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Open thread April 3, 2015

Dan Crawford | April 3, 2015 7:33 am

Tags: open thread Comments (4) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
4 Comments
  • Denis Drew says:
    April 3, 2015 at 10:16 am

    A NATION of VIRTUAL co-ops

    Sure as the pricking of my thumbs something unraveling inequality this way comes.

    Apply RICO and the Hobbs Act to the practice and (in the case of consultants) profession of union-busting — firing workers who try to carry out the federally prescribed steps to establish collective bargaining with their employer — and when the prosecutions begin all the busters may head for the hills waiting (how ever many years it takes) for the cases to reach a conclusion in the higher courts.

    Be nice if every firm were a co-operative — where labor squeezed the consumer as hard as ownership? Combine ACROSS THE BOARD UNIONIZATION — with — CENTRALIZED BARGAINING (all similar jobs under one contract with different employers) and you have the equivalent of A NATION OF CO-OPS.

    Ask Germany; ask Denmark.

  • Denis Drew says:
    April 3, 2015 at 10:18 am

    “Virtual co-ops” [see comment just above] can clear the American labor market — and Chicago’s drop-dead ghettos

    Under “virtual co-ops” the market will clear at a higher price for labor then under what I call our current “two-tier” labor market (unorganized) where labor’s price is set relative to other labor instead of consumer preference (bring back the steam looms!).

    Actually today’s American labor market is NOT clearing because the price of labor is TOO LOW TO CLEAR: e.g., 100,000 out of (I estimate) 200,000 Chicago gang-age males are in street gangs because the minimum wage (to cite one thing) is $3.50 below LBJ’s 1968 $10.75 DOUBLE THE PER CAPITA INCOME LATER!
    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gang-wars-at-the-root-of-chicagos-high-murder-rate/

    The proportion out of the labor market may be worse. Somebody pointed me to a Forbes article stating half of Ferguson’s young African-American males are missing from the census.

    “While the problem of missing African American men is especially severe in Ferguson, young black men are absent from most U.S. cities. In the neighboring cities of East St. Louis, IL and St. Louis, about 38% and 24% of African American men age 25 to 34 are absent from their communities, respectively. On average, about 18 percent of young African American men are absent from large cities. (This calculation is based on the combined population of 33 cities with the largest African American populations, home to about one quarter of African Americans in the U.S.) In contrast, outside of large cities only about 4% of young black men are absent from their communities. The challenges posed by an absence of black men in Ferguson are problems faced primarily by larger cities.”
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2015/03/18/half-of-fergusons-young-african-american-men-are-missing/

    Actually, there may be a ray of hope in this for the long run solution to Chicago’s seemingly permanent drop-dead ghettos. Fix the American labor market as a whole and the men and women who live there may be very flexible about commuting or even emigrating to where the jobs are. Then, they can bring demand back into the neighborhood — or send money back like foreign immigrants! Gradually, economically healthy neighborhoods can emerge.

  • bkrasting says:
    April 3, 2015 at 11:17 am

    A so-so employment report today. The talking heads all say it was the weather. Maybe.

    There are many parts of the economy that are not running very well. Housing, construction, cars, the energy side of the economy, etc.

    The latest update from the Atlanta Fed has 1st Q GDP at……0.1%

    This index has to move rapidly higher pretty soon if the 2015 full year forecast is to be realized. 2015 is looking more like another 2% ho-mum year.

    Oh, and the DC Fed is going to raise % rates sometime after June? The Atlanta Fed’s report is screaming, “Don’t do that”.

    The Atlanta Fed report:
    https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/researchcq/gdpnow.cfm

  • amateur socialist says:
    April 3, 2015 at 2:35 pm

    Yet another scary story on the rise in multi drug resistant bacterial infections on Salon today.

    http://www.salon.com/2015/04/03/international_travelers_are_returning_to_the_u_s_with_a_multidrug_resistant_stomach_bug_and_its_spreading/

    Is it time to acknowledge that the free market isn’t going to invest in needed antibiotic research yet? Or are we going to figure it out after the pandemic kills millions?

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