Unemployment rates seem to fall quickly

Looking at a graph of unemployment rates over the past fifty or so years gives me reason for hope with getting a job.





It really does seem that unemployment spikes are short lived events. They drop nearly as fast as they go up, and don't seem to last that long. The spike we are having right now is really quite normal on the scale of historical events, and therefore in two or three years I expect the employment situation to be America as usual.

If true, think of how amazingly well this turned out for Obama. Had this crisis come a year or two later he would have been blamed for it. If however in four years the unemployment rate is lower than it is today, which looking at that graph seems reasonable, than he can take credit whether or not his actions were the reason things improved.

Feeding your 128 slaves.

A typical person is burning energy at a rate of about 100 Watts. However if you add up the total energy usage of a modern American the number comes up at something like 12800 Watts. So, you have the equivalent of 128 slaves working full time for you.

This is a common thing for energy researchers to point out. After all it demonstrates the amazing progress of the human race over the past few centuries and the importance of energy in our lives. It also gives a great deal of perspective on just how massive the issues we will be facing are. It also happened to show me another way to think of the impossibility of using biofuels to keep our economy going at its present state.

Right now we are feeding these 128 slaves with mostly oil, coal, natural gas, and Uranium. Since we can't eat any of these it is really hard for us to think about just how energy rich these materials are. Switching to biofuels would require you to stop feeding them this inedible material, and start literally feeding them food. To keep our standard of living we would then have to grow 128 times as much food as we grow today. This is the equivalent of feeding thirty eight billion Americans!

Of course next generation biofuels will allow us to stop feeding these slaves corn and soybeans and swap them with switch grass or some other inedible plant. It doesn't really change anything though. We can certainly grow more switch grass than corn, but we can't even get close to 128 times as many calories of switch grass. Why waste research money on this when there are so much more promising routes to take?

Academic Earth

Academicearth.org seems like a pretty impressive webpage. It doesn't have much new, and still has far too few courses on it, but it does do a good job of finding college lectures and courses from around other sites, and it also does a good job of rating talks. It is fairly easy to locate the best of the lectures and avoid the worst.



This physics lecture is really how physics should be taught. Most physics courses seem to get bogged down in mathematics without ever giving you much understanding of the world around you. He seems to move seemlessly from talking about abstract concepts, to real world examples of how we have used the ideas.

And the Index Funds win again

I have been convinced for some time that managed mutual funds are little more than a scam. They don't do much better than index funds on average, and the fees you pay for them are high enough that the need to do a lot better than managed funds to make any sense at all.

I therefore cheer on yet another study showing this to be true.

American Environmentalism

It has been pretty clear to me for some time that America is not as far behind Europe in environmental issues as most people seem to think. For example: we produce more electricity from Geothermal, Wind, and Nuclear power than any other country; our experiences with the dust bowl have resulted in us taking soil conservation far more seriously than much of the world; we have developed some of the most effective pollution control systems such as the sulfur trading credits. A newsweek article I just ran into makes this point pretty effectively:

California, with its 37 million people, emits 20 percent less CO2 per dollar of GDP than Germany. It generates 24 percent of its electrical power from renewable fuels like wind and solar, compared with only 15 percent in Germany and 11 percent in Japan. It also has the world's largest solar-power plant (550 megawatts in the Mojave Desert), the largest wind farm (7,000 turbines at Altamont Pass) and the most powerful geothermal installation (750 megawatts at The Geysers north of San Francisco). Although California isn't immune to the economic crisis—its finances are on the brink of collapse, which could translate into growing support for those who argue that green measures cost jobs—its green accomplishments put it at the head of the pack. If California were a country, its economy would rank as the world's 10th largest and could lay claim to be one of the world's greenest.

It seems to me that our main issue is we just use too much oil and coal. We certainly do more of that than Europe does. Once we get that under control we aren't doing so bad though.

Real Estate Supply

There seems to be a commonly held idea that it is population increase that is the primary driver of housing construction in America. For example in the New York Times today I ran into the following statement:

Consider housing starts, which have fallen to their lowest level in 50 years. That’s bad news for the near term. It means that spending on construction will fall even more. But it also means that the supply of houses is lagging behind population growth, which will eventually prompt a housing revival.

This idea while seemingly common sense is actually rather off base. The median sized home has more than doubled in size in the past fifty years, at the same time as the median household size has decreased by about one person. We are living in a lot more space than ever before. The times when the normal family lived in a one room farm house are long gone. This means that it is how much space we want to pay for that will judge how much housing we need. Predicting how much that will change is a far more tricky problem than looking at population growth, and assuming we will need more houses. What if we just decided we wanted to work less hours, and live in smaller houses?

Another way to look at it: It is quite likely the United States population will never double again. Right now it has something like a 72 year doubling time, and almost all of that is from immigration. The birth rate is at the replacement level, and if what has happened in Europe is any guide it is as likely to drop below replacement level as go above it. If however the population does double at the current rate, and we didn't build another house for the next 72 years, just maintaining what we have, than there would still be enough housing for us all to have the amount of square footage that the average American had in 1950. Because population is likely to never double a second time just maintaining what we currently have, and replacing homes destroyed by disaster or neglect, we could get by just fine without ever having to build another home.

Of course, since homes seem to have turned into little more than status symbols we might just decide we can't get by without 5000 square foot homes. Still, I feel safe in saying that Americans would be no happier if we doubled the size of our homes, than if we halved it.

Poor Stock Market

I just ran into this Business Week article. It is pretty stunning just how bad a decade the stock market has had:

During the darkest 10 years of the Great Depression, from September 1929 to September 1939, the stock market dropped roughly 50%, adjusted for inflation. With today's drop in the stock market, the U.S. has now matched that unfortunate milestone. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, adjusted for inflation, is now down about 50% over the past 10 years from Feb. 17, 1999 to Feb. 17, 2009.

Of course all the Great Depression comparisons are still pretty silly when we don't even have double digit unemployment rates. Still, it is shocking to me just how bad the stock market has been hammered. Many really safe investments are starting to sound like a better, and better idea because of it.

Deep inside me though lurks a voice screaming "buy low, sell high!" I thought the same a year ago though since the stock market had already had one of its worst decades ever. Apparently having one of the worst decades ever does not imply that it can't get much much worse. Still, I have trouble believing that there really will be another decade drop like the last one.