Forest Fight
The Oregonian has a surprisingly good article on national politics and public forests in the West. The hottest political topics: "healthy forests" and "the roadless rule" may matter less than we think. The crux:
All the posturing may have little to do with what really happens in Western forests. Land managers have been trying to cull flammable stands for years and will keep at it no matter who wins the election. And timber companies show little interest in cutting down roadless forests, which generally remain roadless because they have limited commercial value and are remote and difficult to reach.
What Good is Happiness, It Can't Buy You Money
Recent advances in the economics of happiness (discussed on this blog here, here, and here) are getting a little more mainstream attention, due to the growing body of research on the relationships between money and subjective wellbeing.
The bulk of the research that's been done on the subject suggests that the correlations between income and happiness are weak. In general, wealthier people are a little happier than the less well off, but it takes an awful lot of income to "buy" the happiness that companionship and community provide for free. For example, on average a long-lasting marriage is worth about $100,000 in annual income -- which means that a stable, 30-year marriage has a present value of about $1.3 million. That's quite an investment opportunity.
But an interesting trend in reporting about this research is that, rather than emphasizing how little difference money actually makes to happiness, many reporters (as well as some academics) are trumpeting the modest contribution that money does make to our sense of wellbeing. Thus, headlines like this one, on the relationships among happiness, money, and sex: "Money Buys Happiness, But Not Sex".
I expect to see more of this, as reporters on the economy beat -- who are used to seeing things in terms of hard cash -- use their own intellectual filters to understand and distill what, to them, could be a somewhat threatening area of research.
The Sin of Wages
Yesterday's New York Times reported that hourly pay is not keeping up with inflation.
Although you can't read too much into numbers from a month or two, the news should come as little surprise. Adjusted for inflation, hourly pay for "nonsupervisory workers" (i.e., everyone but management) in the United States peaked more than 30 years ago, in 1973. Hourly wages fell from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, and although they recovered somewhat towards the end of the 1990s, they never regained the highs of 1973.
Leaving aside the inherent difficulty of measuring inflation in a time of rapid technological change and rising standards of living, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that it's harder for a family with a single earner to make ends meet than it used to be. So perhaps the most telling quote of the article is this:
On its own, the decline in workers' wages is unlikely to derail the recovery. Though they account for some 80 percent of the work force, they contribute much less to spending.But what kind of "recovery" is it, if the average earnings of some 80 percent of the workforce are declining? Just one more reason to believe we need a better definition of "recovery" -- or, more generally, economic wellbeing.
(Thanks to Kevin Drum Washington Monthly for pointing out the article.)
