America

A trio of labor economists suggest that effort at work is correlated with race...

As The Economist writes, given the long history of making racial slurs about the efforts of some workers, any study casting black and Hispanic men as lazier than whites and Asians is sure to court controversy.

But, a provocative working paper by economists Daniel Hamermesh, Katie Genadek and Michael Burda sticks a tentative toe into these murky waters.

In an era where Amazon steals most of the headlines, it’s easy to forget about brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart.

But, even though the market values the Bezos e-commerce juggernaut at about twice the sum of Walmart, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes that the blue big-box store is very formidable in other ways. For example, revenue and earnings are two areas where Walmart still reigns supreme, and the stock just hit all-time highs yesterday on an earnings beat.

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

It’s nothing new.

Whenever a major country is in decline and approaching collapse, a contingent arises that does everything it can to speed up the process toward collapse.

This is always done in the same way:

Authored by Julieanne Geiger via OilPrice.com,

If you can imagine a massive, horrifying beast with some 6 million miles of tentacles that costs up to $33 billion to feed and $5 trillion to replace, then you can imagine the U.S. electricity grid.

But it’s a beast that can possibly be vanquished, finally.

The national opioid epidemic is even larger drain on the US economy than previously believed, according to a new analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The cost of opioid-related deaths in 2015 was $504 billion, according to the CEA – a figure equivalent to 2.8% of that year’s gross domestic product.