At RealClearMarkets Nicholas Eberstadt observes that we’re about to conduct a real world experiment:
A natural experiment in the US labor market commences next week as pandemic benefits (including pandemic unemployment insurance) are scheduled to end on Labor Day.
The US labor market suffered a terrible shock from the COVID19 pandemic in early 2020, and experienced a remarkably rapid initial recovery — a snap back of unprecedented speed and magnitude. Curiously, however, the return to pre-pandemic employment rates seemed to stall out last fall. While employment rates for men and women 20 and over remain below their Great Recession nadir, they have risen only by a mere one percentage point since October 2020.
Yet, while no one was vaccinated in October 2020, today, thanks to the advent and rollout of three highly effective coronavirus vaccines over 60 percent of the US adult population — over 160 million men and women — are fully inoculated. So what is constraining the return to paid work?
We’ve been doing a lot of that lately. He proceeds to make his case that a presumably unintended effect of pandemic policy was to reduce the willingness to work.
We’ll see. The real world is peculiar. However convincing the argument what matters is what actually happens.
Tried to post this earlier, it’s not just us!
https://www.insider.com/disenchanted-chinese-youth-join-a-mass-movement-to-lie-flat-2021-6
I thought we already had data from states that stopped benefits earlier. IIRC we didnt see much effect.
“However convincing the argument what matters is what actually happens.”
Hah! The conservatives here will die believing that cutting taxes always raises revenue and an increase in minimum wage will always cut employment. What actually happens is ignored.
Steve
Yes, we will see. But we observe two issues in our companies, and with those owners we speak with.
First, primarily an issue with operations in blue states (eg CA) you have people who are convinced – or profess to be convinced – that if they go to work they will surely die of covid. This is a consequence of the hysteria campaign.
Others, and they will be quite candid, simply would rather take the government check and the free time. Or the check and work tax free on the black market. I guess “fair share” is for others.
If you want to run your own, unscientific but real world and primary research, experiment just do as I do and chat up workers and managers at retail outlets you do business with. It won’t take long to get the picture.
“just do as I do and chat up workers and managers at retail outlets you do business with. ”
Who will make sure you hear the answers you want to hear. Mind you I think talking with real workers is a good idea but we should also talk with managers who we dont do business with and workers who arent working for us. Still, the numbers will really be the answer.
Steve
“Still, the numbers will really be the answer.”
Actually they won’t, because of so many confounding factors. Or more academically said, uncontrolled independent variables. Insight and interpretation will be required.
You scare me steve. Do you practice medicine from a straight textbook perspective? From what pharma tells you the stats are? The CDC, who change their view every third Thursday? I know doctors who do. Slaves to the standards. You seem to have total disregard for intuition, experience and anything outside mainstream group think. By the book is for the mediocre; it certainly is the case in what I do. Anybody can do it. Its safe, but not particularly prone to outstanding results.
Textbooks are always 5-10 years out of date, at least in medicine. I dont know anyone who practices textbook medicine. You need to practice using evidence based medicine. Your experience is useful in determining which evidence is useful or best. A new paper comes out with an interesting claim and you need to decide is this one where you wait for more papers to confirm the findings or is it convincing enough to act on based upon one that one paper. I think you also realize that you dont live in isolation. You make sure you know what your colleagues, locally and nationally, are doing.
So as a group, we do a some things that almost no one else in the country is doing but on the whole we are mostly doing what others do. On those things I think what we are doing is the right thing and think the rest of the country will follow us eventually but only time will tell. We are very data driven and I think our results look very good. You need to constantly measure to make sure what you are doing is actually working. (Fun fact- The way you get to be a specialized center in something is to just declare that you are special. )
All that above is for group practices. At 2:00 in the morning when someone is dying, pretty common scenario for me, what you always know that medicine is really the art of trying to apply lots of large scale studies to one individual person. That person is unique and a lot of those studies may not specifically address that individual pts constellation of problems. That said, most people are like most people. Institutions that follow protocols and guidelines have better outcomes than those that dont, especially in critical care areas and trauma. So what I tell my new staff is that it is perfectly OK to deviate from guidelines as long as you know why you are doing it.
You do know House is just make believe dont you? The myth of the rugged individual doctor being the only one who knows what they are doing is pretty much a myth, with some rare exceptions.
Steve
I would add that not adhering to the standard of care can be risky for a physician.
The standard of care is usually a pretty broad and kind of non-specific kind of thing, again with some exceptions. This whole discussion is actually nuanced and most people wont really care so I should stop, but I cant resist two last examples. In my estimation, the people who seem to most carefully and rigidly follow protocols are the oncology people. I would go nuts if I had to follow everything as rigidly as they do, but OTOH they track everything. It is not as if they are just following everything blindly. If it is not working they change and they do make minor changes to accommodate specific pt needs.
So how do we innovate? Sometimes out of desperation in the middle of the night but mostly someone comes upon with an idea and we decide to try it out. (I am talking about our local level stuff.) If it is expensive and involves multiple specialties we ge two have committees and maybe IRB. For smaller efforts a chair (me) decides and we present it to our admin telling them how we will track results. If it is urgent, like we saw with Covid, individual docs are pretty free to try what they want. So with Covid we all used the drugs that, according to some sources we were not being allowed to use like HCQ, and when we had time we stopped to add uo the numbers and see what worked.
Steve