The Chief Economist of a very prominent stock exchange I am connected with posted a gloating report on the labor “market”. I cringe then respond.
Lovely to see a solid jobs report in July, with most labor market measures posting solid gains. The #BLS estimate of a huge 943,000 jobs in July and sharp upward revisions over the prior months brushed aside fears that the #useconomy was losing steam. And while the 0.4% increase in wage gains for the month, up 4.0% for the year, was a concern, wage gains seemed to be concentrated in specific sectors, such as leisure & hospitality jobs, not across the board. With wage pressures not yet broad-based, we believe that it won’t be enough to force the Fed to take away the punchbowl sooner than they have earlier signaled.
It is not that I do not like good news. Good news downstream, without a master plan for humanity, does not necessarily yield good news upstream. So, I had to throw in a little curveball:
One question: how do these job numbers contribute to improving human adaptability to nature's entropy knocking on our door? We gotta stop believing in job numbers that make a car not suitable for driving on the beach spin its wheels faster to get out, if you catch my drift.
With the vast amount of seventy percent of Americans addicted to anti-depressants, forty-thousand people dying of obesity every month, broken systems galore, I cannot help but think how we keep fooling ourselves.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell, in the words of Edward Abbey. Let’s make sure we, as a species, do not succumb to the synthetic cancer of our own making.
