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While Pyongyang's warlike rhetoric has to reach a certain decibel-level for the rest of the world to take note, North Koreans are weaned on a relentless, daily propaganda formula almost from birth.

Problems like food shortages are the fault of unfair, punitive sanctions aimed at weakening the North which must therefore focus all its resources on national defence for a final, decisive battle that could come at any time.

"The regime can no longer fire up people with any coherent or credible vision of a socialist future, so it tries to cast the entire workforce... as an adjunct to the military,"

One of the company’s goals now is “managing out dead wood,” aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards. Turnover is now about twice as high it was a decade ago, with approximately 10% of U.S. employees leaving annually, voluntarily or not, the company said.

Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. “People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,” said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.

Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.41 % in June approved pushing its new performance-management process from the pilot stage to a global rollout. The new system encourages managers to conduct a monthly “reflection” on every direct report, answering five questions that include “Given his/her performance, would you assign this associate to increased scale, scope, and responsibilities?” and “Is this associate at risk for low performance?”

The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach.

But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree.

It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.

“We aren’t a nation rooted in blood. We aren’t a nation based in ethnicity . . .  America was an idea that was about something much bigger than what tribe you come from.”

That message was entirely absent — and remains absent — in the xenophobic, nativist ramblings of Trump and his followers. Trump’s supporters rallied to his cry of white resentment and anti-immigrant blame-mongering. His authoritarianism and contempt for the First Amendment were of no concern.

the right, for all its Constitutional veneration, has become proudly ignorant about our founding principles and instead has adopted the worst aspects of the left: race obsession and class resentment. In the hands of misogynistic and xenophobic opportunists, the right now seems to be all about getting even, getting what some Americans imagine was taken from them.

On Sunday, the president-elect again rejected the Russian role, adding that he was smart enough that he didn’t want or need a daily briefing.

If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his people at risk?

Then there is the ethic of the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.

In 2004, the influential political scientist Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, his manifesto on the tumultuous future of the American identity. The growth of black and Hispanic minorities, he predicted, would provoke a backlash among whites: The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline

Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger—Donald Trump.

the demographic data tells a story of very similar fathers in the two parties.

Where Republican and Democratic dads differ, though, is in their perceptions of the appropriate role of fathers and how they assess their own performance.

Republican dads rate the job they are doing as parents very highly, significantly higher than Democratic fathers rate themselves

While it's understandable President Obama wants to refute the idea that he's America's declinist-in-chief -- and it is a line of attack from Mitt Romney -- I do think it means that we're going to have a 2012 election where on both sides, both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed. And I'd describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.

What is the other type of decline? EL: The other type is the more important one. It is about how America is responding to these challenges, which includes actions and inactions that have exacerbated some of the trends that we associate with this relative decline. These include the impact of globalization on the American economy and the impact of really exponential changes in technology on how Middle America lives and works. Washington's reaction to date has only deepened America's problems by turning this into a more pronounced relative decline than it needs to be.

there's been much less revisiting of the assumptions in the preceding two or three decades before the Lehman Brothers collapse than you would have expected in 2008. I do see some stirrings now of questioning whether, in a world where there is a lot of mercantilism -- or at least where there are a lot of often very effective governments integrated with their private sectors to compete with the United States and others -- whether it is sensible for America to continue to ignore those lessons and those examples not just from Asia, but from places like Germany, Brazil, and Canada. The governments in these countries can often play a constructive role in helping their private sectors compete. But by and large, the preponderance of economists and the intellectual elite in America still hews toward the model that led up to the financial crisis. You could say America has lost a paradigm and not yet found a new one.

Education will end up being dominated by a few huge incumbents.  As we see with Facebook and Twitter and, well, almost everything, the internet offers huge returns to scale, and substantial network effects.

Online education will kill the liberal arts degree.

 The important aspect for this discussion is that what they teach is hard to test efficiently.  There's enormous variation in grading of, say, English papers, and even if it were easier to standardize, that grading requires hours of expensive labor.

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.

Rising costs and falling subsidies have driven average tuition up over 1000% since the 1970s.

American education is not without its problems, but, as Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz masterfully demonstrated in their recent book The Race Between Education and Technology, the issue isn’t that schooling has actually gotten worse, it is that the rate of progress has slowed down.

That’s not ideal, but it hardly amounts to a collapse of the social fabric

Brooks is right that materialist explanations for social decline are unpersuasive, but if the streets are safer and kids are doing better in school than their parents, then what is it that needs explaining?

Community College of Philadelphia has had "mixed success" educating its students, though its tuition is far above the median for similar institutions - and higher than those of all other community colleges in the region, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

school's graduation rate was no better than about average, and in some cases was below those of its peers

On the positive side, the school's African American and Asian students graduate at higher rates than their counterparts at peer schools, and the college graduated a record 1,993 students in 2013-14, up from 1,602 in 2007-08, the report found.

Every year China's port cities erupt in chaos as 130 million migrant factory workers scramble to make their yearly pilgrimage home for the New Year.  This astonishing spectacle, the largest human migration in the history of the world,

Roughly 25 percent of the global workforce is Chinese. Given such enormous firepower, China inevitably sets the norm for wages and working standards in the global supply chain. Multi-national corporate interests have chipped away at those standards and wages in order to maximize profits and serve shareholders.  The chronic disregard for workers' rights in China's foreign-invested sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, so it really should be no surprise that ninety percent of Americans have since the 1970s suffered economic slippage--in wages, benefits, job security. 

sheds light on the relationship between cities and three underlying types of workforce skills--physical skills of the sort used in manufacturing, analytical or cognitive skills, and social intelligence skills like the ability to direct teams, form entrepreneurial new businesses and organizations, and mobilize both people and resources behind common causes and objectives

Larger cities not only draw more educated and innovative people, but more people with the critical social skills required to turn new ideas into successful enterprises and industries.

women who qualify in the view of one type of manager are automatically disqualified by the view of another. “Men can think of reasons against having women on boards and in executive committees,” Mr. Wippermann told the German weekly Die Zeit. “But none in favor.”

Still, “there is a lack of women who want to work full time,” she said. “We can’t tell women how to lead their lives. We don’t want a system like in the old East Germany.”

“Without these talent sources, Germany can’t survive as a leading knowledge economy. “We have to break open all our historic taboos,” he said. “Because if we don’t, we will lose competitiveness.”

a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.

The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.

“Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,

What actually constitutes an economic giant?

A country’s economic size is essentially driven by two long-term forces: the nation’s workforce in terms of the number of people able and eligible to work, and its productivity.

On the list of the top 20 largest economies in the world, most have large populations. From the developed world, Japan (No. 3), Germany, France, Britain and Italy all sit among the top 10, although their relative ranking has slipped in the past decade as China, Brazil and Russia have entered this group