Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
WOODINVILLE, Wash.—Five years ago, Quadrant Homes churned out starter houses in the Seattle area with an average sales price of $269,000 and the marketing slogan, “More House, Less Money.” But facing a debt-burdened middle class and rising land prices, Quadrant has since exchanged entry-level buyers for customers free of credit worries and ready to splurge….
The UK is becoming a nation of grafters. With living standards at their lowest in a decade and real-term wages falling 8 per cent since the financial crisis, more people are cramming extra work into evenings, weekends and even their lunch hours to supplement their main incomes. Officially, the average number of hours Britons work each week…
Photo A convention for fast-food workers last July in Addison, Ill., called for higher minimum wages. Credit Nathan Weber for The New York Times close shareTools All eyes are on wages. For workers who have faced six years of stagnant pay, Federal Reserve officials trying to decide when they can safely raise interest rates, or…
The two hundred and twenty million dollars in venture capital given to Instacart, a grocery delivery service that deploys human servants to retrieve goods from the shelves of existing grocery stores, seems less like an investment in the validity of its specific idea—which is stupid and unsustainable for reasons so blatant that they are not…
article start Seven years after the recession began, only one in 50 U.S. counties has fully bounced back, according to a study the National Association of Counties released Monday. The 2014 County Economic Tracker shows that 65 of the nation’s 3,069 counties have met or surpassed prerecession levels in four measured categories: jobs, unemployment rate,…
Jobs of the MLA Sat Jan 10, 2015 The Current Situation Around last year at this time, I became interested in what the archived editions of the MLA Job Information List could tell us about how the profession has changed over time. The MLA provided page-scans of all the JILs going back to 1965, and…
close shareTools At every age, the chances of not working have changed in the last 15 years. Teenagers are far more likely not to work. Older people are retiring later and working more. In the ages in between — the periods of life when most people work — the changes have been smaller, but they…
(Hammerin Man) In recent years, we’ve written a number of stories about laws aimed at protecting active-duty servicemembers and their families from predatory loans and the businesses that try to take advantage of loopholes in these rules. Some readers have asked why members of our armed forces merit protections not available to civilians. But this…
The December jobs report falls right in line with the course the Fed is trying to chart for its monetary policy, and the upshot is that the numbers mean the Fed is most likely not going to hike rates any earlier than April, WSJ chief economics correspondent Jon Hilsenrath said this morning on the MoneyBeat…
The cubicle may be cozier, and more creativity inducing, than we think. Illustration by Mark Weaver Photo: Mark Weaver What do we give up when we all become freedom-seeking, self-determining, autonomous entrepreneurs? A lot, actually. One October day, I sat in on a seminar at the Freelancers Union called “Building a Foundation for Your…