The comedian Robert “Bobcat” Goldthwaite had a routine about bad ideas, like the day someone decided to cook with an open flame on the Hindenburg. Or, in all seriousness, someone decided that it was a good idea to board an airship attached to a giant ball of flammable gas. What drives humans to make such stupid mistakes? Economists think it has something to do with commonly held misconceptions about risk or, as Bobcat might put it, mass brain-damage.
Why do wages rise in a recession?
This morning, Rutgers University released its Labor Scorecard, which confirmed the high unemployment figures published by the Labor Department earlier this week. Someone in the PR department at Rutgers caught this report on its way out the door and added a little spice to the press release, noting that “though unemployment has risen in 2009 to its highest rate in 26 years, all is not gloom and doom for America’s workers on Labor Day…average inflation-adjusted earnings have actually increased for those still collecting paychecks.”
Posted in Money Tagged economics, great depression, Labor Day, recession, salary, unemployment, wages, working class 1 Comment
Domestic Trends
Economic Analysis
Economic Calendar
Real Clear Markets
Undervalued stocks
Value Cruncher
Wikinvest
Publish dynamic charts to wordpress
Last year, I wrote a piece on how to chart financial data with php. That was before I discovered the flexibility of google docs. A pure php / mysql solution with a web proxy and jquery is more flexible, but it requires server access and the ability to set up a remote database.
Read More »