I see that more attention is being paid to something I pointed out long ago. In real terms Millennials are earning less than previous age cohorts did at the same stage in life. The Associated Press reports:

SOUTH MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Baby Boomers: your millennial children are worse off than you.

With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.

The analysis being released Friday gives concrete details about a troubling generational divide that helps to explain much of the anxiety that defined the 2016 election. Millennials have half the net worth of boomers. Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher.

The AP mentions another point I’ve made here from time to time:

The declining fortunes of millennials could impact boomers who are retired or on the cusp of retirement. Payroll taxes from millennials helps to finance the Social Security and Medicare benefits that many boomers receive — programs that Trump has said won’t be subject to spending cuts. And those same boomers will need younger generations to buy their homes and invest in the financial markets to protect their own savings.

Sadly, the AP failed to link to the actual study and a quick search didn’t turn it up. Unless this is it.

What remains unmentioned is that Millennials have significantly less job security than previous age cohorts have had at their age. Once upon a time in the mists of the different past, having been hired a worker could expect to work for the same employer until retirement. No longer.

There are many reasons for these changes. My own personal belief is that discrimination continues to be a factor both in hiring and pay and a higher proportion of Millennials are black or Hispanic than was the case among the Baby Boomers.

I also wonder if the Millennials are more educated or just more credentialed?

A factor that goes unmentioned: incomes are likely to be correlated with parental incomes. My income is more like my father’s than it is like the income of other people in my age cohort and I suspect that’s true even when controlling for educational attainment. Not all diplomas are created equal.

I think it’s obvious that more than any other factor lower incomes are the price of globalization. Comparing the percentages of college grads between Americans today and 30 or 50 years ago is specious. There are more college-educated Indians than there are Americans at all levels of educational attainment. It’s a small world after all and when employers regularly reach out to offshore resources your diploma just isn’t worth as much as it used to be.

Yesterday evening I received, at long last, the results of the home movies, slides, and videos I sent out for digitization. It took about twelve weeks—nearly a month longer than I expected.

The digitization company, Legacy Media Productions, did a good job. There were some pleasant surprises and a few disappointments. Among the pleasant surprises was the considerable amount of footage from my parents’ honeymoon in Canada and their trip to Mexico in the 1940s after World War II.

Among the disappointments were the photographic dry plates. They were, indeed, from my dad’s trip to Europe in 1938. Sadly, there were no candids among them.

The video above is one of the joys. It’s a very brief clip from my parents’ wedding, more than 70 years ago. I don’t know who the infant in the few frames at the end of the clip is. I’m still trying to master the editing tools I have and don’t quite have the hang of precision editing.

Please leave feedback in the comments on whether you can view the clip and what sort of device you’re using. This is a learning process.

I plan to keep this post at the top for the rest of the day.

NuScale has filed a design certification application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on a revolutionary design for a small, modular nuclear reactor:

Nearly a decade after setting up shop to commercialize technology developed at Oregon State University, NuScale Power has become the first company to submit a design certification application for a small modular reactor (SMR) to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The company, a Fluor Corp. subsidiary which is headquartered in Portland and employs about hundreds of people in Corvallis, filed the application on Thursday and announced the milestone during a press conference in Washington, D.C.

John Hopkins, a former Fluor executive who championed the heavy construction company’s investment in the next-generation nuclear technology before becoming NuScale’s CEO in late 2012, called SMRs the future of the nuclear power industry.

“I believed then, as I believe now, that the NuScale small modular reactor is a disruptive technology with the potential to change the world,” he said.

I believe I’ve written about this company in the past. To understand just how revolutionary the design is, they’re talking about nuclear reactors that are a tiny fraction of the size of today’s reactors:

NuScale’s design is a departure from traditional nuclear power plants, enormous facilities that typically generate about 1,000 megawatts of electricity. By contrast, a NuScale power module is designed to generate 50 megawatts.

Each self-contained reactor vessel could be built in a factory and shipped by truck, train or barge to its destination. As many as 12 modules could be installed in a single power plant to provide a total output of up to 600 megawatts.

That’s a real game-changer in any number of ways, not the least of which is the power distribution model. There’s a real difference between a nuclear reactor that serves a city and one that serves a neighborhood, especially in terms of continuity and reliability.

Also, if you’re skeptical about nuclear power because it always turns out to be more expensive than projections, consider this:

More than 800 NuScale employees and contract workers were involved in developing the 12,000-page application, which took eight and a half years of design, engineering and testing to produce at a cost of $500 million, according to Mike McGough, the company’s chief commercialization officer.

A lot of the expense doesn’t consist of technical bottlenecks but in regulatory and legal ones.

ABC News reports that the FBI is accusing the Chicago Police Department of having systematically and routinely violated the rights of Chicagoans, particularly black Chicagoans:

Chicago police have violated the constitutional rights of residents for years, permitting racial bias against blacks, using excessive force and shooting people who did not pose immediate threats, the Justice Department announced Friday after a yearlong investigation.

Officers endangered civilians, caused avoidable injuries and deaths and eroded community trust that is “the cornerstone of public safety,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The federal report blamed “systemic deficiencies” within the department and the city, including insufficient training and a failure to hold bad officers accountable for misconduct.

It is difficult to build trust again once it’s been violated and lost. It takes more than just a change of administrations, crying crocodile tears, and promising to do better. And it takes more than paying damages to people who’ve been maltreated. It’s Chicagoans at large who pay; the actual people doing the maltreatment somehow never end up paying.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius asks four questions:

1. Did Trump’s campaign encourage Russia’s alleged hacking to hurt his rival Hillary Clinton and help him, and does Russia have any leverage over him?
2. Why did the Obama administration wait so long to deal with Russia’s apparent hacking?
3. What discussions has the Trump team had with Russian officials about future relations?
4. Finally, what’s the chance that Russian intelligence has gamed its covert action more subtly than we realize?

All reasonable questions and I doubt we’ll ever get satisfying answers to any of them.

I’d add one more: why hasn’t the Obama Administration done anything about Chinese hacking? Chinese hacking has been quite damaging. The Administration’s apparent inaction in the matter has encouraged cynicism even if not encouraging further exploits.

I don’t think that Fred Barnes understands why New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker testifed against Trump AG nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions. From Mr. Barnes’s piece in the Weekly Standard:

Booker had nothing to say about Sessions’s personal and private views on race. He had no secrets about Sessions to reveal. His opposition turned out to be a disagreement over policy. A liberal, Booker objected to Sessions’s conservative views. For those eager to derail the Sessions nomination, this had to be a letdown. As soon as Booker finished his testimony, the air went out of the anti-Sessions balloon.

I don’t believe that Sen. Booker was attempting to derail Sessions’s nomination with his testimony. I think he was trying to burnish his credentials to be the next head of the Democratic National Committee. For that job a reputation, for example, for bipartisan cooperation is no credential.

In that he succeeded.

There was one thing in President Obama’s farewell address the other night that puzzled me. From the New York Times’s transcript:

If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse a great recession, reboot our auto industry, and unleash the longest stretch of job creation in our history — if I had told you that we would open up a new chapter with the Cuban people, shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without firing a shot, take out the mastermind of 9-11 — if I had told you that we would win marriage equality and secure the right to health insurance for another 20 million of our fellow citizens — if I had told you all that, you might have said our sights were set a little too high.

But that’s what we did. That’s what you did.

The emphasis is mine. What did President Obama mean by that? Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program. They said that and our intelligence services confirmed it on multiple occasions. The inspectors did not find evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Did he mean that his efforts had prevented Iran from starting a nuclear weapons development program, at least for the next several years? I hope that’s what he meant.

It isn’t often that I get two posts from one newspaper column. In the column I mentioned in my last post Robert Samuelson suggests some reasons for lagging productivity in the U. S.:

I have written about this subject before, because — though obscure — it is vital to our economic future. Faster productivity growth is the basic source of higher incomes and living standards. If not reversed, the productivity slowdown implies something close to long-term stagnation in wages and incomes. Changing the trajectory of productivity growth is a central challenge for the incoming Trump administration — as it would have been if Hillary Clinton had won.

To explain the puzzle, economists have offered many theories. Here are four: 1) Despite contrary appearances, American technology is actually lagging; 2) an aging society weakens risk-taking; 3) too many government regulations discourage start-up firms; and 4) the Great Recession, with peak unemployment of 10 percent, made both consumers and corporations more reluctant to spend, resulting in slower economic growth.

I believe his first point is absolutely right. American businesses aren’t investing in technology like they used to and aren’t creating new technology the way they used to. I’ve been complaining about this for some time. If American companies think they can prosper solely on the basis of retail and management with development, design, and manufacturing being outsource offshore, they’re making a disastrous error.

In fact American businesses aren’t investing in anything the way they used to. The recession of the early Aughts wasn’t caused by a drop in consumer spending but by business spending falling off a cliff.

With respect to an aging society, I guess it depends on what you mean. Contrary to popular belief historically the people who start new businesses aren’t kids. They’re people in their fifties and sixties. When a series of punches has sapped the capital of those people, you shouldn’t be surprised at a decline in startups.

If by aging you mean people in their 70s and 80s, I think that’s probably correct.

To his point about regulations, I think again that’s absolutely correct. Only businesses beyond a certain size can afford the ever-increasing amount of red tape and reporting being required these days. I would add during the Great Recession we subsidized big businesses and left small ones to fend for themselves. That was the wrong strategy although it was politically prudent.

His final point, that we’re still suffering a hangover from the Great Recession, practically goes without saying. If it weren’t true, the recovery wouldn’t have been as phlegmatic as it has been.

The venerable Macy’s and Sears retail chains are struggling. Sears may not last the year. Why? In his Washington Post column Robert Samuelson ponders the question. Here’s his answer:

We have two systems to do one job. Companies have to support the old as well as the new technology. People no longer buy everything in stores, but stores are still necessary. (In 2016, e-commerce totaled about 8 percent of retail sales.) Still, the loss of sales makes brick-and-mortar stores less productive, and their loss of productivity offsets some or all of the gains from digital technologies.

This is, I think, the basic explanation of what’s happening at Macy’s and Sears. They have to invest in the new technology, even as the value of the old technology erodes. The effect is compounded because they’ve been slow to shut marginal stores. There’s always the hope that these stores will bounce back and avoid large losses.

I don’t believe his explanation holds water and it certainly doesn’t explain why Amazon is opening brick and mortar locations.

I think the problem is that Macy’s and Sears are poorly managed. That’s what my experience as a vendor of Sears albeit many years ago tells me. That Sears, the company cut its teeth on catalogue sales, couldn’t figure out that a new kind of catalogue sales had become important, leaving an opening for the upstart Amazon suggests that.

Online is not their only competition. They’re also competing with scads of specialty stores.

Half the time when I go to a brick and mortar retail store I’m told that they don’t have what I’m looking for in stock but I can get it online. To me that doesn’t suggest that they’ve got a technology problem (they’ve already done the investment) but that they’re having an identity crisis.

Brick and mortar stores can compete based on service, based on price, or because you can get what you want now. If they can’t do any of those, they’ll lose, not just to online but to other retail competitors.

Keep in mind that Amazon doesn’t make any money in retail sales, either. The company is making its money providing web services, the infrastructure it built to support its retail operation.

Here’s another explanation: maybe ordinary people, the kind that Sears used to consider its customer base, just don’t buy as much as they used to because they don’t have the money. Retail sales increase when people buy Ferraris, sable coats, and 120 inch 4K flatscreen TVs, too. But you don’t need a lot of physical locations to do that. Just a few very carefully placed.