I haven't seen anything about this, which was buried in an article in today's Times:

After accounting for inflation, hourly wages for blue- and white-collar workers outside management level were 2.8 percent higher in October than a year earlier.

This was the biggest annual increase since 1998, when huge investments in Internet-based companies and services increased wages at the fastest pace since the 1970s. On a monthly basis, the 1 percent gain in real wages recorded in both September and October was the fastest in nearly 35 years.

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Yay team!

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is about to become the darling of the religious right in America -- and it's making him nervous.

The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in the liberal arts, Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income....

"These are not the sort of conclusions I ever thought I would reach when I started looking at charitable giving in graduate school, 10 years ago," he writes in the introduction. "I have to admit I probably would have hated what I have to say in this book."

Still, he says it forcefully, pointing out that liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.