1. Chart of the Day I (above) displays annual US oil production back to 1900, based on data released this week from the EIA for 2015. Note that US oil output started declining steadily from the early 1970s when daily production peaked at 9.6 million barrels, and fell to about 5 million barrels in 2008 during the Great Recession. But then the shale oil revolution started, and in only 7 years US oil production nearly doubled to an average of 9.43 barrels per day last year, the highest output since 1972, and the fourth highest year in US history for average daily oil production (only the years 1970, 1971 and 1972 were higher). Looking forward, the EIA forecasts average daily production this year of 8.7 million barrels and 8.5 million barrels per day in 2017.
2. Chart of the Day II (above) plots the frequency of the word “sustainable” over time.
3. Chart of the Day III (above) displays the annual United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) World Price Index (adjusted for inflation) back to 1961. According to the FAO press release, “Over the full year [2015], the index averaged 164.1 points, nearly 19% less than in 2014, marking the fourth consecutive annual decline. Abundant supplies in the face of a timid world demand and an appreciating US dollar are the main reasons for the general weakness that has dominated food prices in 2015.” I would also add that the 19% drop in real world food prices last year was the largest one-year decline in the history of the FAO food index. Further, I would also note that real world food prices last year were below food prices in every year between 1961 and 1981, despite the fact that the world population today at 7.2 billion is about double the average of 3.7 billion during the 1961-1981 period. Weren’t we supposed to have mass starvation by now because of the growing work population? That’s what Paul Ehrlich predicted back in the 1960s in his book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich wrote in 2009 that he stands behind his unrealized gloom and doom scenarios of mass starvation, etc. and even claims that the most serious flaw of his book was that he was “too optimistic about the future.”
4. Good News. Perhaps partly because of falling world food prices, Margaret Wente wrote last month that “The World is Much Better than It Seems” and she points to lots of good news including falling world poverty and the disappearance of malnutrition around the world among many other measures that support the title of her article.
5. Quotation of the Day I is from Thomas Sowell, who wrote in his column yesterday that:
Equal rights under the law have been made to vanish by saying the magic word “diversity,” whose sweeping benefits are simply assumed and proclaimed endlessly, rather than demonstrated.
6. You Can’t Have Both. There’s an old joke about the teenager who tells his dad that he wants to “grow up and be a musician.” The dad says, “Son, you’ll have to make a choice, you can’t have both.” It’s like that with “diversity” and “safe spaces” on college campuses – you can’t have both, and “the more you have of one, the less you must have of the other,” argues college professor Kevin Currie-Knight in his FEE article “Safe Spaces Can’t Be Diverse: And Vice Versa.” Here’s the article’s “punchline”:
Diversity and emotional safety are values at odds with each other. They can coexist in tension, but the expansion of one can only come at the expense of the other.
7. Chart of the Day IV (above) shows the 24-month changes in US nonfarm payroll employment back to January of 1980. According to Obama last night in his State of the Union speech:
We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the 1990s; an unemployment rate cut in half.
The 5.76 million payroll jobs added over the last 24-month period through December 2015 is the largest two-year period of job growth since the 24-month period ending July 2000. So that part of Obama’s statement was pretty accurate.
8. Chart of the Day V (above), shows monthly changes in US private-sector payroll employment back to January 1980. It’s true that the 70 straight months of private sector job creation is technically the longest consecutive period of positive monthly increases in private sector jobs between March 2010 and December 2015. But there were longer periods of 99 months of private job gains in the 1980s and 100 months in the 1990s when there were a few random months of job losses (see arrows in red chart above). So I would have give Obama about 2 Pinocchios according to the Washington Post Fact Checker scale for making an exaggerated (“half true”) claim about the “longest streak of private sector job creation.” Glenn Kessler, chief fact-checker at the Washington Post agrees (but doesn’t assign any Pinocchios):
While President Obama often has touted what he often calls the “longest streak of private-sector job creation in history,” the average number of jobs created in this 70-month period is significantly lower than under either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. (When you exclude a single month of decline, in fact, Clinton and Reagan had streaks of 85 and 71 months, respectively.)
9. Chart of the Day VI (above) shows monthly exports of US petroleum products back to January 1994 (in billions of inflation-adjusted dollars). Back in his 2010 State of the Union speech, Obama set a goal of doubling US exports in five years. In turns out that was a completely unachievable target – US exports increased only about 24% in the five years following Obama’s promise. That is, except for a few export success stories like US petroleum products, which have just about doubled from $4 billion per month in early 2010 to more than $8 billion per month in 2015. But I’m sure evil fossil fuel exports weren’t what Obama had in mind when he said he wanted to double exports and create US jobs. And those exports doubled even though the ban on crude oil exports was in place. Now if it had been a doubling of US-made solar panels or wind turbines, that would have been a different story….
10. Video of the Day (below) features a TED Talk by economist Tim Harford explains why challenges and problems can derail your creative process … or they can make you more creative than ever.
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