Employers shouldn’t be surprised that Americans won’t take their crummy, low-wage jobs. Dan Gross’s latest column.

After enduring grueling work schedules for several years, many people, for the first time in several years, feel empowered people to ask for more—be it money, time off, stock options, bonuses, promotions, or the ability to work from home. “It’s not that workers feel entitled. It’s that they feel like they’ve earned it because there’s a little more room out there,” says one outplacement CEO. And, if employees feel like companies are not responsive, the high performers eventually will leave.

With new unemployment figures showing a stagnant job market, Nancy Cook asks, Are Fed-Up Workers Getting their Gumption Back?

The interplay between prosperity—and poverty—and religious observance has become a recent fascination of a small number of economists and other social scientists, for understanding these patterns can help us better predict the future. Do hard times produce more fundamentalists? Do prosperous times produce more do-gooders? Will a lengthy economic slump pull people into the pews to pray for jobs and ladle soup for needier neighbors? Or will it keep people at home on the couch, nursing psychic wounds and cursing their creator?

Lisa Miller, on whether recessions make us more religious. 

American Jews are always worrying about the fate of American Jewry, of course. Intermarriage rates, hovering around 50 percent, are perennially cited as the prime factor in Jews’ inevitable extinction; and in The New York Review of Books last month, the journalist Peter Beinart argued that unless “establishment Jewry” made room for Jewish dissent about Israel, it would wake up to find “a mass of secular Jews who range from apathetic to appalled.” But on the day-to-day level, the high cost of the basics—synagogue membership, in particular—is troubling, both outdated as a business model and onerous to families having to choose between Hebrew school and math tutoring. A 2005 study put the average yearly synagogue membership at $1,100—but in big cities, fees can be twice or even three times as much (and, anecdotally at least, higher than churches, which often depend on voluntary donations rather than dues). At the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (italics mine) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch says dues are “consistent with everyone else’s,” about $3,100 a year. (He, like virtually all rabbis, vows never to turn someone away for an inability to pay.)

Lisa Miller, on the high cost of being Jewish

American women are already the breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two thirds of American households; in the European Union, women filled 75 percent of the 8 million new jobs created since 2000. Even with the pay gap factored into the equation, economists predict that by 2024, the average woman in the U.S. and a number of rich European countries will outearn the average man. And she’ll be spending that money: as a new book on female economic power, Influence, points out, American women are responsible for 83 percent of all consumer purchases; they hold 89 percent of U.S. bank accounts, 51 percent of all personal wealth, and are worth more than $5 trillion in consumer spending power—larger than the entire Japanese economy. On a global level, women are the biggest emerging market in the history of the planet—more than twice the size of India and China combined. It’s a seismic change, and by all indications it will continue: of the 15 job categories expected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two are filled primarily by women.

The firm of Bennett and Ellison, on why the economic recovery will be staffed by women.

Fareed, on “Obama’s CEO Problem:”

The Federal Reserve recently reported that America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash on their balance sheets. By any calculation (for example, as a percentage of assets), this is higher than it has been in almost half a century. And yet, most corporations are not spending this money on new plants, equipment, or workers. Were they to begin loosening their purse strings, hundreds of billions of dollars would start pouring through the economy. And these investments would likely have greater effect and staying power than a government stimulus.

[snip]

Now, let me be clear. I think there is a strong case for a temporary and targeted government stimulus….But government spending can only be a bridge to private-sector investment. The key to a sustainable recovery and robust economic growth is to get companies to start investing in America. So why are they reluctant, despite having mounds of cash lying around? I put this question to a series of business leaders over the past few days. They were all expansive on the topic, and all wanted to stay off the record, for fear of offending people in Washington.

Economic uncertainty was the primary cause of their caution. “We’ve just been through a tsunami, and that produces caution,” one said to me. But in addition to economics, they kept talking about politics, about the uncertainty surrounding regulations and taxes. Some have even begun to speak out publicly. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, complained last Friday that government was not in sync with entrepreneurs. The Business Roundtable, which had supported the Obama administration, has begun to complain about the myriad new laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington.

Making a value judgment about deflation depends in part on which side of the balance sheet you sit on, and on what’s going on in the broader economy. Borrowers with fixed-rate loans—like the government, many companies, and homeowners—will cheer for inflation and worry about deflation. When wages and prices grow modestly each year, it’s easier to stay current with existing debt. And when there’s lots of unused economic capacity—shuttered factories, large numbers of unemployed people—a little inflation can be just what the doctor ordered. Continually falling prices act as a disincentive to investment and risk taking. Moreover, many economists and most central bankers believe the ideal rate of inflation is slightly above zero. “Experience shows that a rate of inflation around 2 or 3 percent helps the economy to perform at full potential with maximum sustainable employment,” says Joseph Gagnon, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. In fact, the Federal Reserve, the nation’s chief inflation fighter, actually wants prices to rise. One of the Fed’s mandates is to provide “price stability,” which means a consistent, reliable annual inflation rate. Without saying it in so many words, the Fed designs monetary policy to target inflation of between 1.5 and 2.0 percent per year.

Gross, on inflation v. deflation

We do! And we’re not at all bored! Of course, there are no jobs…