Zero new jobs, for the first time in history. Black Americans vs. white progressives. And Chinese universities pass American universities in rankings.
Zero New Jobs, For the First Time in History
At the Federal Reserve meeting last week, Chairman Jerome Powell said that for the first time in the annals of American history, over the last six months there has been zero net job creation.
But he assures us, this is not such a bad thing. Yahoo Finance reporter Emma Ockermann quotes him:
“Effectively, there’s zero net job creation in the private sector,” after accounting for revisions over the past six months, Powell said. “But actually, that looks like that’s about what the economy needs, in terms of dealing with very, very low — nonexistent, really — growth in the labor force, which of course we’ve never had in our history.”
Indeed, the country may not need as many jobs as it once did amid lower labor force participation rates and immigration declines. But Powell also noted that “labor demand has clearly softened as well.”
This is to say, immigration has all but shut down, leaving fewer workers; lots of potential workers have stopped looking for jobs; and companies are requiring fewer workers.
Powell evidently thinks this can help cool off the economy and slow inflation. According to figures released after the meeting, the economy is projected to grow by 2.4%, inflation is at 2.7%, and the unemployment rate is 4.4%.
Because of the economic growth and high inflation rate, the Federal Reserve refused to lower interest rates, to the disappointment of investors and the president. The combination of relatively high unemployment and no new jobs will be another brake on the economy, portending another interest rate cut down the road. Meanwhile, the unemployed suffer.
Usually, a shortage of workers–as with the decline in the number of immigrants–sends wages higher as companies compete for labor, but that doesn’t happen when the demand for workers also goes down. Another factor is the increased use of AI, which is replacing human workers while allowing companies to keep up production and thus profits and economic growth. As a result, as the old saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The declining labor market started last year, when Chairman Powell specifically cited the impact of AI and the consequences of what happens when employment is low while production remains high. As financial analyst Ronnie Dungan reports,
“Job creation is very low, and the job-finding rate for people who are unemployed is very low,” Powell said. Economists have begun referring to the pattern as the “Great Freeze,” describing a labor market in which companies maintain output growth without adding staff.
With unemployment among recent graduates topping 5% and AI threatening entry-level roles, many Gen Z workers are delaying their entry into the workforce or pursuing further study. . . .
Powell added that the economy now looks increasingly “bifurcated,” with higher-income households and large corporations benefiting from AI-driven productivity gains while lower-income consumers struggle.
“Consumers at the lower end are struggling and buying less and shifting to lower-cost products,” he said. Retailers are reporting a growing divide between affluent shoppers and those trading down.
In the “Great Freeze,” the economy booms while ordinary Americans are left out in the cold.
Black Americans vs. White Progressives
Black Americans are considered a key part of the Democratic base, but there is a growing gap between them and the white progressives who run the party.
National Review‘s Christian Schneider writes about this in his piece White Progressives Still Don’t Get Black Voters. After George Floyd’s death, many white liberals were demanding “defund the police!” while 81% of black Americans–who are most often the victims of crimes–wanted an increased police presence in their neighborhoods.
Schneider cites other statistics about the gap between these two groups of Democrats from that very fraught period:
Further, in one 2022 Pew poll, 70 percent of black Democrats listed “reducing crime” as a priority, while only 34 percent of white Democrats agreed. Similarly, black Democrats were much more likely than white Democrats to prioritize issues like “defending against terrorism” (68 percent to 44 percent), “reducing the budget deficit” (50 percent to 21 percent), and “strengthening the military” (40 percent to 15 percent). Black Americans were also far more likely to prioritize “dealing with immigration” (43 percent to 26 percent). . . .
If liberals listened to black citizens and took what they were saying seriously, they would find, for instance, that black adults (68 percent) are slightly more likely than the general public (60 percent) to say that a person’s gender is determined by their biological sex. They would learn that while Democrats scream that voter ID requirements will disenfranchise minorities, 75 percent of blacks support such requirements. Large majorities of black parents support school-choice programs for children, and minorities have expressed far more desire to start their own businesses than whites.
The phenomenon can also be found on college campuses. Schneider cites a recent study of the University of Wisconsin. As expected, most faculty members (70%) describe themselves as liberals, while only 9% describe themselves as conservatives.
But minority faculty members are more conservative than their white colleagues. This is true of both Asian and black professors.
Schneider concludes, “So if you want more ideological diversity, it makes sense to provide more racial diversity.”
Chinese Universities Pass U.S. Universities in Rankings
In the early 2000’s, the international ranking of the world’s top universities listed 7 American schools in the top ten, with only one from China.
In the latest ranking, though, of the top ten, 8 are Chinese. The others are Harvard (#3) and the University of Toronto (#10).
Of the top 25, 19 are Chinese. The others are the University of São Paolo [Brazil] (#17), University of Michigan (#20), Seoul National University [Korea],(#21), and Johns Hopkins (#23).
There are only three American universities in the top 25: Harvard (#3), University of Michigan (#20), and Johns Hopkins (#23).
This ranking is based on contributions to science, quantified by the number of scientific papers published and the number of times they are cited in other scientific work.
The conservative James G. Marshall Center for Academic Renewal challenges these rankings, saying that the Chinese schools manipulate academic research and publication:
China pours state money into selected disciplines, especially those that yield quick publications. It pressures scholars to publish in English-language journals. It nudges citation networks into tight loops in which researchers cite one another and lift entire institutions at once. What looks like an organic rise of genius is closer to bureaucratic optimization. The result looks like academic ascent but behaves like a rise in industrial output.
And see my post from last year The Scandal in Scientific Publishing, which chronicles the flood of fake research, bribed journal editors, plagiarism, and AI-written papers. China is in the thick of it.
But, as the Marshall Center goes on to say, American higher education is indeed in a bad way:
At the same time, American universities haven’t always helped their own case. Over the past decade, many have embraced DEI not as a moral framework but as an administrative empire. Entire offices now exist to police language, regulate hiring, and manage feelings. Faculty are trained to signal virtue. Students are trained to see disagreement as harm. In some departments (especially the social sciences and humanities), political loyalty counts more than intellectual courage. The Trump administration has pushed back, but the damage will take years to undo, and some of it may never be reversed.
When universities devote more energy to “bias statements” than to defending debate, their prestige erodes. When syllabi revolve around grievance rather than greatness, the case for academic excellence weakens.
For a long time, the hard sciences resisted the relativism and identity politics that has plagued the humanities and the social sciences. But now the hard sciences are succumbing. See my post from two years ago entitled Postmodernism Is Now Infecting Science.
I’m ready to be skeptical of Chinese scientific dominance. But I suspect China’s institutions may have a seriousness of purpose that many American universities are lacking. Ironically for a totalitarian Communist regime, they may be less politicized and even less left wing than American universities.
If we are going to compete against Chinese dominance, we would do well to put our educational house in order.
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