Home » Posts tagged 'trends' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: trends

Golden Years?

Posted on by | 13 Comments

Are you ready for retirement?  While the idea might have its appeal, especially with the winter weather making for long commutes this year, an awful lot of workers are not on a track to be able to retire.  That’s according to a survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), conducted annually.  They found that only 18% are “very confident” that they’ll have enough for retirement and a further 37% are “somewhat confident”.  That’s up from the 2013 survey, in which only 13% was “very confident”.

The implications go beyond any one family’s ability to retire, however.  The decline in workforce participation has been largely due to retirement since the start of 2011, and retirement opens jobs for young people.  The wave of retirement that should accelerate after 2017 is one of the main reasons Barataria has hope for the 2020s.  But is retirement nothing more than a dream for many workers today?
Continue reading →

Three Million Reads, One Purpose

Posted on by | 8 Comments

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 (KJV)

Sometime today, Barataria will hit 3 million total pageviews. Over 6 2/3 years that averages out to 37k per month or 2.7k per post. The views came from regular readers, social media promotion, search engine arrivals, and more than a few people who stumbled in accidentally. Things are pretty tough for me right now, so if you like what you’ve read I’d very much appreciate a donation (which may get my car a new alternator) to help keep this effort going!

But what matters most are you, the readers, because without you there’d be no point to writing at all. The ideas and perspectives I spend time thinking through only come to life after you’ve read and responded, refining them and making them better. It’s a good time to go over this strange year, 2013, to find what conclusions we’ve come to as a community – and to ask you where you think this should go!

Continue reading →

Retiring Inequality

Posted on by | 29 Comments

Income inequality is one of the biggest barriers to sustained growth today.  You can’t have a consumer economy without income reasonably well distributed, and such an economy is going to have more sustained, reliable growth.  But as we’ve shown before, income inequality has grown since 1968, threatening long term growth.

Here is another way to look at that rising inequality as part of a long-term trend that defined 1968-2000 – the expansion of the workforce and subsequent collapse of that expansion that will solidify  when the Baby Boom hits retirement.  Economic changes are often demographic at heart, and we are due for some major upheaval that we need to be ready for.

Continue reading →