“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
This quote came to mind when I stumbled on this post by Wolf Richter, which demonstrates that the “good” news on the job front is nothing more than keeping in the same place:
On average, 205,300 jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth and not allow the unemployment situation to get worse.
Last months good news was that we netted out 255,000 jobs, meaning that while we’re not quite keeping in the same place, we’re not exactly getting somewhere else. Richter points out that most people who don’t live within the Beltway or some other bubble somehow know we’re not moving, and their perception is absolutely correct. It would be ever so nice if the Democrats more vigorously addressed that well founded pervasive anxiety.
Speaking of Lewis Carroll (see the quote above), it occurred to me while thinking about this subject, that another quote that might apply here is “the faster I go, the behinder I get”. So I looked it up to find the source, and what I found was strange. It’s often stated as “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get”, both versions of which are attributed to Carroll. There’s even a website that features 10 quotes from Carroll, one of which is the “hurrier” quote.
I was interested to see which was genuine, so I searched the full text versions of both Alice and Through the Looking Glass, and couldn’t find the quote in either. I searched for the word “hurrier”, assuming it would only appear once. It certainly sounds like a Carroll quote, and in a way, it echoes the quote above, but I must conclude that it’s a misattribution, unless someone’s able to find it. By the way, when I started looking, I thought it likely that it was something Andy Devine might have said on Wild Bill Hickok.
By way of explanation for this pathetic, meandering, post, I just got back from vacation, and am still feeling quite lazy. I’m hoping to get back in the thick of things any day now, though I have to admit that for a guy with a day job, blogging is getting harder. By the time I get in front of my keyboard to point out yet another crazy thing the Donald has said, a million people have beaten me to it, and at least 10% of them have the same take that I do. If this keeps up I’ll have to take to Twitter. Anyway, I’m back, rested and ready to go.
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