Some economists have proposed running a job guarantee through the non-profit sector, which would make it even easier to suit the job to the worker. Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions. Sounds nice, doesn't it?
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Gladwell on Income Inequality: We're Off the Rails - YouTube - 0 views
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Complete Premium video at: http://fora.tv/conference/new_yorker_festival_2010 Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell discusses America's dramatically changing notions of wealth and income inequality since the mid-20th century. Gladwell notes that top-earning Americans faced a 91% income tax rate during most of the 1950s. "What's amazing is that, if you even bring this up now, people don't believe you," he says. ----- This excerpt was taken from a program titled "The Magical Year 1975," featuring Malcolm Gladwell. It was recorded in collaboration with the New Yorker Festival, on October 3, 2010. Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of, most recently, "What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures," and the Times best-selling books "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," and "Outliers: The Story of Success."
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Elections Have Consequences - 0 views
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We are at a pivotal moment in American history, and many Americans watching the deficit talks in Washington are confused, perplexed, angry and frustrated. This country, which has paid its debts from Day 1, must pay its debts. Anyone who says it is not a big deal for this country to default clearly does not understand what he or she is talking about. This is a nation whose faith and credit has been the gold standard of countries throughout the world. Some people simply say we're not going to pay our debt, that there's nothing to really worry about. Those are people who are wishing our economy harm for political reasons, and those are people whose attitudes will have terrible consequences for virtually every working family in this country in terms of higher interest rates, in terms of significant job loss, in terms of making a very unstable global economy even more unstable. Our right-wing friends in the House of Representatives have given us an option. What they have said is end Medicare as we know it and force elderly people, many of whom don't have the money, to pay substantially more for their health care. So when you're 70 under their plan and you get sick and you don't have a whole lot of income, we don't know what happens to you. They forget to tell us that if their plan was passed you're going to have to pay a heck of a lot more for the prescription drugs you're getting today. They we're going to throw millions of kids off health insurance. If your mom or dad is in a nursing home and that nursing home bill is paid significantly by Medicaid and Medicaid isn't paying anymore, they forgot to tell us what happens to your mom or dad in that nursing home. What happens? And what happens today if you are unemployed and you're not able to get unemployment extension? What happens if you are a middle-class family desperately trying to send their kids to college and you make savage cuts to Pell grants and you can't go to college? What does it mean for the nation if we
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Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For | Politics News | Rolling Stone - 0 views
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What if people didn't have to work to survive? Enter the jaw-droppingly simple idea of a universal basic income, in which the government would just add a sum sufficient for subsistence to everyone's bank account every month. A proposal along these lines has been gaining traction in Switzerland, and it's starting to get a lot of attention here, too.
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A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating."
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Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don't really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve.
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In a few years, my landlord will probably sell my building to another landlord and make off with the appreciated value of the land s/he also claims to own – which won't even get taxed, as long as s/he ploughs it right back into more real estate.
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Municipalities themselves can be big-time landowners, and groups can even create large-scale community land trusts so that the land is held in common. In any case, we have to stop letting rich people pretend they privately own what nature provided everyone.
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Hoarders blow. Take, for instance, the infamous one percent, whose ownership of the capital stock of this country leads to such horrific inequality. "Capital stock" refers to two things here: the buildings and equipment that workers use to produce goods and services, and the stocks and bonds that represent ownership over the former. The top 10 percent's ownership of the means of production is represented by the fact that they control 80 percent of all financial assets.
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You know what else really blows? Wall Street. The whole point of a finance sector is supposed to be collecting the surplus that the whole economy has worked to produce, and channeling that surplus wealth toward its most socially valuable uses. It is difficult to overstate how completely awful our finance sector has been at accomplishing that basic goal. Let's try to change that by allowing state governments into the banking game.
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When North Dakotans pay state taxes, the money gets deposited in the state's bank, which in turn offers cheap loans to farmers, students and businesses. The Bank of North Dakota doesn't make seedy, destined-to-default loans, slice them up inscrutably and sell them on a secondary market.
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shared by thinkahol * on 05 Dec 10
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NationalJournal.com - To Tell the Truth - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - 0 views
www.nationaljournal.com/...aded-our-privacy-less-20101202
NationalJournal.com - To Tell the Truth Thursday December 2 2010
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As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both.”
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Judging by the press accounts, Washington is still buzzing over WikiLeaks' release of classified U.S. government information, with both Republicans and Democrats expressing outrage over the disclosures. Meanwhile, many media outlets seem to be practically mute on the subject, avoiding comment on whether WikiLeaks provided a public service or disservice.
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Obama's Business Backers Look Ahead - BusinessWeek.com- msnbc.com - 0 views
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In addition to Logan, they include Valerie Jarrett, CEO of real estate management firm The Habitat Co. and now co-head of Obama's transition team; Jim Reynolds, CEO of investment bank Loop Capital Markets; John Rogers, CEO of mutual fund icon Ariel Investments; Quintin Primo III, CEO of commercial real estate development company Capri Capital Partners; and Frank Clark, CEO of electrical utility Commonwealth Edison.
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Later, during his second year in the U.S. Senate, Obama called Clark, among others, to discuss whether it made sense for him to mount a bid for the Presidency. Clark, 62, is one of Chicago's elder statesmen and chief of ComEd, a subsidiary of energy giant Exelon (EXC) and the largest electric utility in Illinois, serving nearly 4 million customers in Chicago and Northern Illinois. He didn't mince words: "Your window of opportunity is now," Clark recalls saying. "Go do it."
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"Our generation has been limited in terms of how far we can dream," Logan said on Tuesday night just minutes before Obama took the stage. The son of two teachers who worked on Chicago's South Side, Logan majored in accounting and economics at Florida A&M University, a predominantly black college, and later earned an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago. "We've too often been under the impression that we can only serve our own. We've had constraints applied to what we can achieve."
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shared by Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10
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Delivering Health, Wealth and Water, Drip by Drip - 0 views
featured.matternetwork.com/...lth-wealth-water-drip_6552.cfm
solar power drip irrigation third world benefits efficiency
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Solar-powered drip irrigation enhances food security in the Sudano–Sahel documents a field research project which found that: "solar-powered drip irrigation significantly augments both household income and nutritional intake, particularly during the dry season, and is cost effective compared to alternative technologies" Over the decades, irrigation has been shown to greatly increase agricultural productivity. Drip irrigation is spreading rapidly in Africa, with significant benefits. "Drip irrigation delivers water (and fertilizer) directly to the roots of plants, thereby improving soil moisture conditions; in some studies, this has resulted in yield gains of up to 100%, water savings of up to 40–80%, and associated fertilizer, pesticide, and labor savings over conventional irrigation systems" The solar-powered systems, however, look to offer the potential for even better results. From the study on impacts of PVDI systems it was reported: "The women’s agricultural group members utilizing the PVDI systems became strong net producers in vegetables with extra income earned from sales, significantly increasing their purchases of staples, pulses, and protein during the dry season, and oil during the rainy season. Finally, survey respondents were asked how frequently they were unable to meet their household food needs. Based on the frequency and most recent incident, households were assigned a food insecurity score ranging from zero (no problems during the previous year) to one (perpetually unable to meet food needs). This score changed significantly for project beneficiaries, as they were 17% less likely to feel chronically food-insecure. In short, the PVDI systems had a remarkable effect on both year-round and seasonal food access."
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Several weeks ago, a group of researchers published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting how relatively low-powered solar systems offer the potential to increase food supplies in impoverished arid regions while reducing demands for fertilizers and other costly (in fiscal and other terms) additives.
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In Past Decade, American Funds Created Most Wealth - Yahoo! News - 0 views
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Morningstar determined that Janus and Putnam were the two largest "wealth destroyers" during the decade, losing $58 billion and $46 billion, respectively. "Janus and Putnam rode the growth wave more than anyone else," Kinnel says. "They had some very aggressive funds that put up big numbers that got huge inflows." After the tech bubble burst, the funds that were most heavily invested in these types of holdings experienced huge sell-offs, which made it difficult for these funds to attract inflows through the remainder of the decade. According to Morningstar, American Funds created about $191 million in wealth for investors during the decade, followed by Vanguard and Fidelity. Since American Funds generally employs a more value-oriented strategy, the firm was largely able to avert the first bear market of the decade. "The 2000 to 2002 bear market was all growth and tech, and American barely touched that, whereas they had lots of value, dividend payers, and bonds, which did very well," Kinnel says. Recently, the tables have turned for American. In 2009, it lost the most of any fund family (more than $25 billion). No fund family, including American, was able to avoid the bear market of 2008. The same strategy that allowed American to bypass most of the first bear market failed because many well-known dividend-paying companies, like big financial firms, experienced huge losses.
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In a decade with two bear markets and lackluster returns for many investors, American Funds created the most wealth for investors, while Janus destroyed the most wealth, according to a survey released by Morningstar. For the survey, Morningstar looked at the 50 largest mutual fund families and their total net assets at the end of 1999. Then the fund tracker subtracted each fund company's total cash flows over the decade and deducted their total net assets at the end of 2009. Numbers were calculated in dollar terms so that any funds that were liquidated during the decade would also be included.
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Get this! Mutual funds, where most American's have their 401Ks, IRAs, and retirement savings, performed pitifully in the "great economy" of the 2000's (brought to you by Republican deregulationists starting with Ronald Reagan). The "best" made $191 million (but lost $25 billion in 2009!), the worst lost around $50 billion! What a great way to transfer all that hard earned savings, mostly by the "little guy", from them to the Wall Street gamblers. Another socialistic Republican "redistribution of wealth" of the corporate criminal rich, by the corporate criminal rich, and for the corporate criminal rich.
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Income Inequality and the 'Superstar Effect' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try.
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It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
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The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation. The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
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Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
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Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits. Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
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Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
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Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy. Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking
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(Part 2 of 2 - see first part below) What impact do the incredible salaries of superstars have on the rest of us? What has changed, technologically and socially, to precipitate these inequities? This article also offers a brief look at the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, comparing the US throughout its history and the US vis a vis several European countries.
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Income Inequality and the 'Superstar Effect' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In 1982, the top 1 percent of pop stars, in terms of pay, raked in 26 percent of concert ticket revenue. In 2003, that top percentage of stars — names like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera or 50 Cent — was taking 56 percent of the concert pie.
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. In an article entitled “The Economics of Superstars,” he argued that technological changes would allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue. But this would also reduce the spoils available to the less gifted in the business.
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IF one loosens slightly the role played by technological progress, Dr. Rosen’s framework also does a pretty good job explaining the evolution of executive pay. In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.
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CAPITALISM relies on inequality. Like differences in other prices, pay disparities steer resources — in this case, people — to where they would be most productively employed.
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In poor economies, fast economic growth increases inequality as some workers profit from new opportunities and others do not. The share of national income accruing to the top 1 percent of the Chinese population more than doubled from 1986 to 2003.
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What impact do the incredible salaries of superstars have on the rest of us? What has changed, technologically and socially, to precipitate these inequities? This article also offers a brief look at the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, comparing the US throughout its history and the US vis a vis several European countries. (Part 1 of 2)
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Socialism Today - Capitalism: costing the earth - 0 views
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THE 2007 STATEMENT from the United Nation’s climate panel, the IPCC, that the average temperature on earth must not rise more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels or an incalculable disaster will take place, was a powerful reminder of the nature of the problem.
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The market always chooses the easiest means to save a given quantity of carbon in the short term, regardless of what action is needed for long-term reduction. The result is that the system reinforces technological lock-in. For instance, small cuts may often be achieved cheaply through making a technology a little bit more efficient, whereas larger cuts would require massive investments in new technology.
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Does this mean that emissions are dropping? Not at all. So what does this trade mean in practice? An Oxford academic who studied the scheme, Adam Bumpus, concluded that "this regulation is ultimately there to facilitate the markets – it’s not about making cheap reductions, it’s about making a lot of money"
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Therefore, so the theory goes, the buyer pays to emit greenhouse gases while the seller is rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than their quota. There is only one problem. It does not work like that.
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The main reason is that as the oceans warm up they lose the ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Another horrific truth is that there is more carbon beneath the permafrost of the polar regions than in the entire atmosphere. Experts say that if the emissions of carbon dioxide, sulphate and nitrogen dioxide continue as they are today, this bomb will explode within the next 100 years.
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The problem with most of the established green organisations is that they seek mechanisms, such as emissions markets, green taxes, green laws or other technical fixes to the problem of polluting fat cats.
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The carbon trade system is bad in itself. But the fact that governments or other capitalist controlled bodies allocated the emissions permits in the first place, the logic of the market meant that they handed out too many permits out of fear of being in a disadvantage with competing capitalist powers. Today, there are more permits in circulation than there is capacity to pump out greenhouse gases!
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MANY CDMS ARE about dams. The push for mega-dams has been justified by both development banks and multinationals as being necessary for the development of Africa and to combat carbon emissions. While governments, such as the US, Britain and China, announce mighty plans to electrify Africa, and other ‘aid’ schemes, the companies set in action the Boot model – Build, Own, Operate and Transfer – emptying the rivers of Africa to feed the growing energy needs of Europe, etc. And it is a very lucrative business when they can earn more carbon emission credits in the process. Large dams provide electricity for multinational companies, water for mining, and irrigation for large-scale foreign-owned farms.
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In a study of 50 dams in Africa, professor Thayer Scudder, formerly the leading resettlement consultant for the World Bank, found that landlessness affected 86% and joblessness 80% of the displaced people. Lack of food security impacted on 79% of the people displaced by these ‘green dams’.
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