KPC year in review

Here's a wrap up of the 6 most popular posts this year on KPC.

Our most viewed post was America the Beautiful, which chronicled the amazing Texas Law Hawk and his talons of justice.

Second was my screed against the typical use of IV and over identification tests with special invective against dynamic panel methods called Friends don't let Friends use IV.

Third place went to our post documenting the phallic fetishes common to Oklahoma TV weather people.

Coming in fourth was one of my frequent attempts to fix the internet in general and Paul Krugman in particular titled, A tale of two Krugmans.

Then we got silly again pointing out that mass murderer Anders Breivik was now majoring in Political Science.

Finally, coming in at #6 was my post, The powerful negative theorems of economics, detailing why it really is the dismal science!

So there you have KPC in a nutshell, 50% economics, 50% snarky foolishness.

Long may we reign.

UPDATE BY MUNGOWITZ:  Unsurprisingly, all six of the top posts were Angus joints.  He's like Mr. Ed:  He only speaks when he's got something to say!

It could be worse, I could live in Dallas!*

LeBron points us to David Yves' 2012 paper on quality of life in America.  Tyler is interested in whether big cities are bad places to live (I read Yves as saying yes, unless they are on the ocean), but I am interested in how the piece illustrates my current situation.

Oklahoma City is ranked 137 (out of 276), right in the middle of the pack. Santa Fe is 6th.

6th!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

However, my best employment bet in Santa Fe looks to be either community college instructor or free-lance woodworker, while Mrs. Angus and I have amazingly great jobs at OU. We also have season tickets for the Thunder.

People, we badly need one of those Elon Musk tunnels between Santa Fe and Norman.

(*FYCI Dallas is ranked 206!)

I got your headline right here (NSFC)*

Mungo's not the only one who appreciates a headline that make any subsequent text superfluous.

Check out this Humdinger!


*= not safe for church.

Jobs Report!

In January the economy added a net of 157,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up from 7.8 to 7.9 percent. Just another blah report, right?

Well, no because as is often the case, the news is buried in the revisions to previous months:

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for November was revised from +161,000 to +247,000, and the change for December was revised from +155,000 to +196,000.

247,000 is a pretty good monthly jobs number and 196,000 is at least semi-respectable.

But this continues to be a horrible "recovery" for employment. We've never really gotten the historically typical run of really big job growth numbers that push employment sharply back up after the recessionary decline, as this chart from Calculated Risk shows:

(clic the pic for an even more sluggish image)

You can see the strongly V shaped pattern of many previous recessions and recoveries and also that the 2001 recession recovery, while anemic, was still much faster than this one.

At this rate we have around 2 more years before employment will recover it's pre-recession peak level.