Ed West: “The fundamental reasons for why Britain has fallen behind are strangely absent in the national debate; indeed, most politicians aren’t even that interested in the subject. Perhaps that will change, with the ground-breaking essay, Foundations, written by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman…The theme running through the essay is that the British system makes it very hard to invest and extremely expensive and legally difficult to build, making housing and energy costs prohibitive.” [via Arnold Kling]
WSJ: “More companies are trying to get the most out of rising payroll costs by making a part of workers’ pay contingent on completing prescribed goals. Employers say the new way to pay professionals from accountants and human-resource managers to marketing assistants can fuel greater productivity. Plenty of overachievers say they are relishing the often-rich upside potential. Yet some workers say they are making less than they bargained for.”
FT: “In Manhattan, Goldman Sachs and Jane Street are separated by a street, a century, and a 160 per cent average pay gap. Goldman and its rival investment banks were once the titans of trading. Now it is Jane Street that paid an average of over $900,000 per employee last year to Goldman’s $340,000, according to FT calculations. The upstart, founded at the turn of the millennium, is among a handful of highly secretive trading firms — also including Citadel Securities, Susquehanna International Group, XTX Markets and DRW — to have capitalised on the electronification of financial markets to seize market share from less nimble and more heavily regulated banking stalwarts, and reshaped Wall Street’s trading landscape in the process.”
Econlib: “As labor becomes more expensive, employers will tend to find substitutes for that labor. One way they can do this is by substituting workers with machines. This tends to happen over time on its own – as technology advances and becomes less expensive, the relative price of using automation as opposed to hiring workers falls, leading to increases in automation. But artificially increasing the price of labor also lowers the relative price of automation, causing more workers to be substituted with automation.”
