Archive | July, 2011
Professionals win in the hi-tech economy
6 JulHere in microcosm is why America is so ambivalent about globalization and the technology revolution. The populist fear that even America’s most brilliant innovations are creating more jobs abroad than they are at home is clearly true. In fact, the reality may be even grimmer than the Tea Party realizes, since more than half the American iPod jobs are relatively poorly paid and low-skilled.
But America has winners, too: the engineers and other American professionals who work for Apple, whose healthy paychecks are partly due to the bottom-line benefit the company gains from cheap foreign labor. Apple’s shareholders have done even better. In the first of their pair of iPod papers, published in 2009, Mr. Linden, Mr. Dedrick and Mr. Kraemer found that the largest share of financial value created by the iPod went to Apple. Even though the devices are made in China, the financial value added there is “very low.”
If the Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers Paid Taxes Like You and Me, We’d Cut 44 Billion of the National Deficit
6 JulThe top 25 hedge fund managers in the United States collectively earned $22 billion last year, and yet they have their own cushy set of tax rules. If they operated under the same rules that apply to other people — police officers, for example, or teachers — the country could cut its national deficit by as much as $44 billion in the next ten years.
Tendency Toward Egalitarianism May Have Helped Humans Survive – NYTimes.com
5 JulDarwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match. …. The advent of agriculture and settled life may have thrown a few feudal monkeys and monarchs into the mix, but evolutionary theorists say our basic egalitarian leanings remain.
via Tendency Toward Egalitarianism May Have Helped Humans Survive – NYTimes.com.
Happy Empire 4th
4 JulYesterday, in anticipation of the 4th, Michael Sporn posted a series of wonderful photographs of the Empire State Building. They were taken by his friend, Steve Fisher. I urge you to take a look. There’s a wide range of views, and plenty of wit and wow!
I too have taken many photographs of the Empire State Building, all from New Jersey. In some shots the building is small, even almost invisible. In other shots it’s front and center. Here I offer one of each.
World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data – NYTimes.com
2 JulI think this is good, but haven’t had time to think it through. It suggests that maybe someone in the USofA, a very powerful someone, a Republican someone, is looking for a new world. A New World. And that’s a TnT kind of thing. New, but conservative, at the same time.
So it might come as a surprise that the president of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick, a career diplomat and member of the Republican foreign-policy elite, argues that the most valuable currency of the World Bank isn’t its money — it is its information.
Created in 1944 and, by custom, headed by an American, the World Bank initially helped finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Since then, it has extended many trillions in loans for a wide variety of projects, be they institutions like schools and hospitals, infrastructure like roads or, controversially, environmentally unfriendly projects like coal-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams. Along the way the World Bank, like the I.M.F., has tinkered with entire economies, sometimes with disastrous results. …
Long regarded as a windowless ivory tower, the World Bank is opening its vast vault of information. True, the bank still lends roughly $170 billion annually. But it is increasingly competing for influence and power with Wall Street, national governments and smaller regional development banks, who have as much or more money to offer. It is no longer the only game in town.
via World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data – NYTimes.com.
Germany – Nuclear Ban Approved – NYTimes.com
1 JulGerman lawmakers on Thursday overwhelmingly approved plans to shut nuclear plants by 2022. The lower house of Parliament voted 513-79 for the plan drawn up by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.
The Wageless, Profitable Recovery – NYTimes.com
1 JulIn their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.
Remembrance of cities past: spectacular photos of the way we lived | Grist
1 JulPhotographs from a world before cars.
BeIow is a sampling of the collection maintained by Burton Holmes Historical Collection (BHHC), reprinted with special permission and under copyright of BHHC. Caldwell has archived 1,700 of an assemblage which once numbered 30,000 photos, the rest lost to time. A range of movie footage, from 200 film cans rediscovered in 2003, now resides at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.
via Remembrance of cities past: spectacular photos of the way we lived | Grist.
Truth and Traditions 