Week in Charts

Winners Take All

via Mother Jones

The Gender Pay Gap by Industry

via Economix

“Overall, women who worked full-time in wage and salary jobs had median weekly earnings of $657 in 2009. That’s 80 percent of what their male counterparts earned. But as you can see from the chart above, there’s a lot of variation depending on the industry.”

The Relationship Between Union Membership and State Budget Deficits

via The Monkey Cage

“I wanted to look at the relationship between unions and deficits more systematically. Like McCartin I used the CBPP data on budget deficits, although I focused not on the projected

2012 deficits but on the 2011 deficits (see Table 4 of the report). I do not know of readily available data on public-sector collective bargaining or on public-sector union strength, so I used the percent of employed people who are members of unions (from this BLS report)…There is not much of a systematic relationship. The fit line bumps and wiggles but is essentially

flat. The bivariate correlation is 0.19, with a p-value of 0.21. Based on these measures, states with larger unionized workforces do not have larger budget deficits.”

The Great Slump Revisited

via Free Exchange

“Barry Eichengreen has shown that the earlier a country left gold, the sooner its economy recovered. Had Germany left gold earlier, world history might look a lot different. The parallel

with the Great Recession is again clear. Rich world policymakers were pointing their fingers at China even as their own monetary policy stances were too tight. Real interest rates soared in the early stages of the steep 2008 downturn. That wasn't China's fault. It was the failure of the major rich world central banks to react to rapidly falling expectations with overwhelming monetary force. If Chinese policy is deflationary in an environment of falling expectations, then one can either complain about Chinese policy or prevent expectations from falling.”

Realism on Defense Spending


via Paul Krugman

“Yes, there’s a lot of wasteful defense spending — in fact, it’s almost surely the most waste-ridden part of the federal budget, because politicians are afraid to say no to anything for fear of being called unpatriotic. And even aside from the question of the Bush wars, it has long been clear that we’re still spending a lot to head off threats that haven’t existed since the fall of the Soviet Union…But if we’re talking about fiscal issues, you have to bear the arithmetic in mind. We’re not living in the 1950s, when defense was half the federal budget. Even a drastic cut in military spending wouldn’t release enough money to offset more than a small fraction of the projected rise in health care costs.”