Lots of jobs with low wages

Four different measures are all telling the same story: While America's workers keep getting hired at a solid pace, they're having difficulty finding sustained growth in their paychecks.
First, January set a disappointing tone for wages at the start of 2017. Average hourly earnings rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier, the slowest since August. That's even as employers added the most workers in four months.

economics is NOT science

Before the 2008 financial crisis, for example, the standard models more or less ignored finance. No banks, no indebtedness, no leverage. As a result, they couldn’t make sense of the worst global recession since the 1930s. They also typically asserted that fiscal stimulus had little or no effect on consumer spending, which follows from the model’s mathematically convenient assumptions. If President Barack Obama and Congress had applied such thinking in 2009, the recession would have been much worse. Fortunately, policy was guided not by modern macro but by old-fashioned Keynesianism, long since abandoned by the academy.
Given such spectacular failures, you’d think the profession would have gone back to the drawing board. It hasn’t. True, some tweaks have been attempted, and some scholars have done valuable work on the history of crises, the role of household debt, the drivers of inequality, and much else. But the error at the core of modern macroeconomics -- that mathematical consistency matters more than empirical relevance -- prevails. Just glance through the leading academic journals. Or maybe take our word for it.
Reviving economics as a science will require economists to act more like scientists. If models are refuted by the observable world, toss them out. Rely on experiments, data and replication to test theories and understand how people and companies really behave. Editors of the most prestigious (career-advancing) journals should open their pages to research that challenges the standard theories, even if it doesn’t yet point to encompassing new alternatives.

free trade vs. free truth

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for The New York Times, whose academic specialty was free trade, wrote that, "If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade.'" He puts it in that order because one rests on the other.
The concept of "comparative advantage" imagines everything as closed and static - nations, industries, technology, and methods of doing business - and also, as very, very simple. Then it says that a nation should determine what it can produce most efficiently, give up anything it does less efficiently, and put all its resources into the thing it does best...
When we look at the actualities of history, theory shatters on the rocks of reality. Yes, there are moments when comparative advantage seems to exist. But if a nation throws all its resources into the best industry, it will, in the long term, be a disaster.
Also, and this is more important, comparative advantage - and absolute advantage versus other nations - can be, and is, manufactured.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, natural resources were presumed to be the key to economic dominance. The fight was on, in particular, for coal and iron, for fuel and steel. Yet Japan, which had neither, emerged as one of the great manufacturing powers in the world. Through policy, intent, and war.
Bad logic, sloppy science.
Nonetheless, free trade became dogma in economics and among the political and financial elites. It was virtually unchallenged in politics and business...
The reality is that all successful economies grew up behind walls of protectionism. Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln were great advocates of tariffs, government spending on infrastructure, and support of domestic industries.
No underdeveloped country has ever moved from the bottom rungs to the top tier while operating under free trade rules.
"Free trade" can only be practised successfully by dominant economies. When Britain was dominant, when the US was dominant, free trade was great for them. And painful for countries they managed to impose it on.
But what happens to a mature economy when developing nations - working behind their protectionist walls - become developed nations, and compete? There are really only two examples - Great Britain and the US. Both experienced rapid and severe industrial declines and great increases in income inequality.
Free trade is the ultimate weapon in the perennial war between capital and labour.

China reserves

“With reserves dropping below the psychologically important threshold of $3 trillion, this will further ramp up pressure on Chinese policy makers to prevent the further draining of reserves," said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at IHS Global Insight in Singapore. "The Chinese government and the PBOC are now facing a tremendous battle to stem further significant capital outflows while also trying to maintain confidence in the yuan."
"A combination of yuan strength, stricter capital controls and substantial valuation effects failed to arrest the slide," Tom Orlik, chief Asia economist at Bloomberg Intelligence in Beijing, wrote in a report. "A seventh straight month of falling reserves, and a drop below the $3 trillion threshold, means no respite for China’s policy makers in their battle against capital outflows."

Grexit again

Greece’s two-year note yields neared 10 percent as a quarrel between the nation’s creditors over its fiscal targets boosted concern the country is running out of time to complete yet another review of its bailout program before Europe gears up for a busy election season beginning in March.
Greece won’t meet fiscal surplus targets set by its euro-area creditors, the International Monetary Fund said on Monday, after executive directors met to discuss the fund’s annual assessment of the nation’s economy. The IMF’s assumptions aren’t based in reality and don’t take into account the reform of Greece’s public finances, according to a European Union official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are sensitive.

Republicans are morons

Americans' confidence in the U.S. economy remained strong in January. Gallup's U.S. Economic Confidence Index averaged +11, the highest monthly average in Gallup's nine-year trend...
Gallup found an immediate improvement in Republicans' confidence in the economy after the November presidential election, and their confidence has only grown since Trump took office. In January, the index rating among Republicans was +27, up 11 points from December's score of +16. Independents' +5 index score in January remained steady from their +3 reading in December.

Assad: mass murderer

As many as 13,000 people were hanged in five years at a notorious Syrian prison near Damascus, Amnesty International has said, accusing the government of a "policy of extermination".
Titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison," Amnesty's damning report, released on Tuesday, is based on interviews with 84 witnesses, including guards, detainees, and judges.
It found that at least once a week between 2011 and 2015, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their prison cells for arbitrary trials, beaten, then hanged "in the middle of the night and in total secrecy."

Republican: let's shoot some kids

Dan Adamini, the secretary of the Marquette County Republican Party in Michigan, tweeted that he was "sorry" for a pair of social media posts in which he referenced the infamous fatal 1970 shooting of four unarmed college students by National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam War protest, and suggested that a similar incident might be the "only solution" to modern-day protests at the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere.

"Violent protesters who shut down free speech? Time for another Kent State, perhaps," Mr. Adamini wrote in a tweet last Thursday. "One bullet stops a lot of thuggery." In a similar Facebook post, he added, "They do it because they know there are no consequences yet."