Saturday roundup

The  headline for the Washington Post's story about May unemployment numbers had a hold-off-on-the-celebration tone to it, but it turns out to be a case in which reading the actual article greatly diminishes the sensationalism:

. . . the Washington Post is out with a story titled “A ‘misclassification error’ made the May unemployment rate look better than it is.  Here’s what happened.”

The story itself takes the shock out of the headline. Nothing went wrong with the May unemployment rate in particular. There’s just an ongoing, and incredibly boring, technical difficulty stemming from the pandemic.

Basically, the unemployment rate is calculated from surveys the government conducts; people are classified as employed, unemployed, or out of the labor force depending on the answers they give to a slew of questions. But these questions were not written with a pandemic in mind. For instance, if someone is not working because their business was idled, are they considered temporarily laid off (and thus unemployed), or are they employed but not working, like someone who’s on leave?

These workers are supposed to be counted as unemployed, but they’re not always getting entered into the system that way:

The BLS instructed surveyors to try to figure out if someone was absent because of the pandemic and, if so, to classify them as on “temporary layoff,” meaning they would count in the unemployment data. But some people continued to insist they were just “absent” from work during the pandemic, and the BLS has a policy of not changing people’s answers once they are recorded. It’s how the BLS protects again[st] bias or data manipulation.

How does this affect the numbers? Basically, it just makes the official unemployment rate a little lower during this period. After adjusting for the sudden rise of “absent” workers, the March, April, and May unemployment rates are about 5.4 percent, 19.7 percent, and 16.3 percent, respectively, instead of the official figures of 4.4 percent, 14.7 percent, and 13.3 percent. The unemployment rate still fell a bit in May when everyone expected it to rise, and it’s still good news.

Hey, I warned you it was boring.

Saving Elephants, a website I've recently discovered and become a big fan of, has the second part of a series on how belief in an enduring moral order is the crux of conservatism. The latest installment explores how we can know that the order exists a priori:

Kirk summarized two methods of discerning order outside of reason. The first was prescription—"those ways and institutions and rights prescribed by long—sometimes immemorial—usage”—and the second was tradition—“received opinions, convictions religious and moral and political and aesthetic passed down from generation to generation.” Both methods operate from a basis of faith—namely, faith in the notion that order can be discerned via revealed truths or those things shown to be true through generations of trial-and-error. The conservative who believes in God might go so far as to say that the only reason humans would ever conform to order—which grates against our sin nature of appetite and pleasure-seeking—is that God has put inside of each of us the capacity for both discerning and obeying that order.

 Part One is here. Poke around the site. Great podcasts and resources for learning more about the foundations of conservatism.

This one's pretty big and may warrant its own post as things develop: The VSG has issued a directive to draw down U.S. troops in Germany by 9500, and, as of mid-day Saturday German time, had not notified that country's government.

Senate Republicans fear that the VSG might take their majority in that chamber down with him in November. Well, people, it's a little late in the game, but you could still demonstrate some spine and forthrightly declare that you're not in his camp.

Bracing piece by Alexandra Hudson at The Bulwark on how the riots press upon us the truth that it never takes all that much to sever the gossamer thread by which civilization hangs:

The violence and destruction that emerged from the protests, and the speed with which they emerged, should cause us to reconsider some of our assumptions—some of the fundamental social facts we misunderstand or take for granted. In particular, the events of the past week provide a valuable reminder of the fragility of our civilization and our way of life; they refute the notion of inevitable human progress; and they underscore the way in which a truly civilized society is underpinned by a respect for equal human dignity—without which we are lost.

First, the fragility of civilization. Many of us ordinarily and unthinkingly assume that the civilization—and perhaps even the peace and prosperity—we enjoy are somehow natural, the default state of things. Students of history, of course, know otherwise. And even before the events of the last week, 2020 has been an education in overturning such comfortable assumptions.

The riots remind us that civilization and community are not foregone conclusions. They do not simply spring up from the earth, but are the work of centuries; they are the fruit of institutional and social arrangements that must be cultivated and nurtured in our every interaction, every day. Democratic governments in particular depend upon most individuals choosing to follow the law, respect their fellow citizens, and act for the common good. As we saw over the last week, when even just a few citizens choose not to do so, chaos ensues.

Second, the riots also refute the conceit of human progress—the notion that we are continually evolving to have moral and ethical codes superior to those of our forebears. In his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis referred to this way of thinking as “chronological snobbery”—“the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”

Whether today or two millennia ago, the right conditions can unleash the worst of human nature. We remain as vulnerable to fear and rage and tribalism and a “mob mentality” as we have ever been. Social science research suggests that when people act in groups, individuals suppress their moral codes and dispel some of the social and societal constraints that otherwise inhibit violence and destruction. Relatedly, research also suggests that the sense of self—and the individual moral codes that come with it—are diminished in crowds. Anonymity is easier to maintain in large groups, and responsibility is easier to spread across large numbers.

Thanks especially to advances in technology, our overall standards of living have risen dramatically in the last several hundred years. But it is a mistake to think that because our species is improving materially, we are also improving socially and morally. The chaos we observed across the country over the last week reminds us of the truth of an unchanging human nature. 

That last point, by the way, is the point of Part One of the series at Saving Elephants.  We keep getting fancier in terms of comfort, convenience and amazing gadgets but we're still the same critters we were when we got kicked out of the garden of Eden.