Remember…

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…earlier this year, the local leftybots burned a lot of cycles on reports from the Federal Reserve that maintained that while Minnesota was booming, Wisconsin was languishing.

They’ve been a little quiet since then. 

Why?

Because it’s just not true. 

This just in:  Wisconsin’s personal income growth leads the nation:

As I’ve been saying all along – economies aren’t sprints.  They’re marathons.  It’s going to be years before this all shakes out, and that’s assuming the political situation stays stable (and I’m doing my darnedest to make sure it does not in Minnesota).

9 thoughts on “Remember…”

  2. ” …economies aren’t sprints. They’re marathons.”

    From your lips to the financial industry’s ear, Mitch. CNBC, Fox Biz and the rest of them have encouraged this quivering over every datum as it rolls across the ticker. The first thing I’d teach the lot of them is how to calculate a moving average.

  3. Don’t get caught in the correlation = causality trap.
    To show a cause and effect relationship, determine what is limiting growth and remove it.

  6. You do seem to be a random statistic generator, Emery.
    How does Walker do it? An aura of non-job creation that follows him around?
    i am serious, Emery. How do Walker’s reforms inhibit job growth?
    Please ground your answer on accepted economic theory, classical or keynesian, rather than correlation=causation.

  7. I’m just an over-educated engineer who learned to write and who reads a lot of history and economics. When you bring an understanding of math and science to the softer topics of history and economics, its possible to bring clarity to what are frequently fuzzy and opinion-laden topics. People come to me every day at work to ask me to give a simple explanation of how complicated processes of physics and chemistry work. This is just a hobby, but I try to bring the same clarity and precision to our discussions of policy and economics.

    /The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance published a long-term study, which examined a 13-year period from 2000 to 2012, showing that sluggish job creation has characterized the state [Wisconsin] since the start of the millennium./ http://media.jrn.com/documents/WITaxpayer.pdf

    Read enough of my comments, and you’ll find I can be as full of shit as the next guy on occasion. They ain’t all pearls of wisdom.

  8. Y’know, emery, if you don’t mind a little advice, history+economics is not as good as history of economics. Keynesian economics did not replace classical economics, it modified classical economics, and for very specific reasons that may no longer hold true, especially concerning the impact of powerful trade unions on cost elasticity. Keynes is much misunderstood, especially by politicians (terrible breed) who like the idea that it is government spending, not private investment, that makes an economy grow.

    Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the laboring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of Society into accepting, a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they and Nature and the capitalists were co-operating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of “saving” became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion. There grew round the non-consumption of the cake all those instincts of puritanism which in other ages has withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of production as well as those of enjoyment. And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated. Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer, and to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation. Saving was for old age or for your children; but this was only in theory,—the virtue of the cake was that it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you.

    http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15776/15776-h/15776-h.htm

  9. Two points:
    1) What does Scott Walker have to do with this thread?
    2) Wisconsin’s economic situation has been trending for many years. Their reliance on manufacturing is having an obvious impact.

    Manufacturing was never more than 25% of the job market, and it never will be again. Manufacturing in the US is now a high capital, high skill sector. Even as output increases, it will shrink as a fraction of the job market, just as farming did before it.

    Focusing on manufacturing jobs as the key to growing the middle class is very much a case of driving while looking in the rear view mirror. The coming middle class jobs will be in those areas where a large number of low paid workers are displaced by training a fraction of that workforce to do the same work much more productively with the help of intelligent machines of some sort. There’s your new middle class, and that will be in the service sector somewhere. Already high paying manufacturing jobs, in contrast, will only decrease in number as technology progresses. Don’t look there for the savior of the future middle class.

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