South By North Strategies, Ltd.

October Personal Spending

From the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’ most recent analysis of personal income and spending …

Personal income increased $30.1 billion, or 0.2 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $45.7 billion, or 0.4 percent, in October, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $68.3 billion, or 0.7 percent. In September, personal income increased $20.7 billion, or 0.2 percent, DPI increased $21.3 billion, or 0.2 percent, and PCE decreased $60.3 billion, or 0.6 percent, based on revised estimates.
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Real disposable income increased 0.2 percent in October, compared with an increase of 0.1 percent in September. Real PCE increased 0.4 percent, in contrast to a decrease of 0.7 percent.

Around the Dial – Dec. 16

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi wonders if the bank bailout has become a giveaway.
• Ezra Klein discusses the lives that will be lost absent health reform.
• Eliott Spitzer lists three books that explain the  American crisis.
• The New York Times surveys jobless workers.

Learning from Agriculture

In a clever piece in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande argues that America’s current crisis of spiraling health care costs is analogous to the agricultural crisis that roiled the nature at the advent of the last century. And the secret to that success, argues Gawande, was a willingness to experiment continuously with various strategies that eventually grew into a (somewhat) coherent, successful whole. Writes Gawande:

Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results. Knowledge diffuses too slowly. Our information systems are primitive. The malpractice system is wasteful and counterproductive. And the best way to fix all this is—well, plenty of people have plenty of ideas. It’s just that nobody knows for sure.
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The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front. Government has a crucial role to play here—not running the system but guiding it, by looking for the best strategies and practices and finding ways to get them adopted, county by county. Transforming health care everywhere starts with transforming it somewhere. But how?

Around the Dial – Dec. 15

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• The Winston-Salem Journal looks at extended unemployment insurance.
• Paul Krugman wonders about denial and disaster.
• At New Deal 2.0, Randall Wray proposes fixes to the Consumer Financial Protection Act.
• Former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker assesses the state of the economy.

The State of the NC Labor Market

Last Sunday, John Quinterno of South by North Strategies was a guest on the public affairs shows News and Views, which airs on the Raleigh-Durham radio station WRAL-FM (101.5).

In this recorded interview Quinterno discussed the state of the jobs market and explained why the strength of the recovery has been greatly exaggerated.

Click here to listen to the entire audio interview, and see below for a video clip from the conversation.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2il-RhnXdJ8