Average long term employment remains steady while the percentage of people in long term emplyment has plunged. Huh?

I find myself in frequent disagreement with Adam Tooze but he is a smart man, widely read.  It's just that his interpretation, I think, is erroneous.  But he does turn up interesting information.

In today's substack, both traits are on display.  From Are long-term jobs disappearing? Air-conditioning's power demands. The sphere in trouble & red necks and red bandanas.

First up is the boring one - 

Air conditioning as a major driver of electricity demand

 - For contributing subscribers only.

Coercive central planners have always been after air-conditioning as a cause of energy consumption and CO2 emissions.  It is easy to assume that their focus on air-conditioning is because most of the growth in the country, and most the political opposition to the Left, is in warmer states.  What better way to save the planet and fight global warming than to make your political opposition have to give up air-conditioning?  Cleaner air and suffering opponents?  What's not to like?

Except . . . YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO LOOK AT BOTH SIDES.

People live in a broad array of environments both in turns of swings in temperature and in terms of swings in weather.  Some places are steady, some persistently hot, some persistently cold, and some with dramatic swings with the seasons.   

Yes, if you are in a hot environment, you have to cool your space.

But if you live in a cool environment, you have to heat it.

So, one person lives in a location with an average temperature ten degrees colder than is minimally comfortable.  A second person lives in a location ten degrees warmer than is minimally comfortable.  

Which takes more energy?  Does it take more energy to heat a space ten degrees or to cool it ten degrees?

Simplistically, one would think it might be the same but the processes are dramatically different as is the answer.  It consumes significantly less energy to cool a space a given amount than it does to heat it.  

For all that Leftists are eager to ban or restrict air-conditioning for their warm state political opponents, they almost never want to restrict heating in their own environments in the same fashion.

It is an age old argument.  The facts are well known.  The engineering and economic answers are known.  The positions are ideological.  Boring.

In contrast, 

Are long-term jobs disappearing in the US? Justin Fox delivers a master class in composition effects.

The labor market is noisy and subtle and very prone to composition effects.  The mix by age, by immigrant status, by education attainment, legal and illegal labor, morbidity, etc. are always changing, often in surprisingly short time frames.  It is easy to conceptualize the labor market as everyone working for long durations in nine-to-five jobs.  But that is a particularly poor model of the market.  

But it is white collar people in nine-to-five jobs of long duration who study the labor market so it is little surprise that that is the model with which they are most comfortable even though it is not an accurate model.

Apparently in some corners of the fevered chattering class there has been a recent focus or obsession with disappearing full-time jobs.  It is an argument that lends itself to an empirical answer.  Fox:

 

Been with the same employer for 10 years or more? That doesn’t exactly make you a rarity in the US, where 30.2% of employed wage and salary workers were in that situation as of January 2024, according to data released last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while this percentage is down from a decade ago, it’s close to where things stood for the much of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Nothing to see here, right? Contrary to oft-heard claims about the ever-more-fleeting nature of employment in the US, long-run jobs appear to be about as prevalent as ever.

Except that they aren’t, really. The placid picture painted by the above chart is the product of a so-called composition effect, in which changes in the makeup of the population being measured deliver a headline statistic that to some extent misrepresents what’s going on under the surface. In this case, the change is that the US labor force has been aging, and older workers are more likely to have been with the same employer for 10 years than younger ones. Slice up the workforce by five-year ago group, as the BLS does in the tenure statistics it releases every two years, and the percentage for every group from ages 30 to 59 turns out to have either hit a new low in 2024 or tied the low set in 2022.

 

Tooze:

So … the share of folks in long-term jobs is declining, but the share of older people is steadily increasing. And they have longer job tenure.

The population in long term employment has remained the same at around 30% or so.  True.

Every five-year age cohort in the labor market below age 60 has seen a relative 15-50% reduction in long-term employment.  True.

There are interpretations that go with both scenarios independently.

But for both to be true implies quite a different vision of the nature of the labor market as well as suggests substantially different policies than either statement independently.  

That is a useful insight.  

And the implications are obvious.  The mainstream media looks at headline average figures for the national economy and wants to crow about the success of Bidenomics.  But if, instead, you focus on an electorate who can no longer have confidence that they can obtain long term full time work - well, that is an entirely different story.

Forget polarization.  The political angst is because the Mandarin Class and Chattering Class cannot see or understand the reality in which most people live.