October’s Sobering Jobs Report Adds to Mounting Bad Economic News
2023-11-04
The Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) released new jobs data on Friday. According to the report, seasonally adjusted total nonfarm jobs rose 150,000 jobs in October, month over month. The unemployment rate rose slightly from 3.8 percent to 3.9 percent over the same period.
The headline payroll increase of 150,000, however, was possibly among the best news to be found in today’s new jobs data, however. Once we delve more deeply into the numbers, we find substantial evidence that the "strength" of the job situation is greatly overstated by the payroll numbers while employed persons, wages, and other measures point to trouble ahead in in economy already strained by growing bankruptcies, mounting debts, and disappearing savings.
For example, more than one-third of all new employment growth in
Affective Polarization Is Making Us Dumber
2023-11-03
Last month, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University announced that it was laying off almost all of its staff, in spite of having received almost $55 million in funds in the last three years. Critics have jumped on Kendi’s fall to renew arguments that he’s a grifter or a “midwit,” but there’s another underappreciated aspect to Kendi’s fall. Kendi always struck me as someone who had the raw intellectual horsepower to succeed but whose rigid ideology pushed him toward ideas and solutions that were farther and farther from reality. In that way, his fall represents a cautionary tale for all of us.
A few years ago, a landmark study published by Cambridge University Press claimed that our rigid ideologies could actually be making us dumber. The study’s authors