News

Wholesale gasoline prices jumped Tuesday and consumers could see higher prices at the pump after a South Bay power outage forced a Torrance fuel refinery to shut down.

Home sales in Los Angeles County have declined for a fourth month in a row, and the number of pending sales has dropped more than 37 percent over August numbers. That’s according to a new report from realtor John Graff, who also notes that pending sales are down a staggering 48.9 percent since September of last year. They’re now down to the lowest level since 2012.

A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute released today adds to the body of evidence that the majority of independent workers actively sought out their arrangements and are happy with them, but a sizable minority is in the so-called gig economy reluctantly.

In many regions, the SCS process has led to innovative policymaking to support healthy, equitable, and sustainable patterns of development. Drawing on reviews of adopted SCSs, as well as extensive input from ClimatePlan partners, transportation planners, and others, this report highlights some of the leading practices that have emerged so far. It also offers recommendations that go beyond existing SCSs in areas such as climate adaptation, water, and affordable housing.

Employment outside of farms grew by 156,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. That was the smallest gain since May, though it was a level that, if sustained, would deliver enough jobs to keep up with a growing population.

Now, a half-dozen years into Gov. Jerry Brown’s futuristic vision of carbon-free transportation, California is encountering even more potholes along the electric highway — obstacles born from both practicalities and politics. Consumers, put off by high costs and concerned about limited range, just aren’t buying into the state’s ambitious aims. Hybrid electric and fully electric cars have been stuck at only 3 percent of new cars sold in the state. Undaunted, the state intends that by 2025, zero-emission cars will make up 15 percent of California’s new car fleet — a fivefold increase. . . California has lagged in expanding ownership much beyond wealthier coastal areas. Research shows that higher-income neighborhoods are buying these cars at 10 times the rate of lower-income areas — a gap that’s widening.

Wind-power producers are rushing to take advantage of a green energy tax credit extended by Congress—and, in a new twist, many are using it to renovate existing wind farms, not just build new ones. . . In rough numbers, a 100-megawatt project with modern turbines and strong winds might produce $10 million a year in tax credits, according to an analysis by Fitch, the credit rating firm. The current government credit is 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, but it is adjusted for inflation and has jumped 53% since it began in 1992.

Electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc. wants to build 4.6 million square feet of new space for its factory in Fremont — a move that would ramp up production to 500,000 cars per year and add more than 3,000 workers.

Women still earn less than men, but they’ve narrowed the gap because they tend to work in jobs that require more social and analytical skills, a new study from the Pew Research Center finds. . . Women’s pay went up 32 percent while men’s pay went down 3 percent from 1980 to 2015, according to the study, “The State of American Jobs.”

The shifting demand for skills in the modern workplace may be working to the benefit of women. Women, who represent 47% of the overall workforce, make up the majority of workers in jobs where social or analytical skills are relatively more important, 55% and 52%, respectively. For their part, men are relatively more engaged in jobs calling for more intensive physical and manual skills, making up 70% of workers in those occupations. This is likely to have contributed to the shrinking of the gender pay gap from 1980 to 2015 given that wages are rising much faster in jobs requiring social and analytical skills.

The trade gap increased 3.0% from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted $40.73 billion in August, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Imports rose 1.2% and exports rose 0.8%.

Since the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has experienced low real GDP growth and low real interest rates, including for long maturities. We show that these developments were largely predictable by calibrating an overlapping-generation model with a rich demographic structure to observed and projected changes in U.S. population, family composition, life expectancy, and labor market activity. The model accounts for a 1 ¼ percentage-point decline in both real GDP growth and the equilibrium real interest rate since 1980, essentially all of the permanent declines in those variables according to some estimates. The model also implies that these declines were especially pronounced over the past decade or so because of demographic factors most-directly associated with the post-war baby boom and the passing of the information technology boom. Our results further suggest that real GDP growth and real interest rates will remain low in coming decades, consistent with the U.S. economy having reached a “new normal.”

The resulting report, Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy, finds that up to 162 million people in Europe and the United States—or 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population—engage in some form of independent work. While demographically diverse, independent workers largely fit into four segments (exhibit): free agents, who actively choose independent work and derive their primary income from it; casual earners, who use independent work for supplemental income and do so by choice; reluctants, who make their primary living from independent work but would prefer traditional jobs; and the financially strapped, who do supplemental independent work out of necessity.

Documents obtained by Scientific American through Freedom of Information Act requests now paint a disturbing picture of the tactics that are used to control the science press. For example, the FDA assures the public that it is committed to transparency, but the documents show that, privately, the agency denies many reporters access—including ones from major outlets such as Fox News—and even deceives them with half-truths to handicap them in their pursuit of a story. At the same time, the FDA cultivates a coterie of journalists whom it keeps in line with threats. And the agency has made it a practice to demand total control over whom reporters can and can’t talk to until after the news has broken, deaf to protests by journalistic associations and media ethicists and in violation of its own written policies.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 1.4 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Thursday in its third estimate of GDP. That was up from the 1.1 percent rate it reported last month and higher than analysts’ expectations.