BUSINESS
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The most common jobs in the U.S. are among the lowest paid, with one notable exception — registered nurses. According to Labor Department data through May 2011 released this week , the 10 most popular professions made up more than 20% of the jobs in the U.S. economy. Nine of those occupations — administrative assistants, laborers, janitors, customer-service representatives, waitstaff, food-preparation workers, office clerks, cashiers and retail salespersons — make less than the average wage in the U.S. — $45,230. But one of the most popular professions stood out — registered nurses. Of more than 800 occupations, nurses were the fifth most common with 2,724,570 people, or 2.1% of all workers. The average nurse earned $69,110 a year as of May 2011, more than 50% more than the national average.
Real Time Economics - WSJ
The 8th edition of my intermediate macroeconomics text will come out in June, ready for fall classes.
Greg Mankiw's Blog
naked capitalism
Yves here. I hope you’ll take the time to read this important post. There has been a great deal of discussion of the many deficiencies of the mortgage settlement, but its biggest has gone pretty much unnoticed.
“I don’t see anything wrong with asking people to pay the expected value of their health care — a mandate to get insurance to cover the catastrophic things that society would cover in any case — to avoid this type of gaming of the system. Yes, it’s true that many healthy people will pay, remain healthy, and seem to get nothing. But that’s the wrong way to look at it.
The Baseline Scenario
Economist's View
One of the big questions for policymakers is how much of the current downturn represents of temporary cyclical fluctuation and how much of it is a permanent reduction in out productive capacity.
