Category Archives: Wages

Cooperative Compensation

Chris Dil­low:   “Incen­tive pay” can back­fire, accord­ing to some new research. Mar­garet Lee and Ye Li at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity got peo­ple to find as many words as they could in four min­utes from the let­ters “a d e r s t w”. Some solvers were not paid at all. Oth­ers were paid per word they …

7 March 2012 – 10:26 am | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Collectivism, Socialism, Communism, Economics, Wages | Comments (1)

The AER Top 20: Cobb & Douglas (1928)

The Cobb-​​​​Douglas pro­duc­tion func­tion, which this paper intro­duced and made famous, is not really what I want to talk about at all, at least not as a func­tion of pro­duc­tion. I never took Cobb-​​​​Douglas seri­ously see­ing as in my own Macro class it was intro­duced arbi­trar­ily with­out any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion or deriva­tion other than the fact …

1 March 2012 – 12:59 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Collectivism, Socialism, Communism, Economics, Ownership, Wages | Comments (0)

A (Pyhrric?) Victory at Foxconn

Peter Frase:  A recent arti­cle in the New York Times reports an encour­ag­ing vic­tory for the work­ers at Fox­conn, the gigan­tic Chi­nese man­u­fac­turer that makes prod­ucts for Apple and many other com­pa­nies: The announce­ment by Fox­conn, which said that it would raise salaries as much as 25 per­cent, to about $400 a month, came after an out­cry over work­ing …

22 February 2012 – 2:22 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Corporations, Economics, Ownership, Philosophy, Wages | Comments (1)