These are the highest paying jobs in San Antonio

By Jessica Miller of mysanantonio.com.

I made a table out of the numbers they have.

Rank	Occupation	Annual mean wage
1	PSYCHIATRISTS	$244,440
2	FAMILY DOCTORS	$237,670
3	CHIEF EXECUTIVES	$231,850
4	SURGEONS	$212,680
5	DENTISTS	$163,660
6	MARKETING MANAGERS	$154,160
7	ARCHITECTURAL AND ENGINEERING MANAGERS	$144,930
8	COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGERS	$142,940
9	FINANCIAL MANAGERS	$142,340
10	NATURAL SCIENCES MANAGERS	$140,200
11	SALES MANAGERS	$137,440
12	OPTOMETRISTS	$135,890
13	HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGERS	$129,700
14	LAWYERS	$128,280
15	PHARMACISTS	$127,520
16	PURCHASING MANAGERS	$124,280
17	PUBLIC RELATIONS AND FUNDRAISING MANAGERS	$120,480
18	GENERAL and OPERATION MANAGERS	$120,710
19	SALES ENGINEERS	$116,010
20	AEROSPACE ENGINEERS	$114,000
21	ADMINISTRATIVE LAW JUDGES, ADJUDICATORS & HEARING OFFICERS	$112,700
22	COMPUTER & INFORMATION RESEARCH SCIENTISTS	$112,110
23	INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION MANAGER	$111,650
24	AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER	$110,810
25	NURSE PRACTITIONER	$109,550

See also from Nov. 2020 33 of the Highest-Paying Majors You Can Choose in College.

Relate posts:

What College Majors Pay The Highest?

50 College Majors With the Best Return on Investment

Studying Economics Increases Wages a Lot

March Madness Is a Moneymaker. Most Schools Still Operate in Red.

College athletic departments run an average deficit of around $16 million, according to one sports economist 

By Jo Craven McGinty of The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

"fewer than 10% of Division I athletic departments . . . generated enough revenue to cover the expenses of their sports programs."

"in 2019, just 68 of 351 Division I men’s basketball programs generated more revenue than expenses. And in 2016 . . . 73 of 252 Division I teams earned more than they spent."

"In 2019, athletic departments across all three NCAA divisions generated $10.6 billion in revenue from all sports and spent more than $18.9 billion. The two biggest costs were financial aid for athletes ($3.6 billion) and coaches’ compensation ($3.7 billion)."

"only 25 of the 351 Division I athletic departments that provided data to the NCAA for 2019 generated more revenue than they spent.

“The average deficit is around $16 million in the athletic departments,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College.

All 25 moneymakers were part of the Football Bowl Subdivision, one of three Division I subcategories. FBS schools, such as the University of Alabama, participate in bowl games"

"The NCAA’s biggest source of income is March Madness, which produces 75% or more of the organization’s annual revenue, Mr. Fulks said. (The NCAA doesn’t control football broadcast rights.)"

 Related posts:

Cost of attendance stipends in college sports 

How The Economics Of College Sports Might Be Distorted 

All is not well (financially) in the world of college football

Will Moving To NCAA Division I Status Pay Off For The University of the Incarnate Word?

The Flutie Effect: When The Teams Win, More Students Apply To The College.

There's A New Book On The Economics Of College Sports 

NCAA Takes Another Court Hit on Athlete Compensation: The Ninth Circuit ruled that the organization’s restrictions violated federal antitrust law 

The NCAA wants an antitrust exemption from Congress so it can oversee name, image and likeness deals

What Economists Say About "March Madness"

Public universities spend more per per athlete than they do per student

 

Company has to pay $108 million dollar fine

See Pilgrim’s Pride Is First to Plead Guilty to Chicken Price-Fixing by Michael Hirtzer of Bloomberg News. I will be covering anti-trust laws pretty soon in some of my classes and colluding on prices violates those laws.

"Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., one of the top U.S. chicken producers, has become the first company sentenced to pay a criminal fine as part of an ongoing antitrust investigation into the industry by the Justice Department.

The JBS SA-owned firm pleaded guilty to conspiring with rivals to illegally prop up prices between 2012 and 2017, and will pay $108 million, the Justice Department said Tuesday. That adds to hundreds of millions of dollars in civil settlements that the chicken industry has already made.

The fines and payments are likely not over, a sign that the extreme consolidation that’s occurred in the chicken industry over past decades is starting to exact a cost. The investigation into chicken antitrust is ongoing, the Justice Department said, and 10 individuals at major chicken producers have previously been charged.

The “guilty plea demonstrates our unwavering commitment to prosecuting companies that violate the nation’s antitrust laws, especially when it involves something as central to everyday life as the food we eat,” said Richard Powers, acting assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s antitrust division.

The chicken industry has also been embroiled in a class action lawsuit for years. Major buyers including Chick-Fil-A and Target Corp. have accused poultry companies of fixing prices. Pilgrim’s earlier this year said it would pay $75 million to settle with plaintiffs, while Tyson Foods Inc., America’s biggest meatmaker, said it would pay $221.5 million.

Pilgrim’s said the plea marks the end of the government’s investigation into the company.

The government “will bring no further charges against Pilgrim’s in this matter, provided the company complies with the terms and provisions of the agreement,” said Cameron Bruett, a spokesman for Pilgrim’s."

The CPI increased 1.4% in 2020

The 1.4% means that the CPI in December 2020 (260.474) was 1.4% higher than what it was in December 2019 (258.811).

The 260.474 means that what cost $100 in 1982 cost $260.47 in December 2020.

Now the CPI can go up and down during the course of the year and the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates it for every month. So if it increased every month but then fell quite a bit in December, it might not look like there was much inflation.

They also calculate an average CPI over the twelve months and then compare that to the one for the previous year. That inflation rate for 2020 was 1.2%. Those two figures are usually pretty close to each other, but not always. 

In 2008, the Dec.-Dec. method gives a 0.1% inflation rate while the monthly averaging method was 3.8%. In 2009, those numbers were 2.7% and -0.4%. So they can be pretty far apart.

To see this data (actually going back to 2013), go to Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2021.

See also Prices, and Confusion, Set to Rise as Pandemic Fades: Price gains remain muted, but only because services demand is still depressed by the Covid-19 crisis by Justin Lahart of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The things that have kept inflation low during the Covid-19 crisis are a lot different than the ones that used to keep it low. A whipsawing of prices when the pandemic passes is something to look out for.

The Labor Department on Wednesday reported that U.S. consumer prices rose 0.4% in December from November, putting them 1.4% above their year earlier level. Core prices, which exclude food and energy items to better capture inflation’s trend, rose 0.1% from November, and were up 1.6% on the year. 

The Federal Reserve’s aim is for 2% inflation, and the consumer price measures it follows run cooler than the Labor Department’s.

Under inflation’s hood, though, there are some big shifts. Prices for food at home—groceries and the like—remain elevated as a result of the pandemic, and were up 3.9% in December from a year earlier. Meanwhile, prices for lodging at hotels and the like were down 11.2%."

"Core goods prices were up 1.7% on the year last month" (excluding food and energy)

"Core services prices were up 1.6%"

Monkeys seem to be selfish and rational

From Marginal Revolution.

"At the Uluwatu temple in Bali, monkeys mean business. The long-tailed macaques who roam the ancient site are infamous for brazenly robbing unsuspecting tourists and clinging on to their possessions until food is offered as ransom payment.

Researchers have found they are also skilled at judging which items their victims value the most and using this information to maximise their profit.

Shrewd macaques prefer to target items that humans are most likely to exchange for food, such as electronics, rather than objects that tourists care less about, such as hairpins or empty camera bags, said Dr Jean-Baptiste Leca, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of Lethbridge in Canada and lead author of the study.

Mobile phones, wallets and prescription glasses are among the high-value possessions the monkeys aim to steal. “These monkeys have become experts at snatching them from absent-minded tourists who didn’t listen to the temple staff’s recommendations to keep all valuables inside zipped handbags firmly tied around their necks and backs,” said Leca.

After spending more than 273 days filming interactions between the animals and temple visitors, researchers found that the macaques would demand better rewards – such as more food – for higher-valued items.

Bargaining between a monkey robber, tourist and a temple staff member quite often lasted several minutes. The longest wait before an item was returned was 25 minutes, including 17 minutes of negotiation. For lower-valued items, the monkeys were more likely to conclude successful bartering sessions by accepting a lesser reward.

Here is the full story, via David Curran."

A Special Valentine's Message On Romantic Love

But first some links to related news stories:

The first one is Researchers at AAAS Annual Meeting Explore the Science of Kissing. The following quote gives you an idea of what it is all about: "Kissing, it turns out, unleashes chemicals that ease stress hormones in both sexes and encourage bonding in men, though not so much in women." I guess economists call this "interdependent utility functions." Meaning that what brings one person pleasure brings brings the other person pleasure, and vice-versa.

The other is Cocoa Prices Create Chocolate Dilemma. (that is from 2009) The article opens with "Soaring cocoa prices are creating a Valentine's Day dilemma for chocolate makers. They don't want to raise retail prices when recession-weary consumers are trying to limit their spending." The problem is crop diseases in Ivory Coast and Ghana. You might need to be a WSJ subscriber to read the whole article.

Here is a new article from yesterday's San Antonio Express-News (2-13-2011). Romance in bloom at workplace: Survey indicates 59% have taken the risk-filled leap. It seems like many people admit to having a romance at work and/or meeting their spouse at work. So what starts out as economic activity leads to some other needs being met.

Now the economic definition of romantic love.

 Abstract: "Romantic love is characterized by a preoccupation with a deliberately restricted set of perceived characteristics in the love object which are viewed as means to some ideal ends. In the process of selecting the set of perceived characteristics and the process of determining the ideal ends, there is also a systematic failure to assess the accuracy of the perceived characteristics and the feasibility of achieving the ideal ends given the selected set of means and other pre-existing ends.

The study of romantic love can provide insight into the general process of introducing novelty into a system of interacting variables. Novelty, however, is functional only in an open system characterized by uncertainty where the variables have not all been functionally looped and system slacks are readily available to accommodate new things. In a closed system where all the objective functions and variables must be compatible to achieve stability and viability, adjustments in the value of some variables through romantic idealization may be dysfunctional if they represent merely residual responses to the creative combination of the variables in the open sub-system."

The author was K. K. Fung of the Department of Economics, Memphis State University, Memphis. It was from a journal article in 1979. More info on it is at this link. The entire article, which is not too long, can be found at this link.

Then there was this related article: Love really is blind, U.S. study finds. Here is an exerpt:

"Love really is blind, at least when it comes to looking at others, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

College students who reported they were in love were less likely to take careful notice of other attractive men or women, the team at the University of California Los Angeles and dating Web site eHarmony found.

"Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind," said Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony, whose study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

"It's almost like love puts blinders on people," added Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA."

More links:

How to Be a Better Valentine, Through Economics by economist Paul Oyer.

Here’s what science says is the secret ingredient to making your love spark 

Can Giving Up Money And Material Things Lead To More Love?

What Do Men In China Need To Get A Bride?

Adam Smith, Marriage Counselor

A Special Valentine's Message On Romantic Love

Can You Put A Price Tag On Love?

Do Opposites Attract? Not Usually, Except Maybe When It Comes To Money

Return of the Love Headhunters

eHarmony To Provide Personal Counselors To Help You Find Mr. Or Ms. Right

Economist Paul Zak, aka Dr. Love (he studies the brain with "neuroeconomics")

This is your brain on love   (brain scans and biology seem to confirm the economic definition given above)

Dollars & Sex: The Blog of Economist Marina Adshade

Do Women Really Value Income over Looks in a Mate? by Marina Adshade