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Category Archive for 'labor markets'

Worth While

Arnold Kling hits this one out of the park. Here he is on “creating worthlessness”: The gap between the college-educated and the less-educated is arguably due to differential treatment by government programs and billionaire philanthropists. We create a well-paying job for a college-educated ZMP in the “sustainability office” of a government agency or industry trade […]

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My eyes tend to gravitate toward climate and labor market issues, so I encounter the following two “arguments” all of the time. (1) There are those who present global temperature data in the following way: “if you look at global temperature records, the rate of temperature increase around the planet has either slowed or paused […]

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Should I Scream?

So, within a short bicycle ride or car ride from where I live there are five (probably more) ice cream shops that I like to visit. I was going to say that my kids like to visit, but I am driving the proverbial bus on this one. I won’t name their names, but if you […]

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A surprisingly large number of smart people support raising the minimum wage. In two separate conversations this week with very intelligent people, it was argued to me: That there is some research (I once wrote a book review of this) suggesting that labor markets are monopsonistic. And I can draw you a picture of how […]

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There is a well-regarded theory in economics (and popular?) that suggests that during slack economic conditions, we should welcome a bit of unexpected inflation from the Fed. Why? Well, for one, if you believe in a sticky wage view of the world, and the psychological and practical difficulties with employers lowering wages to existing workers, […]

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This is already not going over well among the people this “law” is aiming to “help” … not surprising: Salary Threshold for Hourly Employees to Change The U.S. Department of Labor has announced changes to how some employees are paid by announcing an increase to the salary threshold used to determine eligibility for overtime pay. Effective December 1, […]

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Had to pick up a birthday present and card for one of the kids’ birthday parties this weekend. Used a self-service kiosk to checkout. On the way home, I fancied a quite cup of coffee. Ordered it via a kiosk. Then, headed to my gas station where I filled up my own gas. Finished up […]

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From the interesting book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, comes this one: Sweden now has some of the most generous parental leave allowance in the world, with 16 months’ leave on 80 percent of wages guaranteed by law, to be taken whenever the parents feel like it up until the child is eight years old. Without going […]

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Well, at least there is some clarity on how this all started: After refusing to answer almost all substantive questions I asked, we are at least able to understand how this started. Notice, by the way, the same conclusion to this student e-mail as the other one. So, they insert themselves into a situation that […]

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It looks like this entire union thing was started by … … students. I dug through my old emails to find that one. A student of mine had asked that question, innocently enough, back in October and I never gave it much thought. Until I received a note recently that included: So, do any readers familiar […]

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