The Sky Is Not Falling

A while back, I wrote a short blog, offering some alternative perspective on the economy.  I took some heat for it, receiving some emails from some very impassioned, and even some offended, readers–and also some comments on the blog (feel free to check them out here).

Well, in the name of Truth, and because there’s too much bad news out there (much of it inaccurate) and not enough good news, I offer the following thoughts and sources from MIT’s American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), as a follow-up to my blog, “Don’t Believe the Hype“:

NPR (National Public Radio) radio station, KUHF in Houston, interviewed AIER Senior Fellow, Dr. Richard Ebeling, on Friday morning, February 6th.

Dr. Richard Ebeling, MIT's American Institute for Economic Research

In that interview, Dr. Ebeling highlights the relationship between the bad news we are feeding on every day from the media and the current economic situation in our country: Dr. Ebeling on NPR Radio (text).

WBT News Talk Radio’s (Charlotte, NC) Tara Servatius interviewed Dr. Ebeling on February 5th.  In this discussion, Dr. Ebeling points out that fear, ignorance, and inaccurate language/statistics are driving factors in today’s economic change: Tara Servatius interviews Dr. Ebeling (audio).

National Affairs Correspondent for OneNewsNow, Jim Brown, wrote briefly about Dr. Ebeling’s perspective on the current economic downturn in Brown’s February 9th article, “The Sky Is Not Falling… Economically Speaking“:

A libertarian economist says contrary to what the Obama White House is asserting, the U.S. is not experiencing the most severe economic recession in the post-World War II period.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers cut nearly 600,000 jobs last month, pushing the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent. President Obama says those numbers “demand action.” He has also stated that the country is in the midst of the worst economic recession in terms of job numbers since the end of World War II.

Richard Ebeling, a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, claims that claim is simply factually incorrect.

“The recession of 1949, of 1954, of 1982 show unemployment numbers larger than the ones we’re seeing now. We’re just basically matching the fourth-worst recession in the post-World War II period of 1975,” he contends. “I’m not saying it may not get worse. We don’t know the full numbers for February obviously, since we’re early in the month and so on, but the fact is that the sky is not falling, the floor is not falling out.”

The highest drop-offs in employment, according to Ebeling, are in the construction sector and the automobile industry. But across most other sectors of the economy, he says the employment decline has been 1.5 or 2 percent.

Ebeling adds that he in no way wants to minimize the hardships and anxieties workers face when they lose their jobs, but he believes the magnitude of the economic recession is not as severe as many politicians and the media portray it to be.

[Dr. Richard Ebeling is a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), founded at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT) during the Great Depression (1933), at the impetus of the Vice President of MIT.  You can read Ebeling's bio and credentials here, but I will simply add that he has been not only a Lecturer in Economics at the National University of Ireland in Cork, and a professor of economics at the University of Dallas and Rutgers University; but has also held the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics Chair for 15 years at Hillsdale College in Michigan.]

On an unrelated note, Adrian Schoonmaker would like to add that the sky is also not falling… environmentally speaking, despite the mass media’s love affair with creating imaginary global crises.  More musings at my “Global Warming Is a Religion” and “Global Schwarming.”

~ by Adrian Schoonmaker on February 11, 2009.