1. Huffington Post: Financially Speaking -- Are We an Illiterate Nation?
... Champlain College's Center for Financial Literacy released its '2013 National Report Card,' which quantifies what states are doing to promote financial literacy in the classroom. Only seven of 50 states surveyed came away from the study with an "A" rating. That's right, a paltry seven states! Of these seven states, only four have a standalone course -- Utah, Tennessee, Missouri and Louisiana.
Thirteen states received a "B" rating, and the remaining 30 states received a "C," "D," or "F" rating. In fact, eight states received an "F" rating. Ask yourself, as a parent, would you be content to have your children bring home similar grades? ...
2. Huffington Post: 40 Financial Things You Should Know by 40
3. Carpe Diem: World market cap reached record high in March, and is $2.4T above pre-recession, pre-crisis level
4. Businessweek: Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere
... But the U.S. jobs slide began well before China’s rise as a manufacturing power. And manufacturing employment is falling almost everywhere, including in China. The phenomenon is driven by technology, and there’s reason to think developing countries are going to follow a different path to wealth than the U.S. did—one that involves a lot more jobs in the services sector.
Pretty much every economy around the world has a low or declining share of manufacturing jobs. According to OECD data, the U.K. and Australia have seen their share of manufacturing drop by around two-thirds since 1971. Germany’s share halved, and manufacturing’s contribution to gross domestic product there fell from 30 percent in 1980 to 22 percent today. In South Korea, a late industrializer and exemplar of miracle growth, the manufacturing share of employment rose from 13 percent in 1970 to 28 percent in 1991; it’s fallen to 17 percent today. ...
5. Forbes: High Tech And Robots Can Create More Low Skilled Jobs, Not Just Destroy Them
As we all wait anxiously for the robots to come and steal all our jobs an interesting finding in a study on the effect of ever higher technology on the demand for low skilled labour. Contrary to what everyone seems to be assuming it is possible for that higher tech to actually increase the demand for that low skilled labour. For the higher tech enables that lower skilled labour to perform tasks that could only previously be done by highly skilled labour. And as the costs associated with whatever the task is fall then we quite naturally demand more of that task to be done. Thus, in certain cases at least, higher tech increases the number of jobs, not reduces them. ...
6. Business Insider: Why Food Prices Are Surging
... In a new report, Morgan Stanley commodities analysts led by Adam Longson attribute the surge in prices to a number of factors, "from weather (in the case of sugar, soybeans and coffee) to disease (in the case of hogs) to geopolitics (wheat and corn)."
The Morgan Stanley analysts don't believe this will continue. ...
7. Atlantic: How You, I, and Everyone Got the Top 1 Percent All Wrong
8. House of Debt: Measuring Wealth Inequality
9. Conversable Economist: An Inequality Chartbook: Long-Run Patterns in 25 Countries
This is an interesting chart from chartbook of income inequality.
10. Brookings: Income Growth and Income Inequality: The Facts May Surprise You
... The broadest and most accurate measures of household income are published by the CBO. CBO’s newest estimates confirm the long-term trend toward greater inequality, driven mainly by turbo-charged gains in market income at the very top of the distribution. The market incomes of the top 1% are extraordinarily cyclical, however. They soar in economic expansions and plunge in recessions. Income changes since 2007 fit this pattern. What many observers miss, however, is the success of the nation’s tax and transfer systems in protecting low- and middle-income Americans against the full effects of a depressed economy. As a result of these programs, the spendable incomes of poor and middle class families have been better insulated against recession-driven losses than the incomes of Americans in the top 1%. As the CBO statistics demonstrate, incomes in the middle and at the bottom of the distribution have fared better since 2000 than incomes at the very top.
11. Wall Street Journal: Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families
Intellectuals fretting about income disparity are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family. ...
12. Mother Jones: What If Everything You Knew About Poverty Was Wrong?
... A sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, Edin is one of the nation's preeminent poverty researchers. She has spent much of the past several decades studying some of the country's most dangerous, impoverished neighborhoods. But unlike academics who draw conclusions about poverty from the ivory tower, Edin has gotten up close and personal with the people she studies—and in the process has shattered many myths about the poor, rocking sociology and public-policy circles. ...
13. Forbes: Thank Goodness We Have Walmart If American Shoppers Are This Poor
... The economic background is that sure, WalMart makes good profits out of what it does. Yes, this includes minimising costs such as the wages they pay out, what they’ll let suppliers charge them. It even includes desiring to put other less efficient retailers out of business, those Mon and Pop stores, and to make those that remain more efficient through that competition with them. But there’s another effect of course: consumers save money through those lower prices.
We call this saving the consumer surplus. It’s not something that ever appears in the normal economic statistics, one good reason being that it’s rather hard to calculate. ...
... A 25% reduction in food expenditures just from the existence of WalMart is an amazingly large sum. It’s also considerably larger than the profits that WalMart makes out of its actions. And that’s from a decade ago recall (the paper is from 2005, the data up to 2003) and it is only recording the consumer surplus from WalMart’s move into food retailing, leaving the impact of the other parts of the company aside. ...
14. Atlantic: How the Rich and Poor Spend Money Today—and 30 Years Ago
15. AEI - James Pethokoukis: No, Walmart isn’t ripping off taxpayers
... I think I’m supposed to be outraged that Walmart isn’t paying some employees enough that they don’t need government anti-poverty benefits. But businesses generally aren’t going to pay workers more than they are worth. If a worker can only generate $8 in value to a company, then the firm isn’t going to pay them $10. Nor should they for some humanitarian reason. If American society thinks some of their fellow Americans deserve higher living standards than their skill set currently warrants, then society should pitch in and subsidize their wages through the Earned Income Tax Credit or even a new, broader direct wage subsidy. ...
16. PBS: How nonprofit workers get squeezed when minimum wages increase
Not everyone who supports raising the minimum wage is in a position to pay their employees more. Nowhere is that more true than in the nonprofit sector. ...
17. NPR: Subminimum Wages For The Disabled: Godsend Or Exploitation?
... Executive Director Gus van den Brink says the Sertoma Centre and other agencies do work to find jobs for disabled people in the community, but the focus should not be on shutting down all sheltered workshops. He says it would be nearly impossible for some people with severe intellectual disabilities to get a job at all. It's sheltered workshops, he says, that give them a chance to work and earn a paycheck.
"Some of the individuals may not even completely understand what the value of that paycheck is," van den Brink says. "But they know they are receiving a paycheck, so they are getting a lot of self-esteem. They are very proud of it."
Even so, Assistant Attorney General Samuels says the Justice Department will work with other states to make sure some workers with disabilities have the opportunity to do their work, as she puts it, at "real jobs for real wages."
18. PBS: What’s the welfare initiative uniting liberals and conservatives?
Some conservatives and liberals are uniting around the idea of a basic income because the current welfare system, they say, is an ineffective bureaucracy that doesn’t respect poor people’s ability to make their own decisions. ...
19. Atlantic: Women's Wages Are Rising: Why Are So Many Families Getting Poorer?
Start by looking at what's happening with men's wages. ...
20. Huffington Post: Gender Inequality in the Labor Market: Don't Call It a Wage Gap
When President Obama announced the Paycheck Fairness Act on Equal Pay Day this week, we applauded his efforts to address the so-called "gender wage gap" but, from a data point of view, mourn the fact that he, like many others before him, is building his case around a flawed number. The oft-quoted statistic that women only earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by a man, is not actually very accurate and distracts legislators and the public at large from coming up with solutions to the real problem -- the gender jobs gap. ...
21. Fortune: Corporate America's foreign cash machine: Signs it may be slowing
As governments coordinate to fix international tax laws on overseas earnings, companies may have to pay more taxes. ...
22. Forbes: How The Wealthiest Families Make And Lose Their Money -- Part 5
... Well-accepted research shows that about one-third of companies in the United States make it to the second generation. Only around 10% reach the third generation. If wealth were preserved during this movement away from the privately held business into the publicly traded markets, we would expect to see a greater portion of overall wealth being inherited. But, the numbers tell us that only about 5% of wealth in the U.S. is inherited. On the other hand, the wealthiest families of Europe hold two-thirds of their wealth in private companies and only one-third in publicly traded securities. When we then look at inherited wealth, approximately 85% of European wealth is in its third or older generation. One-third of European wealth is in its fifth or older generation. This is an astounding result. ...
Comments