I recently linked an article about What Buy Local Gets Wrong. I quote Jason Soren's observation:
"If you buy everything within that circumscribed area and exclude everything outside it, your community will be worse off than it would be if it bought from any willing seller."
I came across this quote in a recent article on the surprising rise of independent bookstores.
When you buy a book at one [independent store], you keep your money in the local economy, something that appeals to many shoppers. You're also more likely to find a unique selection of curated books and personalized recommendations from the store's employees, who are usually enthusiastic evangelists of the written word.
The second sentence points to a critical issue. The only way you compete in business is to be the low-cost provider or offer a premium with your product, for which people are willing to pay more. The second sentence is a good example of stores finding a premium.
While the first sentence may accurately describe motivations for some people to shop at Indy stores, it is an irrational and destructive mindset. People say it is ALWAYS better to buy things in the local economy - books, in this case. Let's follow that logic for a moment.
First, let's say local is anything within ten miles of my house. I'm going to buy local, so I go to the indy bookstore and buy my book. Where did the bookseller get the book? Does the author live within ten miles? Was the paper in the book from trees grown and harvested in the community? Was the pulp producer located in the community? How about the chemical producers and processors who made the ink and glue? How about the printing company? If so, was the digital printing and binding equipment - and all the parts - made and bought locally? How about the currency used to buy the book? I can go on, but you get my point.
If we were to apply "buy local" reasoning consistently, we would all be much worse off. All things being equal, buying a product simply because it is local is illogical unless you wish to diminish everyone's standard of living. No matter how big you define local as anything short of global, this is true.
God made us for community. Face-to-face community has irreplaceable benefits in some aspects of life, but we were also made for the community of commercial society. By specializing in our labor according to gifts and looking to the needs of others as reflected through price in a market exchange, we all benefit.
Forbes: A Supply Chain Overhaul To Boost Coffee Farmers' Income 400%
This is about a social enterprise on a mission to reinvent the coffee supply chain, giving farmers a bigger and more equitable piece of the action.
Aimed at growers producing specialty-grade, premium, Fair Trade certified coffee, Vega hopes to enable farmers to roast and package their beans and connect to customers directly via an online subscription marketplace. As a result, they can make a lot more money than they normally do.
The company, which is based in Leon, Nicaragua, is launching a Kickstarter campaign today. ...
... So, even though advocates of Fair Trade and organic coffee are trying their best, because they work within the usual supply chain, small-scale farmers end up with a paltry share of the pie, according to Ketabi. Each small scale farmer produces about 500 pounds of Fair Trade organic coffee a year and gets around $1.30 a pound, or $700 a year. The upshot: Farmers of specialty grade coffee beans earn $1 a pound for a product costing U .S. consumers maybe $20.
Vega’s aim is to cut out most of those other players. To that end, it would set up a processing, packaging and distribution center located 20 to 30 minutes from farmers. There the coffee would be loaded in pallets, shipped overseas via a U.S. carrier, then broken down and mailed to consumers. Farmers would be paid when the processing is done, so it’s not contingent on supply and demand fluctuations. The founders are still working out the details, but, ”We’ll match the Fair Trade price and pay for the value of the processing on top of that,” says Ketabi. The result would allow farmers to earn up to four times what they typically receive. ...
HT: Sarah Stanley
1. Huffington Post: The Unexpected Way Philosophy Majors Are Changing The World Of Business
... Despite a growing media interest in the study of philosophy and dramatically increasing enrollment in philosophy programs at some universities, the subject is still frequently dismissed as outmoded and impractical, removed from the everyday world and relegated to the loftiest of ivory towers.
That doesn't fit with the realities of both the business and tech worlds, where philosophy has proved itself to be not only relevant but often the cornerstone of great innovation. Philosophy and entrepreneurship are a surprisingly good fit. Some of the most successful tech entrepreneurs and innovators come from a philosophy background and put the critical thinking skills they developed to good use launching new digital services to fill needs in various domains of society. Atlantic contributor Edward Tenner even went so far as to call philosophy the "most practical major." ...
... Here are a few reasons that philosophy majors will become the entrepreneurs who are shaping the business world. ...
2. BusinessWeek: Half of U.S. Business Schools Might Be Gone by 2020
Richard Lyons, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has a dire forecast for business education: “Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years—or five,” he says.
The threat, says Lyons, is that more top MBA programs will start to offer degrees online. That will imperil the industry’s business model. For most business schools, students pursuing part-time and executive MBAs generate crucial revenue. Those programs, geared toward working professionals, will soon have to compete with elite online alternatives for the same population.
Lower-ranked business schools, rather than recognized names such as Harvard Business School and Wharton, are most vulnerable to this phenomenon. When the big players start offering online degrees, they’ll draw far-flung students who might otherwise have opted for the convenience of a part-time program close to home. ...
3. Huff Post Business: All Hail, Do-Gooding MBAs!
Don't look now, but it seems that some MBA students are increasingly interested in doing good as well as making money, and more business schools are happy to accommodate them. This is all to the, ahem, good, because we need all the smart, talented MBAs we can get to attack our biggest social, ethical and environmental problems.
While the vast majority of jobs for MBAs are still the traditional ones, I'm seeing evidence of a nascent shift. Indeed, no less a prophet than Michael Porter sees the same thing, and believes that there are opportunities a-plenty for companies that focus on solving there world's most urgent social environmental problems. "If we can get business seeing itself differently and others to see businesses differently," Porter said in a recent TED talk, "we can change the world. My students are getting [the fact that [sic] we can break down this divide, this tension and finally have solutions." As Porter (and C.K. Prahalad before him) suggest, there is plenty of money to be made in doing so. ...
4. Salary.com: 8 College Degrees with the Worst Return on Investment.
...While there's no doubt that a college degree increases earning power and broadens opportunities, today's high cost of education means it makes sense to more carefully consider which degree you earn. When it comes to return on investment (ROI), not all degrees are considered equal. This article exposes eight college degrees with poor ROI....
5. Forbes: 'Should I Tell You The Good News First?' The Feedback Employees Most Want To Hear
... Improving your capability for both giving and receiving feedback is a key factor for every leader. This assessment can help you to understand what you currently prefer and avoid. Living in extremes generally doesn’t lead to lasting success. Positive feedback helps you to know what went well and encourages you to move forward, while corrective feedback opens different options to explore. Whether you prefer one or avoid the other, next time you are faced with a feedback challenge, take the opportunity to be fully aware of the value of what you give and receive.
6. Forbes: How To Tell Your Boss 'No'--Without Saying 'No'
... Pushing back on a request from your boss can be intimidating (especially if you work for someone who’s, let’s say, not the most receptive to answers outside the realm of “Of course! When would you like it completed?”), but the truth is, it’s significantly better than setting yourself up to fail.
The trick is to push back more diplomatically—getting your point across without actually using the word “no.” Read on for how to approach some common situations, as well as one time you should probably just say “yes.” ...
7. Huffington Post: Women at Work: The Unspoken Rule of Meetings
... Men have the luxury of not having to worry about such details. Instead, they can devote their brains to developing cunning strategies to advance their own interests and careers. Men often see meetings as a chance to profile themselves, particularly if the boss or an important customer is in attendance. They will speak up, even if they have little of value to offer -- the main point is that everybody sees them talking. Women will often not speak up unless they have something important to say. Who's going to win the deal?
In addition to the tedium and insipidity of the typical meeting -- dreaded by male and female alike -- women have to think about their voices, their gestures, their eye contact, their style and their very woman-ness. Men simply don't have to worry about these things. This is utterly unfair, but until women occupy more executive positions, these unspoken rules of meetings will remain a challenge for them. ...
8. Huffington Post: Why 'Follow Your Passion' Is Bizarre Advice
... In his TEDTalk, Rowe explains that the tradespeople he profiled on his show, Dirty Jobs, are surprisingly happy. "Roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work," he said. "I swear to God -- I did it with them." To Rowe, these experiences began to challenge many of the "sacred cows" he had been taught to believe about work satisfaction. Perhaps foremost of these sanctified ideas he began to doubt was the importance of pre-existing passion.
"Follow your passion... what could possibly be wrong with that?" Rowe joked in his talk. "Probably the worst advice I ever got." ...
... In his talk, Rowe points out that many of the happiest people in the country have jobs that no one would ever identify as a pre-existing passion. He cited a sheep herder, a pig farmer ("smells like hell, but God bless him, he's making a great living"), and a guy who makes flower pots out of cow dung, as examples of unexpected professional contentment. These observations are powerful for a simple reason: They separate career satisfaction from the specifics of the work.
The pig farmer is not happy because he was born with a pig farmer gene, or because he grew up feeling a deep pre-existing passion for pork. He's instead happy because he's making a great living, has tons of autonomy, and does work that's useful to the world (he raises his pigs on food scraps from nearby casinos that would otherwise go to waste). You could replace pig farming with any number of pursuits, but so long as they yielded these same traits, he'd love his work. ...
9. NPR: Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint
... The physicists are far from the only people moving away from PowerPoint-style presentations: The CEOs of and have eliminated the presentations from meetings. In his recently published memoir, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates Gates writes that as CIA director, he banned slides except for maps and charts, but he could not do so as Secretary of Defense. Gen. James Mattis, former commander of U.S. Central Command, Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned the presentations when he led a successful mission in Iraq, and he compared PowerPoint to an internal threat.
The main advantage of forgoing PowerPoint is that it forces both the speaker and the listener to pay attention, says John Paul Chou, an assistant professor of physics at Rutgers University who recently presented at one of the Fermilab forums.
With PowerPoint, he says, it's "easier to let your mind go on autopilot, and you start to lose focus more easily." ...
10. Huffington Post: Charitable Giving Could Harm A Company's Image, Study Says
Giving to charity may actually hurt a company’s reputation, a new study from the Yale School of Management has suggested.
Interested in how people view donors who make a profit while doing good, Yale professors George Newman and Daylian Cain presented a number of charitable scenarios to their research participants. Their findings, which have been published in Psychological Science, suggest that people are quick to dismiss those who benefit in any way while engaging in philanthropy.
"This work suggests that people may react very negatively to charitable initiatives that are perceived to be in some way 'inauthentic,'" Newman explained in a press release. ...
11. Business Insider: 15 Small Business Owners Share What They Wish They'd Known When They First Started
Building a successful business is typically done by trial and error, with many hurdles along the way. And when it's your first company, every day involves making mistakes and learning something new.
We asked small business owners around America to tell us the one thing they wished they'd known when they first started their businesses.
We've broken out some of the best to serve as a primer on getting as much as possible right the first time around. ...
12. Atlantic Cities: Why Some Communities Foster More Entrepreneurs Than Others
... But new research shows there's clearly more to the story than just individual skill, pluck, and ambition. The study, by Temple University’s Seok-Woo Kwon, the University of Missouri’s Colleen Heflin, and Duke University’s Martin Ruef, examines the relationship between self-employment levels and community support structures across America’s metro areas. Published in the December issue of the American Sociological Review, the authors argue that the strength of local social networks and trust — using the term “social capital,” popularized by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam — plays a major role in whether a city is able to foster a culture of self-employment and entrepreneurship.
The study measures entrepreneurship using data on self-employment from the Census, and compares that to data from Putnam’s own Social Capital Benchmark Survey and the General Social Survey. The results get at how key aspects of social capital, such as membership in voluntary organizations or variation in trust across communities, affect rates of self-employment and entrepreneurial activity. ...
13. New York Times: For Many Older Americans, an Enterprising Path
... Kimberly Palmer, author of “The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life,” said she had noticed that the most eager audience for the book was often people approaching retirement, or already in it. “They want to leverage their skills and experience into something entrepreneurial,” she said.
According to a recent study published by the Kauffman Foundation and Legal Zoom, in 2013, about 20 percent of all new businesses were started by entrepreneurs aged 50 to 59 years, and 15 percent were 60 and over.
And, in fact, over the last decade, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity belongs to those in the 55-to-64 age group, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.
A desire to work for oneself and create a business that is meaningful and has social impact at this stage of life, combined with a job market that makes it tough for workers over 50 to get hired, has clearly pushed more people to pursue the entrepreneurial path. ...
14. Business Insider: 10 American Industries That Are Going To Boom In The Next Decade
... A new data release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals which industries are going to grow the fastest between 2012 and 2022. Health care and technology, already giants today, are expected to keep up their rapid growth over the next decade. At the same time, manufacturing is expected to continue its rapid decline.
So if you're looking ahead to the future, here are the industries that are going to boom. ...
15. Business Insider: 10 Predictions For How Shopping Will Completely Change In The Future
Retail is an incredibly dynamic industry.
"We will see more disruption in the next ten years of retail than we did in the previous one thousand," said Doug Stephens, founder of industry website Retail Prophet and author of The Retail Revival: Re-Imagining Business for the New Age of Consumerism.
Stephens recently published his 10 predictions for how retail will change this year.
He agree to share his list with us. ...
16. Economist: The music industry will see better times in 2014
17. CNN Money: Inside the world of one-click grocery delivery
FORTUNE -- It all seems so simple: Hit the "place order" button online and get a head of lettuce, a dozen eggs, or a gallon of milk delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours. But behind the scenes, the burgeoning market of online grocery delivery involves a surprisingly delicate dance to ensure that perishable food gets from producer to consumer in just enough time to avoid (quite literally) a spoiled delivery.
With demand on the rise, giants such as Wal-Mart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN) are jumping into the fray as investors bet millions on a crop of startups with names like Good Eggs, Relay Foods, and Farmigo. Yet actually turning a profit and managing the logistics of food delivery is tricky, says Leslie Hand, a director at IDC Retail Insights, a market research firm. Unlike shipping books or durable products via UPS, fresh food delivery requires specific short routing, planning, technology, and a race against the clock. ...
18. BloombergBusinessweek: Three Restaurant Chains With Happy, Low-Paid Workers
Low pay in the restaurant industry has spurred a series of one-day walkouts this year by fast-food employees demanding more, yet a trio of chains found their way onto a new list of the 50 best places to work. Starbucks (SBUX) (No. 39), Chick-fil-A (No. 43), and Texas Roadhouse (TXRH) (No. 47) made it onto the annual ranking by jobs website Glassdoor.com, derived from reviews submitted by U.S.-based employees. ...
19. Businessweek: Why the Gender Pay Gap Persists—and How to Really End It
Embedded in a new research paper (PDF) by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin is a valuable piece of news for anyone who is frustrated by the stubborn persistence of the gap in earnings between women and men. It has long been held that women earn only $0.77 for ever dollar that men do, in large part because of discrimination. But, Goldin argues, most of the difference comes down to factors that have nothing to do with sexism: The number of hours a person works and the degree of job flexibility.
This means that companies offering true, stigma-free flexibility and linear compensation—meaning the same pay per hour worked, regardless of when it is worked—have the lowest gaps in pay between men and women—and, in many cases, more women employees overall.
All that’s left is for corporate America to do something about it. ...
20. Forbes: What Happens When Leaders Only Care About Money?
... So yes, under any of the preceding conditions, a profit-is-all-that-matters approach will work.
But, under circumstance other than those above – it probably won’t work. If a leader needs to build a sustainably growing and profitable enterprise in an industry that requires a high degree of innovation or creativity and/or must provide excellent customer service – then the money-only approach will not work. I’ve seen profit-only leaders fail time and time again under such circumstances.
And the core reason – from my observation – is that delivering innovation, creativity or extraordinary customer service demands talented, hardworking employees who are loyal and motivated, and who are supported to do their best. And in this day and age, such employees are in high demand. As soon as they realize that a leader, or a company, cares about them only as a means to the end of raking in the dough – and will therefore consistently look for ways to give them as little of that dough as possible – their resumes will be on the street.
If you, as a leader, need to build a sustainably profitable business that relies upon innovation and/or great customer service to succeed, then I’d suggest the following approach: hire the best people you can find, support their development and their creativity, and establish an environment that both demands and rewards great results. I predict you’ll make lots of money – all without having to avoid telling your mom how you run your business.
1. Quartz: Globalization really means countries just trade with their neighbors
2. Business Insider: Europe's Share Of Global Profits Is At A 28-Year Low
3. USA Today: Europe widespread corruption 'breathtaking'
... Meanwhile, the report, which was the first published by the EU to detail people's perceptions of corruption in the union, also said that 76% of Europeans think corruption is widespread, with another 56% saying they thought the level of corruption in their country had increased over the past three years.
"I think the perception is almost as important as the reality of how much corruption there is because if people feel that the national or EU institution is corrupt, it clearly is an indication of a lack of confidence, a lack of trust and a lack of respect for those governing institutions," said Ben Tonra, a professor of European foreign, security and defence policy at University College Dublin. ...
4. National Review: Welfare, Here and Abroad
How bad have things become? The British newspaper the Telegraph recently looked at the growth in welfare spending in industrialized nations and found that such spending (including health-care and pension programs) had grown faster in the United States since 2000 than in any country in Europe except Ireland, Spain, and Portugal.
Of course, European welfare states were larger to begin with, but the Telegraph’s report is reflective of an important trend. While the Obama administration presses forward with efforts to combat “income inequality” by expanding the American welfare state, the European nations and other industrialized welfare states are moving in the other direction.
A few examples: ...
5. Economist: The parable of Argentina
There are lessons for many governments from one country’s 100 years of decline ...
... Why dwell on a single national tragedy? When people consider the worst that could happen to their country, they think of totalitarianism. Given communism’s failure, that fate no longer seems likely. If Indonesia were to boil over, its citizens would hardly turn to North Korea as a model; the governments in Madrid or Athens are not citing Lenin as the answer to their euro travails. The real danger is inadvertently becoming the Argentina of the 21st century. Slipping casually into steady decline would not be hard. Extremism is not a necessary ingredient, at least not much of it: weak institutions, nativist politicians, lazy dependence on a few assets and a persistent refusal to confront reality will do the trick. ...
6. Matt Ridley: Few people know that global inequality is falling and so is poverty
... None of this is meant to imply that people are wrong to resent inequality in income or wealth, or be bothered about the winner-take-all features of executive pay in recent decades. Indeed, my point is rather the reverse: to try to understand why it is that people mind so much today, when in many ways inequality is so much less acute, and absolute poverty so much less prevalent, than it was in, say, 1900 or 1950. Now that starvation and squalor are mostly avoidable, so what if somebody else has a yacht?
The short answer is that surely we always have and always will care more about relative than absolute differences. This is no surprise to evolutionary biologists. The reproductive rewards went not to the peacock with a good enough tail, but to the one with the best tail. A few thousand years ago, the bloke with one more cow than the other bloke got the girl, and it would have cut little ice to try to reassure the loser by pointing out that he had more cows than his grandfather, that they were better cows, or that he had more than enough cows to feed himself anyway. What mattered was that he had fewer cows.
7. Huffington Post: A Post-GDP World? How to Measure Real Progress in America
... GDP actually tends to rise with societal problems such as crime, pollution, household debt, commuting time, and family breakdown. As a short-term measure of economic output, it increases with the depreciation of machinery and the extraction of finite resources, while failing to reflect the long-term contributions of education and entrepreneurship.
In light of these shortcomings, we seek to answer an overarching question in a report to be released in spring 2014: How should the US government institute supplemental national accounts that better reflect the well-being of the nation? The question, like the broader push for GDP reform, stems from a central premise that new comprehensive indicators would lead to better-informed policymaking, and, in turn, genuine advances in the nation's prosperity. We do not presume to replace GDP, which still serves an important although limited purpose, but to supplement it with modern measures of progress. ...
8. Business Insider: Half Of US GDP Comes From The Orange Spots On This Map
9. Legatus Magazine: Business and the option for the poor
... What does living out the option for the poor mean in practice? We must engage in works of charity — those activities that often address specific dimensions of poverty in ways that no state program ever could. And this means giving of our time, energy, and human and monetary capital in ways that bring Christ’s light into some of the darkest places on earth.
Yet this does not mean that Catholics are required to give something to everything, or even that Catholics must give away everything they own. As Fr. James Schall, SJ, writes, “If we take all the existing world wealth and simply distribute it, what would happen? It would quickly disappear; all would be poor.” Put another way, living out the option for the poor may well involve those people with a talent for creating wealth doing precisely that.
The option for the poor, however, does not rule out any form of government assistance to those in need. Yet lifting people out of poverty — and not just material poverty but also moral and spiritual poverty — does not necessarily mean that the most effective action is to implement yet another welfare program. There is no reason to assume that the preferential option for the poor is somehow a preferential option for big government. Often, being an entrepreneur and starting a business which brings jobs, wages, and opportunities to places where they did not hitherto exist is a greater exercise of love for the poor (and usually far more economically effective) than another government welfare initiative. ...
10. New York Times: Can Marriage Cure Poverty?
... “It isn’t that having a lasting and successful marriage is a cure for living in poverty,” says Kristi Williams of Ohio State University. “Living in poverty is a barrier to having a lasting and successful marriage.” ...
... In an economy that offers so little promise to those at the bottom, family planning in the name of upward mobility doesn’t make much sense. “Engaging in family formation by accident rather than by design, you get a story of low-opportunity costs,” says Kathryn Edin, the poverty researcher at Johns Hopkins. “We’ve created the situation where pregnancy is not the worst thing that can happen to you. It can be seen as a path to redemption in an otherwise violent, unpredictable, hopeless world.”
Similar forces might also spur some young couples not to get married, even if they want to. Many poor women opt not to marry the poor men in their lives, for instance, to avoid bringing more economic chaos into their homes. And the poor women who do marry tend to have unstable marriages — often to ill effect. One study, for instance, found that single mothers who married and later divorced were worse off economically than those who did not marry at all. “These women revere marriage, they want to get married,” Williams says. “They aren’t making an irrational choice not to marry.” ...
11. Atlantic Cities: How Anti-Poverty Programs Marginalize Fathers
... U.S. government programs designed to help such families, however, haven't evolved with the population. Based on decades-old stereotypes that single mothers are raising children alone and single dads are "deadbeats," the majority of United States anti-poverty programs almost exclusively serve women and children, says Jacquelyn Boggess, co-director of the Center for Family Policy and Practice,* a Wisconsin-based think tank that focuses on supporting low-income parents. The welfare system, as a result, can become a muddled mess of rearranging rather than relieving poverty. Single, non-custodial fathers bear the brunt. But dads don’t suffer alone. Because the poor pull together to support one another, everyone absorbs the pinch. ...
12. Investors: Low-Wage Hours At New Low As ObamaCare Fines Loom
... It's impossible to know how much of the drop relates to ObamaCare, but there's good reason to suspect a strong connection. The workweek has been getting shorter in many of the same industries where anecdotes have piled up about employers cutting hours to evade the law's penalties. ...
13. Business Insider: Very Few American Workers Actually Make The Minimum Wage
... "We do not know the share of individuals (or wages) who are just above the minimum wage and whose wages might also rise with an increase, but we do know that it is likely still a small proportion," they write.
"The current minimum wage is well below the economy-wide average. Even for low-paying sectors like retail trade and leisure and hospitality — where the average hourly wage in 2013 was $13.50 and $16.60, respectively — the current minimum is a fair bit lower. These data also suggest a relatively small share of total wage income that would be directly impacted by any increase in the federal (or various state) minimums."
So while the minimum wage debate may be a hot-button political issue, it is somewhat irrelevant from an economic perspective.
14. The Atlantic: Liberals Need to Think Beyond the Minimum Wage
A new report from the Congressional Budget Office says a hike would help the working class, but less than many might hope. ...
15. New York Times: Evaporating Unemployment
Before the recession, in December 2007, about 63 percent of American adults had jobs. Six years later, in December 2013, less than 59 percent of adults had jobs.
And a new analysis says that the recession has very little to do with it.
The study, by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, asserts that workforce participation is in long-term decline. If the recession had never happened, or the economy had since returned to complete health, the authors estimate 59.3 percent of adults would have jobs, instead of 58.6 percent. ...
16. Business Insider: Why 12.7 Million Americans Dropped Out Of The Workforce
17. Conversable Economist: Halfway to Full Economic Recovery
... In short, although the prediction is that the U.S. economy is roughly halfway from the end of the recession to a full economic recovery, this is a case where the glass is actually half-full, rather than half-empty, because the heartier period of economic growth is coming. Here are a few of the details. ...
19. Forbes: Charitable Giving Grew 4.9% In 2013 As Online Donations Picked Up
... Charitable giving revenue grew 4.9% in 2013, the largest gain since the 2008 recession. U.S. based organizations with annual fundraising over $10 million saw 5% growth. Those that receive $1 million to $10 million in gifts gained 3.8% and the smallest nonprofits – less than $1 million raised annually – grew 3.6%. ...
... The tables, however, turn with online giving revenue which, at 13.5% growth overall, had its second consecutive year of double-digit gains. ...
20. NPR: Economist Says Best Climate Fix A Tough Sell, But Worth It
... "When we did our first calculations, they actually spun out these 'shadow prices,' " he says. "And I remember looking at them and trying to think ... what in the world does that mean?"
The shadow prices, he realized, actually represented the cost of putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And with that, climate change suddenly became a problem that could be attacked with the tools of economics.
"Actually from an economic point of view, it's a pretty simple problem," he says.
If people would simply pay the cost of using the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide, that would create a powerful incentive to dump less and invest in cleaner ways to generate energy. But how do you do that?
"We need to put a price on carbon, so that when anyone, anywhere, anytime does something that puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there's a price tag on that," he says.
His colleagues say that inspiration — now taken for granted — makes Nordhaus a prime candidate for a Nobel Prize. A lot of his work has been figuring out how big a price we should pay, and what form it should take. ...
21. New York Times: Your Ancestors, Your Fate
Inequality of income and wealth has risen in America since the 1970s, yet a large-scale research study recently found that social mobility hadn’t changed much during that time. How can that be?
The study, by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley, tells only part of the story. It may be true that mobility hasn’t slowed — but, more to the point, mobility has always been slow.
When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.
To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent of variation in income can be predicted based on your parents’ earnings. In contrast, my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage. The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average — what social scientists call “regression to the mean” — but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past. ...
1. Two informative articles in Forbes: A Tale Of Two Incomes: How To Handle Having More Money Than Your Friends and A Tale Of Two Incomes: How To Handle Having Less Money Than Your Friends
2. New Yorker: Why Your Name Matters
... The effects of name-signalling—what names say about ethnicity, religion, social sphere, and socioeconomic background—may begin long before someone enters the workforce. In a study of children in a Florida school district, conducted between 1994 and 2001, the economist David Figlio demonstrated that a child’s name influenced how he or she was treated by the teacher, and that differential treatment, in turn, translated to test scores. Figlio isolated the effects of the students’ names by comparing siblings—same background, different names. Children with names that were linked to low socioeconomic status or being black, as measured by the approach used by Bertrand and Mullainathan, were met with lower teacher expectations. Unsurprisingly, they then performed more poorly than their counterparts with non-black, higher-status names. Figlio found, for instance, that “a boy named ‘Damarcus’ is estimated to have 1.1 national percentile points lower math and reading scores than would his brother named ‘Dwayne,’ all else equal, and ‘Damarcus’ would in turn have three-quarters of a percentile ranking higher test scores than his brother named Da’Quan.’ ” Conversely, children with Asian-sounding names (also measured by birth-record frequency) were met with higher expectations, and were more frequently placed in gifted programs.
The economists Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer looked at trends in names given to black children in the United States from the nineteen-seventies to the early aughts. They discovered that names which sounded more distinctively “black” became, over time, ever more reliable signals of socioeconomic status. That status, in turn, affected a child’s subsequent life outcome, which meant that it was possible to see a correlation between names and outcomes, suggesting a name effect similar to what was observed in the 1948 Harvard study. But when Levitt and Fryer controlled for the child’s background, the name effect disappeared, strongly indicating that outcomes weren’t influenced by intrinsic qualities of the name itself. As Simonsohn notes, “Names tell us a lot about who you are.” ...
3. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Living with Discrimination Can Take a Toll on Health
"... The researchers wrote, "the anticipatory nature of vigilance sets it apart from traditional notions of perceived racial discrimination. For decades, a large body of scientific and lay literature has provided evidence of the pervasive consequences of interpersonal and societal discrimination. In qualitative studies, social scientists often report on the way Blacks continually think about the potential for discrimination."
"Overall, the work shows that in cases where racism-related vigilance is low or absent, Blacks and Whites have similar levels of hypertension. But when people report chronic vigilance, the rates in Blacks rise significantly. They rise a little in Hispanics, but not at all in Whites," Hicken explains." ...
4. Carpe Diem: Women earned a majority of 2012 doctoral degrees in 33 STEM fields, can we stop calling it a ‘national crisis’?
5. Gruntled Center: Men and Women Work the Same Total Hours (There is no 'Second Shift')
This is a finding reported in the excellent new book, The XX Factor, by leading British economic researcher Alison Wolf.
She says of all that she reports in this book, this fact is the one she expects readers to have the hardest time believing. The belief that men and women now work equally outside the home, and then women come home to an unbalanced 'second shift' is very widespread, especially in the U.S. ...
6. The Atlantic: Why Don't More Women Want to Work With Other Women?
... Pew asked 2,002 people if they would prefer to work with men or women. Most—78 percent of men and 76 percent of women—said they didn't care. But for the 22 percent who did have a preference, "it’s men who get the nod from both sexes by about a 2-1 margin," Pew's Rich Morin writes. In fact, more women said they'd rather work with men than men did. ...
7. The Mercury: As Cohabitation Gains Favor, Shotgun Weddings Fade
... The share of unmarried couples who opt to move in together after a pregnancy surpassed what demographers call “shotgun marriages” for the first time over the last decade. That’s according to a forthcoming paper from the National Center for Health Statistics. ...
8. New York Times: The Childless Plan for Their Fading Days
... Ms. Tint’s situation is one that more and more elderly people will face over the next few decades as fewer women choose to have children. According to an August 2013 report from AARP, 11.6 percent of women ages 80 to 84 were childless in 2010. By 2030, the number will reach 16 percent. What’s more, in 2010, the caregiver support ratio was more than seven potential caregivers for every person over 80 years old. By 2030, that ratio is projected to decline to four to one. By 2050, it’s expected to fall to three to one. ...
... “Many people are extending the notion of family itself, to nieces and nephews, cousins and so on,” he continued. “But it’s also expanding to ‘pseudo kin’ of friends and neighbors. We see this in the L.G.B.T. community, many of whom have been alienated from their families.”
“While it’s great to have kids who are available to help, there are a lot of complications with having kids around,” said Audrey K. Chun, a doctor who is also a medical director at the Martha Stewart Center for Living at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York. “A lot of the dynamics, decisions that have to be made around the end of life, disagreements that arise between siblings, what mom or dad may have wanted, can be very emotional. Many of my patients without kids are interested in not wasting resources at the end of life — when it’s their time, they don’t want unnecessary suffering, or to be a burden on society. They want to die naturally. Because they don’t have children to advocate for them, they’re much more open and direct about that.” ...
9. The Guardian: This column will change your life: gut feelings
... But how many of us would embark on a serious relationship based on a shared passion for The Shining? When it comes to judging character, we prefer to believe gut instinct beats box-ticking. "We have a deep-seated need to feel that we can judge character," Jason Dana, of Yale University, told the Boston Globe recently. But many studies suggest we can't – and a new paper co-authored by Dana is especially damning. ...
... Technically, the problem with unstructured interviews (or dates) isn't that they're insufficiently informative. It's that they're too informative. Bombarded by data, we seek refuge in "sensemaking", clinging to stories that seem to render things clear. But those stories might include racist or sexist stereotypes about who's good at what. Or they might be the seductive stories of candidates skilled at interviews, yet rubbish at the job itself. "Because of sensemaking," the researchers write, "interviewers are likely to feel they are getting useful information from unstructured interviews, even when they are useless." Settling on a coherent story feels good, but that doesn't mean it's accurate.
This gap – between what our guts say and what the data says – will only grow wider. As Big Data quantifies more of our lives, we'll increasingly face dilemmas: if your instincts tell you to date or hire Person A, but the metrics point to Person B, whom will you choose? ...
10. Associated Press: Accident rates improving for older drivers
... Today's drivers aged 70 and older are less likely to be involved in crashes than previous generations, and less likely to be killed or seriously injured if they do crash, according to a study released Thursday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
That's because vehicles are getting safer and seniors are generally getting healthier, the institute said. ...
11. Conversable Economist: How Pedestrian Countdown Signals Cause Auto Accidents
Pedestrian countdown signals at crosswalks show how much time is left before the light turns yellow, thus letting pedestrians know if they should rush to cross the street--or perhaps wait for the next light. But when these signals were introduced in Toronto, the rate of rear-end auto accidents was higher at the intersections with pedestrian signals compared to neighboring intersections. ...
... In short, the pedestrian countdown signals were good for pedestrians. But some of the drivers were watching the signals, trying to squeeze through before the light changed, and rear-ending other cars.
There's are some narrow lessons here about pedestrian countdown signals and a broader lesson about how information works. Here are two narrow lessons, which come out of a more detailed analysis of the data: "The first is cities might benefit from installing countdowns at historically highly dangerous intersections and from not installing them at historically safe intersections. The second conclusion is that while countdowns can improve safety in historically dangerous cities, they may be detrimental to safety in historically safe ones." Also, instead of having a pedestrian countdown signal that is visible to cars, it might make more sense to have a verbal countdown that could only be heard by pedestrians. ...
According to new research, people living in poor countries have a greater sense of meaning in their lives than those living in wealthy countries.
These new findings, published in the Association for Psychological Science’s academic journal “Psychology Science,” suggest that this greater sense of life meaning stems from residents’ strong family ties and solid connections to religious tradition. “Thus far, the wealth of nations has been almost always associated with longevity, health, happiness, or life satisfaction,” Shigehiro Oishi, a professor at the University of Virginia and original publisher of this study, said. “Given that meaning in life is an important aspect of overall well-being, we wanted to look more carefully at differential patterns, correlates, and predictors for meaning in life.” ...
13. Huffington Post: 13 Predictions About The Future That Were Spectacularly Wrong
While humankind has made great leaps in science and technology, we have yet to master the art of prophecy. It turns out that predicting the future is tricky business, but time and again, we insist on doing so.
In the spirit of learning from our foolishness, we've partnered with Hendrick's Gin to take a peek into the lofty predictions that turned out to be terribly, spectacularly wrong. ...
14. Washington Post: 40 more maps that explain the world
Maps seemed to be everywhere in 2013, a trend I like to think we encouraged along with August's 40 maps that explain the world. Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. You might consider this, then, a collection of maps meant to inspire your inner map nerd. I've searched far and wide for maps that can reveal and surprise and inform in ways that the daily headlines might not, with a careful eye for sourcing and detail. I've included a link for more information on just about every one. Enjoy.
This one is one interesting example:
15. Huffington Post: Ancient Town Discovered In Israel Is 2,300 Years Old, Archaeologists Say
On the outskirts of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 2,300-year-old rural village that dates back to the Second Temple period, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced. ...
16. Scientific American: 4,600-Year-Old Step Pyramid Uncovered in Egypt
The pyramid, which predates the Great Pyramid of Giza, is one of seven for which its function remains a mystery. ...
17. Discovery: 11,000-Year-Old Settlement Found Under Baltic Sea
Evidence of a Stone-Age settlement that may have been swallowed whole by the Baltic Sea has resurfaced near Sweden, revealing a collection of well preserved artifacts left by nomads some 11,000 years ago. ...
18. Listverse: 10 Lesser-Known Ancient Roman Traditions
Depending on your personal view, ancient Rome was responsible for giving the modern world a number of traditions, including various legal ideas, democracy, and some of our religious celebrations. However, there are still many ancient Roman traditions that are slightly obscure, mostly relegated to the dustbin of history. Here are some lesser known ones. ...
19. Huff Post: CNN Morality Poll Reveals Surprising Trends In America
A recent CNN poll demonstrates the rapidly increasing support for the legalization of marijuana in America, but the survey also revealed American attitudes about the morality of various other actions.
Opinions on behaviors like drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, cheating on taxes, and adultery have shifted since a similar poll was conducted by Time Magazine in 1987. ...
1. EconLog: On Sweatshops: They're Better Than the Alternative - Art Carden
... Here's some of what I wrote them specifically:
Sweatshops are an important exercise in appreciating the difference between what we see (people in sweatshops) and what we don't see (the jobs they would have if they didn't have sweatshop opportunities). Sweatshops employ children because the children are available for work and because their next-best opportunities (agriculture or, in some cases, prostitution) are usually worse than sweatshop labor. It is definitely good that the workers at least have opportunities to work in sweatshops because, as research by Powell and others has shown, their other alternatives are even worse. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but sweatshop earnings are better than they are in other lines of employment.
Perhaps I'm reading uncharitably, but I think a lot of sweatshop critics misunderstand the economist's argument. The argument isn't that sweatshop conditions and wages are good in some cosmic sense. Rather, they are better than the available alternatives. ...
2. Business Insider: Child Labor Bans Actually Make Things Worse For The Poorest Children
This is straight from the "good intentions gone bad" file.
... But banning child labor outright may not work in countries with systemic, widespread poverty and no social security programs to help out poor families in dire straits.
This is according to a new NBER study by Prashant Bharadwaj of UCSD, Leah Lakdawal of Michigan State University and Nicholas Li of the University of Toronto.
The study uses data from India, a country where the problem of child labor is particularly egregious. According to official estimates, the number of child laborers between the ages of 5 and 14 lay at nearly 5 million in 2010. In 1986, India instituted a ban on child labor through the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which sought to ban children under the age of 14 being employed in "hazardous" occupations, which included construction work, some factory work and work in automobile garages. It also restricted the number of hours children could work in "non-hazardous" occupations, such as food service.
The ban's intended effect was to make it riskier, and hence more costly for employers to employ child labor.
But the only people sending their children out to work were the poorest and most desperate families who had no other means of reaching a minimum level of subsistence. Employers took advantage of this desperation and responded by cutting the wages they would pay a child laborer as a means of passing on the higher cost of the risk of employing them. Families that would earlier have sent only one of their children to work, were now forced to send more of their young children into the workforce. The fall in child wages due to the ban actually led to an increase in child labor.
The research found that child labor increased 12.5% over the pre-ban average, and the likelihood of a business employing a child versus employing an older person increased by 1.7 to 1.9 percentage points. ...
3. BBC: Maid to entrepreneur: Rising out of poverty in Brazil
... The changes have been particularly marked for Brazilian women. Falling birth rates mean mothers have smaller families to care for and often do better in their chosen professions.
According to Sebrae, a body that promotes entrepreneurship, the number of Brazilian women who became business owners grew by 21% in the past decade, at twice the rate of men. ...
4. New York Times: In Middle of Mexico, a Middle Class Rises
... Education. More sophisticated work. Higher pay. This is the development formula Mexico has been seeking for decades. But after the free-market wave of the 1990s failed to produce much more than low-skilled factory work, Mexico is finally attracting the higher-end industries that experts say could lead to lasting prosperity. Here, in a mostly poor state long known as one of the country’s main sources of illegal immigrants to the United States, a new Mexico has begun to emerge.
Dozens of foreign companies are investing, filling in new industrial parks along the highways. Middle-class housing is popping up in former watermelon fields, and new universities are waving in classes of students eager to study engineering, aeronautics and biotechnology, signaling a growing confidence in Mexico’s economic future and what many see as the imported meritocracy of international business. In a country where connections and corruption are still common tools of enrichment, many people here are beginning to believe they can get ahead through study and hard work. ...
5. Forbes: Three Young Entrepreneurs Fighting Poverty Have Big Impact
Jake Harriman says that if the company he’s founded still exists in 30 years, “we’ve failed.” You see, Harriman believes Nuru International can end extreme poverty in that time.
Harriman and I met at the Social Innovation Summit at Stanford this week, where I found a number of young entrepreneurs who are working to end poverty.
Beth Schmidt created a crowdfunding site called Wishbone to help poor high school students to raise funding to attend special university programs that help them prepare for college.
Leila Janah created Samasource to help U.S. companies crowdsource affordable staff from the developing world, providing women and young people with quality jobs that lift them out of poverty. Janah notes, “There are 1.4 billion people living on $1.25 per day or less. This is not acceptable.”...
6. Businessweek: Want to Fight Poverty? Just Give the Poor Cash
A new study by economists at Harvard and from MIT suggests that the best way to fight global poverty (PDF) is simply to give people cash and let them spend it however they want. The study was conducted with Innovations for Poverty Action, with funding from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund. ...
7. Businessweek: Is Land Reform Finally Coming to China?
China’s leaders raised a multitude of reforms as priorities at the plenum that closed a week ago. A key one, a change in land ownership so that farmers can more freely rent, sell, and mortgage their land, is hoped to boost China’s still laggard household consumption.
“The Party leadership has given its blessing to land reforms that should shift more income to rural households. Change will happen slowly but the result should be a boost to consumer spending,” wrote Mark Williams and Julian Evans-Pritchard, economists at London-based Capital Economics in a Nov. 20 note. ...
8. Atlantic: One of the World's Tiniest, Poorest Countries Is Redefining HIV Care
In Rwanda, success is measured not by how many people live and die, but by how many take their medication and lead normal lives.
... Yet in Rwanda, where just 20 years ago a genocide claimed approximately 1 million lives, the government has transformed HIV care for the poor by redefining the standards for successful treatment. More than three decades into the epidemic, many national and international agencies are still counting the basics—how many people get infected, how many people receive medication, how many patients die. Success in Rwanda, meanwhile, is measured not in the number remaining alive, but rather in how many are actually able to take their medications as directed and suppress the virus in their bodies to a level where it is essentially non-existent. In Rwanda, success is achieved when people living with HIV can earn a living, support their family, raise their children, and care for their community no differently than their peers. ...
9. Slate: We're Not Sending Poor Countries the Stuff They Want
The paper looked what people identified as the most pressing problems facing their countries on public attitude surveys from 42 African and Latin American countries. In the case of Africa, Leo found that the overwhelming priorities as “(1) jobs and income; (2) infrastructure; (3) enabling economic and financial policies; and (4) inequality. Since 2002, these issues have steadily accounted for roughly 70 percent of survey responses.” (Notice that health, education, and political instability are not on that list.)
So is this what U.S. aid to Africa has focused on? Not even close. According to Leo, “percentage of US development commitments aligned with what Africans have cited as the three biggest problems has exceeded 50 percent in only two African countries over the last decade.” Those would be Botswana, where PEPFAR programs addressed AIDS, and Burkina Faso, where a Millennium Challenge Corp. grant focused on infrastructure.
Most countries are more like Kenya, where only 6 percent of the $5 billion in U.S. development commitments over the last decade has gone toward the three problems Kenyans consistently identify as the country’s biggest: unemployment, bad infrastructure, and unfriendly economic conditions. ...
10. Wired: The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor
...At the time, there was a campaign, spearheaded by the World Bank, to provide free textbooks throughout sub-Saharan Africa, on the assumption that this would boost test scores and keep children in school longer. ICS had tasked Kremer’s friend with identifying target schools for such a giveaway.
While chatting with his friend about this, Kremer began to wonder: How did ICS know the campaign would work? It made sense in theory—free textbooks should mean more kids read them, so more kids learn from them—but they had no evidence to back that up. On the spot, Kremer suggested a rigorous way to evaluate the program: Identify twice the number of qualifying schools as it had the money to support. Then randomly pick half of those schools to receive the textbooks, while the rest got none. By comparing outcomes between the two cohorts, they could gauge whether the textbooks were making a difference. ...
... But soon after Kremer returned to the US, he was startled to get a call from his friend. ICS was interested in pursuing his idea. Sensing a rare research opportunity, Kremer flew back to Kenya and set to work. By any measure it was a quixotic project. ...
11. Businessweek: Poor Countries Need Relief From Climate Change. They Need Electricity More
... Campaigners pointed out that those with the most to lose from the failure of the climate talks are the world’s poorest people—certain to suffer the greatest impact of the floods, droughts, and rising temperatures that climate change is bringing. At the same time, the world’s poorest people are also those with the lowest access to modern sources of energy such as electricity and natural gas. In order to foster economic growth and improvements in health, developing countries will need to generate huge amounts of additional power. How to achieve considerable reductions in carbon dioxide at a time of massive increases in global energy consumption is of the most complex—and urgent—challenges facing policymakers in the developed world. ...
12. Atlantic: Here's Why Developing Countries Will Consume 65% of the World's Energy by 2040
One bit of good news: Energy consumption per gross domestic product is expected to decline worldwide in the coming decade, with developed and developing nations reaching parity by 2040.
13. Huff Post Impact: How Is Technology Driving Job Creation In Poor Countries? - Jessica Long
... In the developing world, the pace of change may be slower than many would like but, nonetheless, there are marked examples of technology's role in raising incomes and driving employment opportunities.
It's not just the supply chain and information-based jobs spawned by technological innovation that create jobs in less developed countries. In many cases, it's the technology firms themselves that need trained IT programmers and other professionals to fill knowledge gaps and keep up with the demands of the rapidly growing economy. ...
14. Forbes: Why Gates Is Wrong About Poverty And Development And Zuckerberg Is Right
... For the main problem in the world is not disease, nor malnutrition, nor education: it’s poverty. Solve the poverty and all of the other problems become infinitely more malleable, hugely easier to solve. We also need to recall that it is not poverty that is made: no one has caused the poor of the world to be destitute. This is in fact the natural condition of mankind. This is how our own ancestors lived for millennia. ...
Just to give you an idea Mozambique, Guinea, Togo, the sort of places that we regard as the poorest of the poor these days. GDP per capita of around $1,000 a year. These places are richer than the Roman Empire. As rich as England was in 1600 AD and richer than Scotland or Wales were at that time.
What is made is the wealth to lift people up out of that destitution. Thus the great need of our time is to bring the tools of wealth creation to those places that don’t have it. ...
15. Huffington Post: Capitalism for Human Rights? - Carol Te
... There seems to be this justification that promoting civil and political freedoms are sufficient because they are necessary vehicles for procuring social and economic security -- but what if it is the other way around?
It is not a coincidence that many non-profits right now take care of the economically and socially disadvantaged -- economic and social rights are not recognized as important human rights as is evidenced by their absence in international law. So instead the international community pushes aid to both non-profits and the government to even out the structural inequality between civil and political rights and economic and social rights. But it is not enough. Basic economics stipulates that incentives are required for innovation. When organizations or governments are given aid, they aren't going to increase levels of productivity. They are simply not given the incentives to work hard to invest in the future. In fact, economist William Easterly finds that the larger the aid, the lower the savings on the recipient's part -- in effect, aid creates disincentives for the recipient in gathering his or her own resources for development. So, if we cannot count on traditional human rights organizations to make a leap forward, then what should we count on? The answer is trade.
Economic growth requires a free global market. Trade is good for poor countries -- it gives them access to markets in the developed world, it creates more competition for workers, which increases wages, and foreign investment introduces new capital, technology and skills. As economist Dambisa Moyo argues, once there is economic growth, then a middle class can be created to hold the government accountable -- robust institutions can form to create stability. New market potential can reap extraordinary benefits for both natives of the country and the investor. And most important of all, it is sustainable. That is, the infrastructure will not fall apart simply because a donor decides to pull out of a project -- a fate that many NGOs fall prey to. ...
16. Jeffery Sachs: Development, Structure, and Transformation: Some Evidence on Comparative Economic Growth
ABSTRACT:
We suggest that the geographical patterns of income differences across the world have deep underpinnings. We emphasize that economic development is a complex process driven by economic, political, social, and biophysical forces. Some economists have argued that the patterns reflect mainly the historical footprint of colonial rule and political evolution, and that geography’s effects on development occurred exclusively through its effects on this historical institutional development.
We believe that economic development has also been shaped very importantly by the biophysical and geophysical characteristics of economies. Per capita incomes differ around the world in no small part because of sharp differences across regions in the natural resource base and physical geography (e.g. distance to coast), and by the amplification of those differences through the dynamics of saving and investment. We posit that the drivers of economic development include institutions, technology, and geography, and that none of these alone is sufficient to account for the diverse patterns of global growth. We survey the relevant literature, and empirically show that a multi-causal framework helps to explain when countries achieve middle income; the distribution of economic activity around the world today; the patterns of growth between 1960 and 2010; the patterns of income per person within large economies; and the structural characteristics of the remaining countries still stuck in poverty today.
17. Real Clear World: Elections Don't Matter, Institutions Do - Robert Kaplan
... And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other.
Well, of course that's true, they're only states, not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is a dull commonplace doesn't make it any less amazing. To be sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders -- that nevertheless do not conflict with each other -- is unique in political history. And this is not to mention the thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing world would be envious of such an original institutional arrangement for governing an entire continent.
In fact, Huntington's observation can be expanded further: The genius of Western civilization in general is that of institutions. Sure, democracy is a basis for this; but democracy is, nevertheless, a separate factor. For enlightened dictatorships in Asia have built robust, meritocratic institutions whereas weak democracies in Africa have not.
Institutions are such a mundane element of Western civilization that we tend to take them for granted. ...
18. Huffington Post: Why Can't We Innovate Our Way Out of Poverty?
It is one of those unproven-but-probably-true facts that developing countries have an easier time getting out of poverty than getting into prosperity. They go from "low-" to "middle-income" level relatively fast, but rarely make it to "high-income" status. [A country is considered middle-income if its average citizen makes between $1,200 and $12,000 a year, give or take a few dollars]. Somehow, they get stuck in a dreaded middle-income "trap". For them, the typical development story goes like this. They get an initial boost by reforming their agriculture or exploiting their oil and minerals. This releases the labor and the money needed to build industries that can use basic technology to produce cheaply the kind of goods that consumers in rich countries want to buy. Think of Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, or Turkey -- chances are that your T-shirt, tool-box, tea-pot, and TV set were manufactured or assembled in a middle-income country like these. But when those countries try to climb up the technological ladder, sell more valuable stuff, be more productive, and create better-paying jobs, things get complicated. Then the game is no longer to sell cheap but to sell new, not just to be efficient but to be innovative. ...
... How on earth can governments promote that!?
A new book called Mass Flourishing, written by Edmund Phelps, says they can't. Or, rather, it says that they need cultural change. ...
19. Businessweek: Farewell to the Age of Free Trade - Joshua Kurlantzick
Since the end of World War II and the birth of the modern global economy, business leaders have come to accept an iron law: International trade always expands faster than economic growth. Between the late 1940s and 2013, that assumption held true. Trade grew roughly twice as fast as the world economy annually, as fresh markets opened up, governments signed free-trade pacts, new industries and consumers emerged, and technological advances made international trade cheaper and faster.
Now this iron law may be crumbling. Over the past two years, international trade has grown so slowly that it has fallen behind the growth of the world economy, which itself is hardly humming. ...
Not sure I agree, but some interesting thoughts.
20. New York Times: Inequality and Good Intentions - Casey Mulligan
... Progress begets inequality, and the resulting inequality can either encourage more progress or impede it, or both. Professor Deaton suggests that inequality in the modern United States has had both of these effects.
He points to a third influence of progress and inequality on outcomes for those left behind: good intentions. As part of the world becomes rich and no longer worries about day-to-day survival, it can look outward. Many residents of developed countries have a “need to help” those less fortunate.
But the attempts to help often – perhaps even usually – go awry. ...
21. The Telegraph: The world has never had it so good - thanks partly to capitalismWe live in largely peaceful times, with better access to medicine and education - the world is easily in the best place it’s ever been.
Economist: Jobs growth in poor countries by income group
... In the chart, left of zero mean fewer jobs in those income groups, while right of zero mean more jobs. So in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the share of jobs for the poorest workers will contract while jobs for people with more income will expand. ...
... Overall, the data tell an optimistic story: not only are jobs increasing, but the middle class is as well.
1. Carpe Diem: 5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History
2. Everyone is putting out their most important economic charts list for 2013: Atlantic: The Most Important Economic Stories of 2013—in 44 Graphs. Economist: 2013 in charts. Huffington Post: The 13 Most Important Charts Of 2013.
3. Economist: The world has become better fed over the past 50 years
MANY people will groan after stuffing themselves on a Christmas feast. A traditional three-course turkey dinner can be as much as 3,500 calories. Such indulgences are a luxury in many parts of the world—but thankfully less so. Over the past half-century, the amount of food that people consume has increased (measured in calories), according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Our interactive map and chart tracks countries across five decades, letting users select places, years on the timeline or any chart-line. (It performs poorly on smartphones; our apologies.) ...
In a related story at NPR: More People Have More To Eat, But It's Not All Good News
... The good news is: The percentage of the world's population getting what the researchers say is a sufficient diet has grown from 30 percent to 61 percent.
In 1965, a majority of the world survived on less than 2,000 calories a day per person. This was especially true in parts of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, China and Southeast Asia. Now, 61 percent of the world has access to 2,500 or more calories a day.
But one thing the scientists discovered is that the countries that have a history of food insufficiency didn't just up and start growing lots more food. Instead, for the most part they're increasing supply by importing food from abroad. ...
I'm unclear why the author thinks importing food is a problem but other challenges he mentions in the article are an issue.
4. Carpe Diem: When it comes to home appliances, the ‘good old days’ are now: they’re cheaper, better, more energy efficient than ever
... In 1981, the 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above from a 1981 Wards Christmas catalog sold for $359.88. The average hourly manufacturing wage then was $7.42, meaning that it would have taken 48.5 hours of work at the average hourly wage for a typical factory worker to earn enough income 32 years ago to purchase the dishwasher above. ...
... The new Kenmore 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above is currently listed on the Sears website for sale at $539.99. At the current average hourly wage of $20.26 for production workers, the average factory worker today would only have to work 26.7 hours to earn enough pre-tax income to buy today’s energy-efficient dishwasher, which is only a little more than one-half of the 48.5 hour time-cost for the 1981 model.
Bottom Line: Today’s modern household appliances are not only cheaper than ever before, they are the most energy-efficient appliances in history, resulting in additional savings for consumers through lower operating costs. The average dishwasher today is not only more than twice as energy-efficient as a comparable 1981 model, but its real cost today is only about 50% of the price of the 1981 dishwasher, measured in hours worked at the average hourly wage. Put those two factors together, and the average American’s dishwasher today is about six times superior to the dishwasher of thirty years ago. ...
5. Carpe Diem: How much did real US median income increase from 1979 to 2007? A lot depends on the measure of income used
"The median income data [often cited] are on tax units rather than households, they do not include many government transfer payments, they are pre-tax rather than post-tax, they do not adjust for changes in household size, and they do not include nontaxable compensation such as employer-provided health insurance.
Does this matter? Yes!"
6. American Interest: Economic Mobility is a Male Problem
The biggest victim of family breakdown might be lower-class men. In City Journal Kay Hymowitz has a fascinating yet alarming piece on how family breakdown hurts men’s prospects more than women’s. One of the most interesting facts she highlights is that if you separate out men from women, women in America are roughly as upwardly mobile as women anywhere else in the world. It’s only when you add men back in and compare the US whole population to populations abroad that things look bleak:
Numerous studies have confirmed that the U.S. has less upward mobility than just about any developed nation, including England, the homeland of the peerage. Yet, if you look at boys separately from girls, as the Finnish economist Markus Jäntti and his colleagues at the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor did, the story changes markedly. In every country studied, girls are more likely than boys to climb up the income ladder, but in the United States, the disadvantage for sons is substantially greater than in other countries. Almost 75 percent of American daughters escape the lowest quintile—not unlike girls in the comparison countries of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fewer than 60 percent of American sons experience similar success. ...
7. AEI Ideas: 3 charts that show what’s really going on with economic mobility in the US
8. Washington Post: Full employment, not inequality, should be the top economic priority - Ezra Klein
... While there are ways to reduce inequality without doing much about employment (say, by taxing the rich and using the proceeds on defense spending), it's hard to imagine full employment not doing much to reduce inequality. ...
... All that said, income inequality and social mobility really are startling trends that people should be very worried about and that the political system should be working aggressively to solve, or at least ameliorate. I don't have many policy disagreements with the folks focusing on inequality. But politics is about prioritization, and what politicians end up doing is in part driven by what problems their political coalitions are most worried about. ...
9. Conversable Economist: Falling Unemployment and Falling Labor Force Participation
10. Business Insider: This Map Shows Which Parts Of The Country Have A Huge Gender Gap In The Workforce
11. PBS: The rise of the 'new rich': 1 in 5 Americans will reach affluence in their lives
It's not just the wealthiest 1 percent.
Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality.
The growing numbers of the U.S. poor have been well documented, but survey data provided to The Associated Press detail the flip side of the record income gap -- the rise of the "new rich." ...
12. Atlantic Cities: America's Wealth Is Staggeringly Concentrated in the Northeast Corridor
13. New York Times: Demand Soaring, Poor Are Feeling Squeezed
... Today, millions of poor Americans are caught in a similar trap, with the collapse of the housing boom helping stoke a severe shortage of affordable apartments. Demand for rental units has surged, with credit standards tight and many families unable to scrape together enough for a down payment for buying a home. At the same time, supply has declined, with homebuilders and landlords often targeting the upper end of the market. ...
14. Bloomberg: North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly
The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.
Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day....
15. Oil Price: Cheap Fossil Fuels: Good or Bad for the World’s Poor?
... Let’s try reconciling all of the themes raised in Lomborg’s article and in my comments by reframing them in this way:
• Yes, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while. For that reason, a smart energy policy needs to focus on shifting the mix of fossil fuels, so far as is possible, to relatively clean natural gas and away from relatively dirty coal, while also keeping the pressure on for energy conservation across the board.
• Price signals are one way to keep the pressure on. A carbon tax is a somewhat crude way to penalize relatively dirty fuels, in that climate change is not the only issue. We should be concerned, too, about sulfur and mercury from burning coal, urban air pollution from gasoline and diesel fuels, and local environmental risks of fracking for natural gas. Still, a carbon tax serves at least roughly to penalize the dirtiest fuels the most.
• And yes, no environmental policy is going to be successful politically if it is seen as a matter of saving the earth versus helping the poor. Fuel subsidies have to go, since, realistically, they are a burden, not a boon, to the poor, but at the same time, some of the budgetary economies from the elimination of subsidies and some of the revenues from carbon taxes should go toward smarter policies to help the world’s least advantaged.
Those ideas might help point us toward policies that are good for both the poor and the planet.
16. askblog: The Market is a Process, not a Decision Mechanism
... I think that many commentators contrast the market and government as mechanisms for making decisions. In this contrast, the market sometimes has an efficiency advantage, but government is presumed to have a moral-authority advantage.
Instead, think of the market as a process for testing hypotheses. The process is brutally empirical, winnowing out losing strategies and poor execution. In contrast, elections are a much weaker testing mechanism. Elections are unable to winnow out sugar subsidies, improvident loan guarantees, schools that produce bad outcomes, etc. ...
17. Quartz: Why the left-leaning Nelson Mandela was such a champion of free markets
One often overlooked aspect of Nelson Mandela’s legacy is South Africa’s economy. Parallel to everything amazing the man is connected to—freeing the country from the shackles of apartheid, subordinating retribution in favor of peace and reconciliation, and unifying a volatile nation at risk of civil war—he laid the groundwork for South Africa as the continent’s economic powerhouse. ...
18. Atlantic: Why Economics Is Really Called 'the Dismal Science'
... But this origin myth is, well, mythical. Carlyle did coin the phrase "the dismal science." And Malthus was, without question, dismal.
But Carlyle labeled the science "dismal" when writing about slavery in the West Indies. White plantation owners, he said, ought to force black plantation workers to be their servants. Economics, somewhat inconveniently for Carlyle, didn't offer a hearty defense of slavery. Instead, the rules of supply and demand argued for "letting men alone" rather than thrashing them with whips for not being servile. Carlyle bashed political economy as "a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing [science]; what we might call ... the dismal science.” ...
1. The 15 Most Overused Business Words Of 2013
What is your favorite?
2. Lessons In Leadership: It's Not About You. (It's About Them)
"... Heifetz trained as a psychiatrist, and he describes his view of effective leadership with an analogy from medicine. "When a patient comes to a surgeon, the surgeon's default setting is to say, 'You've got a problem? I'll take the problem off your shoulders and I'll deliver back to you a solution.' In psychiatry, when a person comes to you with a problem, it's not your job actually to solve their problem. It's your job to develop their capacity to solve their own problem."..."
3. Kindness Does Not Equate To Weakness In Leadership
"Being a kind leader does not mean that you don’t fire people. It doesn’t mean that you don’t make tough decisions that will impact the bottom line. And it doesn’t mean that you won’t work harder than those who are unkind. It simply means that you are focused as much on the delivery of your message as you are on the message itself. ... "
4. 7 Myths About Ethics Which Will Hurt Your Business
5. The Self-Made Super-Rich Fear Insignificance
... The self-made super-rich (net worth = US$500 million or more) are hardly immune from the personal complications of these stresses. They may very well fear a crashing economy or a stroke as much as anyone else. However, in ethnological investigations of the self-made super-rich, there’s often a somewhat different underlying psychology in action. To understand this core motivation, let’s take a step back and consider a couple of the often more pronounced major concerns of the self-made super-rich.
Fear of losing their wealth. Their fortunes are very much a factor of their efforts. The self-made super-rich are well aware of what they sacrificed and what they did (some of which is likely disconcerting) to become so affluent. Coupled with the wealth creation high, there are times when the thought of losing their vast wealth is actually quite terrifying especially since it’s usually fairly difficult to reconstitute such personal fortunes.
Fear of losing power and influence. In the process of creating a momentous personal fortune, many of the self-made super-rich have created a network of successful and powerful individuals. Consequently, either directly or through these individuals, they’re able to exert substantial power and influence in the world. As with losing their wealth, when they lose this capability it is usually impossible to get it back. ...
... By becoming insignificant, the self-made super-rich are losing their self-identity that is often a product as well as function of their vast wealth. It’s that they are no longer important to the world at large, but they’re no longer important in their own heads.
6. Entrepreneurship differs wildly among countries
7. It’s the end of Walmart—and mass-market retail—as you know it
For a long time, having the best supply chain was enough. This is how Walmart became the powerhouse retailer it is: by building the largest, broadest, most efficient system for moving products across the United States. Then along came advanced analytics, which allowed companies to determine what products to suggest next to the product you were already buying, or to provide add-ons that any specific buyer might want, such as free shipping or free bonus products. Amazon mastered this strategy.
Now those techniques have timed out, too. We already know that 3D printing and robotic manufacturing technology can overtake centralized production. But the difference here is that a single company might not emerge to capitalize on these technologies the way singular brands like Walmart and Amazon have in the past. Instead, we are now entering the primacy of design.
From a consumer perspective, this means more products to choose from at better prices, faster delivery, and with greater personalization. But from a retail perspective this is nothing short of revolutionary: the bottom is dropping out of the middle of retailers’ entire business—the part where they produce and provide customers with products. ...
8. Here's What The Store Of The Future Will Look Like (Hint: Not Amazon)
... Retail consultancy WD Partners has published a report showing how traditional stores can still appeal to modern shoppers by updating their brick and mortar models rather than trying to chase Amazon online.
“The key to finding the edge isn’t copying what Amazon does,” said WD Partners’ Lee Peterson. “It’s doing what Amazon can’t.” ...
9. What We Get Wrong About Small Business
No American politician can go wrong singing the virtues of small businesses. But the much-revered cornerstone of economic growth is a broad category, encompassing everyone from the independent consultant to the coffee-shop owner to the start-up founder on the verge of explosive growth. And while our rhetoric may not distinguish between them, policymakers must in order to understand how to best support the needs of different kinds of small businesses. ...
I was one of the founders of our modern methods of both socially responsible and impact investing. In 1982, the Calvert Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, of which I was one of the founders, was the first family of such funds and today the Calvert Group has over $12 billion under management and is the largest family of such funds. In 1975, I was also one of the founders of the Institute for Community Economics, one of the first designers of impact investment funds (in those days we called it "community investment").
What distinguishes the three kinds of investments in the title of this paper from each other is the priority of each. Our priority each moment determines everything else we do. All secondary priorities honor and yield to the leadership of our highest priority. ...
11. Investing as a Religious Practice
Faith-based mutual funds incorporate ethical values in selecting securities to own.
Some investors are finding meaning by putting their money where their faith is.
Faith-based mutual funds typically screen out stocks of companies that violate the tenets of a given religion or religious denomination. A Muslim fund is likely to screen out companies related to pork production, for example, while a Catholic fund can avoid a maker of contraceptives.
"In almost every regular mutual fund, a [religious] client is going to get a share of companies that are involved in activities in which they'd rather not be involved," says Dan Hardt, a certified financial planner in Louisville, Ky., who specializes in Christian faith-based planning. Mr. Hardt says among his client base, abortion is "easily the No. 1 'egregious' activity in which they would like to avoid investing." ...
Denominations also do screening with investment of their corporate funds. Here is a link to Mission Responsibility Through Investment of the Presbyterian Mission Agency of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., the denomination I belong to. This committee implements denominational policy on socially responsible investing of the denominations's funds and works to persuade corporations to change practices. Some denominations have similar approaches.
12. Employee share ownership: Turning workers into capitalists
... In most cases workers equity stakes are fairly small. But the authors argue that this widespread, if shallow, citizen capitalism is the basis from which something much bolder can be built. They urge a 21st century version of George Washington's logic: government incentives designed to encourage firms to expand employee share ownership. Their proposals range from the small-bore (use the federal government to spread the word on employee share ownership) to a more ambitious restructuring of tax incentives (for instance, making all existing corporate tax breaks contingent on a firm having a profit-sharing or employee ownership scheme).
Are these proposals a good idea? Certaintly the logic that broadening capital participation is part of the answer to countering the squeeze on workers is an appealing one. But does it make sense for workers to build up capital stakes in the firms they work for? One worry has to be the concentration of risk. ...
... Rather than dole out new special incentives to promote a particular, and perhaps risky, route to broader share ownership, why not eliminate existing incentives that serve to encourage the concentration of capital? The carried-interest loophole, which allows private-equity partners to pay (lower) capital-gains tax rates on their income, would be an obvious place to start.
13. The Perfect Elevator Pitch: In 20 Seconds or Less, Tell Me What You Do
14. Why We Can't Get Anything Done in an Open-Plan Office
... The argument for the open-plan office is that it forces workers to talk to each other and triggers fruitful and surprising collaborations that wouldn’t have happened with everyone hunkered down inside their own four walls. A recent study that surveyed 40,000 American officer workers, however, found that those in open-plan arrangements were not only less happy with their workspace than those with private offices; those surveyed also judged that the ”benefits of enhanced ‘ease of interaction’ were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration.” The authors write: “the open-plan proponents’ argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature.” ...
15. Why is ALDI so much cheaper than other supermarkets?
Why is ALDI so much cheaper than other supermarkets?
1. Scientists Should Engage in Policy, Carefully
... There is a helpful way of looking at how scientists give advice to policymakers. In Roger Pielke’s book, The Honest Broker, he suggests that there are four ways scientists can choose to engage in the policy process. First, they can act as a “pure scientist” who publishes papers, and even if their work has relevance to a policy issue, they leave it for others to find and use the results. Second, they can act as “science arbiters”, who answer specific factual questions posed by decision-makers. Third, they can become an “issue advocate”, who decide for themselves on the “right” policy decision and become advocates for the “solution”, sometimes closing down the scope of choices available to policymakers. Finally, they can act as “honest brokers”, who aim to expand and clarify the scope of options and choices available to decision-makers, stepping back, leaving it to the policymaker to use this evidence to decide what to do.
On the matter of these four ways, scientists might reflect on where they sit on particular issues when speaking with policy-makers, journalists and even friends. Do they make up their minds about what should happen and advocate their version? Are they even aware when they, as Martin Rees puts it, are “acting as citizens”, or do they slip into territories that involve aspects beyond science and speak about them with the kind of authority they use when speaking about science?
Scientists get excellent training in how to be scientific – in logic, rational thinking and how to aim for objectivity. They don’t however get much training in reflecting on their behaviour or language, or really thinking through the boundaries of where scientific evidence comes up against other, murkier areas such as ethics and economics. Scientists rarely get training in how to give advice to policymakers. They may just be thrown into doing it, having observed how other scientists behave. ...
2. Colorized American Civil War Photos Beautifully Bring Past To Life
Two professional colorists have combined their skills with photographs and fascination with the American Civil War to create a remarkable series of color photographs from the era. ...
Brought to life: Lewis Powell (pictured) conspired with John Wilkes Booth to kill President Lincoln - Powell's job was to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward, a job at which he failed.
3. On Climate Change, Economics Trumps Science
... Look, for instance, at the cases of China and India.
These two countries have resolutely rejected all demands that they adopt binding limits on their emissions. Yet Beijing is fully aware of the threat posed by climate change; in fact, it has plans for massive public-works projects to adapt to it. New Delhi, even if it has less capacity for large-scale public works, is also fully aware of the threat posed by climate change.
These countries' assessments of climate science do not conflict with those of the IPCC. But Beijing and New Delhi apparently prefer to adapt to climate change instead of investing in high-cost efforts to prevent it. Moreover, in making this choice, the politicians may have a better grasp of the big picture than the scientists do. ...
4. Death in the digital age: Are you prepared?
When 15-year-old Eric Rash committed suicide in 2011, his family and friends wanted to know why.
In a bid to find answers, they went to Eric's Facebook account, and after failing to guess his password, appealed to the social media giant to grant them access.
Facebook refused.
Giving unauthorised access to someone other than the account holder, the company said, was against its privacy policy.
The Rashes, who live in Virginia, tried to fight their case in court, but soon found there just wasn't any legislation that covered the management of "digital assets".
The family's tragic battle is just one of many examples in which the internet has been shown to be woefully unprepared for dealing with death. ...
5. New Disney technology can add texture to completely smooth touch screens
6. New App Lets You Settle Check Before Sitting Down
If you’ve ever had a great dinner ruined by the awkwardness of splitting (or not splitting) a check, you might want to check out Cover, a new app launching today in New York City.
Here’s how Cover works: you enter your credit card information into the app, walk into a participating restaurant, check in, set the tip percentage, the number of diners and then let your server know you’re using it.
When you’re done eating, you just walk out and Cover processes the bill. Simple as that. ...
1. Here's The Chart That Destroys What Republicans Are Saying About The Deficit
2. The 10 Most Popular Charts On The World's Most Amazing Economics Website
Here is one example: Nominal GDP (3.1% growth year over year in Q2):
3. Global trade volume and world industrial production both reached new record highs in July
4. Gas prices dip to eight-month low despite Middle East tumult
Gas prices are at the lowest they've been since late January despite continued unease across the Middle East. Much of the decline in gas prices is part of the seasonal change in supply and demand, but it also reflects a shifting global oil market.
5. 19 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith in the World Economy
Here is one example. Some economists see the Baltic Dry Index as one of the best indicators of global trade and economic vitality:
6. Here Are The Countries That Collect The Most And Least In Taxes
7. Commentary: Robots Taking All Our Jobs? Ridiculous
... If technology enables the same amount of work to be done with fewer people, the argument goes, then it must be bad for employment. More sophisticated variants of this thesis further claim that accelerating technological change has created too much churn in labor markets, and robots are now storming the last few bastions of scarce human abilities.
This tale is not new. The original British Luddites rose up in the early 1800s to oppose mechanization of the textile industry and went so far as to destroy looms that were replacing workers. In the two centuries since, whenever unemployment rates have risen there have been some who blamed the machines. Many even argued that we were heading toward mass permanent unemployment. ...
... Fortunately for workers and for those who understand the potential of new technologies, these ideas are essentially misguided speculation. They fly in the face of years of economic data as well as current trends.
They all fall into what economists call the "Lump of Labor" fallacy, the idea that there's a limited amount of labor to be done. In reality, labor markets aren't fixed. If jobs in one firm or industry are reduced, they're replaced by jobs in other areas of the economy. This is why we did not see massive unemployment as agriculture mechanized in the early 20th century -- the workforce shifted to other professions. ...
8. The Global Economy In 17 Beautiful Maps
For example:
9. Is Innovation Leading to a New Age of Productivity in the U.S.?
... So-called intelligent machines increasingly communicate among themselves and with people. Mobile devices allow round-the-clock interconnectivity. Computers crunch terabytes of data. Such innovations have convinced some economists that the stage is set for a wave of productivity gains to rival the one spawned by the 10-year Internet boom that began in 1995. "I'm quite optimistic," says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. Leaps in productivity would allow faster growth without generating higher inflation. Companies could pay their workers more while still enjoying healthier earnings. Rising tax revenue would make it easier for the U.S. to cut its budget deficit. ...
1. Population Reference Bureau has a great resource that maps their 2013 World Population Data Sheet on an interactive map. Here is one example:
2. Modern family redefined: Say 'goodbye' to the typical American family
A New York Times story looking at the skyrocketing rate of birth outside of marriage among women under 30 (now over 50 percent of such births) pointed up one of the key differences between marriages and cohabitating couples:
Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
The research, in aggregate, says that things are changing for the American family, and quickly. There may be ways for the government to address the trend: increased financial benefits for getting and staying married, for example, or a macro-effort to actively battle rising economic inequality, but systematic change will be a long hard fight. The research seems to suggest that such a fight is worth the effort.
4. Young People Are Still Dropping Out Of The Labor Force
Kids are likely staying in school for longer (or avoiding work altogether) thanks to a tough labor market. On the other hand, the 65-and-over crowd has seen the sharpest uptick in participation. The financial crisis bled retirement savings, forcing older Americans to stay on the job for longer.
5. How Big Data Is Transforming The Mobile Industry
6. Millennials Now Bringing Their Parents Along On Job Interviews
7. Why Bigger Is No Longer Better
Every manager and entrepreneur wants to grow their business. Get bigger and more powerful, the thinking goes, and you'll have it made. The added heft will give you the upper hand in negotiations with suppliers and the doors of customers will swing wide open.
That used to be true to a certain extent, but not so much anymore. Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids.
This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers. While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them. You have lots of customers, a large workforce and stodgy institutional investors to keep happy, all of which contribute to strategic rigidity. To compete in the new economy, we need a new playbook. ...
8. Can For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Purposes?
...Okay, some may respond (e.g., here), churches and other organizations have free exercise rights, but for-profit corporations do not. But why would this be? An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will's example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not she commits to donate her earnings to a religious charity). Does this individual lose such rights if she incorporated? Does that somehow make her religious motivations any less sincere? Any less judicially cognizable? I can't see how. What, then, if the deli owner formed a partnership with her equally devout brother? Would that matter? And, again, if an informal partnership would be okay, why would the adoption of a corporate form and limited liability matter?
The consequence of the "no religious liberty for corporations" position is that individuals who would like to go into business are penalized if they seek to go into business without any potential recourse, under RFRA or otherwise. The choice presented by the state is go into business or stay true to your religious beliefs. Although I suggested otherwise before, it seems to me this approach imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion. Whether this burden can be justified in a given case is a separate question, but the burden is there. ...
9. Five Insights About Private Property from Aquinas
10. Germans Revolt Against Germany's Green Energy Revolution
11. Brussels fears European 'industrial massacre' sparked by energy costs
Europe's industry is being ravaged by exorbitant energy costs and an over-valued euro, blighting efforts to reverse years of global manufacturing decline.
12. What If Roads Lasted Twice As Long?
If there were a better way to take care of roads in the Lone Star State, it would be a very valuable idea.
Enter Sahadat Hossain, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and the man behind a new state program to shore up crumbling roads using an underground support system of recycled plastic pins.
"Just think about it," Hossain says. "You need one million dollars to repair something. Or you can use a sustainable recycling material and do it for $200- or $300,000. You don't need to be an engineer to see that."
The scheme's low price is matched by its high effectiveness. In a two-year feasibility study that concluded this August, sections of Texas Route 287 with 10-foot-long pins drilled into the roadway slope moved only one to two inches. The control sections, left unsupported, moved 15 to 16 inches. ...
... The input cost of the pins, which have previously been tested in Missouri, is less than 50 percent that of traditional highway support measures like retaining walls. And because they are made from recycled plastic—each pin contains about 500 soda bottles—the pin concept turns plastic's non-decomposition from an environmental headache to an engineering solution. ...
14. Why So Many Articles Have Terrible Headlines Online
15. The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
16. What would happen if your church was reviewed on TripAdvisor?
Churches spend a lot of time on the big things, like a glorious anthem and prophetic preaching. But a UMC pastor says small details matter, too, like lights that burn brightly, signs that make sense and greeters who greet. ...
MIT Technology Review: Technology Is Wiping Out Companies Faster than Ever
... Today’s S&P 500 includes many familiar firms, like Apple, AT&T, Corning, Ford, Intel, and Yahoo (and Hewlett-Packard, too). Yet at today’s fast rate of turnover, three out of four names on the list will be banished into obscurity within the next fifteen years.
Foster’s view is that big companies can’t ever out-innovate the market. Instead, he thinks that to stay big, companies need to be willing to exit old businesses and enter new ones—and do it quite boldly. (HP, by contrast, can’t decide whether to jettison its PC business.) ...
1. How effective has the Millennium Villages Project been?
Here is a recent Op Ed in the NYT the Millennium Villages Project by Joe Nocerra, Fighting Poverty, and Critics.
2. Global Economic Growth Has Hit A Two-And-A-Half Year High
3. What Every U.S. Family Really Needs for a Minimum Living Standard
... Computers have become nearly ubiquitous, as cell phones have replaced what was once a reliable indicator of minimum living conditions in the U.S.: the landline. Very soon we'll need to start measuring minimum living conditions in a new way. What if it's your broadband bill you can't afford? Or the computer or smart phone you actually need way more than a dishwasher?
4. The Global Decline of the Labor Share
The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital. The lower price of investment goods explains roughly half of the observed decline in the labor share, even when we allow for other mechanisms influencing factor shares such as increasing profits, capital-augmenting technology growth, and the changing skill composition of the labor force. We highlight the implications of this explanation for welfare and macroeconomic dynamics.
5. The Myth of Part-Time America
... The scare stories are good scares, but they're not good stories, since they start at the end and forget the beginning and middle. The truth about Part-Time America is that a part of America has always been working part-time, and there's not much evidence that we're seeing a terrifically new phenomenon. ...
6. Women Want Work-Life Balance More Than A Big Paycheck
...The survey, which included more than 5,300 working women across 13 countries, asked women questions about what they would need in their careers to feel like they "have it all."
The most interesting result comes from their definition of success. Five to 10 years ago, 56% of women attributed success with earning a big paycheck, but only 45% of women think the same today. And while 39% of women previously defined success as finding the balance between work and personal life, that number has grown to 63% today. ...
I'll add that this dynamic contributes to differences in pay by gender. In aggregate, men are still more singularly focused on work and work is a more central part of male identity.
7. Men's average height 'up 11cm since 1870s'
... The researchers said the gene pool "cannot account for substantial increases in mean stature over four or five generations".
Growth is significantly affected by what happens in the first two years of life, they said.
So, a high rate of illnesses such as respiratory diseases or diarrhoeas - which caused many infant deaths - would also affect survivors' development and therefore their subsequent height.
Infant mortality rates fell significantly throughout the period studied.
Another factor taken into account by the researchers was an increasing move to smaller families - meaning fewer people to feed.
Higher income, more sanitary living conditions and better education about health and nutrition could also have had an effect, they said. ...
Economist Robert Fogel developed the term technophysio evolution in response to his study of the phenomenon. See The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World.
8. US birthrate decline slowing?
The US birth rate could be leveling off after a four-years of drop: 4 million Americans were born in 2012, just a few hundred fewer than2011. Teen births are in a "stunning turnaround," and the birthrate for older moms is increasing. ...
9. What's Killing Poor White Women?
For most Americans, life expectancy continues to rise—but not for uneducated white women. They have lost five years, and no one knows why.
10. Amish Community Not Anti-Technology, Just More Thoughtful
Many outsiders assume the Amish reject all new technology. But that's not true.
One Amish man in Lancaster County, Pa., checks his voicemail about four times a day. His shop is equipped with a propane-powered forklift, hydraulic-powered saws, cordless drills, and a refrigerated tank where milk from dairy cows is stored.
The difference between Amish people and most other Americans is the deliberation that takes place before deciding whether to embrace a new technology. Many Americans assume newer technology is always better, and perhaps even inherently good. ...
11. Religion In Workplace Increasingly Diverse; Comes With Potential Pitfalls
12. The shocking un-truth about church budgets
The church’s rapidly changing role in society requires new ways of looking at the allocation of financial resources. ...
... In the past we churches thought of ourselves as the backbones of society, places where good, moral and faithful people gather to pool resources so we can go out into the world and feed the homeless and convert people in order to save their souls. Keeping administrative costs as low as possible would help us to help the needy.
While many good and righteous things have come out of this view of ourselves, the truth is that that way of thinking is a pretty arrogant self-assessment borne out of a climate of popularity and ease. ...
... What we are now is mission outposts. We are islands in a world full of increasingly adrift people. We are places of solace and hope, community and hospitality for people who are too smart to believe in God and pretty convinced they don’t need the church — until they do. ...
13. 26 Maps That Show How Ethnic Groups Are Divided Across America
14. A Point of View: Why embracing change is the key to happiness
... And every analysis of what makes lucky and happy people lucky and happy demonstrates they adapt fast and well to new situations and people, and so are defended by complex social circles and acclimatised to change. They offer and request help and are free to embrace what's positive in life's inevitable alterations. They don't try to impose stillness on a universe which is in motion. They know real security involves a degree of exposure.
Sadly, most human authorities play to our fears and offer us stasis. They build us, if you like, shark cages for our time in the ever-changing water - consoling little pens which can't protect us when something huge and horrible arrives and we end up like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws - all at sea. They offer apparently eternal values - eternity being unchanging and therefore reliable - the brotherhood of men, the wisdom of the free market, the evil of outsiders, the true path to heaven, the rewards of obedience. An incumbent government will warn against "changing horses in midstream" and we may accept a dire status quo because of how much worse the alternative might be. ...
1. Mark Buchanan asks Is Economics a Science or a Religion?
2. Poverty has moved to the suburbs
I don't think this should be seen as necessarily a bad thing. A few decades ago, the idea was to "warehouse" the poor in large urban complexes. There has been an intentional effort at dispersal through various means including creating mixed-income neighborhoods.
3. Crime has plummeted in the rich world, even amid the recession.
4. 5 Charts That Perfectly Capture The Incredible Rise Of China
5. How (and why) Africa should solve its own problems
Africa cannot rely on outside people to come and feed our poor or treat our sick, says African businessman and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim. The key is good governance, in both the public and private sectors.
6. World Bank: Africa held back by land ownership confusion
Africa's economic growth is being held back by confusion over who owns vast swathes of agricultural land, according to a World Bank report.
7. Deforestation in Africa's Congo Basin rainforest slows
Tree loss in one of the world's largest rainforests has slowed, a study suggests.
Satellite images of Africa's Congo Basin reveal that deforestation has fallen by about a third since 2000.
Researchers believe this is partly because of a focus on mining and oil rather than commercial agriculture, where swathes of forest are cleared. ...
8. Brazil's Evangelicals A Growing Force In Prayer, Politics
... Recent polls show that evangelical Christianity is the fastest-growing sect in Brazil. According to the Pew Research Center, 22 percent of the Brazilian population identifies as evangelical Christian — up from 5 percent in 1970. Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, most of them switched from Roman Catholicism.
These days, only about 62 percent of people in Brazil say they are Catholic. In absolute numbers, however, this still makes Brazil the country with the most Catholics in the world. ...
9. For Developing World, a Streamlined Facebook
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has been quietly working for more than two years on a project that is vital to expanding its base of 1.1 billion users: getting the social network onto the billions of cheap, simple "feature phones" that have largely disappeared in America and Europe but are still the norm in developing countries like India and Brazil.
Facebook soon plans to announce the first results of the initiative, which it calls Facebook for Every Phone: More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20.
Many of those users, who rank among the world's poorest people, pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds and photos, with the data usage subsidized by phone carriers and manufacturers. ...
10. The Huge Threat to Capitalism That Republicans Are Ignoring (I don't agree with a couple of points but I think his thesis is spot on.)
11. Big Racial Divide over Zimmerman Verdict
12. The Wal-Mart Slayer: How Publix's People-First Culture Is Winning The Grocer War
Family-run Publix is both the largest employee-owned company and the most profitable grocer in America. Those two facts are linked, and they might be the formula for fending off Bentonville's retail behemoth. ...
... When a middle-aged woman asks about a box of crackers, no aisle number is blurted out. Instead, an employee races off to find the item, just as he is trained to do. At checkout, shoppers move to the front quickly, thanks to a two-customer-per-line goal enforced by proprietary, predictive staffing software. Baggers, a foggy memory at most large supermarket chains, carry purchases to the parking lot. Even Publix's president, Todd Jones, who started out as a bagger 33 years ago, stoops down to pick up specks of trash on the store floor.
"We believe that there are three ways to differentiate: service, quality and price," Jones says. "You've got to be good at two of them, and the best at one. We make service our number one, then quality and then price."...
... Publix, the seventh-largest private company in the U.S. ($27.5 billion in sales) and one of the least understood thanks to decades of media reticence, is also the largest employee-owned company in America. For 83 years Publix has thrived by delivering top-rated service to its shoppers by turning thousands of its cashiers, baggers, butchers and bakers into the company's largest collective shareholders. All staffers who have put in 1,000 work hours and a year of employment receive an additional 8.5% of their total pay in the form of Publix stock. (Though private, the board sets the stock price every quarter based on an independent valuation; it's pegged at $26.90 now, up nearly 20% already this year.) How rich can employees get? According to Publix, a store manager who has worked at the company for 20 years and earns between $100,000 and $130,000 likely has $300,000 in stock and has received another $30,000 in dividends. ...
13. Grocery shopping online: Can it replace trips to the store?
The website mySupermarket.com compares the prices of groceries online and works to reduce shipping costs. But a limited selection means grocery store runs aren't a things of the past just yet.
14. 25 Everyday Things Made Obsolete This Century. What would you add to the list?
1. Public Religion Research Institute: Survey | Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government are Working?: Religious Left, Religious Right and the Future of the Economic Debate
2. Gallup reports Sub-Saharan Africa Is Wildly Optimistic About Its Future
3. U.S. could lead world oil production by 2017, study says
Domestic shale oil production could shoot up to 5 million barrels per day by 2017, making the United States the top oil producing country in the world, according to a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School.
4. Will Europe Hit a Demographic Tipping Point?
... In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday tome The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and civilizational collapse in much of the world due to overpopulation. But the more serious problem – particularly in traditionally higher-income countries – today is actually too few, not too many new people. The pivot to seeing this as the problem has come through something very basic: pension math. Across the developed world, public pension systems built on the assumption of continued population growth are now facing an actuarial day of reckoning as the bills come due while birth rates have plummeted.
A society needs a total fertility rate – that is, the average number of children born to each woman – of 2.1 just to maintain its population without immigration. Some European countries like France (2.03) and the UK (1.98) are in reasonably good shape, but they are the exception. The total fertility rate in Greece is 1.43, in Germany 1.36, in Spain 1.36, in Portugal 1.30, and in Poland 1.30. Much of southern and central Europe hovers near the so-called “lowest-low” rate of 1.3 in which the population is naturally being cut in half every 45 years.
Simple birth rates alone have caused some to posit a societal going out of business sale in Europe. However, just as extrapolation of high population growth rates in the past led to wildly alarmist claims that proved false, so today we must be careful about not proclaiming Europe is doomed. But with the population on tap to be halved every generation, the runway to turn things around is difficult to conjure. And while we’ve seen many countries make the shift from high to low birth rates, there isn’t a huge track record of success in the other direction. ...
5. Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty
The article includes this interesting graph:
6. Forget Microlending. India Needs Basic, Competent Credit Reporting - Businessweek
Development economists talk a lot about credit. Figure out a way to get it to people in a developing economy, rather than just large companies or the state itself, and you can encourage small-scale risk-taking. Microlending offers very small loans to individuals, often $100 or less. The idea won Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Prize in 2006. More recently, microfinance and mobile banking have offered ways to save and insure on a small scale, allowing people take risks with their own money. Speaking in Mumbai earlier this month, K. C. Chakrabarty, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, offered an additional way to expand credit: better credit reporting. No shepherds with phones, no happy mothers of four with new sewing machines. Just credit reporting, plain old attention to detail, and administrative competence.
7. Why We Need to Treat America's Poorest Neighborhoods Like Developing Countries
The article includes maps showing life expectancy across several metropolitan areas. Here is the one for my hometown, Kansas City.
8. Racial Disparities in Life Spans Narrow, but Persist
The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is at its narrowest since the federal government started systematically tracking it in the 1930s, but a difference of nearly four years remains, and federal researchers have detailed why in a new report.
9. The Unsettling Link Between Sprawl and Suicide
A new scientific working paper (spotted by Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile) contends that as population density decreases, the suicide rate among young people increases. This effect becomes particularly pronounced below 300 inhabitants per square kilometer — roughly the density of San Diego County.
10. Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World's Data Generated Over Last Two Years
11. The one event that destroyed the PC industry
12. Tweets that got people arrested
13. Religion & Wikipedia: The 'Edit Wars' Rage On
Scientists have analyzed page edits in 10 editions of Wikipedia to determine the topics most often fought over by editors of the open encyclopedia. The most debated topics included many religious subjects, like Jesus and God, according to research done by Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész.
Rather than merely citing pages that changed a lot, they identified pages involved in "edit wars," that involved editors making changes that were almost instantly undone by another contributor. This proved the best method of finding controversial pages, as pages often updated could simply belong to a rapidly changing field or topic. However, pages with words and phrases constantly removed and reinserted indicated a passionate disagreement surrounding the issue at hand.
The most controversial pages across all ten editions of Wikipedia were:
Other controversial subjects were Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, and Christianity.
14. The curious case of the fall in crime
... Cherished social theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic diversity would unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong. Young people are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent and to have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better behaved than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued that crime could never be curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.
There is no single cause of the decline; rather, several have coincided. Western societies are growing older, and most crimes are committed by young men. Policing has improved greatly in recent decades, especially in big cities such as New York and London, with forces using computers to analyse the incidence of crime; in some parts of Manhattan this helped to reduce the robbery rate by over 95%. The epidemics of crack cocaine and heroin appear to have burnt out.
The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved. Car immobilisers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security guards and marked money have all but done for bank robbery. Alarms and DNA databases have increased the chance a burglar will be caught. At the same time, the rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic gizmos are so cheap. Even small shops now invest in CCTV cameras and security tags. Some crimes now look very risky—and that matters because, as every survey of criminals shows, the main deterrent to crime is the fear of being caught. ...
15. By 2030, Half of All Colleges Will Collapse
I skipped Saturday Links last week due to the holiday weekend. I'm catching up this week.
"... Selke, now 36, is part of a vanguard of young Christians who believe that God uses not only the church and formal ministry but every sphere of society, including business and free markets, to advance his work of shalom. Selke parlayed his experience analyzing companies, creating spreadsheets, and evaluating profitable opportunities for an investment bank into helping social entrepreneurs—people who create organizations in order to benefit society.
In 2010, Selke co-founded Hub Ventures, an accelerator in San Francisco investing in entrepreneurs launching companies that produce a social good. The 12-week program provides up to $20,000 in seed funding, mentorship, workshops, and access to investors in exchange for an average of a 6 percent ownership stake. What separates Selke's program from other business accelerators en vogue in Silicon Valley is the focus on "entrepreneurs building technology solutions for a better world," Selke says. ..."
2. The Global Low Fertility Panic: Just a Phase?
"...Our new book, The Global Spread of Fertility Decline: Population, Fear, and Uncertainty (Yale University Press, 2013) analyzes these trends and the demographic, political and economic consequences and uncertainties as low fertility has become a global phenomenon. Like other facets of globalization, low fertility rates are by no means universal: High fertility persists in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, but elsewhere low fertility is more the rule than the exception. These underlying trends in childbearing mean that in the near future the rate of population growth both in Europe and Asia are likely to decline. The world is not on a path of unrestrained demographic growth, as some believe. People all over the world have hit the brakes.
Thirty years ago only a small fraction of the world's population lived in the few countries with fertility rates substantially below the "replacement level" - the rate at which the fertility of a hypothetical cohort of women would exactly replace itself in the next generation - normally set at 2.1 children per woman for populations with low mortality conditions. Fast forward to 2013, with roughly 60 percent of the world's population living in countries with such below-replacement fertility rates.
The consequences of these changes are striking. ..."
3. Immigration and Entrepreneurship
According to a Small Business Administration-commissioned report in 2012 by Robert W. Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the business ownership rate is higher for immigrants than the native-born, with 10.5 percent of the immigrant work force owning a business compared with 9.3 percent of the native-born work force.
4. Graft Is On The Rise Around The World
5. Job-Stealing Robots Go Global
Asian workers have scored some victories in rising wages, but many are learning something the West has known for some time: Employers will seek out the cheapest labor on offer, and machines are even cheaper than an underpaid human. In the late 20th century, manufacturing jobs shifted from America to China, then from China to Southeast Asia, and now even those are being automated.
For America, at least, this trend shouldn't be so disconcerting. After all, it's developed economies like ours that are designing the robots Nike is now using. Low-wage manufacturing jobs are drying up, but they're being replaced by jobs in building, operating, and repairing the tech in question. Increasingly, companies will be likely to "onshore" these jobs to America, when shipping and distribution becomes much easier and cheaper. Manufacturing, it seems, will come full circle.
6. Economist Mark Perry with a provocative claim: Yes, the middle-class has been disappearing, but they haven't fallen into the lower-class, they've risen into the upper-class
7. Co.exist with what they see as 4 Bogus Claims About Why Walmart Can't Pay A Living Wage (I'm not in full agreement but they make they present their side articulately.)
8. Gallup Has Never Seen So Many Americans Sitting Out Of The Stock Market
9. K-State study: Arguments about money best predictor of divorce
"Results revealed it didn't matter how much you made or how much you were worth," Britt said in the university statement. "Arguments about money are the top predictor for divorce because it happens at all levels."
She said couples should seek a financial planner as part of premarital counseling, and talk about finances.
10. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name (It had nothing to do with Thomas Malthus or scarcity ... or even with students who have suffered through Econ 101 classes.)
11. Matt Ridley writes I may follow the crowd, but not because it's a crowd
"... My friend objected that I seemed to follow the herd on matters like the reality of evolution and the safety of genetically modified crops, so why not on climate change? Ah, said I, but I don't. I agree with the majority view on evolution, not because it is a majority view but because I have looked at evidence. It's the data that convince me, not the existence of a consensus. ..."
12. Dan Lewis debunks the myth that the end of the telegraph is here: The Spread of a False Fact
13. PC sales see 'longest decline' in history
Global personal computer (PC) sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, making it the "longest duration of decline" in history.
14. Time of 'Incredible Violence': Historian Gives Readers Glimpse of Medieval Life
15. Farming Got Hip In Iran Some 12,000 Years Ago, Ancient Seeds Reveal
Archaeologists digging in the foothills of Iran's Zagros Mountains have discovered the remains of a Stone Age farming community. It turns out that people living there were growing plants like barley, peas and lentils as early as 12,000 years ago.
The findings offer a rare snapshot of a time when humans first started experimenting with farming. They also show that Iran was an important player in the origin of agriculture.
16. LGBT group finds acceptance at evangelical college
"... Fuller's community standards states that "sexual abstinence is required for the unmarried" and marriage is between one man and one woman.
Nevertheless, Fuller's decision not to push back against OneTable is a critical step toward acceptance for gay evangelical students, said Justin Lee, the executive director of the Gay Christian Network, which tracks the burgeoning movement. An increasing number of young people have been coming out on Christian campuses nationwide, whether they are accepted or not, and Fuller's move acknowledges that and provides a touchstone for students who would otherwise keep their sexuality a secret, he said. ..."
17. New generation activists build bridges
A traditional organizing approach makes opponents into 'enemies,' but a new crop of union and other activists is using love and empathy to create alliances and new possibilities.
1. The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class
A favorite "progressive" trope is that America's middle class has stagnated economically since the 1970s. One version of this claim, made by Robert Reich, President Clinton's labor secretary, is typical: "After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top," he wrote in 2010, "the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going."
This trope is spectacularly wrong. ...
... Americans are also much better able to enjoy their longer lives. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life's "basics"—food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities—fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.
One underappreciated result of the dramatic fall in the cost (and rise in the quality) of modern "basics" is that, while income inequality might be rising when measured in dollars, it is falling when reckoned in what's most important—our ability to consume. Before airlines were deregulated, for example, commercial jet travel was a luxury that ordinary Americans seldom enjoyed. Today, air travel for many Americans is as routine as bus travel was during the disco era, thanks to a 50% decline in the real price of airfares since 1980. ...
2. Grow, Baby, Grow! GMOs And the Future of Industry
... We can imagine a future in which GMO agriculture is producing a whole range of things we now think of as industrial products and chemicals. Over the 21st century we seem headed for dramatic, and even mind-blowing, progress in gene technology. It's not too much to think that this revolution will be as big in the future as IT is today. This will be a much more efficient way to create a complex array of substances without the kind of environmental impact that refineries have today. Solar power's future may be much less about replacing oil as a way of producing electricity than about circumventing traditional industrial processes: the fusion of the factory and the farm may be the chief technological business of the new century.
This whole process opens the door to a huge reduction in the costs, economic and environmental, of producing the materials we need for civilized life. It will further reduce the need for human employment in the extractive, refining and processing industries. It will also represent a growing challenge to countries with extraction based economies, much as the development of synthetic rubber was a challenge for rubber tree plantations in places like Malaysia and Brazil. Like all truly powerful new technologies, this one is going to cause massive social change and upheaval in all kinds of hard-to-predict ways. ...
3. Economists Have A One-Page Solution To Climate Change
... "If you let the economists write the legislation," Jacoby says, "it could be quite simple." He says he could fit the whole bill on one page.
Basically, Jacoby would tax fossil fuels in proportion to the amount of carbon they release. That would make coal, oil and natural gas more expensive. That's it; that's the whole plan. ...
4. World GDP Change, 1998 to Present
5. 24/7 Wall St has great piece on the oldest U. S. company logos. The oldest?
6. Why Machines That Can Do Human Things Won't Replace Us Anytime Soon
I believe the answer lies in a fundamental understanding (or lack thereof) of what automated technology is supposed to do for us as a society. In a nutshell, it's like this: Automated technologies are supposed to help human beings become better human beings, not help machines become better human beings.
7. 60% Of Self-Proclaimed Vegetarians Ate Meat Yesterday
A poll conducted by CNN surveyed 10,000 Americans about their eating habits, and roughly 6% of the respondents self-identified as vegetarians. The researchers then asked individuals to describe their eating habits, and 60% of the "vegetarians" reported having eaten meat within the last 24 hours.
Okay, that could've have been a fluke (or just a really, really dumb sample group). Then the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a similar study. This time, they telephoned approximately 13,000 Americans, and 3% claimed to be vegetarians. When they followed up a week later, 66% of the self-proclaimed veggie-lovers had eaten meat the day before.
8. New Online Christian Magazine Offers Funding for Entrepreneurs
New Christian entrepreneur magazine goes live online with plans to offer seed funding for new startups and small businesses.
The online format of hot new Christian entrepreneur publication G-Code Magazine has gone live featuring an exclusive interview with Christian music artist and songwriter Cornell Jermaine, and a mission to provide startup capital to at least 100 new small businesses in the next 18 months.
9. Things for United Methodist laity to unlearn — from a layperson's POV
1. While our church leaders, Pastor, church staff, are responsible to give vision, direction and guidance, they are not charged with keeping us happy. ...
2. The church building does not belong to us; it is an asset for ministry.....
3. Worship on Sunday is not entertainment, and we are not the audience. Worship is a time for us to gather, hear God's word, get filled up, and go in the power of the Spirit to change the world. ...
4. There are a lot more of us (laity) than there are of them (clergy). Why did we ever decide sharing the Gospel was only for the 'professionals'? ...
10. Two Paths for Charitable Giving: From the Head or From the Heart
Mr. Friedman said donors who give emotionally were like people who spend money on an expensive dinner. "It's too focused on the donor so it will naturally not be focused on the most effective causes," he said. "It's being directed by some other criteria. There is nothing wrong with that. I describe it as consumption."
Mr. Tempel said that it was fine to ask organizations to be accountable, but that it could go too far. "People who follow their head looking at return on investment — they will be most disappointed if they have unrealistic expectations on what is possible," he said. "Some things are just difficult to deal with, like solving illiteracy in a community."
11. Pew Research with an interesting piece on Americans' reading habits over time
The population of e-book readers is growing. In the past year, the number of those who read an e-book in the past year increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older in December 2011 to 23% in November 2012. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who read a printed book in the previous 12 months fell from 72% of the population in 2011 to 67% in 2012.
12. Just in case you have been living under a rock, the Supreme Court made same big decisions this week. One Catholic leader, Msgr. Charles Pope, has an interesting response to the decisions on gay marriage:
Msgr. Charles Pope lamented that since 1969, when it became easier to divorce, contraception became widely available and now that the legal standing of gay marriages had been put on equal footing of those of heterosexual couples, that the word 'marriage' no longer has resonance within the Catholic faith.
It is a simple fact that word “marriage” as we have traditionally known it is being redefined in our times. To many in the secular world the word no longer means what it once did and when the Church uses the word marriage we clearly do not mean what the increasing number of states mean.
The pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian then went on to suggest that the Catholic church drop the word marriage altogether and use "Holy Matrimony" in its place.
I propose that we should exclusively refer to marriage in the Church as “Holy Matrimony.” According to this proposal the word marriage would be set aside and replaced by Holy Matrimony. It should be noticed that the Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to this Sacrament formally as “The Sacrament of Matrimony.”
13. How Much Time Do Pastors Spend Preparing a Sermon? The median time spent in preparation is 13-15 hours.
14. What Happened to the Mysterious Humans of the Sahara 7,000 Years Ago?
Forty-one years after the publication of the infamous Limits to Growth, Bjorn Lomborg offers this excellent piece, The Limits to Panic:
... But the report's fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.
In the early 1970's, the flush of technological optimism was over, the Vietnam War was a disaster, societies were in turmoil, and economies were stagnating. Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring had raised fears about pollution and launched the modern environmental movement; Paul Ehrlich's 1968 title The Population Bomb said it all. The first Earth Day, in 1970, was deeply pessimistic.
The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level.
That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.
Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: mercury consumption is down 98% and, by 2000, the price was down 90%. More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically.
Similarly, oil and natural gas were to run out in 1990 and 1992, respectively; today, reserves of both are larger than they were in 1970, although we consume dramatically more. Within the past six years, shale gas alone has doubled potential gas resources in the United States and halved the price.
As for economic collapse, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.
The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960's. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35% of the world's population to under 16%.
Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.
In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost three million people – roughly one in 500 – died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.
Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking. ...
... Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year – 25% of all deaths.CommentsThe solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost a billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life. ...
The key issue here is innovation. Think in terms of a continuum. At one end is the ape from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first human ancestor discovers the idea of using a large bone to manipulate his environment.
Further along, the continuum might be simple tools like hammers and plows. They are extensions of the human body. Then come machines. Human beings are no longer wielding tools but are directing and servicing machines. Next, there is artificial intelligence, where computers can make some decisions for us, as well as do repetitive dehumanizing work. Finally, at the other end might be something like the replicator in Star Trek, where you simply state your wish, and a device rearranges atoms to create the desired object.
The problem with the Limits to Growth mentality is that it is locked into a current point along the continuum. It correctly observes that there is a fixed amount of resources in the world, but it incorrectly assumes that economic growth means increased use of materials at a rate proportional to the rate of economic growth. To get the depletion date for a resource, you calculate the quantity of a material known to exist, calculate the annual present usage of the material, project a rate of economic growth, and subtract the projected annual usage from the total.
Total Resource/Current Annual Resource Usage = Years to Depletion (Increase economic growth and the years to depletion shrinks.)
Since the material quantities are fixed, the only variable is economic demand. Consequently, economic growth … whether from escalating wants and needs per capita or increasing population … is unsustainable. (Similarly, take the current pollution level and multiply it times the economic growth rate to see how polluted the world will be.) Human innovation is nowhere in sight!
But we are not frozen at a point on the continuum. Human creativity is constantly changing the equation. Here is how.
First, in the short run, there is productivity. As demand for a natural resource grows, going after previously unconsidered deposits becomes more profitable. For example, copper is everywhere but varies in accessibility and quality. Accessible quality copper is the first to be used. But as demand increases, new techniques are invented for finding copper, accessing deposits, and processing copper. The Limits to Growth report estimated copper available worldwide in 1972 and projected we would run out by 2000. Today, not only have we not run out, but we are using more annually, and the amount of available copper has grown magnitudes larger.
Second, economizing. Figuring out how to do twice as much (sometimes much more) with the same resource changes the equation. Household appliances today use less than half the power they did forty years ago and often have features that were not imagined then.
Third, substitution of less plentiful resources with more plentiful ones, especially renewable ones. It is true that over a long time horizon, copper would one day be depleted, barring changes in consumption. But as productivity and economizing gradually lose their ability to keep copper plentiful, the price will rise. Recycling copper will become more attractive. But even more likely is replacement of copper with other alternatives. Think how much of our communication now is done with sand (fiber optics are made from silica) versus copper (our old phone lines.) Furthermore, virtually everything made of nonrenewable resources can eventually be made using renewable resources.
Fourth, nanotechnology. We are in the beginning stages of manipulating matter at the molecular level. Nanorobots, about fifteen times an atom's size, can disassemble molecules and assemble atoms into new molecules. 3-D printers are already "printing" a range of items, including human tissue and organs. Scientists are developing printed food for long-term space voyages. Something akin to a replicator is not that unthinkable. The range of materials we can use for particular applications, our ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level, and our flexibility in forming matter into useful forms continue to evolve.
A finite stock of materials is not a limit to economic growth. That is not to say we are without challenges. While many resources can be made more plentiful over time, it is true that in the very near term, there can be shortages and injustices. Extraction of raw materials without adequate consideration for environmental impact could lead to horrific consequences. I'm not saying everything will magically take care of itself. I'm making the case that opposition to economic growth based on static zero-sum perceptions of the world that sees inevitable depletion of resources or over-population is groundless.
1. Climate change: A cooling consensus
... Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.
Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus. ...
2. The 40 Biggest Economies In The World
3. How the world's population has changed
4. Americans are giving less money to God
Americans donated $316 billion to charitable causes in 2012, a 3.5% increase from 2011, a new report by the Giving USA Foundation found. But while charitable donations to education increased 7% to $41 billion, religious donations dropped slightly (by 0.2%) to $101.54 billion. "Americans continue to be the most generous people in the world, despite discretionary income percentages nearing all-time lows," says Eileen Heisman, CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust. But donors are writing the checks to different recipients.
5. I'm not endorsing this analysis, but here is The Capitalist's Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.
6. Gil Press says The 'End Of Innovation' Crowd Doesn't Get IT
In one camp are economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen that tell us that we have reached "a technological plateau." We are experiencing today the waning of the economic impact of the technological revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The IT revolution, they argue, is different from earlier technological revolutions in its more limited impact on productivity growth and standards of living.
In the other camp are economists such as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who recently told the graduating class at Bard College:"…innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A safe prediction, I think, is that human innovation and creativity will continue; it is part of our very nature. Another prediction, just as safe, is that people will nevertheless continue to forecast the end of innovation."
7. How Technology Is Changing The Future Of Capitalism From Competing To Sharing
Can't get a loan from a bank to start your business? You can create a Kickstarter and raise all the money you need from the people who'd be interested in your product in the first place.
It's amazing to see the ways people are coming up with to better take advantage of the web to collaborate on and share the things that we used to have to pay for ourselves.
8. U.S. for first time in 50+ years a net gasoline exporter
9. U.S. Sustains Support For Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
Despite the political fallout from the Fukushima crisis, the U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to commercializing small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technologies.
10. Houses that flip and fold into place
Turns out, prefab may be the most environmentally friendly way to build a house. When a house is built in a factory there's less waste -- materials can be precision measured and cut -- plus a prefab structure can be erected within a couple of weeks -- avoiding months and months of workmen driving greenhouse gas spewing trucks to the site. One speaker at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference earlier this year, Bill Haney -- founder and CEO of Blu Homes, cited another advantage of prefab housing: "No one can build a traditional house on time or on budget. Psychology Today cited a study that said it's more painful to build a house than it is to have a loved one die."
Haney has added a high-tech element to his prefab green houses. Applying technology developed at MIT, Blu Homes designs its modern structures using steel frames that fold on hinges much like a card table. Today, most prefab homes must be delivered at great expense on wide-load trucks that are too big to travel on many roads and have to be accompanied by escort cars. A Blue Home, by contrast, can be folded up to fit on an 18-wheeler, allowing the house to be shipped relatively cheaply and easily from the company's factory in Vallejo, Calif.
11. 71% Of Millennials Want Their Co-Workers To Be A 'Second Family'
12. Demographic Changes Impact Religious Institutions
13. A fascinating piece on Why Men Die Younger Than Women: The 'Guys Are Fragile' Thesis
14. Scientists discover why leprosy disappeared from Europe
The material they found was "a mixture of human DNA, microorganisms and contaminating DNA from other bones and surrounding soil," said Cole, but they were able to fully reconstruct a 600-year-old strain of leprosy and map its genome, only to find that it is essentially identical to living leprosy infecting people in the developing world today.
Cole told NPR, "If the explanation of the drop in leprosy cases isn't in the pathogen, then it must be in the host, that is, in us."
The scientists believe that a certain gene that makes people highly resistant to leprosy spread through the population of Europe, gradually conveying a kind of mass immunity.
15. World's last telegram to be sent next month
16. Top 10 People with Only One Known Photograph
17. Psychologist Analyzes Superheroes
18. Joel Willitts on "Storied Typology" – A possibly more biblical way of thinking about the relationship between the OT & NT
Admittedly, I'm just beginning to work this out, but if we think of Bible as Story and we read the earlier bits as indispensible building blocks in the narrative development toward its resolution than there's no need to denigrate the earlier in view of the later bits of the story. Each part has its place in the story bringing it to its final act, although even this analogy must be carefully delimited. Because "final" in this sense does not mean "The End, but a new stage of the story. So because of the earlier blocks of the story, later scenes and characters become "narratological necessities" (to quote my good friend Daniel Kirk). Furthermore, if there is something of an "incompleteness" to the earlier parts of the story, it is incomplete only as earlier scenes are incomplete without subsequent ones. It is correct then to see the Bible's story as progressive. In Stephen Wellum's words, "it is a word-act revelation that is progressively given" (Kingdom Through Covenant, 90). Instead of using the label "progressive revelation" it may be more useful in stressing the storied nature of the development to call it "storied revelation"- Scripture is a story that unfolds. All of this, of course assumes that God has generated His Story and that story is contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian canon.
1. More deaths than births among whites
Last year, more people who are white and not Hispanic died than were born, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. That group is still the USA’s largest but its share of the total has been shrinking for years.
2. Human Population Growth Creeps Back Up
Earth's human population is expected to coast upward to 9.6 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100, up from 7.2 billion people alive today, a United Nations agency has projected.
The U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs yesterday released revised numbers for the coming century, raising median estimates for population growth in 2050 and 2100. The agency's prior best guess had humanity at 9.3 billion in 2050 and 10.1 billion in 2100. ...
3. New homes still getting bigger
At 2,306 square feet, the typical new home is about 50% larger than its 1973 counterpart while the typical family is 10% smaller and the typical household 15% smaller. The Census Bureau defines a family as two or more people living in the same home who are related by birth, marriage or adoption. A household consists of anyone living in a home regardless of their relationship.
4. American Suburbia Is Shrinking For The First Time Ever
The population of rural and small-town America contracted over the past two years for the first time on record as young people left to search out work in the cities and birth rates fell, according to official data.
An analysis of US Census Bureau data by the Department of Agriculture found that although population growth in America’s rural heartland has risen and fallen for decades with changes in the US economy, the pace of decline accelerated in the years 2010-2012. And for the first time, the so-called “natural increase” in population – total births minus deaths – was insufficient to offset the loss from those migrating away.
5. Business Insider says Online Courses Have Reached A Turning Point That Should Scare Colleges but Mashable says Millennials Prefer Traditional Classrooms Over Online Ones.
6. NYT: Data Reveal a Rise in College Degrees Among Americans
7. Homeschooling Growing Seven Times Faster than Public School Enrollment
A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.
8. The Wedding Industry’s Pricey Little Secret
In 2012, when the average wedding cost was $27,427, the median was $18,086. In 2011, when the average was $27,021, the median was $16,886. In Manhattan, where the widely reported average is $76,687, the median is $55,104. And in Alaska, where the average is $15,504, the median is a mere $8,440.
And speaking of weddings, here is an excellent piece on the economics of wedding dresses.
9. Why Men Still Are Still Scared To Take Paternity Leave
But even when offered paternity leave, studies show most men won’t take it. A 2012 study of tenured track college professors found that only 12% of fathers took paid parental leave when it was offered compared with 69% of mothers. When new dads in the study did take paternity leave, many were still involved in projects at the office.
10. Dads, Feel Your Babies Kicking With Huggies Pregnancy Belt
11. Online Petitions Combat Corruption Abroad
According to Change.org, 44% of international petitions among the 100 largest petitions on the site target government corruption. In stark contrast, none of the petitions among the 100 largest campaigns that originated in the U.S. focus on corruption.
12. Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us Happier Than Actually Buying Them
The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to do with it.
So what should you do with it?
Stop buying so much stuff, renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert told me in an interview a few years ago, and try to spend more money on experiences.
13. Nuclear power seemed to be back in the news this week. New Yorker says Time to Go Nuclear, New Geography says No Solar Way Around It: Why Nuclear Is Essential to Combating Climate Change, and The Energy Collective had a great piece The Bigger Picture: Nuclear Energy vs. Fossil Fuels.
14. Nicaragua Congress approves ocean-to-ocean canal plan
15. China's Plan To Build The World's Tallest Skyscraper In 90 Days Is 'Revolutionary'
16. Singapore's Vegetable Towers
With more than 5 million people crammed into 274 square miles, commercial land values in Singapore are among the highest in the world. Therefore, the island nation needs to get creative when it comes to growing food in a limited space.
17. US breweries have exploded, from 89 in the late 1970s to more than 2,400 today, a 2,600% increase
18. The 'Star Trek' Medical Scanner Is About To Become A Reality
The small device is similar to the medical tricorder scanners featured in Star Trek, and is used by simply placing it against your forehead.
A few seconds later you can see your blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and body temperature.
The Scout then records and stores the information on your smartphone, allowing you to track your vitals or share them with a doctor.
19. The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'
While not strong, the pace has not been any weaker than the pace for wages in the fixed-weighted employment cost index—the ECI. That pattern disproves the widespread impression that mainly “bad” below-average-wage jobs are being created. Average hourly earnings would be declining relative to wages in the ECI if job growth were disproportionately weighted toward below-average-wage jobs.
20. A Christian Walmart for the poor? Willow Creek's new care center
Consider the Chicago-area Willow Creek Community Church, one of the bigger "brands" in the non-denom world, which just built a new "care center" where those in need can come and "shop" for food, children's clothing, even eyeglasses. It's 60,000 square feet are laid out, according to the Chicago Tribune, "less like a thrift shop or food pantry, and more like an upscale mall, complete with cheery colors, welcoming seating areas and designer lighting," according to the Chicago Tribune. Clients pay something if they are able--$5 to visit the children's "boutique," for example, or a $20 copay for an eye exam.
1. Loved this one: 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other. Here is one example.
2. In print and on stage, the Bible makes surprise comeback in secular Norway
3. Japan enters the African aid game: Japan $1 billion aid earmarked for northern Africa
4. The Economist had a great editorial: Towards the end of poverty
Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again.
5. Global Wealth Grew 7.8% In 2012, Driven By Developing Economies
BCG found that global private financial wealth grew at the impressive clip of 7.8% in 2012, besting the 7.3% and 3.6% expansion logged in 2010 and 2011, respectively.
And which countries are driving global growth? Tyler Cowen reports that China and India for half of the growth. He also lists these nations as the fastest growing:
| South Sudan | 32.1 |
| Libya | 20.2 |
| Sierra Leone | 17.1 |
| Mongolia | 14.0 |
| Paraguay | 11.0 |
| Timor-Leste | 10.0 |
| Iraq | 9.0 |
| Panama | 9.0 |
| The Gambia | 8.9 |
| Mozambique | 8.4 |
source: IMF
6. 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is. Here is an example:
7. Toward a Self Employed Nation?
The United States labor market has been undergoing a substantial shift toward small-scale entrepreneurship. The number of proprietors – owners of businesses who are not wage and salary employees, has skyrocketed, especially in the last decade. Proprietors are self employed business owners who use Internal Revenue Service Schedule C to file their federal income tax. Wage and salary workers are all employees of any establishment (private or government), from executives to non-supervisory workers.
From 2000 to 2011, the number of non-farm proprietors grew by 10.7 million. Total wage and salary employment grew by only 105,000 between 2000 and 2011. Government employment, including federal, state and local, grew 1.36 million, while private employment declined by 1.26 million (Figure 1).
8. This looks like an interesting read: Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. Christian Century writes:
For her award-winning book Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty, Susan Crawford Sullivan interviewed a diverse group of women who were living in poverty. She asked them about the challenges of parenting, working and surviving on little income. She discovered that many drew on strong religious beliefs as they struggled with everyday problems. Sullivan teaches sociology at the College of the Holy Cross.
9. Business Insider reports that Millions Of Seniors Are Moving Back To Big Cities
10. Forbes explores How To Use Pinterest For Small Business
11. Atlantic explores Why the Boomers Are the Most Hated Generation. (I think part of it might be that we are obnoxious.)
12. RJS at Jesus Creed with another great post about the historicity of Adam and Eve: Jesus on Adam and Eve (RJS)
... There are ways to reconcile a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data. I have posted on the question of Adam many times. See for example the last part of Evolution, Entropy, and Human Beings 2 or other posts on the question of Adam listed about 3/4 of the way down the Science and Faith index. Reconciling a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data requires something of a stretch, but is not impossible if one feels that the theological teaching of the sweep of scripture requires Adam, Eve, and the Fall.
There are also ways to understand the sweep of scripture and the fallen nature of mankind without reference to a historical Adam and Eve. These do not necessarily diminish the inspiration and authority of scripture as witness to the work of God in the world.
This shouldn’t be a make or break issue. Rather, it is an issue where we need to spend more time and thought.
1. The Kruse Kronicle turns eight years old today. Thanks to my readers for your conversation and encouragement!
2. From the Christian Post: PCUSA Churches Leaving Denomination Dramatically Increased in 2012
According to statistics released Thursday by the Office of the General Assembly for PC(USA), 110 congregations were granted dismissal in 2012 in order to join other denominations; in 2011, the reported number was only 21.
3. In keeping with the Kruse Kronicle tradition of bringing you the most important stories you need to know: Map Shows American Preferences: Church or Beer
4. Lefties like to moan about the anti-science right when it comes to climate change, but large swathes of the left are just as anti-science on other issues: Debunking 'The Big Lie' About Genetically Engineered Crops
"... Since 1996, there has also been an outpouring of data, including prodigious amounts of peer-reviewed risk-assessment research, that provides strong evidence in support of the safety of genetically engineered crops and the foods made from them. During those 17 years, there has been no credible scientific evidence that genetically engineered foods or ingredients cause allergies or any other acute or long-term negative health effects. Several trillion meals containing genetically engineered food ingredients have been consumed by people around the world, with not a single adverse effect documented.
None of these findings should be a surprise. For decades, the scientific community has regarded the use of molecular techniques for genetic engineering as part of a seamless continuum of the genetic improvement of plants – a refinement of earlier methods.
It's long past time we got past the pseudo-controversies fomented by anti-technology activists and more fully exploited the commercial and humanitarian advantages of genetic engineering applied to agriculture.
5. Cities Where Suburban Poverty Is Skyrocketing
The number of poor people in U.S. suburbs rose by 63.6% between 2000 and 2011, from 10 million to well over 16 million people. For the first time, there are now more people living in poverty in the suburbs than in cities.
6. The Biggest Myth About the Gender Wage Gap
... There is a wage difference. But it might not be the wage difference that you thought. The real gap isn't between men and women doing the same job. The real gap is between men and women doing different jobs and following different careers.
That gap should continue to tighten. Women have earned the majority of bachelor's degrees for the last few years. They're well-positioned to benefit from a growing professional service economy, and working moms are already the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of households with kids, an all-time high. But if women are more likely to go into health care than manufacturing, more likely to work in human resources than software, and more likely to leave their careers early to start a family, the gaps will persist.
Ideally, some day soon, it won't take a statistical "control" to show that men and women are fundamental equal partners -- and equal competitors -- in the work force. It will just be the obvious truth.
In a related story: New PayScale Study Challenges Conventional Thinking On Why Women Make Less Than Men
The PayScale analysis, which relied on career profiles of the site's 40 million users, found that women working various non-managerial jobs earn about 98 percent of what men do on average. But once workers become executives, that share shrinks to about 91 percent, according to the study. The findings add dimension to previous analyses of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census data, which estimate that women are earning as little as 77 to 80 percent of what men make overall.
... For upper-middle class men, notes sociologist Michèle Lamont, ambition and a strong work ethic are "doubly sacred... as signals of both moral and socioeconomic purity. Elite men's jobs revolve around the work devotion schema, which communicates that high-level professionals should "demonstrate commitment by making work the central focus of their lives" and "manifest singular 'devotion to work,' unencumbered with family responsibilities," to quote sociologist Mary Blair-Loy. This ideal has roots in the 17th century Protestant work ethic, in which work was viewed as a "calling" to serve God and society. The religious connection has vanished... or has it? ...
8. Manufacturing Is Fueling America's Recovery
... A little historical perspective, beginning in the 1970s: higher costs for raw materials and labor, among others, were significant factors that prompted many American manufacturers to move their operations overseas in order to remain globally competitive. But new supplies and availability of raw materials has shifted in our favor and manufacturers are looking at the United States once again. Today, due to the cost advantage of energy and raw materials, and manufacturing facilities and infrastructure already in place, many companies are beginning to move their operations back within our shores.
In Youngstown, Ohio, for instance, V&M Star is building a $650-million steel mill 34 years after the iron and steel industry left the region. Just last year, General Electric began building appliances previously made in China and Mexico in its long-deserted Appliance Park manufacturing plant in Louisville, Kentucky. Nucor Corp. is opening a new plant in Louisiana this summer. In Houston, Texas, the number of employees in the manufacturing industry has increased from 165,000 to 250,000 since 2009, as companies grow to keep up with the demand for parts needed in the hydraulic manufacturing process. These are just a few examples of the millions of dollars in planned investments as a result of the increased availability of natural gas and NGL. ...
9. The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty
Proof that giving cash to poor people, no strings attached, is an amazingly powerful tool for boosting incomes and promoting development.
Of course, the tricky part is how actually to get the cash into the hands of poor people.
10. I agree with this opinion piece: Time for food aid reform that helps hungry countries – and the US
Under the Food for Peace program, aid organizations working overseas must buy food directly from the US instead of using local sources. If politicians want to cut government costs and avoid aid dependency abroad, they'll support President Obama's proposed reforms to US food aid.
11. Brain overload explains missing childhood memories
Scientists -- and parents -- have long wondered why we don't remember anything that happened before age 3. As all parents know, no matter how momentous an event is in a toddler's life, the memory soon drifts away and within months there isn't even a wisp of it left.
Now a new study shows that "infantile amnesia" may be due to the rapid growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for filing new experiences into long-term memory. The study was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience. ...
Fair enough, but what explains my missing memories of ten minutes ago?
1. The Atlantic says Just 27% of BA's Have Jobs Related to Their Major? Don't Believe the Fed's New Stat
2. 100 fastest growing inner city businesses
From a pet relocation service, a wine lifestyle marketer, to a scrap metal regenerator, America's urban core is home to a variety of fast-growing companies. Here's the top 100, as ranked by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
3. Factory safety: Battle of the brands
... This approach has been criticised by the Workers Rights Consortium because, unlike its plan, it contains no binding commitment to help fund improvements to make factories safe. Yet it is debatable whether wealthy factory owners really lack funds to make factories safe, as opposed to the lack of incentive due to the Bangladesh government's failure to enforce its own building code. WalMart points out that the government has now started to close unsafe fatories, 19 so far (presumably because of the constant protests by locals since the collapse of Rana Plaza). It says its new approach will detect unsafe factories significantly faster than the Workers Rights Consortium's plan.
Perhaps it would be better if everyone agreed on a common approach. But if there must be competition, it is surely better that it is over how to make factories safer than the alternative.
4. Economist Timothy Taylor with some interesting thoughts on Spending on America's Pets
5. Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
While psychologists can't know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
6. Why You Feel Smart Around Some People But Dumb Around Others
... Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.
It's just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. Research in this area should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a "lump of something that's in our heads," as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as "a transaction among people."...
... This research has important implications for the way we educate children and the way we manage employees. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and managers a more accurate sense of people's true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate in schools and workplaces is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion.
Professor Aronson calls the doltishness induced by an uncomfortable social situation "conditional stupidity." We should use that insight to create the conditions for brilliance. ...
7. Do those who doubt climate catastrophism lack scientific credibility?
8. Everything Wrong With America In One Simple Image (INFOGRAPHIC) The article is a bit over the top, but this graphic was interesting:
9. America's Declining Teen Birth Rate, Explained in 3 Charts
10. Suburbia Needs Jesus, Too Interesting piece that has caused some buzz in social media. Her point about the centrality of everyday life is something I resonate with.
12. Methodists May Discourage Those Over 45 from Becoming Pastors
13. How does copyright work in space?
CHRIS HADFIELD has captured the world's heart, judging by the 14m YouTube views of his free-fall rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", recorded on the International Space Station (ISS). The Canadian astronaut's clear voice and capable guitar-playing were complemented by his facility in moving around in the microgravity of low-earth orbit. But when the man fell to Earth in a neat and safe descent a few days ago, after a five-month stay in orbit, should he have been greeted by copyright police? Commander Hadfield was only 250 miles (400 km) up, so he was still subject to terrestrial intellectual-property regimes, which would have applied even if he had flown the "100,000 miles" mentioned in the song's lyrics or millions of kilometres to Mars. His five-minute video had the potential to create a tangled web of intellectual-property issues. How does copyright work in space? ...
1. The High Calling published an article I wrote. I linked it earlier, but here it is again in an act of shameless self-promotion. It goes to some core issues I'm trying to put into a book. Six Ideas on How to Lead Congregations to Integrate Work and Discipleship
2. Should Pastors Know How Much Church Members Give?
A recent study found that churches where pastors know how much is donated and by whom were more likely to be doing well financially. However, only half of the 3,000 responding congregations (and only 39 percent of evangelical ones) told the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving that their pastors knew this information.
What experts said (starting with "yes" and moving to "no" ): ...
3. Model for megacities? Mexico City cleans up its air.
... With urbanization advancing, economies expanding, and climate change a concern, Mexico City has emerged as an unlikely environmental example for cities in developing countries suffering similar air quality issues.
Mexico City recorded only eight days with air quality considered "good" in 1992. That compares with 248 "good" air days in 2012, reflecting the success of initiatives to relocate industry, kick clunkers off the capital's streets, encourage cleaner technologies, and expand public transit and cycling options. ...
4. Unmanned Drones May Have Their Greatest Impact on Agriculture
Talk about beating swords into plowshares. The mention of drones may conjure up images of Star Wars-like spacecraft or hell-fire war machines. But the controversial technology may prove to have its greatest impact in a peaceful endeavor: farming. ...
... The market for agricultural drones lies in the technology's ability to provide farmers with a bird's-eye view of their land. Historically, farmers have walked their land to survey it—looking for areas that need more fertilizer or water. More recently many have begun using small passenger planes to look at their lots from the air. But since airplane rental and fuel costs can quickly run into five figures, there's strong demand for cheaper alternatives. ...
... "Eighty percent of the utilization, once we are allowed to have Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the national airspace, in the first 10 years is going to be in precision agriculture," said Michael Toscano, CEO of AUVSI. "You will have a situation where you can spray crops by a UAS that flies 2 or 3 feet above the plants. You can control the downwash because you can put the pesticides on the plants and not in the ground where it gets to the groundwater."
"It sounds trivial but those numbers really add up a lot," said Rory Paul of Volt Aerial Robotics. "If we could save farms 1 percent on inputs like herbicide and pesticide and increase their yields by 1 percent, you are looking at multibillion dollar savings."...
5. Fascinating piece about the The Historical Horror of Childbirth
... Such stories were not at all shocking, as a woman's chances of dying during childbirth were between one and two percent -for each birth. If a woman gave birth to eight or ten children, her chances of eventually dying in childbirth were pretty high. The infant mortality rate was even higher. The chances of a child dying before his fifth birthday were estimated to be around 20 percent, depending on the community (accurate records are scarce). In addition to the fear of death or the fear of the child dying, there was no pain relief during labor, except for whisky in some places. ...
6. "INDIA will soon have a fifth of the world's working-age population." India's moment
7. 'Late-life crisis' hits the over-60s
"Of the 33% who went through a crisis, bereavement was the most common trigger, followed by personal illness or injury."
8. Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment
9. Atlantic Cities asks the question that has interested me for years: Why Do So Many People Think Gun Violence Is Getting Worse?
"Twenty years into this safer era, we still don't know quite how we got here. Perhaps in absence of a logical narrative, many Americans simply find it hard to believe this is true."
10. People Don't Wear A Shocking Amount Of Their Clothes.
"The average person only wears about 20% of the clothing in his or her closets. Most clothing goes unworn because it's the result of an impulse buy or doesn't fit correctly, Ray A. Smith at the Wall Street Journal reports."
11. This week was the 20th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. The Day Distance Disappeared
12. Great piece! The Tech Trends to Fear the Most: It's Not All Good
13. The market 'bubble' you've never heard of: "Some economists are worried that farmland prices are nearing bubble territory. How bad can it be if no one's heard of it?"
14. Michael Barone says College Bubble Bursts After Decades of Extravagance
15. Whatever happened to these Fortune 500 companies? "Here are seven companies from the first Fortune 500 that have since been merged, split up, or put out to pasture."
16. Dwight Lee has a thought-provoking piece about The Two Moralities of Ebenezer Scrooge.
17. The global economy: Welcome to the post-BRIC world
18. Development finance in Africa
19. Toxic Waste Sites Take Toll on Millions in Poor Nations
New studies attempt to quantify just how harmful the rampant exposure to lead and other chemicals is in the developing world.
20. James Pethokoukis with a provocative article about income inequality: Why A Decline In Income Inequality Would Be Bad News
Why has income inequality been rising in advanced economies — it's not just the US, people — over the past few decades? The economic consensus mostly explains the phenomenon as a race between accelerating technological change and expanding education. And the rise of inequality shows, as JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli puts it in a new report, that the "pace of technological advance has outstripped the ability of the educational system to supply the human capital skills needed to utilize this technology, leading to out-sized earnings gains for those who have such skills (the so-called college wage premium)."...
