Most Read Realitybase Posts in October

The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos With key quotations from documents that are being disappeared. This post is now the #1 response to a Google search for "plutonomy memo."

Two hypotheses for why US CEO pay is so high Charts show that in the US CEO pay is about double that in other advanced countries, implying either that there is a shortage of talent in the US, or that the US CEO pay market is broken.

The American Dream died in February 1973 This post, which makes the top 10 almost every month, has graphs from multiple sources showing stagnation of inflation-adjusted middle class incomes since the 1970s after strong and steady post-WWII growth

Americans have more than enough education to fill 21^st Century jobs. A chart shows that only the 3% of workers with Ph.D.s and professional degrees had increasing earnings, while earnings of those with masters and bachelors degrees or some college declined even more than the earnings of those with high school only. The fact of falling earnings is inconsistent with the claim that there is a shortage of college-educated workers.

The Dysfunction and Corruption of Our Healthcare System, Its Damage to the National Economy and other Basic Healthcare Matters (Guest Post) Describing a system that is destroying American business global competitiveness, that violates fundamental insurance risk principles, and that has inherent conflicts of interest preventing quality national health care delivery and cost efficiency, and proposing a solution.

American Youth: Digitally Skilled and Unemployable. A graph shows that Americans under 25, who presumably are the most familiar with digital technology, are losing employment share to those over 55, who presumably are least at home in the digital age. This counterintuitive trend started long before the Great Recession.

US job creation has been declining since April 2000 and is now in freefall. Discussion around a dramatic graph showing our employment-to-population ratio strongly increasing until 2000 followed by a devastating loss in 10 years of all the gains made in the previous 20 years.

Is the New York Times editorial board adapting to reality, or is this cognitive dissonance? Three years ago the NYT editorial board acknowledged that globalization is one of the reasons "Americans are working harder and not getting ahead," but it continues to urge readers to "embrace" globalization.

The history of US per-capita petroleum consumption will surprise you.  A graph and other data show US per-capita consumption of petroleum is down substantially from the 1970s, has been very stable since 1983 because of CAFE standards, and has fluctuated only slightly with retail price changes.

Comparative Advantage—The Unicorn of Free Trade A collection of sources and analyses demonstrating that the assumptions of classic Ricardian theory rarely if ever align with real-world conditions. Views of this 2009 post tend to spike every exam season.