“According to an operational study of National Football League teams prepared for The Wall Street Journal by Boston Consulting Group, the typical NFL season requires 514,000 hours of labor per team. That’s about eight times the effort it took to conceptualize, build and market Apple’s iPod, according to BCG, and enough time to build 25 [...]
“According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the (U.S.) federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for every $1 it spends on children.” (Source: NY Times, 2/2/10)
“For the first time in American history,” today’s New York Times reports, “a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees.” Last year, the U.S. had 7.9 million unionized workers in the public sector and 7.4 million in private industry. Only 7. 2 percent of the private sector workforce belongs to a labor union, [...]
“The U.S. government estimates that the cultivation and trafficking of illegal drugs directly employs 450,000 people in Mexico. Unknown numbers of people, possibly in the millions, are indirectly linked to the drug industry, which has revenues estimated to be as high as $25 billion a year, exceeded only by Mexico’s annual income from manufacturing and [...]
December brings not only Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and Festivus. The month also heralds even more luminous and transcendent arrival: A new edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The mainstream press likes to call this annual publication “Uncle Sam’s Almanac” — but within the tightly-bound world of factoid junkies, it’s known as “1,000 [...]
Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that some bearish international investors have coined a new term for the countries that they believe are the weak links of the euro zone: PIIGS — which stands for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. That follows on the heels of the oft-used term for the most important emerging markets [...]
The U.S. Census Bureau last week released its twice-a-decade look at what it calls “extended measures of well-being” — and the report is a trove of fascinating data. Among the most interesting nuggets: In 1998, 36% of American households had a cell phone; by 2005, 71% had one. (iIn 1992, the Census Bureau didn’t even [...]
During last year’s presidential campaign, both McCain and Obama endlessly broadcast ads that promised “good middle class jobs.” And whenever an ad intoned that phrase, up popped an image like the one below, which comes from an Obama campaign stop: burly, 50-something (mostly white) guys wearing dirty uniforms.What drove me crazy about these ads is [...]
Home-based entrepreneurs “account for more than half of all U.S. businesses and employ more people than venture-backed companies. Jointly, homepreneurs employ one in 10 private-sector workers, or a total of 13 million people.”(Source: Emergent Research via the Kauffman Foundation)
In a new report, demographer Peter Francese projects that the most prevalent American household in 2010 will be a “married couple with no kids, followed closely by single-person households.” The supposedly traditional arrangement — a married couple with children (e.g., the Pinks, the Obamas, the Gosselins) will account for only 22% of American households.
