We know that in the past long-term unemployment has had lifetime effects on people and families. We also know that over half of all people unemployed for six months or longer in the past, when hired again, were in completely different fields.

You could say that such a dramatic rise in longterm unemployment has given the chance for new and emerging firms to have their pick of experienced talent from a wide variety of fields and that this is an opportunity for an outdated US economy to shift towards 21st Century jobs.

Effects that aren’t being talked about so much: children born in poverty over the past two years (and next XXX years) that otherwise wouldn’t have been and have lacked access to adequate nutrition, medical care, love/affection/nurturing, etc; whether we will be able to get out out of a downward spiral of [unemployment --> less money for job retraining, safety net benefits, etc ---> more unemployment] etc (we have simply never dealt with this large a mass of people unable to find jobs before); the unequal distribution of the above – especially by race and age, and what that means for how recovery might or might not happen in various communities.

Based on all the last recessions, it seems there is very little noise or oscillation at the top of the peak. Once it starts moving down, it continues. So far, there is no sign of a turnaround here, but if we do see one, I think we can say that all things being equal, it should continue. However, all other recessions have occurred pre Peak Oil, when there was plenty of easily accessible petro-energy to rev up the economy. It is unclear that that is the case this time.

It is worth at least a mention, that as we see so many of these indicators push into places that they have never been, that there is the opportunity that people will start to question the entire structure of “jobs”/”work”. A shift to a new norms of what “sufficient material wealth” looks like and why it is that some people are able to maintain their lifestyle while many others can’t is one possible/hopeful outcome here.

An article in the New York Times looks at the hallowing out of the Black middle class in Memphis and the reversal of decades worth of economic gains:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html

From a purely structural standpoint, it has long looked like African-American employment disparities are both part of initial condition gap that has never closed as well as subject to more volatility than white unemployment [ie; macroeconomic shocks happen at the same point, however AA employment is affected quite a bit more and often takes longer to recover. This is consistent with the "last hired/first fired" hypothesis.

The Economic Policy Institute currently notes that as of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100.

Because wealth provides a safety net in times of economic hardship, what we are seeing -- even in the best case scenario of a recovery that is underway [which I think is highly unlikely], is a completely decimated Black middle class, as well as a complete drawdown of the limited amount of assets that were available.

If a higher percentage of black families are unemployed, staying unemployed for longer, and drawing on much smaller pools of wealth as a safety net, that means that Black wealth is going to continue disappearing much faster than white wealth. Add to that predatory lending practices, the greater likelihood of foreclosure in segregated communities, and the greater likelihood of losing all wealth when you are starting with a much smaller amount and you have a situation where even if black and white employment and incomes were brought magically to parity tomorrow, you would see wealth disparities continue to increase.

I am looking for any models, particularly system dynamics models, that look at the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the US. I know Dennis Meadows was working on one model a while ago, but have not been able to track it down. Are you aware of any others?

Quote of the day that lends itself to some modeling:

A century ago, fewer than two people per 1,000 were considered to be “disabled” by mental illness and in need of hospitalisation . By 1955, that number had jumped to 3.38 people per 1,000, and during the past 50 years, a period when psychiatric drugs have been the cornerstone of care, the disability rate has climbed steadily, and has now reached around 20 people per 1,000. As with any epidemic, one would suspect that an outside agent of some type-a virus, a bacterial infection, or an environmental toxin was causing this rise in illness. That is indeed the case here. There is an outside agent fueling this epidemic of mental illness, only it is to be found in the medicine cabinet. Psychiatric drugs perturb normal neurotransmitter function, and while that perturbation may curb symptoms over a short term, over the long run it increases the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill, or ill with new and more severe symptoms . A review of the scientific literature shows quite clearly that it is our drug-based paradigm of care that is fueling this modem-day plague.

from Robert Whitaker’s article “Anatomy of an Epidemic: The Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America” recently expanded into a full length book. [Excellent Salon review here]

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When one starts wading into the literature surrounding psychiatric drug use, it is astonishing how many of the studies focus on short-term efficacy, not long-term effects. Part of this is the nature of the double-blind placebo-controlled FDA efficacy studies, which often demand evidence for a short-term effect, but rarely look at long-term usage effects. [Possibly for good reason, far fewer drugs would ever be brought to market if effects had to be looked at over a period of years or decades]. Even more astonishing is the disconnect between the popular conception and “party line” of drug reps that psychiatric drugs are short-term solutions to manage crises, whereas in reality most psychiatric patients are kept on polydrug cocktails for years – often gradually increasing doses and adding drugs over time, rather than the reverse.

Short-term solutions that actually make problems worse in the long run are so common as to be canonical in system dynamics modeling. What then, are we to make of long term behavior patterns like the ones below. [All quotes are taken from the original version of Robert Whitaker's paper, linked above].

The study that is still cited today as proving the efficacy of neuroleptics for curbing acute episodes of schizophrenia was a nine-hospital trial of 344 patients conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health in the early 1960s. At the end of six weeks, 75% of the drug-treated patients were “much improved” or “very much improved” compared to 23% of the placebo patients. (Cole, Klermn et al., 1964).

However, three years later, the NIMH reported on one-year outcomes for the patients. Much to their surprise, they found that “patients who received placebo treatment were less likely to be rehospitalized than those who received any of the three active phenothiazines” (Schooler, Goldberg et al., 1967, pp. 991).

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In 1988, researchers who led the large Cross-National Collaborative Panic Study, which involved 1,700 patients in 14 countries, reported that at the end of four weeks, 82% of the patients treated with Xanax (alprazolam) were “moderately improved” or “better,” versus 42% of the placebo patients. However, by the end of eight weeks, there was no difference between the groups, at least among those who remained in the study (Balanger, 1988). Any benefit with Xanax seemed to last for only a short period. As a followup to that study, researchers in Canada and the U.K. studied benzodiazepine-treated patients over a period of six months. They reported that the Xanax patients got better during the first four weeks of treatment, that they did not improve any more in weeks four to eight, and that their symptoms began to worsen after that. As patients were weaned from the drugs, a high percentage relapsed, and by the end of 23 weeks, they were worse off than patients treated without drugs on five different outcomes measures (Marks, 1993).

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Lastly, multiple studies looking at the long-term wellness of people diagnosed with schizophrenia based on anti-psychotic use that suggest that longterm anti-psychotic use is inversely correlated with wellbeing.

Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report rightly points out that based on the Brandeis data, African Americans and whites will never gain wealth parity, indeed they are moving further away from it and notes that

Black folks have been integrated long enough to know that the white family didn’t get richer by a quarter million dollars because they were smarter than the Black family. Privilege, especially cumulative privilege over generations, works wonders, like compound interest only better.

Not only does wealth itself function in a strong reinforcing loop (“gotta have money to make money”), especially combined with inheritance, but the power to continually tweak socioeconomic structures is the metaprivilege underneath it all.

It continually amazes me how strong the dominant narrative of “racial disparities were bad, they are getting better, and soon they will cease to exist” is. Despite the fact that in nearly every indicator of wellbeing, racial disparities not only continue to exist, but are in many cases the same or worse than they were 50 years ago. When better, they are either trivially better, or the bar has been moved. (HS graduation disparities are a lot better, for example, but a HS diploma doesn’t get you very far these days) These statistics are there for anyone that looks, yet even fellow white progressives are often shocked at their extent.

Two notes:

Both the United for A Fair Economy reports cited and Mr Ford’s article, often project forward disparities based on the assumption that they will stay on the exact same trajectory. We know, in fact, that this is rarely the case.

While it is true that significant wealth disparities exist even for Black families with incomes equal or greater to corresponding white families, we also know that much of this inequality is disproportionately benefiting a very small portion of the elite class. It would be foolish to assert that the continuing economic downturn would magically result in racial harmony and a class-based consciousness, when in fact we have seen harsh economic storms almost always bring increasing racial antagonism and fierce fighting over smaller pieces of the pie. However, we can continue to organize around the fact that the same socioeconomic structures that disproportionately benefit whites are also resulting in a decimated middle class and intensifying wealth inequality overall.

While I don’t see any hope of a large multi-racial movement for economic justice on the horizon, I do see the gathering storm clouds of a Tea Party populism and anti-immigrant sentiment that has racial anxiety all twisted up with economic fears. Sometimes you gotta work as hard as you can just to keep things from getting worse.

Nice little widget from PBS that allows you to adjust the flow rate for different possible Deepwater Horizon scenarios and see the total oil leaked. Would be nice if they also let you project out into the future and benchmark it against other large oil spills

We know that the NOAA/BP estimate is off, since BP now says they are diverting that amount through their stopgap tube. And clearly, based on live video, there is still tons of oil/gas spewing into the Gulf.

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Edit: Finally! (only took a month of BP stonewalling)

Admiral Thad Allen..has today established the Flow Rate Technical Team, a multi-agency federal effort to determine oil flow rates from the BP spill at multiple time periods following the explosion, fire, and subsequent loss of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning posts excerpts from a new paper in PNAS that estimates that given the worst-case IPCC scenario (which remember, we have had to, err, make worser a number of times already) we have about a five percent chance of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet is uninhabitable. And by uninhabitable they mean that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die.

In the past few months, there have been a variety of reports that have come out looking at the growing racial wealth gap in the United States.

The most recent was a study from Brandeis University showing both that the black/white wealth gap has quadrupled in about one generation, and that income disparities themselves aren’t the only factor in wealth disparities.

Before that, we saw a study showing that single Black women (across all ages, from age 18 to 64) have a median wealth of $100 and single Latinas have a median wealth of $120. The figure for single white women? $41,000.

Michelle Alexander points out in her book that the mass incarceration of Black males in the United States is a large contributing factor to the wealth gap that is rarely talked about and that during the economic boom years of the 90s under Clinton, that real Black male unemployment (including prisoners) stood at greater than 40%. [Look for a future post about the problems caused by mass incarceration]

Keys here in my mind:

• Wealth is a stock and income is a flow. Wealth accumulates. Even if income disparities were eliminated tomorrow, there is no guarantee that wealth disparities would close. In fact, given the way that wealth accumulates in a capitalist system, without some strong balancing feedback loops (progressive taxation, high taxation of inheritance, social pressure to donate wealth to charity, etc), we would expect to see wealth disparities continue to rise exponentially.

• These wealth disparities have gone hand-in-hand with a socioeconomic system that has created one of the most staggeringly unequal societies in the world. A system where in 1970 about half of executives were paid about 25x more than the average worker’s pay and in 2004 they were paid over 100x the average worker’s pay. A system where the bottom 50% of Americans only have 2.5% of the wealth (and the top 1% of Americans have nearly one-third).
• Wealth disparities today equal health and education disparities tomorrow. Now, this doesn’t have to be the case. There are ways of building social structures so that wealth doesn’t so directly affect access to educational opportunity or health care. But, we don’t have structures like that in the US.
• Remember, this is largely before the Great Recession, which we know continues to have disparate racialized impacts.
• Lastly, much of this wealth is hallucinatory. The great abstraction of the money economy, combined with the ability to draw upon nearly-free fossil fuel reserves for the past few generations (as well as a heaping dose of old-fashioned economic imperialism and empire-building), has allowed a build-up of paper worth that is so abstract that even the people that get paid millions of dollars a year to figure out how it corresponds to real goods and services have been unable (or perhaps, more to the point, unwilling) to do so.

There have been a variety of back-of-the-envelope calculations trying to estimate the rate of the current oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of them have been orders of magnitude higher than the official estimate of 5000 bbl/d. (Even though neither BP nor NOAA have been repeating those numbers for the past week, the media have continued to use them as fact — until tonight).

Whether analyzing flow rate based on the videos recently released or the size of the slick, most estimates have been closer to 50000 bbl/d. Some higher, some lower, so that seems to be a solid middle of the road estimate at this point.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525

http://www.skytruth.org/

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50000 bbl/d would be one Exxon Valdez every four days.

It is also more than over half the countries in the world use per day.

Into an ecosystem that is much more difficult to remediate than the rocky beaches of Prince William Sound.

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EDIT: The Oil Drum has a good wonky discussion today grappling with the various estimates out there. Consensus seems to be that 50-70k bbl/day is probably on the high side, but that 5k bbl/day is almost certainly too low.

The real question is, BP has cameras and robots down there. No doubt they have a good assessment of the flow rate, or could make enough video available that good assessments could be done. Or just stick something in the flow to get some different measurements. Why isn’t more information being made publicly available to get more solid estimates of the scale of the catastrophe?

Conferences and Workshops that may be of interest to you.

ISSS Conference: Governance for a Resilient Planent
Waterloo, Canada – July 18-23

System Dynamics Society Conference
Seoul, South Korea – July 25-29

American Society for Cybernetics conference
July 30-August 2
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Summer workshops at the Santa Fe Institute

Upcoming ISEE and Waters Foundation workshops

Creative Learning Exchange — Systems Thinking & Dynamic Modeling For K-12 Education
June 26-28, 2010
Wellesley, MA