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The Five Numbers You Need to Know From the May Jobs Report

Woof. May was a dog of a month for hiring.


Woof. May was a dog of a month for hiring, according to the latest jobs numbers released by the government today. After an optimistic start to the year, it’s clear after several disappointing results that the U.S. labor market is still stagnant. Businesses, concerned about Europe’s ability to contain its financial crisis and the slowing economies of major developing countries like China, Brazil and India, appear reluctant to hire. Let’s dig into the numbers.

69,000. The net number of non-farm jobs created in May. It's the lowest number of the year, and with newly updated measures of jobs growth in March and April also revised downward, it enunciates the slow growth in the labor market.

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Moving On Up

If you want to be more successful, perhaps the best thing you can do is relocate.

"The biggest problem we have in all migration research is that migration is a choice," says David McKenzie, a senior economist at the World Bank and an expert in migration. "Most people don’t make that choice. People stay where they’re born."

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Could You Live on $300 a Week? How About $0? The 99ers Lose Their Insurance

As public assistance dries up, the most vulnerable of the unemployed are being hung out to dry. What can we do to fix the problem?

Across the country, long-term unemployment insurance is drying up. Some 200,000 unemployed Americans lost access to government benefits earlier this month, most in California. All told, at least 500,000 people will fall off the rolls this year.

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TED's Taboo: What's Too Controversial for the Hipster Confab?

Real talk about rich people is the last sacred cow at conference where the entry fee starts at $7,500—and reaches heights of $125,000.


Visit the website for TED, the conference for creative techies and do-gooding hipsters that vaulted the 18-minute lecture into an art form, and you’ll find speakers discussing everything from “Sculpting Waves in Wood and Time” to “Building U.S.-China relations … by Banjo.”

What you won’t find is a recent TED talk by Michael Hanauer, a wealthy venture capitalist, that argues income inequality is a problem that threatens the economy, and that higher taxes on the wealthy are part of the solution.

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What's Killing the Electric Car? The Price of Batteries

Ford's new EV is impressive, but like other automakers, it's facing a real barrier in battery technology.

At last week's Electric Vehicle Symposium in Los Angeles, a consortium of automakers from the United States and Europe unveiled a speedy new standardized charger for electric vehicles.

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Meet the French Socialist Who Could Save Europe

A socialist president in France is inspiring jitters, but the Francois Hollande could be just what the doctor ordered for Europe—and the world.


Over the weekend, the citizens of France elected a Francois Hollande, a socialist, to be their president. Here in the United States, attempts to comprehend this may be futile, given national confusion over whether or not our own president is a socialist,* but there’s no need to panic over this particular European specter. In fact, Hollande’s election may be exactly what Europe needs.

The key issue in Europe right now is hashing out the financial crisis that has already brought low governments in Greece, Spain, and Italy. A simplified version of the story is that most European countries got together under one currency, like the U.S. dollar, but didn’t put the bulk of their government spending under one organ, like the U.S. Congress. Without those two tools unified, some European countries ran up more debt than they could manage and now find themselves in danger of losing access to funding for public spending while their banks teeter, drying up credit that entrepreneurs need.

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