The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in labor markets on Mar 26th, 2011
Did you know that: 13.3% of the workers who earn the minimum wage or less are employed in the government sector? 16.9% of the workers who earn the minimum wage or less have a college degree? 47.3% of the workers who earn the minimum wage or less are married and have a spouse present? 67.7% [...]
Posted in Unintended Consequences, labor markets on Mar 1st, 2011
Radio ads here in Rochester have been touting the “new” employment tax credits that have come from Washington, DC. The idea is that for firms that hire currently unemployed workers and keep them employed for a long-enough time period, they will receive a credit on their tax liabilities. Let’s not think of the labor economics [...]
Posted in You Can't Have it Both Ways, labor markets on Dec 30th, 2010
A few e-mails came in last week when I mentioned that my marginal tax rates on my next dollar of earned income were rather high. In doing so, I included nearly all of the 15.3% of the payroll tax as coming out of my wages. Was I right to do this? That is not the [...]
Posted in Macroeconomics, labor markets on Dec 27th, 2010
Since the Bureau of Labor Statistic started collecting the data in 2001, the annual average number of jobs that have been “destroyed” in the US economy has been 23.7 million per year or roughly 2 million jobs per month. Now these “jobs” are not the same as employment experiences. Some of the people represented in [...]
Posted in labor markets on Apr 22nd, 2010
Several folks have e-mailed me asking that I repost a thought or two on the original auto bailouts. Here is one of them, and for fun, I added the following section to my original post. But let’s assume that even all 1 million auto workers would be out of work. That of course would never [...]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, labor markets on Feb 15th, 2010
The following chart depicts Net Job Changes by Firm Size for the Last Six Years. I broke out firm size by those under 50 employees (small), those from 50 to 499 employees (mid-sized) and those over 500 employees (large). Note that the trends are similar for finer increments of the data. Macroeconomic Aggregates: Employment Situation [...]
Posted in Economics Problems, labor markets on Dec 16th, 2009
We have had a sighting of an man employment eating beast right here in North America! And this one doesn’t seem to have the tail of poisonous spines or multiple rows of teeth. And what is this vicious creature? A reduction in the minimum wage. Paul Krugman castigates the Focks news crowd for thinking that [...]
Posted in labor markets on Nov 5th, 2009
Seriously. When I was an economics graduate student at Cornell, I was being asked to join the UAW. That’s because us poor graduate students were being exploited by agreeing to work as Teaching Assistants and Research Assistants in order to have our free tuition and continue to receive a stipend to go to school. You [...]
Posted in You Can't Have it Both Ways, labor markets on Oct 3rd, 2009
And now the “clean jobs” free lunch. The health reforms are costly, and will be imposing more costs on workers and firms, particularly small businesses. But as I’ve said before, the issue of health costs and being competitive in labor markets is a red herring. What matters is total compensation. If for some reason, health [...]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Environment, labor markets on Jul 28th, 2009
In the recently published “Green Jobs Report” from the US Conference of Mayors, they report that: By 2038 there will be 1,246 new green jobs created in Greenville, North Carolina.” We have a term for that sort of work: scientism. Oh, and what sorts of jobs are classified as “green”? Anything that is 6-degrees of [...]
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