Links for you. Science:
Lies You’ve Been Told About the Pacific Garbage Patch
Worst Column Ever by Times Pundit David Brooks: “When the Good Do Bad” (but there are so many to choose from…)
When Should Schools Start in the morning?
Bees, CCD, and Pesticides
Other:
America’s Women Can’t Be Trusted: When you strip everything away, that’s the root of the GOP’s campaign against abortion, contraception, and laws that protect women from domestic violence.
Was Columbus secretly a Jew? (hasn’t this been assumed for quite some time?)
Billionaire donors drive anti-teacher, pro-testing education reform agenda
An America without health insurance companies
The American Middle Class, Income Inequality, and the Strength of Our Economy
Solamere, Tagg Romney, and the New American Normal
Don’t mention income inequality please, we’re entrepreneurs
How to fix banking
Want to win the WI Recall? Make sure this story goes as wide as humanly possible
Too hot for jobs (not sure I buy this; the competitor regions also have housing shortages)
ALEC’s next target: state AGs who go after companies (they really do think they’re above the law)
Cory Booker’s Slip Reveals Role of Private Equity in Local Government Funding (it’s affected Obama too)
All Tomorrow’s Barties
Generally Horrendo
mikethemadbiologist
>Don’t mention income inequality please, we’re entrepreneurs
Interesting
>Too hot for jobs (not sure I buy this; the competitor regions also have housing shortages)
“For high-tech employment the multiplier is much higher, however; 5 jobs in non-tradable industries are generally created for each job in high tech.”
I think I read that Facebook has a new data center that employs like, 100 workers? Or less than a thousand anyway.
Maybe they don’t count janitors as part of the “main employment” or they just contract it out.
The POSSIBLE explanation for why higher-paid workers could have a ‘higher local multiplier’ would be if less of their income goes to rents, and their discretionary spending is diverse enough that the amount of employment they generate is at least close to proportional to their spending.
Instead of being spent on, for example, iPods with a 50% profit margin. But people generally spend about 30% of their income on housing, and the US survey on household spending supports this. Other data also shows that people with more money buy more expensive houses and that they suffered significant decreases in home value (so rich people don’t have some magical ability to avoid buying ‘overpriced’ houses) so this probably does not significantly increase ‘local multiplier’ as long as the manufacturing jobs being compared against pay reasonably well compared to the regional average.
But generally, the CBO and Moody’s both recognize that poor people have higher ‘multipliers’ than rich people. If it was true that a tech job created 5 local jobs while a manufacturing job only 1.5, it is because the tech job is being paid significantly more than 3.3 times as much as the tech worker and the economy would be better off if people avoided buying that company’s brand-name product unless it lowered its prices.