The Angry Bear

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,...

Words cannot describe the torment experienced by the data before it confessed what the University of Washington team got it to confess. I can only urge readers with an open mind to study Table 3 carefully. The average wage increase, from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, for all employees of single site establishments was 18 percent. Eighteen percent! That is an annual increase of almost 8 percent. For two and a quarter years in a row....

One consequence of electing the popular vote loser is that the official winners act as if they have a mandate for the most extreme version of their policies. Thus, we have proposed legislation, the misleadingly titled Better Care Reconciliation Act, that will not only roll back Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, but impose further large cuts on the program in addition. In total, the Medicaid cuts will come to $772 billion through 2026. As a result primarily...

CBPP has this pictorial analysis of the increased premiums resulting from the Senate version of the AHCA for a 60 year old at 350% FPL with an ACA Silver plan. “For a 60-year-old with income of 350 percent of the poverty level (about $42 ,000 today) facing the average premium on HealthCare.gov, out-of-pocket premiums would jump by an estimated $4,994. Premiums would rise by $ 2,022 for a 45-year-old at this income level, and fall by $75 for a 30-year-old....

Richard Layard, How to Beat Unemployment, 1986: “If you ask the man in the street (not Wall Street) what has caused our unemployment, nine times out of ten he will say that it is machines displacing people. In fact for this reason he is often deeply pessimistic about whether we could ever have full employment again.” Dear Professor Layard, In your 1986 book, “How to Beat Unemployment,” you wrote: “If you ask the man in the street (not Wall Street) what has...