Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Employed Women Dropping out of the Labor Force
In the latest jobs report coverage, it has been found that the unemployment rate has fallen in November because a large number of people, primarily women, have dropped out of the labor force. What is more peculiar is that a substantial portion of these women had jobs in October, alluding to reasons such as maternity leave or other reasons.
CNN Hero Feeds Hungry for Seven Years Straight
A CNN video of Jorge Munoz, a bus driver and family man in the city of New York, really touched upon the concept of income inequality and the social welfare system in the U.S. As we have seen, the social safety net has typically been smaller than that of Europe because of "reciprocal altruism" for one. As Americans, we believe that the poor are lazy, so we are more resistant to welfare programs. However, Jorge Munoz shows that there are people who are not judgmental but instead offer their assistance to the poor and homeless. Those like Jorge add a cushion for the poor while the 90/10 wage gap decreases.
California Creek name to stay the same despite cultural insensitivity claim
Officials decided Tuesday not to change the name of Negro Creek, located in Nevada County, California despite cultural insensitivity claims by the NAACP. After already being changed once last summer from the pejorative "N-word" to Negro, officials dictated that Negro is only an objective term used today. Leon Jenkins of the NAACP complained saying, "If you are willing to change it to negro, how much of a push would it take to change it to black? How much harder would that have been?"
Economic Inequality
According to President Obama the inequality in US has increased a lot and has not been so high at great depression (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/06/obama-compares-current-economy-to-great-depression/?hpt=hp_t1). This ties to what Kuznets curve shows i.e. with the increase in level of development the measure of inequality also increases.
Obama compares current economic inequality to Great Depression
According to the President, the United States has reached a level of economic inequality that has not been seen since the early 1930s during the Great Depression. The middle class continues to suffer as the top 1% continues to enjoy great success. And yet, Obama stated that Republicans would still have us stick to the same policies that stack against middle-class Americans, adopting an "every man for himself" mentality.
Report documents dramatic shift in immigrant workforce’s skill level
Recently, the US immigration rate of skilled labor is higher than that of unskilled one. The increase shifts out labour supply curve. Among those skilled immigrants, they have a high educational attainment because 30% of them have at least a bachelor’ degree. It shows that the immigration is positively selected. Also, we can see that the trend of labor demand is changing because we have transformed from manufacturing industry to a technological industry. We then need more skilled workers to complement the technological transfer. Besides, it is interesting to note that immigrants from Mexico and Central America seem to be low-skilled while immigrants from Asia tend to be high-skilled.
Main Causes of the Great Depression
In our lecture, we learned that the causes of the Great Depression are mainly due stock market crash and bank panic. During October 1929, the market stock price started to fall, which decreased the wealth of investors. Also, the fall in price level increased the real value of the debt obligation of people who had mortgage. People also worried about their unemployment, so they would then decrease their consumption. For bank panic, in October 1930, a series of banks failed caused people to withdraw from banks. This act decreased money supply in the market and caused interest rate to increase. GPD then would decrease as well.
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