WHEN people are bashing something, it’s always tempting to defend that something, if only for the sake of sport. After a week in which the economics blogosphere jumped all over the policy of occupational licensing, someone was bound to try and make the case for such restrictions, and that someone turned out to be Felix Salmon. Mr Salmon acknowledges that “a lot of the criticism of licensing laws is entirely justified”, but he goes on to argue that:

[B]roadly speaking, the more constraints you have on a profession, the less likely you are to see massive inequality within that profession. If you got rid of licensing for profession X, you’d see many more low-paid Xs than you do right now, and you’d also see a significant uptick in earnings at the very top of the X profession. It’

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FEDERAL RESERVE Chairman Ben Bernanke (most influential economist of the past decade?) gave a speech today discussing the economic outlook and the Fed’s role in supporting economic activity. The Federal Open Market Committee’s policy stance, he argued, is having a positive effect on current economic conditions:

A wide range of market indicators supports the view that the Federal Reserve’s securities purchases have been effective at easing financial conditions. For example, since August, when we announced our policy of reinvesting maturing securities and signaled we were considering more purchases, equity prices have risen significantly, volatility in the equity market has fallen, corporate bond spreads have narrowed, and inflation compensation as measured in the market for inflation-indexed securities has risen from low to more normal levels.

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NEW YORK – Online advertised vacancies for healthcare practitioners, technical staff and support personnel increased significantly in January, according to a report released this week.

The Conference Board’s latest “Help Wanted OnLine Data Series” reveals that online vacancies for healthcare practitioners and technical occupations experienced the largest increase of any job category in January, rising 78,500 to 604,400. The organization said the gain reflects increases in demand for registered nurses and family practitioners.

Labor demand for healthcare support occupations also rose in January, with job vacancies increasing by 16,600 to 143,300. C

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DURING his state visit to America last week, President Hu Jintao of China offered some familiar banalities and worthy pieties, as this week’s Banyan remarks. But he also made a couple of hard, quantitative claims. In a speech on January 20th, President Hu said that cheap inexpensive imports from China had saved American consumers $600 billion over the past decade (2001-2010) and that exports to China had created over 14m jobs around the world.

Those figures were probably provided by the Ministry of Commerce, but I’ve no idea how they were calculated. (The figure of 14m jobs made an earlier appearance in a 2009 piece in the People’s Daily.) In this blogpost and a sequel, I’ll see if I can make sense of President Hu’s arithmetic.

I’ve received great help in this endeavour from Raphael Auer of the Swiss National Bank and Princeton University. In a paper*

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WASHINGTON – Americans remain divided over the Affordable Care Act, while those who oppose it don’t want to see it defunded, according to a new survey conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Opposition to the ACA ticked upward in January as Republicans ramped up efforts to repeal it, yet there is no groundswell of public support for overturning the law, the study found. 

“Budget experts say that the budget deficit cannot be tackled without taking on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending or by raising taxes,” said Kaiser President and CEO Drew Altman. “But the American people do not believe this at all. There is a huge gap in basic beliefs and understandings of the problem and what it takes to solve it.”

The study found that Americans with unfavorable views of the health reform law rose to 50 percent this month, up from 41 percent in December. In

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