Neil deMause: The Website

Reason #1 never to believe economic predictions in the media:

The number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits fell for the third straight week, evidence that layoffs are continuing to ease in the earliest stages of an economic recovery. —AP, 9/24/09

The American economy lost 263,000 jobs in September — far more than expected — and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the government reported on Friday, dimming prospects of any meaningful job growth by the end of the year. —New York Times, today

Reason #2, three headlines that greeted me in a stack on Google News this morning:

Manhattan Apartment Sales Bounced Back Over the Summer, but Not All the Way

Manhattan real estate sales ’stabilizing’

Manhattan Apartment Prices Drop for Second Quarter

Finally, if you want some predictions with actual research behind them, I offer Rutgers economists Jim Hughes and Joseph Seneca, who predict that we could be heading into the “Lost Employment Decade,” and that it could be 2017 before unemployment drops to pre-recession levels of 2007, and called this an “optimistic” projection: “It’s not going to be an easy slog from here.” Though of course, I read about this in a newspaper report, so it’s probably best to take it with a grain of salt.

There are some tentative signs that the recession may finally be able to do what Hurricane Katrina did not: Get the news media to pay attention to the 1 in 8 Americans — or more, depending on how you’re counting — who are living in poverty. Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a long essay by Barbara Ehrenreich decrying the media focus on the “Nouveau Poor” and noting that while the economic hard times have been hardest on the already-poor, they’ve all but disappeared from the public debate in favor of laid-off stockbrokers forced to limit their vacation travel. (To be fair, the already-poor were mostly never there to begin with.) Notes Ehrenreich bitterly: “‘Low-Wage Worker Loses Job, Home’ is nobody’s idea of news.”

That’s certainly been the case, but could it be changing? Witness today’s Wall Street Journal, which takes a look at rising welfare rolls that actually manages to dig deeper than the usual recitation of stats, citing my former radio comrade Liz Schott to the effect that though welfare rolls are rising, they’re still lagging far behind food stamp enrollments, a sign that there are plenty of needy unable to meet the strict income and work requirements imposed by welfare reform. “But people in between have the hardest time,” one food stamp recipient (and non-Nouveau Poor person) told the Journal. “You don’t make enough money to get by but you make too much to get help.”

The real test, of course, is to see whether this is a trend: While it’s hopeful that the Times piece says “First in a series,” the rest could end up all being about former yacht salesmen who are forced to buy their steaks at Costco. Stay tuned.

My biweekly sojourn in Metro addresses the hair-trigger panic that seems to be gripping us (and if Krugman is to be believed, probably isn’t going away on its own any too soon):

The Defense Department bright lights who decided to swoop Air Force One low over Manhattan last week, it’s now clear, did us all a favor: By panicking an entire city about the prospect of another 9/11, they gave us a welcome respite from panicking about swine flu.

Panic, in fact, is the default mode these days, whether what’s setting it off is the threat of global pandemic or merely of our car warranties not being honored… [read more]

I’ve been wondering about how to reconcile the need for consumer spending to save the economy and the need to stop buying so much useless crap for a while now, and wondering where I’d find a guru to make sense of it for me. Finally, I found a spiritual leader of one kind:

It’s not an easy time to be an American consumer. At every turn, we’re told that our free-spending ways have brought us to the brink of economic disaster. And now that we’re again hiding money in our mattresses, what’s the solution? As Uncle Sam ordered from the cover of last week’s Newsweek: “I Want YOU To Start Spending!”

Fortunately, the Rev. Billy has a way out… [read more]