The list includes some familiar names—and quite a few surprises among both private and public universities By Alyssa Lukpat of The WSJ. The article also includes extensive detailed tables on how much the graduates at different colleges earn. One thing to remember about the schools mentioned here is that the students who get accepted to them are already high quality and that also contributes to their later success. Excerpts: "The colleges putting graduates onto the most lucrative pathways in finance, tech and management consulting include many schools you’d expect—Ivy League schools, for insta ..read more

See Texas car insurance premiums are soaring. Here's what's behind the spike — and what you can do by Madison Iszler. Excerpts: "In Texas, rates climbed an average 25.5% in 2023, according to the Texas Department of Insurance, the biggest annual increase in at least a decade —  more than double average increases nationwide. Data on average premiums paid by Texas drivers in 2023 was not yet available, the department said. But financial services company Bankrate.com estimated the average annual premium in Texas is $2,620 this year, up from $2,019 in 2023 and $1,868 in 2022.  ..read more

Among the hundreds of medicines now in short supply are popular drugs used for weight loss such as Ozempic By Liz Essley Whyte and Peter Loftus of The WSJ.  I liked that this article mentions that price increases are part of the solution, something that usually does get mentioned. A shortage means that current price is below the equilibrium price so that quantity demanded is greater than quantity supplied. If markets are allowed to work freely, prices will rise. Excerpts from the article: "Shortages of drugs in the U.S. have risen to an all-time high. Supplies are low for everything from ..read more

Campbell wrote the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which was one of the inspirations for Star Wars. He was interviewed by Bill Moyers in a six hour series in the 1980s on PBS. That series was called The Power of Myth. Here is one passage: "“This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system ..read more

See ‘Now They’re Voting Red’: A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances: Economic churn is pushing voters toward Trump in the Pittsburgh area, potentially overwhelming Democrats’ base of college-educated workers by Aaron Zitner and Kris Maher of The WSJ. Excerpts: "Pittsburgh is at the center of a class inversion between the two parties that is redefining American politics. Democrats have traded their former blue-collar base for professional-class, metropolitan workers, while Republicans have become overwhelmingly dependent on working-class voters concentrated in ..read more

The meatpacking industry is investing billions of dollars to automate notoriously difficult jobs By Patrick Thomas of The WSJ.  Do businesses replace workers with robots or other capital to cut down on costs? Or do they add robots because there is a labor shortage? Or, as mentioned in some of my related posts, do robots and humans complement each other? If robots and humans are substitutes, if the price of human labor rises then the demand for robots would increase. The article mentions a labor shortage in the meat industry. If market forces are allowed to work, then a shortage should lea ..read more

First, see I’m an Economist. Don’t Worry. Be Happy. by Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Excerpts: "The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel. It follows that the typical worker can now afford 2 percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but ..read more

See Heard on the Street: Is That Starbucks Latte Finally Getting Too Expensive? by Spencer Jakab of The WSJ. "You see an Iced Starbucks Blonde Vanilla Latte that costs $7.25. An economist sees a “Veblen good.” Part of the secret to the coffee chain’s success and ubiquity has been the fact that it sells coffee not only at a huge markup to the cost of foamy brown water but simply that it costs a lot. Like an expensive handbag, the small luxury of the beverage that could be bought more cheaply elsewhere for the same utility is part of the appeal. But, with the chain’s share price hitti ..read more

By Derek Thompson of The Atlantic Monthly. From 2013. "The story goes like this: Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and philosopher, called economics "the dismal science" in reference to Thomas Malthus, that lugubrious economist who claimed humanity was trapped in a world where population growth would always strain natural resources and bring widespread misery. Dismal, indeed. But this origin myth is, well, mythical. Carlyle did coin the phrase "the dismal science." And Malthus was, without question, dismal. But Carlyle labeled the science "dismal" when writing about slavery in the West ..read more

See Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) compiled by the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis for data on the seasonally adjusted CPI. That site shows a graph but if you click on the Download button you will get the actual numbers in Microsoft Excel. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average (CPIAUCSL) was 311.054 in Feb. and 312.230 in March. Since 312.230/311.054 = 1.0038, that means it was up 0.38% in Feb. If we had that every month for 12 ..read more