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Dynamic, not Chaotic

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Our world appears more chaotic by the day. Some people enjoy the chaos, especially those who are looking for cover for their own misdeeds. Others are horrified by it, as they rely on a stable world to manage their vulnerabilities and look after their family.

What has caused this chaos? In a certain sense, it’s globalism. A world closer together is a world with seven billion neighbors and a lot more complex than a small town of 10,000. But globalism, as a concept, is a big word which easily hides important details. It’s a cop-out, a big term that shades more than it illuminates.

I have come to believe that what causes chaos is the move to a genuine market-based world from an industrial world. Attempts at understanding and controlling the world using old industrial models are failing terribly. The move to marketism is not defined by globalism, as it was, but defines globalism and the increasing irrelevance of nations as we know them.

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Jobs Are Good!

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Good news! The economy added 313k jobs in February!

Like all news, we need some kind of reality check first. Did it really? The long and short of it is that, as always, the ADP employment report is less noisy and thus more accurate. It had a gain of 263k jobs in February, which is probably the right number. Still very good news all around.

But is good news actually bad news? Along with the jobs report we have the increase in wages, which stands at a modest 2.6% over the last year. Does that mean inflation is tamed? We will see what the markets think.

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A Big Week

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We have in front of us a big week. This may determine the course of the next year or so in the stock market, the economy, and in politics.

A lot is about to happen. Let’s run it down, day by day.

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Yes, But How is It All Screwed Up?

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We’ve made the Barataria position very clear – that current federal policy is doomed to trash the stock market and somewhat damage the overall economy. That wasn’t talking about new tariffs, however. As the mechanism for screwing things up shifts, the predictions as to how it will all go down have to shift.

So here we are, trying to make some sense of the senseless. It’s more of a crapshoot every day.

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Redefining Work

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A busy day calls for a repeat. This piece from two years ago demands a revisit in light of the potential for inflation now that we are approaching full employment and wages are indeed rising.

Is technology a net creator or destroyer of jobs? The question is as old as the Industrial Revolution, when workers in mills found themselves put out of work by large industrial looms. In France, they threw their shoes (sabots) into the weaving machines to destroy them – the origin of the term “sabotage”. The protests didn’t stop the machines, however, and the workers had to find something else to do in an ever-changing economy where machines did more and more work.

Today, the pace of technological change is faster than ever, with new gadgets coming into our lives constantly. Automation is also transforming our lives, with new robots and artificial intelligence replacing workers constantly. Are today’s productivity gains tomorrow’s unemployment? Increasingly those who study technology in our lives and the popular media are coming to the conclusion that yes, workers are net losers in the race against tech. And this is not a partisan issue.

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