Category: Statistics

Welcome to the 3rd World America.

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The rate of maternal deaths in the United States has neary doubled since 1990:

Maternal deaths related to childbirth in the United States are nearly at the highest rate in a quarter century, and a woman giving birth in America is now more likely to die than a woman giving birth in China, according to a new study.

The United States is one of just eight countries to see a rise in maternal mortality over the past decade, said researchers for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in a study published in The Lancet, a weekly medical journal. The others are Afghanistan, Greece, and several countries in Africa and Central America.

The researchers estimated that 18.5 mothers died for every 100,000 births in the U.S. in 2013, a total of almost 800 deaths. That is more than double the maternal mortality rate in Saudi Arabia and Canada, and more than triple the rate in the United Kingdom.

The study was the latest to underscore a steep rise in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. since at least 1987, when the mortality rate was 7.2 per 100,000 births. The U.S. experienced a sharp spike in 2009 that the Centers for Disease Control attributed to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The rate has dipped slightly since then, said Nicholas Kassebaum, the lead physician in the University of Washington study, but it remains stubbornly high.

The increase is in stark contrast to most other countries that have had notable decreases, including many in east Asia and Latin America, the report said. The United States now ranks 60 for maternal deaths on a list of 180 countries, down markedly from its rank of 22 in 1990. China, by contrast, is up to number 57.

The reasons for the rise in the maternal deaths in the U.S. are not entirely clear, but several factors seem to be in play.

The article to go on about diabetes, obesity, etc., but makes not a single mention of the rise in equality and the increasing incidence of extreme poverty.

Note that this sort of decline in wellness and life expectancy for the population was presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We are in the process of destroying ourselves.

So Not Surprised

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Getting away from the mindless contrarianism* that Nate Silver’s rebooted Fivethirtyeight dot com seems to specialize in, Ben Casselman actually does some meaningful statistics, and discovers that the end of extended unemployment benefits has not led to more people finding jobs:

The cutoff of federal unemployment benefits doesn’t seem to be helping the long-term unemployed get back to work.

More than a million Americans saw their unemployment benefits expire at the start of the year, after Congress failed to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program. The program, which Congress created in 2008, had provided federally funded payments to unemployed workers when their state-funded benefits ran out, usually after 26 weeks.
The Senate recently voted to restore the benefits, but the House shows little sign of following suit.

Some economists had argued that the program was doing more harm than good by discouraging recipients from looking for work or taking jobs. They said that because the job market was improving, the time had come to cut off benefits. That would prod the unemployed to get back to work, perhaps leading them to accept offers that seem less than ideal.
So far, however, the evidence doesn’t seem to support that theory. Rather than finding jobs, the long-term unemployed continue to be out of luck.

We now have three months’ worth of job market data since the benefits program expired. The chart below shows job-finding rates for the long-term and short-term unemployed. Notice three things: First, the short-term unemployed have a much better chance of finding a job than the long-term unemployed and always have. Second, the short-term unemployed are seeing a steady improvement in their prospects, but the long-term jobless are not. And third, there’s been no major shift since the benefits program expired at the end of last year. (The chart shows the data as a 12-month rolling average, which could obscure a sudden shift. The un-smoothed data, however, doesn’t show a jump either.)

What a surprise.

The right wing economists, and those who listen to them, people who have been wrong about everything since at least 1929 are wrong again.

* AKA Michael Kinsley disease.

Meh

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Once again, we have a jobs report that is only a bit better than treading water:

Employers are hiring at a more aggressive pace again after a winter cold snap, but the pace of job gains is only slowly making up for years of lost ground in the labor market.

Nearly five years after the end of the Great Recession, the total number of private sector jobs is finally back to where it was as the downturn began in early 2008, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

But that level is still far below what is needed to fully accommodate the millions of people who have joined the work force since then, or relieve the backlog of jobless workers anytime soon.

Still, the addition of 192,000 jobs last month, all from private employers, represented an uptick from the anemic rate of job creation recorded at the turn of the year. That encouraged optimists, who foresee a slight strengthening as the wintry weather in many parts of the country in late 2013 and early 2014 yields to a more inviting spring.

In addition, while the unemployment rate remained flat at 6.7 percent in March, an increase in the number of Americans looking for work also offered up some modest hope that better times could lie ahead in 2014. So too did an upward revision in the number of jobs that government statisticians estimate were added in January and February.

At the current rate, we will have a pre-Great Recession workforce participation rate sometime in the 2nd half of this century.

Uh-Oh………

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Labor force participation rate

It looks like the Fed was a little bit premature in its decision to ease off quantitative easing:

Today’s U.S. unemployment figures were surprisingly bad. Only 74,000 jobs were added to payrolls in December, barely half what analysts had expected. The news was a reminder of how far from normal the economy still is — and of how tricky it will be for Janet Yellen, who’s about to take over as chairman of the Federal Reserve, to explain the central bank’s policy.

That jobs number by itself is more worrisome than alarming. It’s a noisy statistic, subject to seasonal disturbances and big revisions. But it can’t be dismissed, either. It’s enough to suggest that the economic acceleration that looked to be getting under way in recent months isn’t yet a done deal. Some of the markets’ recent enthusiasm on that score needs to be reined in – – and, thanks to these numbers, it will be.

At first sight, the big fall in the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent from 7 percent tells a much happier story. Sadly, no. The fall reflects a further drop in the number of people looking for work. A shrinking labor force reduces the economy’s productive capacity, to say nothing of the effect on the dropouts’ prospects. And the proportion of long-term unemployed — the workers most at risk of dropping out of the jobs market in future months — remains close to 40 percent of the total.

In one way, the implications for policy are clear: This is no time to be tightening either fiscal or monetary policy. Extending unemployment benefits, which already made sense on economic and humanitarian grounds, is now all but mandatory. If this can be financed by extra borrowing rather than by offsetting cuts in other spending, so much the better: Some new fiscal stimulus, however modest, wouldn’t go amiss.

The bad jobs news will make the Fed think twice about its plan to phase out asset purchases — the policy of quantitative easing, which it has been using to supply unconventional monetary stimulus. Until better numbers come along, this policy may be paused or even reversed, a possibility Chairman Ben S. Bernanke mentioned in his last news conference. Financial markets will also expect a delay in any decision to start raising interest rates. On news like this, the Fed will want to avoid any suspicion of wishing to tighten monetary conditions.

It is true that these numbers can be volatile, but it has to give the Federal Reserve a case of gas.

You Know that Whole Inflation Running Wild Thing?

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Not so much:

Wholesale prices in the U.S. declined for a third month in November, reflecting lower costs for energy and cars.

The 0.1 percent drop in the producer-price index followed a 0.2 percent decrease the prior month, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 77 economists called for no change. The so-called core measure, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.1 percent.

Prices of goods and materials used in the earlier stages of production fell for a second month as slow improvement in global markets limits demand. Scant signs of accelerating inflation indicate Federal Reserve policy makers meeting next week have more room to maintain their unprecedented $85 billion in monthly asset purchases in order to help spur the expansion.

“Inflation remains quite tame,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics Ltd. in Valhalla, New York, who correctly projected the drop in prices. “Over the course of the next year, the core numbers will drift up a little bit as the economy remains healthy and unemployment keeps falling.”

An important thing to note is that the inflation hawks have been wrong on everything this time around.

It’s Jobless Thursday!!!!!

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Initial unemployment claims fell to below 300,000, 298000, beating expectations, though the holidays have a lot of noise in there.

More significantly, 3rd quarter GDP was revised upward by a large amount:

The U.S. economy grew faster than initially estimated in the third quarter but weak demand and a pile-up in business inventories buoyed the case for the Federal Reserve to keep up its bond-buying stimulus for now.

Gross domestic product grew at a 3.6 percent annual rate instead of the 2.8 percent pace reported a month ago, the Commerce Department said on Thursday.

It was the biggest gain since the first quarter of 2012, but inventories accounted for almost half of the increase in growth.

“The strong third-quarter growth pace masks the more subdued tone in domestic activity, and as the bloated level of inventory is worked off, we are likely to see a much softer performance in growth in the fourth quarter,” said Millan Mulraine, senior economist at TD Securities in New York.

So, what happened was that more stuff was made, but it just filled up warehouse shelves.

The holiday shopping season could be make or break for the economy.

What, You Mean that Gazillionaires Won’t Leave New York City for Orlando, Florida for Lower Taxes

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So not surprised.

Studies show that the idle rich do not relocate over their tax levels:

It is not news that New York’s political and media elites worship the extremely rich. You can see this when in a tough economy the New York Times publishes a “Wealth” section fronted by a how-to piece on buying Irish castles. You can see it when you hear the city’s billionaire mayor insisting that critics of wealth inequality should be quiet because they interfere with his dream to “get all the Russian billionaires to move here.” And you can see it when you behold Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., slamming a modest initiative to slightly increase taxes on the Big Apple’s millionaires.

Again, none of this unto itself is all that newsy because it isn’t all that new. New York’s “let them eat cake” culture has been around for a long time in a city where almost half of all residents live below or near the poverty line. However, what is news is the extent to which this wealth-obsessed environment helps strengthen the mythologies that distort economic reality.

Cuomo’s attack, in particular, perfectly illustrates this trend. Fresh off raising millions from wealthy donors for his political front group, the governor slammed Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio’s tax hike proposal, claiming it will drive Cuomo’s beloved millionaires out of the state.

“What they fear is that they’re in a place where the taxes will continually go up and there will be a ceiling and they’ll say, ‘I’m going to Florida,’” Cuomo said of the rich. “I believe that.”

Before you join Cuomo in weeping for the Manhattan fat cats supposedly forced to flee from economic persecution, remember that his story is a fantastical fact-free fable — one that conveniently serves the political interests of the aristocracy, but has nothing to do with reality.

Rich people leaving New Jersey and California actually fell after taxes rose, and the decrease in millionaires in New York happened because their wages fell after the financial crisis.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And the numbers suck, but as with the past few weeks, there are computer/reporting issues, so the accuracy is suspect:

Claims for U.S. jobless benefits jumped last week to the highest level in six months, providing the first statistical warning that the damage from the partial federal shutdown is starting to ripple through the economy.

 While half the increase came from California as the state worked through a backlog following a switch in computer systems, another 15,000 reflected the furlough of non-federal workers from employers losing government business, a Labor Department spokesman said as the data was released to the press. Applications (INJCJC) for unemployment insurance benefits surged by 66,000 in the week ended Oct. 5 to 374,000, the most since late March, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington.

Hopefully, we will start seeing some “normal” numbers in the next few weeks.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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The numbers look pretty good:

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits edged higher last week but remained at pre-recession levels, a signal of growing strength in the labor market.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 308,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

The data could provide some of the strongest guidance this week on the health of the U.S. economy as a partial government shutdown delays the release of economic data, including the monthly employment report which was scheduled to be released on Friday.

In related news, we won’t get last month’s figures on Friday, because there literally three people left working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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The number of initial claims, 292,000, sounds good, but there were problems with the statistics:

Initial jobless claims fell to their lowest level last week since the spring of 2006, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Or not.

The reported figure, which estimated that jobless claims had dropped to 292,000, about 31,000 fewer than the week before, seemingly suggested that the economy was finally entering a self-sustaining recovery on the back of a healing job market.

The number, however, is unreliable, the government said, skewed by upgrades on two state computer systems that caused those states to underreport claims. The total number of initial jobless claims is almost certainly higher than reported, though nobody knows the scope of the mismeasurement at this point.

The data malfunction has called into question the accuracy of a major leading indicator, one scrutinized by investors, economists and policy makers alike. It also shined a light on the imperfect and often outdated systems that states and the federal government use to provide benefits to workers and cull data on the labor market and the broader economy — a situation that some experts warn might become even worse because of the $1 trillion in budget cuts spread over 10 years known as sequestration.

The Labor Department would not confirm which two states had issues or guess as to the scope of the mismeasurement. But Nevada confirmed that it had not reported complete claims data to the federal government because of a computer upgrade.

So basically, the numbers won’t mean anything until next week, when the revision comes in.

The shortened Labor Day week probably skewed the numbers too, or at least made it harder for Nevada and a state to be named at a later date to get their act together with regard to the computer update..

It’s Jobless Thursday!!!

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Initial claims hit a 5 year low, with the 4-week moving average, continuing claims, and emergency claims falling as well.

Additionally, 2nd quarter GDP increase was adjusted up to a 1.7% annual rate (forcast was for 1.0%), though this was because the 1st quarter was revised down from 1.8% to 1.1%, meaning that the end position pretty much matched estimates.

It’s an artifact of the ill advised deal that gave us the sequester, because the federal spending cuts to a large degree offset good numbers from the manufacturing sector.

July job numbers come out tomorrow.

Schadenfreude on 401(k) Plans

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Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale, has been reviewing 401(k) programs, and will publicize the really sucky plans that charge excessive fees:

A Yale Law School professor is causing a ruckus among U.S. corporations with plans to publicize a study of employers’ 401(k) plan costs.

 The professor, Ian Ayres, has sent about 6,000 letters to companies, saying he would disseminate the results of his study using Twitter, with separate hashtags for each company.

 Prof. Ayres has mailed out several different versions of the letter since June, and at least one said that he had identified an employer’s 401(k) specifically “as a potential high-cost plan.” He said that he and his research partner planned to publicize the results in spring 2014.

 Tri-City Electrical Contractors Inc., in Altamonte Springs, Fla., received one such letter on July 5. It said that the company’s plan ranked worse than 77% of plans of comparable size based on total plan cost.

 “As a reminder, fiduciary duties are the most stringent imposed by the law, and require administrators to act solely in the interests of plan participants,” continued the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

 The letters come as administrators of 401(k) plans have been under fire for what some workers and retirees say are excessive fees. Federal fee-disclosure rules went into effect last year requiring 401(k) administrators to better spell out the fees being charged to plan sponsors and participants.

The problem is that there are a lot of 401(k) administrators who over-promise returns to justify inflated fees.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that there should be (low) statutory limits on 401(k) and IRA because otherwise, the tax breaks are simply going straight into Wall Street’s pockets (expense ratio is largely unrelated to plan returns).

If you want to blow your money on a mutual fund manager who charges high fees, it’s your business, until Uncle Sam starts supplying tax benefits, at which point, it becomes a matter for the public to discuss.

They Pretend to Pay Us, and We Pretend to Work

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It’s an old joke from the Soviet Union, and in a very real way, it explains much of what brought down the USSR.

Well, the good folks at The New York Times have found a study showing that, after decades of MBA driven management by intimidation, a majority of American workers actually loathe their employers:

I thought of this black mark on my résumé while reading an exhaustive and depressing new study of the American workplace done by the Gallup organization. Among the 100 million people in this country who hold full-time jobs, about 70 percent of them either hate going to work or have mentally checked out to the point of costing their companies money — “roaming the halls spreading discontent,” as Gallup reported. Only 30 percent of workers are “engaged and inspired” at work.

 At first glance, this sad survey is further proof of two truisms. One, the timeless line from Thoreau that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The other, less known, came from Homer Simpson by way of fatherly advice, after being asked about a labor dispute by his daughter Lisa. “If you don’t like your job,” he said, “you don’t strike, you just go in there every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”

Or, as Gin and Tacos notes, “When a job devalues employee, literally and figuratively, their response is often to work just hard enough to avoid getting fired.”

In the G&T case, he’s talking about (underpaid and never getting a raise) teachers at a Catholic school basically checking out for the month of May (multiple showings of Toy Story), but it applies throughout our economy.

In a very real way, we are eating our seed corn, and I fear that it will not become apparent until it is too late.

What happens when we run out or rubes who think that good work and honesty will get you ahead?

H/T Balloon Juice.

And While We are On the Subject of Secrecy and Leaks

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We have another leak which shows that many of the drone strikes were conducted on the basis of the sketchiest of evidence:

The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period, an NBC News review of classified intelligence reports shows.

About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as “other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.

The uncertainty appears to arise from the use of so-called “signature” strikes to eliminate suspected terrorists — picking targets based in part on their behavior and associates. A former White House official said the U.S. sometimes executes people based on “circumstantial evidence.”

Three former senior Obama administration officials also told NBC News that some White House officials were worried that the CIA had painted too rosy a picture of its success and likely ignored or missed mistakes when tallying death totals.

Gee, you think that under the command of David Petraeus, the CIA would let public relations trump the truth?

Hoocoodanode? That’s like his entire f%$#ing career!

On a more serious note, it does appear that a whole bunch of people with very high security clearances are having crises of conscience.

I think that we will see more leaks.