3.6%

I look forward to the jobs report coming out at 8:30 am on what is typically the first Friday of the month. If it's during the academic year, this is the news item that begins or ends class on Friday. And I get a particular thrill looking at the report(s), coming to my own conclusion, encouraging the kids to come to their own conclusion, and then (finally) seeing if our conclusions aligns with what the journalists and the markets are saying. 

So, how does the job market look? On a scale of cataclysmic bad to awesome, this one landed somewhere between okay and good (with meh being below okay and solid being above good). One of the two headline numbers is the unemployment rate which went down a little bit, from 3.7% to 3.6%. Down is good, but the difference between May's and June's numbers is very small. Further, we are about as low as possible with the unemployment rate. Due to frictional (firing and quitting), structural (when demand for one particular type of job dries up), and seasonal factors there should be about 4.0% of the population unemployed. So by the standard definition we are at or a smidge below full employment. By the way, here's the report. Oh, and please keep in mind that the unemployment rate tends to make things appear rosier than they really are. 

Looking at more lines on that report, we can see some hey-the-glass-is-half-full sort of numbers. The participation rate is unchanged. Long-term unemployment and discouraged workers are both decreasing. Part-time for economic reasons is also down a little bit. That's good news for a lot of Americans. 

There's a few ugly lines, too, though. The unemployment rate for black Americans jumped upwards. Same with Latino and Asian segments of our population. And youth unemployment went up, too. This is all suggesting some problems in the labor market related to the service industries. 

The other headline number is the quantity of jobs added. One finds that information on a sister report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (here it is). Again there is a combination of good and bad news, with a little bit more good than bad. In June we saw 209,000 jobs added to the economy, lower than the benchmark I use of 225,000 in a good month in a healthy economy. The diffusion index is going the wrong way (I invite you to think 50.0 = bad and 75.0 = great), but it's rising for manufacturing. So, again, I'm seeing a pattern here that services might be weak but durable goods / manufacturing might be strong. 

One also finds wages and hours reported on this report. Those numbers seem to indicate upward movement in the economy. Both wages and hours are rising a smidge. That's good news for people at work. But will rising wages contribute to more inflation? More on inflation when that report comes out Wednesday.

Of course the markets reacted poorly on Friday, and that's where the irony of all the labor market stuff comes into play. We have a job market that's more good than bad but the markets swoon? Why would that occur? Because the markets worry about interest rates, and the Federal Reserve likely will resume raising interest rates later this month. The evidence suggests there's more slowing the economy needs to do to get inflation under control. And that leads to the big policy dilemma facing us right now. Inflation is more of a problem than jobs. To get inflation under control, one can make the jobs market worse. Ugh. More on that later. 

TPIR

For reasons too random to list here I've started watching The Price is Right again. What a pleasant show!

And, my, things have changed since I last tuned in. No, I'm not just talking about the new host. (Drew Carey seems to have grown into his role as host.) The games remain a mix of new and old. The audience is clustered in pods, though that might just be a legacy of the Covid era. But there's no commercial break between the first and second pricing games! And the troupe that used to be known as Barker's Beauties are now the Price is Right Models. And there's a man in that group!

I guess, though, those changes are more cosmetic. The bones of the show remain the same. They encourage the audience to participate by giving contestants help with answers. The format is largely the same: six pricing games, two big wheel spins, two showcases. The host is on the contestants' side. Those elements are all in place. 

So, can I repurpose elements of the show for my classroom? Probably. Mom claims that my favorite TV show when I was little was The Price is Right and I should probably consider that foreshadowing of my career as an economics teacher. I need to give thought to using some clips from the show when I'm working through inflation in Macroeconomics. And some of the Blackjack-like elements fit nicely with marginal analysis in microeconomics. 

There were two moments with the show that gave me cause to reflect as a teacher recently. First, an episode I watched recently happened to feature a young man from the area, Benjamin Hartranft. Benjamin is somewhat well known in the North Penn area: he's an outspoken advocate for including individuals with a diagnosis of Autism. He does public speaking engagements on inclusion for those with special needs. He's done a fantastic job leveraging relationships and goodwill with area schools and sports teams. And he was a contestant on an episode that aired recently. The show and its host seemed to do very well working with Benjamin, allowing him to authentically compete. 

And then, also, I watched the documentary The Perfect Bid which made a dive into the history of the show. From it I learned that in the Bob Barker years there was typically no editing. In other words, they filmed it stem to stern, then allowed the video of what they filmed to simply go to broadcast. They didn't reshoot segments. They didn't cut material that wasn't worthy of making it to screen. They ran the cameras, kept it with the time parameters, and allow the production crew to put it in the can and get home early. In other words, Bob Barker and the crew were essentially executing an hour-long lesson on prices, probability, and personality, every day, for more the two decades. I think I can relate to that. 

Fives!

The College Board said they were releasing scores on July 7. They were wrong. They came out on Wednesday, July 5. Their release led to a really fun burst of activity. 

The two kids I worked with most directly on these efforts (aside from my students) both shared their fives with me. Sam earned a five in AP Euro! I'm thrilled, though I would've been thrilled with a four. Oh, and Amber, the daughter of a friend, shared her news of a five early on also. I had coached her through some tricky material while making dinner a couple of times (it was funny . . . she twice realized she was stuck on something in AP Macro around 5 pm or so, so she called, and I would walk through the intricacies of deficit financing and the nature of the Long Run Phillips Curve while stirring something). Sam, by the way, mostly did this on his own. I nudged him occasionally, and once or twice I affirmed and clarified the feedback he was getting from his teacher. Ironically, I won't hear from the majority of students I actually taught this year. 

Those two are teenagers, though, and slept in a little bit. The first person I heard from was my friend and partner in crime at work who shared the news that a student we were rooting for earned a three. She passed! We were quite pleased. Then my friend and I proceeded to evaluate the status of our annual bet (Who scored better in AP Macro? that person deserves a beer!) I was convinced I would be buying this year. Lo and behold, we tied! Tied with a 4.06 average. 

It's remarkable about how this publication of test scores got teachers talking in the midst of the summer. There were three other colleagues in my department I was connecting with about AP Economics scores. One colleague just joined us in teaching it this year, and his kids did pretty well on it. Another colleague had been tutoring one of my students, more on executive functioning stuff than economics material per se. She was happy to hear the student earned a four. By the way, when students share news of a four with me, my response is largely similar to how I respond to a five. Sometimes the difference between earning a four and five is luck. (The understanding evinced by a four is quite different than that evinced by a three). Oh, and usually fours are good for credit at colleges. 

Though I tend to be skeptical of standardized tests I have put a lot of stock in these results. It's a chief gauge by which I calibrate my teaching practices. I keep close track of my results with a spreadsheet, looking to see what my long-term trend is but also seeing if there is fidelity between what a student earns in my class and how they perform on the exam. In many ways, this data represents my chance to reset and focus on the year ahead. This year, the reports indicate that my students and I met with more success than it felt like we were meeting in real time. I should be reluctant to do too much differently in the year ahead. 

Four(th)

Happy Independence Day! We celebrate our nation's birthday today and mark how many years we've made it around the sun since 1776, the year of our nation's birth. Or was it 1776? Quite a bit of controversy has been stirred the last few years since a group of journalists at the New York Times launched an endeavor urging Americans to think of 1619 as the year of our origin. That, by the way, was about a dozen years after a colony emerged in present-day Virginia. Our Constitution was drafted on September 17, 1787, a day we mark as Constitution Day. And on January 1, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Could these, also, mark our beginning as a people? 

But even if one were to focus in on the Revolutionary Era, the story gets messy. The Second Continental Congress began meeting in 1775. The Boston Tea Party took place in 1773. Any of those events could mark our genesis as a nation-state. If we were to go later, our treaty of friendship with France in the winter of 1777-78 short-circuited a plausible chance at a negotiated peace with Britain. And the fighting of the Revolution didn't end until 1781, the treaty formalizing our peace settlement two years after that. Any of these years could claim to be our starting spot. 

Oh, and the Declaration of Independence itself wasn't promulgated on July 4. Actually, on July 2. And as soon as the ink was dry, our Founding Fathers (or at least the most noteworthy of them) fled Philadelphia for their states believing that the most important work of nationhood would be happening in those thirteen units. Thomas Jefferson, often credited as the Declaration's chief author, was one of those who returned home for the important statecraft. Who was left in Philadelphia minding the store? Young bachelors and old widowers. The B-team of the Founding Fathers. 

Dates are fun, but history is messy. Major eras don't start and end as cleanly in real time as they do in our rear-view mirror. When was our nation born? There's a lot of plausible answers to that. The totemic importance we put on the precise date of July 4 might catch the signers of that document a bit surprised if they were alive today. July 4, 1776 is a good compromise date for a long and complicated story. A story that involves the messy emergence of this country I love, and that's why I celebrate this day. 

Ambivalence

Ambivalence can be described as being of two minds. And that is how one can characterize my response to the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down race-based affirmative action. Is the Constitution color blind, obliging government to ignore circumstances of race? Or, is the Constitution a document compelling government to put its thumb on the scales to counter-balance racial injustice? Was it time for a two-dimensional definition of inequality (race-based) to give way to more sophisticated ways of understanding inequity? Was it a mistake to cast aside a system that gave black and brown kids a shot at elite colleges that might otherwise be denied in favor of white and Asian students? It's really hard to say. 

That elite college thing is the thing, though, isn't it. I've worked for many years with students applying for college, and many of them are focused on acceptance into one of those elite colleges. Casting aside the merits of that pursuit of the prized sheepskin from that prized institution, I've come to know that the process by which one gets admitted is a game. And games can be gamed. And now the rules for the game will be in flux for at least a little bit until a new equilibrium is reached, an equilibrium that offers a silver bullet combination of essays and/or GPA and/or test scores and/or life experience that brings home the prize. Frank Bruni's take on the game of admissions remains a masterpiece in understanding this realm, a realm whose rules the Supreme Court has temporarily scrambled as one would the image on an Etch-a-Sketch. 

One major reason for pause, though, is what we have seen in the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Many of those who cheered the Supreme Court's decision to reverse that controversial half-century-old precedent did so because they hailed the promise of letting the issue of abortion return to the States where it supposedly belongs. What we received is Constitutional cacophony. What is legal in what state and when? What governor vetoed? What veto got overridden? What state supreme court ruled on what? What will be dealt with via state executive order vs. state law vs. amendment to state constitution? And then will abortion become a civil or a criminal issue? Confusion and noise have prevailed above all else on that issue in the year since. And we will see that happen with college's attempts to create or maintain diversity on their campuses. Can a college cultivate a student body that is diverse? And if it can, what form will that diversity take? I guess it will depend on the state in which the college is functioning. I'm sure that will add another layer of complexity to the game of college admissions, creating a longer limbo until we arrive at the game's new and not-entirely-equitable equilibrium. 

More like a frisbee . . .

One of the more compelling articles I've read in sometime isn't about politics or economics or history, but instead about this big not-quite-as-round orb we call home. Here's a link to the New York Times article about the changing tilt of our planet: Pumping Groundwater Has Changed Earth's Spin, Study Finds. Well, that's fascinating. Apparently we don't go round and round an axis as neatly as that globe on your desk suggests. In fact, my favorite line in the article likened the planet's trip through the solar system to a wobbly frisbee. So, why is the earth's tilt changing? Long-term geological reaction to an ice age long ago (is that too political?), climate change (uh oh, that is getting political), and the pumping of massive amounts of underground water (okay, that can get uncomfortable real fast). Not to worry: our seasons aren't going to change anytime soon. But we could see our GPS technology fouled by this modification of what the planet is doing. 

There's always a tradeoff. Always. We cannot seem to agree in this country as to whether or not our behaviors and economic activity is changing the climate, though it seems foolish to think there is not some tradeoff to all of the energy we create and consume. And the article's first two explanations for the change in Earth's tilt seems to take the two different sides of any climate debate. Interesting. But that third one is a kicker. And it's hard to dispute that extracting billions of gallons of water from beneath the surface of the earth won't somehow alter the mass of this rock as it hurdles through space. There's always a tradeoff. Even if that tradeoff is just the inconvenience of a little bit less precision from devices we take for granted. 

And the piling on keeps piling on . . .

Institutions are made up of people. Institutions are also easy to blame. Just take a look down the road in Philadelphia where the Moms for Liberty Convention is meeting. There's a lot of institution-blaming going on down there. Bureaucrats at departments of education. Schools. Teacher unions. It's also easier to blame these institutions than the teachers. Even the political hopefuls who are obsequiously playing for this crowd know this. Maggie Hanna in the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that "Some of the education officials were careful to draw a distinction between union leaders and rank-and-file teachers." This blaming of institutions isn't entirely honest, because it allows individuals to blame individuals implicitly and indirectly. Is it really the unions, the schools? Or is the problem that "We've got a lot of bad teachers, and the problem is you can't get them out?" Those are our former president's words. At that same convention where so many falsely profess their concerns are about the institutions, not the people. Baloney.