Free Republic

U.S. nonfarm productivity unexpectedly fell in the second quarter, pointing to sustained weakness that could raise concerns about corporate profits and companies' ability to maintain their recent robust pace of hiring. The Labor Department said on Tuesday that productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, dropped at a 0.5 percent annual rate in the April-June period. It was the third consecutive quarterly decline. Productivity fell at an unrevised 0.6 percent rate in the first quarter. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast productivity rising at a 0.4 percent rate in the second quarter. Productivity decreased at a 0.4 percent rate compared...

Wealth inequality? Blame local government, whose meddling in property rights causes artificial scarcity in housing. ... Matthew Rognlie, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student in economics .. makes an interesting insight; housing prices are going up because of artificial scarcity caused by land-use regulation. Put another way, the concentration of wealth is not an issue of the “1 percent” winning while the rest of us lose—it’s an issue of homeowners benefitting from government restrictions on property rights that prevent a free market in homebuilding, restricting supply and driving up prices. ... If Rognlie is correct (and the data suggests...

One of the most frustrating parts of the sluggish recovery has been paltry wage gains for most workers. That's because even if the stock market is performing well, corporate profits are increasing, and home values are rising—one of the most direct and important ways to boost the financial health, and consumption, of the middle and lower class is through increases to worker's wages.

Conveyor Belt Sushi, Japan A dining concept that lets you pick from a wide range of one of Japan's best-known foods. NOTE: Click on the referenced link to watch the video. P.S. This technology will doom the SEIU/$15.00 minimum wage movement.

As this session of the 113th Congress draws to a merciful close, much of the punditry has picked up on the refrain that this is the “most unproductive Congress in history.” Indeed, this Congress has passed just 28 bills, easily eclipsing the previous record for inactivity set by Congress in 2012, when it passed just 68 new laws. But why, we might ask, is this such a bad thing? Sure, there are things we might have wished Congress had accomplished. Something to address immigration or entitlement reform springs to mind. And it certainly would have produced less chaos if Congress...

Analysis It was Verity Stob who identified the key challenge for Microsoft Office upgrades: "Name just ONE feature introduced into Word in the 21st century that the weak-willed upgrader regularly uses," asked the antiquarian. Fourteen revisions since the first Office that it may not be easy, because spell checking, grammar checking, wiggly underlines, paragraph styles and even Track Changes have been in Word since way back when. With Office 2013 now officially available, is there anything in it actually worth upgrading for? As was the case with its predecessors, the latest Office upgrade is driven less by actual appetite from...

Chrysler was forced to reinstate 13 assembly line workers fired two years ago when a TV news crew caught them drinking and smoking pot on the job at the company's Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit. “First of all, the filming was an invasion of these employees' privacy,” arbitrator Justin Moran ruled. “Second, since the film showed no evidence that the accused were actually working on assembling vehicles at the time, the company's prohibition against 'drinking on the job' could not be proved to have been violated. Consequently, the company's argument that the firing was justified because intoxicated employees could...

Tweet Are you constantly tired and do you feel incredibly stressed almost all the time? Well, that means that there is a really good chance that you are a typical American worker. Even though our incomes are going down, Americans are spending more time at work than ever before. In fact, U.S. workers spend more time at work than anyone else in the world. But it was not always this way. Back in 1970, the average work week for an American worker was about 35 hours. Today, it is up to 46 hours. But there are other major economies...

It's a huge understatement to say that being president is a very demanding job. It requires some serious time management and work coping skills. 99U has compiled a list of things President Obama does that keep him going and focused and help him get things done.

  Unrecoverable Stall: Air France 447, America David C. Stolinsky Feb. 16, 2012 The closest I ever came to flying a plane was sitting next to a colleague who was piloting a small plane. But even I know that what enables a plane to fly is lift. As the plane moves forward, the angle and shape of the wings cause the air rushing by to produce an upward force. This lift must exceed the drag caused by the friction of the air, and still be enough to counter the plane’s weight. Unlike balloons or blimps, airplanes are heavier than...

This roll the country has been on lately, where we burn brighter and brighter while our traditional lodestars, the United States and Europe, sink deeper into the western sky — and, moreover, the rest of the world seems to be noticing our ascent — has produced strangely unaccustomed feelings of self-confidence in many Canadians. It’s not that they aren’t nice feelings. But for a country more used to thinking of itself as not being terribly noticeable, superstar status — well, OK, let’s not get carried away — rising-star status takes getting used to. Not since Expo 67 or the early...

The productivity of U.S. businesses climbed 3.1% in the third quarter...Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had expected productivity to increase by 3.7% in the third quarter... ...real output, grew at an annual rate of 3.8%...Hours worked, however, rose a much smaller 0.6%, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. As a result, unit-labor costs fell 2.4%...

The productivity of U.S. businesses fell in the second quarter, the government said Tuesday, while first-quarter figures were revised lower to show a decline as labor costs accelerated. Second-quarter productivity fell by a 0.3% annual rate on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Labor Department. Productivity in the first quarter was revised lower to a 0.6% decline instead of a 1.8% increase. The economy hasn’t experienced two straight drops in productivity since the second half of 2008. The government also revised productivity for the prior three years, showing a higher increase in 2010 and lower gains in 2009 and...

Businesses expect a lot more out of their employees these days, as a visit to Rioja, the top-rated Denver restaurant, can demonstrate. If you like Rioja's hazelnut tortamisu, thank pastry chef Eric Dale. And if you happen to pop your head into the bakery room and admire the tile job on the floor, you can thank him for that, too. Ever since his boss, chef Jen Jasinski, discovered that Mr. Dale is handy, she's had him doing double duty as the maintenance man. He has spent hours repainting the oven, fixing the plumbing and installing a garbage disposal. And that's...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The productivity of U.S. businesses rose at a slower rate in the first quarter while hourly wages of workers adjusted for inflation fell by the largest amount in almost three years, according to government data. First-quarter productivity rose at a 1.6% annual rate, the Labor Department said Thursday. Productivity in the fourth quarter was also revised up to 2.9% from 2.6%. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had expected productivity to increase by 1.5% in the first quarter... ...Although compensation per hour rose 2.6% at an annualized rate, hourly wages adjusted for inflation fell by 2.5%. That’s the biggest...

Season's greetings. And while I'm on the subject, this is a good time for us "haves" to start thinking more about America's "have nots." The national unemployment rate stands at a horrifying 9.8%. But unemployment is 15.7% among high-school dropouts, and an astonishing 42% of all unemployed workers have been jobless for more than six months. At press time, Congress appeared poised to pass a package of tax cuts that offers 19% of its benefits to the richest 1% of taxpayers. Earlier this month, the president's deficit commission proposed a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan with many virtues. But it included, among...

Goods-producing industries could achieve high productivity growth as labor-saving automation and supply-chain efficiencies scaled up. But jobs in nursing and teaching required the same number of person-hours with patients or students as they did in years past. In other words, labor-intensive services had far lower rates of productivity growth than did goods-producing industries. And yet salary increases in those service sectors -- education, health care, government, to name a few -- keep pace with those in industries where raises are justified by greater productivity. This difference has a consequence that few had noticed before: As gross domestic product rises due...

In the four months between June and October, retail sales surged 10.2% at an annual rate and are up 7.3% over the past 12 months. Still, consumers get no respect from the majority of analysts and economists, who during the summer and early fall, could not stop talking about a double-dip recession. But instead of going wobbly, consumers seem to be standing strong. ComScore ( SCOR - news - people ) says online sales vs. last year were up 28% on Thanksgiving Day, 9% on Black Friday and 13% so far in November. Coremetrics, another online data gatherer, reports sales...

Here's my sin: I'm trying to find some grounds for optimism. Achilles2000 (and others) say, forget it: "The only thing in the middle of the road is road kill ;-) For those who care about America and liberty, there is exactly one right answer - education by government must end." I don't say this is wrong, just that I don't think anything so drastic will actually happen. Conservatives might take over Congress. This is no time to assume the worst. Meanwhile, the main thing I'm struck by as I read comments on many sites is that the average American doesn't...

Ron Bullock, chairman of Bison Gear & Engineering Corp, writing in the Washington Examiner: "More effective foreign competition has led to increasing manufactured-goods trade deficits and the loss of 7 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since 1980." Don Boudreaux responds: "This account – repeated ad nauseam – would be more plausible if it were also the case that U.S. manufacturing output, during this same time, had declined. But this output rose. Manufacturing output today is nearly 100 percent higher than it was 30 years ago (see chart). Importantly, manufacturing output is up while manufacturing employment is down for a reason...