FROM ÞE ARCHIVES: Productivity Growth Optimism, & Oþer Topics
In two days I cover a variety of topics, ranging from the trends and implications of productivity growth in the US economy, to the origins and influences of some cultural traditions, to the personal experiences and opinions of the author on hiking, politics, and history. This is a good glimpse into the early days of webblogging, when the medium was still relatively new and experimental:
PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH TRENDS: The Economist focuses on this past quarter's productivity growth number, without taking a look at the larger picture: Economist.com: ‘Output has dipped and climbed, but has the trend rate of growth risen? Economists are still far from a consensus...’. The figure below plots the quarter-by-quarter productivity growth numbers since 1970, alongside a centered eight-quarter moving average. Yes, the quarter-by-quarter numbers do jump around. Yes, the early stages of a business cycle recovery are often times of unsustainably high productivity growth--following a period of abnormally low productivity growth as firms hoard labor during the recession….
The rapid productivity growth of the quarter just past is a small piece of evidence that trend productivity growth has accelerated. But there are a lot of other pieces of evidence as well…
THE INVENTION OF TRADITION: Listening to a tape about the life of Stephen Foster, 1826-1864. A Pittsburgh boy, a ninth child, born, schooled, and lived in Pittsburgh pretty much his entire life. Yet this guy from Pittsburgh created an amazing amount of what we now think of as southern and western folk music: "The Old Folks at Home", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Old Black Joe", "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground", "Oh, Susannah!", "Camptown Races", and others. What's a guy from Pittsburgh doing writing songs about the Swanee River? About Kentucky plantation mansions? About mining camps?…. Similar weirdness includes the fact that the words to the Christmas carol version of "Greensleaves"--"What Child Is This?"--were written by a late-nineteenth century Victorian trying to write something that would sound like Tudor dialect. "Why lies he in such mean estate?" indeed…
ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL: Highly recommended: The trail to Donner Summit Lake…. The marching song of the Pacific Crest Trail: “Everywhere we go/People want to know/Who we are/So we tell them:/We are the unacclimated/The feeble feeble unacclimated/Unacclimated to the high country/With too few red cells in our blood...
NOTES: NIXON AND CIVIL RIGHTS: From Sally L. Todd Sistersara@aol.com…. ‘In the fall of 1960 this program was scheduled to begin with the arrival of 500 African students. Ford and other foundations had arranged full scholarships for this group, with many institutions making their own scholarship commitments. The only involvement of the US Government in the project was to be award of travel grants to get the students here, and of course the normal visa services…. In August of 1960—just before the students were to depart on Charters that had been organized, the opponents of the project raised it in the US Senate, and there was a full floor debate…. Eventually the Senate vote was tied, and Nixon cast the deciding vote against funding what by then had come to be called the "African Student Airlift." The following weekend, Tom Myoba (a Kenyan Labor Leader then traveling in the US) visited the Kennedy home at Hyannisport, and the Kennedy Family foundations agreed to pay for the Charter flights. As a result, the students all arrived, though they lost about a week of their planned orientation program. It might be useful in appreciating this story to know that among the first group of students selected for this project was Kofi Annan. Nixon's deciding vote against this project was covered by the major media as it happened, but it was covered in depth by the Black Press…
I'M NOT AS SMART AS I THOUGHT I WAS: Ah. I thought--from GDP and aggregate hours data--that we would have a 4% per year productivity growth quarter in the spring of 2003. I was wrong: we had a 5.7% per year productivity growth quarter. It is amazing that nonfarm business hours worked can fall--and fall at a 2.2% annual rate--in a quarter in which nonfarm business output can rise at a rate of 3.4% per year. If only we had demand rising fast enough to employ more rather than fewer people, the performance of the American economy would be truly amazing…
AMERICAN ACTION MARKETS: Ah. A certain shoe drops... ‘AAM Concept Overview: Analysts often use prices from various markets as indicators of potential events…. The American Action Market (AAM)… trading futures contracts that deal with the two most important questions facing the world today: (1) What will the U.S. government do next? (2) What is informing the U.S. government's current behavior?…