1. Chart of the Day I (above) shows that we just entered the 127th month of the current economic expansion, which is the longest expansion in US history. How long can it last? See the next chart for a possible answer.

2. Chart of the Day II (above) shows the monthly probabilities of a pending US recession based on research and data from University of Oregon economics professor Jeremy Piger. For the month of October, the probability of a US recession increased to nearly 10%, which is higher than the 9.2% recession probability in December 2007 when the Great Recession started. According to Piger’s website:

Monthly smoothed recession probabilities are calculated from a dynamic-factor Markov-switching (DFMS) model applied to four monthly coincident variables: a) non-farm payroll employment, b) the index of industrial production, c) real personal income excluding transfer payments, and d) real manufacturing and trade sales.

If you look at the full history of recession probabilities above over the last 50 years, you’ll see that although there have been a few false signals when the recession probability rose to 10% and a recession didn’t follow, it’s more often the case that a 10% probability is actually followed by an official recession. Stay tuned!

3. Chart of the Day III (above) shows the relationship between: a) median household income by race from the Census Bureau and b) the share of births to unmarried mothers from the Center for Health Statistics, both for 2018. Based on a statistical measure of the correlation between two variables, there is almost a perfect negative relationship (correlation coefficient = -0.988) between median household income by race and the share of births to unmarried mothers by race.

4. Quotation of the Day I is more utter brilliance from Thomas Sowell, the master of “idea density”:

Unfortunately, our educational system is not only failing to teach critical thinking, it is often itself a source of confused rhetoric and emotional venting in place of systematic reasoning.

Instead of trying to propagandize children to hug trees and recycle garbage, our schools would be put to better use teaching them how to analyze and test what is said by people who advocate tree-hugging, recycling, and innumerable other causes across the political spectrum.

The point is not to teach them correct conclusions but to teach them to be able to use their own minds to analyze the issues that will come up in the years ahead, which may have nothing to do with recycling or any of the other issues of our time.

5. Monopolies and Cartels Aren’t Forever. Exhibit A: “The Epic Rise and Hard Fall of New York’s Taxi King” in today’s New York Times:

For more than a decade, New York taxi industry leaders got rich by creating a bubble in the market for the city permits, known as medallions, that allow people to own and operate cabs.

In several articles this year, an investigation by The New York Times found that government officials stood by as industry leaders artificially inflated medallion prices and channeled immigrant drivers into loans they could not afford to purchase the permits. The leaders reaped hundreds of millions of dollars before the bubble burst, wiping out thousands of buyers who are still mired in debt today.

6. The Gender Scooter Gap. No surprise here — a new study finds a “Gender Electric Scooter Gap” consistent with other data showing women are generally more risk-averse than men. For example ~90% of workplace fatalities, motorcycle deaths, federal prisoners, and deaths attempting to climb Mt. Everest are men. And yet the author of the article apparently advocates “fixing that gender gap.” ?? Why?

7. Graphic of the Day (above) applies especially to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Karla Marx (AOC) and other Democratic Socialists.

8. Quotation of the Day II is from Matt Frost’s article “After Climate Despair” in The New Atlantis and is considered a “must read” by Judith Curry:

It is time to acknowledge that catastrophism has failed to bring about the global political breakthrough the climate establishment dreams of, and will not succeed in time to avert serious warming. Instead of despairing over a forever-deferred dream of austerity, our resources would be better spent now on investing in potential technological breakthroughs to reduce atmospheric carbon, and our political imagination better put toward preparing for a future of ever more abundant energy.
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What should motivate our response to climate change is what got us into this mess in the first place: our desire for the abundance that energy technology affords. Energy is the commodity that allows us to protect ourselves from the ravages of nature and to live distinctly human lives, and many of the benefits we enjoy today were made possible by the exploitation of fossil energy. Our children should enjoy greater energy abundance than us, not less.
But the mainstream climate establishment — the government officials, researchers, advocates, and journalists who sustain the consensus agenda represented by the IPCC — is bent on austerity. They demand that we ration fossil energy consumption until zero-emission sources like wind and solar replace the fossil share of the global energy budget.
Our climate approach should presuppose that we are the benefactors of a burgeoning future population, not the progenitors of an ascetic cult formed to dole out a dwindling stock of resources. New sources of carbon-free energy would offer more value to more people than whatever new levers of social control we might invent to enforce a worldwide carbon-rationing regime.

9. Quotation of the Day III is from the article “The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history” on the World Socialist Web Site:

Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.

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There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history. 

10. Video of the Day (below) of the Tesla Energy Crisis, see “Chaos in California as Tesla drivers are stranded for hours in a half-a-mile-long line to charge their cars on Black Friday.” The downside of rich people’s green virtue signaling….

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