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Has been found by who? Where is your data? Where are these studies? You're making up things out of thin air.

Pretty much all studies done on overtime and productivity. which is a big part of why the overtime rules were allowed to exist in the first place.

No, your claim is that it is "stupid" to work more than 40 hours because your productivity drops. As an employee who gets overtime pay ("time-and-a-half"), my productivity doesn't matter at all to me. And if I'm self-employed, I make more money for every extra hour worked as long as I make a non-zero salary.

True, but damage to your brain and heart, which overtime creates, should matter to you, not even considering that free time should be valuable to you on its own. If you had balls and a boss that wasn't an idiot, tell him to fuck off, pay you 75% more per hour, and let you rest, because that'd be better for everyone.

Whoops

When most people say things like 30/40 years ago online I realize they mean they 50s and 60s. When they say 10, they mean the 90s. "The CPS evidence shows several striking patterns. First, job tenure appears to be at an all-time high in the early 1960s, as the 1963 job tenure supplement shows an extraordinarily high percentage of workers, 35.5%, with more than ten years of tenure at their current job. " http://ftp.iza.org/dp9776.pdf

There have been so many studies showing that is not the case in most parts of the country. A recent resume audit study was looking into day care centers. While they were actually looking for effects of other qualifications (degree, experience, etc.), they also found strong effects of having an ethnic-sounding name. Unfortunately, even though they specifically pointed out that male teachers make more than female teachers, they didn't actually test male vs. female resume callbacks/interviews. Dumb oversight if you ask me.

Here is the earlier ungated version, which claims that in Chile girls do better at math than boys, but this reference says the opposite: that boys do better than girls in math in Chile.

Regardless, if you look at the scatter plots in the report, you can see that while there may be a trend, it is a weak one with a great deal of outliers (like Iran, where supposedly girls do better than boys in math, but clearly not a "progressive society").

I find it quite surprising.

Sure being a pot head is going to have a detrimental effect on your grades.

But given my experiences with university in a place where marijuana was not legal I can't believe there are enough students who would not smoke when it is illegal but would when it is legal to swing the overall grade by 5%.

So in the article the authors stated the following:

“The effects we find are large, consistent and statistically very significant,” Marie told the Observer. “For example, we estimate that students who were no longer able to buy cannabis legally were 5% more likely to pass courses. The grade improvement this represents is about the same as having a qualified teacher and, more relevantly, similar to decreases in grades observed from reaching legal drinking age in the US.”

For low performers, there was a larger effect on grades. They had a 7.6% better chance of passing their courses.

Note that they don't seem to be saying that pot smokers in specific are affected, but rather that any student who was legally barred from buying pot got a 5% better chance of passing. I can't imagine the total number of students who were buying legal pot before and stopped buying after was very large.

Note they got their study populations by looking at a city where they banned most foreign students from buying pot for several years:

Economists Olivier Marie of Maastricht University and Ulf Zölitz of IZA Bonn examined what happened in Maastricht in 2011 when the Dutch city allowed only Dutch, German and Belgian passport-holders access to the 13 coffee shops where cannabis was sold. The temporary restrictions were introduced because of fears that nationals from other countries, chiefly France and Luxembourg, were visiting the city simply to smoke drugs, which would tarnish its genteel image.

After studying data on more than 54,000 course grades achieved by students from around the world who were enrolled at Maastricht University before and after the restrictions were introduced

So I looked around and I think I found the paper here. I haven't digested it but there's a table on page 33 that shows the average grade change over the study period. There's two things that strike me about this table.

First there's not a lot of data to convince me that big divergences in grades by nationality are abnormal. For all we know secondary factors cause quirks like this all the time.

Second, half way through the prohibition period the grades of the DGB students who can buy pot starts shooting up. By the end of the prohibition they're actually doing better relative to the non-DGB students then they were before prohibition!

Maybe they're onto something, but of the stuff I've seen I'm still really skeptical.

A study on anonymous hiring practices in France showed that anonymization resulted in fewer minority candidates getting hired. Their explanation is essentially that the companies who care enough about diversity to participate in this sort of study are already subtly biased in favor of minority candidates, and anonymization put a stop to it. Considering the amount of focus big tech companies are putting on diversity, there's a fair chance the same thing is happening here too.

Every time I see that measured, it consistently shows the US having the least social mobility of all developed nations. For example, here: http://ftp.iza.org/dp1993.pdf and http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/81/

I do often see the claim that the US has an advantage here, but I have never, ever seen it backed up, while I have seen the counterclaim backed up.

Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

We know that those other countries have lower levels of income inequality, so the "football field" is smaller, thus a smaller absolute difference could yield a greater relative difference.

Or the lower intergenerational mobility in the US could simply reveal a greater level of meritocracy combined with the high genetic heritability of IQ.

The actual study is a good read. Intergenerational mobility is notoriously tough to measure because of the small number of data points generally used due to the need to carefully track individuals, considering changing economic conditions, and trying to determine someone's lifetime income before they die (for example, all those unemployed college graduates in France and Spain, do you measure their income now or when they finally get a job?)

It seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.

That of course, depends on your definition of cake. I'd prefer some organic fair trade bread in lieu of a Little Debbie sugar pile. Well, most of the time.

The "other nations", unless intimidated by the US military or other political forces, already do have freedom to choose what they want to produce.

Can you name a small country not intimidated by China, the US, or Russia?

Again, in theory, they have freedom. In practice, the dictatorships and governments supported by the United States always seem to have the same trait of serving US business interests, just like the countries supported by China and Russia are serving their interests. I single out America as an American, because it's the only place I have real influence.

Unless you believe people of other nations are idiots, they naturally chose the most profitable goods to produce, and your Fortune 500 companies buy them.

That's not the way it works. That would be trade that I believe in. Let's just take a random working paper from IZA which looks like a reasonably balanced third party. (Caveat - I gave their website a once-over. Consider it a "Palin" pick.)

In the paper concerning globalization and El Salvador, it plainly states that GDP has gone way up since the economic reforms of the 90s. That's often the statistic that's touted as progress. However, it also states that real wages for most workers have declined. It also states that almost 20% of the GDP is from workers who have fled to other countries and are sending money back home.

How does this happen? Well, it starts by giving corporate welfare precedence over indigenous rights by establishing Free Trade Zones. FTZs allow already rich corporations to build manufacturing centers that have almost no regulation - more commonly known as sweatshops. They don't have the same regulatory hurdles as local companies, they often corrupt local governments through huge infusions of cash (but not tax to benefit the rest of the population), and they don't pay tariffs. After a few years of operation, when the tax free period expires, the foreign investors threaten to leave if they don't retain huge tax breaks - there's certainly somewhere else in the world that has a more desperate and corrupt government. The local government usually concedes, the workers continue to be exploited (work for basically nothing or starve - what dishonest economists call "freedom" in the free market.)

Now, why would these people work for less money? Often at the same time as the establishment of the FTZs, another foreign investor buys up lots of farm land for agribusiness. Now there are tens of thousands of usually indigenous farmers thrown off of their land, who have no modern job skills and no home. Again, foreign investors profit, a small portion of local businessmen profit, corrupt governments profit, GDP goes up, trade goes up, and the rest of the population suffers. These are not accidents - they are done deliberately, since westerners can no longer depose local governments with brute force as they did in the decades following WWII.

The only way living standards for Americans will rise is when your Fortune 500 companies can buy labor from developing countries at dirt cheap prices, without that supply the prices of commodities will soar sky high, and you'll have to do the grunt work that the developing countries have been doing for decades.

Ahh. So if the developing countries have been doing that for decades, why have real wages declined in the US during those decades, and the top half percent of earners experienced a thousand percent increase in the same period?

Commodities are more effected by fuel prices than anything else (at least currently.) You are already paying for higher food costs because the real

I heartily agree there Brave New hpycmprok! Education in the USA has tanked. Too many otherwise good people are not completing high school. See the David Brooks editorial below (NyTimes registration required). A summary; the USA was fine and improving through 1970 then from 1975 to 1990 education graduation did not move. Other countries during that time moved ahead. The article is based on two books. Goldin and Katz http://www.amazon.com/Race-between-Education-Technology/dp/0674028678 "Schools, Skills, and Synapses" by Heckman (downloadable PDF) http://ftp.iza.org/dp3515.pdf "The Real Issue", David Brooks http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/opinion/29brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Finally people are not concerned about TFA because they a) shelter their knowledge by keeping within circles of limited curiosity. This means they don't care., b) as you said, could not comprehend its impacts. Best wishes oh wise one, Jim Burke

Well you go on believing that FUD: We've already made it back to the 90's, I don't think the 90's rate is sustainable at all so I'm expecting a downturn over the next couple of years because we are doing so good it can't be sustained. As for your statement about unemployment figures the change only was for federal employee's benefits affecting only an extremely small fraction of the number. The random sampling method continues today, let me let snopes.com school you on your FUD: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm On the economy, let me just copy and paste what I did on another forum back in November (which is why some of the numbers are a little older than a couple of months but still less than a year, and we've gotten even better since then)

ftp://ftp.iza.org/charts/PDF56_e.pdf
For the past 3-4 years the US has had the highest GDP growth of: germany, france, italy, japan, canada, UK & EU in general

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/47/35326565.pdf
From OECD standardized unemployment rates, July of 05 we have a level of 5.0, less than Germany (9.3), less than France (9.7), less than Italy (7.8), less than Canada (6.8), only UK (4.7) and Japan (4.4) have a lower one.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/ CurrentInflation.asp
For about a year we've been hovering at around 3% or so (up and down) inflation, which is the same it was before 9/11. You'll note around 9/11 Greenspan dumped a whole lot of cash into the economy & China picked up it's output significantly decreasing inflation to some of the lowest rates it's ever been (~1 percent). Greenspan only lately has been saying that our economy has been doing so *good* that our growth rate is starting to encourage those inflationary items, so he's started gradually raising the interest rate to start removing dollars out of the economy to slow it's growth rate down. Classic example of a Phillips curve. I think greenspan should probably start getting more aggressive on it as our economy has been going so *good* that we need to stop it from turning into a beast like it did in the 2000 where we get another big bubble. Right now it ain't sky high, it's nowhere near sky high, under 1-2% means our employment level isn't doing well and pressuring it down, over 5% is high, over 10% is sky high (look to the 70's).

So we have a higher GDP growth rate (rate our economy is expanding/contracting) and we have one of the lowest unemployment rates. Our unemployment rate is at a level that is lower than almost every other country in the world. Our inflation rate is increasing but it's still very reasonable, but the government does need to start pulling money out of the economy because we are doing so good we are starting overheat it. The govenment needs to start becoming more miserly with our money: spend when the goings bad and save when the things go good to reduce the major peaks and valleys. Unlike you, from all the things I see as economic indicators that I think our economy's been doing *so* good that we should be expecting a dip here in the next few years as part of the general up/down cycle, and we should start pulling money out of the economy.