Unemployment is what they call a “lagging indicator,” meaning that when an economy pulls out of a recession you can expect unemployment to grow or stay flat some time after GDP begins growing. In a sense, though, this is an arbitrary choice of terms. We could define recessions in labor market terms and think of GDP as a leading indicator. But I think that if you want to understand elite conceptions of the economy you need to process Richard Florida’s point about education and unemployment:

Unemployment is even more uneven by education or human capital level. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.8 percent, half that for high school (only) graduates (10 percent), and one-third of the 15.5 percent rate facing those without a high school diploma.

Now of course even for college graduates the labor market right now is relatively bad compared to how things have looked in the past. But the point is that even a very bad labor market doesn’t lead to especially high unemployment rates among the college educated. But the college educated are relatively likely to have investments in the stock market—retirement plans, savings for the kids to go to college, etc.

So for the college educated, what we’ve seen over the past three months—slower deterioration of labor market conditions and a turnaround in stock prices—really does count as substantial improvement. And of course it’s college educated people writing your newspaper articles, writing your tv news copy, staffing your members of congress, etc. And there’s a good deal of social stratification along these kind of class lines. College educated people tend to have college educated families (not me, though, neither my dad nor my brother has a bachelor’s degree) and college educated friends. The whole situation can create an intense solipsism about conditions facing the BA-less majority of the country.

As clowns like Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) are wont to point out, the scale of the average temperature shift associated with catastrophic climate change is not especially large relative to ordinary fluctuations in the weather. In other words, in most parts of the world summer is much hotter than winter, and the summer-winter gap exceeds the sort of changes associated with carbon emissions. If you’re dumb, this becomes a reason to get blasé about climate change. If you understand the issue, you understand that even modest structural shifts in the climate can have enormous impacts—shifting rainfall patterns, altering sea levels, massively increasing the odds of extreme weather, etc.

Consequently, most climate change analysis focuses on these kinds of problems. But new research from Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones, and Benjamin Olken gives reason to believe that the hot weather on its own will likely have large adverse consequences for economic growth rates in poor countries:

We find that higher temperatures reduce the growth rate in poor countries, not simply the level of output. Since even small growth effects have large consequences over time, these growth effects – if they persist in the medium run – imply very large impacts of permanent temperature increases. [...]

To the extent that responses to future climate change are similar to historical responses, our findings have implications for quantifying potential future impacts of climate change. Even assuming that countries adapt fully after only a decade to temperature changes, if the future response follows our historically-driven estimates, the future effects of climate change for poor countries would be substantially more negative than those implied by existing models. For example, our estimates imply that global climate change would lower the median poor country’s growth rate by 0.6 percentage points each year from now until 2099. Extrapolated over 90 years, the median poor country would then be about 40% poorer in 2099 than it would have been in the absence of climate change.

That’s the estimated negative impact assuming complete and successful adaptation . And that, in turn, is a completely heroic assumption. Members of congress considering the Waxman-Markey bill should think that over, but so should political leaders in China, India, and Brazil.

All this via Ryan Avent.

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One of the most effective possible uses of stimulus funds would be to cover gaps in the operating budgets of mass transit systems. The downfall in state and local tax revenue is forcing transit cutbacks across the country that have both a direct contractionary impact and also make it harder for people to live their lives and conduct their business. But currently stimulus funds can be used only for new capital projects rather than for operating costs. So you can have bus drivers being laid off even as new construction workers are hired.

Friday, Pete DeFazio (D-OR) and 26 other House members launched an initiative to try to change that:

Passenger rail and bus advocates are pressing conferees on the war supplemental bill to include a Senate-passed provision that would allow public transit agencies to spend some of their stimulus dollars on operating expenses, instead of capital improvements. The language in the Senate version of the bill (HR 2346) would let transit agencies use as much as 10 percent of their funding from the economic recovery law (PL 111-5) to fend off personnel and service cuts. Transit received $8.4 billion total in the stimulus.

Pat Garofalo argues at the Wonk Room:

Since one of the goals of the stimulus was to preserve jobs, it makes little sense to prevent cities from saving the jobs of transit employees, particularly as more and more people are turning towards public transportation. Hopefully, Congress makes a better decision this time around.

Summer’s coming and gasoline taxes are rising. One of the simplest things the government can do to push back on that situation is expand transit offerings. Really fundamental expansion requires capital expenditures and takes time. But increasing the number of bus routes, and the frequency of service on existing bus and rail routes, can be done fairly easily. It just takes money. But it’s a good use of stimulus funds.

Very interesting early nineties CBC report on the rise of “Internet”—a time before broadband and before Internet became the Internet:

I was a sufficiently early adopter that I have some vague recollections of Gopher and WAIS as well as Prodigy.