By Christopher Briem, on April 11th, 2012
Not anything in the news today that I see, but in general I have to admit I get confused when I read most opining on the source of job growth in the region’s economy. So below is just a straight up look at where recent job gains are coming from in the Pittsburgh region. It’s the job gains that are most likely fueling the migration gains of late which then has a big impact on local real estate markets. The big decline in ‘government’ jobs is of note. Of the 3,300 job loss over the year, just about half (1,600) are losses in state government jobs. 600 jobs were lost in the Federal government, 500 in local school districts and 600 in local government other than the school districts.
By Simon Grey, on April 10th, 2012
Sixty percent of women in the United States who are 65 or older do not have enough income to cover basic expenses without help, even if they are married, according to the report.
That is compared to 41 percent of men in that age group.
The report compares income, not including food stamps or help with utility bills, to very basic monthly expenses for housing, food, transportation and health care. For a single person, this Elder Economic Security Standard Index, developed by Wider Opportunities for Women, estimates an annual income of $19,000 to $28,000, depending on whether they own their homes outright, rent or pay a mortgage. For married couples, the necessary income to cover basic expenses ranges from $29,500 to $39,000.
More than half the nation’s elderly do not make enough. But women, who typically outlive men, are more vulnerable. Nearly half of white women, 61 percent of Asian women and three-quarters of black and Hispanic women have incomes that fall below the Elder Index levels. Men 65 or older report incomes that are almost 75 percent higher than women’s.
There are two trends that promise a miserable future for women.
First, the sexual revolution, which has enabled female promiscuity on a scale heretofore unseen, has done serious damage to marriage, and will continue to do so as men realize that informal LTRs are preferable to legal marriages. This means that women are less likely to have husbands in the future, ad will be less assured of having access to a man’s wealth. This will be problematic for women since it is already difficult for them to make ends meet without spousal or government help.
Second, the current federal spending trend is unsustainable. Quite simply all the benefits that today’s retirees take for granted, plus all the other benefits that politicians continue to promise them in their various bids for election, will simply not exist in the future. People cannot have everything, which is one way of saying that resources are finite. At the current rate of consumption, they will eventually be squandered, and no one will have anything. This means that women will be even worse off because the government will not be able to provide for them anymore, particularly if environmentalists of the left wing manage to impose their plans for destroying the economy for Gaia.
Women will have three options to avoid this mess. They can either take their future financial security into their own hands by getting degrees and jobs (and real jobs, wherein one actually contributes to the economy and doesn’t merely engage in busy work), they can marry beta providers (trololol), or they can become part of an alpha harem (and here alpha refers to a man who can command resources to provide for multiple women). My guess is that women will go down first path until the bottom falls out of the economy and demand for superfluous workers declines, and then they will go down the third path, which will incidentally lead to the decline of civilization.
By Christopher Briem, on April 9th, 2012
Mark my words, the energy story of 2012 will be the 2nd order effects of a natural gas glut that will peak as they run out of storage to even keep the natgas being produced. What then? Good for some manufacturers for sure, but not for others.
Take for example the opening paragraph in this story today from Calgary: Gas supply glut curbs pipeline spending
The dampening of support for two proposed northern frontier natural gas pipelines to Alberta by their backers indicates an economic awakening that’s been at least three years in the making
.
As much as I know the Keystone Pipeline, and all the investment and jobs it could potentially induce, is at the center of national politics… the investment being turned off elsewhere will be a bigger deal. The pipeline just in the news above is a $16 billion dollar project. That is a lot of pipe that is not going to be bought.
You would think low prices and potential that the nation will run out of storage capacity for natural gas prices would slow production, you would not know from looking at Ohio. There will be books written on all of this someday.
and while we are all still absorbing the news of a potential ethylene cracker going into Beaver County, just note that Shell is also making noise about an even bigger Natural Gas to Diesel project that may go to Louisiana.
The bigger Pennsylvania story is going to be the royalty payments many households have already been spending. There just have to be a lot of folks spending their initial royalty checks without much consideration of how long they will last. With natural gas prices dropping there is going to be an impact for sure and it may be bigger than some expect.. Pennsylvania court rulings have meant that state landowners only get royalties on the market price net of production costs which are reported to be just under 90 cents/mcf for Marcellus gas. So at current prices the royalty base ($2 minus 90 cents) is down conceivably 90% from mid 2008 (when prices were over ~$10/mcf). It is not inconceivable royalty payments will virtually disappear if gas prices continue to drop. I have seen no stories on this across Pennsylvania which makes me wonder what the delay is between production and royalty payment calculation. If that delay is long, it means most just have not seen the bulk of the impact yet in their checks. Since I hear stories of people paying cash for a lot of the noveau riche mega purchases… maybe the consequences won’t be so dire, but hopefully there are not credit purchases that will come back to bite folks.
Finally if you are all doom and gloom on the price of oil and gasoline, some useful perspective in USNews: Be Wary of the Gloom and Doom Predicted by Energy ‘Models’.
By Christopher Briem, on April 5th, 2012
Just one way to look at the monthly dump of labor force data for the Pittsburgh MSA. The headline is that the region’s unemployment rate dropped 2/10ths of a percent to 6.7%, but that just isn’t the story. I will point out though that to overparse the rate dropped to just under 6.66%. If the unemployment count had dropped just a couple hundred more it would have been a 3/10’s of a percent drop over the month. That rarely happens.
Anyways… here is a far more interesting trend with the latest data appended.
 February 2012 labor force = 1,235,200. It was a bit higher in October of last year, but it is the highest ever for a February. The year over year jump being reported of +16K is pretty meaningful even if not really commented on anywhere. There is a subtle transition going on in the regional economy you can start to see with this months data. The absolute labor force peak for the region was a single month spike showing up in October 2008. That one month came in at 1,238,500, not all that much higher than the number just reported and I will stretch to say October this coming fall will really be a peak. These are the seasonally adjusted numbers which should smooth variations within the year, but I don’t think the adjustment really captures the scale of seasonal employment shifts here in Pittsburgh. So October is typically not smoothed over and can be a spike because it captures both the back to school employment which is big here, while a lot of summer construction is continuing.
The shift is that when you go back and look at October 2008 it was right in the middle of the AP-dubbed ‘Great Recession’. So lots of anomalous things going on in a lot of regional labor markets that were probably inhibiting normal migration flows across the nation. Economic worries in a lot of places that were hit harder than Pittsburgh probably were not ‘pulling’ people from Pittsburgh at normal rates. People staying in place here, while others coming here from regions that were already seeing rapid job losses probably played into the labor force surge here at the time. ‘Surge’ relative to what Pittsburgh has normally experienced in recent years.
Now however, there has been a significant drop in the national unemployment rate and national job growth over the last year. In a lot of regions Pittsburgh normally ‘competes’ with for people and jobs the rebound has been significant. So the ‘pull’ of people and jobs elsewhere has probably started to return to normal levels. Yet there is no sign of a turnarourd in the upward labor force trend here. That really marks a different dynamic if these trends sustain themselves.
If recent labor force trends showing Pittsburgh comparing well to the nation were really mostly an artifact of the recession, then when the recession ended. you might expect things to revert for Pittsburgh. I was not expecting it because Pittsburgh’s divergence from national trends began well before the recession even appeared, but it was something to watch for. For the moment the evidence is that Pittsburgh’s trends were not a corollary of the recession. If the relative differences in unemployment rates (Pgh vs. US) continue, it bodes well for migration trends as reinforced by the labor force numbers. Little secret, but labor force participation rates do not jump around anywhere near as much as people think they do. Near term trends in labor force at a regional level is more impacted by workforce migration.
By Simon Grey, on March 20th, 2012
She is far from alone, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve, due to be published shortly.
It shows that between 1993 and 2006, there was a decline in the workforce of 0.1 percent a year on average in the number of college-educated women, with similarly educated spouses.
That contrasts with growth of 2.4 percent a year between 1976 and 1992.
The result: the labor force in 2008 had 1.64 million fewer such women than if the growth rate had kept up its earlier trend, slightly more than 1 percent of the total workforce in that year.
I have commented on these job losses a few times before, so this time around I want to highlight the gender dynamics a bit. These cuts to state and local government workforces, while a significant drag on the economy as a whole, are particularly damaging for women. In 2011, women made up 46.6 percent of the overall labor force, but among state and local workers, about 60 percent are women. Because women are so disproportionately represented in state and local jobs, they also have taken the brunt of the job losses in state and local governments. Of the net change in total state and local employment between 2007 and 2011—a decline of roughly 765,000 jobs—70 percent of the drop is from female employees. Today, there are about 540,000 fewer women in state and local jobs than in 2007, compared with about 225,000 fewer men.
The first thing to note is that women are not as indispensable to the workforce as is generally supposed. The first story tells us that the economy grows just fine without them, since GDP increased from $6.6 trillion to $9.9 trillion (in constant 1993 dollars) from 1993 to 2008** in spite of there being 1.64 trillion fewer female participants in the labor force.
Now, it is possible that nominal GDP would have grown in the event of greater female labor participation, but this hypothetical occurrence could potentially be due to the fact that it is easier to record the contributions to GDP in the event of increased formal channels of production. For example, there really is no way to calculate, say, how much a SAHM’s completion of household chores contributes to GDP, while one can calculate the costs of formally recognized cleaning agencies. This is to say that a SAHM’s economic contributions are not—and indeed cannot be—generally accounted for in the official measurements of GDP, while a SAHM’s replacement goods and services (say, pre-cooked meals or day care) can be accounted for. As such, any potential growth in nominal GDP that might result as a result of hypothetically increasing the labor participation rate of women might occur simply because the contributions can now be officially measured.
The second thing to note is that women take disproportionately economically damaging jobs. Government bureaucracies impose economic inefficiency on citizens. At the most basic level, this accomplished merely by taxation. At more advanced levels, some economic inefficiencies take the form of asinine regulations that must be met. If the government does provide some desirable services (I would argue for education and criminal investigations and prosecutions), it is likely that these services could be performed more efficiently on the free market, away from the coercion of taxes. On the other hand, the government may provide some services that aren’t desirable at all, like issuing driver’s licenses, in which case the loss imposed by this economic inefficiency is simply revealed in its direct costs. Additionally, the government may impose some counterproductive services, like regulation, that not only impose direct costs on taxpayers (which is one form of inefficiency) but also indirect cost via increased consumption costs (which is another form of inefficiency).
That there are a disproportionate number of women that work in government jobs, it is highly likely that, in the aggregate, women impose significant economic costs by their employment. Since they work so many government jobs, relatively speaking, eliminating their jobs would lead to either more efficient outcomes through privatization or the elimination of wasteful or counterproductive spending. Remember, regulations and vast government services are luxury goods, which makes them marginal items, not the foundation of society. Thus, eliminating women from government jobs frees up the economy to do things that are more productive.
When all is said and done, it would appear that the feminists’ press for gender equality in the workforce is nothing more than a steaming pile of bovine fecal matter. Women are not needed for economic growth, and in many cases their presence in the workforce hinders it. As such, the call for increasing women’s presence in workforce seems a little forced, and not particularly well thought-out. Perhaps it’s time we encourage women to leave.
* On a completely tangential note, can you tell which of the two excerpts was written by a journalist and which one was written by an academic?
** Figures derived by going to Google’s Public Data and the BLS’s Inflation Calculator.
By Christopher Briem, on March 19th, 2012
The Atlantic had a short look at the state of the Irish economy of late: Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Ireland! Now About That Miserable Economy …
Hard not to mention that Ireland was once pointed out as paragon for Pittsburgh to follow. See in the PG: We can import the Irish miracle.
Times change.
But that is not why I mention it. The Atlantic touches upon something more relevant to Pittsburgh today. Ireland has had a dramatic transformation in its economy, recessionary times of late not withstanding. I’ve had this discussion with folks from Ireland and it is not me making this statement. But in Ireland it may be that the case of the Celtic Tiger is really the story of the Celtic Tigress. Irish women, much like Pittsburgh women before them, lagged their peers in labor force participation and that fact alone may have kept the Irish economy depressed for so long. So the Atlantic says ” The biggest, and only sustainable, gain of the Celtic Tiger economy lay in coaxing women into the workforce, “.
For Pittsburgh, no matter what you read about transformation this, or transformation that, make no doubt that the most meaningful story of transformation in the Pittsburgh economy has been in the story of female labor force participation catching up with the nation’s. The impact of that is bigger than most everything else we talk about when it comes to economic change in Pittsburgh.
I will throw out there again the quote from 1947 that presages it all. Here is the advice that was ignored until it was too late:
(Pittsburgh) will, however, slowly decline unless new industries employing women and those engaged in the production of consumer goods are attracted to the area.
Which is from a report written by a place called the Econometric Institute based in News York City and titled: “Long Range Outlook for the Pittsburgh Industrial Area”, stamped February 12, 1947 and was for the Allegheny Conference and the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.
If that all strikes you as too distant a history to matter. I will point out again the really remarkable factoid that only in the last couple of years has the number of women working the Pittsburgh region sustainably topped the number of men. For the region as a whole the employment numbers are about even for men as for women. For Allegheny County… it is clearly now a majority female workforce. Ponder that. I have yet to see anyone really take notice, but follow the previous link for some hard data showing the convergence of male and female numbers in local employment data.
By Christopher Briem, on March 16th, 2012
So.. since both the PG and the Trib agree that the biggest news from the latest labor market update is that 10K folks dropped out of the labor market.. things must be bad right?
What nobody mention on the size of the labor force is that some of the 2011 labor force numbers were revised, and revised upward. Ready for this? The December 2011 seasonally adjusted labor force number for the Pittsburgh region was moved to 1.24 million. Up from the 1.231 million originally reported. So an increase of 9K. That December # may be largest labor force ever recorded for the region. I have not actually checked (because the data is not all online yet) all the historical revisions as yet to see if maybe there was some other peak. But the December 1.24 million number is in the press release just out. It is possible October 2011 was higher if it that number is revised. October 2011 is now showing as 1,236,700, which is lower than the December.. but that may change. Whether or not October changes, we are basically bouncing around the peak labor force ever and well within a reasonable range of sample error for the labor force data.
But since it is last month’s news technically nobody is going to look back. Yet if you really think about it, the January data is preliminary as it always is when this monthly data comes out. The harder data here is the December data we have now moved on from talking about. Should be the other way around. Yes, if you really take in what I am saying. The decrease in the labor force everyone is focusing on pretty much the same as the revision upwards in the December labor force numbers the January numbers are now being compared to. Put another way, the 10K people everyone is focused on as ‘leaving’ the labor force are showing up because we now measure 9K more people than were thought to be in the labor force the previous month.
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By Christopher Briem, on March 15th, 2012
The Bureau of Labor statistics just put out its routine revisions of employment data and it looks like 2011 was actually a better year for jobs in the Pittsburgh region that previously thought. Here is what I get for the scale of change which is positive every month by some nontrivial amounts.
| Total Nonfarm Jobs in thousands |
|
|
|
|
Previous |
Revised |
| Jan |
1111.2 |
1116.1 |
| Feb |
1112.3 |
1118 |
| Mar |
1122.7 |
1128.3 |
| Apr |
1137.6 |
1142.7 |
| May |
1139.6 |
1152.5 |
| Jun |
1154.7 |
1160.6 |
| Jul |
1143.2 |
1149.9 |
| Aug |
1140.5 |
1147.5 |
| Sep |
1147.7 |
1155.9 |
| oct |
1162.6 |
1170.4 |
| Nov |
1163.5 |
1171.1 |
| Dec |
1164 |
1169.7 |
By Simon Grey, on March 9th, 2012
Hasbrook, who turned 17 in January according to her Tumblr, is a high school junior from Oregon. During this NYFW, she walked for Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, Theyskens’ Theory, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Lacoste, Victoria by Victoria Beckham, and Houghton. That’s a big debut for a model. On her blog, she also describes doing looks for Reem Acra, shooting a video for Lacoste, and working various photo shoots; again, typical for a successful new face during fashion week. These long hours are just one reason why the CFDA recommends that girls under 16 not work fashion week: the shows last a month, which often has the effect of forcing these girls to make an uncomfortable choice between staying in school and pursuing their careers, and while some underaged models are chaperoned (Hasbrook says her mother traveled with her to New York), many girls — especially the majority of models who come from poorer countries — are not so lucky, and work unsupervised. No organization currently conducts background checks on the adults who work with minors in the fashion industry.
Before discussing this in depth, there are a couple of things that must first be clarified. First, the primary purpose of education is to increase a child’s intellectual capital, and so prepare him or her for work later on. Second, teenagers are perfectly capable of work (just ask this guy). Third, my personal bias is toward child labor, primarily as way to train children to become productive adults. For what it’s worth, I had a paper route at age eight, started mowing lawns for money when I was twelve, started painting when I was fourteen, and had my first “official” job when I was sixteen. I’m very used to working, and I don’t think it all that demanding for children, and more especially teenagers to have jobs that fall within the range of their abilities.
Now, in the first place, it seems obvious that having a job and, more broadly, work experience of some sort is a good thing. This is true even if you’re a young lady working as a fashion model. Remember, the whole point of an education is to prepare you for work. Now, if you’re already working, there isn’t actually that much of a point in going to school, since you already have the benefits of school (i.e. a job). Thus, the tradeoff between work and school is in many ways a false dichotomy because school does not have that much more to offer you if you’re already working as a supermodel.
In the second place, the career trajectory of female models differs quite a bit from their looks-challenged counterparts. As Vox pointed out, there are a decent number of hot young models that have married young and started families, usually at the expense of their career. There does not appear to be any extensive data on whether this is a trend, but the anecdotal evidence seems to bear it out. As such, it is somewhat ludicrous to even suggest that education in general is all that important to girls who go into modeling because it is highly likely that a significant number of them will leverage their looks into marrying a high-status (read: usually wealthy) man. For those who were educated in public school, this means that looks, not education, are the relevant factor for a model’s long-term plans, and so it would be far more beneficial for models to skip school in favor of their careers, as it will help them to widen the pool of potential mates.
Therefore, we can conclude that child labor laws suck, because their general application is actually counterproductive in some cases.* As is seen in this case, the proposed labor regulations would actually be harmful to under-aged models, as it would prevent them from achieving their general goals. Since it is feminists that are proposing these laws (and ugly ones at that), it seems reasonable that this proposed legislation is motivate more by jealousy than actual concern. Of course, once the old hamster starts spinning, it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between the two.
* Yes, I know that labor don’t apply in this case. However, it is an article calling for legislation/regulation of some sort, and is thus relevant to my broader point regarding labor laws.
By Christopher Briem, on March 6th, 2012
Forbes looks into population migration trends with some neat graphics: Ten American Comeback Cities. The data for Allegheny County seems to be popping out for them.
We’ve been parsing the IRS migration long time.. I have some reports back to the 1980’s, but with the data becoming more accessible you see more and more folks looking at it like this. Still if you want more on the data compiled at a metropolitan level for Pittsburgh the latest is what I compiled last year in this report which already had its news cycle fwiw… still good to see the national perspective.
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