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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...

from Peter Radford I have been less vexed about economics recently precisely because I have been focused on other, and more urgent, topics. The politics of our age are wondrously absorbing, if not a little disturbing. In any case I do try to keep an eye on what economists are up to. In that endeavor I came across a short article by Diane Coyle on the website “Project Syndicate”. If you want to know what is occupying the establishment it’s a good place to visit periodically. And Professor...

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....

from David Ruccio Obviously, recent events—such as Brexit, Donald Trump’s presidency, and the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn—have surprised many experts and shaken up the existing common sense. Some have therefore begun to make the case that an era has come to an end. The problem, of course, is while the old may be dying, it’s not all clear the new can be born. And, as Antonio Gramsci warned during the previous world-shaking crisis, “in this interregnum morbid phenomena of the...

real-world economics reviewIssue no. 80 download whole issue Inequality, democracy and the ecosystem Politics, preferences, and prices: the political consequences of inequality          2Luke Petach          download pdf The triumph of Pareto          14Gary Flomenhoft          download pdf Do we need a new economics for sustainable development?          32Peter Söderbaum         download pdf From green growth towards a sustainable real economy          45Jørgen Nørgård and Jin Xue...

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...

Worse than expected and prior month revised lower, but otherwise muddling through at modest rates of annual growth: Highlights Aircraft had been the strength but is now the weakness for durable goods which, pulled down by a second straight downswing for commercial aircraft, fell 1.1 percent in May. When excluding transportation, a reading that excludes aircraft, orders actually rose, but not very much at only 0.1 percent which falls 4 tenths shy of Econoday’s consensus. An...