Skip to main content

Home/ Global Economy/ Group items tagged number

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gene Ellis

Oversize Expectations for the Airbus A380 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tions-for-the-airbus-a380.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • this aircraft, which can hold more than 500 passengers. The plane dwarfs every commercial jet in the skies.
  • Its two full-length decks total 6,000 square feet, 50 percent more than the original jumbo jet, the Boeing 747.
  • The A380 was also Airbus’s answer to a problematic trend: More and more passengers meant more flights and increasingly congested tarmacs. Airbus figured that the future of air travel belonged to big planes flying between major hubs.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Airbus has struggled to sell the planes. Orders have been slow, and not a single buyer has been found in the United States, South America, Africa or India.
  • While the A380 program has been a boon for the European aerospace industry, Airbus is unlikely to recover its research and development costs. The best it can now expect is to break even on production costs, according to analysts, provided that it can keep orders going.
  • Airbus made the wrong prediction about travel preferences. People would rather take direct flights on smaller airplanes, he said, than get on big airplanes — no matter their feats of engineering — that make connections through huge hubs.
  • “It’s a commercial disaster,” Mr. Aboulafia says. “Every conceivably bad idea that anyone’s ever had about the aviation industry is embodied in this airplane.”
  • Airline executives were wary of expanding their fleets aggressively, especially for a costly, four-engine fuel hog.
  • And there are a fair number of those routes. Around 15 of the 20 largest long-haul routes by passenger volume in the world today are slot-constrained,
  • “The A380 is not made for every route, but it is ideal for high-traffic routes, high-volume routes that are congested, or where there are flying constraints,”
  • A little more than a decade ago, the two dominant airplane makers, Boeing and Airbus, looked at where their businesses were headed and saw similar facts: air traffic doubling every 15 years, estimates that the number of travelers would hit four billion by 2030 — and came to radically different conclusions about what those numbers meant for their future.
  • Boeing, too, is facing lukewarm demand for its latest jumbo jet upgrade, known as the 747-8. The company has received just 51 orders for this big plane, which can seat about 460 passengers and lists at $357 million. By contrast, it has sold more than 1,200 twin-engine 777s, which sell for as much as $320 million.
  • Richard H. Anderson, Delta’s chief executive, has said the A380 is “by definition an uneconomic airplane unless you’re a state-owned enterprise with subsidies.”
  • Bruno Delile, Air France’s senior vice president for fleet management, says that there are a limited number of routes in its network with enough daily traffic to justify the expense of such a big plane. “The forecasts about traffic growth and market saturation haven’t exactly panned out,” he says.
  • Not only do airlines take a big risk on the size and cost of the A380, but they also have to gain the cooperation of airports to modify gates and widen taxiways to make room for the plane.
  • With versions that seat 210 to 330 passengers, and with a range of about 9,000 miles, the 787 allows airlines to fly pretty much anywhere in the world and connect smaller airports without going through a hub.
  • And passengers are willing to pay more to avoid a connection
  • f most airlines appear skeptical of the A380, Emirates is a true believer. It stunned the industry in December when it ordered 50 more of the planes, beyond the 90 it already had on order, throwing Airbus a much needed lifeline
  • The airport handled 66 million passengers last year, rivaling Heathrow as the busiest international hub.
  • for Emirates, the biggest selling point of the A380 is its ability to pack in more business-class seats and create an environment that appeals to big-spending passengers.
Gene Ellis

This one number explains how China is taking over the world - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...china-is-taking-over-the-world

SWIFT global finance

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • This one number explains how China is taking over the world
Gene Ellis

The euro crisis: The most important number | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...euro-crisis-1

euro crisis number economist

shared by Gene Ellis on 01 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gene Ellis on 01 Dec 12
     
    Why decreasing unemployment is the criterion...
Gene Ellis

Robert Samuelson: A dishonest budget debate - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

budget debate washington

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • t’s the math: In fiscal 2012, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and civil service and military retirement cost $1.7 trillion, about half the budget.
  • As a share of national income, defense spending ($670 billion in 2012) is headed toward its lowest level since 1940.
  • States’ Medicaid costs will increase with the number of aged and disabled, which represent two-thirds of Medicaid spending. All this will force higher taxes or reduce traditional state and local spending on schools, police, roads and parks.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Almost everything is being subordinated to protect retirees.
  • “for how long will we continue to sacrifice investments in our nation’s children and youth ... to spend more and more on the aged?”
  • In a Pew poll, 87 percent of respondents favored present or greater Social Security spending; only 10 percent backed cuts. Results were similar for 18 of 19 programs, foreign aid being the exception.
  • an aging America needs a new social compact: one recognizing that longer life expectancies justify gradual increases in Social Security’s and Medicare’s eligibility ages; one accepting that sizable numbers of well-off retirees can afford to pay more for their benefits or receive less; one that improves generational fairness by concentrating help for the elderly more on the needy and poor to lighten the burdens — in higher taxes and fewer public services — on workers; and one that limits health costs.
  • Government is being slowly transformed into a vast old-age home, with everything else devalued and degraded.
Gene Ellis

Read, I, Pencil | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...rdPncl1.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 26 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.
  • Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
  • a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California.
  • The slats are waxed and kiln dried again.
  • The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.
  • Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
  • Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
  • The graphite is mined in Ceylon.
  • The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
  • My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are.
  • Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
  • My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain. RP.18
  • An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide
  • Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others.
  • There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.
  • Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.
  • There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found.
  • For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
  • Gene Ellis on 26 Apr 13
     
    " Articles EconLog EconTalk Books Encyclopedia Guides Search "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" A selected essay reprint Home | Books | Read | Selected essay reprint Read, Leonard E. (1898-1983) BIO Display paragraphs in this essay containing: Search essay Editor/Trans. First Pub. Date Dec. 1958 Publisher/Edition Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Pub. Date 1999 Comments Pamphlet PRINT EMAIL CITE COPYRIGHT Start PREVIOUS 4 of 5 NEXT End "
Gene Ellis

A Fracking Good Story by Bjørn Lomborg - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ng-good-story-by-bj-rn-lomborg

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years.
  • this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.
  • The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45% less carbon per energy unit. The US used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20% from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: in April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32%, on par with gas.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • For starters, fracking has caused gas prices to drop dramatically.
  • Indeed, US carbon emissions have dropped some 20% per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.
  • the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced US emissions by 400-500 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year. To put that number in perspective, it is about twice the total effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions in the rest of the world, including the European Union.
  • America’s 30,000 wind turbines reduce emissions by just one-tenth the amount that natural gas does. Biofuels reduce emissions by only ten Mt, and solar panels by a paltry three Mt.
  • Since 1990, the EU has heavily subsidized solar and wind energy at a cost of more than $20 billion annually. Yet its per capita CO2 emissions have fallen by less than half of the reduction achieved in the US – even in percentage terms, the US is now doing better.
  • Along with the closure of German nuclear power stations, this has led, ironically, to a resurgence of coal.
Gene Ellis

PORTFOLIO.HU | Blanchard: Eurozone integration needs to go forward or go back, but it c... - 0 views

www.portfolio.hu/...t_it_cant_stay_here.24931.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 04 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • And, while lower investment since the beginning of the crisis has led to a smaller capital stock, again the effect appears quantitatively small. It is also difficult to see why the crisis would have led to a large decrease in total factor productivity. This being said, I would have expected a large output gap to lead to more downward pressure on inflation than we have seen. I see the fact that inflation is roughly stable is a puzzle. We are doing more research on this issue at the IMF.
  • O.B.:There is no question internal devaluations are tougher to achieve than when you can adjust the nominal exchange rate. That’s well understood. A number of European countries have a competitiveness problem, which shows up in a large current account deficit.
  • olve it. And there is no alternative for them than to become more competitive, to decrease the real exchange rate. Is it happening? I think it’s starting to happen, but it’s happening slowly, and it’s going to take a long time.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • They have to
  • Many countries have a tough adjustment to achieve. In doing so, they indeed have to be careful about their social implications. When adjustment requires a decrease in the real wage (or at least a decrease relative to productivity), it is essential that the decrease be fairly shared. You have to make sure that there is a safety net in place. If the pension system has to be made less generous, which is the case in a number of countries, you have to make sure the lowest pensions are protected.
  • It is clear that adjustment in the Euro zone requires a decrease in the relative price of periphery countries and an increase in the relative price of core countries. If the ECB wants to maintain two percent inflation for the Euro zone as a whole, this implies, arithmetically, that core countries have to have inflation higher than two percent, periphery countries have to have inflation lower than two percent, until the adjustment has taken place.
Gene Ellis

Eastern European Migration - 0 views

www.slideshare.net/...eastern-european-migration

GDP

shared by Gene Ellis on 01 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gene Ellis on 01 May 12
     
    www.slideshare.net gives a number of good powerpoint presentations on migration and other topics.
Gene Ellis

Why China will not buy the world - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...ba-11e2-babb-00144feabdc0.html

China will not buy the world

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • At the heart of the new global economy are what Prof Nolan calls “systems integrator” companies – businesses with dominant brands and superior technologies, which are at the apex of value chains that serve the global middle classes. These global businesses, in turn, exert enormous pressure on their supply chains, creating ever-rising consolidation there, as well.
  • Using data from 2006-09, Prof Nolan concludes that the number of globally dominant businesses in the manufacture of large commercial aircraft and carbonated drinks was two; of mobile telecommunications infrastructure and smart phones, just three; of beer, elevators, heavy-duty trucks and personal computers, four; of digital cameras, six; and of motor vehicles and pharmaceuticals, 10. In these cases, dominant businesses supplied between half and all of the world market. Similar degrees of concentration have emerged, after consolidation, in many industries
  • Much the same concentration can be seen among component suppliers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Such a business “typically possesses some combination of a number of key attributes, among them the capability to raise finance for large new projects and the resources necessary to fund a high level of research and development spending to sustain technological leadership, to develop a global brand, to invest in state-of-the-art information technology and to attract the best human resources”.
  • Moreover, “one hundred giant firms, all from the high-income countries, account for over three-fifths of the total R&D expenditure among the world’s top 1,400 companies. They are the foundation of the world’s technical progress in the era of capitalist globalisation”.
  • This creates growing tension, as governments find “their” companies ever harder to tax or regulate.
Gene Ellis

Our Schumpeter columnist: What exactly is an entrepreneur? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...our-schumpeter-columnist

shared by Gene Ellis on 07 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What exactly is an entrepreneur?
  • Schumpeterians distinguish between “replicative” entrepreneurs (who set up small businesses much like other small businesses) and “innovative” entrepreneurs (who upset and disorganise the existing way of doing things). They also distinguish between “small businesses” and “high-growth businesses” (most small businesses stay small). Both sorts have an important role in a successful economy
  • In a new paper Magnus Henrekson and Tino Sanandaji argue that the number of self-made billionaires a country produces provides a much better measure of its entrepreneurial vigour than the number of small businesses.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Countries with a lot of small companies are often stagnant
  • Who are the Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who dominate the modern economy? And how do you create more of them?
  • The bulk of American entrepreneurs come from just three clusters: Boston, New York and Silicon Valley.
  • Schumpeterian entrepreneurship is all about innovation and ambition to turn small businesses into big ones.
Gene Ellis

Productivity: Technology isn't working | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...higher-productivity-and-better

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Technology isn’t working
  • Technology isn’t working
  • n the 1970s the blistering growth after the second world war vanished in both Europe and America. In the early 1990s Japan joined the slump, entering a prolonged period of economic stagnation.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries.
  • Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all.
  • And the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made rapid progress.
  • A second explanation for the Solow paradox, put forward by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (as well as plenty of techno-optimists in Silicon Valley), is that technological advances increase productivity only after a long lag.
  • John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and perhaps the foremost authority on American productivity figures, earlier this year published a study of productivity growth over the past decade. He found that its slowness had nothing to do with the housing boom and bust, the financial crisis or the recession. Instead, it was concentrated in ICT industries and those that use ICT intensively.
  • Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost.
  • For example, new techniques and technologies in medical care appear to be slowing the rise in health-care costs in America. Machine intelligence could aid diagnosis, allowing a given doctor or nurse to diagnose more patients more effectively at lower cost. The use of mobile technology to monitor chronically ill patients at home could also produce huge savings.
  • Health care and education are expensive, in large part, because expansion involves putting up new buildings and filling them with costly employees. Rising productivity in those sectors would probably cut employment.
  • The integration of large emerging markets into the global economy added a large pool of relatively low-skilled labour which many workers in rich countries had to compete with. That meant firms were able to keep workers’ pay low.
  • By creating a labour glut, new technologies have trapped rich economies in a cycle of self-limiting productivity growth.
  • Productivity growth has always meant cutting down on labour. In 1900 some 40% of Americans worked in agriculture, and just over 40% of the typical household budget was spent on food. Over the next century automation reduced agricultural employment in most rich countries to below 5%,
  • A new paper by Peter Cappelli, of the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that in recent years over-education has been a consistent problem in most developed economies, which do not produce enough suitable jobs to absorb the growing number of college-educated workers.
Gene Ellis

Singapore, the Nation That Lee Kuan Yew Built, Questions Its Direction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-questions-its-direction.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Singapore, the Nation That Lee Kuan Yew Built, Questions Its Direction
  • Battling a low birthrate among its citizens, the government opened the floodgates to foreign labor over the past decade and a half. More than a third of the 5.5 million people living in Singapore today are not citizens.The number of nonresident immigrants has more than doubled since 2000, to nearly 1.6 million from 754,000. The number of foreigners given permanent resident status also nearly doubled during the same period, to just over 500,000.
Gene Ellis

Deutsche Post - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Deutsche_Post

deutsche post wikipedia free encyclopedia

shared by Gene Ellis on 08 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Mail division inherits most of the traditional mail services formerly offered by the state-owned monopoly, for which it uses the Deutsche Post brand. Its exclusive right to deliver letters under 50 grams in Germany expired on 1 January 2008, following the implementation of European legislation. A number of companies are vying to challenge Deutsche Post's near monopolistic hold on letter deliveries, including Luxembourg-based PIN Group and Dutch-owned TNT Post.[2] In 2002, Deutsche Post was granted a license to deliver mail in the United Kingdom, breaking Royal Mail's long-standing monopoly.
  • Beginning in the early 1990s, Deutsche Post started an e-mail service called ePost. Today, a verified e-mail hosting service is run under this brand which allows customers to send and receive messages with digital signatures according to the De-Mail law.
Gene Ellis

Hot Money Blues - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-hot-money-blues.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • for the time being, and probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country.
  • It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked.
  • To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It’s hard to imagine now, but for more than three decades after World War II financial crises of the kind we’ve lately become so familiar with hardly ever happened.
  • But the best predictor of crisis is large inflows of foreign money: in all but a couple of the cases I just mentioned, the foundation for crisis was laid by a rush of foreign investors into a country, followed by a sudden rush out.
Gene Ellis

Will bank supervision in Ohio and Austria be similar? A transatlantic view of the Singl... - 0 views

www.voxeu.org/...w-single-supervisory-mechanism

bank supervision ohio austria single mechanism

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • At the inception of the euro, it was thought possible to have a centralised monetary authority and decentralised bank supervision, but the inability to separate sovereign-debt problems from those of bank stability has led the leaders of the member states of the EU to agree to centralise supervision in the Single Supervisory Mechanism.
  • The states retained their powers to supervise the small number of state-chartered banks that seemed little threat to the stability of the new more tightly regulated national system.
  • What was not anticipated was that the more stable national banks would fail to adequately supply credit to the economy.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • States, not the federal government, regulated securities markets and insurance, leaving little oversight for interstate business.
  • The 1930s New Deal reforms added more agencies, including the Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, complicating political oversight by giving them distinctive missions,
  • Yet, it was the trust companies, lacking access to emergency liquidity that caused the 1907 crisis to erupt and spread to the banks.
  • To remedy these defects, the Federal Reserve System, established in 1913, was to act as a lender of last resort, bringing all systemically important institutions – national banks , large state banks and trust companies – under the federal supervision of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency or the Federal Reserve banks.
  • Consequently, when onerous rules, such as the prohibition on branch banking prevented banks from financing the emerging giant corporations, markets, assisted by more lightly regulated trust and insurance companies, stepped in.
  • But, they have not converged, especially with regard to state banks that often pressure state regulators.
  • Surveillance of a bank is not dependent on the geographic scope of its operations, as in the US, but on its systemic significance measured in several dimensions and whether it receives financial assistance from the European Stability Mechanism.
  • the ECB’s direct authority is more encompassing.
  • The ECB will not be directly involved in crisis management and bank resolution, which will be the responsibility of the national authorities. This autonomy will not be incentive compatible until EU directives are adopted for a unified deposit insurance system and a funded single resolution authority.
Gene Ellis

After Bangladesh, Seeking New Sources - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...adesh-seeking-new-sources.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • Dozens of impoverished countries make T-shirts and other very basic clothing. But only a few countries — really just China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and to some extent Cambodia and Pakistan — have developed highly complex systems for producing and shipping tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of identical, high-quality shirts, blouses or trousers to a global retailer within several weeks of receiving an order.
  • The clothing needs to be labeled correctly so that it travels smoothly through a large retailer’s distribution centers
  • The process requires formidable numbers of skilled workers who can oversee quality control as well as labeling and shipping of garments.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Big retailers and fashion companies have repeatedly tried and failed to develop alternatives, experimenting in India, Africa and Latin America, only to run into infrastructure bottlenecks and shortages of skilled managers or workers.
  • India was not organized for large-scale, timely production,
  • Africa did not have enough workers with the right skills for high-volume labeling and shipping,
  • and Latin America did not have enough workers interested in operating sewing machines.
  • In Guatemala, the quality was excellent, he said, but, “They can’t handle big orders and they’re slow on delivery.”
  • What may save Bangladesh from a sharp, immediate drop in export orders is simply that most Southeast Asian factories are already fully booked with orders from multinationals fleeing China’s ever-rising costs.
  • “For this year, it’s impossible — we’re already full,”
  • Indonesia’s national training center for seamstresses — women make up 98 percent of the students — is here in Semarang, producing 12,000 graduates a year. But even that isn’t enough. Four factories with a combined employment of 30,000 are to open in the next year in Semarang, and many more factories are being built nearby.
  • “It’s going to take time, but it’s going to eventually filter out all over the place,” he said. “It’ll take two or three years.”
  • Newly opened factories have started competing for scarce seamstresses by offering free meals and free health insurance
  • Dozens of impoverished countries make T-shirts and other very basic clothing. But only a few countries — really just China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and to some extent Cambodia and Pakistan — have developed highly complex systems for producing and shipping tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of identical, high-quality shirts, blouses or trousers to a global retailer within several weeks of receiving an order.
  • He said that he and a couple of other suppliers of elite retail chains always worried about Bangladesh’s reliance on high-rise factories,
Gene Ellis

The Morality of Amorality in Foreign Policy by Robert Cooper - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...of-amorality-in-foreign-policy

morality foreign policy policy robert cooper project syndicate

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Foreign policy is about war and peace. If wars are fought on moral or religious grounds, no basis for restraint exists. After all, to call something evil is to invoke a moral duty to destroy it.
  • The Thirty Years War, fought over religion, laid waste to the Continent, killing one-third of Germany's population.
  • As the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran says: "Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a God the consequences are incalculable."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The objective of amoral foreign policy is to sustain order in an anarchic international system by ensuring tolerance and pluralism among a number of independent actors.
1 - 20 of 49 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page