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Javier E

Walmart's Visible Hand - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...man-walmarts-visible-hand.html

social science economics labor wages income policy theory middle-class government research

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Conservatives — with the backing, I have to admit, of many economists — normally argue that the market for labor is like the market for anything else. The law of supply and demand, they say, determines the level of wages, and the invisible hand of the market will punish anyone who tries to defy this law.
  • Specifically, this view implies that any attempt to push up wages will either fail or have bad consequences. Setting a minimum wage, it’s claimed, will reduce employment and create a labor surplus, the same way attempts to put floors under the prices of agricultural commodities used to lead to butter mountains, wine lakes and so on
  • Pressuring employers to pay more, or encouraging workers to organize into unions, will have the same effect.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But labor economists have long questioned this view
  • the labor force — is people. And because workers are people, wages are not, in fact, like the price of butter, and how much workers are paid depends as much on social forces and political power as it does on simple supply and demand.
  • What’s the evidence? First, there is what actually happens when minimum wages are increased. Many states set minimum wages above the federal level, and we can look at what happens when a state raises its minimum while neighboring states do no
  • the overwhelming conclusion from studying these natural experiments is that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little or no negative effect on employment.
  • Then there’s history. It turns out that the middle-class society we used to have didn’t evolve as a result of impersonal market forces — it was created by political action, and in a brief period of time
  • Part of the answer is direct government intervention, especially during World War II, when government wage-setting authority was used to narrow gaps between the best paid and the worst paid. Part of it, surely, was a sharp increase in unionization. Part of it was the full-employment economy of the war years, which created very strong demand for workers and empowered them to seek higher pay.
  • How did that happen?
  • America was still a very unequal society in 1940, but by 1950 it had been transformed by a dramatic reduction in income disparities, which the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo labeled the Great Compression.
  • the Great Compression didn’t go away as soon as the war was over. Instead, full employment and pro-worker politics changed pay norms, and a strong middle class endured for more than a generation. Oh, and the decades after the war were also marked by unprecedented economic growth.
  • Walmart is under political pressure over wages so low that a substantial number of employees are on food stamps and Medicaid. Meanwhile, workers are gaining clout thanks to an improving labor market, reflected in increasing willingness to quit bad jobs.
  • its justification for the move echoes what critics of its low-wage policy have been saying for years: Paying workers better will lead to reduced turnover, better morale and higher productivity.
  • What this means, in turn, is that engineering a significant pay raise for tens of millions of Americans would almost surely be much easier than conventional wisdom suggests. Raise minimum wages by a substantial amount; make it easier for workers to organize, increasing their bargaining power; direct monetary and fiscal policy toward full employment, as opposed to keeping the economy depressed out of fear that we’ll suddenly turn into Weimar Germany. It’s not a hard list to implement — and if we did these things we could make major strides back toward the kind of society most of us want to live in.
  • The point is that extreme inequality and the falling fortunes of America’s workers are a choice, not a destiny imposed by the gods of the market. And we can change that choice if we want to.
Javier E

Grubwithus Organizes Dinners - Social, Minus Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05ping.html

social media friendship digital

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • My newfound friends came courtesy of a Chicago start-up business called Grubwithus, an online service with the seemingly modest aim of bringing strangers together to have a meal. The concept is simple enough: People browse through a list of dinners in their cities and buy tickets, usually for around $25. Before the event, they can share a few online tidbits about themselves with their dining partners
  • It is using contemporary techniques to foster a kind of social networking that predates the dawn of services like Facebook and Twitter: old-fashioned conversation among casual acquaintances, without keyboards and screens.
  • a new generation of services that rely on the ubiquity of social networking to prompt contact that the Web calls IRL, or “in real life,” sometimes known as the real world.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “Friendship networks dwindle as you get older, so this is an easy and nonawkward way to meet new people,” said Sen Sugano, the development director of Grubwithus. “You have your circle of friends, of course, and the people you work with, but expanding beyond that can be hard.”
  • Sonar, for example, is a new mobile application that combs a user’s connections on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and alerts them if they have any friends in the vicinity.
  • the company wants to leverage the dozens, or even hundreds, of connections that many people have already made online and see if they can use those to form new, meaningful friendships.
sissij

The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html

new york times bias social media technology

shared by sissij on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
  • No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week.
  • “You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you’re a designer of reality.”
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  • It started with President Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.
  • The proof, you would have heard him say, was already out there in the mainstream media — what with a report on the website Heat Street saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had secured a warrant to investigate ties between people in Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and articles in The New York Times, in The Washington Post and elsewhere about intelligence linking people in Mr. Trump’s campaign to Russia, some of it from wiretaps.
  • You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around. If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why couldn’t it allow you to live more fully in your own political reality — don the goggles and go live full time in the adventure of your choosing: A, B or C.
  • Just watch out for that wall you’re about to walk into IRL (in real life). Or, hey, don’t — knock yourself out.
  • sissij on 14 Mar 17
     
    This new design reminds me of how the internet is limiting us in our comfort zone. Although in theory, there is almost infinite amount of information on the internet, we can only get a very small proportion of it. And people tends to read the information that support their idea or fit their interests. So the news servers start to design system that only provide readers with what they want to see or like to see. It does not do good to diversify people's mind as what internet should be doing. In the quote, Dan Wagner said: "you're a designer of reality", but I interpret this as we are the designer of our own reality. This will only isolate people from each other. Without living in the same reality, people won't have real communication, so I think this new design does have cons. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
Javier E

We Live In Imaginary Worlds - by Freya India - After Babel - 0 views

www.afterbabel.com/...we-live-in-imaginary-worlds

artificial worlds social media AI nature IRL

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • It’s only going to get more addictive, more customized, more controllable. Already we can customize AI girlfriends with traits like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate” or “smart, strict, rational”, making sure she is “judgement-free” and laughs at all our jokes. “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI.
  • We have to bring children back into the real world. We have to bring childhood back to Earth.
  • But first we have to let them, and ourselves, feel that loneliness. Feel it enough that we are forced to do something, to build something. To get up and get out.
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  • The problem here is not just the imaginary friends or imaginary communities. It’s that more and more of us don’t have the real thing.
  • As Jon put it in The Anxious Generation, there was Act I of the Tragedy: the disappearance of the play-based childhood. Then came Act II: the rise of the phone-based childhood. But as he and Zach began to realize, there was actually an Act before both of these—the loss of local community.
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