Japan's Economy Hit Worse Than Expected: A Look at Hedging Costs [View article]
Interesting anecdote. There does seem to be an odd dichotomy at work in Japan: on the one hand, their industrial companies make some extremely well-engineered machines; but on the other hand, the power backup set-up at this plant seems to have been pretty flawed in hindsight.
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
1) I haven't said productivity is to blame; on the contrary, I pointed out in the comments that Germany currently has its lowest unemployment rate in 20 years and has high productivity.
2) Despite your protestations to the contrary, the law of supply and demand appears to apply to the labor market as well as other markets. See the reference to George Borjas above where he attempts to quantify the effect.
3) The problem with your well-trodden reductio argument regarding trade is it assumes those who question the merits of unrestricted free trade are necessarily against trade per se, when that is clearly not the case. There are salient differences between trade with in the U.S. and international trade: for starters, we have a federal minimum wage, which limits a race-to-the-bottom in wages domestically.
Reasonable people can disagree about this subject, but to suggest that the only reason one might question the merits of our current trade policy is because one has never heard of Ricardo or comparative advantage is to be a tad insufferable. If Paul Samuelson could, in his later years, rethink the benefits of free trade ( www.boston.com/news/gl.../ ), perhaps the rest of us would do well to be less dogmatic about the subject.
4) Re manufacturing: China actually just surpassed the U.S. as the world's top manufacturer ( www.cnbc.com/id/42065544 ). And your analogy between manufacturing in recent decades and agriculture in the 19th century elides a crucial difference between the two industries: when agricultural employment was much higher in the 19th century, many of those agricultural jobs were low-paying (if not subsistence) jobs. On the contrary, manufacturing jobs in the post-war period have tended to be relatively high-paying.
It's also worth noting, too, that manufacturing employment in Germany remains much higher than ours as a percentage of work force, despite Germany's manufacturing sector being as highly automated as ours.
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
It's an interesting question, Seth. One of the men I referred to in the article, Thomas Geoghegan, has argued that German workers have higher productivity than American workers (he believes that Germans overstate and Americans understate the number of hours they work: www.salon.com/books/fe... ). And last month, Germany recorded its lowest unemployment rate in 20 years. So having higher productivity doesn't seem to preclude having lower unemployment.
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
Interesting point by Tedlow about denial. But to paraphrase Herbert Stein, if something can't continue, it won't. And when the government can no longer afford to continue its unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, then it may be forced to consider substantive and wide-ranging policy changes.
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
Splitting the difference between you and indymonkey:
Indymonkey is right that there's a broader economic benefit when workers at the bottom of the ladder can afford to buy more -- that was an insight of Henry Ford's, when he instituted $5 per day wages for his assembly line workers.
You are right that there are limits to how much low margin retailers can pay their workers. Manufacturers making high value products can afford to pay their workers more, as I noted in the article.
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
True, and the per-employee numbers (in terms of pay and profit) are similar with Starbucks -- which raises the question of why Richard Florida didn't highlight Wal-Mart as an innovative retailer. My guess is that that was simply an example of cultural bias.
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
The "Yale or Jail" mentality that you describe regarding immigration is a problem, and I agree that more emphasis on vocational training (and more respect for it, frankly) would be helpful. As I noted in a blog post a few years back ( thehackensack.blogspot... ),
"The problem is that liberal think tanks such as the Center for American Progress -- although they support the goal of a strong middle class in the abstract -- advocate policies that work against this goal in reality. They oppose most manufacturing and natural resource industries out of concerns about carbon and global warming; they advocate policies that will make energy (and thus energy-intensive industries such as manufacturing) more expensive, for similar reasons; they oppose the vocational tracking that would support a strong manufacturing base, out of egalitarian educational ideals; and they support unskilled immigration, which lowers the wages of blue collar workers in industries such as construction."
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
Those profits are big in absolute terms, but you have to remember how many employees those companies have. Starbucks has about 137k employees, Wal-Mart has about 2.1 million employees.
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
As Ian Fletcher has pointed out, in an instablog post here, and elsewhere ( www.huffingtonpost.com... ), America was protectionist essentially from its founding until the middle of the last century, and the reason our policy makers embraced free trade after WWII was not economic, but geopolitical: to bind allies to us economically in the cold war. And yet elites in both major parties tend to be radical free traders, and act as if any reconsideration of that is taboo.
2 Bullish Options Bets on a Down Day [View article]
Japan's Economy Hit Worse Than Expected: A Look at Hedging Costs [View article]
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
2) Despite your protestations to the contrary, the law of supply and demand appears to apply to the labor market as well as other markets. See the reference to George Borjas above where he attempts to quantify the effect.
3) The problem with your well-trodden reductio argument regarding trade is it assumes those who question the merits of unrestricted free trade are necessarily against trade per se, when that is clearly not the case. There are salient differences between trade with in the U.S. and international trade: for starters, we have a federal minimum wage, which limits a race-to-the-bottom in wages domestically.
Reasonable people can disagree about this subject, but to suggest that the only reason one might question the merits of our current trade policy is because one has never heard of Ricardo or comparative advantage is to be a tad insufferable. If Paul Samuelson could, in his later years, rethink the benefits of free trade ( www.boston.com/news/gl.../ ), perhaps the rest of us would do well to be less dogmatic about the subject.
4) Re manufacturing: China actually just surpassed the U.S. as the world's top manufacturer ( www.cnbc.com/id/42065544 ). And your analogy between manufacturing in recent decades and agriculture in the 19th century elides a crucial difference between the two industries: when agricultural employment was much higher in the 19th century, many of those agricultural jobs were low-paying (if not subsistence) jobs. On the contrary, manufacturing jobs in the post-war period have tended to be relatively high-paying.
It's also worth noting, too, that manufacturing employment in Germany remains much higher than ours as a percentage of work force, despite Germany's manufacturing sector being as highly automated as ours.
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
What David Brooks Doesn't Get About Unemployment [View article]
Market Neutral Investing in China's Fast Food Industry [View article]
Coincidentally, I wrote a follow up to this article on another site yesterday, if you'd like to check it out: slopeofhope.com/2011/0...
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
Indymonkey is right that there's a broader economic benefit when workers at the bottom of the ladder can afford to buy more -- that was an insight of Henry Ford's, when he instituted $5 per day wages for his assembly line workers.
You are right that there are limits to how much low margin retailers can pay their workers. Manufacturers making high value products can afford to pay their workers more, as I noted in the article.
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
"The problem is that liberal think tanks such as the Center for American Progress -- although they support the goal of a strong middle class in the abstract -- advocate policies that work against this goal in reality. They oppose most manufacturing and natural resource industries out of concerns about carbon and global warming; they advocate policies that will make energy (and thus energy-intensive industries such as manufacturing) more expensive, for similar reasons; they oppose the vocational tracking that would support a strong manufacturing base, out of egalitarian educational ideals; and they support unskilled immigration, which lowers the wages of blue collar workers in industries such as construction."
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
How Not to Fix America's 'Broken Jobs Machine' [View article]
Re the education bubble, that's something I've been blogging about elsewhere since Oct 2008: steamcatapult.com/2010.../