The Angry Bear

Muhammed Bin Nayef Bin Abdulaziz Al Sa’ud Confined To His Palace In Jidda, according to the New York Times today.  So the story about the now deposed 57-year old former Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and former Minister of the Interior, Muhammed bin Nayef (MbN), putting out a video supporting his own removal appears to be phony propaganda.  The Saudis instead have been broadcasting a video of the new Crown Prince, 31-year old Muhammed bin Salman (MbS) kissing...

Sandwichman in the FT Financial Times: “The minimum wage wars are heating up: A new study fails to prove its claim that Seattle wage floor hurts workers” by Martin Sandbu, at Free Lunch on FT Alphaville First, the numerical result struggles to pass an intuitive “smell test”. As the Angry Bear blog [cross posted at EconoSpeak!] points out, employment in Seattle was booming throughout the period: average wages increased by 18 per cent (!) in the time covered by...

I used to live in Little Rock,  so waking up this morning to the news of the shooting in Little Rock was a bit of a shock.  Fortunately, the expletive expletive who did the shooting was a bad shot and nobody got killed. I don’t even know how to comment on this, though, so I’m going to just to put it up… This is a screenshot I just took from the night club’s website which shows the act that was performing last night. I guess what with the events of the last...

A just-released paper by the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) looks at hiring processes in the Australian Public Service Commission. Here’s the summary: This study assessed whether women and minorities are discriminated against in the early stages of the recruitment process for senior positions in the APS, while also testing the impact of implementing a ‘blind’ or de-identified approach to reviewing candidates. Over 2,100 public...

Dan here…I don’t usually pass along a study that has a company attached to the article itself, but thought this one might be of interest for readers. On government handouts sports, stadiums or schools is the political side of the issue. Stadiums or Schools: An Analysis of Public Expenditures What we found is that ten states have allocated public funds to fund new professional sports stadiums since 2008. This does not include state expenditures on collegiate...

There has been a lot of very good critique of the methodology of the University of Washington’s study of the minimum wage increase in Seattle. However, I want to repeat and emphasize a very simple point that jumps out. A static low-wage cutoff point, whether it be $19 or $100, automatically reduces the size of the treatment group (Seattle) if wages in the treatment group are increasing faster than the wage of the control group. This is not erudite...

Five graphs for 2017: mid year update – by New Deal democrat At the beginning of the year, I identified 5 trends that bore particular watching, primarily as potentially setting the stage for a recession next year.  Now that we are halfway through the year, let’s take another look at each of them. #5 Gas Prices One potential pressure point on the economy was gas prices, which appear to have made a long- bottom in January of 2016. As they began to rise,...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) The Seattle Study: Increasing the Minimum Wage as a Way to Boost High Income Jobs As labor market mavens all know by now, the University of Washington team chosen by the city of Seattle to evaluate its minimum wage law has issued a new report.  This one is particularly juicy since it covers the increase from $11 to $13 an hour, which moved Seattle into new territory, beyond what has been studied elsewhere. ...

From Thomas Edsall in the NY Times At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate. In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. Wealth — and the ability to generate more wealth — must still be considered a reliable proxy for power. But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force,...