S&P’s Howard Silverblatt is out with a preliminary reading on 2024Q1’s stock buybacks. In a phrase, they were big, if not quite the biggest.

Buybacks for S&P 500 stocks totaled $237 billion in the quarter, up 8% from the previous quarter and 9% from a year earlier. At an annualized rate, that equaled 3.4% of GDP, up from 2.9% last year and above the 3.1% average since 2005. Firms devoted over half their operating earnings—51.4% to be precise—to purchasing their own shares, slightly below the average since 2012. The buyback sum equaled a third of nonresidential fixed investment.

Call us old-fashioned, but maybe a larger share of earnings should be devoted to capital spending. Note how much lower the share devoted to buybacks were in the late 1990s, a time of high investment and rapid productivity growth.

Noting that consumers access a range of sources for information about the economy—discussions with friends, their own experiences, and what they read or hear—Dr. Joanne Hsu, who directs the University of Michigan’s survey of consumers—recently broke out the sources that go into the “news heard” component of the survey. Apparently prompted by that fact that consumers reporting that they had heard bad news about inflation was “much higher,” in 2022 than it was during the “objectively worse” inflation periods of the 1970s, her team asked respondents open-ended questions about news sources from January through April.

NB: Unfavorable news about prices hit just 20% in the 1970s, and topped out at 35% in 2022. 

Top sources, all over 30%, were mainstream news, general/other news, and general/other internet, followed by discussions with friends, family and co-workers, about 20%. Business news was mentioned by about 18% of respondents, and partisan sources by about 15%. Social media followed at about 13%, and just 10% of consumers mentioned the stock market, or their own experiences as sources.

Consumers who rely on their own and friends’ experiences have the lowest favorability ratings, which Hsu points out may well be because they are the most vulnerable, with fewer holding college degrees, and lowest median incomes. Those who read mainstream or business news, or follow the stock market, have highest levels of educational attainment and median incomes, and report most favorably on what they read. Those who rely on what Hsu calls the “catch-all” categories are close to the average, which she believes is because the sources are diverse.

But if you break out Democrats, Independents and Republicans, all hell breaks loose. Half of Democratic respondents, 27% of Independents, and just 16% of Republicans follow the mainstream news. Although shares by party for those who follow general sources and the internet are within the same range, those are the most common sources among Republicans, 38% and 37%. About 20% of Republicans follow partisan sources, as do 15% of Democrats. As you might guess, Independents are least likely to follow such news.

Although hearing more upbeat news is tied with higher sentiment, Hsu suggests the need for follow-up research on whether that is the product of bias confirmation. In any case, assessing partisan sources is associated with lower net favorability of news heard, and lower sentiment, among Republicans, and higher levels among Democrats. Among Democrats who mention partisan sources, net favorability of news heard is 143, and sentiment 110, among Republicans who mention partisan sources, net assessment is 31, and sentiment, 53. Democratic assessment and sentiment falls among those with no mention of partisan sources, 123 and 99, and rises among Republicans, 47 and 65.

AllSides Media Bias Chart: Read it and weep.

Professors Lusina Grigoryan, of York University, and Madalina Vlasceanu, of New York University, recently led a study on what works and what doesn’t in order to alter behaviors affecting climate change. The study included 60,000 participants in 63 countries, and 11 strategies, including gloom and doom, stressing the scientific consensus, and writing a letter from the future.

The large team was “quite surprised” to discover that 86% of the participants believe climate change to be a “serious issue,” that needs to be addressed, with 70% supporting “systemic/collective action,” something you might not think from reading the headlines.

That aside, the regional results were as skewed as you might guess. For example, stressing the 99% consensus among climate experts lifted support for climate-friendly policies by 9% in Romania, but lowered it by 5% in Canada.

A gloom and doom bombardment produced a 12% increase, the largest change, in the share of social-media enthusiasts willing to post pro-environmental messages, which seems to go with the territory, and may be part of the problem: Do those posts really do much?

Overall, the most effective strategy was devised by Grigoryan, lifting support for green policies by 9% overall, with a range of 10% in the US and in Brazil to very modest declines in the UAE, Serbia and India. Grigoryan asked participants to imagine their future selves writing a letter to a child close to them today, outlining what they would have done differently.

Yesterday David Blanchflower opened a program sponsored by the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth, “COVID and Mental Health in America.” His talk was followed by a panel of seven surgeons general all investigating the mental health of young people. We’re grateful for the quality of work David regularly produces with his various colleagues.

Each slide is worth a thousand words, but in his own words, “The decline in wellbeing of the young and especially young women is shocking —12% of 22 to 23-year-old women say every day of their lives is a bad mental health day.” He notes that the trend started in 2011, “looks on first go a uniquely American phenomenon,” and may be driven by the high U-3 unemployment rate among those 16 to 24 years old. The U-3 captures only those who are unemployed and actively looking for work, an oddity in a time when people are complaining about labor shortages, especially as there is such a thing as on-the-job training.

Nineteen percent of women in that age group have had long Covid—rates among young women are about twice that of young men. David references a paper he wrote with his frequent partner Alex Bryson that documents long COVID’s unequal hand. Not only are rates higher among women, they are higher among Whites than among Blacks and Asians, and vary significantly by region: in West Virginia, 18% of those responding to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey reported having had long COVID, as did only 11% of those in Hawaii.

Prior to COVID, Blanchflower and Bryson found despair peaked in middle-age, but as you can see on the graph we selected from the deck, that is no longer true. It now declines with age, and also with higher levels of education. Overall, 11% of males and 14% of females short a high-school diploma suffer from despair, as do 17% of males and 19% of females with no diploma under 30. That ladders down to 3.6% of males and 4.4% of females with a graduate degree, and 6.7% and 7.8% of males and females under thirty with advanced degrees.

It’s easy to feel numb these days. David Blanchflower has studied workers and would-be-workers’ blues for decades and from many angles: un- and under-employment, disparate rates of despair among demographic groups, and working woes across countries. We’re guessing that if he’s shocked, Alex Bryson is shocked too, as we all might be. If we’re concerned about our country’s future, this is the place to start.