More going on than meets the eye

Some friends and I were talking about the current Katrina-disruption gas crisis.

I just happen to keep track of my mileage, so I have some solid data .

I always keep track of my mileage. But this summer, prices were rising so fast that for the first time, I started making note of prices even when I wasn't buying. The interesting thing to notice here is that the summer of '05 was already a gas crisis BEFORE Katrina.

(My apologies if this is too tedious for anyone, but I figure that as I already HAVE this data, I might as well share it.)

2005
Jan. 18 191.9 paid
Jan. 22 185.9 paid
Jan.29 191.9 paid
Feb.19 193.9 paid
Feb.20 175.9 paid (New Jersey Hess)
Mar.12 207.9 paid
(...skipping a bit -- a stable quarter, too tedious even for me --
but then we enter an inflationary period)
June 5 212.9 paid
June 7 212.9 paid
June12 216.9 paid
June19 216.9 paid
June21 220.9 paid
July 10 231.9 paid
July 10 233.9 paid (up 21¢ / 10% in a month)
(7/10 is at the SAME STATION: they increased price 2¢ midday, as alluded to in the July 11th post below)
July 16 233.9 paid
July 30 233.9 paid
Aug. 6 235.9 paid
In early August, gas starts going up fast enough that I start keeping note of it - -
Here are the observed prices at my corner Mobil station:
Aug. 8 243.9
Aug 10 249.9
Aug.11 253.9
Aug.12 249.9 paid
Aug.13 263.9
Aug.14 265.9 - up 22¢ / 8% in 6 days
Aug.22 261.9 paid
Aug.29 267.9 paid (up 34¢ / 15% in a month, PRE-crisis)

Monday morning, August 29th, Katrina hits the Gulf Coast: the following are mostly (unless noted) the observed prices at my corner Mobil station
Aug.30 267.9 observed
Aug.31 269.9 obs.
(Prices now sometimes change MIDDAY, I don't have all of those observations)
Aug. 31 279.9 paid (I had the Lady M fill the minivan...)
Sept. 1 289.9
Sept. 2 319.9 (+30¢ /10%, the biggest daily jump I've ever seen)
Sept. 3 339.9 (up 70¢ / 26% in 3 days)
Sept. 4 329.9
Sept. 5 329.9
Sept. 6 329.9
Sept. 7 329.9
Sept. 7 339.9 (changed MIDDAY)
(Sept. 7: 329.9 paid (Getty, 7gal. Highest I’ve ever paid.)
Sept. 8 339.9
Sept. 9 339.9
Sept.10 339.9
(Sept.10: 324.9 paid (Citgo, 11 gal) )
Sept.11 339.9
Sept.12 334.9
Sept.13 309.9 (- 25¢, biggest 1-day drop I've ever seen)
Sept.14 309.9
Sept.15 299.9 (up 30-32¢ - say 12%- over pre-crisis)

So: a two-week crisis (so far...), with a 26% spike, five days at the peak price, and now maybe settling at something >40% higher than at the start of the summer, perhaps 12% higher than two weeks ago.

But note that July was up 10% over June,
August was up 15% over July.
So another 12% "Katrina" rise in September
is just a continuation of that trend.

More on employment and the common weal

SOMEWHERE there exists research that reduces the unemployment rate to a straightforward algorithm for predicting the consequences: n points of additional unemployment produces x and y of so much other results.

I think I learned this in that distant age before the Internets, so I'm not turning it up quickly when I Google around for it. (Either that, or I simply lack the google fu to turn it up.) So instead of actually looking up the real research -- which MUST be out there -- I instead turn to a handy back-of-the-envelope for some quick calculations.

Take the recession under Bush the Greater - the overall mortality rate jumped from 8.5/1000 to 8.8/thousand, for about 3 years. (Yes, most of this persisted into the Clinton years; but I think it's likely that the death rate lags the economic circumstances, in both directions. People don't usually drop dead immediately after being laid off: they cut corners on their prescriptions, skip doctor's appointments, etc. The changes in the mortality rates must come a year or two later.)

Anyway, cranking this through, deaths were running around 2.1m/year, in a pop. of 275?m, so a change of 0.3/1000 must be about 65,000 additional deaths above the EV. Three years of this must easily go 200,000. Then factor in the fact that the EV for the death rate would reasonably have been expected to continue its historic decline (instead of the increase we actually got...).

Think of that: even a downturn as mild as the First Bush Recession may be said to have caused something like a quarter-million excess American deaths.

Why wasn't that on a "Clinton '92 " bumper sticker?

I'm almost afraid to run the numbers on the Reagan Depression.

Welcome to Weimar

Well, that was interesting.

One wonders why the American public isn't griping more about gas prices. Yes, I'm numerate enough to know that the current price of gas isn't nearly as dear as it was in, say, the early '80's; but then, just five or six years ago when Bill Clinton was president, I was paying under 90 cents/gallon. (But then, I am not among the half of Americans who were lulled by low gas prices into buying something monumentally stupid, like an SUV... no, rather, I seem to be among the few Americans cursed with a long-term memory. . . .)

A year or two ago, I once noticed a day in which the corner Mobil station had raised their price midday. (Usually, a gas station will have the decency to change their prices while they’re closed.)

Sunday, I realized that we’re about to see another surge in gas prices, and so I might as well top off the Home Fleet before the price increases hit. So, I filled the Miata (aka “the Red Menace” ) at about 5:30 pm at the cheapest station near me, the Rotterdam Hess: 231.9. As I was leaving, I noticed that the Hess gasoline truck was pulling in.

I went back with the minivan at 7:30, and only after I started pumping did I notice that in the intervening two hours(!), the price had been bumped up 2 cents/gallon to 233.9. In the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Noticing the new price gave me a bit of a 'runaway-inflation' frisson, it did.

Welcome to Weimar, Mr. Isherwood.


ADDENDUM, 8/11/05: The corner Mobil station was $243.9 earlier this week, 249.9 yesterday, and 253.9 today.
That's a rise of a dime/gallon just this week, and (I think) the first time they've gone over the $2.50 mark.
LATER: 263.9 on 8/13; 265.9 on 8/14. Ten cents in two days?! Twenty cents in a week??

Oh, and I was wondering above "why the American public isn't griping more about gas prices"? Well, the gas-price protests have started: truckers in Florida, but it's scarcely made the news.

Thanks, Dad

As I mentioned somewhat obliquely below, in about the summer of 1976, my father returned from TDY in Europe and handed me a Konica T3 SLR, fresh from the Weisbaden A-V Club. I was twenty, and, up to that point, had not shown a remarkable avocation for photography. I had taken some pictures, including some surprisingly technical work as a kid, a odd roll of trip snapshots here and there, but my father and my sister had been the primary family photographers.

Having had a pretty decent camera drop into my lap totally out of the blue, I felt I was under some moral obligation to learn how to use it. One of my college chums (Hi, Rod!) taught me how to develop film, and off I went. Within a year or two, I was doing my own 4x5 sheet film. And this was also the era when E-6 was replacing the older, more difficult E-4 Ektachrome - so I was quickly doing my own color slides. (I actually watched guys run their last E-4 - that’s how old I am.) I joined the college photo club, I was on the staff of the school newspaper. I photographed everything.

We tend to forget how expensive photography used to be. The mid-70s were the age of the introduction of the One-Hour lab on every corner, which, surprisingly, helped drive prices down - but before that, it was both expensive and time-consuming to get prints back. When Fuji 400 came out about 1976, it was probably about $4 a roll, and a DP-36 mailer was probably close to ten bucks. So a roll of color prints probably ran close to 40 cents a print.

Being obsessive, I could probably work up some real numbers on this topic. Umm, I was paying 18? bucks for a can of Tri-X, less for Ilford, that's under 3 cents/frame for film; chemistry was pretty cheap, especially when I used the student paper's darkroom. A can of Ektachrome was about 40 bucks for 19-20 rolls, that's 6 cents/frame, a gallon of E-6 chemistry was also about 40 bucks for 32 rolls, so add another 4 cents/frame for development, plus storage. So what I seem to recall is that I was getting pictures as far as B&W negatives for 4 cents or so, with a contact sheet adding another penny a frame? And I was doing (unmounted) color slides (bulk film, souped myself) for just about a dime a frame. Of course, this was a long time ago - multiply those figures by a factor of four or five for today’s values.

[Cf. today: I'm doing a significant amount of work at 2 cents/frame for film, + about 8 cents/frame for EK processing (4x6 + an index print) = just about 10 cents/printed frame. Adjusting for inflation, that's cheaper than I was making B&W negatives in the old days. Photography is so cheap that home processing can no longer be justified on economic grounds: that is, even ignoring your time investment, it's now substantially MORE expensive to do your own darkroom work. (Which rather explains why my own darkroom has been sitting idle for nearly a decade.)]

So most of my work made it only as far as contact sheets - I had decided very early in the game that my limited funds were better spent on making more negatives than on expensive prints. Thirty years ago, I already realized that in the future, I could better afford to make prints - but that the photo opportunities themselves were always slipping away. I figured that someday I'd be in better circumstances to catch up on my printing. I may even have been anticipating the home scanner; even though that was completely SFnal in 1976.

And I was right: here in the future, photography is cheaper.