Professor Steve Keen gives a half-hour presentation on the causes and condition of the Great Recession (if I may call our current malaise that). In short, massive debt (both private and governmental) with an accompanying stock market and housing bubble has left us in a very difficult situation–one that will not be easy to extract ourselves from without a painful deleveraging process.
Mr. Keen has an Australian accent, but his talk is worth the effort to listen to.

Krugman’s column essentially argues that a decline in public educational investment is leading to a decline in America’s global economic supremacy.
Excerpt:

[T]hese days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college. In fact, we have a college graduation rate that’s slightly below the average across all advanced economies.
Even without the effects of the current crisis, there would be every reason to expect us to fall further in these rankings, if only because we make it so hard for those with limited financial means to stay in school. In America, with its weak social safety net and limited student aid, students are far more likely than their counterparts in, say, France to hold part-time jobs while still attending classes. Not surprisingly, given the financial pressures, young Americans are also less likely to stay in school and more likely to become full-time workers instead.

There’s no question that skyrocketing tuition cost increases place a greater strain on students, but does this really explain poor graduation rates?
The cynical side of me says that extracurricular activities and poor discipline are also to blame.
A few months ago I saw a documentary comparing the daily routines of Chinese high school students versus those in the U.S. The difference was striking. The Chinese youth’s day centers around academic advancement. Evenings are spent doing classwork. And it isn’t just the students; their parents are involved with homework, too (recall that in China many households only have one child due to population control).
Meanwhile, in the U.S., teen students are caught up in soccer, music, shopping, video games, and whatever else. Classwork is just one of many items on the plate.
Fast forward this track to college and it’s not a leap to conclude that one reason foreign students have better graduation rates is because they are more focused on academic achievement.
So while Krugman may be correct that budget cuts are hurting U.S. students, I think his column overlooks an important piece of the puzzle.

I’m afraid this guy may be correct:

Mohamed El-Erian says economists are wrong to dismiss unemployment as merely a lagging indicator, a sign of where the economy has been.
. . .
“Today’s unemployment rate is much more than a lagging indicator,” said El-Erian, whose Newport, California-based Pimco manages the world’s largest bond fund, in an e-mail after the Labor Department report on Oct. 2. “It is also a signal of future pressures on consumption, housing and the country’s social safety net.”
The job market tends to trail the economy in a recovery because companies hesitate to take on more workers until they are convinced the expansion will last. What’s different this time is the “large and protracted” rise in joblessness and the likelihood that it will stay high for years, according to El- Erian. That means unemployment will affect the economy going forward, not merely reflect where it has been.

“Less Credit, Fewer Jobs ”
A couple months ago I watched Australian economics professor Steve Keen give a convincing presentation pointing out that over the last couple decades, the only periods of significant job growth have been accompanied by large expansions in credit/debt (e.g., the housing and Internet bubbles). This doesn’t bode well for us today, as we are de-leveraging record debt.
Unless consumers (or the government) borrows and spends more, what is going to be the driver for job growth? I don’t see anything out there now.

Via Mish, here’s an interesting 19-minute presentation by Australian economics professor Steve Keen. It’s geared somewhat towards the Australian economy, but the theme reflects what we’re experiencing globally.

Two troubling trends Keen outlines:
–This decade we reached the highest debt level since the Great Depression
–Over the last three decades, employment growth has corresponded with debt growth. In other words, employment grew when debt-financed consumption grew, and it fell when outstanding debt dropped.
This paints a bad picture looking forward the next few years. We have a massive amount of debt to de-leverage:

“What we are going through is a deleveraging crisis and we haven’t experienced one of those since 1930. Last time it took 10 years and a world war to get rid of it, and this time we are staring up with 1.7 times the level of debt in America, not even mentioning the derivatives catastrophe that is also there.”
“And deleveraging which is the attempt by the private sector to reduce its debt level can overwhelm the government’s stimulus. The whole problem was caused by irresponsible lending and the only way out of this ultimately is to eliminate that debt. The debt has to be written off”

For consumers, de-leveraging means saving more and buying less. And less consumption means slower economic growth.
Employment growth could be weak for several years.

A few weeks ago I started encountering the following problem when I tried using Google Street View on my system:

When I drag the icon to a spot on the map, a small photo box pops up and a yellow “Loading . . .” box appears at the top of the window. When I release the mouse button, the small photo vanishes and nothing else happens; the application just sits there with the “Loading . . .” indicator displayed.

I searched for a fix. Turns out there’s a conflict between the Street Views application and the MediaWrap Add-on. If I disable the MediaWrap extension (click on the icon in the bottom right tray), Street View works again.
So if you’re a searcher encountering a similar problem, try that out and see if it works for you.