Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Shooting in Little Rock

I used to live in Little Rock,  so waking up this morning to the news of the shooting in Little Rock was a bit of a shock.  Fortunately, the expletive expletive who did the shooting was a bad shot and nobody got killed. I don’t even know how to comment on this, though, so I’m […]

Some Examples of the Hiring Process

A just-released paper by the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) looks at hiring processes in the Australian Public Service Commission. Here’s the summary: This study assessed whether women and minorities are discriminated against in the early stages of the recruitment process for senior positions in the APS, while also testing the impact […]

Stadiums or Schools: An Analysis of Public Expenditures

Dan here…I don’t usually pass along a study that has a company attached to the article itself, but thought this one might be of interest for readers. On government handouts sports, stadiums or schools is the political side of the issue. Stadiums or Schools: An Analysis of Public Expenditures What we found is that ten […]

Five graphs for 2017: mid year update

Five graphs for 2017: mid year update – by New Deal democrat At the beginning of the year, I identified 5 trends that bore particular watching, primarily as potentially setting the stage for a recession next year.  Now that we are halfway through the year, let’s take another look at each of them. #5 Gas […]

The Seattle Study: Increasing the Minimum Wage as a Way to Boost High Income Jobs

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) The Seattle Study: Increasing the Minimum Wage as a Way to Boost High Income Jobs As labor market mavens all know by now, the University of Washington team chosen by the city of Seattle to evaluate its minimum wage law has issued a new report.  This one is […]

Explaining the Gender Wage Gap

From Thomas Edsall in the NY Times At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate. In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. Wealth — and the ability to […]

Seattle Minimum Wage

Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before they confessed what the University of Washington team got them to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees […]