Employment
Economic Research from the St. Louis Fed Reserve Bank: What Are Teachers Really Paid? Adjusting Wages for Regional Differences in Cost of Living
Strikes by teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and Colorado have highlighted differences in teachers' wages across the country. Teachers in these states have lower-than-average annual wages but also lower-than-average cost of living (COL)... Real wages are lower in high-amenity places because the amenities are part of the workers' compensation. This helps to explain why places such as Hawaii, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and Colorado, which are all high-sunshine states, tend to have lower real wages for most occupations, including teachers. more »
Shaping America at the American Precision Museum: How the Machinists and Tool Builders Influence American History
"Our exhibit, Shaping America, explores how the machinists and tool builders of this region's 'Precision Valley' influenced the course of American history, helping drive rapid industrialization, the emergence of the United States as a world power, and the development of our consumer culture. The Tool Revolution tells the story of innovators in Windsor, Vermont, in the 1840s at the forefront of the push to create interchangeable parts and the American System of Manufacturing. more »
Seth Frotman: *Broken Promises: How Debt-Financed Higher Education Rewrote America's Social Contract and Fueled a Quiet Crisis
"However, by limiting the definition of the student debt problem to those borrowers who are behind or in default, the literature assumes that the remaining thirty-three million borrowers are doing just fine. This perspective is deeply flawed. First, it is certainly not acceptable to write off the financial futures of eleven million people. Second, by defining down what it means to “struggle” to include only those in immediate, documented financial distress, these commentators are ignoring the broader reality of debt-financed higher education. For every borrower who misses a student loan payment or defaults on a debt, there is another borrower who is struggling to buy a home, start a business, or save for retirement due to the burden of their student loans." Seth Frotman, the man who has resigned from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. more »
The Good Old Days ... Not! (Memoirs of a Former Secretary)
Rose Madeline Mula writes: The mimeograph machine was another diabolic duplicating device. If we didn't want to get purple ink all over ourselves, instead of using a ditto master, we typed a mimeograph stencil. This was a blue sheet over a stiff backing on which we typed without a typewriter ribbon so that the keys cut through the stencil. If we made a mistake, we coated it with a special white glop, waited for it to dry, and then tried to cut the correct symbols through the glop. Good luck. When the typing and glopping were finished, we wrapped the stencil around the black-ink coated drum of the mimeograph machine and cranked out the required copies. The big advantage of this method was no purple-stained clothes and body parts. We did, however, wind up with black-stained clothes and body parts. more »