While last week’s news of the unemployment rate falling to its lowest in more than two years was very welcome, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out: ...the main reason for the big drop in that number and the fall in the jobless rate wasn’t more people working, but fewer people looking for work.......
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The following was nationally distributed in the United States by the Associated Press and appeared in the New York Daily News on Friday, November 4, 1949. The measures being referenced are those in the Fair Deal, the cradle-to-grave welfare state proposal of President Harry S Truman to follow up on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal...
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With the unemployment rate remaining persistently high at 9%, politicians seem intent on passing legislation that will create jobs. Never mind that job creation legislation hasn’t worked for four years now. What the job creation rhetoric fails to recognize is that jobs fall on the cost side of the ledger. The benefit is what...
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Classical liberals are used to being the “odd one out” but how many of us have lived through a strike with its demands for “solidarity”? I believe in voluntary association and even joined the Faculty Association (union) some years ago. I also believe that workers may strike but they are not entitled to a...
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How goes the recovery? Not well, it seems. Indeed, according to the most recent official estimates, it is anemic, at best. As the chart shows, real GDP has recovered its losses during the recent contraction and is now running at about the same rate as it was at its pre-recession peak in late 2007. So, the rate at which the...
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According to the latest Kauffman Foundation survey of “top” economics bloggers. (I participate, so it’s not that exclusive a club.) Regular Beacon readers will not be surprised by the biggest word in the cloud. The full report is available here. As Kauffman’s Tim Kane notes, “The economics blogging community has proven to be very...
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The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has edged out San Jose’s silicon valley as the highest-income metropolitan area in the United States, this story notes. People’s incomes can come from one of two sources. People can engage in productive activity and voluntary exchange, or they can forcibly take income from others. Silicon Valley gets its...
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Financial markets and analysts fear a new global recession. Data point to a growth slow-down that might eventually lead to a fall in production. Some pundits, who bought the idea of a recovery in previous years, seem to be surprised by the negative data of the latest months. The stock market probably shared this...
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Dr. Brendan Brown, Head of Economic Research at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International (London), recently cited Senior Fellow Robert Higgs‘s work on regime uncertainty—both as the cause of the prolongation of the Great Depression as well as today’s economic malaise—suggesting that his premise could well be expanded to explain today’s global economy. In his Economic...
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I recently recorded a short video on “jobs” programs. Here it is: