3/15/15 Today's Inquiries

Ah the ides of March. Here's a list of 6 things which we get wrong about March and killing Caesar. 

The Links:

The Dollar is strong again. Here's some posts discussing what that means. Krugman. Justin Fox. 

More on "Obama's" trade deal. It's important that the TPP gets labeled at Obama's deal in case Hillary has to be against it in 2016. 

The Billion Prices Project thinks inflation may be coming back. Which is good because having a nearly 0 interest rate and almost no inflation is kinda bad for the economy. 

Do larger firms cause more inequality?

But the paper shows that the benefits of scale are not shared equally among all workers. Using data on wages at British firms, they divide workers into nine groups according to how skilled they are. Over time, they find that the proportional difference in wages between the groups grows as firms get bigger. This trend is driven entirely by a rising gap between wages at the top compared with the middle and bottom of the distribution. As the authors note, this is very similar to the trend in income inequality in America and Britain as a whole since the 1990s, when pay for low and median earners began to stagnate (see chart).

At this rate, there are 5 states that won't close the gender wage gap this century. 

One of our major newspapers says: What the hell, why not start another unwinnable war?

Selma, Obama, and the colonization of the Black Resistance. 

Genetic data gives a window onto the slave trade. 

 One of the men seemed to come from the Bamoun, a Bantu-speaking group in northern Cameroon, and the other two slaves came from non-Bantu speaking groups in the region of Nigeria and Ghana.

New Tommy Wiseau!

For those Dr. Who fans out there: