Day-Before-Thanksgiving Traffic

Traffic is different today, on the day before Thanksgiving. And it’s not just that traffic is lighter on commercial through streets and heavier on highways. The traffic has a different character. An unusually large proportion of drivers, the highest of any day of the year, don’t quite know where they are because they are going somewhere they don’t go often. They are more hesitant. When they stop at a stop sign, they may take a second longer to size up the intersection before they proceed. They might be reading the street signs. They act like they’ve never been in this town before — and in many cases, that’s true.

The behavior of the traffic on the day before Thanksgiving must be maddening to people who otherwise drive only in rush hour, a time when they can expect nearly all drivers on the road to be quick and decisive. You can be quick and decisive when you’re driving to the same place for the 1,000th time. It’s not a realistic pattern to expect when you’re going someplace for the second or third time, as many people are today.

Patience and caution are helpful traits to adopt when you have to deal with a bunch of newbies on the roads (or anywhere else, for that matter). Patience, because it takes everyone longer to figure things out when they’re seeing them for the first time. Caution, because people who are in unfamiliar territory are likely to see things differently, and to make decisions you might not anticipate. I wish safe travels for everyone who is going somewhere today.

U.S. Flu Decline Confirmed

The CDC is reporting a decline in U.S. flu cases. The CDC’s numbers are potentially misleading, but are confirmed by other measures. It is now safe to say the H1N1 flu really did peak in August.

The CDC’s measures can be misleading, as they are mainly influenced by the number of doctor visits, which in turn are strongly affected by the hype surrounding the flu. Health authorities engineered an avalanche of media reports about flu at the end of September and in the first half of October to try to persuade people to get the H1N1 flu vaccine. The scare tactics worked. They also scared lots of people into thinking they had the flu, and when they went to the doctor, many got tested, and sure enough, nearly half of them did have the H1N1 flu. The spike in flu cases confirmed during that period does not indicate a spike in flu during that time, though, just an increase in testing, as other measures showed flu at a much lower level than during its August peak.

The flu hype certainly faded as we went into November, so the decline reported by the CDC also has to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet the picture coming from the CDC of a substantial decline in flu this month is probably true because it matches other measures, based mostly on self-reporting. These show a total rate of flu barely half that of late September and October, and perhaps a fifth of the rate of the second half of August and first few days of September.

According to one epidemiological estimate, based mostly on lab tests from people who appeared healthy, about 14 percent of Americans came down with H1N1 flu during the summer, and if I can extrapolate that, that would mean about 4 to 5 percent caught it in the fall — with most showing no more than vague, fleeting symptoms. The first wave, then, was over long before anyone could have produced a vaccine. The current fuss over the way the vaccine was produced and delivered is largely academic, at least in the United States.

Doctor-visit reports from Canada are still showing an increase in H1N1 flu, but remaining at a much lower level than seen in the United States. There, the vaccine probably did arrive before the flu peak.

There will be a second wave of H1N1 flu in the United States during the winter months, and probably again during the following winter, but the first wave was so large that any subsequent wave would have to be smaller — too small to notice, if we weren’t all looking for it.

Across the northern hemisphere, there are concerns about the spread of H1N1 flu, but the facts so far are not living up to the worst fears. This is particularly so with an epidemic in Ukraine in which more than one fourth of the population was thought to have come down with flu. The Ukraine epidemic is worrisome because of the number of deaths reported, even though tests so far suggest that most of the cases do not involve flu. This means that the problem is probably a different infectious disease. At this point, determining the cause and nature of the Ukraine illnesses ought to be a greater priority than the mop-up work remaining to be done for H1N1 flu.

The Personal Impact of Job Loss

An ABC News/Washington Post poll released over the weekend shows the personal impact of job loss in the United States. The headline number: 30 percent have seen a household member lose a job within the last year (or have lost a job themselves). That’s a number to rival the Great Depression, and it helps to explain why consumers are so downbeat about the economy.

Another number that sheds some light on this is the number of people who were surprised when a job loss occurred: 52 percent. This suggests that people are taking economic conditions personally. If so, consumer sentiment could fall substantially as millions of additional job cuts occur over the next year.

A more encouraging note from the survey: nearly half of respondents believe the economy is starting to improve, or will do so within the next few months.

The poll and the ABC News report of it are worth taking a look at:

Beyond the Financial Damage, Layoffs Take a Heavy Emotional Toll

Taping Toy Guns to Trees

Al Gore was on Saturday Night Live last night, appearing in a Weekend Update bit to complain about how hard it is to get people to pay attention to climate issues. Science and reason aren’t working so well to persuade political leaders, he said, but he had a plan B:

I’m going to start acting crazy. . . . I think it’s crazy that our politicians aren’t more worried about the climate crisis, so it’s time for us to out-crazy the crazy.

Within this joke, there is a serious point about the typical approach of management by failure. Waiting for a problem to grow serious enough to do damage in a dramatic way puts us at a distinct disadvantage with some problems. If we wait until the sea level rises enough to flood Interstate 95 before we respond, we miss the chance to avoid, at a relatively modest cost, the extensive damage that would accompany that degree of climate change.

The Thirsty Economy

Why is money so important? Why does it matter that the financial system, and with it, people’s ability to use money, is breaking down?

This may be easiest to see with a metaphor taken from biology. Any living organism needs water to carry materials into and out of cells. The cells are where the action takes place in an organism, so if there is less water, the action slows down.

This is why, if you have an illness, water may be the first recommendation you hear (along with rest). Recovery and healing are a body’s natural responses to illness, but when you are thirsty, these processes slow down. If you have enough water at the cellular level, you recover faster.

When money is scarce or uncertain, or impaired in some other way, it is as if the economy is thirsty. The action in the economy is the action of individuals, but money makes it easy to transfer work and its results from person to person and from place to place. When there is a problem with money, the result is less action, and the whole economy slows down.

There are quite a few problems with money right now. Bank deposits and other ways of storing money are not as safe as they were two years ago. The credit card transaction network is under assault from criminal organizations, along with their collaborators inside more than a few banks. Many consumers have become wary of using their debit cards because of the risk of hidden transaction fees. The exchange rates between currencies have gone through awkward adjustments this year, and that will continue into next year, and perhaps beyond, as there is a huge risk of inflation in some currencies, but only a slight risk in others.

The result of all these problems with money is a shift in the way people work. You see this in its most stark form in the boom in subsistence farming. Growing your own food might be hard work, but one thing you can say for it is that it is one thing you can do, assuming you have land to do it on, when your access to money becomes uncertain. In many other smaller ways, people are on their own, having to solve their own problems because they are unable to buy a solution.

When money isn’t working, the people responsible for economic policy do what they think they can to get money working again. The rest of us have two other angles we can look into to alleviate the problem. One of these, which I alluded to already, is self-reliance — getting better at solving our own problems. The other, though, is as modern as self-reliance is ancient. This is the use of technology to get better information on the things we’re trying to do. Most of the Internet didn’t exist yet during the last recession, so this is basically new. Money ultimately acts a form of information anyway, so it isn’t so strange to see information being used as a substitute for money.