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Technological change means that jobs are vanishing all the time, and you ha ve to retrain to do something else if you want to work.

There's also the point that US capitalism has been out-sourcing jobs to Chi na and even lower-wage countries for quite some time now. Real wages in Chi na are now rising, but there are less developed countries around to take up the slack for another generation or two. Technological change has made it a lot easier to out-source mass production than it used to be.

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The US economy isn't all that generous to those that it can't exploit. If U S looked more like Denmark, where they make a real effort to retrain the un employed, there would be fewer people "riding the cart" (or, more accuratel y, tossed into the garbage dumpster).

Busts have two pointed O's, that is correct.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website:

Dead-wrong, utterly false; a polar opposite mischaracterization.

and that the the least efficient 25% of the economy needed to go to the wall (not that efficiency actually has much to do with which companies have to go into Chapter 11).

Except that you've no idea who did what or how much, no notion of scale. Yours is a qualitative world full of narratives and fables. Told to connect two dots on a page, you draw an elephant.

I find that interesting. And yet you're so confident about things you've no knowledge of. I find that interesting too--you've got no sense of what you don't know.

In engineering that flaw can be fatal. We have to a sense of when we have enough information, and also when we don't.

I just re-iterated that I don't approve of Hoover's response, only to be rewarded with this vacuous example of your inability to read.

There's not much point in discussing things with someone intentionally unable to understand basic sentences. And what is discussed, you soon forget anyhow.

Que sera.

Cheers, James Arthur

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s (from 1929 to 1933) and had shrunk to to 75% of it's 1929 capacity before Roosevelt turned it around.

ough > > > > to stop the wheels from falling off.

Elsewhere you've told us that Hoover raised taxes and invested "massively" in stimulating the economy - though obviously not massively enough to keep him in office.

Do make up your mind.

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I don't need one. It all happened a decade before I was born, when the worl d economy was rather smaller. There's no doubt that Hoover didn't spend eno ugh on stimulating the economy, and Roosevelt spent more, and that's all th e scale information I need. I know where to get more, if I need it, but I h aven't had to bother so far.

John von Neumann is reputed to have claim that with four parameters he coul d draw an elephant and with five he could make it wave it's trunk. When I f irst heard the claim it was attributed to a rather earlier mathematician.

What you appear to have had in mind is the political significance of the el ephant as the totem animal of the US Republicans. You'd like me to churn ou t the same kind of mindless pro-Republican propaganda that you do, so you'v e effectively satirised you own output rather than mine.

You do make attempts to produce propaganda that looks quantitative, but it never takes much qualitative examination to find the fraud.

I've not been brainwashed at a right-wing re-education camp, so there are a lot of things that you think I ought to know which I know ain't so.

I remember you being rude about Obama's economic management because median incomes were going down while average incomes were going up. Serious econom ists had dug into this (Piketty for one) and they'd noticed that it had bee n going on pretty much since Reagan came to power - so it wasn't Obama's fa ult, which I did happen to know, and you didn't.

ng - and Roosevelt was Democrat and - by the same logic - incapable of doin g anything right.

Perhaps I was remembering what you were claiming shortly after the GFC had hit ...

Then again, I can remember what you've said earlier, which you do seem to f ind difficult, if not downright inconvenient.

Does _ANYONE_ know WTF "lip synch" means? Are they trying to communicate to Mars?

Is this crap typical of "news" blabber? (have not watched TV for 15 years)

There was nothing wrong with the data, it's just data. Empirical fact.

It's not my job to spoon-feed you information in whatever format you demand until you understand it. Feel free to seek it out.

The usual result to a recession is a glitch in the long-term rising employment trend, that quickly recovers as people find new jobs, then resumes at its previous slope and offset.

(view in fixed font, e.g. Courier)

| . | .' | . / | .' \/ |.'

This time we glitched down but never recovered to the previous trend. | * | * . | . .' | .' \. ' |.'

That's the graph I linked.

We're down roughly 12 million jobs (conservatively) from the previous long-term trend (marked '*').

I gave you a graph of the actual data. You are free to verify it. I've pointed you to a website with the tools. Educate yourself.

Cheers, James Arthur

I disable videos in my browser, and just read the text.

I do confess to watching Downton Abbey and the new Sherlocks, both of which are getting kind of silly. BBC writing is over-the-top lately.

There are many facts. It is the interpretation of the facts that is often wrong.

I simply pointed out the limitation of your data and the fact that your conclusions are not supported since you didn't consider an appropriate data set. So get the correct data set or remain ignorant.

Except that the data you linked did *not* show the trend *before* the meltdown. That is what I've already pointed out to you. It only goes back to 2006 which is at the peak of the boom, just as anomalous as the bust but in the other direction.

Your imagined trend based on "boom" data and not a good historical perspective. Let's try to bring back the boom so you can see the numbers you want... but that will also result in another bust, no?

Actual data that you then misinterpreted.

Rickman is about as repulsive as Sloman. Both are content-free insult generators.

I ignore them both.

Kind of amazing to see an adult so lazy, so full of excuses, and so unwilling to look things up even when pointed right at the resource.

I hate to excommunicate anyone, but I guess at some point it's hopeless.

Cheers, James Arthur

Amazing! I am having a relatively polite conversation and John has to jump in and make a personal attack. What is up with him?

And so uninterested, and so humorless. Hell of a way to live.

There is an infinite pool of jerks, and we have finite time.

For the curious and inquisitive, this cuts through everything and makes U.S. employment plain in minimal time:

It's interactive--feel free to twiddle the knobs.

We've not recovered. Why? New businesses aren't starting, old businesses aren't expanding or hiring. And people aren't looking.

There, that was easier than a lot of pointless debate.

Simple.

Cheers, James

Great graph! I see the same thing each time in 1990, 2001 and 2008. Employment takes a hit dropping back, then starts up on a parallel path never reaching the numbers that would have been achieved if the hit had never happened. Why should 2008 be any different from the others?

Obviously that is the result of every employment downturn for the last several decades. Hard to say exactly what happens. Maybe it has to do with general trends that aren't fully reflected in the employment numbers until some trigger event happens. For example, more modern equipment and methods require fewer man hours to accomplish the same results. Maybe companies stick with their established routines and people aren't really let go until a downturn, then they are never replaced as it is discovered they aren't really needed.

I don't see info in this graph to allow you to draw the conclusions you do about businesses starting or whatever. It is very clear however that the economy is growing on a similar path as it was before the big crap. So if the economy is growing, how can businesses *not* be expanding or new ones starting?

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The US total population in 2016 was 321M, and in 2006 298M. That's an 8% in crease. The Fed2 graph shows population numbers of 148M and 173M for the sa me dates, a 16% rise. Rickman - not unreasonably - asked for an explanation of why the potentially working population can rise 16% when the total popu lation has risen 8%, and James Arthur fob him off with a non-answer

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It's certainly got a feature that deserves clarification. The potentially w orking population is shown as going up from 148M to 173M from 2006 to 2014, which is a 16% increase over a period when the total population went up on ly 8%.

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It's also an empirical fact that the Fed2 data shows the working population going up 16% over a period when the total US population went up 16%. This is surprising, and needs explanation - an explanation that James Arthur has failed to provide.

James Arthur presented the Fed2 graph. It's his job to explain why it start ed in 2006 - the peak of building boom driven by the wide availability of t he sub-prime mortgages whose high rate of default triggered the GFC which i s usually dated as starting in August 2007.

Rickman asked contentful questions. I didn't notice any insults in any of t hem. James Arthur insulted his intelligence by failing to answer legitimate ques tion, and trying to palm him off with

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when the 16% is in the raw data. James Arthur's implication would be that F ed2 had increased the potentially working US population from 148M in 2006 t o 173M in 2014 - 25M extra potential workers, because the total US populati on had gone up from 298M to 321M - 23M extra people. This is implausible. T he potentially working population - aged say 16 to 65 - is a proportion of the total population.

If everybody lived to 80, it would be 49% (which is pretty much the 148/298 for 2006). The proportion has increase to 53% in 2014 (173/321) which does require some explanation. Maybe Fed2 has decided that people are now part of the potential working population if they are aged from 16 to 75.

John Larkin ignores anybody who wants him to think. He likes to gets his ce rtainties from the Murdoch media.

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James Arthur's enthusiasm for posting right-wing nonsense and his refusal t o recognise that it is nonsense when it's defects are pointed out, is getti ng too blatant to be entirely tolerable.

He's clearly an enthusiastic fan of any far right-wing economic commentator , but he's becoming a little too one-eyed to be taken seriously.

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"Uninterested"? Anybody who posts anything here is clearly registering a ce rtain amount of interest. "So humourless" reflects the fact that John Larki n doesn't get a lot of the jokes poste here, particularly those involving h is inflated ideas about his own intelligence.

The pool of jerks that post to s.e.d. is finite and John Larkin is not only clearly a jerk, but also our most prolific poster.

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Sadly for your reputation for intellectual honesty, the debate wasn't point less, though your contributions did evade the points being made with remark able enthusiasm.

Typical James Arthur. Rickman was querying the "potential employees" line o n the original Fed2 graph

which should have had it's own - different coloured - vertical axis to make it clear that it's running from 298M to 321M, which would also have made i t obvious that the number potential candidates for jobs increases only half as fast as the population as a whole. If everybody lived to 80, only 49% o f the population is in the 16-65 age group who can be expected to be lookin g for work.

What James Arthur also fails to acknowledge is that the new graph makes it perfectly obvious that Rickman's other contention was correct.

By starting the original Fed2 graph at 2006, rather than 2003, that graph e xaggerated the base employment by the extent of the sub-prime mortgage gene rated building bubble, which seems to have generated a couple of million ex tra jobs.

So James Arthur's rhetoric depends on two dishonest tricks - one in doublin g the number of potential employees by claiming that all the natural increa se in the population has to find a new job, when - in fact - only half the population is ever of an age to work - and the other in cherry picking the starting point of the comparison at close to the top of a boom.

Rickman identified both and James Arthur took a long time to come up with a ny kind of honest response to either.

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He's a dim jerk, and a personal friend of James Arthur. He doesn't get what 's going on - there certainly weren't any insults in what you'd posted, and he's too intellectually lazy to realise that there was a real debate going on (not that James Arthur's evasive responses helped).