Archive | January, 2012

About time – Examining the case for a shorter working week – Video and audio – News and media – Home

19 Jan

Click the link at the end to go to the vido of this panel discussion.

\As the economic crisis deepens, this is the moment to consider moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours – sharing out jobs and unpaid time more fairly across the population. The new economics foundation (nef) set out the case in its report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century.

Now, in partnership with CASE (Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion) at the London School of Economics, this event brings together a panel of experts to examine the social, environmental and economic implications. They will consider how far a shorter working week can help to address a range of urgent social, economic and environmental problems: unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being and entrenched inequalities.

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College, and author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, and The Overworked American.

Professor Lord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and biographer of J. M. Keynes. He is the co-author, with Dr Edward Skidelsky, of the forthcoming book, How Much is Enough? Economics and the Good Life.

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, and author of Prosperity without Growth.

via About time – Examining the case for a shorter working week – Video and audio – News and media – Home.

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There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away | Easily Distracted

19 Jan

As the result of a ruling the Supreme Court handed down yesterday (Golan v. Holder), copyright just got worse.

The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. …

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

via There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away | Easily Distracted.

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In Piracy Bill Fight, New Economy Rises Against Old – NYTimes.com

19 Jan

…the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

It appeared by Wednesday evening that Congress would follow Bank of America, Netflix and Verizon as the latest institution to change course in the face of a netizen revolt.

via In Piracy Bill Fight, New Economy Rises Against Old – NYTimes.com.

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The real beneficiaries of energy subsidies – Big Oil – Salon.com

18 Jan

In 2010, Bloomberg News released a report showing that global governmental support “for fossil fuels dwarf support given to renewable energy sources.” The numbers led one financial expert to note that while “mainstream investors worry that renewable energy only works with direct government support,” the truth is that “the global direct subsidy for fossil fuels is around ten times the subsidy for renewables.”

According to data compiled by the Environmental Law Institute, the United States is a big contributor to this global subsidy imbalance, “provid(ing) substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewables.” In practice, some of the biggest of those U.S. subsidies come in the form of special tax breaks for oil and gas development, and in direct taxpayer funding of multinational corporations’ foreign mining projects (yes, you read that right — your tax dollars go to fund fossil fuel development overseas).

via The real beneficiaries of energy subsidies – Energy – Salon.com.

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How the U.S. Can Help Humanity Achieve World Peace (Yes, World Peace) | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network

18 Jan

The U.S., which continues to cling to the atavistic adage that peace can only be assured by fighting and preparing to fight, remains a major impediment to a post-war world. We insist that we are a peaceful people, and yet we maintain a global military empire, with soldiers deployed in more than 100 countries. In the past decade we have been embroiled in two major wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as contributing to the recent bombing campaign against Libya.

Consider, moreover, these statistics from SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a respected, independent tracker of trends in conflict. The U.S. military budget has almost doubled in the past decade to $700 billion. If you include spending on nuclear weapons and homeland security, our annual outlays approach $1 trillion, which exceeds the defense budgets of all other nations combined. We spend more than six times as much on defense as China, our closest competitor, and more than 10 times as much as our former nemesis Russia.

The U.S. is also by far the world’s largest arms dealer.

via How the U.S. Can Help Humanity Achieve World Peace (Yes, World Peace) | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network.

Flying Blind: Inside the Federal Reserve’s Damning 2006 Transcript – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic

17 Jan

“The problem was not a lack of information,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes in the New York Times. “It was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.” It was total systemic failure, from 2006 into 2008, to diagnose a crisis and act to stop it, based partly on overconfidence that, in the economy, we had built an unstallable machine — that the plane could, quite certainly, fly itself.

via Flying Blind: Inside the Federal Reserve’s Damning 2006 Transcript – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic.

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5% of Americans Made Up 50% of U.S. Health Care Spending – Jordan Weissmann – Business – The Atlantic

17 Jan

America’s health care spending crisis is a concentrated phenomenon. The challenge isn’t just about making everybody’s insurance cheaper (although that would be nice). It’s about figuring out how to cut costs, wisely and fairly, for the disastrously ill and preventing diseases before they become chronic. This is America’s 5% problem.

via 5% of Americans Made Up 50% of U.S. Health Care Spending – Jordan Weissmann – Business – The Atlantic.

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Fracking: Anatomy of a Free Market Failure « Real Climate Economics

16 Jan

Right now everybody knows that energy sources are key to our economic future, but nobody knows what sources will turn out to be the “winners” or “losers” in the short, medium, or long-run. Unless renewable sources dominate in the long-run, most knowledgeable observers believe we are in a lot of trouble. But what energy sources will dominate in the medium and short-run is very much up in the air. Again, scientists may tell us that unless renewables are playing a dominant role in the medium-run, and a much more important role in the short-run than they currently do, we are in more trouble than we should find comfortable. But betting odds on whether that will prove to be the case are much less certain than scientific opinion about what needs to happen.

What role does natural gas play in this scenario? To make a long story short: Oil has peaked, coal is plentiful but most likely to lead to cataclysmic climate change, and natural gas is cleaner than coal but a fossil fuel nonetheless. Which is what makes betting odds on the role natural gas will – as opposed to should play – in our energy future so difficult to predict. If wise political forces seize control over energy policy it will play a limited role, and only as a “bridge technology” as renewables replace all fossil fuels ASAP. If the fossil fuel industry continues to exert as much political power as it has over the past hundred years, natural gas may become the new “king” for many decades.

via Fracking: Anatomy of a Free Market Failure « Real Climate Economics.

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What They Don’t Want to Talk About – NYTimes.com

15 Jan

Mr. Giuliani has one thing right: Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.

The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.

via What They Don’t Want to Talk About – NYTimes.com.

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The 1 Percent Paint a More Nuanced Portrait of the Rich – NYTimes.com

15 Jan

Of the 1 percenters interviewed for this article, almost all — conservatives and liberals alike — said the wealthy could and should shoulder more of the country’s financial burden, and almost all said they viewed the current system as unfair. But they may prefer facing cuts to their own benefits like Social Security than paying more taxes. In one survey of wealthy Chicago families, almost twice as many respondents said they would cut government spending as those who said they would cut spending and raise revenue.

via The 1 Percent Paint a More Nuanced Portrait of the Rich – NYTimes.com.

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