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Gene Ellis

Stanford Professor Michael Boskin: A Five-Step Plan for European Prosperity - Jewish Bu... - 0 views

jewishbusinessnews.com/...p-plan-for-european-prosperity

shared by Gene Ellis on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Stanford Professor Michael Boskin: A Five-Step Plan for European Prosperity
Gene Ellis

The delicate balance of fixing the eurozone | Martin Wolf's Exchange - 0 views

blogs.ft.com/...balance-of-fixing-the-eurozone

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • The euro itself was a leading cause of this crisis by ushering in a remarkably swift convergence in interest rates, which had the effect of directing too much capital into countries that formerly had had to pay high interest rates. This undermined the competitiveness of these countries through inflation and gave rise to huge deficits in their current accounts.
  • The euro is not suffering from a mere confidence crisis that can be resolved by assuaging the markets; it is experiencing a profound balance‐of‐payment crisis that is being prolonged by the expansion of public financial aid.
  • Since autumn 2007, long before the official bail‐out initiatives began, some of the crisis‐hit countries have replaced dwindling private capital imports and capital flight with their money‐printing presses (Target credits).
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  • 5. Export surpluses create no real value if they translate into claims vis‐à‐vis countries which ultimately cannot pay their debts,
  • 6. The ECB Council overstepped its mandate when it transferred to Eurozone national central banks, primarily the Bundesbank, the task of financing the public and private deficits of other countries.
  • 7. Germany’s liability for the bail‐out initiatives does not total 211 billion euros, as often cited, but is actually now close to 600 billion euros if the far larger bailout initiatives of the ECB are included in this figure.
  • 8. The Target credits and the purchase of government bonds by the ECB system transfer the investment risk of private investors and banks to the taxpayers of economically sound countries, posing a threat to the euro because they offer debtor countries incentives to advocate inflationary policies at the ECB Council which would help them defer their obligation to repay their foreign debts.
  • 9. Eurobonds would undermine debt discipline, lead to much higher interest burdens for the German state, and anew induce capital flows in Europe that would exacerbate the external imbalances.
  • ) Target debts are to be settled on an annual basis with interest‐bearing, marketable assets as in the US.
  • g) Countries that are not competitive enough to repay their foreign debts should, in their own interest, leave the Monetary Union.”
  • I also appreciate the fact that the declaration envisages a credit boom in Germany that would ultimately rebalance the eurozone economy. Nevertheless, this rebalancing is likely to prove painfully slow and certainly requires a prolonged period of relatively high inflation in Germany, to offset relatively low inflation in the vulnerable countries. It is far from clear that German public opinion is prepared for such an outcome.
  • More important, I do not believe a currency union that takes for granted the possibility of sovereign defaults and even exit would prove workable. It is a recipe for extreme financial instability, with huge runs on credit to banks, private non-banks and governments built in.
  • mechanisms of financing and adjustment. Permanent transfers from some countries to others, merely to offset a lack of
  • competitiveness (rather than accelerate income convergence), are indeed undesirable. Nevertheless, financing needs to be sufficiently large and generous to give vulnerable countries some chance of managing the adjustment to shocks, without sovereign default, mass private bankruptcies and implosion of financial systems.
  • Gene Ellis on 17 Jul 12
     
    The second major article on Professor Hans-Werner Sinn's attack on the premises of the eurozone. TARGET 2 analysis, plus...
Gene Ellis

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ret-to-success-is-failure.html

Duckworth

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
  • Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
  • Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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  • According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.
  • As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.
  • “The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”
  • Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s.
  • People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”
  • Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled a “report card.”
  • Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
  • She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.
  • The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
  • The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates — about 350 kids, in all — and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen:
  • I came to Witter’s class to observe something that Levin was calling “dual-purpose instruction,” the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.
  • It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.
  • The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
Gene Ellis

Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Webe... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...-ECB-strongman-Axel-Weber.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 24 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber
  • Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff said the launch of the euro had been a "giant historic mistake, done to soon" that now requires a degree of fiscal union and a common bank resolution fund to make it work, but EMU leaders are still refusing to take these steps.
  • "People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said.
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  • Mr Rogoff said Europe is squandering the "scarce resource" of its youth, badly needed to fortify an ageing society as the demographic crunch sets in.
  • "If these latent technologies are not realised, Europe will wake up like Rip Van Winkel from a long Japan-like slumber to find itself a much smaller part of the world economy, and a lot less important."
  • Mr Rogoff said debt write-downs across the EMU periphery "will eventually happen" but the longer leaders let the crisis fester with half-measures, the worse damage this will do to European society in the end.
  • Mr Weber, who resigned from the Bundesbank and the ECB in a dispute over euro debt crisis strategy, said new "bail-in" rules for bond-holders of eurozone banks will cause investors to act pre-emptively, aiming to avoid large losses before the ECB issues its test verdicts. "We may see that speculators do not wait until November, but bet on winners and losers before that," he said.
  • Sir Martin said the eurozone is pursuing a reverse "Phillips Curve" - the trade off between jobs and inflation - as if it were testing "what level of unemployment it is prepared to tolerate for zero inflation".
  • Pierre Nanterme, chairman and chief executive officer of Accenture, said Europe is losing the great battle for competitiveness, and risks a perma-slump where debt burdens of 100pc of GDP prevent governments breaking free by investing in skills and technology.
  • He said Europe is falling further behind as the US basks in cheap energy and pours funds into cutting-edge technology. "A lot is at stake. If in 12 to 24 months no radical steps are taken to break the curse, we might have not just five, ten, but twenty years of a low-growth sluggish situation in Europe," he said.
  • "People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said
Gene Ellis

Immigration Math: It's a Long Story - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18view.html

Migration

shared by Gene Ellis on 13 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Children of immigrants complete more years of education than their native-born counterparts of similar socioeconomic backgrounds.
  • Being a child of immigrants, he said, "sort of boosts your driv
  • Still, it can take several generations for poor immigrant families to catch up to American norms.
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  • But despite the lag in education, Mr. Johnson said, Mexican immigrants and their families don't have much trouble finding jobs. "One of the paradoxes of Mexican immigration is that you have these workers with low skills but incredibly high employment rates," he said. "The second generation isn't able to maintain employment levels that are quite so high, but they're basically in the same ballpark."
  • By contrast, the children of recent arrivals face competition from successive waves of immigrants from numerous regions.
  • Professor Waldinger said that "the median for Indian immigrants is 16 years of schooling" and that, on balance, "the Indians, the Koreans, the Chinese — they're already successful." One reason, he added, is that society is "much more open to outsiders" in top jobs and at elite colleges than it ever was before.
Gene Ellis

How Jean Tirole's Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lain-the-internet-economy.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • How Jean Tirole’s Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy
  • He also said that industries should be regulated differently depending on their distinct characteristics.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14
       
      excellent point!
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  • Many Internet companies, for instance, give their products away free, which means that antitrust law built on pricing is irrelevant. But a result is they grow so fast that they can quickly become monopolies.
  • “He’s helping us think about what is one of the greatest challenges of our time, how to deal with what feel like friendly monopolists,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who studies Internet policy and antitrust. “Amazon, Google and the others give us all this stuff for free or lower prices, so we love them, but are they dangerous in ways we don’t always see?”
  • In the 2002 paper with Jean-Charles Rochet, Mr. Tirole defined two-sided markets, or markets that “get both sides on board” by charging more to one set of customers in order to increase demand by others.
  • In the tech industry, it explains why Google, Facebook and Twitter offer their services free – the more people who use them, the more advertisers they can attract. Likewise, Amazon lowered the price of its new phone to 99 cents in part because smartphones succeed when they have a lot of apps – and developers won’t want to build apps for Amazon’s phone unless a lot of people are using it.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14
       
      nice example...
  • For regulators, tech companies have been a riddle in part because they do not follow the behavior of typical monopolies: Many do not charge for their products, and companies that offer entirely different products are nonetheless competitors. For instance, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, argued in a speech on Monday that Google’s biggest competitor in search is Amazon and in mobile is Facebook — even though neither one is a search engine.
  • “Inspired by him and others like him, our effort was to try to move beyond the traditional understanding of something like an aluminum cartel who just raised their prices on aluminum and everything got more expensive,” said Mr. Wu, who was a senior adviser to the Federal Trade Commission on antitrust matters.
  • For consumers, the costs include absorbing advertisers’ ad spending by paying more for their products, being tracked and shown personalized ads, and giving up privacy.
  • our end-users do not internalize the impact of their purchase on the other side of the market.”
Gene Ellis

Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-americans-stink-at-math.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Why Do Americans Stink at Math?
  • The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them.
  • In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.
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  • Carefully taught, the assignments can help make math more concrete. Students don’t just memorize their times tables and addition facts but also understand how arithmetic works and how to apply it to real-life situations. But in practice, most teachers are unprepared and children are baffled, leaving parents furious.
  • On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer.
  • On the same multiple-choice test, three-quarters of fourth graders could not translate a simple word problem about a girl who sold 15 cups of lemonade on Saturday and twice as many on Sunday into the expression “15 + (2×15).” Even in Massachusetts, one of the country’s highest-performing states, math students are more than two years behind their counterparts in Shanghai.
  • A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy.
  • On a scale of 1 to 5, 29 percent of them scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they could do basic arithmetic but not computations requiring two or more steps.
  • One study that examined medical prescriptions gone awry found that 17 percent of errors were caused by math mistakes on the part of doctors or pharmacists.
  • “I’m just not a math person,” Lampert says her education students would say with an apologetic shrug.
  • In the 1970s and the 1980s, cognitive scientists studied a population known as the unschooled, people with little or no formal education.
  • For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.”
  • Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change.
  • The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.
  • The answer-getting strategies may serve them well for a class period of practice problems, but after a week, they forget. And students often can’t figure out how to apply the strategy for a particular problem to new problems.
  • In the process, she gave them an opportunity to realize, on their own, why their answers were wrong.
  • At most education schools, the professors with the research budgets and deanships have little interest in the science of teaching
  • Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
  • Some of the failure could be explained by active resistance.
  • A year after he got to Chicago, he went to a one-day conference of teachers and mathematicians and was perplexed by the fact that the gathering occurred only twice a year.
  • More distressing to Takahashi was that American teachers had almost no opportunities to watch one another teach.
  • In Japan, teachers had always depended on jugyokenkyu, which translates literally as “lesson study,” a set of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft. A teacher first plans lessons, then teaches in front of an audience of students and other teachers along with at least one university observer. Then the observers talk with the teacher about what has just taken place. Each public lesson poses a hypothesis, a new idea about how to help children learn.
  • The research showed that Japanese students initiated the method for solving a problem in 40 percent of the lessons; Americans initiated 9 percent of the time.
  • Similarly, 96 percent of American students’ work fell into the category of “practice,” while Japanese students spent only 41 percent of their time practicing.
  • Finland, meanwhile, made the shift by carving out time for teachers to spend learning. There, as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback.
  • “Sit on a stone for three years to accomplish anything.”
  • In one experiment in which more than 200 American teachers took part in lesson study, student achievement rose, as did teachers’ math knowledge — two rare accomplishments.
  • Examining nearly 3,000 teachers in six school districts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently found that nearly two-thirds scored less than “proficient” in the areas of “intellectual challenge” and “classroom discourse.”
Gene Ellis

Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cern-for-eurozone-economy.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy
  • Some economists argue that the region is already well into a so-called lost decade.
  • Analysts surmised that the strained relations with Russia as well as turmoil in the Middle East had undercut demand for Italian exports, in particular fashion and other luxury goods.
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  • “I definitely expect that things will get worse,” he said.
  • The European Union exported agricultural goods worth 11.8 billion euros, or $15.8 billion, to Russia last year, and sales have been rising at a rate of almost 15 percent a year.
  • The economic data and news that Russia was massing troops and military equipment on the Ukrainian border caused stock prices to fall across Europe on Wednesday.
  • Separately, the German Federal Statistical Office reported on Wednesday that new industrial orders in Germany fell 3.2 percent in June compared with May. Analysts had expected orders to increase.
  • For Italy, the deteriorating economy puts greater pressure on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who less than a week ago promised not to impose any more government budget cuts and to invest in improving the country’s roads and other infrastructure. Such promises will be difficult to keep if slower growth, which usually translates into higher unemployment and lower corporate profits, limits tax receipts.A slower economy also endangers Italy’s ability to comply with eurozone rules on budget deficits.
  • Italy’s 2.1 trillion euro government debt equals 136 percent of its annual gross domestic product, the second-highest debt ratio in the eurozone, after Greece.
  • They said Italy’s problems stemmed more from its failure make changes needed to improve the performance of its economy.
  • The slow pace of structural reforms is worrisome,” said Paolo Manasse, a professor of macroeconomics at Bologna University. He said there was no sign of progress on necessary steps like selling off state-owned assets or overhauling the labor market or public pension system.
Gene Ellis

Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cook-making-apple-his-own.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Mr. Balter calls Apple a financial “Rock of Gibraltar"— it is sitting on $150.6 billion of cash
  • Chief among them is a reliance on small creative teams whose membership remains intact to this day
  • And Mr. Ive pointed to another enduring value: a complete focus on the product.
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  • Michael A. Cusumano, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., said he thought Apple no longer had the juice to create the world-beating product it needs.
Gene Ellis

China Exports Pollution to U.S., Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-western-us-study-finds.html

China exports pollution u s input_output

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “We’re focusing on the trade impact,” said Mr. Lin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Peking University’s School of Physics. “Trade changes the location of production and thus affects emissions.”
  • “Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.Black carbon is a particular problem because rain does not wash it out of the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances, the statement said. Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.
  • The study’s scientists also looked at the impact of China’s export industries on its own air quality. They estimated that in 2006, China’s exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon monoxide.
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  • The scholars who gave emissions estimates for China’s export industries, a significant part of the country’s economy, looked at data from 42 sectors that are direct or indirect contributors to emissions. They included steel and cement production, power generation and transportation. Coal-burning factories were the biggest sources of pollutants and greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14
       
      Note:  here they have used input-output coefficients of sectors to calculate the effects...
  • In Japan, for instance, an environmental engineer has attributed a mysterious pestilence that is killing trees on Yakushima Island to pollutants from China.
  • Exports accounted for 24.1 percent of China’s entire economic output last year, down sharply from a peak of 35 percent in 2007, before the global financial crisis began to weaken overseas demand even as China’s domestic economy continued to grow.
  • But the proportion of China’s exports that are made in China has risen steadily in recent years as many companies move more of their supply chains, instead of just having final assembly work done here.
Gene Ellis

Suspension Bridges - Inca - Andes - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08bridg.html

General inca suspension bridges

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - Cached
  • “Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”
  • Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building.
  • The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.
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  • Similar bridges existed in other mountainous regions of the world, most notably in the Himalayas and in ancient China, where iron chain suspension bridges existed in the third century B.C.”
  • The last existing Inca suspension bridge, at Huinchiri, near Cuzco, is virtually rebuilt each year. People from the villages on either side hold a three-day festival and gather stiff grasses for producing more than 50,000 feet of cord. Finally, the cord is braided into 150-foot replacement cables.
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