The Best Thing to Say to Someone Who Won’t Understand You

a post by Lori Deschene for the Tiny Buddha blog


“True love is born from understanding.” ~Buddha

I believe one of our strongest desires in life is to feel understood.

We want to know that people see our good intentions and not only get where we’re coming from but get us.

We want to know they see us. They recognize the thoughts, feelings, and struggles that underlie our choices, and they not only empathize but maybe even relate. And maybe they’d do the same thing if they were in our shoes.

Maybe, if they’d been where we’ve been, if they’d seen what we’ve seen, they’d stand right where we are now, in the same circumstances, with the same beliefs, making the same choices.

Underneath all these maybes is the desire to feel validated.

We’re social creatures, and we thrive when feel a sense of belonging. That requires a certain sense of safety, which hinges upon feeling valued and accepted. But those feelings don’t always come easily.

There was a time when one of my relationships felt incredibly unsafe. I never felt understood or validated, and worse, I often got the sense the other person didn’t care to understand me.

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Price and wage setting when accurate decisions are costly: Implications for monetary policy transmission

a column by James Costain and Anton Nakov for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Recent low inflation is motivating new research to better characterise how individual firms and workers set prices and wages.

This column describes a new approach which emphasises that the costs of decision making may limit the precision of price and wage changes. As well as making better sense of price and wage changes in microeconomic data, this new approach also strikes a middle ground between two leading models of monetary policy transmission, improving our quantitative understanding of the short-run effects of monetary policy on output and the short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

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5 Things You Need to Start Forming Better Habits

a post by Susie Pettit for YourTango.com [via the World of Psychology blog]


Good habits will change your whole life.

If you’re interested in life advice for self-improvement, you’ll need to learn how to form good habits and how long it takes to break bad ones.

When it comes to forming good habits, there are no golden rules.

10 Ways You Can Become a Better Version of Yourself

It does not take two weeks, 21 days, 1,000 hours, or 10,000 hours. I’ve stopped behaviors that I’ve been doing for years in a moment, I’ve also taken months to wean myself away from whatever habit I was doing. At any moment, at any time, on any day of the week, you can choose to do something differently.

What is needed to start a new habit or change a bad one? Here are the five things you need to form good habits and start your self-improvement journey.

1. A Strong Why
   
   
2. Accountability
   
   
3. Visualization
   
   
4. Mindset Shift
   
   
5. To Take Action Every Day

Continue reading to fill in the details. I had not read all thisd about habit changing when I finally stopped smoking but I now realise that I had a very strong why. I needed to support my husband in his effort to stop on doctor’s orders. Incidentally he started again after about three weeks. After 14 years I am still tobacco free.

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The individual consequences of occupational decline

a column by Per-Anders Edin, Tiernan Evans, Georg Graetz, Sofia Hernnäs and Guy Michaels for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

As new technologies replace human labour in a growing number of tasks, employment in some occupations invariably falls.

This column compares outcomes for similar workers in similar occupations over 28 years to explore the consequences of large declines in occupational employment for workers’ careers. While mean losses in earnings and employment for those initially working in occupations that later declined are relatively moderate, low-earners lose significantly more.

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On the socially optimal labour share of income

a column by Jakub Growiec, Peter McAdam and Jakub Mućk for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

The worldwide decline of the labour share is worrying, because the labour share is thought to be too low.

This column attempts to derive an estimate of the socially optimal labour share. The calibration implies that the socially optimal share is 17% higher than the historical average.

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Hazel&rsquo's comment:
I will freely admit that I did not manage to follow all the statistical analysis. I have been too long awau from the coalface.

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Linking decent work with physical and mental health: A psychology of working perspective

an article by Ryan D.Duffy, Haram J.Kim, Nicholas P.Gensmer, Richard P.Douglass and Jessica W.England (University of Florida, USA), Trisha L.Raque-Bogdan (University of Denvert, USA) and AysenurBuyukgoze-Kavasa (Ondokuz Mayıs University, Turkey) published in Journal of Vocational Behavior Volume 112 (June 2019)

Highlights

• Collected data diverse sample of employed adults (N = 497) with an annual household income under $50,000
• Examined links between decent work, need satisfaction, and physical health grounded in Psychology of Working Theory
• Decent work strongly predicted survival, social contribution, and self-determination need satisfaction.
• All three need satisfactions fully mediated the link of decent work to mental health.
• Survival needs satisfaction partially mediated the link between decent work and physical health.

Abstract

Drawing from a psychology of working perspective, the current study examined links between decent work and health among a sample (N = 497) of employed adults with an annual household income under $50,000.

A theory driven mediation model was tested positioning decent work as a predictor of mental and physical health via need satisfaction at work. Decent work strongly predicted survival, social contribution, and self-determination need satisfaction.

Regarding mental health, hypotheses were mainly supported as all three need satisfactions mediated the link of decent work to mental health.

Regarding physical health, hypotheses were partially supported as only survival needs partially mediated this relation.

Overall, findings suggest that securing decent work may promote increased mental health primarily because work is meeting individual needs and may promote physical health – in part – by helping meet survival needs. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

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The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-educated Men

a paper (NBER Working Paper No. 25577) by Ariel J. Binder and John Bound (National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, USA) republished in Journal of Economic Prospects Volume 33 Number 2 (Spring 2019)

Abstract

Over the last half century, U.S. wage growth stagnated, wage inequality rose, and the labor force participation rate of prime-age men steadily declined.

In this article, we examine these labor market trends, focusing on outcomes for males without a college education.

Though wages and participation have fallen in tandem for this population, we argue that the canonical neo-classical framework, which postulates a labor demand curve shifting inward across a stable labor supply curve, does not reasonably explain the data. Alternatives we discuss include adjustment frictions associated with labor demand shocks and effects of the changing marriage market—that is, the fact that fewer less-educated men are forming their own stable families—on male labor supply incentives.

Our observations lead us to be skeptical of attempts to attribute the secular decline in male labor-force participation to a series of separately-acting causal factors.

We argue that the correct interpretation probably involves complicated feedback between falling labor demand and other factors which have disproportionately affected men without a college education.

JEL Classificagtion: E24, J12, J21, J22, J23, J31

Full text (PDF 48pp)

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