Gimme Shelter: the rental affordability crisis has worsened Four years ago HUD warned of “the worst rental affordability crisis ever,” citing statistics that About half of renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, up from 18 percent a decade ago, according to newly released research by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Twenty-seven percent […]
Four measures of wages all show renewed stagnation This is something I haven’t looked at in awhile. Since 2013, I have documented the stagnation vs. growth in average and median wages, for example here and here. I last did this in 2017. So let’s take an updated look. We have a variety of economic data series to track both […]
June 2018 JOLTS report evidence of both excellent jobs market and taboo against raising wages Yesterday’s JOLTS report remained excellent, suffering only in comparison to last month: Hires were just below their all-time high of one month ago Quits were just below their all-time high of one month ago Total separations made a new 17-year […]
Would Serious Climate Change Mitigation Policy Increase World Hunger? That’s the finding of a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, “Risk of Increased Food Insecurity under Stringent Global Climate Change Mitigation Policy” by an international team of 22 researchers. (Coauthorship like this is why god created et al.) The abstract has made the rounds of the blogosphere, including Marginal […]
How close are we to “full employment”? As I pointed out Friday, there was a lot of good news underneath the headline jobs gain — primarily in labor force participation and underemployment. So, how close are we to “full employment,” based on the last few expansions? Let’s start with the simple, straightforward unemployment rate of […]
Real Wages Decline Trump and his allies have been loudly bragging about the second quarterly GDP growth rate of 4.1%. It is quite possible that a growth rate of this sort may be maintained for another quarter or so, given the large fiscal stimulus put in place at the beginning of the year. How curious […]
July jobs report: booming jobs market, and a surge in participation continues to depress wage growth HEADLINES: +157,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.0% to 3.9% U6 underemployment rate down -0.3% from 7.8% to 7.5% (new expansion low) Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and […]
By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Four Definitions of Money. All Correct Money makes the world go round. That may well be true, but money certainly makes the economics world go round. It’s the discipline’s special purview, the numeric linchpin that gives economics its dominant role and voice in our affairs. It’s what makes economics seem […]
Mush versus Mush on Climate Change The very long New York Times piece on climate change politics in the 1980s by Nathaniel Rich has attracted a lot of critical commentary—justifiably. To say that the failure to achieve a political response was due to human nature, a genetic defect that prevents our species from planning ahead, is just […]
Via Truthout: In every community, there are nonprofit charities that serve real needs: local food pantries, programs addressing the opioid crisis, the Red Cross chapters that come to our aid after a storm. Charities provide vital services to the people and places they serve. These organizations lean heavily on volunteers, fundraisers, and donors. And most […]