Shabby's Economic Indicator

Earlier Ol’Shabby had a few thoughts collide to form an idea for a simple, straightforward economic indicator.

An economic indicator may be a report, a statistic, a regularly occurring seasonal trend, or any combination of those things. Economists use economic indicators to determine what is going on in the economy and to make predictions of the future.

(Given their track record over these past few years, most economists are either the class drop-outs, doing too many drugs, live on another planet, or are paid to NOT say what they really think.)

My idea for an economic indicator is based on two observations.

First, walking around my neighborhood and driving around town, I notice a lot of homes for sale. By the overgrowth of grass and shuttered windows some of those places look like they’ve been on the market for quite awhile.

Second, the local newspaper’s help-wanted section used to span several pages. In recent years it has dwindled to a handful of help-wanted ads in a single column. Most of the jobs listed are part-time, temporary, seasonal or on-call. Rarely is a job opening posted that would pay enough to afford one of the homes for sale.

Put these two observations together and you get this:

When the number of homes for sale far exceed the number of available jobs that pay enough to afford those homes, you don’t have an economic recovery!

Yeah, I know this flies in the face of what the main stream media is pumping out. Radical and revolutionary ideas like this usually do.

In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for my Nobel Peace Prize in Economics and my Pulitzer Prize for Creative Writing. They may be one and the same.



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