I think the advanced economies of the world fundamentally grow through technological progress, and as their rate of progress slows, they will have less growth. This creates incredible pressures on our political systems. I think the political system at its core works when it crafts compromises in which most people benefit most of the time. When there's no growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game in which there's a loser for every winner. Most of the losers will come to suspect that the winners are involved in some kind of racket. So I think there's a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.

I'm not always a fan of Thiel's arguments, but there are a lot of insightful comments in this interview.

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Update: As CR notes, this large one month delta is in part due to population estimate adjustments made annually. With the population adjustment applied to the CPS employment numbers, the more accurate 1 month delta is 631K. Funny that the BLS doesn't revise prior numbers as they do with other series.

Over the last two years, the private sector grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, while the government shrank at an annual rate of 1.4 percent.

The combined result has been economic growth of 2.3 percent.

Catherine Rampell provides an excellent summary of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce's new report called: Hard Times: Not all College Degrees are Created Equal. Unemployment rates and median income by major and levels of education and experience are below.

Tyson believes that the scientific community has to do its part to keep costs down, but he worries that politicians may not recognize that there is value to exploring the universe. The first exposure many people have to science is in a planetarium or on a NASA web site. By learning about black holes or dark energy, people become acquainted with science itself. Some of them go on to become scientists, and others become scientifically literate citizens. And that's how to keep a country thriving.

"There's no greater engine of economic growth than innovations in those fields," Tyson said.

CalculatedRisk and Tom Lawler used HousingTracker data to help estimate the NAR revision to existing home sales would be reduced by about 13%. Today the NAR announced a 14.3% downward revision. Pretty good!

Update: It looks like it might not be the last revision.

In 2010, the median age at first marriage for women was 26.5 years, and for men it was 28.7 years. Fifty years ago, the comparable ages were about six years younger for both genders.

A smaller share of Americans moved last year that at any time on record... Nearly six in ten Americans live in the state where they were born, according to the U.S. Census bureau.

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It is east to diagnose a basic failure of responsibility as one of the causes of the debt crisis; and there's no denying that such failures took place on the widest imaginable scale, from individuals up to governments.

I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency — the individual's ability to affect the course of events. An enourmous number of people today feel as if they have very little economic agency in their own lives; often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren't conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control — impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.

It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. Many of the people who did stupid things ... did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on.

We classified jobs into those that depend on the local economy — such as retail employees, waiters and barbers — and those that cater to the national or even the global economy, such as those involved in producing manufactured goods. (We labeled the local category "non-tradable" industries and the national or global category "tradable.")

If weak household balance sheets are responsible for a large share of job cuts, we expected losses in non-tradable industries to be much larger in U.S. counties with weak household balance sheets. That is exactly what we found. In counties in the top 10 percent of the 2006 household-debt distribution, employment in non-tradable industries declined 5.1 percent from 2007 to 2009. In the counties in the bottom 10 percent, the losses were only 0.3 percent.

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Clearly, rising prices are the far less important story given the flooding's toll on individuals, but it's been interesting to see people using Camelcamelcamel (a site I help run) to track consumer price changes in real-time as it becomes clear that production will significantly slow.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today's STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

This all suggests that inequality seems to matter in itself and is not just proxying for other factors. Inequality also preserves its significance more systematically across different samples and definitions of growth spells than the other variables do. Of course, inequality is not the only thing that matters but, from our analysis, it clearly belongs on the list of well-established growth factors such as the quality of political institutions or trade openness.

Remember that roughly 1/3 of households nationwide have no mortgage on their house at all. So in these two towns the outstanding mortgage debt on the subset of homes that have mortgages adds up to more than the total value of all homes including the ones without mortgages.

The full 9.8 percent drop in income from the start of the recession to this June — the most recent month in the study — appears to be the largest in several decades, according to other Census Bureau data.

Note: Felix Salmon was the first I saw to dig this image out of the report the New York Times referenced.

I wasn't a huge fan of all the pieces in Michael Lewis' Vanity Fair series (which make up his new book Boomerang); some were interesting. But his one hour interview on Charlie Rose earlier this week is just fantastic. He's never really talking about finance or money per se, he's talking about how people respond individually and collectively to the evolving economic environment that they inhabit. I wish this was a couple of hours longer.

Among the forces: those ever-rising costs in China; more flexibility from some U.S. unions, resulting in fewer work rules and lower labor costs; more subsidies from some state governments; far higher productivity in the U.S.; and pressure from retailers to shorten turnaround time and cut inventories, prompting more manufacturers to abandon long supply chains to China.

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