Joining the club. A while ago, I bemoaned my miserable prediction record when it came to picking the survivors on Presidential Primary Island. I feel a little better now, having discovered that even generally smart people like Dan Drezner can lay some whoppers now and again:

If offshore outsourcing is not the cause of sluggish job growth, what is? A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the economy is undergoing a structural transformation: jobs are disappearing from old sectors (such as manufacturing) and being created in new ones (such as mortgage brokering).

(This was written back in 2004; emphasis added.) And maybe it's not fair to blame DD for cheering on the creative destruction that would herald the bright new dawn of a nation of mortgage brokers; it seems he was just passing on what the Fed told him.

Still, it does remind me that I read somewhere that we seem to have gotten into the habit of patching over the damage of financial bubbles by .... plunging into new financial bubbles.

Semi-related: it also reminds me of a day back in Oregon, back in 2001 or so, driving somewhere and listening to the local news on the radio... the state had come up with a plan to retrain all the out-of-work loggers so that they could become out-of-work IT guys. (Well, that wasn't how they put it – I just filled in a few extra steps for them.)

Posted by David Fleck at 14 April 2008 09:43 PM