I’m genuinely surprised that it has taken people so long to realize this. In his Washington Post column Robert Samuelson writes about three of China’s leading exports:

China may be an even bigger economic deal than we thought. Almost everyone knows that, in the past three decades, China has gone from a huge and poor nation to the world’s biggest exporter and second-largest economy. Now, in a new report, two economists claim that China’s emergence explains a lot more. Specifically, they say it fostered three major global trends: low interest rates (which also prop up stock prices); weak or declining wages for workers; and growing economic inequality.

The central cause of these massive side effects is population change, contend Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics and Manoj Pradhan, formerly of Morgan Stanley. The infusion of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers into the world economy weakened global wages and created a glut of global savings. Lagging wages worsened inequality; surplus savings depressed interest rates.

Read the whole thing.

It didn’t have to be this way. If China hadn’t maintained its mercantilist policies and, indeed, had merely conformed to its international agreements, some of the adverse effects of China’s becoming a participating member of the global economy could have been mitigated.

And none of this was unforeseen. I said it 35 years ago and again 20 years ago when granting China MFN trading status and admitting it to the World Trade Organization were being debated.

Nicholas Krisoff devotes the entirety of his New York Times column to a catalogue of the horrors of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen:

We Americans have sometimes wondered how Russia can possibly be so Machiavellian as to support its Syrian government allies as they bomb and starve civilians. Yet we’re doing the same thing with Saudi Arabia, and it’s just as unconscionable when we’re the ones complicit in war crimes.

Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen is and always has been illegal and immoral. Not only shouldn’t we be supporting it but we should be denouncing it. Not only are the Saudis not our friends they are the supporters of much of the terrorism and Islamist activity worldwide.

That should be apparent regardless of who’s president and regardless of the letter behind the president’s name. Sadly, apparently not.

I thought you might be amused by this. This is the result of a professionally-prepared “behavior assessment” my employer commissioned for me and a selection of other employees.

David is a very verbal, animated and stimulating communicator, poised, and capable of projecting enthusiasm and warmth. A fluent, lively, forceful talker, he is able to sell ideas with assurance and intensity.

He has a strong sense of urgency, initiative and competitive drive to get things done, with emphasis on working with and through people in the process. He understands people well and uses that understanding effectively in persuading others to do willingly what he wants them to do.

Impatient for results, David is a confident and ambitious “doer” and decision-maker, a self-starter who can delegate responsibility and authority when necessary. Having a distinctly low level of interest in details which are not pertinent to his goals, he will delegate them whenever possible, relying on persuasion, rather than close follow-up, to assure completion of such work. Venturesome and rather freewheeling, David is uninhibited in expressing and acting on his own ideas, which he will do without very much concern for traditional, established policies. Skillful at “selling” his ideas to others, he is also determined and persistent in expressing and acting on them.

At ease and self-assured with groups or in making new contacts, David is gregarious and extraverted, has a compelling impact on people, and is always “selling” in a general sense. He learns and reacts quickly and functions at a faster-than-average pace. Able to adapt quickly to change and variety in his work, he will become impatient and less effective if required to work with repetitive routines and details or to do structured work under close supervision.

I would quibble with some of the findings but note that it is an evaluation of personality and preference rather than performance. As a first order approximation I think it’s fair.

I have no idea what my employer intends to use this for but I strongly suspect its findings will be misapplied.

Keith Olbermann — this is your brain on the Democrat party

The Bookworm Beat 8/30/17 — leftist insanity of the day edition

President Trump Is 100% Right – The Media’s Feeding Hate And Division

An Important Development In The Mideast Peace Process 
 
African-Americans need a Great Awakening to repair their broken culture 

Protecting Public Employees’ First Amendment Rights

Victor Davis Hanson – Trump Compared to What?

Colin Kaepernick – The New Social Justice Poster Child

Colombia: FARC’s listed assets fall short

Justice is Done! Trump Pardons Sheriff Arpaio

Science Points the Way to Antifa’s Achilles Heel

The Bookworm Beat 8/28/17 — the illustrated edition and open thread

Snapshot USA: Decency in Houston; Indecency in Berkeley

Orwell’s world: Telling the truth about Antifa is a revolutionary act

What Happened: The Delusional Handmaid’s Tale

Putin and Netanyahu or journeys of a bibliophile

Man who boasted about sucker punching Black Trump supporter at rally, gets his wish.

At RealClearMarkets Jay Shambaugh reflects on the labor force participation rate, still low despite an unemployment rate below what it was a decade ago, just before the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Let’s jump to the conclusion of his post:

Yet, increasing employment is more than a purely material goal. Research has demonstrated that many people draw meaning from their work and establish their identity through their job, making increasing employment rates an even more important step to increasing welfare.

By “welfare” he means it in its economic and true sense: well-being. He doesn’t mean being on the dole.

In his article after noting that those who’ve remained unemployed are not a homogeneous group, he makes three suggestions:

• Making sure childcare policies are adequate, schedule flexibility available, and pathways to re-enter the workforce after taking time out as a caregiver would make it substantially easier to boost the employment rate.
• Protecting and further strengthening our nation’s healthcare system—including access to mental health care and drug treatment—would likely help many rejoin the workforce.
• Making investments in training programs, public employment, re-entry programs for felons, reforming licensing rules, among other policies may be needed to stem a long term decline in participation.

I strongly suspect that even if all three of those were implemented to the greatest degree practical the effect on the LFPR would be negligible. There are all sorts of factors that make a life without work more attractive and practical than it otherwise might be. The stronger and broader the safety net. The more menial and tedious the jobs on offer. Households in which there’s already one or more employed people. Safety net programs constructed to end as soon as you go back to work. Just not wanting to work. Habit.

This may be the new normal. Contrary to the urgings of some we shouldn’t just eliminate the network of state, local, and federal programs referred to as “the safety net”. The programs could and should be constructed better and more creatively. We could steer our economy away from maximizing the number of minimum wage jobs, our present policy and which the Germans refer to as “the American plan”, in favor of a system that produced more interesting and creative jobs. That would require a wholesale reappraisal which is unlikely to be forthcoming. Too many people are making too much money from our present system.

We could stop encouraging people to take on debt in pursuit of a higher education that will lead to jobs that don’t and will never exist. That, too, would require a massive reappraisal and reorientation. Anything that’s been a mantra for 25 years is bound to have momentum behind it.

My suspicion is that the emerging America will be one with a lot more hopelessness, opioid addiction, and violent crime than the world of bourgeois work and respectability that was expected when I was a kid. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

There’s an interesting article at Hollywood Reporter on this summer’s flabby domestic box office, the lowest in more than ten years:

By the time Labor Day weekend wraps, summer box-office revenue in North America will end up being down nearly 16 percent over last year, the steepest decline in modern times and eclipsing the 14.6 percent dip in 2014. It will also be the first time since 2006 that summer didn’t clear $4 billion.

That’s according to comScore, which is predicting that revenue will end up at roughly $3.78 billion (a 15.7 percent decline). Attendance also plummeted, and is almost assured of hitting a 25-year low in terms of the number of tickets sold, according to Box Office Mojo.

Some of the pictures that floundered have done well overseas and, apparently, that is where the future of Hollywood blockbusters will be.

How do you explain the poor domestic box office this summer?

1. I haven’t gone out to see a movie in years.
2. I just don’t have that much interest in comic book superhero movies.
3. I just don’t have that much interest in the umpteenth sequel to a movie that wasn’t that great to begin with.
4. Hollywood is sacrificing the domestic audience to gain international box office. Their plan is working.
5. American movie-goers are tired of the heavy-handed messages that Hollywood is trying to peddle.
6. Americans are reacting to a too-political Hollywood by punishing it at the box office.
7. I was too busy bailing/looking for a job/trying to find my keys/other.

Just for the record I think that political explanations are a very minor source of Hollywood’s problems. IMO car chases and explosions eventually get old. When you sacrifice all other values to the action necessary to secure an international audience, movies start getting pretty tired quickly.

I actually wish that Hollywood would adopt the Bollywood formula: pretty girls, pretty boys, singing and dancing, low comedy, some action, if you want to send a message use Western Union. I think they’d be amazed at how many people would spring to see those movies here in the U. S. just as they do everywhere else in the world.

The MIT Technology Review presents more evidence that the “skills gap” that’s the basis of so much policy is a myth. Here’s the meat of it:

The results yield a number of surprises. First, persistent hiring problems are less widespread than many pundits and industry representatives claim. A few years back, Paul Osterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and I found that less than a quarter of manufacturing plants had one or more production-­worker vacancies that had lasted for three months or more. By contrast, industry claims at the time were that three-­quarters or more faced a persistent inability to hire skilled workers.

More recently, I have looked for signs of hiring trouble in IT and clinical laboratory occupations. Given a tighter labor market and higher educational requirements for these entry-level technical jobs, it would be reasonable to expect hiring to be more difficult. Not so. Only 15 percent of IT help desks report extended vacancies in technician positions. While the results do show higher levels of long-term lab-tech openings, it turns out that many of these are concentrated in the overnight shift and thus reflect inadequate compensation for difficult working conditions, not a structural skill deficiency. A little over a quarter of clinical diagnostic labs report at least one long-term vacancy.

The survey results do show some hiring challenges, but not for the reasons posited by the conventional skill-gap narrative. In fact, the data reveal that high-tech and cutting-edge establishments do not have greater hiring difficulties than other establishments. Furthermore, the data imply that we should be careful about calling for more technical skills without specifying which skills we are talking about. It is quite common to hear advocates—and even academics—assert that the answer to the nation’s labor-market and economic-growth challenges is for workers to acquire more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills. However, my data show that employers looking for higher-level computer skills generally do not have a harder time filling job openings. Manufacturers requiring higher-level math do sometimes have more hiring challenges, but math requirements are not a problem for IT help desks or clinical labs.

So what are the skill requirements most consistently associated with hiring difficulties? In manufacturing, it’s higher-level reading, while for help-desk technicians it’s higher-level writing. Proponents of the skill-gap theory sometimes assert that the problem, if not a lack of STEM skills, is actually the result of a poor attitude or inadequate soft skills among younger workers. But while demand for a few soft skills—like the ability to initiate new tasks without guidance from management—is occasionally predictive of hiring problems, most soft-skill demands, including requirements for cooperation and teamwork, are not.

What I think is not mythical is a lack of willingness of employers to pay what workers with the skills and experience they claim to seek are worth. They’re confident that if they complain loudly enough they’ll be able to import workers at lower wages.

Is it too early to start playing “spot the Broken Window fallacies”? So far this morning I’ve found three.

I strongly recommend that you read Ian Bogost’s piece at the Atlantic on the reasons for Houston’s flooding. It has plenty of words of wisdom like these:

Accounting for a 100-year, 500-year, or “million-year” flood, as some are calling Harvey’s aftermath, is difficult and costly. Stiftel confirms that it’s almost impossible to design for these “maximal probable flood events,” as planners call them. Instead, the hope is to design communities such that when they flood, they can withstand the ill effects and support effective evacuations to keep people safe. “The Houston event seems like an illustration that we haven’t figured it out,” Stiftel says.

Many planners contend that impervious surface itself is the problem. The more of it there is, the less absorption takes place and the more runoff has to be managed. Reducing development, then, is one of the best ways to manage urban flooding. The problem is, urban development hasn’t slowed in the last half-century. Cities have only become more desirable, spreading outward over the plentiful land available in the United States.

and that has happened at least in part because we’ve subsidized it. It’s what insurance companies call “moral hazard”. There’s money to be made in land development and if in addition to the money that’s naturally there you subsidize it, particularly if you subsidize the development of areas that would likely remain undeveloped, all the better.