socialist-economics

Sorting Men and Women by College Major and Occupation https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/11/23/sorting-men-and-women-by-college-major-and-occupation/ Men and women tend to sort into different college majors. Even given the same college major, they tend to sort into different jobs.  Carolyn M. Sloane, Erik G. Hurst, and Dan A. Black explore these patterns, and some implications for wage differences between men and women, in "College Majors, Occupations, and the Gender Wage Gap"  ( Journal of Economic Perspectives , Fall 2021, 35:4, pp, 223-48). (Full disclosure: I've been the Managing Editor at JEP since the first issue in 1987, so I am perhaps predisposed to think the articles are of wider interest. Fuller disclosure: All JEP articles back to the first issue have been freely available online for a decade now, courtesy of the American Economic Association, so neither I nor anyone else get any direct financial benefit if you choose to check out the journal.)...

Opioid Overdoses: Worse Again https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/11/19/opioid-overdoses-worse-again/ Deaths from overdoses, especially opioids, are getting worse.  Here's a graph from the Centers for Disease Control . Each point plots the cumulative deaths from drug overdoses in the previous 12 months. Thus, in January 2015 on the left-hand-side of the figure, there had been bout 50,000 drug overdose deaths in the previous 12 months. By April 2021, on the right-hand-side of the figure, there has been about 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the previous 12 months. The figure also shows that the problem seemed to have levelled out for awhile in 2018 and 2019, but with the pandemic in 2020 is started getting worse again. David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser offer a primer on how we got here in their article in the Fall 2021 issue of the  Journal of Economic Perspectives : "When Innovation Goes Wrong: Technological Regress and the Opioid Epidemic."  (Full discl...