News From the Control Tower - 8/19/2021
News from the Control Tower: Our weekly curated list of news stories affecting you and your finances.
This week’s reads include:
Welcome back to school, where counselors, substitute teachers and ketchup packets are in short supply
2. The Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles
A race is on to produce lithium in the United States, but competing projects are taking very different approaches to extracting the vital raw material. Some might not be very green.
3. These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs
When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. Why be good at one job, they thought, when they could be mediocre at two?
4. What Has Driven the Recent Increase in Retirements?
During the pandemic, the share of retirees in the U.S. population rose much faster than its normal pace. Typically, an increase in this share is driven by more people transitioning from employment to retirement. However, we show that the recent increase was instead driven by fewer people transitioning from retirement back into employment, likely due to pandemic-related health risks. More retirees may rejoin the workforce as these health risks fade, but the retirement share is unlikely to return to a normal level for some time.
5. Inflation wiped out America's pay raises
In fact, compensation is now lower than it was in December 2019, when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University.
Bonus: Speaking in whistles
Dozens of traditional cultures use a whistled form of their native language for long-distance communication. You could, too.