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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class – NYTimes.com

21 Jan

Why have high-tech manufacturing jobs left the US and will they ever come back? The NYTimes has a fascinating article using Apple’s iPhone as a central case study. We aren’t going to get those jobs back. Maybe we need to rethink how we life, top to bottom.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

via Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class – NYTimes.com.

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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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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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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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Towards a 21-hour working week? — Crooked Timber

15 Jan

An interesting discussion or the idea that a shorter workweek is an important component of a more sustainable world. We need more time for play, in the deepest sense of that word.

Last Wednesday I attended an event at LSE (under the auspices of the New Economics Foundation) exploring the idea of working-time reduction with an eventual goal of moving to a normal working week of 21 hours. …

The three speakers were Juliet Schor (author of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth), Robert Skidelsky (former Tory spokesman in the Lords, but goodness knows what his party affiliation is today) and Tim Jackson (author of Prosperity Without Growth).

Schor explained that labour-time reduction had been an issue twenty years ago (I guess she was thinking of people like André Gorz) but has slipped out of the policy debate during the boom years. Now, in the post-2008 world, governments are pushing the line that we all need to work harder, for more hours and for more of our lives. But that, argued Schor is exactly wrong. Working-time reduction offers the threefold benefit of few people being unemployed, of less ecological damage and of people having more time to spend on social activities (cue mention of The Big Society). Even if we could grow our way to full employment, we shouldn’t. Rather we should reorient away from overconsumption towards leading better quality lives. More time-stressed households are have more carbon-intensive lifestyles. She held up the Netherlands as a model of how to start moving in this direction. Apparently, the Dutch are the slackers of Europe generally and, some years ago, made new civil service contracts 80%. You have the freedom there to choose to be a five, four, three, two or one-day-a week employee.

via Towards a 21-hour working week? — Crooked Timber.

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America’s dangerously removed elite – Salon.com

13 Jan

Taken together, we see that there really are “Two Americas,” as the saying goes — and that’s no accident. It’s the result of a permanent elite that is removing itself from the rest of the nation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in education — a realm in which this elite physically separates itself from us mere serfs. As the head of one of the country’s largest urban school districts, Boasberg is a perfect example of this — but he is only one example….

Outside of Washington, it’s often the same story; as just two recent examples, both Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have championed massive cuts to public education while sending their kids to private school.

via America’s dangerously removed elite – Salon.com.

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As Romney Advances, Private Equity Becomes Part of the Debate – NYTimes.com

11 Jan

Just as Mr. Romney and his advisers are defending his work at Bain, the industry is also trying to blunt some of the attacks. For a group of Wall Street executives who prefer to operate out of the spotlight, the repercussions could be considerable. Among the things the industry wants to preserve is favorable tax treatment for profits on private equity deals.

via As Romney Advances, Private Equity Becomes Part of the Debate – NYTimes.com.

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Land of (unequal) opportunity — Crooked Timber

6 Jan

A little late to the game, the NY Times has quite a good piece by Jason DeParle on the well-established finding that the US is not only the most unequal of developed societies but is also at the bottom of the scale for social mobility.

I’ve been arguing since the Triassic era of blogging that this isn’t a coincidence – a society with highly unequal outcomes can’t sustain equality of opportunity, but until this year (in fact, until the emergence of the Occupy movement) I didn’t see any evidence that the facts were sinking in, even among the majority liberals. Now it’s as if a dam has broken. Some thoughts, cautionary and otherwise over the fold.

via Land of (unequal) opportunity — Crooked Timber.

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