Submitted by unsettling economics
Do you remember when we could save Social Security by funding retirement in the stock market. Here is what the Wall Street Journal reports about the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.’s decision to invest in the stock market.
Silva, Lauren and Martin Hutchinson. 2008. “Pension Guarantor’s Bad Bet.” Wall Street Journal (21 February): […]

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Submitted by EconWeekly
Productivity is the main determinant of long-run growth. In the United States, between 1958 and 2007, the average growth of output per capita has been 2% per year, whereas the average growth of productivity —output produced in one hour of work— has been 2.1%. But productivity growth fluctuates a lot, and the latest […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser
The latest employment numbers suggest that the tide has turned.

The BLS reported on Friday that the number of Americans employed on nonfarm payrolls fell by a seasonally adjusted 63,000 workers between January and February. As Menzie observed in a very nice picture yesterday, the BLS on Friday also revised down its earlier estimates […]

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Submitted by Econbrowser
From yesterday’s White House press conference:

CHAIRMAN LAZEAR: … The jobs report contains a variety of information in it, and one of the pieces of information, and only one of the pieces is the jobs number. In addition to that, there are also numbers on unemployment, wage growth and weekly hours. And it’s important […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

Thanks to a suggestion in a comment on a previous post by Mad Toothfish, the chart above shows the significant increase in fuel efficiency over time, based on “miles per gallon (m.p.g.)” data from the EIA (Figure 23) for passenger cars. Compared to 1973, when the average passenger car got only 13.4 […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
 
An excellent 5-part National Review Online interview with Thomas Sowell, based on his new book “Economic Facts and Fallacies“:
Part 1: The conventional wisdom instructs that the rise of women in corporate America in the latter half of the 20th century was due to the implementation of anti-discrimination laws championed by the […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM
 
The chart above (click to enlarge) shows the cost of 1,000 gallons of gas at the retail price in each year from 1919 to 2007 using historical gas price data from the EIA, as a percent of GDP per capita in those years using data from Global Financial Data (paid subscription required).
1. […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

The chart above was created using inflation-adjusted gas prices from the Energy Information Administration from 1919 to 2008, along with the overall trend line for gas prices over the last 90 years.
1. The trend line shows that real gas prices (2007 dollars), started from a price slightly above $3 in 1919 and […]

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Submitted by CARPE DIEM

The graph above was created using college tuition data from the National Center for Education Statistics (with estimates for 2007 and 2008), Consumer Price Index data from the BLS, and average annual oil price data for West Texas Intermediate Oil from Global Financial Data. All series are set to an index value […]

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