“Everyone I know in a firm or corporation is doing 50% more than they were expected to do a decade ago, and they certainly aren’t earning 50% more in real terms or even nominal terms. (And the 50% is not an exaggeration: I know quite a few people who are single-handedly doing what was formerly two jobs at their company).”

I don’t have reason to question the accuracy of that statement.

But it raises a very important question:

How do we statistically measure this for society as a whole?

It would appear that this is not being captured at all in the statistics currently being compiled.

Yet this is a critical variable that needs to be objectively measured if we are to have any remotely accurate idea of the true level of “quality of life” in the nation.

It implies that America is currently flying blind in terms of measuring the true quality of life (not to mention having highly inaccurate measurements of true unemployment).

It also brings up a larger question of compiling more accurate data that measures the “overall quality of life”.

How do you measure the quality of human relationships (trust, social cohesion, love, friendship)?

How do you measure the quality of the work activities that people perform every day (is the work stimulating or fulfilling)?

How do you measure the quality of the physical living environment (climate/architecture/etc) that people live in every day?

These three things are what really count, what really determine each person’s happiness.

The current statistics seem to paint a totally false picture of what the quality of life in America really is.

The nation is worshipping at the altar of a false god—the god of production/consumption. This is otherwise known as the “American Dream”. The idea that “consumption = happiness”. Let us thank Madison Avenue for decades of brainwashing on television since World War II for this present state of affairs.

Yes, I watched the BBC documentary “Century of the Self”. I would strongly recommend reading the book “The Status Seekers” written by Vance Packard.

Excuse me if I am more than a little skeptic. IMO, this is just another way to put a criteria on the table to filter candidates in a apparently “objective” manner. “Look ‘Ma! I’ve got a number to justify my decision.”

““This is a return to normal,” says Robert E. Hall, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative research group at Stanford.”

A return to normal? Ooooh! So, a job growth that can’t even absorb the natural increase in active population is the norm now? With stingy unemployment benefits, no real training program for displaced workers, no welfare program that can be called decent, now we learn that it just too bad Buster but you can expect to have fewer and fewer opportunities to work because we are experiencing a “return to normal”. That is reassuring indeed.

Conservatives have had a chance to prove their economic thesis since 1980 and the result isn’t pretty for workers. Something will burst in an ugly way (social unrest cannot be discarded) if a big number of layoffs happen during this recession.

It is becoming more and more difficult for middle income workers to feel increasing job insecurity and financial anxiety, while a selected few are raking in enormous amounts of bonuses, severance packages and paychecks. Regardless of WHY it is so, people may reach a “I’ve had it!” point and come to rebel against this situation.

Instead of obfuscating the numbers and spinning reality, our political leaders should take a hard look at the situation now, before a social crisis erupt.

I I find it relaxing to read Henry

THE ROAD TO HYPERINFLATION
Fed helpless in its own crisis
By Henry C K Liu

As economist Hyman Minsky (1919-1996) observed insightfully, money is created whenever credit is issued. The corollary is that money is destroyed when debts are not paid back. That is why home mortgage defaults create liquidity crises. This simple insight demolishes the myth that the central bank is the sole controller of a nation’s money supply.

Greenspan sees no Fed cure
Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, wrote in a defensive article in the December 12, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal: “In theory, central banks can expand their balance sheets without limit. In practice, they are constrained by the potential inflationary impact of their actions. The ability of central banks and their governments to join with the International Monetary Fund in broad-based currency stabilization is arguably long since gone. More generally, global forces, combined with lower international trade barriers, have diminished the scope of national governments to affect the paths of their economies.”

In exoteric language, Greenspan is saying that short of moving towards hyperinflation, central banks have no cure for a collapsed debt bubble.

Greenspan then gives his prognosis: “The current credit crisis will come to an end when the overhang of inventories of newly built homes is largely liquidated and home price deflation comes to an end … Very large losses will, no doubt, be taken as a consequence of the crisis. But after a period of protracted adjustment, the US economy, and the global economy more generally, will be able to get back to business.”

Greenspan blames “the Third World, especially China” for the so-called global savings glut, with an obscene attitude of the free-spending rich who borrowed from the helpless poor scolding the poor for being too conservative with money.

Yet Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data show exchange-traded derivatives growing 27% to a record $681 trillion in third quarter 2007, the biggest increase in three years. Compared this astronomical expansion of virtual money with China’s foreign exchange reserve of $1.4 trillion, it gives a new meaning to the term “blaming the tail for wagging the dog”. The notional value of outstanding over-the-counter (OTC) derivative between counterparties not traded on exchanges was $516 trillion in June, 2007, with a gross market value of over $11 trillion, which half of the total was in interest rate swaps. China was hardly a factor in the global credit market, where massive amount of virtual money has been created by computerized trades.