This Veteran’s Day is a bit more significant as it is the centenary of the end of World War I. That is meaningful to me because my grandfather, Sgt. Harrison Hicks, was serving in Company K, 307th Infantry of the 77th Division as the war ended. Like many men in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, he was…
Last month’s jobs report from the Department of Labor reported that average earnings grew by 2.8 percent over the year ending in August. This is an improvement on wage growth, but subtracting inflation of maybe 2.2 percent from this figure yields wage growth that will double inflation-adjusted take-home pay every 115 years or so. Over…
Over the summer, Indiana’s economy showed clear signs of weakening. This same story played out across the manufacturing and farming-intensive states of the Midwest. To be sure, it is still easy to paint a rosy picture of our economy. Jobs are plentiful, pay has finally begun to rise and tax coffers are full. We are…
Amazon announced last week that it would be raising its entry wage to $15 an hour and would lobby for a higher minimum wage at federal, state and municipal governments. Other companies have announced this in recent months, including Walmart, who bumped their starting wages to $10 an hour. These are interesting developments that merit…
Anti-capitalist feelings in the United States are enjoying a brief moment in the sun these days. Surveys of young people report that support for socialism is on the rise, and we can even hear some apparently wistful musings about communism from the shallow end of the public debate pool. Given that the only coherent national…
A recent column of mine offered advice to young college students. So, it only seems reasonable to offer similar economic advice to the 45 percent of high school grads who aren’t headed to college. To be honest, much of the practical advice will be the same, but for young folks who’ve decided not to attend…
Last Monday’s announcement of a revision of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was met with real skepticism. That’s a wholly appropriate response, as is the inevitable political fallout over the growing trade war. Let me explain. There has long been some skepticism over NAFTA in Canada, Mexico and the United States. This…
The United States is close to 40 years into the ‘War on Drugs.’ What began as a campaign of good intentions has become among the most costly policy failures of the last 150 years. We seem unwilling or unable to grapple with the immense consequences, or indeed even fully appreciate the depth, of the problem….
One of the joyful indulgences of my profession comes in chatting with people about the economics of their jobs. The very best folks to chat with are those who deal with prices and wages. Men and women in the trades are maybe the most informed about the immediate vagaries of the economy. Local bankers, insurance…
The US economy is a job creation miracle, adding more than 70 million new jobs since the late 1970s. Still, over the same time we’ve lost some 7 million manufacturing jobs. For every factory job we’ve lost, we gained another ten jobs in other occupations. These new occupations require different skills and are frequently located…
