THE DEMS, COVID AND SCIENCE

Humanity is now in its third year of battling the SARS-CoV-2 virus (aka Covid). We have become frightened, pained, upset and wounded, as well as wearied and drained. Even Democratic Governors –  from California to Connecticut – have been announcing relaxed rules for dealing with Covid during the past three (3) weeks.

Today the CDC finally issued new, eased and science-based Covid guidelines, following the relaxation already begun at the State level. The CDC guidelines focus on preventing hospitals and health care facilities from being overwhelmed, rather than prior guidelines that emphasized eliminating the transmission of Covid among people. I doubt the CDC would have issued their new guidelines now without being forced by the governors’ prior decisions.

Can we breathe an un-masked sigh of relief? Hope springs eternal. Such hope may now be especially appropriate since Spring will formally appear in less than a month. But what about the BA.2 variant that’s now entering our viral stage?

Throughout this ever-shifting pandemic, Dems have consistently proclaimed their allegiance to “following science” as the only valid way of overcoming this virus. It’s seriously doubtful we will ever overcome Covid. But thanks to vaccines and other health care improvements, we may be able to live with it endemically, as I mentioned in a previous blog .

The Dems’ following science mantra is necessary for Covid policies’ groundwork, but the mantra may not be sufficient as a policy justification. The vaunted Scientific Method, which western science has used for over 400 years, has promoted significant, broad-based societal benefits. Despite this impressive chronicle, many Repubs seemingly beg to differ about using science. That’s farcical.

In contrast, by emphasizing their policies follow science, the Dems seem to believe they can circumvent stating other relevant justifications. That is mistaken. Two issues test this mantra’s policy efficacy. First, certifiable medical science can take considerable time to become digested from its beginnings in academic or private labs into medicines and practices, and finally public policies. Second, science rarely proscribes only one solution. There’s often more than one scientific way to achieve an objective. Each way invariably requires trade-offs to be considered and resolved. Numerous scientific results are controversial at first. In a sense, such trade-offs and resolution are at the heart of the Scientific Method.

A brightly shining star in Covid’s firmament has been the impressively quick commercial development of the vaccines. The first person in the US was inoculated with a Covid vaccine on December 14, 2020. The mRNA vaccines’ production took just a gold medal sprint worthy 11 months to be produced, authorized and shot into arms.

But that swift production of mRNA Covid vaccines required a foundation of basic, scientific research and knowledge that began long ago in the early 1960s. One of the pioneering scientists whose interest in mRNA vaccines began in the 1970s is Katalin Karikó, who is now Senior Vice President of BioNTech. BioNTech, together with Pfizer, has provided 324 million Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA Covid vaccine doses in the US.

The Dems have inappropriately hoisted “following science” as a needed policy pinata, shown below, that will ensure the production of unambiguous, universal guidance for how we should deal with this pandemic. If an FDA or CDC policy is science-based, as these agencies’ policy-makers and the president routinely state, it must be right. If only.

 

The Dems' Covid Pinata 

Numerous groups, disagreeing with such guidance for assorted reasons, have persistently attempted to sling sharp pokes into the Dems’ follow science pinata. They have yet to be showered with treats, but they keep on trying.

Historically, empirically-based scientific inquiry has produced many valued changes that have fundamentally altered and improved how we see ourselves, our world and beyond. An apocryphal apple falling on Newton’s head is but one example.

Scientific inquiry is never static. Scientific knowledge regularly evolves as more data are gathered and new theories are postulated to describe them. Scientific findings on many topics of public interest cannot be carved into a Mt. Rushmore for all time. Here are two examples from the past.

The heliocentric model of the heavens.  Talk about fundamental changes. When Copernicus first suggested that the universe did not revolve around our Earth it was a big deal for those in the know – meaning the Catholic Church. Geocentrism – where the Earth is placed at the center of the heavens – had been accepted wisdom from on high for eons. In 1543 Copernicus first proposed an alternative sun-centered (heliocentric) model of the heavens. Astronomers and others will celebrate his 550th birthday next year.

In 1609, Galileo defended Copernican heliocentrism based on his own, original astronomical observations. For that he incurred the Catholic Church’s unrelenting rath. During the Roman Inquisition in 1615 Galileo was found to be a nasty heliocentric heretic and placed under house arrest until he died nearly 50 years later. Yet the cloistered Church could not stop the heliocentric sun from shining in.

The theory of evolution.  Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace offered their ground-breaking research about evolutionary natural selection in 1858 at London’s Linnean Society. The next year, Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection that was hugely controversial and consequential. Quixotically, it still remains provocative for a few people mostly on theological grounds. After the late-19th century, natural selection has become a foundational cornerstone of modern biology. But folks still petition school boards to stop teaching evolution to their children, not just CRT.

There is no unique, unambiguous prescriptive policy to cure our Covid dilemmas. Policies must change as Covid-reality varies. Science-based policy options involve shortcomings as well as benefits. These trade-offs need to be recognized and discussed. Invariable remedies do not spring forth because they have been wrapped within a mantle of science. Pronouncing policies as “following science” does not obviate the need to acknowledge their trade-offs.

Discussing these trade-offs is key. That’s not something that Dems or policy-makers at the FDA and CDC have seemed comfortable doing in prior stages of the pandemic. The Dems would be wise to cease characterizing their policy remedies as loftier simply because they’re following science and take a more holistic, inclusive approach.

 

 

IS THE SUN SETTING ON CALIFORNIA’S SOLAR ROOFTOPS?

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away. ~ Elvis Presley 

California has long been the sunniest place in America. Californians have installed solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on 1.3 million of their homes, the largest number of rooftop installations of any state. Hawaii is also sunny, duh; its solar installations are numero uno on a per capita basis. But the Aloha State’s total solar installations represent just 7.4% of California’s.

The Golden State’s solar rooftop expansion began in 2006, when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law the million solar roof’s initiative. It has been impressively-successful in reducing the state’s production of fossil-fueled greenhouse gases (GHG). But the sun may be dimming soon for solar roofs, just like this picture shows.  

A setting sun for California’s solar rooftops?

In addition to being sunny, California is also one of the most committed states in rectifying economic inequity. One of the latest efforts involves municipalities branching out to plant more trees in “underprivileged” and “low-resource” areas to mitigate inequitable, “racist housing policies.”

Colossal Los Angeles and much-smaller Richmond are but two California cities that have initiated vigorous tree-planting programs that will eventually spread natural shade and coolness across more urban neighborhoods. These are great, greening efforts that will take a long time to produce significant shade.

But there’s no stopping in California with just saplings to alleviate inequity. Nope, in the name of inequity relief, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) soon may significantly cloud the state’s bright efforts that reduce nasty environmental emissions via residential rooftop solar arrays.

How could this be? If it happens, you can thank short-sighted equityists within the CPUC staff and maybe the Commission itself, as well as the state’s private utilities. The utilities have always been dismayed about rooftop solar electricity generation they don’t own and earn no money from.

These solar critics are short-sighted because they see solar’s current NEM (net energy metering) protocols only from the cost side (what customers pay), allegedly harming low-income non-solar rate-payers. The critics entirely dismiss the actual substantial benefits that solar provides communities.

The CPUC will soon decide whether to diminish significantly the incentives for homeowners to install solar. Why? Because the CPUC staff as well as privately-owned electric utilities believe non-solar, low-income electricity customers pay disproportionately more under current California rules than owners of rooftop solar systems. That’s not equitable and thus must go.

I am not a disinterested party to these considerations. We installed solar PV (and thermal) panels on our roof 12 years ago. It’s a modest 2.8kW array (there’s no need for AC cooling here in fog city) that now has probably just paid for our initial investment due to California’s time-of-use NEM mechanism that reduced our electricity bills.

I am very interested in having the PUC recognize that solar NEM’s benefits transcend direct dollars and cents advantages. A principal benefit of solar generation is reduction in GHG emissions that aids everyone, no matter what their income and whether or not they’re a solar customer.

Does the PUC wish now to create disincentives in the name of equality for solar’s continued ascendency? If the CPUC accedes to the utilities’ cynical support of “solar equity,” it will require increased use of natural-gas powered generation. Dirtier kWh will be produced to the benefit of the utilities, with subsequent harm to all.

California’s solar industry is the nation’s largest. It directly provides about 65,000 jobs and produces more energy than nuclear and coal combined in the state.[1] Last year solar rooftops delivered 9% of California’s total electric production, the largest of any renewable resource.

Governor Gavin Newsom has embraced both a renewable energy goal of procuring 50% of retail sales from renewables by 2030 (it’s 33% now), and of reaching 100% renewable energy production by 2045. These goals depend on continued growth in solar rooftop energy production. Neither objective will be achieved if the PUC reduces solar incentives.

The governor’s July 2021 report, California’s Electricity System of the Future states, “solar and wind build rates need to nearly triple” in order to achieve his 2045 100% renewable energy production goal. Solar will never triple production if the CPUC changes its solar NEM rates, as planned.

The CPUC’s proposed plan will shred by over 75% how much residents would get paid for electricity generated from their rooftop panels. In addition, it proposes sharp increases, about $60/month, in grid-access charges for a typical solar customer.

In effect, the plan virtually eliminates the monetary incentives that have continued to support more homeowners’ investing in solar. These investments often require paying thousands of dollars up front to install rooftop PV panels.

So far, Gov. Newsom has shirked his duty to strongly and publicly support continued solar incentives like NEM.

Perhaps he’s scared of upsetting the utilities and the IBEW, the principal electric utility union who’s prominently in favor of reducing rooftop solar incentives. The union wants to cash in on lucrative PV panel installation jobs by the utilities that they don’t enjoy now. Maybe the governor also doesn’t really believe in the environmental goals he’s previously stated were vital.

Do Gov. Newsom and the CPUC want to re-monopolize California’s largest utilities at the expense of environmental degradation to gain a sliver more equality? So far, it seems so.

I recommend he have at least one private conversation with CPUC decision-makers encouraging them to relieve some underprivileged customers’ issues without darkening solar’s clear environmental benefits. The benefits he’s counting on to meet his popular environmental goals. Maybe the CPUC could extend these customers’ baseline (low-cost) consumption block to provide relief, or at the very least, adopt a far less extreme reduction in rooftop installations’ incentives.

The Commission might welcome such informal communication because it’s not batting at full strength now. The new CPUC President has been in her job for only 20 workdays and one of the five Commissioner chairs remains vacant.

In any event, the sun must continue to shine on California’s ever-growing solar rooftops for all our sakes.

 

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[1] Speaking of impending environmental challenges, California’s last operating nuclear power station, PG&E’s Diablo Canyon, will begin to shut down late next year. Nuclear, including Diablo Canyon, has many faults and it produces no GHGs. 

 

JUST LIVING WITH COVID

Everybody’s headed for a hole in the ground. ~ Warren Zevon & Duncan Aldrich 

It’s been 25 months and more than 5.5 million global deaths since the insidious Covid-19 pandemic began. The World Health Organization (WHO) properly declared a public health emergency of international concern a month after this virus was first discovered in Wuhan China. How long will the Covid-emergency last? How long should it last? When can we just live with Covid?

Coronaviruses began infecting humans in 1965. They caused the SARS and MERS outbreaks in 2002 and 2012, respectively.

Virologists believe Covid will be with us for a very long time, just like the H1N1 virus that jumped to humans producing the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed 675,000 Americans. The H1N1 virus is still with us; it’s now one of the strains in the seasonal flu virus.

Despite politicians’ and policy-makers’ fervent proclamations that Covid will be “conquered” and “vanquished,” it won’t be. Why? Because it’s a virus, it mutates constantly, forever. It won’t surrender even to our fully-modern medical technology. Like every other infectious disease-producing virus, it’s here for ages. The single exception to this eventuality was the smallpox virus that was eradicated world-wide in 1979, nearly 200 years after a vaccine was first produced, and after killing an estimated 900 million humans during its reign.

As we enter the third year of this pandemic, the question has been raised: how we can learn to live with Covid on an ongoing basis. Other questions include determining what continuing, non-emergency policies will sustain our ability to live, play and work alongside the presence of Covid, like we have done with the flu virus and many others.

Several prominent former members of President Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory Board have recommended creating “New Normal,” non-emergency health policies that will allow us to survive more safely with Covid. Their recommendations essentially involve strengthening the role of US public health agencies by improving and sustaining public health infrastructure. Such strengthening would involve significant, continuing federal and state funding, which, perhaps wisely, they did not enumerate.

The mystery isn’t only about what our Covid policies should become, after suffering so much in this enduring pandemic. There are others as well.

Because they don’t leave any fossils, it remains mysterious as to what viruses really are and have been. Many scientists believe proto-viruses began replicating on Earth several billion years ago. They have a giant head start; the earliest modern homo sapiens have been doing this for perhaps 300,000 years.

These virologists subscribe to the virus-first premise: Long, long ago, viruses evolved from molecules of protein and nucleic acid, before cells first appeared on Earth. Thus ironically, viruses themselves contributed to the development of cellular life.

The first human virus was scientifically identified in 1881, the yellow fever virus. During the past century scientists have changed their minds several times about what viruses are. They were first seen as poisons (the word “virus” is derived from the Latin term for poison, venenum), then as an elementary life-form and finally as biological chemicals.

Virus devaluation to inactive chemicals began 86 years ago, when biochemists determined that viruses are not alive. On their own they cannot produce life-required metabolic functions, such as conversion of food/fuel into energy to run cellular processes.

Viruses’ hosts provide these necessary functions, not the virus itself. Unfortunately, viruses can and have infected virtually every earthly life-form, from humans and insects to tobacco plants and bacteria. Some virologists believe viruses may occupy an enigmatic grey area between living and nonliving. Perhaps similar to what certain Dems believe Trumpists are.

They may not be alive, but the microscopic Covid viruses have affected hundreds of millions of people during the past two years, and will continue to do so all the way to its omega variant (which is 9 variants after omicron, if you never had to memorize the Greek alphabet like I did long ago) and beyond. This virus’s persistence – which, politicians, policy-makers and the rest of us should have previously acknowledged – has precipitated growing relevance for changing short-term, emergency policies to ones that support our need learn how to “live with it” (the Covid virus) over the longer-term.

It can’t be an emergency forever, as an infectious disease expert aptly phrased our current policies.

How can policies be changed from considering Covid not as an emergency, but as an ongoing epidemic? Increasing Covid vaccination rates is the most important objective for living with it. Shown below is one of a growing number of pop-up vaccination clinics.  Regrettably, it’s also the most problematic, given the political caste and personal reluctance that now surrounds vaccination. Next in line is widespread use of masks. The fragile nature of some healthcare systems also poses problems.  

A pop-up vaccination clinic in action.

Achieving this objective will be challenging and increasingly expensive. The “easy arms” have already been injected. At the moment, the US has a fully-vaccinated rate of 63%, much below what epidemiologists used to, but no longer talk about in terms of Covid’s Herd Immunity rate might be.

Medical personal directly involved with immunization describe the current process of getting reluctant folks to be inoculated as “a very grinding, slow process” that’s akin to “medical trench warfare.”

This is especially true after the Supreme Court’s misguided decision last week to block government-mandated shots by companies with more than 100 workers, who employ 67% of our labor force. The Supremes can no longer be relied on to support public health, among other issues. Itself a tragedy within a tragedy.

Interim policies that have been recently initiated should increase availability of take-home Covid tests and oral anti-Covid medicines. Other “living with it” policies once hospitalizations stabilize and decline may ultimately include modifying restrictions on: mask usage, isolation periods, travel, public and private meetings, social distancing, K-12 and college closings, restaurants, quarantines and business hours/operations.

To be successful in reducing Covid’s substantial negative externalities, such guidelines require everyone to comply. Those who willingly damage public health by non-compliance of vaccination and eased, non-emergency Covid-mitigation policies should result in added limitations-consequences for those people. Such compliance consequences would be completely consistent with existing, mandated inoculations in order for children to attend day care, pre-K and K-12 schools.

“Living with it” policies will require “get with it” public compliance. Here’s to a brighter, healthier future. 

URBAN TRANSIT, STUCK BEYOND THE SHOULDER

It was a nightmare. The band had to tour Greenland by bus. ~ Fred Schneider, a founder of the B-52s 

Have you ridden a bus, hopped on a subway or taken a train recently? Fewer folks than ever have been using public mass transportation to get places near and far. The resurgent Covid pandemic hasn’t helped. Local bus and rail systems – public mass transit – remain stuck, beyond the shoulder of thoroughfares that count, as both customers and transit drivers have abandoned them.

Mass transit is not a pedestrian matter; its status affects millions, can alter our environment and over time has been influenced by many factors. In econo-speak, mass transit has been considered an inferior good, one whose demand declines as consumers’ income rises. It wasn’t always inferior.

After my mother graduated from the University of Massachusetts during an early stage of the Great Depression, she boarded a Greyhound bus in Boston and over the next six months travelled around the country. To visit friends, she first headed to Florida and then across the deep south and south-western US to Los Angeles, where stayed nearly a month. From LA she took train rides on the Union Pacific, Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads during a 5-day jaunt back to Massachusetts.

At that time, trains and buses were the most popular means of travelling long distances. Greyhound had over 4,800 stations across the US. Railroads’ passenger carriage was more than five (5) times what Amtrak’s is now.

Public transit ridership has never since been higher than it was in 1926. Automobiles were certainly present then, but were not nearly as fast or convenient for a single person undertaking a long, cross-country trip. My mother saw first-hand the sights of America at ground-level, riding Greyhounds and the rails. The picture below shows the classic Scenicruiser bus, designed by Raymond Lowey, that Greyhound operated for about 20 years.

A great deal has changed in mass transit during the past 80 years, most of it unfavorable. Municipal transit systems have been owned and operated by city and regional governments since the 1950s. Greyhound remains the country’s largest inter-city motorcoach operator, but now operates in less than 60% of the cities it did at its peak before WWII.

 

The Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, used from 1954 to the mid-1970s.

Transit ridership essentially plateaued with subsequent gradual declines for decades, as the automobile gained dominance. President Eisenhower’s groundbreaking federal funding of the Interstate highway system in 1956 confirmed the government’s commitment that it needed to meet the increasing challenge of evermore cars on US highways. 

It wasn’t until eight years later that the government first began providing sizeable financial assistance to local transit systems with the passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act (UMTA) in 1964. The UMTA funding paid for two-thirds of the costs of local transit systems’ equipment and facilities. By the 1970s this federal funding had allowed cities to build new, heavy-rail mass transit systems like the San Francisco Bay area’s BART, Washington DC’s Metro and MARTA (not our first president's wife; it's Atlanta's subway system).

During the 1980s and thereafter many cities built less capital-intensive light-rail transit systems, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle and San Jose. Light-rail, surface systems operate on dedicated rights-of-way with power provided via overhead wires. These additions to cities’ transit coverage have been helpfully modernizing.

Despite this sizeable public investment, the share of US workers commuting by public transportation fell from 12.1% in 1960 to about 5% in 2019. Annual growth in public transit ridership is a minute 0.6% since 2000. Adding to urban transit’s miseries, current ridership now is less than one-half of what it was pre-Covid.

Transit advocates advise that the costs of urban driving are too low and need to increase if transit is to recover ridership. This could involve instituting congestion fees, increasing parking costs and pumping up state and local gasoline taxes.

Manhattan, NY now appears to be edging back onto the roadway for implementing substantial congestion fees. It may work in Manhattan, but it’s not clear there are many politicians willing to brave public resistance to elevating driving-related fees and taxes. Travelling that political pathway to change decades of commuting behavior is likely to be a fully pothole-filled trail.

In November, President Biden signed the $1.2 trillion (T) Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation’s fiscal largesse will be spread wide and far. Confusingly, this trillion-dollar number is not the amount of actual new infrastructure spending. Nope. The large, legislative budget number also includes typical annual expenditures for public roads, bridges, ports, railroads and water infrastructure, such as filling potholes, replacing worn-out pipes and equipment and operations & maintenance expenses.

New expenditures in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act sum to about $550 billion (B). This hefty number represents only 46% of the Act’s total $1.2T sticker-price. It’s these new outlays, not pothole-filling, that the president and Dems proclaim will significantly improve America’s transit infrastructure and consequently its citizens’ lives.

Such efforts will hopefully benefit many folks in many ways, which is a good thing. But this confusing reporting of funding level is an example of how Congress swells the apparent significance of its legislative efforts. Dems believe bigger is clearly better, even though it’s misleadingly stated. So it goes.

Public transit is due to receive $39B, 7.1% of new infrastructure expenditures. This tidy sum will serve to upgrade our 2,200 public urban and rural transit systems nationwide. The Act will also provide money to create new bus routes, electrify bus fleets and assist in making public transit more accessible to seniors and disabled Americans. Interestingly, urban rail lines are already reported to be at least 90% handicap-accessible; buses are 99% accessible.

Berkeley has its own ideas for improving its bus system. The City Council is considering a program that will offer free AC Transit bus rides in a portion of the city. If the Council approves, if they find funding for it and if AC Transit (the bus operator) agrees, one bus route that travels through several low-income neighborhoods will be renewed and fare-free on Sundays for a year. That’s three very big “ifs,” especially the last one. The Council believes this program would remedy in part systemic inequalities that Berkeley, being Berkeley, is very attuned to.

Among several issues with the program, picking Sunday as the free-fare day is regrettable. Sunday has the lowest ridership of any day of the week, and excludes virtually all commuters and students, the bulk of bus riders in Berkeley. Sundays are not a representative day of transit usage for most systems, including Berkeley’s.

The number of Berkeleyans who use buses regularly to commute to work is quite small, less than 8%. It’s not because bus fares are too high. Transit takes much longer to get places and ridership does not depend that much on fare level.

AC Transit studies indicate that reducing bus fares will not produce a significant or proportionate increase in ridership. Factors that promote bus ridership include the lack of a car for personal use, a positive assessment of buses relative to autos and close proximity to the bus route from one’s residence.

Unfortunately for transit, folks have become increasingly wary of traveling where crime and Covid may occur. As elsewhere, Bay Area residents are voting with their steering wheels to lower these risks, opting to drive and not use buses. AC Transit’s ridership dropped precipitously, 70% during the year ending April 2020. Now, its ridership is down a mere 60%.

Free fares are not going to solve these significant issues. It’s hard to imagine how this program will produce worthwhile information that could be useful beyond the one bus route that’s involved. But that’s not likely the true purpose of the program.

The Berkeley City Council has few qualms about undertaking this program that it’s not going to directly pay for. It could follow the Council’s well-established predilection of hurling other organizations’ money at issues like those facing underprivileged people in the hope that something useful might happen eventually.

With enough time, effort and searching, money will likely be found for this interim program. Possible funding sources include the American Rescue Plan Act and the new infrastructure Act. California expects to receive nearly $9.5B from the new Act to improve public transit infrastructure across the state. Berkeley stands ready to claim some.

However, AC Transit, who would have to implement the program, does not favor it as currently proposed by the city. Being very aware of the surrounding politics, AC Transit is on record supporting the idea of a free-fare program, just not this one. So far, Berkeley’s free-fare transit program, like public urban transit itself, seems parked far beyond the shoulder of transportation priorities. 

WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT GOODS?

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases. ~ William Shenstone 

 How’s your holiday shopping coming along? Beyond the holidays, have you been buying more goods or services than in the past? As I’ll discuss, some folks are concerned we consumers have been buying too many goods and not enough services. Goods are bad, services are better. The giant consumer segment of our economy is not in balance.

Even Pope Francis is concerned about consumption. He ended his visit to Greece several weeks ago by encouraging its young people to “follow your dreams and not be tempted by the consumerist ‘sirens’ of today that promise easy pleasures.” Those sirens are blowing a different tune of late.

Recently, polls indicate how we have felt increasingly uneasy about the economy. Family finances are in fairly decent shape for most people, due in part to the exceptional series of Covid-related government “economic impact payments” they’ve received since April 2020. The federal government has sent 478 million direct-cash payments to qualified recipients. Ninety-three percent (93%) of Americans have received these outlays.

Government-provided pandemic assistance extended to businesses as well as people. Government-funded, Covid-related business support was $753.8 billion in 2020, principally through the Paycheck Protection Program and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.

Beginning in July, eligible parents have additionally received five (5) monthly child tax credit assistance checks. Remarkably, this aid – totaling about $90 billion (B) – has quickly reduced the national poverty rate by nearly 50%, compared to three (3) years ago.

Largely because of these support programs, 64% of respondents believed their personal finances were good in a recent poll, but incongruently only 35% described the national economy as good. Stored-up household savings from all these compensations may total $2 trillion (T), which is an impressively large sum. But all is not well.

According to insistent media proclamations by economic wizzes, we consumers are buying too many goods and not enough services with these unspent funds. I find these declarations a bit puzzling, as I’ll mention.

After a very long slumber, inflation has reared its costly head across the economy with consumer demand outstripping available supply. In November, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 6.8%, the largest 12-month increase since June 1982.

Even the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell finally succumbed to this economic reality by stating last week he would no longer call inflation “transitory.” He didn’t mention what he would be calling inflation now. I’d suggest “unfortunately augmented.” The CPI’s energy index rose a whopping 33.3% over the last 12 months, the food index increased 6.1%, which comes as no surprise to those of us who frequent gas stations and grocery stores.

Because of the Great Resignation, where workers are quitting their jobs in unexpectedly large numbers, businesses are offering higher wages and salaries to entice workers back. Over the past year, wages have increased 4.2%, almost a 50% rise compared to pre-Covid times.

How long will these inflationary trends last? No one knows, despite erudite claims to the contrary. What the Fed is going to do about this continuing, augmented inflation was partially revealed on December 15 when the Fed stated it would further reduce its expansionary policies for the economy “in light of inflation developments.” This means the Fed will likely increase interest rates several times next year. How much will the markets shudder at this key change in monetary policy? On Friday December 17, the S&P500 Index had lost just 1.89%, perhaps because the market’s expectations for a policy change have already been built into stock values.

The current, augmented level of inflation is due to three (3) factors: consumers’ growing demand for goods and services (especially goods), the fragility of some supply-chains to provide more goods and recently-elevated inflationary expectations.

This last item is the most problematic. Policy-makers have next to no control over how or why consumers hold such expectations or how they can influence them, short of implementing broad, contractionary economic policies. Such a policy reversal will not happen by Congress, which with the president dictates fiscal policy. The Dems would resist such policies as exceptionally fraught politically.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has no interest in halting his troops from passing the now-reduced, but still extensive $1.85T Build Back Better (BBB) Act. That’s even though several months of full-court-press worthy efforts by the president and other Dems has yet to convince Sen. Manchin to put his name in the BBB’s yea column. The senator publicly stated on Dec. 19 he could not support the legislation, a change in the usual behind-closed-doors negotiations with the White House. Despite the media hurrah, I expect the negotiating isn’t dead yet, a bit like we saw for a while in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

It’s ironic that the Dems have argued the far-reaching BBB expenditures will actually reduce inflation. A large upsurge in government spending, like the BBB Act, spreads more money throughout the economy, which raises business and consumer demand, and likely prices. Thus, federal economic policy to reduce inflation will be solely the Fed’s responsibility through its monetary policy mechanisms.

But back to goods. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) have long been the nation’s single largest type of spending. Consumer purchases account for about 70% of our GDP. In contrast, government expenditures are just 17% of GDP, despite our being saturated with news of trillion-dollar legislative efforts. This is as true currently as it was a decade ago.

Our consumer purchases are placed into two (2) principal categories, goods expenditures and services expenditures. About 60% of our PCE are for services (everything from haircuts and restaurant meals to streaming service fees) and around 40% for goods (including furniture, jewelry, gasoline, rent and college tuition). These proportions haven’t changed much at all during the last year, as shown in the table.

Goods and Services Sectors Expenditures and Employment

Economic Sector	2021Q3	2020Q3	2011
Personal Goods expenditures (trillions $)	$5.524 (40.3%)*	$5.159 (40.2%)*	$3.331 (35.3%)*
Goods employment (millions of workers)	N.A.	20.022 (12.8%)**	18.244 (11.9%)**
Personal Services expenditures (trillions $)	$8.366 (61.0%)*	$7.815 (61.0%)*	$6.102 (64.7%)*
Services employment (millions of workers)	N.A.	122.774 (74.7%)**	114.652 (74.6%)**

*Percent of personal consumption expenditures (PCE). **Percent of total labor force. 

Personal consumer goods purchases have slightly increased during the past year, by $365B, which is a lot of money representing a 6.6% overall increase. Yet it’s only a one-tenth of one percent increase, as a proportion of PCE. From 2020Q3 to this year, services purchases have also increased, by $551B, a 6.6% increase from last year; but with no proportional change. During the last decade, as a proportion of PCE, goods expenditures have fallen by 5% relative to services. These diminutive changes have the wizzes concerned.

Consumers’ minor shift to purchasing goods recently has risen relative to services in no small part because of the pandemic’s restrictions. But the shift to goods expenditures is a very modest change, seemingly not worthy of much attention. However, I found the likely reason for all the interest.

The wizzes’ focus may not be on changes in expenditures, but on employment levels, also shown in the table. Our economy’s services sector employs a disproportionately larger number of people, relative to the goods sector. In 2020Q3 (latest year for data), 122.8 million people were employed in the services sector, far more than the 20 million in the goods sector. Services employment is 6x larger than the goods industries, and accounts for almost 75% of our total labor force. Intriguingly, services sector labor productivity (measured by output per employee) is much lower, just 45.3%, than the goods sector.

During the last 12 months, workers’ wages and salaries have risen higher than any time in more than 15 years. These increases reflect the labor market’s growing tightness. Goods-producing workers’ wages and salaries increased 3.5% on an annual basis. Service-providing workers’ wages and salaries increased 4.3% during the same period, among the highest of any sector.

During the pandemic, six (6) of the 13 services sector sub-industries, accounting for 74% of the sector’s total employment, have lost 2.8M employees as of November. The largest losses have been in leisure and hospitality – 90,000 restaurants have closed permanently during Covid – and government, especially local governments.

Despite the ever-lowering official unemployment rate, now 4.2%, the services sector’s loss of employees is a serious personal and  macroeconomic problem. Our low unemployment rate masks the ever-increasing number of workers who have dropped-out of the labor market, are no longer actively looking for jobs, and thus technically are not “unemployed.”

Santa’s bag filled with more goods and less services.

The rise of Omicron will only intensify simultaneous inflationary prices and dwindling labor availability. Covid keeps making services, like eating in restaurants and a host of other shared, public activities riskier. Even Santa’s becoming concerned. His bag of goodies will likely need to be enlarged, making his travels down chimneys that much more challenging. 

PRICE RISES AND TIME SLIPPING

You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away. ~ Paul Simon   

Is it time to travel? Seems so. Many more people have travelled to eat green bean casserole with distant relatives and friends. AAA expected more than 53 million people will travel during this Thanksgiving holiday, the highest single-year increase since 2005. We’re clearly more on the move than last year.

Perhaps high-flying sojourners are attempting to escape increasingly tumultuous, rising prices in their localities. The media and others have been proclaiming inflation as a big, but non-transitory issue facing President Biden.

Indeed, prices facing consumers are elevating. The year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October increased 6.2%, the highest in 30 years. Gasoline prices rose 49.6%, the second-highest increase of any CPI item. Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs’ prices increased 11.9%, that you’ve already witnessed at your grocery’s check-out. Amazon’s prices on more than 20,000 popular items increased 7.5% in October from a year ago.

Are these price surges connected with the president’s increasingly dire poll numbers? Maybe, although it’s by no means conclusive. Time may tell.

Unfortunately, every president including Mr. Biden has few direct means of quickly controlling rising prices of final goods and services. President Biden’s statements that his newly-signed $1.2T of infrastructure expenditures will reduce inflation may be true ultimately, but only after all the bridges, highways, power lines and Amtrak have been revitalized eight years from now. Large-scale infrastructure projects take considerable time to start, and a long time to be completed. Needed infrastructure improvements will not reduce inflation between now and the mid-term elections.

We economists maintain, with fingers crossed behind our backs, that prices are simply a consequence of how market supply and market demand are interacting. When consumer demand increases more than supply, as seems to be happening for a while, prices will rise, as they have been. Alas, economic models are far less definitive about the duration of upward price pressures.

Even as the Federal Reserve and the president maintain such price increases are merely “transitory,” monthly consumer price increases have averaged 8% since April. October’s annualized monthly increase is 10.8%. No wonder inflation is becoming a beyond-transitory issue for the administration.

To show that he’s doing something, the president has ordered that 50 million barrels be sold from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to increase the domestic supply of oil products. He also requested that OPEC increase its production. Nice try Joe, but such efforts at best may have some momentary political benefit, but no substantive market effect for lowering gas prices or inflationary pressures. OPEC predictably declined his request. Fifty million barrels represents just 2 ½ days of total US oil consumption; and a mere 8% of the Reserve (that at some point will need to be replaced at likely higher-per-barrel prices).  

Interestingly, although transportation expenditures’ costs rose 4.5% over the past year, airline fares taxied downward at 4.6%. Maybe these declines, in addition to the public’s strong, pent-up desires to share turkey and tofurkey, spurred the rush into cramped airplane seats.

Nevertheless, a small number of travelers aren’t flying or driving. Nope, they’re following time-slips.

If you aren’t familiar with time-slips, they refer to fleeting, temporal anomalies experienced by individuals. A sort of accidental, serendipitous time travel. Such time crossings are not extended adventures such as Mark Twain described in his pioneering 1889 time-travel novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I enjoyed reading this book last year.

Twain’s popular book portrays Yankee engineer Hank Morgan as he somehow finds himself, after being hit on his head, transported from late 19th-century New England into non-new England during the reign of King Arthur in the 6th-century. The original frontispiece from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is shown below, where a mounted, armored knight with a lance is charging Mr. Morgan up a tree. It describes the considerable period and many adventures that Mr. Morgan experienced in Camelot. His ventures allowed Mark Twain to comment on then-contemporary American society and as well as parody the idea of chivalry and the legend of King Arthur’s Camelot.

Source: Wikipedia

Time travel didn’t stop in the late 1800s. Modern tales of people who have experienced transitory time-slips (time-slippers?) describe them as short excursions back in time at the spot where the person happens to be right before the slippage. Some time-slippers travel far rearward in history, others not so far.

Buckle up for the several time-slip accounts. In July 1996, Frank, an off-duty policeman, walked down a street in central Liverpool, Merseyside, England to shop at Dillon’s Bookshop. As he walked, he noticed the street was now cobbled. It hadn’t been before he started; pedestrians were now wearing clothes appropriate for 40 or so years prior, not 1996 contemporary. He crossed the cobbled street and noticed instead of Dillon’s was a store named Cripps, selling handbags and women’s shoes. Frank saw a woman dressed in 1990s clothes enter Cripps looking perplexed. Suddenly, the whole scene revered back to 1996 and the cobblestones and Cripps disappeared. Frank asked the woman if she’d seen the same strange, time-warped things; she said yes. Frank later found out that a women’s haberdashery called Cripps operated on the Dillon’s bookstore site in the 1950s.

Another time-slipper vividly saw medieval boats sailing on a British river next to the ancient castle he was visiting in Wales, and then suddenly the boats vanished as he returned to the present-day. Two young women were walking up a densely-wooded local hill in northwest England during the summer on a trail they had hiked on many times before. On this hike they saw for the first time an old-fashioned, rough-stone cottage amid the trees that reminded them of a dwelling “from the Middle Ages.” There was smoke wafting out of the chimney and the door began to open as they came closer. They promptly fled down the hill and haven’t seen the ancient cottage ever again on this trail.

These time-slip recountings offer a however brief alternative to our usual linear sense of time. Also, they perhaps bear the idea that time is more than a one-way throughfare to the hereafter.

Perhaps President Biden would wish to time-slip himself back to 1965, when inflation was a trifling 1.6%. And when the Dems enjoyed impressively formidable control of both the House and Senate after Lyndon Johnson’s giant victory over Barry Goldwater. The Dems margin in the 1965 House was +155 representatives; in the Senate it was a 36-senator, filibuster-proof majority margin. Those were the days, sort of.

Here’s to slipping through time as easily and interestingly as possible.

 

 

CALENDARS, JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME

 I’ve been on a calendar, but I’ve never been on time. ~ Marilyn Monroe

Today’s date is November 13, 2021, as well as Alban 22, 1400, October 31, 2021 and 2459532.18830. I’ll explain each of these “today’s” dates shortly. There’s a long, fascinating history behind this date, and for that matter, any calendar date.

Several noteworthy events have occurred on November 13, including:

1775 - During the American Revolution, US forces captured Montreal.

1956 - The US Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

1971 - The US spacecraft Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, Mars.

1995 - Greg Maddox of the Atlanta Braves became the first major league pitcher to win four consecutive Cy Young Awards.

Why do we know when these events happened? Because of calendars. A calendar is a methodical ordering of days, months and years. Many diverse calendars, using different day-ordering systems, have been and are still being used. Calendar cognoscenti say there are about 40 different calendars now being utilized around the globe. Wikipedia displays an impressive 86 calendars in its list.

The word “calendar” is derived from calendae, the Roman designation for the first day of the month, when debts were due to be paid. I was told the “…ar” ending in the word calendar, which is much rarer than the usual “…er” ending syllable, notes a Sumerian dialect as its prime source.

For the past 439 years, virtually all of us have been using the Gregorian calendar as a basis for defining our day-to-day lives through the years. Ever since homo sapiens gained some sense of awareness of their larger surroundings – at least one hundred thousand years ago, perhaps much longer ago – they noted the daily cycle of each day, the roughly monthly cycle of the moon (29.53 days) and earth’s yearly cycle around the sun (365.242190 days in 2021).

The passage of the moon and the sun have always been the most prominent, regular, repeated events useful for keeping track of time. Virtually every human calendar uses some combination of lunar or solar periodicity, which is why many calendars are called lunisolar, whose date indicates both the moon phase and the time of the solar year.

Subsequent to the initial development of written records in the Near East, the first documented calendars are Bronze Age Sumerian/Babylonian calendars from 12,000 years ago. These calendars’ years began during the spring season with each of their lunar months (starting with a setting, new crescent moon), plus an intercalary “leap month” that could be inserted by decree. The intercalary period served to inflate the year’s number of days, allowing the annual calendar to follow the seasons. Such adjustments were important because the shorter 12 lunar months add up to almost 11 fewer annual sidereal days.

The Babylonian calendar was followed by Zoroastrian and Persian ones. Evidence of Persian calendars has been found from the second millennium BCE. Persian calendars have been altered many times for a variety of religious and administrative motivations. The calendars’ twelve 30-day months were each named for festivals or activities during the year. An intercalary phase was added periodically to harmonize the calendar with the seasons.

The 11th-century Persian intellect Omar Khayyam – a true Renaissance man, several centuries or so before its time in Italy – lay the formulation and structure for one of the most accurate, ancient calendars. In 1079, Khayyam made astronomical observations and announced a new calendar whose year-length was measured as 365.242198 days. This 942-year-old estimate represents astounding accuracy, fully comparable to modern calculations. Today’s date is Alban 22, 1400 in the Persian calendar.

The Persian year usually begins within a day of the northern vernal equinox, March 20-21 in the Gregorian calendar. The Persian calendar was one of the first to be based on the solar year, rather than a lunar or lunisolar approach. That’s consistent with the sun’s being a divine and religious symbol in Persian culture.

The Hindu calendar has been guiding people on the Indian continent probably since 1700 BCE and continues to be used by Hindus around the world to determine festival dates. The ancient Hindu calendar ordering system is also seen the Babylonian calendar, as well as the Hebrew and Chinese calendars.

The Hindu system differs from the Gregorian calendar. Unlike the initial Gregorian calendar, which added days to several lunar months to synchronize lunar cycles and the sidereal year, the Hindu calendar maintains every lunar month, and inserts a full-month intercalary period every 32–33 months. This ensures that festivals and agriculture-related rituals that are spread throughout the year occur during the appropriate season. An elegant Hindu calendar from 1871 is shown below.

 

Hindu calendar

The first Roman calendars also followed lunar month cycles. Each month had several principal days, including the first day (the kalends) and a day a bit before the middle of the month (the ides). Thus, these calendars had more ides beyond just March. For centuries, the Romans had eight-day weeks, two millennia before the Beatles’ song.^[1] It wasn’t until 321 CE that Emperor Constantine eventually established a seven-day week in the Roman calendar.

Interestingly, the Babylonians were astute observers of the skies, and it is largely thanks to them that Constantine changed the week’s length. The reason the Babylonians first adopted seven days was they saw seven celestial bodies that were deemed preeminent — the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The chart below shows how each of the seven weekdays were named.

Weekday	Named after
Sunday	the celestial body, Sun.
Monday	the celestial body, Moon.
Tuesday	Tiu, the Anglo-Saxon god of war. The Romans named their third day of the week after Mars, their god of war. That is why romantic languages like Spanish, French and Italian all have similar names for Tuesday: martes, mardi, and martedi.
Wednesday	Woden, the Norse god of war.
Thursday	Thor, the Norse god of thunder and lightning.
Friday	Frigg, the wife of Woden, representing love and beauty.
Saturday	Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.

 Way before Constantine, Julius Caesar reformed the Empire’s existing calendar in 45 BCE with help from Greek mathematicians. This new calendar, the Julian calendar, became a solar calendar. Today’s Julian calendar date is Oct. 31, 2021, Halloween (again)!

Two changes were made. Simply put, the first modification realigned the Julian calendar year to be consistent with a solar year and became 365 days long. This was done by inflating the number of days in several old Roman months. Second, a leap day was added to February every four years, making average Julian year-length, 365.25 days. And eventually, the seventh month turned into July (after Julius Caesar) followed by August (after Caesar Augustus).

The Julian calendar became the principal calendar in the Roman Empire and subsequently in most of the Western world for more than 1,600 years.

However, the Roman Catholic Church noticed that the Julian system had caused the calendar to drift relative to the spring and fall equinoxes. This was important because the Julian calendar’s excess leap days caused the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox to happen considerably before March 20 or 21 and thus affected the church’s crucial spring celebration, the lunar-based Easter Sunday mass^[2].

With such motivation, Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed in 1582 a minor but crucial calendar modification which reduced the average length of the Julian year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 days. The Gregorian calendar thus more closely approximates the 365.242190-day solar year that it takes the Earth to make one revolution around the Sun.

The Gregorian calendar change does this by spacing leap years beyond the Julian method of simply saying a leap year is one that is exactly divisible by four. Gregorian leap years include the Julian method, but go beyond it. The further delineation for Gregorian leap-years is for years which are exactly divisible by 100, like 2000 was. These years are only a leap year if they are exactly divisible by 400. Thus, the century year that will begin on Friday, Jan. 1, 2100 is not a Gregorian leap year nor was 1900. But 2000 was and 2400 will be. Consequently, the Gregorian calendar corrected the Julian calendar's wandering away from the solar year and has been with us on our spinning globe ever since 1582.

Another calendar mechanism is the Julian day. No, it’s not an update of the ancient Julian calendar. The Julian day format, also called the ordinal format, is yyyyddd (first four digits signify the year, the next three refer to the numeric day of the year). Today’s Julian day date is thus 2021313. The format is used in computer programming and by the military.

Confusingly, there is also a Julian Date Number (JDN) used by astronomers, other skyward-looking scientists and in software. It is the strangest calendar mechanism I found. This date is today’s contiguous number of days, and fractions of days, since the beginning of the Julian Period, which is defined at noon Universal Time on Jan. 1, 4713 BCE. Really? Today’s JDN, at 08:30 PST (drum-roll please) is 2459532.18830, which is a whole lot of days and digits.

Why Jan. 1, 4713 BCE? Because Joseph Scaliger devised this calendar mechanism in 1583, one year after the Gregorian calendar began. And he chose the Julian Period to begin on the date when the Julian calendar, the Lunar calendar and the Roman Tax calendar all coincided – Jan. 1, 4713 BCE. Also, this date apparently is the most recent day in which the year began on a Sunday with a full moon.

No matter how you choose to label today, I hope it’s a good date for you.

 

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[1] The Beatles’ Eight Days a Week was recorded in 1964: “Hold me, love me, hold me, love me, I ain't got nothing but love, babe, eight days a week.”

[2] The date of Roman Catholic Easter is the Sunday on or after the first full moon following the spring equinox.