The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Center for American Progress

A Win-Win for Working Families and State Budgets: Pairing Medicaid Expansion and a $10.10 Minimum Wage
Rachel West and Michael Reich

Retailer Revelations: Why America’s Struggling Middle Class Has Businesses Scared
Brendan V. Duke and Ike Lee

Dean Baker
October 16, 2014, Al Jazeera America

Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth MilkmanOctober 15, 2014, NorthJersey.Com

Unfortunately that is not an exaggeration. He concludes his column this morning about the difficulties the folks at the I.M.F. meetings have in promoting growth by telling readers:

"We’re witnessing a historic break from the past. I think the IMF forecasters deserve some sympathy. They’re dealing with a global economy that strains our intellectual understanding and is outside their personal experience. We don’t know what we don’t know."

Samuelson tells us that there are three huge problems. The first one is:

"Sobered and scared, people and businesses delay consumption and investment. To prepare for the next crisis, they reduce debts (“deleverage”) and increase savings. Firms hoard profits."

The problem is that this is not really true, especially in the United States. Consumption is actually quite high relative to disposable income (which means savings is low), albeit not quite as high as at the peaks of the stock and housing bubbles when people had trillions of dollars of ephemeral wealth.

The investment share of GDP is not quite back to its pre-recession peak, but it's above its 2005 share. No one in 2005 was saying that firms were scared and deleveraging.

Dean Baker
October 13, 2014, TruthOut

Dean Baker / October 13, 2014

Campaigning for the Bolivia’s presidential election officially ended on Wednesday, ahead of voting on Sunday. The election, which includes 272,058 voters living abroad in 33 countries, will be observed by a mission from the Organization of American States. While the final outcome is likely to be a first-round victory for the incumbent, Evo Morales, the most interesting results will come from the four departments of the media luna region. In the past, the Morales administration has faced significant opposition there, including a sometimes violent secessionist movement.  This year, the president has a chance to win majority support in all four of the departments, which would mark a major turning point in Bolivian politics.

Earlier this week, Morales expressed confidence that he will surpass his 2009 record of support, and that as much as 70 percent of the electorate will vote for him this year. Morales won previous elections handily, with 54 percent of the vote in 2005, and 64 percent in 2009. When his party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), celebrated the end of its campaign in what has been an opposition stronghold, Santa Cruz, on Tuesday, thousands of people came together to show their support, demonstrating changing dynamics in the relationship between the MAS and Santa Cruz. Then on Wednesday, Morales brought his campaign to an end in El Alto, where he claimed that he will win in all nine of Bolivia’s departments, saying:

Bolivia is united, the “half-moon” is over, now it is a full moon. We have all united at the top the social forces and the youth, who have joined for two reasons: because of the patriotic agenda and stability and because of the economic growth that guarantees hope for future generations.

The “half moon,” or “media luna,” is located in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia and is comprised of the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija. According to an IPSOS poll the MAS could win in Santa Cruz with 50 percent of the votes. In the 2009 presidential elections, Morales lost in Santa Cruz, Beni, and Pando. Things have been changing, however, and Morales has been strategic in building and maintaining alliances in the media luna departments. Not only do polls show that Morales might win in Santa Cruz, but he might also win in Beni (44 percent), Pando (54 percent), and Tarija (43 percent).

Back in 2000, a higher share of U.S. women aged 25 to 54 were employed than was the case for prime age women in six of our peers in the OECD. Newly released data from the OECD (see figure below) show that the rate has declined, in both relative and absolute terms, over the last 14 years and is now the lowest in the group, a trend clearly visible in the graph below. Even Japan, which in 2000 was more than 10 percentage points below the U.S. now has a higher share of prime age women in employment.

Franklin Foer has an interesting, but ultimately badly confused article in the New Republic about Amazon and its growth. The article is debating the appropriate anti-trust approach to Amazon, questioning whether it merits government intervention to protect producers and not just consumers.

This is a reasonable question, but the confusion comes in the first sentence of the second paragraph, which tells readers:

"Rather than pocketing the profits from this creation, Amazon has plowed revenue into bettering itself—into the construction of well-placed fulfillment centers that further hasten the arrival of its packages, into technologies that attempt to read our acquisitive minds and aptly suggest our next purchase."

The problem here is that there were actually few profits to pocket and what little profits did exist were due to the enormous subsidy Amazon enjoyed from not being required to collect state sales tax. The first point is straightforward. Amazon has always had very thin profits and has had almost as many losing quarters as profitable ones.