1. People “leaving” the workforce (as though leaving means they decided to just live on their trust fund, instead of hitting the office twice a week).

2. Population growth, which has to add 110,000 new workers to the workforce – a workforce that is far smaller today (4 million) than five years ago.

Instead of economic analysius, we are faced with media blather about whether each number is a winner or loser. Trends are ignored and numbers are treated like scores in the football playoffs.

It has all digressed to: is my team (Dem or Rep) winning, not whether or not our incomes and futures will see improvement.

Such plays well to us accepting the financial takeover artists (Bain?), who control an increasing number of American companies, and whose management style is just winning the latest quarterly goal, and the Hell with the future.

Last Friday, Dr JB was on Ratigan’s program and at one point the host mentioned the economy being ‘like an ecosystem’. That struck me as a harbinger.

At a later point in that interview, Dr JB mentioned that the GOP conversations so far this year are pretty much a continuation of the same old ‘trickle down’ economics we’ve heard for a generation.

Unfortunately, the ‘trickle down’ framework does not explain how (nor why) formerly retail jobs are now morphing into network-based, logistics-enabled delivery jobs.

Last week, Ratigan also hosted entrepreneur Nick Hanauer on his program, talking about how our very concepts of what an economy ‘is’ needs to adapt to new scientific insights about about individual and social behavior.

Having just finished Hanauer’s “The Gardens of Democracy”, what strikes me about this post is how Dr JB’s “… thinking about how seasonal employment patterns are evolving over time…” is exactly the kind of adaptive, real-time thinking we need. What underlies the shift in seasonal employment patterns? Probably the emergence of digital technologies, eCommerce, logistics (i.e., UPS, FedEx, DHL), vast server farms, and networked communications. Top-down, trickle-down simply does not map to this kind of economic activity.

Apart from the specifics of employment patterns, lurking under the surface of this post is the bigger topic of economic paradigms, and how ‘trickle-down’ is not a realistic roadmap given the deeper economic shifts we are seeing. The employment stats seem like more evidence of the increasing disconnect between outdated economic paradigms (i.e. ‘trickle down’), the digitizing economy, and the sclerotic effects on economic behavior when policies are in thrall to outdated thinking.

PPss. apply your statistics to my point above and you will “interpret” more correctly what we mean.

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday did set records, the brick N mortars tried to get the shopping season off earlier than normal. Their goal might have also been to smooth out the holiday hiring. Either they hired more people earlier to stock and sell, OR they hired less later to re-stock and sell. Might have done both, but with Amazon flooding the streets, we think not.

Either way, the normal shopping season was not as normal this year. Sorta like being more like “politicians”. Although one might argue that those people are never, ever, real-ly normal.