Real average and aggregate wages: July 2018 update As we close out this week devoted to jobs and wages, with the consumer price index having been reported yesterday, let’s take a look at real wages. By now you’ve probably read elsewhere that YoY wages for average workers actually declined slightly (-0.1%): But the flatness goes […]
A (mainly) business cycle explanation for this year’s better jobs growth The pace of job creation declined from averaging over 200,000 a month between Q2 2014 through Q2 2015 to 180,000 or less during most of 2017. This year, it has picked up noticeably to over 200,000 per month again: Why? A basic analysis of […]
This is mostly a C&P as taken from Justin Frantz’s article One of the World’s Largest Steam Locomotives Is About to Make a Triumphant Return It is a fun post with a tad of economics tied to it. It was not seventy years ago and may be more like sixty years ago when I took […]
A business cycle theory of labor force participation and wage growth I’ve devoted a lot of time and thought, and typed a lot of pixels of commentary, about wage growth in the last few years. Some of it has panned out: based on past expansions,I expected YoY wage growth to bottom consistent with an unemployment […]
I’m not a lawyer. Also Republicans are worse than I imagine possible even taking into account the fact that they are worse than I imagine possible. However, I think Brett Kavanaugh defender Andrew Leipold of The U of Illinois School of Law is unfit to serve as a law professor. The issue is that Kavanaugh […]
How Much Do the NATO Members Spend on National Defense? Josh Marshall provides a nice discussion of the difference between how NATO is funded versus how much each of its members spends on national defense, which begins with: As we move toward the NATO Summit and the Putin-Trump summit, I thought it made sense to review […]
Understanding the simple strategy for the 2018 elections Pretend for a moment that you are a political strategist. Your party is the party in power. The opposition has been enraged since the moment of your standard-bearer’s election. In the special and off-year elections since, they have been showing up in unprecedented droves for offices up […]
A teaser about wages and labor force participation I was going to put up a short piece about wages this morning, but it has turned into a longer, more comprehensive piece, so in the meantime, here are some teasers to ponder. 1. There is a direct relationship between the economy generally, and child care costs […]