Back in the 1980s, the decade that saw researchers start detailing America’s increasing concentration of income and wealth, flacks for the emerging Reagan economic order disdainfully dismissed the significance of the alarming new data.
NEW YORK — “It’s Not a Roar,” read the first-edition headline for the New York Times business article published January 27, “but the Global Economy is Finally Making Noise.”
A death rattle, perhaps?
Try as they may, the mainstream media simply cannot prepare for public viewing the gaping wound to the head that murdered the U.S. economy. Never mind the Dow, the Fed Funds rate, or Apple’s latest earnings report, the cause of death is really quite simple: work is underpaid.
In an attempt to help close the gender pay gap, New York City has become the first US city to ban employers from asking job applicants about their previous salaries
The post New York City bans salary questions to fight gender pay gap appeared first on Positive News.
In what is becoming a tradition, Chinese troops have again crossed the border into Indian territory, this time in Sikkim. Indian and Chinese soldiers are facing off at the border, trying to see who blinks first. As usual, politicians and people on social media are calling for a boycott of Chinese goods. Forget the impracticality of the whole proposition for a moment – there is another good reason for not boycotting Chinese products.
Taxes are a price, or a penalty levied on production. In that case it's no coincidence that so many movies are nowadays shot in Georgia. Hollywood’s best and brightest seek the lowest tax price (or better yet, the best tax incentive) to maximize profits in an industry defined by shrinking margins. The Peach State is very competitive on the tax front.
A Marxist, Wolff argues in keeping with the labor theory of value, which the marginal revolution exploded. This is the doctrine that what determines the value of a good or service is the “socially necessary labor” required to produce it. It implies that value is inherent, determined by the labor necessary to produce the good or service in question.
There’s nothing at all to recommend working in a sweatshop as a lifestyle. Unless it is better than all of your other opportunities. In fact, this kind of work has raised the Chinese manufacturing wage from $1,000 a year to $7,000 in under two decades. That is the largest diminution in poverty in the history of our species.
Just where would we be without pop stars to tell us about economic policy? Without Annie Lennox, how would we know that people in poor countries don’t get paid very much? For that is what her latest campaign, The Circle, wants to tell us. According to Lennox, the solution is simple: everyone involved in the garment industry should just be paid more money. This lacks a certain economic sophistication, it must be said. In fact, it arguably lacks any economic understanding at all.
Where are you more likely to earn a better income, in the private sector or working for the government? It turns out that those employed by the federal government, who also have high school diplomas or bachelors’ degrees, are likely to be financially far better off.
