Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/288180
APRIL 2-8, 2014 UCW 19 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM New Books, Times and Authors for Bookwatch by D.G. MARTIN There are three pieces of good news about my favorite television program, UNC-TV's North Carolina Bookwatch. First, upcoming new programs feature some of North Carolina's most interesting authors. UNC-Greensboro's Michael Parker's new novel follows a North Carolina man who packs up a truck, runs away from his troubles here, and winds up in Texas. On a used car lot, he meets a woman who wants to buy the same 1984 Buick Electra that he had decided to buy. Inexplicably, they buy it together. Then Parker brings the stories of these two people and the car into one surprising and satisfying saga titled All I have in this World. (The program previews on UNC-MX Friday March 28, at 9 p.m., and airs on UNC-TV Sunday March 30 at noon and Thursday, April 3 at 5 p.m.) Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was one of The New York Times's 10 best fiction books of the year, a Times best seller, and a critical success. We had to wait eight years for her second book, Night Film. Like her first book, it takes us on a wild and intriguing journey. This time the reader explores the world of a mysterious filmmaker whose cult followers and detractors collide after the apparent suicide of his talented daughter. (April 4, 6, 10) UNC-Chapel Hill folklorist and scholar William Ferris has spent a lifetime collecting and celebrating voices of the South. In The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, he shares his favorite memories of 26 Southern writers, scholars, artists, and composers, including Eudora Welty, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Pete Seeger, (April 11, 13, 17) In The Governor's Lady, former WBTV anchor Bob Inman takes us inside the government of a southern state that could be North Carolina. Cooper Lanier, the new governor, must deal with the possibility that her husband, the former governor, and current presidential candidate Pickett Lanier, is deeply involved in corrupt schemes to line the pockets of his supporters. (April 18, 20, 24) In What I Came to Tell You by Tommy Hays, Grover, a 12-year-old boy in Asheville, has lost his mom in a traffic accident. He struggles and finds solace in creating art in a bamboo forest on a lot near his home. Everything for him is threatened when the lot goes up for sale. Hayes wrote for a young audience, but his story has great appeal to readers of any age. (April 25, 27, May 1) Real facts are the basis of North Carolina State University Professor Elaine Neil Orr's fictional account, A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa. The daughter of a pre-Civil War Southern slaveholder travels to Africa as the wife of a Baptist missionary to bring the gospel to the Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria. Orr, herself the daughter of Baptist missionaries, uses her characters and setting to tell a richly complex tale filled with universal themes and conflicts. (May 2, 4, 8) The second good news item: with the end of Festival's fundraising special programming, Bookwatch gets back its Sunday noon airtime on March 30 in addition to its regular Thursday at 5 p.m. slot. Thirdly, some cable customers (including TimeWarner) have more opportunities. On Friday evening at 9 p.m., UNC-MX channel provides a preview of the upcoming Sunday and Thursday programs. Also on MX on Friday evenings are programs like the McLaughlin Group, Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley, another program about books called Well Read, plus re-airings of News- Hour and Washington Week in Review. Not a bad way to spend Friday evenings. Look Before You (Statistically) Leap by JOHN HOOD In late February, some 44,000 discouraged North Carolina workers suddenly disappeared. Relax. It's not as mysterious as it sounds. What happened was that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its long- awaited revision of five years of household-employment data for North Carolina and the rest of the country. For months, critics of North Carolina's decision to exit the unemployment insurance extended benefits program have cited household-survey data to pummel Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican-led legislature. Ignoring warnings about the preliminary nature of the data, and the statistical insignificance of many findings because of the survey's small sample size, these critics claimed that some 111,000 people had left North Carolina's labor force in 2013, dwarfing the scant 13,000 unemployed workers who had obtained jobs during the year. The first egregious problem with this claim was that extended benefits ceased in North Carolina in July, not in January. As it happens, the first six months of 2013 were the roughest for North Carolina's labor market, with very little net job growth. This could not have been caused by a policy change that hadn't happened yet. The second egregious problem with the claim was that not everyone exiting the labor force deserves the label "discouraged worker." Those who have been unemployed for a long time and are so frustrated that they've given up form only a small minority — albeit a sympathetic minority — of those leaving the labor force. Others are in the midst of relocating or retraining for a new job. Still others are simply retiring, as the Baby Boom bulge is now affecting labor-force participation across the country. Now there is a third egregious problem with the claim: the revised BLS numbers show something very different. North Carolina's labor force declined last year by 67,000, not 111,000. For the last six months of 2013, the period after extended benefits ended, the number of employed North Carolinians rose by about 27,000 while the labor force declined by 39,000. Furthermore, because labor-force participation is trending downward for the nation as a whole, and particularly among Southeastern states, it would be silly to attribute North Carolina's entire 39,000 decline to the end of extended UI benefits. As a matter of fact, even these revised household-survey findings should still be treated with great caution because of the small sample size of the survey. For the last six months of 2013, all that can be said with a high degree of confidence from the household-survey data is that the number of unemployed North Carolinians fell by about 65,000. During the same six-month period, North Carolina employers added about 60,000 net new jobs, according to the broader BLS survey of employer establishments — the data from which have also just been revised. Economists and policy analysts typically put more stock in the employer survey because of its far-larger sample size. The survey data are also periodically adjusted to comport with actual payrolls reported to the federal government each quarter. According to this dataset, North Carolina added 86,000 net new jobs in 2013 — more than two-thirds of them after July 2013 — which was a faster rate of growth than the national average and the largest annual job gain the state has experienced since the Great Recession. Do these revised household and employer surveys depict North Carolina's economic performance as spectacular? No, not by historical standards. The nation as a whole is experiencing a comparatively weak recovery from a severe downturn. Since 2011, North Carolina has done better than the national average in job creation and income growth, but these were not exactly high bars to clear. Hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians remain unemployed or underemployed. All sides of the political debate agree that significant economic challenges remain, even as we disagree about the best policies to respond to them. One way to foster meaningful dialogue, however, would be for everyone to stop hyping preliminary data and drawing statistically invalid conclusions from them. Resist the temptation. JOHN HOOD, President of the John Locke Foundation, Columnist. COM- MENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly. com. 910 484 6200 D.G. MARTIN, Host of UNCTV's Bookwatch, Columnist. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. 910 484 6200