Economy
I’ve been trying to figure out which is the case: Either politicians have developed such thorough contempt for the people that they assume we’re complete fools whom they can deceive with impunity or we’re allowing people to gain public office whom a healthy civilization would have kept well away from the controls. The problem goes…
Almost since I began keeping an eye on it, the unemployment rate has primarily been a means of disguising the underlying weakness of RI’s economy. With the latest iteration, the AP writer seems to accentuate the positive, but you don’t have to dig far to see the negative — as far, say, as the state…
A lack of housing is a problem, and racism is simply wrong, so we have powerful emotional incentive to join the two matters into the story we tell about our society. In a more-specific way, advocates and researchers have even more-powerful economic incentive to do so. In that space, as with “equity audits” in schools,…
Maybe I’m just entering that late-middle-age phase, but it seems to me that younger adults — or all of us, with reference to times that were before our time — too infrequently understand the experience of the past. Consider this find from Tim Worstall for Accuracy in Media: A new piece from Teen Vogue says that…
Gas prices have hit record highs in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to AAA. We’ve achieved and exceeded the pain some of us remember all too well from the Obama years: In one week, Rhode Island gas prices rose 58 cents and Massachusetts saw a growth of 54 cents. AAA Northeast says Rhode Island’s average…
Ed Driscoll rounds up a little bit of the commentary, including: TWITTER THREAD ON 2020 AND ITS AFTERMATH: “The Democrats saw an opportunity with the emergence of Covid to crush a roaring economy under a president they didn’t like. So they, & their base, did everything in their power to impose crushing restrictions on small…
Not long ago, technology was beginning to allow the blind to see. Beware the need for maintenance and software support: These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just…
Author and former Providence Journal opinion page editor Ed Achorn has been tweeting about the Canadian government’s move on banking, and the topic is one that ought to be of much more concern to all of us. Note this tweet, from Peter Sweden, which Achorn passes along with the comment, “If true, this is terrifying”: In Canada…
If you’re only a casual observer of legislation and/or labor law, you might find news coverage of Rhode Island labor unions’ study on “wage theft” confusing. The study is about misclassification of workers as independent contractors, yet the rhetoric is about “wage theft.” Are those the same thing? It’s an important question, because the push…
Patrick Tyrrell and Anthony Kim summarize a recent study of the effect of enhanced unemployment on the job market: If common sense and reports from thousands of employers weren’t enough, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper found conclusively that paying people not to work during the COVID-19 pandemic was why many of them…
