Labor Shortage?--Open the Borders

 This post at Econofact notes the drop in immigration, and relates it to our current economy:

Due to increased restrictions on immigration and travel, which began with the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020, the net inflow of immigrants into the United States has essentially halted for almost 2 years. By the end of 2021 there were about 2 million fewer working-age immigrants living in the United States than there would have been if the pre-2020 immigration trend had continued unchanged. Of these lost immigrants, about one million would have been college educated. The data on labor shortages across industries suggest that this dramatic drop in foreign labor supply growth is likely a contributor to the current job shortages and could slow down employment recovery and growth as the economy picks up speed.

Buried in the Charts--Black Men

 The NYTimes had an article on the recent employment report.  Towards the end they had a series of 4 charts comparing the employment levels for men and women for whites, blacks, Asian-Americans, and Latinos.  It was all in support of the article's points about the differential impact of the pandemic. But the charts also had the data for the numbers in the employment market. For three categories there were more men in the force than women, roughly 10-12 percent more when I eyeballed it.  But for blacks there were fewer men than women.  Again roughly speaking, there were about 3 million fewer black men than there should have been if the ratio were similar to those for the other groups.

Hidden Factors in Economic History

 I'm intrigued by the idea that some hidden factors account for economic gains:

• The invention of eyeglasses. That must have significantly improved the capabilities of a segment of the population 
• The change from women as housewives to women as teachers to women as professionals.  Those changes raised the average intelligence of the (paid) workface, while lowering the average for the teaching profession.
• The opening of "virgin land"--meaning the exploitation of fertility accumulated over years
• The invention of the container ship.  (Good book on that.)

[Updated 1: The invention of writing of course was important, as were the inventions of libraries, and public libraries, and lenses which were prerequisite for glasses and then Ben Franklin's bifocals.

Updated 2:  The adoption of uniform time zones in the 1880s]

 

Upward Mobility

 Ran across a statistic about the Forbes 400 billionaires so did a search with this result:

"When we first created the self-made score [see the article for an explanation of how they scored], we went back and assigned scores for the members of  the 1984 list. Less than half of them were self-made. By 2014, 69% of the list was deemed self-made. Fast forward to the present list, and that figure has inched up to 69.5%. All but one of the 18 newcomers this year are self-made.   [Oprah Winfrey is an example of someone who's entirely self made]

I don't know how this compares to other nations.  But China is an easy case:

The pandemic has proved no match for China’s wealth juggernaut. The total wealth of the China’s 400 Richest soared to $2.11 trillion, from $1.29 trillion a year earlier. The 64% gain was due to the easing of capital-market rules and an economic rebound that enabled China to pull ahead of the world’s other large economies in recovering from the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of the listees saw their fortunes climb in the past year. The minimum net worth needed to make the list rose to $1.55 billion, compared with $1 billion a year ago. 

While not everyone on this list is also on the overall Forbes list, we can, I think, assume that many (almost all?) of the Chinese billionaires (I still have trouble comprehending the concept when typing it) are "self-made".  Some proportion of them are likely children or grandchildren of the bigwigs of the original Chinese communist party. 

Anyone Remember Retreads?

 Rubber was in short supply in the early days of WWII for America, because the Japanese took control of the major producing areas. 

It's not mentioned in the book  I'm reading but I remembered "retreads". No one born in the last 50's years is likely to be familiar with them, at least according to this website.