Kruse Kronicle

Paul Collier on Moralistic Conceptualizations of Climate Change

From Paul Collier's The Plundered Planet: Why we must - and how we can - manage nature for global prosperity:

... The moral discourse on global warming starts from the attribution of blame, or, to return to the caricature of medieval Christian theology, of guilt. Industrial capitalism is guilty of polluting the world with carbon and must now pay for its sin. This morality tale is music to the ears of those in the rich world who hate industrial capitalism: an alliance of the anti-industrial values of the aristocracy, exemplified by Prince Charles, and the anti-capitalist values of Marxists. It is also seductive to the marginalized societies of the bottom billion, which aspire to industrial capitalism but have not achieved it. They sense the opportunity to refresh the guilt-ridden colonialist hangover: the West is responsible for their poverty. Global warming gives colonial guilt a new lease on life. Victimhood is back in business. Approaches to climate change are encumbered by such ethical baggage, much of it unhelpful.

Here is another thought experiment to cut through the thicket.  Suppose scientists discovered that the reason why we in the North die before we reach the age of 150 is that cassava, a crop grown by poor peasant farmers in Africa, emitted ions which corroded the air in northern latitudes. Does this discovery give us all a claim for compensation from African farmers? The answer, obviously, is that it does not. Since the farmers did not know, they incur no liability. Now push this one step further. Once the science is accepted, what should happen? Clearly, African peasants should cease to grow cassava, but who should bear the cost? Should Africans simply recognize that killing us is an unacceptable price to pay for growing their favorite crop, or should we in the North compensate them for not killing us' Having decided who should pick up the liability for those deathly cassava ions, apply the same principle to global warming. The baggage encumbering climate change - sin and guilt - is not intrinsic to the structure of the problem, but imported from other agendas.

A further thought experiment. Suppose that the entire world had industrialized at the same time as the West. Carbon emissions would have built up beyond dangerous levels before scientific knowledge advanced sufficiently to understand it properly. Our understanding of climate change would still only really have become convincing around the millennium, by which time it would have been too late. Alternatively, if none of the world had industrialized, we would not now have the problem of global warming, but nor would we have the ability to deliver prosperity: The painful but reasonable conclusion is that it was fortuitous that only part of the world industrialized. This gave science the time to understand global warming in time for us to take preemptive action. The corollary of such a skewed pattern of global industrialization is that some societies have remained impoverished.

The case for helping the bottom billion, a case I believe is overwhelming, is that they are needy because they have been unlucky enough not to have had the opportunities open to the rest of us. The basis for helping them is not that they are victims of our industrial greed. Had no part of the world industrialized there would be no path to prosperity. Had every part of the world industrialized we would now be frying. As it is, we have learned that it will be entirely feasible for the world to industrialize and prosper as long as we all make the relatively modest adjustments involved in low-carbon growth. Nobody need feel guilty about past carbon emissions. Nobody is entitled to feel victimized. However, the lucky parts of the world should behave generously toward those that have been unlucky. ... (195-197)

Protecting Endangered Species to Extinction

CBS News: Can hunting endangered animals save the species?

This is a fascinating piece about bringing endangered speicies back from extinction through the use of property rights ... in Texas. Some background ...

By Mid-Twentieth Century, elephants were endangered in Africa. Hunters hunted them vigorously. Locals viewed them as oversized rodents that frequently destoryed their crops. In 1977, with more than 160,ooo elephants in existence, Kenya placed a complete ban on hunting elephants. Barely more than a decade later, there were 16,000 elephants left.

Also with diminshing herds, Zimbabwe took another apporach. Hunting areas were established with proceeds going to compensate locals for damages caused by elephants and to elepehant preservation. Experts calculate a sustainable number of elephants that can me hunted each year and hunters bid pay for the privilege of hunting them. From 1989 through 2005, the elephant population grew from 37,000 to 85,000, and is believed to top 100,000 today. Meanwhile, hunters get to hunt and the locals have an incentive to preserve the wildlife. (See my earlier post: Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community)

The story below is about conservation of three other species in Texase using Zimbabwean methods. Yet environtmentalists are successfully winning legal battles to stop this approach in favor of the Kenyan model, effectively protecting species to extinction.

(CBS News) 

The scimitar horned oryx . . . the addax . . . the dama gazelle - three elegant desert antelope that you'd hope to see on a journey through Africa, except that their numbers are dwindling there. Which is why Lara Logan went to Texas -- yes, Texas. There, on large grassland ranches, some exotic species that are endangered in the wild have been brought back in large numbers. But there's a catch: a percentage of the herd is hunted every year by hunters who pay big money for a big catch. The ranchers say this limited "culling" gives them the money they need to care for the animals and conserve the species. But animal rights activists don't buy that argument, claiming the hunts are "canned" and that hunting is wholly inconsistent with conservancy.

Coke, Soda, or Pop?

Below is one of my favorite charts. It was published in 2003. I haven't ever investigated their sampling methods but even with under sampling it seems unlikely that you would get such distinct patterns. I have always been intrigued by the "soda island" in western Missouri and eastern Illinois, centered on St. Louis. (HT: John Brandkamp)

The Real Romney and Gingrich Debate

This is too close to being the real thing.

(HT: Clark Cowden via Gary Anderson)

The new black theology

Christian Century: The new black theology

Retrieving ancient sources to challenge racism

What is revolutionary about these three black theologians is that they rely heavily on dogmatic texts from the patristic period to the Reformation. Why is this novel? Because nonwhite male theologians have historically been hesitant to trust these sources—and for good reason. In the worst of times, classic theological texts have been used to oppress persons of color and women. In the best of times, the overwhelming attention given these particular voices obscured other voices, giving the impression that the only Christians speaking and writing about God for the last 2,000 years were European men. Those who did not fit that description simply did not know how to relate to a tradition that claimed to speak for but did not reflect them.

James Cone, considered the father of contemporary black theology, expressed these frustrations four decades ago. "American theology," he wrote, "is racist. . . . It identifies theology as dispassionate analysis of 'the tradition,' unrelated to the suffering of the oppressed." The result, Cone observed, was that "an increasing number of black religionists are finding it difficult to be black and be identified with traditional theological thought forms." Disconnecting themselves from the Anglo-European white tradition, black intellectuals looked to other sources to describe how African-American Christians talked about and related to God.

Many Western theologians in the last few decades have returned to premodern theological sources, representing an intellectual renaissance of sorts as Christians look back to classical theologians from Augustine to Maximus the Confessor to Catherine of Siena for expressions of present-day faith. This was not entirely unexpected as Christianity tried to free itself from the hold the Enlightenment had on the church for so long.

However, what is quite surprising is that persons of color and women are increasingly finding their way to these sources. This shift in black theology's relationship to traditional Christianity means that the rest of the church can no longer ignore black theology's claims. So long as black theologians felt that they had good reason to pursue nontraditional and extra-Christian sources in such secular social theory as anthropology, cultural studies, sociology and political science, white theologians could keep black theology at arm's length. When black theology championed the black church as the location of God's preference and accused white Christianity of heresy, white theologians only saw secularism run amok. Or at least they could claim as much, allowing them to dismiss much black theology outright no matter how scripturally anchored it was.

Black theology's return to pre-Enlightenment sources is also surprising in that the Enlightenment has often been credited with overcoming oppression. In a fascinating reversal, Jennings, Carter and Bantum turn the Enlighten­ment's claim of liberation on its head, locating in that movement a basis of oppression and looking instead to ancient and medieval Christian theology to free us from contemporary racism. ...

... In other words, black theology is reclaiming the theological tradition as its own and, under the banner of orthodoxy, taking on all comers. By rethinking the Enlightenment's promises of enlightenment and rearticulating racial existence in the language of the church's most sacred doctrines, black theology is now (or once again) making a case that cannot be denied. The debate is no longer fixed on racial identity politics (a quagmire from which none can escape); rather, it takes place on the level playing field of orthodoxy.

The new theology reminds us that it was a mistake to call black theology "black theology" in the first place. Consistency at least would have required that European theology equally bear the burden of qualifications ("colonizing theology"). To be sure, patronizing name-calling allowed black theology to develop its own voice in its own time, just as the segregated black church developed its own styles, saints and stories. But because the margins were managed by white theologians, those voices were heard by whites, and when heard they were regarded as less than equal and so were not allowed to challenge white hegemony and help white theology be anything other than white theology.

Accordingly, the new black theology is best described as the new theology, no (dis)qualifying adjective necessary. In it we see Christian theology at long last incarnating the material conditions whereby the good news becomes good news.

A Tale of Two Imperialisms

First Things: A Tale of Two Imperialisms  Peter Liethart

It is common these days to read the Bible as an anti-imperial epic, the story of God and Israel, then (for Christians) God and Jesus, against empire. “Come out, come out from Babylon, my people!” is the theme.

It’s a hard sell for all sorts of reasons. Jeremiah urges the people of Judah to enter not exit Babylon (Jeremiah 27, 29). Isaiah invests Cyrus the Persian conqueror with Davidic titles—he is the Lord’s “servant” and “shepherd” and “anointed one” (Isaiah 44-45). Heroes like Joseph, Daniel, and Mordecai end up as chief advisors to emperors. In Scripture, there is no such thing as “empire” but only empires, and they are not all the same. Some are Babels, some beasts; some are rods of discipline, some provide refuge for the people of God.

God does frustrate empires of the Babelic and bestial sort. In the Bible’s earliest account of empire (Genesis 11:1-9), human beings erect a city and tower in the plains of Shinar. The fourfold repetition of “one” (Genesis 11:1, 6) shows their goal is uniformity. Babel, the prototype of all later “Babels,” is intolerant of linguistic, cultural, and religious difference. ...

... After Babel’s fall, Yahweh calls Abram from Ur to initiate his counter-Babel program (Genesis 12:1-3). Given Yahweh’s vigorous opposition to Babel, it’s surprising that his promises to Abram share many features of Babelic imperialism. He promises Abram a “great name” (12:2). He assures Abram that he will produce “a great and mighty nation” (18:18), but not just one: “I have made you a father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:4-6, 16). Abram will become the father of kings (Genesis 17:6, 16), a patriarchal “king of kings.” The two great promises—land and seed—echo the dual aim of Babel to build a city and a tower. Abram’s children eventually conquer the land and build in it a city and a tower—Jerusalem and its temple, the true “gate of God,” which is the meaning of the name “Babylon.” ...

... Israel has an imperial vocation to realize in truth what Babel sought in rebellion—unity among peoples, a link to heaven, a great name, righteousness and peace and security. Abrahamic empire is not a Babel imposing its will but the center of “a unified world community under God’s rule” (Oliver O’Donovan). Israel’s hope, and the church’s, is not “peace in isolation” but “a peaceful international community” gathered around Zion (O’Donovan).

The Bible is not a story of Israel in opposition to empire. It is a tale of two empires, written to assure believers that all Babels will crumble and that Abram’s empire will shine forever.

Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

... Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital–Life–Design conference, in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.

During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen, and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move had been motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digital media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.

He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said. ...

What does the inequality-immobility link mean?

Marginal Revolution: What does the inequality-immobility link mean?

... As for my take, Justin is painting himself into a corner here of his own making.  Let’s step back for a moment.  I see two big and very real problems: slow income growth for many income classes and a problem with excessively high returns to finance at the very top.  (As an aside, both of these problems contain elements of both “left-wing concerns” and “right-wing concerns,” and both problems are deeper than any particular ideology can solve and they should make virtually everyone rethink their views).

Those are the problems and we should try to fix them.

If we could fix these problems, that would mean a smaller financial sector, less moral hazard, better allocation of capital, and for most/all income classes rates of income growth comparable to the 1948-1972 period, chop it up as you wish.  Imagine that everyone’s income went up three percent a year, every year, and every generation was about twice as rich as the parents.  Whether there then would be more or less marginal “churn” in the relative income rankings is not a matter of irrelevance but having somewhat more churn should not be viewed as a major social goal per se.  It would depend on the reason for the immobility, and the real focus of our concern would be the reason (e.g., bad schools? some kind of unfairness?), and not the marginal change in the numerical churn per se.

Given that background, and those two very real problems, you can in fact create other “problems” by creating and manipulating more complicated statistics, based on the initial problems, and that can lead you to various measures of inequality and immobility.  But not all inequalities are bad, or avoidable, and the same is true for immobilities.  The valid problems, as embedded in the new complicated measures, still will boil down to the two simpler problems mentioned above.  In the meantime, toying around with misleading and less transparent aggregate measures of inequality and immobility will bring confusion as to what is really at stake.

Focus on the two very real and fairly simple (as distinct from simple to fix) problems.

Nokia ringtone during concert of classical music

Talk about being adaptive. I love it.

When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

Mental Floss: When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

... As for the “why,” though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don’t pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd. Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don’t know much more about said accent, though. Various claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia’s Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists. 

Talk This Way

Around the turn of the 18th 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably. Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally “neutral” and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.

Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received Pronunciation to show off their status. This happened especially in the port cities that still had close trading ties with England — Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. From the Southeastern coast, the RP sound spread through much of the South along with plantation culture and wealth. ...

Have you ever noticed how British and American accents get used in the movies. I always get a kick out of how the artisticratic types ... be they Roman soliders or Star Wars villians ... speak with British accents and how the heros ... Ben Hur or Luke Skywalker ... have American Midwestern accents.

 

Solo nation: American consumers stay single

FortuneCNN: Solo nation: American consumers stay single

A record number of people in the U.S. now live by themselves -- and they spend $1.9 trillion a year. Businesses are beginning to take notice.

FORTUNE -- In 1957, University of Michigan psychology professors Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard Kulka released a survey that examined American attitudes to being single. The findings were stark: 80% of those surveyed believed that people who preferred being unmarried were "sick," "immoral," or "neurotic." At a time when more than 70% of adults were married, it's not surprising that people would express a preference for wedded life. But the scorn certainly sounds jarring to contemporary ears.

Oh, how things have changed. Americans are now within mere percentage points of being a majority single nation: Only 51% of adults today are married, according to census data. And 28% of all households now consist of just one person -- the highest level in U.S. history. That second statistic may appear less dramatic than the first, but it's actually changing much faster: The percentage of Americans living by themselves has doubled since 1960.

The extraordinary rise of living alone is among the greatest social changes since the baby boom. Until recently, no culture in human history had sustained large numbers of people in places of their own. Today more than 40% of households have just one occupant in cities such as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Denver, St. Louis, and Seattle. In Manhattan, nearly 50% of households consist of a single occupant, a number that seems impossibly high until you discover that the rate is similar in London and Paris, and even higher -- a staggering 60% -- in Stockholm. ...

Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals (Peter Enns)

Huffington Post: Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals

... Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver. ...

I love Enns ... even if he is a diehard Yankee fan. (Just shows that even great minds have been corupted by sin. ;-) )

A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included)

New York Times: A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included) Greg Mankiw

... Here are four principles of tax reform that most of those economists would endorse:

BROADEN THE BASE AND LOWER RATES The United States tax code is filled with deductions and exclusions that shrink the basis of taxation. The smaller base in turn requires higher tax rates to raise the revenue needed to fund government. The starting point of reform is to reverse this process.

This principle was endorsed both by President George W. Bush’s tax reform commission in 2005 and by President Obama’s deficit reduction commission in 2010. ...

TAX CONSUMPTION RATHER THAN INCOME Almost four centuries ago, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that taxes should be based on consumption, not income. Income measures a person’s contribution of labor and capital to society’s production of goods and services. Consumption measures the quantity of those goods and services he gets to enjoy. Hobbes reasoned that because consumption better reflects the benefits a person receives as a member of society, it is the proper basis of taxation.

Much modern economic theory confirms that conclusion. ...

TAX BADS RATHER THAN GOODS A good rule of thumb is that when you tax something, you get less of it. That means that taxes on hard work, saving and entrepreneurial risk-taking impede these fundamental drivers of economic growth. The alternative is to tax those things we would like to get less of.

Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. ...

KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID This engineering aphorism is based on the timeless insight that complex systems are more likely to break down, often in ways the designer failed to anticipate. It applies with force to tax systems.

Indeed, unlike engineering systems, complex tax systems go awry because an army of highly paid accountants and tax lawyers is ready to take advantage of any loophole it can find. Remember when President Obama’s stimulus plan offered tax credits for electric cars? Suddenly, the sale of golf carts took off. ...

All good suggestions but their are substanial political barriers to achieving most of them ... moving from an income tax to a consumption tax in particular. It is easy to go from a consumption tax to an income tax but going the other direction is very hard. I've worked all my like paying an income tax. Now late in life when I will be earning less spending more, I will have to pay a consumption tax. It's a double whammy. Negotiating that transition in a society like ours may not be feasible but it's worth trying.

Economic Freedom & Income Equality (Robert Lawson, SMU)

An interesting piece by Robert Lawson at SMU's Cox School of Business. He argues that income inequality isn't related to economic freedom. Furthermore, he argues that income mobility is more important than income inequality, and that income mobility is declining. His two primary solutions? 1. Let rich people fail, and 2. Let poor people get rich.

Do People Become More Conservative as They Age?

Discovery News: Do People Become More Conservative as They Age?

In fact, research shows that seniors become more tolerant and more open-minded in their later years.

... "Pigeonholing older people into these rigid attitude boxes or conservative boxes is not a good idea," said Nick Dangelis, a sociologist and gerontologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

"Rather, when they were born, what experiences they had growing up, as well as political, social and economic events have a lot to do with how people behave," he said. "Our results are showing that these have profound effects." ...

And this is the central thesis of William Strauss and Neil Howe's work on generations. Their additional contribtuion (if you buy it) is that there is an oscillating nature to change. We are influenced by events in our formative years and those influences shape our agendas throughout our lives. But it is precisely our overattention to the things that shaped us that often causes us to overcorrect, setting the stage for a countermovement by the next generations. (Think of the overprotective "Norman Rockwell" parents of the 1930-1940s, to the latch-key kids of the 1970-1980s, back to the "heliocopter parents" of today.)

... Results, which are just starting to emerge, suggest that each belief follows its own complicated pattern. Seniors seem to have become more liberal about subordinate groups, for example, but more conservative about civil liberties.

Overall, what's happening in society at large as people come of age seems to matter most in determining the starting point for their core beliefs, said Karl Pillemer, a sociologist and gerontologist at Cornell University, who conducted more than 1,000 in-depth interviews with seniors for his book, "30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans." From there, people's attitudes can evolve as they age. And flexibility often trumps rigidity.

"Older people said very surprising things about being old," Pillemer said. "One of those things was that old age was a quest for adventure and a time to try new things. Many older people describe themselves as feeling freer or clearer."

Late in life, his research shows, people often become more open, more tolerant, and more appreciative of compassion. Even if they started out conservative, they may become less extreme in their conservatism.

"Many describe themselves as open to ideas or open to new ways of thinking, and they come back to a sense of much greater tolerance for different points of view," he said. "I had someone say, 'I used to think I was always right, but now that I'm 80, I'm not so sure I'm always right.'"

When it comes to change in the church, it is usually not the oldest people who are the biggest obstacles to change. It is usually the fifty-somethings, like me. We've been "paying or dues" all our lives and now it is "our turn." How dare you suggest rearranging the game just when I got here.

Many older adults no longer care about status issues. They are more comfortable with who they are and they care less about what others think. (Remember the Jenny Joseph poem "When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple.") Frequently there is more wisdom about creating a more civil society than with "big ideas" (if I may borrow from U2) of any stripe that will "fix" the world.

The New American Divide - Charles Murray

Wall Street Journal: The New American Divide

The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.

America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. ...

... To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010. ...

... The only thing that can make a difference is the recognition among Americans of all classes that a problem of cultural inequality exists and that something has to be done about it. That "something" has nothing to do with new government programs or regulations. Public policy has certainly affected the culture, unfortunately, but unintended consequences have been as grimly inevitable for conservative social engineering as for liberal social engineering.

The "something" that I have in mind has to be defined in terms of individual American families acting in their own interests and the interests of their children. Doing that in Fishtown requires support from outside. There remains a core of civic virtue and involvement in working-class America that could make headway against its problems if the people who are trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance, but in validation of the values and standards they continue to uphold. The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

Changing life in the SuperZIPs requires that members of the new upper class rethink their priorities. Here are some propositions that might guide them: Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting. Places to live in which the people around you have no problems that need cooperative solutions tend to be sterile. America outside the enclaves of the new upper class is still a wonderful place, filled with smart, interesting, entertaining people. If you're not part of that America, you've stripped yourself of much of what makes being American special.

Such priorities can be expressed in any number of familiar decisions: the neighborhood where you buy your next home, the next school that you choose for your children, what you tell them about the value and virtues of physical labor and military service, whether you become an active member of a religious congregation (and what kind you choose) and whether you become involved in the life of your community at a more meaningful level than charity events.

Everyone in the new upper class has the monetary resources to make a wide variety of decisions that determine whether they engage themselves and their children in the rest of America or whether they isolate themselves from it. The only question is which they prefer to do. ...

His new book is sure to be controversial. Businessweek had a book review.

Employee-Owned Companies Are Not a Fix for Crony Capitalism

Economist: The feeling is mutual

... Giving workers shares in a firm may have commercial benefits. Employee-owned companies are more productive and hardier in a recession, according to a 2010 study by Cass Business School. John Lewis, which also owns Waitrose, a posh grocery chain, seems to bear this out. Staff turnover is low; the shop beat many competitors on Christmas sales. Firms with similar structures concur: Arup, an engineering outfit, attributes its business range and “family feel” to being owned by its 10,000 employees.

All of which seems less likely to make the blood boil than reports of huge executive pay-offs. But there is little evidence that shared ownership makes capitalism more “responsible”, as Mr Clegg hopes. It does not prevent bad decisions: having a quarter of shares in employees’ hands did not save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy. And the benefits for staff are questionable. It is rash to put a worker’s livelihood, savings and pension in one basket case; many employees lost everything when Enron, an energy-trading company, collapsed in 2001.

Companies that are wholly-owned by their staff may face barriers to growth. Many firms need a flexible capital base to expand—one reason the partnership model in banking declined. Employee mobility promotes innovation. At base, it is unrealistic to expect many bastions of capitalism to turn their shares over to their workforce, reckons Ian Brinkley of the Work Foundation, a think-tank. It is, he says, hard to imagine someone like Sir Fred Goodwin, the acquisitive former Royal Bank of Scotland boss who oversaw its demise, “being reined in by some workers’ committee.”

Bogeyman Economics

National Affairs: Bogeyman Economics

This is a very lengthy article that is well worth reading. I'm just presenting the opening and the conclusion here. In short, to quote a former US President from eighty years ago, "... let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." FDR

Whether or not you agree with all the author's analysis, I do think it is wise for us to reflect from time to time on our own characterization of things, on our tendency to manufacture bogeyman on to which we can project our fear, on our temptation to use fear as a means of political gain.

In this moment of economic challenge, it can be difficult to keep our problems in perspective. The scale of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession, the weakness of the recovery, the persistence of high unemployment, and the possibility of yet another shock — this time originating in Europe — have left Americans feeling deeply insecure about their economic prospects.

Unfortunately, too many politicians, activists, analysts, and journalists (largely, but not exclusively, on the left) seem determined to feed that insecurity in order to advance an economic agenda badly suited to our actual circumstances. They argue not that a financial crisis pulled the rug out from under our enviably comfortable lives, but rather that our lives were not all that comfortable to begin with. A signal feature of our economy in recent decades, they contend, has been pervasive economic risk — a function not of the ups and downs of the business cycle, but of the very structure of our economic system. According to this view, no American is immune to dreadful economic calamities like income loss, chronic joblessness, unaffordable medical bills, inadequate retirement savings, or crippling debt. Most of us — "the 99%," to borrow the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protestors — cannot escape the insecurity fomented by an economy geared to the needs of the wealthy few. Misery is not a marginal risk on the horizon: It is an ever-present danger, and was even before the recession.

But compelling though this narrative may be to headline writers, it is fundamentally wrong as a description of America's economy both before and after the recession. When analyzed correctly, the available data belie the notions that this degree of economic risk pervades American life and that our circumstances today are significantly more precarious than they were in the past. Even as we slog through what are likely to be years of lower-than-normal growth and higher-than-normal unemployment, most Americans will be only marginally worse off than they were in past downturns.

The story of pervasive and overwhelming risk is not just inaccurate, it is dangerous to our actual economic prospects. This systematic exaggeration of our economic insecurity saps the confidence of consumers, businesses, and investors — hindering an already sluggish recovery from the Great Recession. It also leads to misdirected policies that are too zealous and too broad, overextending our political and economic systems. The result is that it has become much more difficult to solve the specific problems that do cry out for resolution, and to help those Americans who really have fallen behind.

Only by moving beyond this misleading exaggeration, carefully reviewing the realities of economic risk in America, and restoring a sense of calm and perspective to our approach to economic policymaking can we find constructive solutions to our real economic problems. ...

And the conclusion:

POLITICS BY HORROR STORY

Because we have yet to crawl out of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, many Americans are willing to believe every negative description of our economic circumstances, no matter how inflated. But it is important to remember that the economic doomsayers did not originate with the recession. They were active in the 1980s, claiming that de-industrialization would be the death knell of the middle class and that Germany and Japan were destined to leave us in the dust. Their claims were prevalent through most of the 1990s, when outsourcing was said to foreshadow disaster for American workers in the midst of a "white-collar recession" (which subsequent research showed had not hit professionals nearly as hard as popular accounts suggested). And the gloom was apparent in the pre-recession 2000s, in all the talk of jobless recoveries, "stagnating" living standards, and families running to stand still.

The unfortunate irony is that, in proclaiming economic doom, these Cassandras may do more to harm the truly disadvantaged than to help them. Economist Benjamin Friedman and sociologist William Julius Wilson have independently argued that societies are more generous to those in need when economic times are good. It is not clear why convincing the broad middle class that it is teetering on the brink should be more likely to inspire solidarity than to inspire tight-fistedness and hoarding.

The horror stories harm workers in other ways as well. In good times, scaring workers may make them less willing to demand more from their employers in the way of compensation or better working conditions. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan famously cited job insecurity as a primary reason for low inflation (and therefore low wage growth) in the late 1990s; on the left, former labor secretary and American Prospect co-founder Robert Reich concurred.

In bad times, meanwhile, scaring workers (as well as consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs) only delays recovery. Digging out of our current hole will require businesses to create jobs, which will happen only when consumers start feeling comfortable enough to spend money again and when investors start feeling comfortable enough to take risks again. We do not have to whitewash the seriousness of economic conditions to talk more hopefully (and accurately) about the enduring strengths of our economy.

Exaggerating economic problems has political costs, too. It is hard to read Confidence Men, journalist Ron Suskind's recent account of the first two years of economic policymaking in the Obama administration, without concluding that health-care reform distracted the president and his advisors from thinking about how to shore up the flagging economy. Even now, the huge political lift — and fiscal cost — of the Affordable Care Act has made it vastly more difficult to enact policies truly capable of fostering economic growth.

Such effective economic policies and reforms will need to build on our economy's strengths in order to address its weaknesses. By badly distorting our understanding of both, the bogeyman narrative adopted by too many analysts, activists, and politicians makes it more difficult to help those Americans who do face very real hardships and dangers. If we are to effectively confront the fiscal and economic challenges of the 21^st century, we will need to begin by seeing things as they really are.

The last Kodak moment?

The Economist: The last Kodak moment?

Kodak is at death’s door; Fujifilm, its old rival, is thriving. Why?

... Both firms saw their traditional business rendered obsolete. But whereas Kodak has so far failed to adapt adequately, Fujifilm has transformed itself into a solidly profitable business, with a market capitalisation, even after a rough year, of some $12.6 billion to Kodak’s $220m. Why did these two firms fare so differently?

Both saw change coming. Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive who now teaches at the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business, recalls writing a report in 1979 detailing, fairly accurately, how different parts of the market would switch from film to digital, starting with government reconnaissance, then professional photography and finally the mass market, all by 2010. He was only a few years out.

Fujifilm, too, saw omens of digital doom as early as the 1980s. It developed a three-pronged strategy: to squeeze as much money out of the film business as possible, to prepare for the switch to digital and to develop new business lines.

Both firms realised that digital photography itself would not be very profitable. “Wise businesspeople concluded that it was best not to hurry to switch from making 70 cents on the dollar on film to maybe five cents at most in digital,” says Mr Matteson. But both firms had to adapt; Kodak was slower. ...

A culture of complacency

Its culture did not help. Despite its strengths—hefty investment in research, a rigorous approach to manufacturing and good relations with its local community—Kodak had become a complacent monopolist. Fujifilm exposed this weakness by bagging the sponsorship of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles while Kodak dithered. The publicity helped Fujifilm’s far cheaper film invade Kodak’s home market.

Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, who has advised the firm. Working in a one-company town did not help, either. Kodak’s bosses in Rochester seldom heard much criticism of the firm, she says. Even when Kodak decided to diversify, it took years to make its first acquisition. It created a widely admired venture-capital arm, but never made big enough bets to create breakthroughs, says Ms Kanter.

Bad luck played a role, too. Kodak thought that the thousands of chemicals its researchers had created for use in film might instead be turned into drugs. But its pharmaceutical operations fizzled, and were sold in the 1990s.

Fujifilm diversified more successfully. Film is a bit like skin: both contain collagen. Just as photos fade because of oxidation, cosmetics firms would like you to think that skin is preserved with anti-oxidants. In Fujifilm’s library of 200,000 chemical compounds, some 4,000 are related to anti-oxidants. So the company launched a line of cosmetics, called Astalift, which is sold in Asia and is being launched in Europe this year.

Fujifilm also sought new outlets for its expertise in film: for example, making optical films for LCD flat-panel screens. It has invested $4 billion in the business since 2000. And this has paid off. In one sort of film, to expand the LCD viewing angle, Fujifilm enjoys a 100% market share. ...

Sounds like a great case study in adaptive change.

New iPhone app lets users follow roaming great white sharks

Reuters: New iPhone app lets users follow roaming great white sharks

(Reuters) - The great white shark is lurking in cyberspace, in the form of an iPhone application launched this week that allows users to track a dozen of the predators as they roam around the Pacific Ocean.

The California-based Marine Conservation Science Institute launched the app, which the nonprofit describes as the first shark tracker of its kind, to raise funds for its research. ...

... The application, launched at iTunes on Wednesday, cost nearly $100,000 to produce, he said. Included in that budget was video content and a game for children to learn about great whites.

The institute has tagged more than 20 great white sharks, but the batteries on some of the tags expired, Domeier said. The iPhone application allows users to follow the migration of a dozen sharks the institute is still following, he said ...

Where Are the Liberals? (David Brooks)

New York Times: Where Are the Liberals?

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?

It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.

It’s not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we’re still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.

It’s not because liberalism’s opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.

The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.

A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.

Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists’ language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers. ...

... Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good. ...

Middle class dropouts (This Story Doesn't Make Sense)

CNNMoney has a story titled Middle class dropouts. It begins:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Nearly one third of Americans who were raised in the middle class dropped down the economic ladder as adults -- and that's before the Great Recession hit.

"Being raised in the middle class is not a guarantee that you'll have that same status as an adult," said Erin Currier, project manager at Pew's Economic Mobility Project. "With all the economic turmoil in the past four years, there's good reason to think that downward mobility is more severe."

Later it says:

The middle class is defined as those between the 30th and 70th income percentile.

Well if 33% of the people in 30-70th percentile range dropped lower, then someone from either below or above moved in! That means some combination of people in the 0-30th percentiles moved up and some of the people in the 70-100th percentiles moved down (and in the later case that means some people moved up from lower tiers into the top tiers.)

By the story's definition, the middle class can't decline (or grow)! It is statistically impossible for them to change as a proportion of the whole. The underlying implication of this story is that there is significant churn going up and down the ladder but the story lifts out one isolated number to support a predetermined news angle. In other words, this is really bad reporting.

CDC Update on US Trends

Knology: Homicide drops off US list of top causes of death

ATLANTA (AP) — For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation's top 15 causes of death, bumped by a lung illness that often develops in elderly people who have choked on their food. ...

The CDC's latest annual report on deaths contained several nuggets of good news:

—The infant mortality rate dropped to an all-time low of 6.14 deaths per 1,000 births in 2010. It was 6.39 the year before.

—U.S. life expectancy for a child born in 2010 was about 78 years and 8 months, up about a little more than one month from life expectancy for 2009.

—Heart disease and cancer remain the top killers, accounting for nearly half the nation's more than 2.4 million deaths in 2010. But the death rates from them continued to decline.

— Death rates for five other leading causes of death also dropped in 2010, including stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, flu/pneumonia and blood infections.

But death rates increased for Alzheimer's disease, which is the nation's sixth-leading killer, kidney disease (No. 8), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (No. 12), Parkinson's disease (No. 14) and pneumonitis.

The report is drawn from a review of at least 98 percent of the death certificates filed in the U.S. in 2010.

Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School

New York Times: Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force. ...

... Many economists initially thought that the shrinking labor force — which drove down November’s unemployment rate — was caused primarily by discouraged older workers giving up on the job market. Instead, many of the workers on the sidelines are young people upgrading their skills, which could portend something like the postwar economic boom, when millions of World War II veterans went to college through the G.I. Bill instead of immediately entering, and overwhelming, the job market.

Now, as was the case then, one sex is the primary beneficiary. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.

For now at least, many young women still feel that the deck is stacked against them. ...

... Some studies suggest that women are pickier about their job choices than men. Already earning lower pay, women are less willing to work when wages fall further, especially if they are able to rely on an employed (and these days, often newly re-employed) husband. Women are also more reluctant to work night or weekend shifts, according to government data on how Americans spend their time, partly because they have more family responsibilities. ...

... Then there are societal influences that affect a person’s willingness to take a lesser job or return to school.

“There is still this heavy cultural message that men should be out there earning money and supporting themselves, and they feel more distressed by losing their breadwinner role,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. “We’ve made much more progress overcoming the ‘feminine mystique’ than this masculine mystique.” ...

... “Today young girls are told they can do anything, go into any occupation. But if boys express any interest in traditionally female occupations, they get teased and bullied,” Ms. Coontz said. “Lots of guys are not understanding what’s happening to traditional low-income or middle-income male jobs.”

Jobs in the male-dominated manufacturing industry and in other sectors involving manual labor have been, and still are, in structural decline. These careers can also be hard to maintain indefinitely because youthful strength eventually fades. And now many manufacturing workers do not have pensions to carry them through when their bodies do break down. ...

Top 10 Reasons to Visit Kansas City in 2012

PR Newswire: Top 10 Reasons to Visit Kansas City in 2012

1. All eyes turn to Kauffman Stadium next July, as KC welcomes the Major League Baseball All-Star Game for the first time in 38 years. Fans new and old will enjoy a week's worth of festivities, including a massive FanFest at the KC Convention Center.
2. This fall, Travel + Leisure's readers crowned Kansas City as America's #1 Affordable Getaway. Explore KC's many free attractions, including factory tours at Hallmark Cards, Harley-Davidson and Boulevard Brewing Co.   
3. As the world pauses to reflect on the 100th Anniversary of the Titanic, Union Station will pay tribute to the tragedy with a poignant look at the ship and its passengers. "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" will feature more than 300 relics from ship and its debris field (March 3-Sept. 3).
4. A cornerstone of KC's cultural renaissance, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opened this fall to national acclaim. Designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie, the $413 million facility is KC's new address for ballet, symphony, opera and more.
5. The five-year commemoration for the Civil War's 150th Anniversary continues in 2012. Situated between pro and anti-slavery forces, the Kansas City region has several ties to the turbulent time period. In fact, the largest battle west of the Mississippi River was fought in in KC's Westport neighborhood in 1864.
6. Known as the College Basketball Capital of America, Kansas City hosts more college basketball tournament games than anywhere else in the country each March. In 2012, the total comes to 63 games in just 14 days.
7. Crown Center—home to Hallmark Cards—will soon unveil the city's first aquarium, SEA LIFE Kansas City. Making a splash this April, the facility will house more than 30 displays of diverse marine life—everything from starfish and seahorses to sharks and rays.
8. Brick by brick, Crown Center is building America's fourth LEGOLAND Discovery Center, debuting this May. Based on the ever-popular LEGO toys, the attraction will feature a 4-D theatre, master building classes, a LEGO ride and more.
9. The Hollywood Casino at Kansas Speedway will debut this February with 2,000 slot machines and 52 table games. The entire 100,000-square-foot complex will overlook turn two of the racetrack.  
10. Before you vote, revisit one of America's most prolific presidents. Candidates from both parties are quoting Harry S. Truman on the campaign trail. Learn about the tumultuous events of his presidency at his museum in nearby Independence, Mo.

Paul Collier on Sustainability and Nonrenewable Resources in Emerging Nations

I've been reading Paul Collier's The Plundered Planet: Why We Must - And How We Can - Manage Nature for Global Prosperity. He is writing about natural resource extraction in emerging nations and the impact that has on local economies. I thought this excerpt was especially helpful:

We have now reached the heart of what is distinctive about the role of government in societies that are rich in nonrenewable natural, assets. The exploitation of the natural asset is intrinsically unsustainable. At some stage the oil well is going to run dry, the vein copper ore will be exhausted, and the revenue stream will cease.

That word "unsustainable" sends shivers down the spine every environmentalist. But just because the exploitation of a natural asset is unsustainable does not mean that it should be avoided. The only sustainable rate of use of a nonrenewable natural asset zero. But were we never to use any nonrenewable assets they might as well not be there in the first place: the baby has disappeared with the bathwater. So, literal sustainability sets the bar absurdly high. Here economics is helpful in imagining a more meaningful conception: sustainability does not imply preservation. The world has sustained overall economic growth, albeit with hiccups, for two centuries yet virtually no Single economic activity has been sustained. Growth has not been a matter of everything getting bigger. Rather, it has been like running across ice flows: if you stand still you fall in and drown; if you keep going - even if each individual step is unsustainable - you survive. In the nineteenth century the British government was worried that it was going to run out of tall trees for the masts of ships. What happened, of course, is that at a certain point ships no longer needed trees.

The decision to deplete a nonrenewable natural asset is therefore not intrinsically an economic sin. The ethics of depletion depend upon how the money generated gets used. I have suggested that it is ethically incumbent on us to respect the rights of future generations. We may not be the curators of natural assets, but we are the custodians of their value. We are not obliged to turn the earth into a gigantic museum, with nature neatly preserved in its display case. Nonetheless, we have a responsibility not to plunder natural resources because we do not own them in the way that we own created assets. We can fulfill our ethical obligations by bequeathing to the future other kinds of assets of an equivalent value. This boils down to whether to consume the revenues or save them. We have a responsibility to save.

This represents the golden rule for the ethical use of revenue from nonrenewable natural assets. It implies that the use of this revenue should be quite unlike that of normal tax revenue. Normally, tax revenue can be presumed to rise as the economy grows: it is sustainable and thus can be spent on consumption. A good test of whether the government of a resource-rich country is being ethically responsible is whether it has a higher savings rate of its revenues from natural-asset depletion than from other tax revenues. As it depletes the natural asset is it accumulating man-made assets in its place?

Do you have a higher savings rate of unsustainable income than income you expect to continue? Perhaps you have not consciously thought about it; you just have an overall savings rate out of your total income. It might equally be difficult for a government to identify which part of its overall savings is attached to which part of its income. However, we might reasonably expect that those governments whose revenues are largely generated by the depletion of natural assets should have higher savings rates than those whose revenues are fully sustainable. For example, Africa, where so much revenue comes from resource extraction, should tend to have a higher savings rate than "Developing Asia," where revenues are linked to industry. In fact, the opposite is the case. Africa's savings rate averages around 20 percent of national income, whereas that of Developing Asia has been approximately double. (98-99)

Harnessing the sun's power (New Model for Fusion)

Fortune: Harnessing the sun's power

Ever since cold fusion flopped spectacularly, the idea of finding an affordable way of replicating the sun's method of generating energy has become almost a joke. That may be about to change. Yes, the two major fusion reactor designs being explored in the research world -- one is called a tokamak and the other is inertial confinement systems -- show promise, but they are 20 to 30 years off. Also, they require either gigantic superconducting magnet systems or extra-fierce laser arrays and will cost tens of billions at best.

A small Canadian company called General Fusion has a new technology called magnetized target fusion, which could end up costing a fraction of what the other designs do. ...

... General Fusion's design shares aspects of the other two but aims to pull off fusion reactions using far simpler and cheaper hardware. The company's reactor draws on work begun more than 30 years ago at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. It uses 200 very powerful pneumatic pistons inserted through holes in a spherical metal vessel that Richardson compares to a "wiffle ball." Firing the pistons at precisely the right moment creates an acoustic shock wave that compresses hot liquid lead and lithium swirling around inside. Then, the injected deuterium-tritium gas encounters such heat and pressure that a fusion reaction briefly occurs. General Fusion brought the Navy's original idea to life by engineering control systems for the pistons that weren't possible a few decades ago. ...

Pay TV Subscribers Canceling Service, Going Online

Marketing Charts: Pay TV Subscribers Canceling Service, Going Online

9% of Americans have cut their pay TV connection because they can watch all their favorite shows online, while a further 11% are considering doing so, according to a Deloitte survey released in January 2012. An additional 15% say they will most likely watch movies, TV programs, and videos from online digital sources (via download or streamed over the Internet) in the near future. The proportion considering “cutting the cord” is highest among leading millennials, defined as respondents aged 23-28, at 19%. Meanwhile, 11% of Boomers report having already canceled their paid TV service, highest among the age groups.

However, the survey also shows that Americans value cable TV and satellite TV above most other services. According to December 2011 figures from Motorola, Americans are spending 21 hours per week in front of the TV. And although only 44% of the Deloitte survey respondents report having DVR functionality, using a DVR is the second-most preferred means of watching a favorite TV show. ...

Behind Every Great Woman

BusinessWeek: Behind Every Great Woman

As more women earn high-level corporate roles, more husbands are staying home, raising the kids, and changing the rules.

... This role reversal is occurring more and more as women edge past men at work. Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S.

During the recent recession, three men lost their jobs for every woman. Many unemployed fathers, casualties of layoffs in manufacturing and finance, have ended up caring for their children full-time while their wives are the primary wage earners. The number of men in the U.S. who regularly care for children under age five increased to 32 percent in 2010 from 19 percent in 1988, according to Census figures. Among those fathers with preschool-age children, one in five served as the main caregiver.

Even as the trend becomes more widespread, stigmas persist. At-home dads are sometimes perceived as freeloaders, even if they’ve lost jobs. Or they’re considered frivolous kept men—gentlemen who golf. The househusbands of highly successful women, after all, live in luxurious homes, take nice vacations, and can afford nannies and housekeepers, which many employ at least part-time. In reaction, at-home dads have launched a spate of support groups and daddy blogs to defend themselves. ...