Angry Bear: I have been bugging Daniel to write on occasion for Angry Bear. Daniel did write occasionally and his commentaries were good. I know it is a burden. Well, here is one of Daniel’s comments. A good one as usual . . . I believe the interest costs are part of the story as […]
This commentary is along the lines of what I have been taught when I was consulting with Ingersoll Engineers in Rockford and which is now extinct. My background includes manufacturing planning at all levels domestically and internationally for US and foreign companies. Labor’s wages are a small part of the Cost of Manufacturing, etc. Spencer […]
Real average hourly wages and real aggregate payrolls for October – by New Deal democrat With yesterday’s report on October consumer prices, we can take up two of my favorite measures of how the working/middle class is doing – real average non-supervisory wages, and real aggregate payrolls. Real average wages for non-supervisory workers declined -0.1% […]
Cause and effect leaves little room for how people want the world to work. Here are two stories illustrating that. From Bloomberg: A Swiss maker of hamburger buns for McDonald’s Corp. said it’s struggling to run a Chicago bakery after it lost a third of its workers in a clampdown on 800 immigrants without sufficient […]
The Guardian newspaper has a story about wages in England: A shortage of factory workers is starting to push up pay rates but wage rises in the services sector remain rooted at around 2%, according to the latest feedback from the Bank of England’s regional agents. The central bank said its agents, which are based […]
I came across the following graph: (Click to embiggen) Both the supply curve for labor in the state of California and the demand curve for housing in California are made up of the states residents. In general, if you increase the supply of something, all else being equal you bring down its price. On the […]
Tom Cotton, the junior United States Senator from Arkansas had a piece in the NY Times: President-elect Trump now has a clear mandate not only to stop illegal immigration, but also to finally cut the generation-long influx of low-skilled immigrants that undermines American workers. Yet many powerful industries benefit from such immigration. They’re arguing that […]
Sorry for the thin posting lately…I have had some SI joint problems which makes for difficulty sitting still to focus. Via Keven Drum comes this research paper addressing the issue of sticky wages in the economics of today: First off, a new paper by a trio of researchers confirms some old news: Adjusted for inflation, […]
What you don’t know can hurt you. I think that’s a clear lesson of some so-called trade agreements the United States has signed over the last 20 years, and illustrated further by the few that have been defeated, most notably the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from1995 […]
Cross-posted from Middle Class Political Economist. Your read it here first: Real wages fell 0.2% in 2012, down from $295.49 (1982-84 dollars) to $294.83 per week, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. Thus, a 1.9% increase in nominal wages was more than wiped out by inflation, marking the 40th consecutive year that […]