Recent quotes:
Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1
Liberals at the time were sure there was another way. They cheered Ted Kennedy at the 1980 Democratic convention, when he said, “Let us pledge that we will never misuse unemployment, high interest rates, and human misery as false weapons against inflation.” That same year, Kenneth Arrow stated his disagreement “with those who suggest we use shock methods or a very severe economic slump to eliminate inflation. It could have permanently bad consequences. People don’t get over a depression easily.” And Paul Samuelson argued that to change the “present inflation-growth path quickly will take severe measures—which I’m not for. . . . My personal judgment is that this is too severe a price for less advantaged people to pay.”Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1
Those who praise Volcker like to say he “broke the back” of inflation. Nancy Teeters, the lone dissenter on the Fed Board of Governors, had a different metaphor: “I told them, ‘You are pulling the financial fabric of this country so tight that it’s going to rip. You should understand that once you tear a piece of fabric, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to put it back together again.” (Teeters, also the first woman on the Fed board, told journalist William Greider that “None of these guys has ever sewn anything in his life.”) Fabric or backbone: both images convey violence. In any case, a price index doesn’t have a spine or a seam; the broken bodies and rent garments of the early 1980s belonged to people. Reagan economic adviser Michael Mussa was nearer the truth when he said that “to establish its credibility, the Federal Reserve had to demonstrate its willingness to spill blood, lots of blood, other people’s blood.”Other People’s Blood | Online Only | n+1
t the height (or nadir) of the Volcker Shock, benchmark interest rates were over 20 percent—and worse if you had bad credit. The exorbitant cost of borrowing put tens of thousands of firms out of business, and led to twenty-two months of negative growth. In December 1982, unemployment was at 10.8 percent—closer to 20 percent if you include workers who wanted jobs but had stopped looking, and underemployed workers who could not find steady full-time work. In absolute terms, twelve million Americans were unemployed that month, plus another thirteen million “discouraged” and underemployed.
The United States graduated proportionally fewer computer-science majors in 2011-12 than in 1985-86.
Could that really be? We live in an age when techology companies are growing at exponential rates and, in some cases, have resorted to anticompetitive measures in order to retain the best people.
So we looked into it.
It’s true that the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in 1985-86 (4.3 percent of the total) was significantly higher than the percentage in 2011-12 (2.6 percent).