I stumbled across this quote a few days ago and it brought a smile to my face. From, of all places, a Chinese game show in which applicants interview for jobs:

It seems that no matter whether you’re American or Chinese, if you don’t have any job experience, something subconscious when looking for your first job will make you choose planning.

The interviewee was a young American studying in China.

I submit this link a bit reluctantly. The author is a Swede of Kurdish descent andit’s a post on U. S. non-defense federal spending as a percentage of GDP with an alarming graphic. The howls of anguish in the comments are astonishing. Go on over and read the whole thing (hat tip: Greg Mankiw). The author notes:

In the latest projection by the Congressional Budget Office, the ten year deficit is estimated at 13 trillion dollars. By contrast, Obama’s various tax increases on the rich will only bring in 1 trillion in the same period.

The 13 trillion dollar deficit which the President helped create and long terms entitlement deficits are the main reason why S&P downgraded U.S debt, not the 1 trillion in tax increases which Republicans prevented.

As a response to the economic crises and based on ideological conviction, President Obama decided to expand federal non-defense spending more than any President in recent history. This unprecedented expansion of government can perhaps be justified by orthodox Keynesianism.

I am not particularly alarmed by the sharp rise in spending. That was to be expected for the reasons stated.

What concerns me is that the increase is maintained indefinitely into the future. That can’t be justified under Keynesian theory and, frankly, it can’t be justified economically.

I think that this is a very big danger area for the president and it’s likely to be one of the Republicans’ primary lines of attack.

I don’t blame President Obama alone for the mess that we’re in. I think that we’re reaching the end of a process that goes back far before him or his predecessor for the last forty or even the last sixty years. The liabilities that we’ve incurred that are starting to come due as the Baby Boomers retire are hardly a surprise and the time to address them was 15 or 20 years ago when it looked like the good times would last forever.

Mish catalogs the stimulus measures that have been tried over the last couple of years by the Bush and Obama Administrations:

Is there any kind of stimulus the US did not try in the last 10 years?

1. We had 1% interest rates from Greenspan fueling housing.
2. We had wars from Bush and Obama fueling defense industry employment.
3. We had two rounds of Quantitative easing from the Fed.
4. We had cash-for-clunkers.
5. We had two housing tax credit packages.
6. We had an $800 billion stimulus package from Congress for “shovel-ready” projects.
7. We had stimulus kickbacks to states.
8. We had HAMP (Home Affordable Mortgage Program).
9. We had bank bailouts out the wazoo to stimulate lending.
10. We had Small Business lending programs.
11. We had central bank liquidity swaps.
12. We had Maiden Lane, Maiden Lane II, and Maiden Lane III
13. We had Single Tranche Repurchase agreements
14. We had the Citi Asset Guarantee
15. We had TALF, TARP, TAF, CPFF, TSLF, MMIFF, TLGP, AMLF, PPIP, and PDCF
16. We had so many programs the Fed must have run out of letters because they were not given an acronym.

I’ll answer Mish’s question. The only form of stimulus we haven’t tried over the last four years is, ironically, the form explicitly endorsed by Keynes—direct government employment.

What should be counted as stimulus when reckoning the effects of fiscal and monetary stimulus? Right now the federal government is borrowing and spending well over a trillion dollars more annually than it’s taken in, roughly 10% of GDP.

Hat tip: Global Finance Magazine

The graph above illustrates the total U. S. debt to GDP ratio over the period of the last 82 years.

More information:

Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED), Federal Reserve

I think that this largely speaks for itself. Some brief observations:

1. The present trend is unsustainable.
2. A lot of the growth of the last couple of decades was illusory. Increasing debt of itself makes growth look larger.
3. There is no reasonably foreseeable level of economic growth that will bail us out of this problem.
4. Deleveraging has barely begun.
5. Deleveraging has stopped.

Another ignorant, know-nothing, ideologically motivated, partisan Republican heard from. In an interview on NPR All Things Considered this evening former Obama Administration senior economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, in response to a question about why companies holding cash rather than investing or hiring, responded: “Uncertainty”.

There were some other interresting things in the interview, too. For example, he said flatly that home construction and retail weren’t going to be the driving engines of the economy going forward.

The post-war period is over. This is something new.

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of posts attacking some widely held but IMO erroneous beliefs, mostly about economics and business. My first target is the claim you sometimes hear that Congressmen are underpaid. Let’s consider the Illinois Congressional delegation:

In summary based on wages in their fields at their education levels and for people graduating from their alma maters, 9 are overpaid, 2 might be overpaid, 2 are underpaid, and 5 might be underpaid. Survey says: Illinois congressmen, generally speaking, are overpaid.

Maybe Illinois is atypical. Frankly, I think that Illinois is all too typical. I’m open to evidence-based arguments about the assessments I’ve made of pay grades. I don’t think there are a lot of ministers, high school teachers, or country lawyers who make $174,000 a year or more.

This might be a good time to repeat a claim I’ve made from time to time: paying Congressmen more wouldn’t attract a better class of Congressman. The actual result would be paying the same old Congressmen more.

Now here’s a creative use of off-the-shelf technology. Researchers at UCSD have figured out a way to adapt the Microsoft Kinect as a sort of inexpensive 3D scanner:

Archaeological digs are a painstaking process even after the earth has been excavated — artifacts must be carefully catalogued so researchers know exactly where they were found, which tells information about their past. On an upcoming dig in Jordan, a modified Kinect could serve as a 3-D scanner, making this process simpler — and decidedly more high-tech.

Researchers hope students traveling to an archaeological dig in Jordan will use a hacked Microsoft Kinect as a mobile scanning system, making 3-D models of ancient sites that can then be visited in a virtual-reality environment.

For now, the system relies upon an overhead camera system, so it only works indoors, but computer scientists at the University of California-San Diego want to modify it so it will work in the field. Researchers at UCSD are planning a future trip to archaeological sites in Jordan, where the system could help catalog their finds.

Jürgen Schulze, a research scientist at UCSD’s division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), eventually want to use the Kinect to scan entire buildings and neighborhoods. This ability would have applications far beyond archaeology, Fast Company points out.

The modified ArKinect — archaeology and Kinect — would scan an entire dig site, and the data would be used to reconstruct the site in 3-D. Calit2 has an immersive VR system called StarCAVE, a 360-degree, 16-panel setup, which allows researchers to interact with virtual objects. A realistic 3-D portrayal of ancient cookware, for instance, would be a lot more valuable than a 2-D photograph, because it would show more detail and craftsmanship and even help researchers understand how an artifact was used.

Russian, American, and Canadian researchers have discovered the skull of a wolf-dog in the early stages of domestication which appears to push back the date at which our best friend emerged by 10,000 years or more:

A very well-preserved 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication ever found.

But the specimen raises doubts about early man’s loyalty to his new best friend as times got tough.

The findings come from a Russian-led international team of archaeologists.

The skull, from shortly before the peak of the last ice age, is unlike those of modern dogs or wolves.

Although the snout is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from 1,000 years ago, its large teeth resemble those of 31,000 year-old wild European wolves.

This indicates a dog in the very early stages of domestication, says evolutionary biologist Dr Susan Crockford, one of the authors on the study.

“The wolves were not deliberately domesticated, the process of making a wolf into a dog was a natural process,” explained Dr Crockford of Pacific Identifications, Canada.

But for this to happen required settled early human populations: “At this time, people were hunting animals in large numbers and leaving large piles of bones behind, and that was attracting the wolves,” she said.

What modern dog most closely resembles this early domesticated wolf? The Samoyed. 😉

The original article is here.

Update

My wife’s reaction to this news: “Was it still barking?”

Since the BLS server crashed I haven’t been able to go straight to the horse’s mouth but Business Insider has reproduced the BLS’s employment situation report here. It’s essentially unchanged with the unemployment rate dropping a bit largely on the basis of lower labor force participation. Most commentators are likely to portrary this as either wonderful news or a sign of the apocalypse, depending on partisan affiliation.

The question I would ask is is this good enough? Is this as good as it will get?