WEEKLY BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-11-22 Fr
My weekly read-around...
My weekly read-around...
ONE IMAGE: How Rapidly Will This Reverse?:
A SECOND IMAGE: Is This Driven by Our Failure to Find People with Steroid-Soaked Muscles as Their Principal Skill Something Rewarding to Do?
Or is there something else going on?
ONE VIDEO: ERROR CORRECTION!:
A SECOND VIDEO: RICHARD BALDWIN ON THE BIG SHIFT IN GLOBALIZATION:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Even interrupted by the plague, the (mostly) full-employment economy of 2017 to the present have been the best years for wage growth since the Clinton years, which were in turn the best years for wage growth since the Kennedy-Johnson years:
Arin Dube: Real Wage Growth: The Post-Pandemic Labor Market and Beyond: ‘Between 2000 and 2017, real wages for non-managerial workers grew slowly…. From 2017 onward… the labor market tightened [&] wage growth…became much stronger…. Overall real wages are today at trend, while non-managerial wages are above trend… despite the disruptions,, [of] the pandemic and the… inflation…. That real wage… continued to rise… in the face of inflation… [shows] the power of full employment…. Unprecedented challenges, yet… also… workers—particularly non-managerial workers—have seen real wage growth that outpaces historical trends…. Maintaining this momentum in a post-pandemic economy will be essential for sustaining these gains… <https://arindube.substack.com/p/real-wage-growth-the-post-pandemic>Public Reason: Misinformation at scale sounding the death knell of even semi technocratic and utilitarian politics? Of Young’s two Americas, one is reality and one is fantasy:
Clifford Young & al.: The link between media consumption and public opinion: ‘We live in two Americas. Partisanship has created a deep divide among Americans on politics and beyond. However, beneath partisanship, media source is also significantly correlated with Americans’ views. Americans’ primary news source plays into what they believe to be true, their own daily personal economic situation, and ultimately, how they view former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris… <https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/link-between-media-consumption-and-public-opinion>Neofascism: Yes, Edith Jones is pretty crazy. But a good part of the Federalist Society attendees appear equally crazy:
Steve Vladeck: Things Fall Apart: ‘My disheartening exchange with Judge Jones at last Thursday's Federalist Society convention—and its ominous implications for the future of legal debate: ‘Judge Edith Jones… “judge shopping”… her sustained personal attack against me for my criticisms of that behavior, including her allegation that I am directly responsible for death threats she claims Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Amarillo-based federal district judge who has been a frequent favorite of judge-shoppers, has received…. (1) The inability of people who should know better to distinguish between principled criticisms of judicial behavior and personal attacks on judges is a serious problem for our discourse; and (2) given the period of unified Republican control of the federal government into which we’re heading, without real effort on the part of judges to publicly acknowledge both the existence of this distinction and the importance of principled debate over judicial behavior, we’re going to exacerbate—perhaps past the breaking point—the (already) intensely partisan divide over how much power unelected federal judges should have…. What happened Thursday was both a sad reflection of where we are and an ominous warning of where we may be going…. There is a public video of the entire panel… <https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/109-things-fall-apart>
Neofascism: There are actually three different types of politicians who try to spark and lead movements that are put under the label “populists”. The first are true populists: those whose driving goal was what Classical Hellenic civilization called seisakhtheia—lift the very real economic burdens off of the people (in that context, cancel the debts and redistribute the land). The second are pragmatists—people who want power, and who want to stay in power, and find pushing to take from the rich and the oligarchs and give to the working and the poor helps them to assemble and maintain a coalition. The third are fascists: those who see themselves as not there to serve the people but rather see the people there to serve them, for what the people really want is not some utilitarian prosperity but rather to participate vicariously in the leader’s and in society’s glorious purpose, which is usually one of identification, suppression, and perhaps extermination of those the leader labels as enemies. But Trump does not fit any of these models well: He is definitely not the first, certainly not the second, and as for the third—well, he hates a lot of people, and he knows that he ought to be leading his people forward and imbuing them with glorious purpose, but he has no idea what that might be or how to do it:
David French: There Were Two Huge Problems Harris Could Not Escape: ‘The Harris campaign had answers for all these criticisms…. They also rightly argued that Trump nostalgia was misplaced…. [But] Americans want to end wars but not lose them, inflation bit… hard… and there was never a good explanation for permitting so very many migrants to enter the country…. Two different numbers—17 million and 73 million. The first number represents Trump’s primary voters. That’s MAGA…. We can count on Trump to be performative, but we cannot count on him to perform…. Soon enough the MAGA true believers will realize that their ideological dreams will quickly die if they can’t deliver the peace and prosperity they promised… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/opinion/harris-trump-campaign-curling.html>Sociology: For the shoebox:
James Horton: Boundary years for generations on Wikipedia…. Lost… 1883-1900. Greatest… 1901-1927. Silent… 1928-1945… Boomers: 1946-1964…. X: 1965-1980. Millenials: 1981-1996…. Z: 1997-2012…. Alpha: 2013 onward… <https://substack.com/@sj1984/note/c-74776028>Globalized Value-Chain Society: Strangely, this was actually one of the key technologies of the mode of production we are now starting to leave:
Julian: A Guide To Long-Haul Business Class Seats: ‘Most airlines use standard seat models… made by… Rockwell Collins, Recaro, or Safran. Airlines usually then customize minor details… [or] highly modify them, such as Cathay’s and American’s highly modified versions of the Zodiac Cirus… <https://airtravelanalysis.com/long-haul-business-class-compilation/>Attention Info-Bio Tech Society: From my perspective, one of the big things wrong with the Apple VisionPro was that its non-immersive non-3D objects app model was the iPad rather than the Macintosh. The ultrawide monitor mode goes a very long way to repairing that. But it would be much better if my Macintosh windows were not confined to a single virtual screen, even a very wide one. But even confined to that very wide screen, I now feel for the first time that I am on the verge of the VR-AR experiences of Neuromancer <https://archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_206.dv> or Aristoi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)> that I have long been waiting for:
Mark Gurman: The Vision Pro’s first killer app has arrived: The Vision Pro… one of its best features is the ability to serve as a Mac external monitor… new wide and ultrawide monitor options… on beta… are a game changer. In my view… the first true killer app for the Vision Pro. They provide a high-resolution Mac external monitor with what feels like an infinite amount of screen real estate…. Apple should be marketing the new ultrawide display modes in a major way. It’s that good… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-10/apple-s-expansion-plan-glasses-home-devices-mixed-reality-headsets-airpods-m3bncxeo?cmpid=BBD111024_POWERON>
“Polycrisis”: The characteristics of our current post-Neoliberal Order interregnum. But is this a useful concept or just a handwaving dropping of the analytical baton?:
Kate Whiting, HyoJin Park, & Adam Tooze: (2023): This is why 'polycrisis' is a useful way of looking at the world right now: ‘“Disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part”…. Economics, politics, geopolitics, and then the natural environment blowing back at us. And those four things, they don't reduce to a single common denominator. They don't reduce to a single factor. The polycrisis term has a real utility descriptively, because it's arm-waving. It's going, ‘Look, there's a lot of stuff happening here all at once’. And that precisely is what we're trying to wrap our minds around… <https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explain>
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> Is This Driven by Our Failure to Find People with Steroid-Soaked Muscles as Their Principal Skill Something Rewarding to Do?
If/as those rates stabilize more or less close to each other, a possible [optimistic] reading is that labor demand (maybe not necessarily cost) doesn't put as much weight on gender as before.
If/as male rates continue climbing in relative terms above female rates, then an hypothesis could be that economic paterns have shifted labor demand to relatively/previously low-status female-coded jobs or skill sets, and there's a sort of "status stickiness" that has made it harder for males to adjust.
None of that though explains higher education rates for females, though.
A 4D data set of gender x activity x unemployment rate x time would be an interesting way to see what happened first and drove what.
Video game consoles followed by online gaming?