Recall what I said about ‘official’ figures being fake?
Respected economist John Williams agrees. His hard numbers closely match the eyeball "guesstimates" Dan Gougherty and I have previously posited.And the truth, Williams claims, is that the economy has always performed much more poorly than the federal numbers indicate. Prices are higher, fewer people are working, and the economy is growing at a much slower pace. Even now, when the nation faces its greatest crisis since the Great Depression, the real dimensions of the disaster are still being obscured by gimmicks. It's a message that has earned him an odd bit of notoriety, to the clear frustration of some of the country's most prominent economists, who claim that Williams has built a career misrepresenting complex mathematical models and spreading panic.
Take February, for example. What does Williams think was the true state of the economy? The official unemployment rate was listed at 9.7 percent, but according to Williams' models, the real number, including part-time employees and workers who have just given up in despair, is closer to a staggering 21.6 percent. The official February inflation rate was 2.1 percent; Williams argues that it's really around 5.5 percent. And GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009 was not 5.9 percent, as the government claims, but 2.9 percent.
--
But it's when the feds report the results of the payroll survey, Williams claims, that the major distortions show up. The number that gets all the headlines, the so-called U-3 Measure, is the number of utterly unemployed people. A broader measure of unemployment, which is called the U-6 Measure and includes part-time workers and "discouraged workers," or people who have recently stopped looking for work, usually puts unemployment at a little less than twice what we usually read about.
But Williams claims that even the broader measure is erroneous because sixteen years ago, the feds changed the definition of so-called discouraged workers. "Up through 1994, this was the definition of discouraged workers: You met all the other qualifications, but you haven't looked for work in the last four weeks," Williams said. "In '94, they changed the definition so that in order to be discouraged, you had to have not looked for work in the last four weeks, but you had to have worked in the last year. The result knocked several million people out of consideration. ... Those who hadn't looked for work in the last year just weren't counted." The result, he said, is an army of unemployed workers that the government simply redefined out of existence.
--
Williams' most controversial critique concerns inflation, expressed as the Consumer Price Index. The CPI is an index of commodities you need to buy in order to live the average American life: a gallon of gas, a slab of steak, etc. Once upon a time, measuring CPI was simple; you took the price from the year before of all the goods in the index, compared it to the price today, et voila. But in the 1980s, Alan Greenspan and others tweaked the model, adding an assumption known as "product substitution," i.e., that consumers would switch to cheaper but essentially equivalent goods if the price of any given commodity got too high.
"They said that if the price of steak went up too much, people would buy hamburger, and the cost of living would go down instead of up," Williams said. "But the CPI is designed to measure what you need to maintain a constant standard of living. It moved the measurement of CPI away from measuring a constant standard of living to something less than that." And Williams imputes a rather sinister motive behind the change: if you lower inflation with gimmicks, you can reduce everything from interest payments on the national debt to cost of living adjustment to Social Security payments. Suddenly, national leaders had a more transparent interest in arcane CPI minutiae.AlterNet
So? How can a poor man stand such times and live?
A five-minute walk improves health, study shows
The blooms appear because the weather is warming and the days lengthening, and those factors, in their turn, spark a hormonal change in us all. "The brain's chemistry alters," says Dr Holmes, "notably in banishing what used to be called 'winter blues', but is now more accurately labelled seasonal affective disorder or SAD. A hormone is released called melatonin which wakes us up from what you could see as akin to a period of hibernation and lifts our mood."
But the benefits of spotting an eye-catching wisteria, whether it be on a Notting Hill mansion or a council house in Kirkcaldy, may also improve our mental and physical health, according to a study published last week by a team from Essex University, headed by Professor Jules Pretty, in the American chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology. "We all feel," says Pretty, an environmental scientist, "that spring is a wonderful time for nature, but what we have been trying to do is measure that feeling accurately and therefore lift it out of the realms of quackery."
His paper, A Dose of Nature, finds, in a sample of some 1,250 people, across a range of age groups, that both mood and self-esteem improve significantly in quantifiable ways from contact with nature, especially if that contact includes "green exercise" – i.e. walking, gardening, cycling and countryside sports. "And self-esteem and mood," he says, "are strong indicators of good mental health, and also, in the long-term, of good physical health."
The study shows, for example, that being in a green environment is better than being in an urban one in terms of a measurable positive effect on blood pressure, hormones and stress levels. Intriguingly, it also concludes that the biggest beneficial boost from exposure to nature is gained within the initial five minutes of each encounter with the great outdoors. While it continues to reap a harvest thereafter, the crop of positives diminishes. So, it will be the first few steps of a walk through a spring garden that changes your mood most, rather than clocking up the first mile.The Independent/UK
WWOOFING for room and board
It is a taste of the good life for the iPhone generation: more rewarding than InterRailing, safer than kibbutzim. It even has a catchy name, wwoofing. Record numbers of environmentally conscious young people are volunteering through the organisation Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (Wwoof).
In the UK alone, volunteer numbers have doubled in the past three years; providing a stream of free labour that is proving a godsend for some of Britain's struggling organic farmers. At the moment 400 of the UK's 5,000 organic farms participate in the scheme – under which more than 3,000 volunteers work for up to 30 hours a week, weeding, planting and fruit picking in exchange for board and lodging. But the organisation says more farms are needed. "We've had a surge in people wanting placements, and quite a few branches around the world have been swamped and have stopped taking on new members," said Katherine Hallewell, a spokeswoman for Wwoof UK.
"We have the young gap-year types," she added. "And those who use it as a life-changing step. It is a fantastic way to learn about growing, and a good way to learn an alternative lifestyle."The Independent/UK
Also
The economics of organic farming in US
posted by Tom Nadeau at 5:46 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home