The Unbroken Window

Isn’t it the case that “employment” is always 100%? What does this indicate about people if you suggest otherwise? Back in the 1600s, when we all worked on farms, would you like to have argued that the “employment rate” in America was zero? And yes, I know that the labor force statistics try to account [...]

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Earlier this Spring we examined how one aspect of our tax code (our current debates are like two people fighting over the last egg salad sandwich on the titanic) is anti-family and anti-women. For all of the rhetoric we hear out there about “equal pay for equal work” the idea that you can ever achieve [...]

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I am sure you folks are familiar with the claim that “markets are prone to monopolies.” Let’s just take that as given and accept the conclusion that this requires considerable government interference in the course of voluntary transactions. The data are not very clear that this is, indeed, what happens. Take a look at the [...]

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In Chinese cities, roughly 1 in 5 workers is employed by the government, or so it is thought. In the US, there are about 4.5 million federal employees, about 4.3 million state employees and 12 million local employees, for a total of 20 million people working directly for the government. There are a total of [...]

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I’m off to class, but a few quick things that will surely have people stop inviting you to their holiday afterparties this year: It’s likely that the main beneficiaries of “Veterans’ Day” and other ways we celebrate Veterans are not the Veterans at all. It is almost surely the government itself (on many dimensions). The [...]

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Economists have long puzzled about why even some currently unemployed workers could not simply reduce their wage requirements by a substantial amount and encourage firms to hire them. There is a nice literature on this which includes explanations such as unmeasured productivity, the signaling implied by such an offer, the matching difficulty between potential workers [...]

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Some of you may be familiar with the idea in macroeconomics that since prices (particularly wages) are “sticky” that recessions can turn into depressions or last a long time because the inability of prices and wages to fall when “aggregate demand” falls will prevent markets from equilibrating. There is lots to read on this topic, [...]

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It is well known that the raw wage data indicate that on average women earn less than 80% of what men earn in similar jobs. When economists do research to control for some factors that might explain the gap (such as differences in occupational choice or skills) some, but not all, of the gap goes [...]

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Our fair college is in a contract dispute with nearly 2000 of its employees (I think mostly at the Medical Center) who are members of the SEIU. From what I can gather the dispute seems to be around the value of health benefits. U of R seems to be wanting to offer the workers “more [...]

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I had two nice young folks stop by my house last night canvassing for a candidate for a local State Senate race. Too much was covered in our conversation for a single post, but id like to make two points. First, to their great credit, they were actually very interested in hearing what makes me [...]

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