Most Read Realitybase Posts in July

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."

How the Luckiest Generation lived the American Dream A narrated slide show (in movie format) with graphs showing how Depression Babies surfed through life on a big wave of job creation, upward mobility, and rising real wages not seen before or since.

US health care efficiency did not go off the rails until about 30 years ago. Updates to this post show that the rate of increase in US life expectancy at birth, especially for females, abruptly slowed in 1982 and that this was apparently unrelated to healthcare spending which continued rising at a very steady rate.

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.

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.

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.

The Plan to Reduce Income Inequality by Driving down the Wages of College Graduates Critique of a recent paper by Georgetown University economists who say the college wage premium is too high and estimate how big an oversupply of college graduates we need to turn out to drive that wage premium down from 74% to 46%.

The score is Chindia 98, USA 2, and USA is sticking to its game plan. Only 2% of the additional jobs created in America between 1990 and 2008 were in sectors subject to foreign competition, but there is no evidence America will change the policies that caused this disaster.

Skilled labor shortages in declining industries accelerate the decline. One might think that widespread layoffs in a shrinking industry would create a surplus of willing workers, but in fact there are shortages because skilled workers with options move as fast as they can to growing, better-paying industries.

The Recession Is Coming! The Recession Is Coming! (Republished with corrected chart.) December 2007 post with charts showing America's middle class had already been in recession for 7 years and asking if we really care about them.