Black Friday around here in New England begins to night in stores about 8 P.M. On the internet Black Friday’s discounts began last week as the competition heats up between companies with stores and internet based sales. Stores have responded with aggressive discounts, especially visible is Walmart. This post is relevant to the issue of […]

by Kenneth Thomas US wages trail 10 OECD countries, but with higher unemployment than 9 of them Contra Eric Cantor, Labor Day celebrates the importance of labor and the labor movement in American history. But the bluster of Cantor, where he celebrates the so-called job creators, does illustrate that organized labor has been in decline […]

Update: spelling corrected in title. I heard and then went to look see that Caterpillar is working hard to control it’s costs. “Despite earning a record $4.9 billion profit last year and projecting even better results for 2012, the company is insisting on a six-year wage freeze and a pension freeze for most of the […]

by Mike Kimel Tyler Cowen has a post on truck driving jobs in North Dakota: My poking around showed that some of them start at 75k a year, though with raises for good performance. The implication, of course – why don’t unemployed people move to North Dakota and drive trucks for good wages rather than […]

by Martin Ford Job Automation, Purchasing Power and Consumer Spending I’ve had several recent posts here arguing that automation technology is likely to depress wages and lead to significant structural unemployment in the coming years. One of the most common criticisms of my argument is that I am “not thinking like an economist” and that […]

Here’s what Happens When I Click a Link by Accident: Does anyone believe the market rate for taxi drivers in Maryland is $11.41 an hour? The base salary for an Assistant Professor of Economics is $115-120K for elite schools (well, Harvard and Stanford, but you get the idea).* Morgan Stanley offered $85,000 for an Analyst […]