According to the Atlanta Fed in order to have an unemployment rate of 6% at a labor force participation rate of 63.7% by the end of the first quarter of 2016, the economy would need to average an increase of more than 163,000 new jobs per month in payroll employment (CES).

Since that hasn’t been the case in the last 15 years (the last 20 years if, as I do, you consider the dot-com boom an aberration), long before the housing boom and bust, not to mention that the labor force participation rate has been going declining rather than staying the same or increasing for the last few years that suggests that the only way that the unemployment rate will get that low by the end of the next presidential term is to lower the participation rate farther.

If that’s the strategy, I’m not sure why we’d want the unemployment rate to go lower.

From the Initiative on Global Markets:

Because the U.S. Treasury bailed out and backstopped banks (by injecting equity into them in late 2008, and later committing to provide public capital to any banks that failed the stress tests and could not raise private capital), the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without these measures.

78% of the economists polled either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. I conclude from this that they do not believe on net that the U. S. is over-invested in the banking sector and that deadweight loss plays little or no part in our current economic doldrums.

It certainly goes a long way towards explaining the actions and statements of the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Here’s what they’re thinking:

“The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept,” said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” (Princeton, 2007). “But then making it was also difficult.”

To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, Anthony explained, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels’ holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate. [What Makes Wheels Appear to Spin Backward?]

The success of the whole structure was extremely sensitive to the size of the axle. While a narrow one would reduce the amount of friction, it would also be too weak to support a load. Meanwhile, a thick axle would hugely increase the amount of friction. “They solved this problem by making the earliest wagons quite narrow, so they could have short axles, which made it possible to have an axle that wasn’t very thick,” Anthony told Life’s Little Mysteries.

The sensitivity of the wheel-and-axle system to all these factors meant that it could not have been developed in phases, he said. It was an all-or-nothing structure.

And here I’d thought it was because it was done on a cost-plus contract.

until it’s been officially denied:

The Libyan leader, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, has vowed to use force to stop the country breaking up after leaders in an eastern region declared autonomy.

“We are not prepared to divide Libya,” he said, blaming infiltrators and pro-Gaddafi elements for backing the autonomy plan. “We are ready to deter them, even with force.”

His comments come amid mounting evidence that Libya is slowly splintering into a series of rival fiefdoms controlled by competing militias, who increasingly follow their own agendas rather than acting in the national interest.

Tomorrow you have a great new excuse for any mistakes you might make:

The solar flare caused my computer to malfunction.

It’s best to have these things prepared in advance.

This memory was brought to the surface by a discussion of old arcade games going on in comments. I don’t recall whether I’ve ever mentioned it before but during the 1980s I spent an enormous amount of time in bowling alleys all over the country. Big ones. Small ones. California. South Dakota. Wisconsin. Louisiana. New Jersey. My client, Brunswick, was paying me to do it. I’m probably the only person in the world to have done a general systems analysis of a bowling alley—operations, the business side, accounting, the whole shebang.

At lot of my time was spent trouble-shooting. When you’re there to trouble-shoot, you end up with a lot of dead time on your hands—until trouble pops up which it may never do. Then it’s, you know, in case of emergency break glass.

Now, there are only so many things you can do when you’re killing time in a bowling alley. You might be able to bowl but league bowling schedules frequently make that impossible. You can drink but, er, that kind of impairs your ability to trouble-shoot. Or you can play arcade games. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent playing arcade games. Hundreds? Probably.

I don’t remember where the alley was but one evening I was there, playing arcade games as usual, and I noticed I was attracting an audience, mostly nine to twelve year old boys. After, perhaps, twenty minutes of silent watching one of the older boys, presumably deputized by the group, walked up behind me and said over my shoulder “You’re pretty good for a grownup.”

I took it as a compliment.

The subject of AMC’s horror drama, The Walking Dead, came up in comments a week or so ago. It’s one of the few series I go out of my way to watch and I haven’t commented on it so here goes. This post will be filled with spoilers. If you want to be surprised, have no interest in television, or are not interested in flesh-eating zombies, walk on by.

The Walking Dead is a combination horror drama, soap opera, and allegorical/philosophical narrative. In the modern day drama the world has been overrun by flesh-eating zombies, the condition begun by a mysterious and possibly manmade plague and now spread by transmission from the bite of the zombies, the few pitiful remnants of humanity struggling for survival against the zombies, the elements, and each other. In some ways it’s an update of the old 1950s western Wagon Train with flesh-eating zombies in place of hostile Indians or bands of outlaws. It’s just finishing its third season on AMC and it will be back for at least one more.

In The Walking Dead the zombies are the McGuffin. A “McGuffin” is the pretext for a drama. The term comes from joke. Here’s a version of the joke:

First man (pointing to an oddly shaped object): What’s that?

Second man: It’s a McGuffin.

First man: What’s a McGuffin?

Second man: It’s used for hunting the lions that inhabit the Scottish Highlands.

First man: There are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.

Second man: Then that’s no McGuffin.

Alfred Hitchcock used the term. In The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and The Man Who Knew Too Much the spy story is the McGuffin. In The Walking Dead it’s the zombies.

That’s the objection even outrage that hardcore zombie purists have about the show: the zombies aren’t front and center. Mostly they’re just lurking around the periphery, shambling across fields, or stirring from piles of decaying bodies.

The series is tense, frightening, and gruesome. It’s just on my limit of tolerance. I found the very first episode in which the main character, Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes, revives from a coma in a hospital empty except for the dead bodies and the zombies, about as intense as any television I’ve ever watched. His town is overrun by them. The world is overrun by them. His family has disappeared. Everything he knew and everyone he knew is gone.

The soap opera component is completely forgettable—uninteresting to me. For me what elevates TWD above other horror dramas is that the producers and writers rather clearly see it as an opportunity to discuss larger issues.

What do you do when the world you knew just disappears? And is replaced by something much grimmer and more threatening than anything you’ve ever expected? Are the old values relevant? Do you just do whatever it takes to survive?

The most recent theme along these lines has been developing for a while and really emerged in the most recent episode. What do you do when your kid, under the influence of all of the changes that have occurred, the danger that he’s experienced, and the violence that’s been a part of daily life develops a fascination with cruelty, danger, and death? Is he becoming a sociopath? Is he the New Adam? Is there a difference? What do you do? What should you do? Will attempting to cultivate the old values and damp down the new ones that are emerging just make it harder for him to survive?

The third season has raised any number of new issues and has handled them in intelligent and frequently surprising ways. I’ll give it one more season. We’ll see.

The producers of House have announced that this will be the the Fox medical drama’s last season. For my money it can’t happen too soon. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the network, writers, and cast have lost interest in the program. Why should the audience be any different?

Here’s a rule of thumb for determining whether a television series has passed its prime: if this season had been the first season would it have had a second season?

House has always been a formula show. Here’s the formula. The diagnostic team, through a series of misdiagnoses, between the diagnostic tests and the mistaken therapies darned near kill the patient. Eventually the correct diagnosis is stumbled upon (usually by Greg House). Patient saved. Lot of snotty comments by House. There have been some deviations from the formula but that’s about it.

What could otherwise have been unwatchable has been made engaging by Hugh Laurie’s vivid characterization of Dr. Greg House. Brilliant, infuriating, wounded. I think that for the last several seasons, Hugh Laurie has been holding the show together, as Mary McNamara of the LA Times put it, “by sheer force of will”. The series has jumped the shark.

When did House jump the shark? I think it was during season season three, the season in which David Morse had a recurring role as a cop, Javert to House’s Jean Valjean. Supporting evidence is the cast change in season four. Cast change is one of the warning signs of jumping the shark.

It was a great series but IMO is great no longer. Wrap the show up, give it some resolution. At this point Hugh Laurie is rich, probably beyond his wildest imaginings. I suspect he won’t return to series television but stick with live performance, either the theater or music.

I’m not interested in the Republican primaries. Whatever happens happens. I suspect Romney will be the eventual nominee but a lot depends on how unhinged the Republican base is.

It looks very much as though the whole world is going into recession. Europe and Australia very clearly are. China is equally clearly slowing down and may actually go into recession. I seriously doubt that, if the rest of the world goes into recession, that we can escape it here.

I think that war with Iran is becoming increasingly likely. Iran’s recent overtures for more talks are unlikely to do much; they’ve already poisoned the well. Both the Israelis and the French are pouring cold water on the idea. I honestly don’t know what the Iranians could do at this point to prevent either Israel, the U. S., or both from attacking them.

Unless something more interesting happens today, I think I’ll post about television.