Chris Bertram at Crookedtimber posted on a conference he attended (and Sandwichman, who hasn’t written to date) on the idea of working time reduction in response to keeping unemployment lower. The comments are worth a post to summarize, but at least this pointer is a start. Towards a 21-hour working week? by Chris Bertram Last […]
by Linda Beale Romney’s Tax Plan Helps the 1%, Hurts the Bottom 40% In spite of having to suffer some closer view of his Bain Capital time–during which the self-proclaimed “job creator” businessman did a lot of job cutting and destruction of going concerns so that his investors could make more money, Romney continues on […]
As you all have heard, Friday was (again) S&P’s day in the limelight. The rating agency downgraded over half of the 16 Euro area countries put on credit watch negative in December 2011. A quick look at my feed shows several takes on S&P’s action: the Economist’s Free Exchange comments on the now soft-core country, […]
I don’t usually link to Paul Krugman because he everyone reads him anyway, right? He doesn’t need my google juice. But I have to make an exception here because he adds to my trove of graphs demonstrating how America today — after thirty years of Reaganomics policies that were supposed to be all about freedom, […]
This is just a short post to illustrate the magnitude of GDP revisions. I downloaded quarterly GDP data from BEA in June 2011. I went back to BEA this morning to update the file. Forgetting about GDP revisions, I thought I’d be adding 2 or three more quarters of data, but discovered that all the […]
John Scalzi: …in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. […]
Ever since Bryan offered this bet on future unemployment rates in the U.S. and Europe, I’ve been wondering: how do incarceration rates affect those numbers? Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population […]
You hear from lots of people — including lots of economists — that they do. Because they’re monopolistic price-fixers, they distort economic decisions and make us all worse off. The theory makes sense, as far as it goes. But if it were really true you’d expect to see it in the data. This got me […]
by run75441 For Garbage and Labor “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” February 1968, 1,300 Sanitation Workers of Memphis went on strike for better working conditions and benefits, doing so with little support from the International […]