Tag: wages

Posted on by Tim Worstall

Why Doesn’t Vox Bother To Read Its Own Articles?

As we all know Vox is the home of the snowflake journalists. That specific subgroup who are inline with the more statist of the Democratic Party – if it’s wonkable they’re in favour. This does rather lead them into adopting whatever is the fashionable position according to that wonkier end of politics without actually thinking through what they’re saying.

For example, we can most certainly note the lack of significant pay rises over the past decade for the average working man and woman in the US.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

10% Of Global Workers Get 50% Of Pay – 20% Get Only 1%

This all sounds entirely logical and reasonable:

Nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by only 10% of workers, according to the International Labour Organization, while the lowest-paid 50% receive only 6.4%.

The lowest-paid 20% – about 650 million workers – get less than 1% of total pay, a figure that has barely moved in 13 years, ILO analysis found. It used labour income figures from 189 countries between 2004 and 2017, the latest available data.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Keynes Was Right – On One Thing At Least

A contention of JM Keynes was that people hate, really just hate, their wages to go down. This also being subject to the money illusion. It’s that we hate nominal wages, that amount of £s or $s that we get, going down. Doesn’t matter if the prices of everything else more than halve we’ll be mighty pissed off at still being better off if our own nominal wages halve. This is of course silly but it’s very human.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

How To Lie With Numbers – Akki’s Inflation Edition

We’re told that modern day people are worse off than those in the past. Because the price of bread has risen, while wages haven’t. This is, of course, lying with numbers. Either that or the sort of gross ignorance that means the inability to chew gum and fart at the same time.

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Not Really The Best Economic Description Of Why Inflation Is Desirable

It would appear that the United States also suffers from that overexpansion of the universities. It not so much being that there’s not a sufficient portion of the population that will benefit from an academic finishing off but that there aren’t enough people bright enough to teach at them. You know, the difficulty of getting the staff these days.

It is indeed possible to make a case for society having a modicum of inflation. But that case isn’t this one:

A moderate amount of inflation is generally considered to be a sign of a healthy economy, because as the economy grows, demand for stuff increases.

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Bernie Sanders And Walmart’s $11 An Hour – Top 3% Income Globally

Bernie Sanders insists that $11 an hour is too small a wage. This, the starting wage at Walmart, is not a living wage. Which, if we’re honest about it, is a hell of a piece of news for us out here in the real world. Because $11 an hour is pretty good money actually. Puts you in the top 3% of all incomes globally. And if top 3% really just isn’t enough then we’ve got to start wondering what would be.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Proving Gary Becker’s Contention – The Stripper With The Lousy Boyfriend

Not that we’d look to Salon for good sense on anything of course but even the things they miss, the errors in their thinking are useful to understand. The agony aunt column has a piece from a stripper who seems blessed with a lousy boyfriend. She’s earning the money, he’s living off it and ain’t that terrible. The advice back is that you’re just great girl and you should do whatever.

There’s a certain amusement at the lack of equality being shown here.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

A Hard Brexit – One Without Free Movement – Will Raise UK Wages

So, Britain has record low unemployment, record high employment to population ratio and yet pretty anaemic wage growth. What the hell went wrong? Actually, it’s freedom of movement of labour within the EU:

Brexit is about to give us a problem with this, though. Karl Marx was right: wages won’t rise when there’s spare labour available, his “reserve army” of the unemployed. The capitalist doesn’t have to increase pay to gain more workers if there’s a squad of the starving eager to labour for a crust.

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

National Pay Scales Reduce Both Earnings And Employment

As we know having a national pay scale for nurses in the NHS kills people. In high pay areas it’s difficult to get nurses to come work – thus there are fewer than might be wise and people die. Schools also find it hard to hire in expensive areas on those national wage scales. So too, in a recent story, with social workers.

This is, in fact, true of jobs in general under national pay scales.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Proof Perfect That We Should Leave The Grammar Schools Alone

The argument against grammar schools is that they perpetuate privilege. The middle classes – the upper middle classes even – use them to give their children a leg up in life. This cannot be stood for, equality is all.

Yet now we’ve proof perfect that we can and should just leave the grammar schools alone:

Grammar school does not make you healthier or wealthier in later life, research has found. The in-depth analysis of people who went to selective schools in the 1970s concluded that the only advantage was a higher likelihood of achieving A levels and a degree, but now that those are taken by teenagers from a range of backgrounds, even this may disappear.

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