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Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times

29 Aug

Where this is headed is to a shorter work week. And leaves more time for drumming and dancing, community gardens, and everyone teaching skills to kids and one another.

After surveying policies around the world, we found that there is one that clearly dominates in terms of impact and cost-effectiveness: work-sharing. The idea is simple. Currently, firms mostly respond to weak demand by laying off workers. Under a work-sharing program, firms are encouraged by government policy to spread a small amount of the pain across many workers.

In Germany, for example, which has used work-sharing aggressively in this downturn, a typical company might reduce the hours of 50 workers by 20% rather than laying off 10 workers. The government would then provide a tax credit to make up for most of the lost pay, with the employer kicking in some as well. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.

via Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times.

Does America Need Manufacturing? – NYTimes.com

27 Aug

If America wants to stay competitive in the world of green energy technologies, it will have to invest in local facilities for manufacturing those technologies. They are not so easy to off-shore as software and services.

“Now I think we’re at a really different moment,” Berger says. “We’re seeing a wave of new technologies, in energy, biotechnology, batteries, where there has to be a closer integration between research, development, design, product definition and production.”

One challenge to moving in this direction may be that our banks, hedge funds and venture capitalists are geared toward investing in financial instruments and software companies. In such endeavors, even modest investments can yield extraordinarily quick and large returns. Financing brick-and-mortar factories, by contrast, is expensive and painstaking and offers far less potential for speedy returns. Berger maintains that for the economy to get “full value” from our laboratories’ ideas in energy or biotech — not just new company headquarters but industrial jobs too — we must aspire to a different business model than the one we have come to admire.

via Does America Need Manufacturing? – NYTimes.com.

A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now | Common Dreams

26 Aug

This is a perfect time for a cooperative economy. Considering the disproportionate struggles faced by women and people of color during a recession, the cooperative economy presents an opportunity for all people, to leverage more power by making themselves the bosses, sharing ownership, and taking a collective approach to good management. Many people have already been let down by a top-down corporate or non-profit model in a recession-ridden society. Now is the time to rebuild the system, and build a society founded on justice, dignity, and respect for people and the planet.

via A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now | Common Dreams.

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How Much Tax Should The Rich Pay? | ThinkProgress

22 Aug

Close the loopholes in the tax system!

But the biggest takeaway that I’d like to see people take from this paper is that fans of progressive taxation should be fans of tax reform. As you see in the text, the optimal marginal tax rate for high income people soars if you first (or simultaneously) enact loophole-closing measures to broaden the tax base. In a tax code with many loopholes, higher rates is largely an incentive to exploit loopholes. Close the loopholes, and you can soak the rich with much more efficacy.

via How Much Tax Should The Rich Pay? | ThinkProgress.

Soaking the rich — Crooked Timber

22 Aug

As has been pointed out many times, the Great Compression in income distribution during the 1950s and 1960s, driven in part by policies designed quite explicitly to “stick it to the rich”, was also a time of full employment and steadily growing economic growth. And, while the success of those policies made it sensible to focus on other issues, such as civil rights, rather than seeking to push economic redistribution even further, the situation is exactly the opposite today.

When the top 1 per cent have 25 per cent of all income and this share is steadily growing, a government that doesn’t soak the rich can’t do much more than spread the pain a bit more evenly, whether this means cutting services to balance the budget without higher taxes on the bottom 99 per cent, or squeezing out a bit of extra revenue to preserve essential parts of the welfare state.

via Soaking the rich — Crooked Timber.

The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food  – Technology Review

21 Aug

But what’s interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don’t necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. “These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest,” say Lagi and co.

In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.

On 13 December last year, the group wrote to the US government pointing out that global food prices were about to cross the threshold they had identified. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that triggered a wave of social unrest that continues to spread throughout the middle east today.

One of two factors in the rise of food prices “is the con version of corn into ethanol, a practiced directly encouraged by subsidies.” The other factor is speculating in food prices.

via The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food  – Technology Review.

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com

9 Aug

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems. …

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

via Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt – NYTimes.com.

“You Start with Bike Lanes” « One Jersey City

7 Aug

This is the way to think. A relatively minor, but critical, change that has broad ramifications. Like bikes!

Take bicycles. The advent of bike lanes in some American cities may seem like a big step, but merely marking a strip of the road for recreational cycling spectacularly misses the point. In Amsterdam, nearly everyone cycles, and cars, bikes and trams coexist in a complex flow, with dedicated bicycle lanes, traffic lights and parking garages. But this is thanks to a different way of thinking about transportation.

To give a small but telling example, pointed out to me by my friend Ruth Oldenziel, an expert on the history of technology at Eindhoven University, Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind. Likewise, every Dutch child has to pass a bicycle safety exam at school. The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture.

This in turn relates to lots of other things — such as bread. How? Cyclists can’t carry six bags of groceries; bulk buying is almost nonexistent. Instead of shopping for a week, people stop at the market daily. So the need for processed loaves that will last for days is gone. A result: good bread.

via “You Start with Bike Lanes” « One Jersey City.

Peak oil was thirty years ago — and civilization still perks along

5 Aug

Read the stuff I’ve put in BOLD at the end, then read the rest of it, or just click through to the original post, in full.

The Oil Peak that actually mattered was the peak in consumption per person, which took place back in 1980 at 5.3 barrels per person per year. Since then, consumption per person has dropped to 4.4 barrels per person per year. Given the growth of demand in Asia, consumption per person in the countries that were already rich in 1980 has fallen much faster. Meanwhile living standards have risen substantially[2], unconstrained by declining consumption per person of oil, and of energy more generally.

Oddly enough, most people who worry about Peak Oil are also environmentalists concerned about climate change. From this viewpoint, which I share, Peak Oil looks like good news rather than bad. But the optimistic interpretation is trumped by the spurious idea that there is a 1-1 relationship between oil (or energy) and economic activity. This fallacious idea is held both by Peak Oil fans and by the rightwing doomsayers who suggest that reducing emissions of CO2 will destroy the economy.

A particularly interesting subgroup of Peak Oil fans are those who see nuclear energy as the only possible solution, a view that was mooted by Hubbert himself. This part of the discussion is dominated by a belief in something called ‘baseload power demand’ which must be met at all times if disaster is to be avoided. The idea that demand responds to prices and market structures seems entirely foreign to this discussion.

One of the few upsides of the disastrous Fukushima meltdown is that it has allowed a perfect test of this theory. Following the meltdown, Japan has taken 38 of its 54 reactors offline. It’s now midsummer there, and the blackouts predicted by the scaremongers have not occurred. Instead, the reduction in supply has been handled by (mostly voluntary) efficiency measures.

via Peak oil was thirty years ago — Crooked Timber.

Small Nations’ Alliance « Second Vermont Republic

3 Aug

Objective: To encourage (1) the nonviolent breakup of meganations such as the United States, China, Russia, and India; (2) the peaceful coexistence of a community of small, sustainable, cooperative, democratic, socially responsible, egalitarian, nonviolent, ecofriendly nations; and (3) the independence of small breakaway states such as Quebec, Tibet, and Vermont.

via Small Nations’ Alliance « Second Vermont Republic.

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