Moving, but Not Up
I like offbeat economic indicators – the number of boats or RVs sold, what colors are in the crayon box, etc. etc. A lot of time they tell you what is going on just as well as some of the stuffier stuff (y’know, GDP and all that) that we all track every day. So I was [...]
Read More...After the Fall
Now that the U.S. economy looks a just a teensy bit better (I know, I know the National Bureau of Economic Research won’t say that the recession is over, but still) it’s probably okay to start adding up the cost of the crisis. The Pew Research Institute has a new study out that does just [...]
Read More...What’s Up Doc?
Okay, this one seemed a little out of sync for me: doctors would apparently be employees than free agents. Or at least that’s what the New York Times says, in this article that was splashed across the front of the business page.
According to the Medical Group Management Association, in 2005 about two-thirds of medical practices [...]
A Jobs Boom – But Not for Everyone
Oh the labor shortage thing: it get dredged up every so often, and not without cause. We all know the theory behind it, more or less. The boomers are aging, and they are going ot exit the labor force. The generation coming up behind them was not nearly as plentiful in numbers, so they won’t [...]
Read More...Generous Generations
Here’s an interesting study (by non-profit consultants Convio) on how the different U.S. generations are doling out money to charity. Turns out that everybody is still pretty generous in their giving (recession or no recession), but that not all charities are doing a good job in reaching the people that might write the checks. Actually, not all [...]
Read More...Post-Recession Generations Part I
Baby boomers are going to retire and take down the pension system. Generation X is lazy. Generation Y is spoiled and undisciplined, and they’ve pretty much blown out their eardrums by having them stuffed with ipods all the time anyway.
Ah generational analysis. I love it, I use it, I think it’s a good way to [...]
School Days – Just Less of Them
How to respond to the Wall Street Journal’s story on four day school weeks a a solution to the state fiscal crisis in the U.S.? The economist in me says wow, `that`s a great inventive solution` while at the same time wondering if its a short sighted one that will lead to poorly educated kids and [...]
Read More...An Un-Equal Share of Pain
The recession has taken what was more or less an nicely operational system, and created an absolute mess, a jobs situation without enough jobs and with years to go before we get to anything you could call ‘normal’.
Read More...The Olympic Experience
I was going to write something very business-like about the Olympics, something about the returns to invesment for Vancouver or Canada or something like that. On second thought, though, at this point I’d don’t know that anyone can really do justice to the topic without makling some, well, Olympian assumptions.
Let me back up a [...]
Battling for Brides
Loved this article from the Wall Street Journal on the battle for bride dollars. Basically the wedding magazines still standing (some folded during the ad recession of 2009) are battling each other to grab the soon-to-be-married market. And, despite the fact that revenues for U.S. wedding magazines plunged 30% last year, there are plans to [...]
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