian South and the industrial North before the Civil War, this threatens to become what President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, defined as an “irrepressible conflict.”

Other major economic divides—between capital and labor, Wall Street versus Main Street—defined politics for much of the 20th century. But today’s tangible-intangible divide is particularly tragic because it undermines America’s peculiar advantage in being a powerhouse in both the material and non-material worlds. No other large country can say that, certainly not China, Japan, or Germany, industrial powerhouses short on resources, while our closest cousins, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, remain, for the most part, dependent on commodity trade.

The China syndrome and the shape of the next slowdown

Over the past decade, the United States has enjoyed two parallel booms that combined to propel the economy out of recession. One was centered in places like Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, and across much of the Great Plains. These areas were all located in the first states to emerge from the recession, and benefited massively from a gusher in energy jobs due largely to fracking.

At the same time, another part of the economy, centered in Silicon Valley as well as Seattle, Austin, and Raleigh/Durham, has also been booming. Though far more restricted than their counterparts in the “tangible” economy in terms of both geography and jobs, the tech/digital economy did not lag when it came to minting fortunes. By 2014, the media-tech sector accounted for six of the nation’s wealthiest people. Perhaps more important, 12 of the nation’s 17 billionaires under 40 also hail from the tech sector.

Until China’s economy hit a wall this fall, these two sectors were humming along, maybe not enough to restore the economy to its ’90s trim robustly enough to improve conditions in many parts of the country. But as China begins to cut back on commodity purchases, many key raw material prices—copper and iron to oil and gas as well as food stuffs—have fallen precipitously, devastating many developing economies in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Plunging prices are also beginning to hurt many local economies in the U.S., particularly in the “oil patch” that spreads from west Texas to North Dakota. This is one reason why overall economic growth has fallen, and is unlikely to revive strongly in the months ahead. Overall, according to the most recent numbers, job growth remains slow and long-term unemployment stubbornly high while labor participation is stuck at historically low levels. Much of this loss is felt by the kind of middle and working class people who tend to work in tangible industries...

Keep reading.