Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
While we are all quarantined, it may be time to start thinking about long term economic impacts as well. Look at this amazing chart:
This is a very atypical recession. There is no moral hazard involved as these people are losing their job to a pure external shock. But the risk that this will blossom into something worse is worth considering, especially if the epidemic lasts for a while. Schools and universities (and daycares!) are currently closed for months. This will impact hiring and employment. It is hard to job search while you are social distancing and economic activity is down. These numbers are unimaginable when compared to normal times:
Government of Canada has received 500,000 applications for Employment Insurance this week, PM Justin Trudeau says. That compares to 27,000 for the same week last year.
The time to be considering these consequences, and how to mitigate them, is now. We are so far outside the range of previous data that we should be thinking carefully about heroic measures and not hoping that normal measures will work.
Early Friday morning, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) denied any wrongdoing when she sold millions of dollars worth of stocks soon after a closed-door briefing with the entire Senate on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wreaked havoc on the stock market.
That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies valued at between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.
It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.
Now it possible that she just got lucky. Or that the "multiple third-party advisors" were independently seeing evidence of the turmoil in China. But the optics are terrible. At the very least I would like to know a lot more about the very prescient advisors, who were able to mimic the insider information that she had.
The idea that the rich can get out of the markets while my retirement funds (worth far less to begin with) strikes at the very heart of free and open markets. This is a big deal
Edit: Also this is kind of damning:
So a big and very prescient stock sale after a period of no trading that starts the day of the briefing. I really want the advisors to come forward and explain, because otherwise this is clearly insider trading.
The Palo Alto-based company has been operating the factory — which normally employs about 10,000 people, making model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles — this week despite a multi-county Bay Area lockdown order issued Monday to reduce the spread of coronavirus. Tesla told Alameda County Wednesday that 2,500 workers are now at the plant.
“We had a good conversation with Tesla today,” said Alameda County spokesman Ray Kelly. “They understand our position. The county explained they cannot continue their business as usual. They have to go on a minimum operations basis.”
The lockdown order allows companies to continue minimum basic operations, defined as payroll, security, and preservation of inventory value. That list does not include car making, Kelly acknowledged, and said “it sounds like they’re still making cars.”
Tesla did not return calls for comment.
Asked what, if anything, the county would do if production continues, Kelly said, “Tesla is not going to decide what the law is.” Enforcement, he said, will be handled by Fremont Police.
...
In an email sent to factory workers at 8:49 a.m. Wednesday, Tesla human resources head Valerie Capers Workman said, “There are no changes in your normal assignment and you should continue to report for work if you are in an essential function” which she said include “production, service, deliveries, testing and supporting groups.” Sick workers could stay home and use their accumulated paid time off, she said.
She cited “conflicting guidance from different levels of government” on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
Workman didn’t detail conflicting government guidance, but in an email to employees early Tuesday morning she said “the federal government has directed that all National Critical Infrastructure continue to operate during this global pandemic,” which she said covers “business sectors crucial to the economic prosperity and continuity of the United States.” That includes auto manufacturing, she said, but didn’t include a source.
“People need access to transportation and energy, and we are essential to providing it,” she wrote.
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk had minimized what he called “panic” reaction to the virus on Twitter and in an email Monday night. In his email, Musk said, “My frank opinion is that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” and he said that COVID-19 cases “will not exceed 0.1% of the population.”
...
Thousands of workers streamed into the factory Tuesday, many arriving by bus.
More than a dozen employees sent messages to The Times complaining about Tesla’s failure to comply with the lockdown order. Several said they feared catching the virus and spreading it to family but also feared losing their jobs if they stayed home.
On late Wednesday afternoon, one worker who did not want to be identified for fear of losing her job said via a Twitter direct message that “all production still running” on the assembly line.
I don't have numbers but I'm reasonably certain this is the largest number of Americans working from home since the advent of the internet and the smart phone.
There's no good technological reason why most knowledge workers need to live within a hundred or even a thousand miles of where they work. The obstacles are cultural but they are still formidable. Despite a tight job market and a growing housing crisis centered around a handful of overcrowded and overpriced cities, employers have been slow to consider alternative models.
Now new models are being forced upon everybody. New things will be tried. Adaptations will be made. Bugs will be worked out. Attitudes will shift.
Fifty years from now, this might be what Covid-19 is remembered for.
Smart people, like statisticians' models, are often most interesting when they are wrong. There is no better example of this than Arthur C Clarke's 1964 predictions about the demise of the urban age, where he suggested that what we would now call telecommuting would end the need for people to congregate around centers of employment and would therefore mean the end of cities.
What about the city of the day after tomorrow? Say, the year 2000. I think it will be completely different. In fact, it may not even exist at all. Oh, I'm not thinking about the atom bomb and the next Stone Age; I'm thinking about the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and above all the communications satellite. These things will make possible a world where we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that someday we may have rain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as the meeting place for man will have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute; they will communicate. They won't have to travel for business anymore; they'll only travel for pleasure. I only hope that, when that day comes and the city is abolished, the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb.
Clarke was working with a 20 to 50 year timeframe, so it's fair to say that he got this one wrong. The question is why. Both as a fiction writer and a serious futurist, the man was remarkably and famously prescient about telecommunications and its impact on society. Even here, he got many of the details right while still being dead wrong on the conclusion.
What went wrong? Part of this unquestionably has to do with the nature of modern work. Clarke probably envisioned a more automated workplace in the 21st century, one where stocking shelves and cleaning floors and, yes, driving vehicles would be done entirely by machines. He likely also underestimated the intrinsic appeal of cities.
But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.
This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.
Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.
For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.
When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)
Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right.
Consider that the
only thing Trump knows how to do is bully, lie, bribe, and engage in
underhanded, immoral conduct. This tells me he knows
there's a problem, and he knows mean tweeting, lying, and
bribing won't help. https://t.co/Pwjv9zMR8B
what's
not clear to me about this is we don't think the German national
government wouldn't happily nationalize the company before
letting this happen? https://t.co/t4HuPwQq3O
Germany ends any
possibility of US stake in Pharma firm CureVac over fear that “America
first” would apply to corona vaccine. The depth of distrust revealed by
this episode is shocking even in these days. https://t.co/0sH8qk5oDC
The ignorance of
@dhookstead
here is stunning. Sacrifices for the common good defined the era. The
idea that families that sent sons off to war, their wives off to
munition plants, and lived under rationing would complain about a
cancelled game is an insult to the generation.
three days before
Fox acted, President Trump sent Regan’s commentary and a defense of its
content to his 73-million Twitter followers https://t.co/OVTPYlDMFA
I expect Devin
Nunes to be stupid enough to contradict the advice of health
professionals. Shouldn't someone at Fox know
better? Are literally trying to kill their own viewers? https://t.co/UmiOFaYpj1
When your own
people are passing along bad information in a public health disaster,
putting at grave risk your core viewership, you don't just take
one show host — the least powerful — off the air. It's a
professional crisis for every person working there. https://t.co/vK2iw4PSLM
The best face I
can put in this is that it is risky to the point of recklessness. But if
you are going this way, I recommend mass testing (to allow people to
isolate while they are sick) and a lot of field hospitals with breathing
support. Because you will need
them
Difficult to
overstate the extent to which the press has fanned these flames.
Overblown coverage of isolated cases created a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Nonexistent shortages of toilet paper got more attention than real and
desperate shortages of tests. https://t.co/hSUbAPY8k0
Put another way,
would anyone argue that South Korea's aggressive approach
DIDN'T pay for itself economically if it averted Italy-level
consequences? https://t.co/ampzHxkU1Q
Wash Post, May
2018: Story quotes experts saying disbanding of White House global
health security office will make country more vulnerable to a pandemic.
https://t.co/eGey0L5tF1
We've been arguing for about a decade now that the Straussian strategy and tactics has the dominant factor in American politics since the late 90s, both in the undermining of reliable and trusted information sources and the spread of disinformation.
This essential piece from our best press critic points out how costly this disinformation has become.
When Trump says “jump,” the network leaps into action. And what the president hears on Fox News often dictates his own pronouncements and policies — which, in turn, are glowingly represented in Fox News’s coverage and commentary.
That’s never been anything short of dangerous, since the effect has been to create a de facto state-run media monster more devoted to maintaining power than shedding light on the truth. But now the mind-meld of Fox News and Trump is potentially lethal as Trump plays down the seriousness of the coronavirus and, hearing nothing but applause from his favorite information source for doing so, sees little reason to change.
There’s one person who could transform all that in an instant: Fox founder Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born media mogul who, at 89, still exerts his influence on the leading cable network — and thus on the president himself.
...
The network’s influence on Trump is clear from the presidential tweets that follow fast on the heels of a Fox News broadcast. He was always a fan of Fox News, but after entering the White House, he made it even more of an obsessive daily habit, Bloomberg News reported in 2017, to the extent of blotting out dissenting voices from other sources.
Trump made specific reference to his reliance on Fox News during his misleading press event Friday, when he offered unwarranted reassurance rather than urging extreme caution and decisive action: “As of the time I left the plane . . . we had 240 cases — that’s at least what was on a very fine network known as Fox News.”
The message: Go about your business, America, and it will all disappear soon.
Days later, 30 deaths and more than 1,000 cases have been reported in the United States, with those numbers expected to grow exponentially. (By contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is telling hard truths: As much as 70 percent of that country could end up being infected.)
Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow and the foremost chronicler of the insidious Trump-Fox News feedback loop, connected the dots: “Roughly an hour before his comments, a Fox News medical correspondent argued on-air that coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu; a few hours later, the same correspondent argued that coronavirus fears were being deliberately overblown in hopes of damaging Trump politically.”
He added: “The network's personalities have frequently claimed that the Trump administration has been doing a great job responding to coronavirus, that the fears of the disease are overblown, and that the real problem is Democrats and the media politicizing the epidemic to prevent Trump's reelection.”
On Fox Business Channel, host Trish Regan drew widespread condemnation for her over-the-top rant in Trump's defense: “The chorus of hate being leveled at the president is nearing a crescendo as Democrats blame him and only him for a virus that originated halfway around the world. This is yet another attempt to impeach the president.”
(By contrast, her Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson has taken the threat seriously, though using it as an excuse to stoke anti-China sentiment along the way.)
...
Even if all that changed today, great harm has already been done. As The Washington Post and others have documented, the administration has repeatedly squandered chances to prepare for and manage the global epidemic.
But every moment still counts. Lives can be saved by prudent practices and aggressive government action — and lost by their absence.
But it takes leadership from the top. And so, let’s acknowledge the obvious: There is no more important player in influencing Trump than Fox News. And no more powerful figure at Fox than its patriarch.
Murdoch might consider, too, that with the median age of Fox’s viewers around 65, they are among the most vulnerable to the virus’s threats.
The 2008
financial crisis was brought on by the collapse of an immense housing
bubble. But many on the right denied that there was anything amiss.
Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economist, ridiculed “bubbleheads” who suggested that housing prices were out of line.
And I can tell you from personal experience that when I began writing
about the housing bubble I was relentlessly accused of playing
politics: “You only say there’s a bubble because you hate President
Bush.”
When the economy began to slide, mainstream Republicans
remained deeply in denial. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s senior economic
adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, declared that America was
only suffering a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”
Even
the failure of Lehman Brothers, which sent the economy into a full
meltdown, initially didn’t put a dent in conservative denial. Kudlow
hailed the failure as good news, because it signaled an end to bailouts,
and predicted housing and financial recovery in “months, not years.”
Wait,
there’s more. After the economic crisis helped Barack Obama win the
2008 election, right-wing pundits declared that it was all a left-wing
conspiracy. Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly accused the news media of hyping bad news to enable Obama’s socialist agenda, while Rush Limbaugh asserted that Senator Chuck Schumer personally caused the crisis (don’t ask).
Not Biden or Sanders. Arguably not Warren. But possibly everyone else in the Democratic field who got the commentators hot and bothered could be explained by the dynamics described below, It is the nature of the game to have small feedback driven surges that quickly fade.That's one of the reasons campaign data is so noisy. Another reason is the political journalists who insist on amplifying that noise.
I've been meaning to write this up for quite a while, but it keeps
getting put off and I'm afraid if I don't get something quick off,
events may overtake us again. I'll try to come back to this if we get a
chance.
Those who followed our comments
on the 2016 may remember how various pundits (especially Nate Cohn)
truly, deeply, desperately wanted to convince us and, more to the point
themselves, that Donald Trump was just another Herman Cain and his polls
numbers would fall just as quickly.
The analogy never made any sense with Trump, but the idea of an HC3,
someone who emerges from the middle of the pack for little apparent
reason, seems to be on the verge of challenging the leading candidates
only to have that surge evaporate, can be useful.
My take on HC3s is that it's basically a mix of symmetry breaking and a
Keynesian beauty contest. Voters are dissatisfied or, at least, with the
front runners. As the decision point approaches, second and third tier
choices are reexamined.with the considerably lower standard of being an
acceptable alternative. Eventually this process converges on a
candidate, at which point the scrutiny increases and the bloom is off
the rose.
I'm not saying that Pete Buttigieg is a Herman Cain (I'm not even saying
Herman Cain was a Herman Cain), but so far, I don't know that I've
heard any supporter describe Buttigieg in positive rather than
non-negative terms, and that is generally not a good sign.
This is what epidemiologists I know are sharing. The good news I get from this is that the problem can be solved. The bad news is that the way to solve it is by doing the exact opposite of everything we've been doing.
With Italy
quarantining millions and contemplating critical care rationing in
hospitals, and Iran's health system in chaos, it's fair
to ask if this is possible in the US. Bottom line is:
the longer we wait to act, the more likely it becomes.
I've made some charts.
—
Jeremy COVID-19 IS NOT LIKE FLU Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March
8, 2020
—
Jeremy COVID-19 IS NOT LIKE FLU Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) March
9, 2020
That graph deserves revisiting.
There are so many
of these great animations about “reducing the peak” on Twitter.
This is what we at @WHO
mean by flattening the curve, slowing this down, allowing time to
prepare. #COVID19https://t.co/rQTymCFpKV
The Italian example is even more worrisome than the initial accounts suggest.
This is the
"Italy's in trouble because they are have a national
health system" nonsense To be clear:
MDs per 1,000: Italy 4.0, USA
2.6 Hosp beds per 1,000: Italy 3.2, USA
2.8 The problem is surge of COVID19 has overwhelmed
northern Italian hospitals This can happen here https://t.co/kp3IqxIbJu
35% of the people
in ICU are less than 65 years old in Lombardy.
That's a number that gives an answer to
those that said that the disease affected primarily (in severe cases)
older populations. That's not the case and
Lombardy's healthcare system is on the brink of collapse. pic.twitter.com/pwrGO3gXL4
Some particularly idiotic comments by Elon Musk prompted this reminder that not all billionaires are created equal.
In 2015, Bill
Gates told me a deadly flu-like pandemic spreading under globalized
conditions was the most predictable disaster in the history of the human
race, and so there was no excuse to not be prepared for
it. I'm thinking about that a lot lately.
https://t.co/2XlyCtTdwW
Arkansas can only
test five patients for Coronavirus per day. Maine
can't test any yet. Washington State has a
backlog of tests it hasn't gotten
through. New from me, @katie_thomas
and @NickAtNews
on the Coronavirus testing scramble.https://t.co/aQcmTe5He6
" the exact opposite of everything we've been doing."
On current trends
it will take South Korea only 3 weeks to get initial spread of COVID19
under control. But that requires exceptionally broad testing and strong
mitigation. https://t.co/UUCQvBAUgd
This is also a good time to observe that the economic costs of the South Korean approach will almost certainly be less than the cost of continuing to pursue our current course. As with climate change, paying now is cheaper than paying later.
And finally, this thread from an Italian ICU MD makes one of the most important points you'll read all week.
2/ This is the
English translation of a post of another ICU physician in Bergamo, Dr.
Daniele Macchini. Read until the end "After much thought about
whether and what to write about what is happening to us, I felt that
silence was not responsible.
20/ I finish by saying that I really don't
understand this war on panic. The only reason I see is mask shortages,
but there's no mask on sale anymore. We don't have a lot
of studies, but is it panic really worse than neglect and carelessness
during an epidemic of this sort?
Much more on this soon, but I wanted to point out another of those weird narrative convergences between the mainstream press and conservative media. In this case both are heavily pushing the idea that most people's concerns about the pandemic are overblown and irrational.
At this stage, no one can specify the magnitude of the threat from the coronavirus. But one thing is clear: A lot of people are more scared than they have any reason to be. They have an exaggerated sense of their own personal risk. ...
Turn to the coronavirus in this light. The situation is very fluid, but as of now, most people in North America and Europe do not need to worry much about the risk of contracting the disease. That’s true even for people who are traveling to nations such as Italy that have seen outbreaks of the disease.
For most people, the disease is probably not particularly deadly;
health officials tend to put it somewhere within range of an
unusually severe seasonal flu. Even in a global pandemic, it’s
expected to kill fewer people than the flu virus. Data so far
suggests that if you catch the coronavirus, you may be likelier to
have no symptoms at all than to require hospitalization.
And from the right (in more dramatic fashion).
Reviewing the
coronavirus supplemental appropriation and preparing to go vote. pic.twitter.com/wjJ4YY4VZz
(Worth noting that there are a lot of seniors in Gaetz's district.)
The reasons for the convergence vary based on side. The mainstream press loves to think of itself as the voice of reason which may be part of the reason it's so fond of the irrationality-of-the-common-man narrative. Fox et al. are trying to hold to administration line and avoid spooking the economy and the electorate.
It's worth noting that the narrative I've been from researchers is a bit more concerned.
I mean really, this "double dipping" language is quoted out of an actual NYT article. No, it really wasn't the Onion by mistake.
This is so silly. There is no such thing as "double dipping" -- if the players are eligible for Social Security Disability then it is because they have a separate insurance program and one that is hard to get on. This reduces costs for the most vulnerable players who are also the ones who got injured in the process of a dangerous occupation. Now I know there are probably bigger social injustices but what stops the NYT from framing this differently?
Given the brutal nature of the sport, hundreds of former players apply for disability benefits every year. Currently, some inactive players collect up to $135,000 year, or $11,250 a month, in disability benefits. If they also receive, say, $2,000 a month from Social Security, they collect $13,250 a month in disability payments. The N.F.L. wants to end that “double dipping” and reduce the players’ N.F.L. benefits by offsetting the amount they receive from Social Security.
Why not just say that owners want to reduce payments to disabled former employees to redeploy that revenue elsewhere?
I have long stated that Jack Welch was one of the luckier, more
wildly over-compensated CEOs around. He became CEO of General Electric
in 1981, just before an 18 year bull market in big cap stocks began. he
left in 2001, just as the market implosion was getting rolling.
GE’s revenues grew 385% under his watch, but the company’s market cap
grew 4000%. How did that happen? GE increased earnings over the years,
and with stunning regularity, managed a quarterly profit beat.
So if anyone knows a thing or two about cooking the books, its GE’s
Jack Welch. Want even more proof? Have a look at this chart of Welch’s
earnings versus his successor, Jeff Immelt:
The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the
lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's
because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because
inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days
you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be
sorry."
The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the
lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that
traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart
enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that
superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the
masses.
Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a
question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and
the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph
generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending
Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.
This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect
Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical
consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on
their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a
threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make
their own decisions.
To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead
to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and
doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective
information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider
the following from Jared Bernstein:
[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service
is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high
end tax cuts and economic growth.
The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one
I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics
literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch
McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like
the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they
hold so dear.
And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:
NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment,
along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation
and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be
14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the
Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning
about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather
forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until
another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many
people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday
for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps
most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would
have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long
for an accurate forecast.'"
Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is
accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report
to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this
slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes
the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments
of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the
establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and
the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household
survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to
note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers
in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not
that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences
between these two surveys.
BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in
the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are
manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends
reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other
economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000
increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was
right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive
growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force
and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted
to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the
report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing
unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are
more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see
unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing
implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown
greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey
throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share
of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent,
which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7
percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly
strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur
accusations of outright fraud.
We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.
Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:
The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the
Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and
$91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year.
Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for
this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic
statistics.
And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:
On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican
presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget
Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a
reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic
growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that
it has not internally generated."
Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the
description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the
aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical
institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.
It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich
hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing
Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.
...
Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has
consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he
enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998.
In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the
C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had
improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5,
Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you
must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...
Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main
obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's
professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere
in their areas of expertise.
To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to
dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the
knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they
saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to
slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed
thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.
Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those
employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But
the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995
weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply
abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving
members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they
are responsible for overseeing.
Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How
could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing
to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first
Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he
asked for.
In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two
really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology
Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on
legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an
important voice in Congressional deliberations.
The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's
budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the
speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who
followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to
challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his
agenda was simply rubber-stamped.
Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders
continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their
way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the
Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the
Government Accountability Office.
Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting
its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in
investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So
misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma
and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the
agency's defense.
In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out
that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since
1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people.
By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation
and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last
decade.
Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings
recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add
$3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency
that will go unidentified.
For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how
Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to
exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both
the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have
fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th
Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.
In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a
pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is
willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way.
Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish
actions as speaker.
We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when
Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues
in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many
others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local
governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an
organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations
would be invaluable.
