水

The Chinese character for water has deep significance for a nation whose population is slowly sucking down her remaining natural water supplies, particularly in the more arid, northern part of China. Back in 2005, the BBC reported that potable water from China’s existing sources was already fighting an horrific environmental battle: “Zhang Lijun, Deputy Director of the State Environmental Protection Administration [noted:] ‘A survey showed that underground water in 90 percent of Chinese cities has been polluted by organic and inorganic pollutants, and there are signs that [it] is spreading.’” China drew 70% of its urban and 40% of its agricultural water supplies from underground sources. Water issues could just be the giant brake on an otherwise accelerating economy. The situation has grown from “it can ’t get much worse than this” to “oh my God, the water situation in China has gotten so much worse.”

Add a dash of rising global temperatures, and China may shrivel up and die of thirst: “A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin [Beijing’s sister port city] alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill.” New York Times, June 1^st.

But China tackles big problems in even bigger ways. Take for example, China’s Three Gorges Dam (above), built over 19 years to contain flooding, generate massive hydroelectric power and store tons of water by blocking off the western Yangtze River, which runs east-west through the middle of the country. It has been a colossal feat, albeit plagued with problems: “According to official figures, the venture cost China about $23 billion, but outside experts estimate it may have cost double that amount. The dam has been plagued by reports of floating archipelagos of garbage, carpets of algae and landslides on the banks along the vast expanse of still water since the 600-foot-tall dam on the Yangtze River was completed in 2006. Critics also have complained that the government has fallen far short of its goals in helping to reset tle the 1.4 million people displaced by the rising waters behind the dam.” New York Times, May 19^th.

But such problems have not deterred China’s planners to begin moving forward on her next huge water-related solution to the obvious crisis and pending shortages in the north: “Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.

“The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had ‘urgent problems,’ the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities.

“Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison.” NY Times, June 1^st. The drain on the river system is so significant that scientists believe the environmental consequences will produce very significant and yet unforeseen damage. Further, the emphasis on Beijing and its surrounding areas has southerners screaming that they should not be required to bear the burden of solving the water problems in the north. The bureaucracy trundles along undeterred.

Lest we sit back with a smug environmentally-superior smile, the United States faces its own intense water issues – which have been the frequent subject of my blog. Not only are obvious problems arising in the arid Western states, but as the Ogallala Aquifer (which stretches from the Dakotas to north Texas and supplies much of the irrigation water to our grain belt) runs out of water in the next 25-35 years, the U.S. may have to contemplate similar massive water diversion projects either to refill that aquifer from our great rivers or to transport water in other ways to the plains states where so much of our food supply is centered.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you think the problems of dwindling oil are the biggest issues on earth, think again.

Wars of Choice

Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense appointee of both a Republican and a Democratic administration, would appear to be about as politically neutral and objective as any military expert could be expected to be. And in these ruinous financial times, as the United States moves into a phase of modern history where it will share the superpower limelight with at least China (if not Russia… again), our ability to wage war without regard to social or hard dollar costs is no more. “‘If we were about to be attacked or had been attacked or something happened that threatened a vital U.S. national interest, I would be the first in line to say, ‘Let’s go,’ ’ Mr. Gates said [from his office in the Pentagon]. ‘I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.’” New York Times, June 18^th.

Take a good look at Chinese and Russian policies after the fall of the Berlin Wall: they have not spent their nations’ capital to fund their military for attacks outside of their own territorial borders. But 9/11 was an attack on American soil by foreign powers, something neither China nor Russia has experienced in recent history. But who attacked us? Afghanistan? Iraq? And who wound up paying the greatest price? Afghanistan? Iraq? Or us? By removing a Sunni minority government (Saddam Hussein) from Iraq and allowing the majority Shiites to take control, we effectively realigned Iraq’s political future into the Shiite orbit of or clear enemy, Iran. In Afghanistan, we placed our bet on a government that became horribly corrupt, allowing the Taliban to increase their power in every region of the country except the capital cit y of Kabul and environs.

Indeed, despite our pledge to rid the Afghan people of the Taliban scourge forever, we are now forced to negotiate with them to accelerate our extraction from a region where no foreign power has ever succeeded in creating a sustained military success: “The United States is in contact with the Taliban about a possible settlement to the near decade-long war in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on [June 18^th], the first official confirmation of U.S. involvement in negotiations.”HuffingtonPost.com, June 18^th. “Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates [also] acknowledged on [June 19^th] that the U.S. State Department is in direct talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Huffington Post, June 19^th. Meanwhile, our economy is in shambles with a federal deficit that boggles the mind and has brought our Congress to a virtual halt as it considers raising the debt ceiling.

We spent over 1$ trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, turned a federal surplus into an economy-destroying deficit, and really did not accomplish the fundamentals of our military mission. Indeed, our war efforts in these two theaters seem to have provided massive recruiting materials for anti-American Muslim fundamentalists, from Pakistan to Iran. According to the June 21^st Bloomberg.com: “Spending growth on Afghanistan operations helped push the Pentagon over the $1 trillion mark, increasing to $6.2 billion per month in April from $4.3 billion in the first two months of fiscal 2011 that began Oct. 1. Afghanistan spending in fiscal 2009, as Barack Obama became president, averaged $3.9 billion per month… The spending total includes war-related operations, transportation, special combat pay and benefits, food, medical services, maintenance, replacement of lost combat equipment and building the Iraq and Afghanistan security forces... Still, the $1 trillion does not include about $95 billion in funds appropriated but still to put on contract or paid to personnel to cover operational costs over the rest of the fiscal year as well as procurement of replacement weapons systems and construction that take years to spend, said Amy Belasco, a Congressional Research Service budget expert.” And think about those lifetime benefits, survivor and disability payments that can drag on for decades that aren’t in those figures. Still, we seem to be the perennial global cop.

We joined U.N. efforts in Bosnia, a successful purge of genocidal maniacs, and perhaps that is the poster-war for global intervention. Now, we face our military commitment, engendering legal challenges to the President’s ability to wage such combat efforts, in another war against repression, this time in support of rebels against a brutal dictator in Libya. Somehow, we missed intervening in the slaughter being conducted against its own citizens by Syrian forces. We also missed another military expedition – against nuclear-powered Iran – that was seriously contemplated in the last two years of the Bush-Cheney administration… because Robert Gates was very much a part of the faction of cabinet officers that opposed such adventurism. “ ‘[Robert Gates will] be remembered for making us aware of the danger of over-reliance on military intervention as an instrument of American foreign policy,’ said former Senator David L. Boren, who, during his tenure as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, developed a rapport with Mr. Gates when he was director of central intelligence in the early 1990s.” NY Times. For the most part, our attempts at playing global cop have alienated more people than those who would stand and admire us.

There is no way for the United States to withdraw completely from military efforts outside our borders. Our minor remaining presence in South Korea, for example, does serve as a deterrent to the idiotic dictatorship to the north, and South Korea is a vital economic link to the U.S. We also have treaties that we have signed, which includes our pledge to protect Israel. But it would seem that reliance on U.S. forces as the mainstay of “moral intervention” in internal disputes in which we are not attacked (or are in imminent and real danger of attack) is no longer tenable. We can no longer afford to be the single major player in such efforts, instead relying on a vastly more balanced participation in U.N.-sanctioned (perhaps N.A.T.O.-sanctioned, but this must be viewed with increasing skepticism) peace-keeping, primarily targeting genocide-prevention or the destruction of resources that are absolutely vital to our future. We must learn this lesson, because we cannot survive another kick up of deficit-growing military intervention unless we truly can justify “why.” We literally could spend ourselves into self-destruction.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I truly wish more political decision-makers were well-schooled in the clear and obvious lessons of history.

Are American Workers Sittin’ Around & Chewin’ the Fat?

If only Americans could export girth to settle our trade imbalance, but alas, we are just getting bigger, putting increasing burdens on our medical system with increases in diabetes, coronary issues and the whole host of ailments and infirmities associated with being overweight, a particularly disturbing trend as we grapple with the out-of-control costs of medical care in this country. Fact is the American workplace is increasingly sedentary.

“A sweeping review of shifts in the labor force since 1960 suggests that a sizable portion of the national weight gain can be explained by declining physical activity during the workday. Jobs requiring moderate physical activity, which accounted for 50 percent of the labor market in 1960, have plummeted to just 20 percent…. The remaining 80 percent of jobs, the researchers report, are sedentary or require only light activity. The shift translates to an average decline of about 120 to 140 calories a day in physical activity, closely matching the nation’s steady weight gain over the past five decades, according to the report, published [May 25^th] in the journal PLoS One.

“Today, an estimated one in three Americans are obese. Researchers caution that workplace physical activity most likely accounts for only one piece of the obesity puzzle, and that diet, lifestyle and genetics all play an important role.” New York Times, May 25^th. Add to this horrific fact is our love of all things fat, from fried chicken and apple pie to pizza, hamburgers, ice cream and sugar-laden soft drinks. Throw in a dash of NexFlix and American Idol from the local couch, and you have a pretty ugly picture of America today. Just walking down the street in just about any American city, checking out the average posterior doesn’t bode well for posterity!

According to U.S. government reports (available on USGovinfo.About.com) , “[a]verage adult Americans are about one inch taller, but nearly a whopping 25 pounds heavier than they were in 1960, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The bad news, says CDC is that average BMI (body mass index, a weight-for-height formula used to measure obesity) has increased among adults from approximately 25 in 1960 to 28 in 2002…Meanwhile, the average weight for men aged 20-74 years rose dramatically from 166.3 pounds in 1960 to 191 pounds in 2002, while the average weight for women the same age increased from 140.2 pounds in 1960 to 164.3 pounds in 2002.

“Though the average weight for men aged 20-39 years increased by nearly 20 pounds over the last four decades, the increase was greater among older men:

Men between the ages of 40 and 49 were nearly 27 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.

Men between the ages of 50 and 59 were nearly 28 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.

Men between the ages of 60 and 74 were almost 33 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960

For women, the near opposite trend occurred:

Women aged 20-29 were nearly 29 pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.

Women aged 40-49 were about 25½ pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.

Women aged 60-74 were about 17½ pounds heavier on average in 2002 compared to 1960.”

You don’t want to hear the information about our kids… let’s just say it’s trending with the adults.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are some heavy concepts that really scare me.

Declinism

“A pessimistic belief that things are in decline.” Wordnik.com. It’s a controversial word, but quite de rigueur these days in discussing the West in general, but often specifically pegged to discussions of the United States and, particularly, Great Britain. When nations have ridden high, dominating the earth in some extraordinary way, and then contracted for whatever reason, as standards of living fall, there is the inevitable discussion of whether such vectors are both long-term and irreversible. Until England’s handover of Hong Kong to China, the sun never set on the British Empire; until the twentieth century, Britain ruled the seas. But the austerity-driven U.K. of today is only a mere shadow of its former self. Even “declining” Libyan dictator,Muammar Gaddafi, recently derisively described Her Majesty’s isle this way “Britain no longer exists. It is a trace of what it used to be.”

Indeed, Britain’s politicians, apparently seeing no longer-term value-generating economic futures of any significance capable of paying off the U.K. massive deficit, have opted to fight inflation fears over those of continued economic contraction. The latter seems all but inevitable when looking at both England’s political leadership and the current economic malaise. The spirit seems to have gone out of the once optimistic Brits. Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity/ corporate tax reduction programme (note British spelling!) seems to mirror the same desired to inflict deep cuts in government spending reflected in the American Tea Party movement, regardless of the immediate negative consequences – from the UK’s current contracting retail sales to rising unemployment… or longer-term sacrifices in reducing educational capacity, economically-incenting infrastructure or supporting value-creating research.

Ian Jack, writing in the May 2^nd Newsweek in an article entitled “Time for a Royal Wedding… While England is Royalty Screwed,” delves into the self-deprecating factual unpinning for Britain’s erstwhile demise: “The country is facing the biggest squeeze in living standards since the 1920s. Government budgets have been slashed in every direction. This year hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers will get the sack, while inflation, tax increases, and a steep reduction in welfare benefits will eat into the household incomes of nearly everyone else. A whole range of public institutions, from military airfields to public libraries, are closing or being sold off. What remains of the British Navy has been deprived of its last aircraft carrier (the HMS Ark Royal, now for sale on the Ministry of Defence’s version o f eBay).”

Indeed, in contrasting the time of the royal marriage of Will and Kate to that of Will parent’s, Charles and Diana, the comparison is bleak: “When Charles married Diana, British coal pits still employed 250,000 miners; British shipyards still launched ships; British factories still made steel, cars, confectionery, clothes, and beer. Today, mining, shipbuilding, and textiles have almost vanished. What survives of the rest is mainly in the hands of foreign companies. Never mind the royal yacht; which of us in 1981 could have imagined that every British chocolate bar would be made by firms run from Switzerland and the U.S.; that London’s water supply would be owned in Germany and its electricity in France; that the future of Britain’s steel mills would hang by threads attached to headquarters in Mumbai and Bangkok?” Newsweek.

For those who truly accept facts as opposed to unsupported beliefs as to the consequences of severe government austerity in recessionary times, England is the poster child for taking an economic slump and making sure it continues for even longer, disrupting the future as no inflationary spiral could. What is the future of a nation that no longer has the quality educational institutions to train an innovative workforce… even though a few elite universities still remain in the private sector? What is the legacy of a country that no longer manufacturers much of anything that the rest of the world is willing to import? As North Sea’s oil is pumped out, is there a “next” in that precious resource?

No, this is not necessarily the story of the whole of Europe. Germany, which sits atop the European economic heap, is a net exporter, a manufacturer of exceptionally high-quality electronic and mechanical products and systems that are still the envy of enterprises the world over. For Germany, except for the need to support failing European Union economies, the recession is all but over. While there has been a modicum of austerity imposed by her government, Germany’s public schools are still uniformly excellent and her infrastructure is being both repaired and expanded, all aimed at continuing that manufacturing excellence.

But England’s plight and failed solutions should be sending a strong message to the American Congress, in a factious battle to cut with little concern for our future in order to contain a clearly excessive deficit. Apparently, however, no one in the Tea Party cares to look at the impact their purported desired austerity course of action has already made on our neighbor across the sea. One can only look at what is “on the table” in the conservative-led House – from cuts to education, infrastructure, research… and yes, social programs like Medicare – to what is not – from tax increases and oil companies’ special tax treatment to a military budget that consumes 44% of the world’s military expenditures – to understand that this deficit reduction pageant is nothing more than declinism, catering to special interests and social reformers, than manifest fiscal responsibility. After all, if someone really believed in America, wouldn’t they want to invest in her future?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am reminded what we call it when politicians move their lips!

Does America Have a Free Market?

The rallying cry for so many politicians is to “let our free market economy” determine solutions and fix the economy. There’s just one catch: there hasn’t been a free market in the United States for well over a century. Special interests have managed to get preferential treatment from the government for so long that I wonder why this myth persists. The place where you can see this anomaly most clearly is in our federal tax code. Not only does the principal of a private equity investment fund make vastly more money than his executive assistant, he or she is also taxed on their income, for the most part, at a vastly lower tax rate. The tax code is filled with special treatments for those “big campaign contributors,” and as the battle for deficit reduction piles on, there is still resistance against removing these free market distorters from our federal laws.

For example, the May 17^th CBSNews.com reports the most recent failure to repeal such favoritism in an era of outrageous gasoline prices (“fueled” by speculators) and even more outrageous profits from the oil companies: “The Senate has blocked a bill to repeal about $2 billion a year in tax breaks for the five biggest oil companies, a Democratic measure meant to respond to huge industry profits and $4-a-gallon gas prices… The Democratic measure, the ‘Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act,’ is sponsored by Senators Robert Menendez, D-NJ, Claire McCaskill, D-MO, and Sherrod Brown, D-OH. It is not expected to get the 60 votes necessary to advance the bill in the Senate… Republicans oppose the bill because they say it does nothing to lower gas prices and is not a serious effort to address the problem.” Fact remains, the oil companies still get the tax break.

Homeowners have an edge tax-wise over renters; subject to caps, they get to deduct mortgage interest. Investors who buy and sell equities have an edge over those whose revenues are generated from labor: the former get vastly reduced capital gains taxes while workers pay taxes at often a multiple of those rates for earned income. U.S. corporations may be subject to the highest corporate taxes in the industrialized world, but it they just keep their earnings off-shore, they can avoid that tax… resulting in the reality that American corporations pay some of the lowest tax bills in the industrialized world. Oh, individuals are taxed on income no matter where it sits.

While agricultural subsidies are the subject of debate in this deficit-reduction-oriented time, as a January 20^th report from the Cato institute notes, we are still distorting this market as well: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributes between $10 billion and $30 billion in cash subsidies to farmers and owners of farmland each year. The particular amount depends on market prices for crops, the level of disaster payments, and other factors. More than 90 percent of agriculture subsidies go to farmers of five crops—wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, and cotton. More than 800,000 farmers and landowners receive subsidies, but the payments are heavily tilted toward the largest producers.” Congress men and women from farm states don’t look to kindly on cuts to these subsidies… or believe that the huge duty we apply to cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugarcane should be removed so that our expensive American ethanol producers (who use expensive corn that drives up the cost of livestock feed) will be faced with real competition.

Had the government not bailed out on the “too big to fail” Wall Street players many special interests argue, the collapse of these mega financial institutions would have brought the entire country to its knees in a massive and more intense depression. Subsidies to encourage alternative energy installation, car purchases, new home buyers, etc. have been used in the past to stimulate expenditures in certain market sectors. NAFTA is a treaty that was supposed to level the playing field among signatory nations to reduce and then eliminate import duties, but if you listen to the indigenous American companies who cannot compete with much of that cheap Latin American labor, you know they oppose free markets.

Plain fact is we don’t have a free market and are never going to have a free market. The financial requirements to get elected almost mandate that the massive campaign contributors get their money’s worth or candidates won’t get funded. Further, as extrinsic forces, themselves often the product of non-free market government intervention operating overseas, distort and pressure our economy, the government responds with its retaliatory non-free market responses. Even without such obvious and biased pressures, the level of complexity in society necessitates governmental market regulation at some level. Think the free market would be a good replacement for the purity requirements of the FDA? Think cars would have catalytic converters without the EPA? Think the workplace would be safer if market forces and not OSHA set safety rules? Kids would go to school without public education and mandatory attendance rules? You get my point.

So for people who believe that the “free market” is the answer, to me and anyone who really looks behind the rhetoric knows, no such animal exists or will exist; we are just getting another “vote for me” buzzword without any real meaning in contemporary America. But it amazing to me how gullible so many Americans can be when it comes to relatively simple economic principles. We need to understand that an American “free market” has been a myth for a very long time. And even as we remove some distortions in this cynical “deficit reduction” trendy time, trust me, there will new ones passed to perpetuate the system.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I like keepin’ it real!

The Changing Face of Work in America

With the recent numbers from Bureau of Labor Statistics telling us that our unemployment rate has improved slightly, it seems that we are solidly in “recovery phase,” and that improvements in the job market are always a “trailing economic indicator.”AOLNews.com (April 1^st) summarizes: “The unemployment rate fell to a two-year low of 8.8 percent in March, capping the strongest two months of hiring since before the recession began… The economy added 216,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. Factories, retailers, the education and health care sectors and professional and financial services all expanded payrolls. Those job gains offset layoffs by local governments.” Woo hoo!

Except that unemployment number doesn’t contain those who have slipped out of the statistics because they’ve been unemployed so long they don’t count, folks who want to work full time and can only find part-time or occasional work, and those folks in chronically high regions of unemployment, including parts of Nevada, California, Michigan and large segments of the “rust best.” And it comes before the plethora of expected levels of austerity layoffs triggered at the state and local government levels, the potential offshoot of a federal shutdown if Congress can’t agree on a budget or the fact that so many workers are “contract” workers with no tenure and no benefits.

The unemployment statistic also doesn’t address the notion of unhappy workers and underemployed specialists forced to take lower-paying jobs outside of their field of expertise (which may have become obsolete!). It’s great to create jobs, but the actual pay and benefit levels become relevant to a consumer-driven recovery and home values. Folks with less money to spend or who are uncertain about their futures simply spend less and are very unlikely to buy a new home. Measuring underemployment is exceptionally difficult, however, but the starting point has to be various “job satisfaction surveys,” yet one also has to be sensitive to employed workers whose job description has expanded (but their pay has not) to cover all those fellow employees who got the sack in a corporate efficiency move; employers, sensing a scarcity of jobs out there, don’t seem to be concerned with treating their employees well or even paying them commensurate with their effort these days. And as the dollar inflates, but pay levels do not (unless you are on Wall Street in a senior capacity), folks are able to spend even less, another form of underemployment.

So let’s see if we can look around for hints of what might give us a handle on whether there is also a rising river of underemployment in these discontentment statistics. You can start with the most exaggerated version of this analysis: “According to a recent survey by job-placement firm Manpower, 84% of employees plan to look for a new position in 2011. That's up from just 60% last year.” CNNMoney.com (December 23, 2010). Too dire; I just don’t buy it.

Maybe it depends on the kind of job. According to the October 11, 2010 Buzzle.com, “Job Satisfaction Statistics or employee surveys say that over 65% of workers are not satisfied with their job. Many surveys regarding job satisfaction have been conducted by several companies and individuals, after consulting thousands of Americans by giving them a questionnaire on employee job satisfaction. Though the reasons given for dissatisfaction in job were many, the situation is really serious and hence, HR managers should take timely steps to solve these problems in the workplace. According to statistics, more than 70 % of teachers, fire fighters, authors and physical therapists were found to be highly satisfied with their jobs. Even psychologists, in general, have a very high percentage of job satisfaction. Then, which are the professions where job satisfaction is low? This might be an obvious question in your mind. Jobs such as those of laborers, waiters, servers, cashiers and bartenders have the least satisfaction percentage. Job satisfaction statistics reveals that only 21 to 27 % of people engaged in these professions are satisfied with their work. The job satisfaction percentage has reduced significantly in the US as compared to the earlier days.” Still stretching my credibility, but better.

OK, here’s study from insurance giant MetLife (blimp, anyone?), that actually carries a whole lot of credibility: http://www.metlife.com/assets/institutional/services/insights-and-tools/ebts/Employee-Benefits-Trends-Study.pdf Want the short strokes? The March 28, 2011 TransparencyRevolution.com summarizes the most important “dissatisfaction” results of the relevant polling in this piece: “The report describes a ‘workforce ready for flight’ and states that some 34% of employees surveyed hope to be working elsewhere in the next 12 months… Studies show that, on average, people change jobs every four years. Although job changes occur for a lot of different reasons, it would make sense to estimate that in more robust economic times, the number of people looking to change jobs would be around 25% [considered normal], rather than 34%. When hiring really does pick back up in earnest, companies that are interested in minimizing turnover and retaining talent are going to be surprised to see so many people leave….Workers who say that ‘I am satisfied with the job I have now’ has declined from 59 percent three years ago to 51 percent last year.” OK, I’m finally buying the numbers. We have a really, really long way to go – if we even ever get there – to reception the halcyon days of 2006/7!

I’m Peter Dekom, still lookin’ behind the numbers to see what it all means.