Even janitors have noncompetes now. Nobody is safe.

One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that what makes it work — competition — is also what capitalists want to get rid of the most.

Matt O'Brien

It’s better to be born rich than gifted

A revolution in genomics is creeping into economics. It allows us to say something we might have suspected, but could never confirm: money trumps genes. Using one new, genome-based measure, economists found genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families. Success is not. The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.

Andrew Van Dam

How the Great Recession fueled for-profit colleges

Stef W. Kight

Most jobs created since the recession have been low-paying

Steve LeVine & Naema Ahmed

A few comments on the Labor Force Participation Rate

Bill McBride

Has wage growth been slower than normal in the current business cycle?

The FRED Blog

Corporate profits versus labor income : Risk & reward versus slow & steady

The FRED Blog

Goldman Sachs Warns That Rising Wages Could Cut Into Corporate Profits. The Horror!

Jordan Weissmann

Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism

“We think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism, but we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child — technology.”

Eric Weinstein with Sean Illing

For the biggest group of American workers, wages aren’t just flat. They’re falling.

For workers in “production and nonsupervisory” positions, the value of the average paycheck has declined in the past year. For those workers, average “real wages” — a measure of pay that takes inflation into account — fell from $22.62 in May 2017 to $22.59 in May 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

“The extra growth we are seeing in the economy is going somewhere: to capital owners and people at the top of the income distribution,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, noting workers' share of corporate income remained relatively low as of January. “And what we've seen is in recent period a much higher share of total income earned going to owners of capital.”

Jeff Stein

Maybe This One Dumb Chart Explains the Economy

Jordan Weissmann

Forget about broad-based pay hikes, executives say

Now, executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further.

Steve LeVine

There is no productivity crisis, experts say

In a presentation at the Dallas Fed on Friday, Chad Syverson, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, said technological history has been one of lag-times between the launch of new technologies and their visibility in productivity numbers.

Steve LeVine

NFL owners are stifling speech, but it’s not called “no-platforming” when you’re rich and own the platform

Real power over the flow of ideas rests with the wealthy.

Matthew Yglesias

The emerging plan to save the American labor movement

Dylan Matthews

More and more companies have monopoly power over workers’ wages. That’s killing the economy.

Suresh Naidu, Eric Posner, and Glen Weyl

Workers don’t have much say in corporations. Why not give them seats on the board?

Dylan Matthews

Econ 101 No Longer Explains the Job Market

Noah Smith

In all fairness, it probably never did. -ed.

Employers are increasingly using their workers as lobbyists. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

Uber Better Not Be the Future of Work

Noah Smith