During the period  Orion and artappraiser discuss in their interesting   adjacent blogs something else happened.

US Unemployment %

Feb 2008    4.9

Feb 2009    8.3

Oct 2009   10.0 

Feb 2012    8.3

Feb  2015  5.5

Some unemployment level is pretty much painless. ¨Frictional¨ . People who´ve just left one job and are quite happy to take a break.

Statisticians know the number,I don´t.    But let´s say it´s at @3%.  So the swing in ¨involuntary¨ unemployment was from

1.9% in Feb 08 to

7.0% in Oct 09.  Say three  and a half times. A lot.

And not just a blip. In 2015 we still hadn´t gotten back to the 2008 level.

Just maybe if you  overlay those numbers over the qualitative trends Orion and  aa discuss the picture comes into focus: alt right? drug use? New York City homeless shelters? 

Joe Lunchpail is programmed  to need 3 squares a day; a job that causes him to feel he is coping with life;  a ¨home¨ where he spend nights with only his family .

And if he doesn´t  have those what happens to him?

Does he give up his belief in capitalism? Or sort of the opposite:  give up his belief in trying to care for his fellow human beings and look for muslim school girls to beat up on a train? 

Surely  for many  socioeconomic conditions seem  random or worse :¨those whom the gods destroy they first make mad¨. 

 One wonders how Joe L. would react if he learned the financial crisis hadn´t been  random.

The gods hadn´t done it.  Ayn Rand had. Or rather her disciple , Alan Greenspan. That it was the result of his -and his sponsors from Reagan on-  doctrinaire theory that the economy shouldn´t be ¨managed::,  It would take care of itself  but only provided  the Government didn´t try to  ¨regulate ¨ it.  .

They - the free- enterprise uber alles cohort -  ¨knew ¨ Keynes had been  wrong .  When he concluded that the ¨classical¨ view -that economies self correct- no longer applied ( if it ever did) ,that instead an economy  could as easily  stabilize in a permanent ¨depression¨  as at full employment. And Joe  could sleep in his homeless shelter forever.

We are only the slaves of a dead economist if we don´t have the sense to

elect an  Obama  who has the guts to act.