Entering the Job Market in a Recession

The OMB has released some numbers that pertain to some previous posts here on the subject of starting your career in a recession. The key chart appears here:

So, if cohort X enters the job market under conditions of just 1% higher unemployment than cohort Y, even 15 years later, cohort X's wages are still 2.5% lower.

Quoth the OMB:

The long-term effect isn’t just a residual of low first-year wages: the author suggests that poor job match, lower prestige placements, and fewer opportunities for training and promotion also play a role.

I'd be curious, too, what effect could be developmental: does understanding of employment and adulthood tend to form through the start of one's career, and then stick with the individual, leaving less motivation or ambition? Perhaps a way to test this would be to displace people who began their career in locations with chronic unemployment/recession (such as, um, my hometown) and see if the wage effect still exists compared to those whose entire career has been built in the new location.

Tim Wise

It is well worth reading in full Tim Wise's recent article asking us to imagine if the tea partiers were black. Unlike the blog post that has been circulating lately, Wise's original post contains annotations for all his quotes and anecdotes.

Petrol Consumption Per Capita

From the Infrastructurist (click to enlarge):

Carbon Emission Trends

Take a look around NPR's infographic tool for evaluating carbon emissions and trends worldwide.

Chickens and Private Health Care

From Paul Krugman:

Conservatives don’t like this; if few of them propose paying in chickens, there is nonetheless a constant refrain of calls for making the market for health care more like the market for bread, with consumers paying out of medical accounts and engaging in comparison shopping. There is, for example, vast romanticizing of things like Lasik and cosmetic surgery, which are held up as models for health care as a whole — even though they’re actually very poor models. (They’re discretionary and fairly cheap — not at all like the procedures that dominate health costs in the real world.)

Fighting Terrorism

One of my favorite new sources of information is a site called "Barking up the wrong tree," which appears to be written by someone who spends all his time looking through recently published research and abstracts to report to us, as he says, "just the interesting stuff." He recently reported from the Copenhagen Census on the subject of whether it is worth it to combat terrorism with anti-terrorism measures:

Three of the five “solutions” proposed here – business-as-usual, increased proactive responses, and enhanced defensive measures – have very adverse benefit-cost ratios under a wide range of scenarios, even when the most promising assumptions are invoked. The most effective solutions are the cheapest, but they must overcome the greatest obstacles that require either greater international cooperation or more sensitive and farsighted policymaking. Such qualities seldom characterize rich countries’ actions.

It's been my suspicion that the best way to react to acts of terrorism is to treat it like a natural disaster (and no, oil rig explosions don't count as "natural"). We should react quickly and maturely to help those in need and repair any damage done, but any large-scale response demonstrating fear of terrorists tends to justify that method of getting one's point across – and is also about as effective as attempting to stop all earthquakes or hurricanes.

It's possible the metaphor could extend further – that, much like we could look at global climate issues that could elevate the frequency and severity of hurricanes, if we are serious about reducing terrorism, we should look at global economic (and religious?) issues that could lead people to consider drastic methods to change their lot in life.

Some pretty imporant information regarding the disaster in the gulf

The WSJ reports that the flow of oil could have been cut off via the use of an acoustic trigger system that the rig in question lacked. The cost of the trigger would have been merely $500k (which you can compare to the rig's replacement cost at 560 million, or the billions that would be required for clean up of the disaster (which will probably not include billions more in undocumented externalized costs)).

William Galston of the New Republic documents some of the reasons why the rig might have lacked it. It wasn't required, and the Minerals Management Service (a division of the Interior Department) had experienced a shift in their policy recommendations between 2000 and 2003 regarding whether it should be required for every rig. If the insinuation is unclear or unpresumed, they previously advocated the requirement for each rig to be a regulation, later they thought they maybe the cost was a little too much.

I found the following particularly revelatory:

After the Bush administration took office, the MMS became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.” They adopted a “private sector approach to essentially everything they did.” This included “opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act.” On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked. One of the employees even had a lucrative consulting arrangement with a firm doing business with the government. And in a laconic sentence that speaks volumes, the IG reported: “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”

Galston conjectures the administration's role, "What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy – a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks."

Thanks, guys.