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

I've posted about many new jobs like this. See related posts below.  Also, this post is based on yesterday's post You Spent $6,000 on a Secondhand Chanel Bag. Now Find Out if It Is Real. It had excerpts from an article by Chavie Lieber of The WSJ. Here are excerpts related to today's post: "Many secondhand luxury shoppers say [Zekrayat] Husein, a 43-year-old Palestinian mother of three and a former aesthetician who goes by the nickname Zeko, is the Coco Chanel of authentication. She has evaluated over 25,000 Chanel bags since she started her business in 2019, she said. She auth ..read more

Handbag authenticators are cashing in on buyers’ anxieties about fakes; hardware must be champagne not bronze; that pink leather is only made in France. By Chavie Lieber of The WSJ. Excerpts: "Many secondhand luxury shoppers say [Zekrayat] Husein, a 43-year-old Palestinian mother of three and a former aesthetician who goes by the nickname Zeko, is the Coco Chanel of authentication. She has evaluated over 25,000 Chanel bags since she started her business in 2019, she said. She authenticates hundreds of bags a week."  "Chanel bags sold in Japan from 1985 through 2016 have the bag’s ..read more

See Yen Intervention Risk Is Rising, but Effects Could Be Short-Lived by Ronnie Harui of The WSJ. When I taught exchange rates, one factor that caused them to change was interest rates. If interest rates rise in country A (say, on government bonds), people in country B will try to buy more of country A's currency so they can buy more of those bonds to get a better rate of return. The increased demand for A's currency raises it's value and that means it falls for country B. The article seems to be suggesting this for the Yen right now. Excerpts: "the yen weakened to 34-year lows against t ..read more

One weakness of the unemployment rate is that if people drop out of the labor force they cannot be counted as an unemployed person and the unemployment rate goes down. They are no longer actively seeking work and it might be because they are discouraged workers. The lower unemployment rate can be misleading in this case. People dropping out of the labor force might indicate a weak labor market. We could look at the employment to population ratio instead, since that includes those not in the labor force. But that includes everyone over 16 and that means that senior citizens are in the group bu ..read more

This is the title of a paper I presented at the Western Economic Association Meetings in 1992 in San Francisco. I will be posting this paper in parts. There will be 5 parts. This last part has the bibliography and a transcript of the radio interview when Joseph Campbell said entrepreneurs are heroes. Part 4 has footnotes. Part 1. Part 2.  Part 3. Part 4. REFERENCES Barnaby, K. and P. D'Acierno, eds., 1990. C. G. Jung and the Humanities, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berger, B. 1991. The Culture of Entrepreneurship. The Institute for Contemporary Studies: San Francisco. Burch, J ..read more