Live Images of the New Normal: Unemployment Extension Won’t Help 99ers - WSJ

SOURCE: Unemployment Extension Won’t Help 99ers - WSJ:

The extension for unemployment benefits that is part of the compromise tax deal is good news for many of the unemployed, but it won’t provide aid to anyone who’s been out of a job over 99 weeks.

That’s a concern because the number of 99ers may be increasing. The number of people who have received their final payments from extended-benefits programs this year through the end of October — the most recent month for which data are available — is over one million, and that number has been steadily increasing. Separately, the Labor Department reported that nearly 10% of the unemployed in the third quarter of 2010 — more than one million people — had been out of a job and looking for work for about two years or more. Meanwhile, initial claims for unemployment have been trending lower recently, but the biggest surge came in early 2009. The peak of 643,000 claims in a single week came in March of last year, 89 weeks ago. Anyone still unemployed since that peak is likely to run out of benefits soon, if they haven’t already.

The New York Times adds that amidst this mancession:

Misplaced confidence in market forces is making it virtually impossible for the unemployed to man up — or woman up.

None of these figures even begin to take into account those who fell off of the 99-week edge-of-the-economic-Earth, prior to this most recent capitalist extremist economic cleansing. A post-information, post-scarcity economy is by definition a public-private partnership. Neither side can be the supreme commander; each must do their part.

We need Free Markets to create new products, services, innovations, and the number of jobs possible. It's utterly absurd to mandate non-productive, make-work J.O.B's (Justifications Of Being). It's even worse to panic and claw back industrial jobs that are needed for development throughout the rest of the world.

We need Basic Income to provide for social stability and human dignity in a nation where nearly 20% U-6 Unemployment is already the norm; and it's heading to 30% because we keep becoming more and more labor efficient. We should not roll back those efficiency gains just because we've never encountered such breakthrough levels of achievement ever before in history. In the so-called advanced west, should look at the world as it is and make the adaptive changes required to show the way forward. If we do not, why would today's developing nations seek to emulate us at all, if widespread unemployment, poverty, and panic are the final outcomes of mastering the efficiencies of advanced industrialization?

It's time to increment our understanding, time to move forward. That's the PlusPlus in Capitalism++. BasicIncome.Org | USBig.Net

Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory

Forum on Capital as Power: "Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory." Conference Program and Videos. Co-sponsored by Routledge and Springer. Brennan, Jordan and Cochrane, D. T. and Starrs, Sean. (2010). Conference held at York University in Toronto on October 29-31 2010.

Trend of Unemployment Claims as % of Continuing Unemployment; US Population vs. Employment, vs. Labor Force, vs. Continued Unemployed

Inquiring minds might be interested in a pair of charts courtesy of Mish's reader Tim Wallace.

Note the trendline of new unemployment claims as a percentage of continuing unemployment.

SOURCE: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MishsGlobalEconomicTrendAnalysis/~3/bYS8QnW6vbA/trend-of-unemployment-claims-as-of.html

Shared via my6sense

Unsustainable Resource Skews: The Messsage Made it Through

But the WORK remains to be completed.

Do a little googling in various time frames for the quoted phrase "unsustainable resource skews" and you will find that we began signaling this particular message from approximately April 2007. So, it may have taken a little over three years to really reach mainstream exposure, but every single character typed in every single random forum and chat session, adding just one more voice to the rising global chorus for change, has been worth it.

That said, over the intervening time, many of us have come to the conclusion that there may ultimately be no other way of addressing what NPR has fleshed out as overwhelmingly unsustainable Income Inequality, or Slate's expose series on The United States of Inequality, or the New York Time's mandate for Confronting Income Inequality, other than to make the entire unsustainably skewed system completely irrelevant.

The institutional pathology just runs too deep and the hoarding dementia at the helm is impossible to reason with. If Warren Buffet can't get through, who can? It's pointless to confront people who are incapable of comprehending their own mental illness, or who refuse to adjust their world view to the empirical data right before their very eyes. They're fixated on a particular perception and to hell with facts.

We also may not need to resort to dramatic measures like rapidly aggressive taxation. For one, that wouldn't really make for structural change; it just moves around the deck chairs on the Titanic.

So let's leave the demented to continue living in their make believe world a little longer, while we go about the business of accelerating adaptation for the real world that the rest of us live in. Things will fall apart gradually all around them; they won't understand what's gone wrong; and by the point that they do notice there will not be much empathy left for that world view because when we gave it the opportunity to change, it decided to dig in with a rabid, foaming, snarling, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine. Since the Objectivists among that number would be first and foremost to say, "we all choose our own fate," then apparently the 95% of us at the bottom can see precisely the fate chosen by an economically sociopathological 5% of the population.

If you were numbered among that 5% and made the decision was to dig in with what you got, then when the rest of the 95% of us unilaterally decide that what you got is worthless, do you see how that works, now? Oops, too late.

There are extraordinary new efforts underway and proven programs that have been a quarter century or more in the making that could essentially obviate the entire current economic fiction. When the time comes, the transition can be done relatively quickly, with little or no social unrest because 95% of people will be instantly better off and only 5% will be raging like lunatics; at which point, we will all indeed see pathological hoarders for what they've always been: snarling demented sociopaths; literally, people who lack a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience; and in extreme cases, even while paying lip service to those very principles.

Look, nobody is saying that "all rich people are demented." That's absurd. Anyone who has read this space with any frequency knows that's nothing even remotely close to the point. The sad problem is that there is a large enough number of textbook-defined clinical sociopaths in that 5% that we may have no other choice but to simply move forward without them.

So maybe this provides something of a definition for the "++" that some have asked me about, wondering what precisely that means. It means we simply leave the previous iteration behind. It's broken, don't fix it. Leave it on the side of the road and walk on. No big conflict. No big votes. Just move on. We'll figure it out.

Capitalism and Confidence: "Not So Much, Any More"

"Capitalism in the West thrives because of our ability to legally transfer property, with confidence and certitude. Only, not so much any more."
-- Barry Ritholtz

But wait, there's more:

"And we will see that at every step along the process, the reckless rush for easy profits has systemically undermined these legal property rights — how mortgages are recorded, the bungled bundling of notes to be securitized, the electronic system that fictionalized the process of assembling transfer documents, and how all the players along the way — The investment firms, banks, law firms, even court system, utterly lost sight of what they were doing.

If de Soto were to come to the United States today and review all of this, he would see a system that ignores its own laws, cheats on process, engages in wanton fraud, and is in danger of sliding not just backwards to the 18th century, but slipping towards a third world nation of dubious legal protections and the worst form of crony capitalism.

Welcome to 21st century America."

88% of Americans say "Now is a Bad Time to Find a Quality Job"

According to Mish, anyway.

Some policy implications of the interdependence of cyclical and structural unemployment

From Econobrowser.

Valuations of Unskilled Labor

So here's a question: how many climbs like this per year should a human have to make in order to make what YOU make clicking you little tippy-tappy mice and pads and pocket-protected whiney little smart phones every day? Could you even make that climb, once in your entire life? Probably not. Yet do you depend on the signals relayed from that tower for your cute little iPhone? Likely, every single moment of every single day.

So how many climbs per year should it take to justify the climber's existence and feed his kids? 1? 6? 12? 24? As many as you can push them to do just short of dying? Or do you subscribe to the "F them, they're expendable unskilled monkeys, theory?" Show of hands?