Group items tagged

"new report from the Economic Policy Institute calls attention to the hardy perennial of how much America's corporate titans make: bosses of the top 350 firms made an average of $18.9m in 2017. That's a ratio of 312-1 over the median worker in their industries. Big bucks to be sure. And a big change since 1965, when the ratio was just 20-1. But what does it mean? And if there's a problem, what is it, exactly? What it means, as the EPI economists carefully document, is that the top US corporate chiefs are paid overwhelmingly with stock options, and their income fluctuates with the market. About 80% of the pay packet is in stocks, and the rise of 17% in 2017 after two flat years surely suggests that the top CEOs (not unreasonably) sensed the market peaked last year. So they cashed in. On the other 20% of the pay packets, no gains occurred"

At least some of my peers are now handing over their working lives to producing cynical content rigged to fit the desires of streaming services, which, when you think about it, is a small tragedy for a world as fucked as ours. Most of the good writers are not. But how could you not at least think about these imperatives when a strange new amalgam of Hollywood and tech offers the greatest rewards for a hit second novel and when magazines pay below rates that were standard three decades ago? Almost all notable book-length nonfiction written in this country emerges as an expansion of work that was first published by a magazine, so-whether they admit it or not-magazines are the incubators for the nonfiction writers who describe our world. But these outlets generally make not the barest pretense of trying to pay writers enough to build a life. Instead, editors at prestige outlets increasingly view writing as germinal IP.

" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

"he premise is that everyone should be entitled to a good job, one that pays at least $15 an hour and comes with benefits such as health care, family leave policies and child care. The program would be administered at a local level, with federal funding, and jobs would be fitted to people, not the other way around. The aim "is not to change the worker in some fundamental way," said Stephanie Kelton, a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and formerly a senior advisor to Sanders. "You take the worker the way they are and you fit the job to the worker.""

"I like this piece by Kate Aronoff looking back on WPA "boondoggles" in the context of a suddenly much discussed job guarantee. A lot of people deserve congratulations for the suddenly much-discussedness of job guarantee proposals. People like William Darity, Darrick Hamilton, and Mark Paul, Pavlina Tcherneva, Randy Wray, and others have worked doggedly through years of winter to keep this (by no means new) idea alive while no major political faction in the United States was willing to give it the time of day. Now, all of a sudden, Democratic Party(ish) bigwigs including Kristen Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders are racing onto the bandwagon. Persistence pays (although perhaps not quite a living wage). Let's get this part out of the way. I'm for it, if it's well implemented. What about a UBI? I'm for that too, if it's well implemented. Do we need both? Well, they do complement each other: Pairing a job guarantee with a UBI would mitigate the risk that the "guarantee" would transmogrify under political pressure into a punitive workfare program. Pairing a UBI with a job guarantee would mitigate the risk that we neglect the broader project of integrating one another into a vibrant society, that we let a check in the mail substitute for human engagement. If we could get both a UBI and a JG, that'd be great. (Of course, if we did get both, we'd want the numbers to be different than either as a standalone.)"