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Category: Economics

California pushing for 32-hour workweek at larger companies as part of pandemic-driven shift

California pushing for 32-hour workweek at larger companies as part of pandemic-driven shift

USA Today reports: California is trying to become the first state in the nation to make a four-day workweek a state law. The state introduced a bill that would make the official workweek 32 hours and no longer 40 hours for companies with 500 employees or more, giving higher raises and time-and-a-half pay to any worker who surpasses that cutoff. A typical workday would remain eight hours. The bill – AB 2932 – also states that 12 hours past the…

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How many billionaires are there, anyway?

How many billionaires are there, anyway?

Willy Staley writes: In 1981, Malcolm Forbes, the eccentric and fabulously wealthy magazine publisher, came to his editors with a request: Could they pull together a special issue about the 400 richest Americans? The idea was inspired by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the doyenne of Gilded Age New York, who regularly hosted the city’s high society in her Fifth Avenue ballroom, which was said to fit about 400 people. It’s quite possible Forbes saw something of himself in Astor. This was…

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What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

James Livingston writes: Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it…

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Russia’s Ukraine invasion could be a global economic ‘game changer’

Russia’s Ukraine invasion could be a global economic ‘game changer’

The Washington Post reports: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the financial reckoning imposed on Moscow in response are proof that the triumphant globalization campaign that began more than 30 years ago has reached a dead end. Fallout from the fighting in Ukraine will take a meaningful bite out of the global economic recovery this year, with the greatest impact in Europe, economists said. A spike in oil prices to more than $110 per barrel and renewed supply chain disruptions —…

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Can Germany function without Russian natural gas?

Can Germany function without Russian natural gas?

The Guardian reports: The Ukraine crisis has plunged Germany into an intense debate about how it will heat its homes and power its industry in future, summed up in the short question: can Europe’s largest economy function without Vladimir Putin’s gas? The Green federal economics minister, Robert Habeck, answered with a decisive “yes it can”, a day after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was meant to deliver from Russia as much…

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How Larry Summers became the preeminent critic of the Biden era’s economic consensus

How Larry Summers became the preeminent critic of the Biden era’s economic consensus

Eric Levitz writes: There’s a story that progressives like to tell about Larry Summers. The doyen of Establishment economics is dining out with a populist politician. The two have made it through the meal with minimal awkwardness — their ideological tensions eased by booze and food — when Summers leans back in his chair and offers his left-wing foil a hard-won insight. There are two kinds of political actors in this world: insiders and outsiders. Outsiders are free to speak…

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Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Justin McGuirk writes: The opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is problematic for many reasons, but there’s one that we rarely discuss. The ‘nature vs culture’ dualism leaves out an entire domain that properly belongs to neither: the world of waste. The mountains of waste that we produce every year, the torrents of polluting effluent, the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, the new cosmos of microplastics expanding through our oceans – none of this has ever been entered into the…

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The Fed’s doomsday prophet has a dire warning about where we’re headed

The Fed’s doomsday prophet has a dire warning about where we’re headed

Christopher Leonard writes: Thomas Hoenig doesn’t look like a rebel. He is a conservative man, soft-spoken, now happily retired at the age of 75. He acts like someone who has spent the vast majority of his career, as he has, working at one of the stuffiest and powerful institutions in America: the Federal Reserve Bank. Hoenig has all the fiery disposition that one might expect from a central banker, which is to say none at all. He unspools sentences methodically,…

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UK’s Brexit losses more than 178 times bigger than trade deal gains

UK’s Brexit losses more than 178 times bigger than trade deal gains

The Independent reports: All of Boris Johnson’s new post-Brexit trade deals put together will have an economic benefit of just £3 to £7 per person over the next 15 years, according to the government’s own figures. The tiny economic boost – amounting to just 0.01 to 0.02 per cent of GDP, and less than 50p per person a year – is dwarfed by the economic hit from leaving the EU, which the government estimates at 4 per cent of GDP…

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Thoreau’s economics: the truly precious costs precious little

Thoreau’s economics: the truly precious costs precious little

John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle write: The word ‘economy’ evolved from the Greek root οἶκος. ‘Oikos’ had three interrelated senses in ancient Greece: the family, the family’s land, and the family’s home. These three, taken interchangeably, constituted the first or fundamental political unit in the ancient Greek world, especially in the minds of Greece’s hereditary aristocrats, for whom family mattered more than all other affiliations. The family, then and after, was viewed as the state in miniature, with its…

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America needs you to buy less junk

America needs you to buy less junk

Amanda Mull writes: Lately, news stories about the supply chain tend to start in similar ways. The reader is dropped into an American container port, maybe in Long Beach, California, or Savannah, Georgia, full to bursting with trailer-size steel boxes loaded with toilet paper and exercise bikes and future Christmas presents. Some of the containers have gone untouched for weeks or months, waiting for their contents to be trucked to distribution centers. On the horizon, dozens of additional vessels are…

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World’s growth cools and the rich-poor divide widens

World’s growth cools and the rich-poor divide widens

The New York Times reports: As the world economy struggles to find its footing, the resurgence of the coronavirus and supply chain chokeholds threaten to hold back the global recovery’s momentum, a closely watched report warned on Tuesday. The overall growth rate will remain near 6 percent this year, a historically high level after a recession, but the expansion reflects a vast divergence in the fortunes of rich and poor countries, the International Monetary Fund said in its latest World…

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A record number of workers are quitting their jobs, empowered by new leverage

A record number of workers are quitting their jobs, empowered by new leverage

The Washington Post reports: The number of people quitting their jobs has surged to record highs, pushed by a combination of factors that include Americans sensing ample opportunity and better pay elsewhere. Some 4.3 million people quit jobs in August — about 2.9 percent of the workforce, according to new data released Tuesday from the Labor Department. Those numbers are up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting, reflecting how the pandemic has continued…

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Global supply-chain problems escalate, threatening economic recovery

Global supply-chain problems escalate, threatening economic recovery

The Wall Street Journal reports: Global supply-chain bottlenecks are feeding on one another, with shortages of components and surging prices of critical raw materials squeezing manufacturers around the world. The supply shocks are already showing signs of choking off the recovery in some regions. Part of the problem is a global economy that is out of sync on the pandemic, restrictions and recovery. Factories and retailers in Western economies that have largely emerged from lockdowns are eager for finished products,…

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Cargo piles up as California ports jostle over how to resolve delays

Cargo piles up as California ports jostle over how to resolve delays

The Wall Street Journal reports: Nike Inc. doesn’t have enough sneakers to sell for the holidays. Costco Wholesale Corp. is reimposing limits on paper towel purchases. Prices for artificial Christmas trees have jumped 25% this season. Despite mounting shipping delays and cargo backlogs, the busiest U.S. port complex shuts its gates for hours on most days and remains closed on Sundays. Meanwhile, major ports in Asia and Europe have operated round-the-clock for years. “With the current work schedule you have…

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Vaccinated Democratic counties are leading the U.S. economic recovery

Vaccinated Democratic counties are leading the U.S. economic recovery

Joshua Green writes: With Covid-19 cases once again rising across the country, the U.S. is struggling to curb the latest, delta-driven surge, as hospitalizations and deaths have steadily climbed. But at least so far, the economy has proved highly resilient. There are many reasons for this, ranging from generous stimulus checks to the Federal Reserve’s commitment to buying bonds and holding interest rates low. But some interesting new data on the overlap of electoral politics and economic dynamism suggest another…

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