Imagine that you’ve fallen out of an airplane. You’re plummeting to your death. Your first response is panic: you wonder if you left the oven on; you worry about who’s going to pick up the kids from daycare; you pray you didn’t leave any errant porn in your browser history. But to make matters worse, you realize at some point during the fall that the velocity at which you’re plummeting is increasing at a rate of 9.8m/s². You can’t even find comfort in knowing that death is approaching at a linear rate; you’re hurtling towards it exponentially.
Yet at some point during the fall you realize that something’s changed: as you approach terminal velocity the rate of acceleration begins to go down. In the face of imminent death you take great solace in the fact that, though you’re still going to be dead any minute, at least you’re only going to become a human pancake at the more casual rate of acceleration of 9.4m/s².
This is more or less what it sounds like to me when I see headlines exclaiming that the “Labor Department says first time jobless claims fell by 52,000 last week to 565,000”.
