Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Herbert Whitehouse was one of the first in the U.S. to suggest workers use a 401(k). His hope in 1981 was that the retirement-savings plan would supplement a company pension that guaranteed payouts for life. Thirty-five years later, the former Johnson & Johnson human-resources executive has misgivings about what he helped start. What Mr. Whitehouse and…
Graduate school is pricey. Very pricey. But with the dearth of data coming from schools on how their students perform financially after graduating, it can be nearly impossible to figure out whether taking thousands of dollars in loans or eviscerating your savings account will actually pay off. To figure out which graduate school degrees tend…
The claim that if wages go up, jobs go down isn’t a description of reality at all. It is a negotiating strategy used by employers to keep wages down and profits high, writes billionaire venture capitalist and $15 minimum wage proponent Nick Hanauer. Photo by Brendan McDermid/Reuters Editor’s Note: This column is reproduced with permission…
As experienced pros are replaced by passionate up-and-comers, will diners notice a change in seasoning? If I hadn’t gone to cooking school or spent six years working in Toronto kitchens, I wouldn’t be who I am today: a writer, not a cook. Cooking is a wonderful art, skill, trade and craft. But as a career,…
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that “if economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.” Almost a century later, he’s getting his wish. Economists tend to be a grandiose bunch. They advise presidents and billionaires. They are generally unashamed about offering…
Companies need to be aware of — and take action to mitigate — pay inequity in the hiring process. advertisement Gender and racial inequality in pay is making headlines these days, and many companies are moving to eradicate it. One major and often unrecognized obstacle companies face is a less-than-robust understanding of the role of…
(1) Nerdy Childhood Pursuit Almost every conversation I have with an engineer starts with “oh I started coding when I was 10.” We think that people don’t really love technology unless they found it themselves in a garage. Well, I can tell you about using Perl when I was 10. And I can tell you…
While the algos have long forgotten about today’s job report whose headline was good enough to unleash an epic buying spree which has pushed the S&P to the highest level since July 2015, a quick read between the lines reveals a continuation of some recent troubling trends, namely that all job gains in recent years…
Three years ago, TIME magazine published a cover story called “The Me Me Me Generation—Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.” It was the print version of clickbait, designed to be devoured by TIME’s Baby Boomer base, or perhaps flipped through angrily by millennials killing time at TIME’s most reliable subscriber,…
Last Friday’s employment report cast a pall over the economic outlook. Headline jobs growth of just 38,000 was much weaker than expected and left us all wondering whether the Federal Reserve would wait longer to raise interest rates. The manufacturing sector shed 10,000 jobs, and has shown job losses in three of the past four…