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Interpretation of the employment statistics was also a little odd to me. If you look at the figure, it's not like there's a leveling off or decrease in employme
by derbOac 5y ago
Interpretation of the employment statistics was also a little odd to me. If you look at the figure, it's not like there's a leveling off or decrease in employment numbers, it's just that the employment numbers haven't reached pre-pandemic levels yet. My interpretation of those numbers is it could be another year or two, or maybe longer, before employment numbers increase to pre-pandemic levels, assuming current trends hold. Maybe the author would argue that that's too long?
As an aside, the lumber price increases seem historically anomalous. Going back as far as I can, the price increases seem like an order of magnitude bigger than typical price variation. With other commodities, the price increases seem in line with past variation (at least in the last few decades). It seems like the lumber trends are worth paying attention to, almost like oil prices in the 70s (but again maybe that supports the author in a circumstantial way).
- jjk166 5y agoLumber is a resource that takes an incredibly long time to deal with supply chain disruptions, but for which large scale supply disruptions are difficult. First you need to plant trees years in advance before you harvest them, then green lumber needs to age for an extended period of time before it can be used. If you for some reason have to stop felling trees for a few months, a few months later you're going to have a shortage; and while you can cut down those trees later, if people start panic buying there are only so many trees ready to be felled. Luckily forests are spread out over many areas and logging does not depend on any suppliers that represent a single point of failure, so the odds of every logging operation getting disrupted at the same time is astronomically low - unless there's a global pandemic or something.