1/10 - It's 5:52 in the morning, and I am revisiting decades-old thoughts about race, class, and privilege; about "Line" and "Staff" jobs and who tended to get each in the civilian Federal workplace from which I retired; ...

2/10 - ... about EEO, Diversity, "avoiding the appearance of impropriety" in assigning salary ranges to different classes of hard and sometimes dirty work, and the extent to which these salaries and classes seem "Stamped from the Beginning," to use a phrase from @DrIbram.

3/10 - These ideas and thoughts woke me up from sound sleep and had their seeds in a dream on a recurring theme I was having: I was back in my Federal Civilian office job, and we were once again wrestling with reorganization because it was moving our duties out from under us

4/10 - I have these kinds of dreams because of, I think, my disposition, which according to the way my Federal @DeptofDefense workforce management wanted to divide up the work to be done, made me a tough person to fit . . and possibly to promote.

5/10 - I had no desire to do anything but the fascinating technical work for which I was hired and, later, for which I boosted my productivity tenfold by cross-training. This came at a price, but also raised in my mind questions about that price.

November 2020 US NPD THREAD - November 2020 consumer spending across video game hardware, content and accessories reached a November record $7.0 billion, 35% higher when compared to a year ago. YTD spending totaled $44.5 billion, 22% higher than the same time period in 2019.

US NPD HW - Consumers spent a November record $1.4 billion on new video game hardware, an increase of 58% versus YA. Growth was driven by the launches of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. Year-to-date hardware spending reached $4.0 billion, 34% higher than a year ago.

US NPD HW - PlayStation 5 was November's best-selling hardware platform in consumer spending, while Nintendo Switch led the market in units sold.

US NPD HW - PlayStation 5 achieved the highest launch month unit and dollar sales for a video game hardware platform in U.S. history. The records were previously held by the PlayStation 4, which debuted in November 2013.

US NPD HW - Nintendo Switch has been the best-selling hardware platform in units sold for a record 24 consecutive months.

These are 10 of my favourite #UrbanEconomics articles published in 2020, in alphabetical order by author, continuing with a tradition from the last couple of years

1) @TrebAllen, Arkolakis & Takahashi, JPE. Shows key theoretical properties & predictions of large class of trade/geography gravity models depend on 2 parameters: elasticities of supply and demand. Proposes IV estimation strategy relying on GE structure

2) Ambrus, Field & @rmgonzalez046, AER. 1854 London: prices fell in blocks served by well transmitting cholera. Differences persist. Model: tenants change as contracts expire, -ve externality of poor tenants, shock makes landlords persistently target poor

3) @kon_buechel & @maxvehrlich, JUE. More sociable individuals sort into cities. Even after accounting for sorting, those in denser areas call each other more often & longer, suggesting complementarity between face-to-face and phone interactions

4) @CarozziFelipe, JEEA. Shows how credit constraints affect composition of housing sales & access to home-ownership by the young. Neat model of housing markets as ladders with young in cheap units, possibly trading up as they age, post-2008 UK evidence

Payrolls in November rose a mere +245k. That's the sort of number you might see in a "normal" month, and definitely not what you're hoping for in the snapback from a covid-induced shutdown.

THE RECOVERY IS STALLING.

Remember, the economy lost 22 million jobs, then gained roughly half of them back.

We still have 10 million fewer jobs than we did in February. Clawing the rest back at +245k per month will take basically forever. If this is the second half of the recovery, it's going to be grim

The dramatic ups and downs of recent months might hide the real story here: The economy is in a deep hole -- as deep as in the darkest days following the financial crisis -- and the recovery is faltering. Barely there. Making no progress. Stalled. Stopped.

The proximate causes of our slowing economy are obvious:
The virus is back, which hobbles the service sector, and stimulus has basically petered out, leaving the economy with little help. It doesn't have to be this way.

The household survey suggests that employment actually declined (by -74k) last month. So the fall in unemployment from 6.9% to 6.7% largely reflect the fact that an additional 400k people dropped out of the labor force.

What you need to know about Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Bill.

Crude oil dominates Nigeria’s economy, accounting for around 90% of export earnings. #NigeriaNeedsPIB

The country has the largest oil and gas reserves in sub-Saharan Africa with an estimated 37bn barrels of oil and 188 trillion cubic feet of gas. #NigeriaNeedsPIB

Yet for decades, the virtually ungovernable industry has been plagued by poor leadership, eye-watering corruption and environmental degradation. #NigeriaNeedsPIB

Value has leached away through opaque licensing deals, unaccountable middlemen, a lack of refining capacity and graft in the government and state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). #NigeriaNeedsPIB

Sabotage and pipeline theft in the oil-rich Niger Delta have ensured that the taxpayer loses out on billions of dollars in annual revenues. #NigeriaNeedsPIB

Here’s the thing about equality intersectionality.

A serious effort to reduce socio-economic inequality (that did nothing on race or gender) would inevitably have disproportionate benefits to BAME communities and women.

Because they are more likely to be poor. (1/?)

So Liz Truss’s starting point is not off the wall.

*Sometimes* efforts to increase BAME inclusion or female diversity end up helping only those who were privileged already. The same woman who sits on 8 boards. The privately educated middle class child of a lawyer who gets onto a special internship to improve diversity in the law.

If you want to seriously address racial and gender disparities you need to also tackle poverty and sociology economic inequality. You have to be intersectional.

Because the middle classes - including BAME people and women in them - are good at protecting their privilege.

But the same is true if you start - as Liz Truss does - on the other side of the equation.

As I said: reduce inequality and women and BAME people will disproportionately benefit.

BUT

1) Since 1970, the United States has increased its population by 64%.

Northeast Ohio, a 12-county region with more people than Connecticut, has lost 7% of its population over this same time period, shrinking from 4.1 million to 3.8 million people.

2) In 1970, 1.4 million of those 4.1 million people lived in the four core cities of Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown.

Today, barely 700,000 of the 3.8 million people live in those four cities.

3) The region was once a model of working-class prosperity. It was an exemplar of how people who didn't have a college degree could support their families, earn a good salary with good benefits, and have a stable middle-class existence.

4) In 1960, median household income in metro Washington D.C. was only 9% higher than in metro Cleveland.

Today, median household income in metro D.C. is 82% higher than in metro Cleveland.

5) This morning, I read that Ohio is poised to break its all-time annual record for drug overdose deaths.

If you look at this great analysis by @InnovateEconomy you will see that Ohio is one of the worst-performing states in terms of expanding

Family member asks me to buy pepperoni.

I search for "pepperoni".

201 results returned.

That's a lot of items with pepperoni.

1/x

Wondering if they have large bulk packages of pepperoni, I change the sort order to "Price: high to low" with hopes that any bulk items will show up at the top.

All the results are pizza snacks: tiny pizzas and pizza rolls.

There are now only 17 "pepperoni" results returned.

I filter for "Meat" and still only get pizza snacks.

And the number of pepperoni results drops to 7.

This isn't helping me find a large quantity of pepperoni.

I start over with a new search for "pepperoni".

I get 201 results, and the results displayed above the fold are the same as my original search.

I filter for "Deli".

It now shows 51 pepperoni results.

Yesterday, at the end of @dbongino's pod...he talked about creating a "parallel economy."

I have a few questions for you pertaining to this. Specifically, what is the end game of a "parallel economy?"

Did we not have a parallel economy back in the 50s? An econ that was segregated for white people and "negros" (Historical context, NOT derogatory meaning).

So, I understand your idea about creating competition in the market place

Competing News Aggregators
Competing social media platforms
Video hosting platforms
PAYMENT processing platforms

Competing scholarly journals
1000s of competing news outlets...

But a parallel econ?

A parallel econ in it's entity will continue the wedge in the country which, historically, is exactly the discourse and demoralization that the left/communists THRIVE IN!

You're advocating for a systemic chaos system of constant conflict...hear me out.

Will this "parallel econ" create a "parallel country?" What geographic territory will this "parallel economy" hold?

By creating a parallel economy, you're creating a parallel country that is running in two separate, but diametrically opposed directions.

What is your endgame?

1. Crushing the middle class for the glorious NWO:

I just finished talking about how government works to my boys' yaya of 23 years, who's a self-proclaimed DDS. I explained to her who controls the budget, why lawmakers suck up to the President, why politicos kill each other during elections for what seems like a measly salary. 1/

I told her why I was angry with this government's response to the pandemic, how we're trillions deep in debt but hardly feeling any of it, how we're the laggard in the region in addressing COVID despite how much higher our tax rates are. I explained why we need to vote better. 2/

But what eventually made everything I was saying to her sink in was when I told her, "You know, this lousy government, it doesn't affect me or my family. You've seen that. We can sell off all our assets if we want to and just migrate to another country if we have to." 3/

I said, "All throughout this pandemic, did you see any adverse effects on my family? No. We eat what we want, my boys can turn on the aircon in their rooms and just be on the computer every day if they wanted to. We didn't suffer. But guess who did? The poor, like you." 4/

And it was then that it finally sank in how voting for someone inept impacted people in her social class so much more adversely than it ever could someone on my social class. This discussion started because we talked about Pacquiao running for the Presidency, and she liked him 5/