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German Publishers Seek Amazon Inquiry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ny-of-antitrust-violation.html Germany book publishing amazon distribution online economics monopoly
shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • the cozy world of German publishing has been slow to adapt to the Internet age, whether in online sales or digital publishing. That has left a vacuum, which Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has swiftly moved to fill. According to industry estimates, it controls as much as 70 percent of the German market for online sales of printed and electronic books.
  • Germany is the company’s largest market outside the United States. Its earnings in Germany reached 1.9 billion euros, or $2.6 billion, last year.
  • The antitrust agency on Tuesday confirmed receipt of the 22-page formal complaint. After reviewing it, the government will decide whether grounds are sufficient to find that Amazon holds a market-dominant position and as a result may be investigated for potential antitrust violations.
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  • The association accuses Amazon of abusing its “market dominant” position and argues that because many people use Amazon as a modern card catalog to explore what books are available, if an author is not listed, a reader would assume that the writer has not published any books.
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The Disruption Myth - Justin Fox - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...379348 crisis economics progress innovation growth
shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • economists can now track what they call “business dynamism” in ways they couldn’t before. As researchers have dug into these numbers, they’ve found that most metrics of dynamism and upheaval in American business have actually been declining for decades, with the downturn steepening after 2000. Fewer new businesses are being launched in the United States, the average age of businesses is increasing, job creation and job destruction are on the wane, industries are being consolidated, and fast-growth businesses are rarer.
  • There was in fact plenty of upheaval in the top ranks of the business world in the 1980s and ’90s, as newcomers crashed the Fortune 500 list with increasing frequency. And the high tech sector was, as widely perceived, a hotbed of entrepreneurship and growth. All of that activity seems to have peaked, however, a year or two after the stock market did in 2000. Measures of big-business volatility began to drop.High-tech start-up activity and what economists call the skewness of growth—how quickly the fastest-growing companies in a sector are outpacing the median company—declined below the levels of the mid-’90s and stayed there.
  • spectacular rise in living standards that began in Europe and North America just over 200 years ago is thus largely the work of disruptive innovations. Without a new burst of them, we may face “secular stagnation”—an extended period of slow growth.
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  • impetus.The
  • it’s also possible that a decades long accretion of regulation has come to weigh on new-business formation and growth; that for all the tales of Silicon Valley swashbuckling, most Americans have become more cautious and less entrepreneurial; or that—and this argument springs straight from Christensen’s keyboard—the pressures of the financial market and a preoccupation with corporate financial metrics have left most businesses “afraid to pursue what they see as risky innovations” and focused instead on cutting costs.
  • some companies are pursuing risky innovations and disrupting established industries. Business publications are full of stories about them: Google and Uber and Amazon and Salesforce and Workday and many more. They just haven’t had a measurable impact on the overall economy yet. One group of economists says to give it a few years— the adoption of new technologies has always affected productivity in fits and starts, and the rise of smartphones and cloud computing and Big Data will show up in the numbers eventually. The other view is that today’s technological innovations pale in significance beside electricity and the internal combustion engine—they’ll have some positive impact, but growth will be slower than it used to be.
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A Cultural Gift to Paris Could Redesign LVMH's Image - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ould-redesign-lvmhs-image.html france luxury marketing culture museum image
shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The luxury business is changing. As consumers have experienced what Bain & Company calls “logo fatigue,” growth for brands including Gucci, Prada and Vuitton has slowed.
  • The conventional wisdom was that consumers cared about obvious aspirational signifiers like name and price; the new view is that they now care about the less apparent marks of connoisseurship: handwork and craft
  • “If the 20th century was about manufacturing,” said Michael Burke, the chief executive of Louis Vuitton, “the 21st century will be about intangibles” — concern for preservation, heritage, the environment.
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  • “The sophisticated consumer became a bit disappointed in luxury as it strove for ubiquity,”
  • “You can’t keep opening stores,” Mr. Hutchings said, “so you have to think about exactly how you are engaging with the consumer.” He added: “The new model is representing something a whole lot deeper and more meaningful to consumers.”
  • As a result, a new front has opened in the luxury wars, with the names stitched inside handbags now also chiseled on cultural institutions. In Italy alone, Tod’s, the Italian luxury group, is underwriting the restoration of the Colosseum for 25 million euros, or $31.7 million; LVMH’s Fendi is spending €2 million for restoration of the Trevi Fountain; Versace is helping to restore Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II; and Salvatore Ferragamo pitched in at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
  • “Consumers buy luxury goods products as a way to ennoble themselves; luxury goods companies and brands can earn more ‘nobility’ by associating their names to art and masterpieces,”
  • All of this halo-associating behavior is occurring as luxury has become more enticing as a sector. In the depths of the recession, the luxury market grew by 5 percent worldwide
  • Today, the company vies for brands and creative talent not just with peers like Kering and Richemont, but also with private equity firms like Yucaipa (which has stakes in Barneys and Zac Posen) and players from the Middle East and Asia. The Qatar Investment Authority owns Harrods as well as minority stakes in Tiffany and Porsche. And the Hong Kong-based Fung Group, through its private equity vehicle First Heritage Brands, owns Sonia Rykiel, Robert Clergerie and Delvaux.
  • the question for a business being courted by several buyers is not so much “Can you afford us?” as “Who do we like best?” In that context, “linking to culture is a very powerful tool,” said Ms. D’Arpizio at Bain. “You are dealing largely with entrepreneurs who want their brand to survive them and last into the future, and culture is all about preserving that for the future.”
  • “Steve Jobs once asked me for some advice about retail, but I said, ‘I am not sure at all we are in the same business.’ I don’t know if we will still use Apple products in 25 years, but I am sure we will still be drinking Dom Pérignon.”Technology is predicated on change; luxury, however, is predicated on heritage and connection to tradition.
  • “France has a complicated relationship to success,” said Mr. Burke, who has worked with Mr. Arnault since that time. “Just think about the fact the expression ‘to make money’ does not exist in France. You ‘gagner l’argent’; you win money — the implication being either you are taking it away from someone by beating them, or you didn’t deserve it. And in France, Bernard Arnault epitomizes making money.”
  • Mr. Arnault sees his role as ensuring the future of brands, but not necessarily the designers behind them — a crucial distinction. As a result, whenever he makes a controversial play for a company, the predator image becomes part of the fight.
  • The increased prominence of Antoine and Delphine Arnault has also helped promote an image of LVMH — despite being a huge public company with €29.1 billion in revenue — as a family affair.
  • “It will show everyone who he really is,” Mr. Claverie said, suggesting that the FLV would reveal Mr. Arnault as someone who makes creativity happen, as opposed to a man who merely exploits and commoditizes it.
  • “I told Mr. Arnault to be prepared for the fact that the French reaction, at least, will not be all positive,” Mr. Burke of Vuitton said. “I think we may get something along the lines of, ‘Who does he think he is to do this? It is not for business people to make these kinds of cultural statements!’ and so on.”
  • “At some point, though, France will adapt to it,” he continued. “Then they will accept it. And then they will love it.”
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Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans From Polar Melt - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-has-begun-scientists-say.html climate change Antarctica ice glacier melt
shared by Javier E on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable,
  • a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.
  • The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.
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  • Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades.
  • Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.
  • The new finding appears to be the fulfillment of a prediction made in 1978 by an eminent glaciologist, John H. Mercer of the Ohio State University. He outlined the vulnerable nature of the West Antarctic ice sheet and warned that the rapid human-driven release of greenhouse gases posed “a threat of disaster.” He was assailed at the time, but in recent years, scientists have been watching with growing concern as events have unfolded in much the way Dr. Mercer predicted
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What's in a Name? Everything. - Benjamin M. Friedman - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...372271 inequality mobility historical social science genetics status international
shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • As Tocqueville observed after visiting the new republic, the widespread perception that anyone can get ahead creates a presumption that everyone has an obligation to at least try.
  • two centuries later, both the perception and the sense of obligation that follows are still firmly in place. According to the World Values Survey, while 60 percent of Europeans say they think “the poor are trapped in poverty,” only 29 percent of Americans think so. Instead, 60 percent of Americans think “the poor are lazy,” compared with just 26 percent of Europeans.
  • Vast inequality may be acceptable to most citizens if anyone, or at least anyone’s grandchild, has a fair shot at the top. But if wealth and poverty simply perpetuate themselves within families, ever wider inequality becomes ever harder to justify. In America, the debate about inequality is, inevitably, also a debate about mobility.
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  • The implications are profound. If mobility is constant, then the ability of social institutions to affect it must be negligible. Clark points to such changes as the movement from feudalism to democracy and then the expansion of the franchise, as well as free public education and redistributive taxation
  • But if modern America and modern Sweden have the same rate of mobility, and that rate is the same as what prevailed in medieval England and in 19th-century China, then none of those changes mattered.
  • if the journey from unusually high or low status to the middle can, as Clark claims, “take ten or fifteen generations (300–450 years),” the mobility-based defense of inequality becomes strained, here and everywhere else.
  • Why does Clark find mobility rates to be so much slower than other economists do? To begin with, he’s measuring something different.
  • Clark is after something broader, encompassing not just people’s income and wealth but also their education, their occupation, their likelihood of holding elected office or other distinguished positions, or of belonging to elite groups. He refers to the entire constellation of such attributes as “status,” or “fundamental social competence,” or “general social competence or ability”
  • ultimately, “an inescapable inherited substrate, looking suspiciously like social class.” Clark argues that this more comprehensive concept of mobility is what most of us really care about, and he’s probably right.
  • muddying up a statistical relationship with lots of purely random noise inevitably lowers the estimate of whatever is the object of interest, and so looking only at income (or education, or any other single feature) means finding less parent-to-child persistence. And that in turn means concluding, as many economists have done, that there is more mobility
  • By examining instead the whole array of attributes that constitutes socioeconomic status, Clark averages out the purely chance variation in any one factor, like income, and therefore finds greater parent-to-child persistence—in other words, less mobility.
  • Clark measures the persistence of status by looking at what has happened over time to groups of people bearing names that, at some point in the past—generations or even centuries ago—indicated socioeconomic status either well above or well below that of the general population.
  • How he measures these groups’ socioeconomic status over time is quite specific as well: their educational attainment, their representation in elite professions like medicine and law, and, conversely, their representation in generally low-status occupations like farming and domestic service.
  • The results are remarkably consistent. In these and more than a dozen other examples, Clark again and again finds evidence of far less mobility—a much slower rate of convergence toward the society’s general population, from either above or below—than what researchers using conventional methods have concluded.
  • the advantage of looking at surnames is twofold. First, it enormously increases the spans of time Clark can study—up to 900 years in some of his English examples. Second, it allows him to examine countries, like India, where the kinds of directly linked parent-and-child data other researchers use aren’t available and may not be for decades, if ever.
  • the important question is whether mobility is as slow as he says—and whether it really is a “universal constant.” Those claims are well worth taking seriously, in part because his more comprehensive notion of socioeconomic status—a concept economists typically don’t try to grapple with—does seem like what really matters.
  • Clark’s is indeed a discouraging story—as, inevitably, is just about any account of human existence in which heredity is the dominant factor governing our individual destinies.
  • As the book moves on, however, it becomes ever clearer that Clark has our genes in mind.
  • what’s being rewarded in life—with income, wealth, good jobs, social prestige—is no more than the talent and energy that each individual brings to the contest.
  • every person’s chances of moving up or down so dominated by whatever subcellular makeup he or she simply happens to inherit.
  • An important corollary to the finding that social outcomes are the product of a lineage lottery is that we should not create social structures that magnify the rewards of a high social position … If social position is largely a product of the blind inheritance of talent, combined with a dose of pure chance, why would we want to multiply the rewards to the lottery winners?
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Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-too-powerful-ask-google.html politics conservative liberal technology research
shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • CONSERVATIVES and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.
  • The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game.
  • Now information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property. Most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Such “intellectual property” is the key building block of the new economy
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  • as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies
  • The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network
  • Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent
  • Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything
  • Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic.
  • almost all of the profits go to the platforms’ owners, who have all of the bargaining power
  • The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants
  • The law gives 20 years of patent protection to inventions that are “new and useful,” as decided by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the winners are big enough to game the system. They make small improvements warranting new patents, effectively making their intellectual property semipermanent.
  • They also lay claim to whole terrains of potential innovation including ideas barely on drawing boards and flood the system with so many applications that lone inventors have to wait years.
  • Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.
  • Economic and political power can’t be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are maintained and enforced, which enlarges their economic power further. One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent this.
  • We are now in a new gilded age similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. As then, those with great power and resources are making the “free market” function on their behalf. Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture and financial giants — dominates both our economy and our politics.
  • The real question is how government organizes the market, and who has the most influence over its decisions
  • Yet as long as we remain obsessed by the debate over the relative merits of the “free market” and “government,” we have little hope of seeing what’s occurring and taking the action that’s needed to make our economy work for the many, not the few.
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Problems at Volkswagen Start in the Boardroom - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-start-in-the-boardroom.html VW car governance industry germany
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • I spoke this week to a longtime former senior Volkswagen executive, who agreed that a scandal, especially one involving emissions, was all but inevitable at Volkswagen. He cited the company’s isolation, its clannish board and a deep-rooted hostility to environmental regulations among its engineers.
  • Wolfsburg, where Volkswagen is based in Lower Saxony and the city with the highest per capita income in Germany, is even more remote and isolated than Detroit was in its heyday. “The entire economy is automotive,” he said. “People have a completely uncritical view of cars and their impact on the environment because they all make a living from the industry.”
  • Moreover, “there’s no other company where the owners and the unions are working so closely together as Volkswagen,” he said. Volkswagen “guarantees jobs for over half the supervisory board. What management, the government and the unions all want is full employment, and the more jobs, the better. Volkswagen is seen as having a national mission to provide employment to the German people. That’s behind the push to be No. 1 in the world. They’ll look the other way about anything.”
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  • From an employment standpoint, the company has succeeded. Volkswagen said it employed nearly 600,000 people last year to produce about 10 million vehicles. By comparison, No. 2 Toyota employed 340,000 to produce just under nine million vehicles.
  • maximizing employment shouldn’t be a primary goal of a board, whose purpose is to monitor management for a company’s investors and ensure the long-term health and profitability of a company.
  • The Volkswagen board has been especially slow to move on environmental issues, investing less in electric and hybrid engine technology than industry leaders.
  • “There’s an attitude among the German public that it’s very unfair for the U.S. to target the auto industry over emissions,” Professor Roth said. “If you have electric cars and a coal-fired plant producing the electricity, you gain nothing.”
  • The former Volkswagen executive said Volkswagen’s engineer-driven culture takes the notion even further. He said the engineers felt that the politicians were guilty of rank hypocrisy, especially in the United States, also grumbling that electric cars make no sense as long as power plants are burning fossil fuels.
  • That Volkswagen is nonetheless obliged to obey applicable environmental laws, he said, is a notion likely to fall on deaf ears in Wolfsburg, especially compared to demands to be No. 1 in sales.
  • Considering the damage to Volkswagen from the still-unfolding scandal, its attitudes and approach to governance may have to change. Volkswagen faces a staggering number of investigations and lawsuits. Volkswagen said it set aside $7.3 billion, which doesn’t seem nearly enough; legal fees are likely to run into the billions, and the Environmental Protection Agency alone could fine the company up to $18 billion
  • Volkswagen shares were trading at about €160, or $180, last Friday before the Environmental Protection Agency announced its investigation. They have dropped about 30 percent in the days after the news broke, wiping out over $26 billion in shareholder value
  • Given the serious financial and reputational damage, the long-term survival of Volkswagen is a real question
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Krugman vs. Brooks: The Times' columnists' amazing brawl over Charles Murray's new book... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...arles_murray_s_new_books_.html decline white US americans culture economics politics
shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • 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?
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  • Two related facts seem to trouble both Brooks and Krugman. Marriage rates are down, and so is male workforce participation. Brooks sees this as a cultural crisis that’s leading to declining material welfare, while Krugman sees declining male wages as driving both trends.
  • what if this is a non-crisis driven by abundance? The obvious place to look for an explanation of the declining marriage rate is the vast increase in the economic opportunities available to women. Newly empowered and less dependent on male economic support, women have become somewhat choosie
  • As for labor force participation, Krugman must be right that poor labor market conditions explain the trend over the past few years. But the long-term decline has been going on since as far back as we have data. Male labor force participation rates were declining in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and in the ‘80s, and now in the aughts. Maybe the value of leisure is increasing?
  • it’s a natural outgrowth of progress. On the whole, the American population has grown less desperate over time and less interested in working—an entirely typical pattern, globally and historically.
  • The short-term jobs situation is a real crisis, but the longer-term decline of work is an opportunity. If men want to tempt women back into marriage, they’ll have to use more of their free time to pitch in with housework and child care, building a more egalitarian tomorrow. If employers want to tempt people back into working, they’ll have to offer higher pay or more pleasant jobs
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Allegation of U.S. Spying on Merkel Puts Obama at Crossroads - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-puts-obama-at-crossroads.html
shared by Maria Delzi on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The angry allegation by the German government that the National Security Agency monitored the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel may force President Obama into making a choice he has avoided for years between continuing the age-old game of spying on America’s friends and undercutting cooperation with important partners in tracking terrorists, managing the global economy and slowing Iran’s nuclear program.
  • The pressure to make such a choice builds each day, as some of the United States’ closest allies have demanded explanations from Washington after similar disclosures about the breadth and sophistication of American electronic spying.
  • The tension with Germany built last week after German officials were given evidence of the cellphone monitoring by Der Spiegel, the German weekly newsmagazine. The first protests to Washington came in an angry phone call to Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, from her German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen.
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  • During the call, according to German officials, Ms. Rice insisted that Mr. Obama did not know about the monitoring of Ms. Merkel’s phone, and said it was not currently happening, and would not in the future. But according to American officials familiar with the call, Ms. Rice would not acknowledge that the monitoring took place, even though she did not dispute the evidence the Germans had provided to her, which stretched back into the administration of President George W. Bush.
  • In the past, Germany has pushed for an agreement similar to the understanding that the United States has with Britain and three other English-speaking allies that prohibits spying on one another.
  • Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations. Whether to make those kinds of reciprocal agreements with allies is among the questions two different administration reviews of N.S.A. spying practices hope to address.
  • The advisers are looking at a range of issues, from the collection of “metadata” about the calls and Web searches conducted by Americans to the surveillance of allies and their leaders.
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We're Making Life Too Hard for Millennials - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-too-hard-for-millennials.html trends millennials life
shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • . The most educated generation in history is on track to becoming less prosperous, at least financially, than its predecessors.
  • They are faced with a slow economy, high unemployment, stagnant wages and student loans that constrict their ability both to maintain a reasonable lifestyle and to save for the future.Longer term, rising federal debt payments and increased spending on Social Security and Medicare will inflict a tremendous financial burden on them, threatening their own prospect of receiving promised retirement benefits
  • To a considerable extent, that’s the fault of my generation, the baby boomers. We were the children of the Greatest Generation, but we may also be the most irresponsible generation.
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  • A typical millennial averaged earnings of $33,883 (in 2013 dollars) between 2009 and 2013. That was down 9.3 percent (after adjustment for inflation) in just a decade and is the lowest since 1980. Older
  • So what’s going on? A major reason is the recession. Those who graduate in weaker economic times typically earn less than those who enter the work force during more robust periods. Starting behind often means never catching up
  • The wealth of millennials has been hit even harder than their incomes. Their median net worth was just $10,400 as of 2013, down 43 percent from the $18,200 that Gen Xers had in 1995 when they were under 35. With incomes squeezed, millennials are not only not saving much; they are dipping into whatever savings they do have.
  • Millennials also participate less frequently in 401(k) plans and, scarred by the recession, invest less and keep more than half their money in cash — not a great long-term strategy.
  • Members of this year’s graduating class left their campuses owing an average of $35,051, about twice the levels borne by their counterparts two decades earlier (after adjusting for inflation).
  • millennials are delaying purchasing cars and new homes, low mortgage rates notwithstanding. By June of this year, homeownership among Americans under 35 fell to 34.8 percent, down from a high of 43.6 percent in 2004.
  • millennials will also be the victims of the irresponsible fiscal policies pursued in large part by members of my generation. The massive budget deficits of recent years and projected needs to meet future obligations to retirees will result in a steady increase in federal debt, from less than 80 percent of gross domestic product today to an estimated 181 percent of G.D.P. by 2090.
  • we can start to put in place policies that will ease their burden. First and foremost would be to get the nation’s economy onto a stronger growth trajectory.
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Gloomy Republican Campaigns Leave Behind Reagan Cheer - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...leave-behind-reagan-cheer.html GOP attitude politics culture
shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The mood of the country is certainly grim. About two-thirds of Americans believe the country is adrift, according to recent public opinion surveys from a variety of news organizations and independent firms. That sentiment has remained stubbornly high for most of the Obama presidency, with strong majorities of Americans consistently saying the country is on the wrong track for the last five years
  • After years of slow economic growth, stagnant incomes, political dysfunction and worsening threats from abroad, many Republican pollsters and analysts are asking themselves whether there has been a fundamental change in how Americans, historically an optimistic people, now see themselves. And they are wondering whether, as a consequence, 2016 will be a year when voters turn to someone whose message is mainly focused on what is wrong with the country.
  • The dark imagery emanating from Mr. Trump and others collides with the long-held Republican conviction that a message of optimism and uplift is essential to winning elections and leading the country. That belief also aligns with their view of America as a special and divinely inspired nation, always capable of renewal.
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  • Despite the country’s challenges, there are signs of improvement: Job growth is up, unemployment is down, and the economy is in vastly better shape than it was eight years ago. Some Republicans worry that a strategy of telling voters, in effect, that things are much worse than they thought is a losing one. They point to how candidates like George W. Bush, who ran in 2000 as the amiable “compassionate conservative,” were almost always upbeat.
  • Quoting something he said George W. Bush had once told him, Mr. Castellanos added, “Nobody ever bought a product that made them feel worse.”
  • In the three winning states — Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina — voters said they thought the Republican was the more optimistic candidate. Only in the state Republicans lost, New Hampshire, did voters say they felt the Republican, Scott Brown, was the more pessimistic candidate. Still, some Republicans question the power of optimism, noting that voters picked the candidate of hope and change in 2008 and that many are unhappy with the results.
  • Indeed, some Republicans are now debating how great the country is (or isn’t), whether it needs to be made great again and who can best do that. And like many debates among Republicans, this one returns to the legacy of Reagan.
  • Looking at the presidents that most Americans would consider great leaders, Mr. Castellanos, the Republican brand strategist, said they all shared one theme: an optimistic vision for where the country was headed. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal; John F. Kennedy, the New Frontier; Reagan, the “rendezvous with destiny”; Bill Clinton, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”
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Turkey's Elections Will Test Power of the President - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-tayyip-erdogan-kurds-hdp.html turkey history culture politics
shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • ISTANBUL — Fighter jets raced across the Istanbul sky, painting the Turkish flag with ribbons of colored smoke, as a military band with nearly 600 musicians marched below. Hundreds of thousands of people looked on, in an event that quickly took on the fervor of a religiously infused political rally.
  • The event being celebrated so lavishly last Saturday occurred 562 years ago, when the Ottomans conquered what was then called Constantinople
  • Never mind that when Turkish voters choose a new Parliament on Sunday, Mr. Erdogan will not be on the ballot. The election will still largely be a referendum on him, and on his plans to transform Turkey’s Constitution and concentrate more power in an executive presidency
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  • Mr. Erdogan’s power has seemed to grow in the presidency, as he consolidated his grip on the judiciary, tightened restrictions on the news media and moved into an immense new presidential palace.
  • Mr. Erdogan was once lauded as a reformer for pushing for minority rights, peace with Turkey’s restive Kurds, an overhaul of the economy and membership in the European Union.
  • Mr. Erdogan began his speech at the rally by reciting verses from the Quran, bringing tears to the eyes of many supporters. He challenged secular Turks who are uncomfortable with his government by saying, “We will not give way to those who speak out against our call to prayer,” and the audience responded with shouts of “Allahu akbar” — God is great.
  • The polls indicate that the party’s support has slipped a bit from the last election in 2011, when it received almost half the vote. With economic growth slowing and many liberals who once backed Mr. Erdogan now critical of his authoritarian bent, support for his party is running in the range of 43 to 45 percent, on average.
  • The election campaign has been marred by violence, with bombings at the offices of the Kurdish party, and by plenty of vitriol, some of it directed at Mr. Erdogan’s new palace.
  • qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15
     
    Turkey has elections coming up, and it could bring major change. 
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Turkish president's feud with press is rooted in a deeper, personal unease | World news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ed-in-a-deeper-personal-unease turkey president guardian history politics
shared by Emilio Ergueta on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Recep Tayyip Erdogan fears he may have misread electorate’s mood as polls show strong support for opposition parties
  • President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s long-running feud with Turkey’s feisty opposition media has descended into open warfare ahead of Sunday’s general election, amid claims that his ruling neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) is plotting to fix the results and shrill threats to lock up journalists and editors en masse.
  • But Erdogan’s livid fury with the press may be rooted in a deeper, personal unease
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Accustomed to winning easily, Erdogan has been thrown off-balance by opponents empowered by concerns over a slowing economy, unemployment, high-level corruption, the unresolved Kurdish question, and officialdom’s zero tolerance for dissent, as seen in the brutal suppression of the 2013 Gezi park street protests.
  • “If Erdogan cannot rig the elections, it seems the AKP will not be able to form a one-party government. This would mean the end of Erdogan’s sultanistic aspirations,” said Ihsan Yilmaz in a column headlined “Erdogan’s Jihad”.
  • “In a nutshell, it has turned out to be a simple choice between giving approval or not for all Erdogan now stands for: introducing to Turkey an arbitrary rule, disrespect for human dignity, rejection of supremacy of the rule of law, eradication of rights and freedoms, unaccountability and impunity, and construction of a new system in which there will be no separation of powers.”
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Appomattox and the Ongoing Civil War - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...389847 civil war history historiography GOP government reconstruction
shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The great issues of the war were not resolved on that April morning at Appomattox.
  • not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost.
  • if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Americans like being “first” with ideas. But as Abraham Lincoln reminded us, more than four-score years later, the nation founded in a revolution against monarchy had to fight a second revolution against itself in order to determine whether the “proposition” of “equality” had a future in any republic
  • In the wake of this war, Americans faced a profound and all but impossible challenge of achieving two deeply contradictory goals—healing and justice. Healing took generations in many families, if it ever came at all. Justice was fiercely contested.
  • the defeated in this civil war eventually came to control large elements of the event’s meaning, legacies, and policy implications, a reality wracked with irony and driven by the nation’s persistence racism.
  • A shooting war between huge formal armies did indeed end in the spring of 1865 after four years of physical, environmental, social, and human devastation.
  • The “Union,” and all that it meant to northerners as a kind of shield for liberal democracy against oligarchy and aristocracy, survived. It was transformed through blood and reimagined for later generations. The first American republic, created out of revolution in the late 18th century, was in effect destroyed. A new, second republic took its place, given a violent birth in the emancipation of four million slaves and the re-crafting of the U. S. Constitution in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Those Amendments—ending legal slavery forever, sanctifying birthright citizenship and establishing “equal protection of the law,” and creating black male suffrage—in effect re-made the United States Constitution. This comprised a second American revolution.  
  • as many as 750,000 American soldiers and sailors may have died in the conflict, the majority from disease. Approximately 1.2 million were wounded
  • There is no reasonable count of civilian deaths, nor of the numbers of freed slaves who perished in the struggle for their own emancipation. Research now suggests that a quarter of all freedmen who made it to contraband camps operated by the Union forces died in the process
  • The Reconstruction era, stretching from 1865 to 1877, was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdicts reached at Appomattox. Differing visions of America’s future were at stake.
  • Perhaps above all, America is a society riven by conflict over federalism, the never-ending debate over the proper relation of federal to state powe
  • In a new book, historian Gregory Downs persuasively argues that a long and persistent “occupation” occurred for at least three years, and perhaps as long as six years, after the end of actual hostilities in spring, 1865
  • As the federal troops receded from view over time, large swaths of the former Confederate states descended into chaos, anarchy and violence, requiring a sustained use of Constitutional “war powers” to maintain any order. Indeed, as Downs shows, a genuine, if inadequate “occupation” was engineered by the U. S. government, almost without precedent, in order to try to bring control to a region that fell into “statelessness,” as it also revolted against defeat and all that it meant. Downs wants his work to speak to the present, and indeed it should. He urges libertarians of today to take notice because this history, as he says, demonstrates that “freedom is only possible within the state.”
  • violence left Reconstruction’s most vexing, twisted legacy. In 1866, bloody massacres of blacks and the destruction of freedmen’s communities wracked the cities of Memphis and New Orleans. In the political violence of Reconstruction, especially in the periods 1868-71 and again in 1875-77, a counter-revolution unfolded
  • Their violence reveals the implications of an unending struggle over race, power, land, and hugely different visions of the ideas of liberty and federalism
  • For a very long time, white Southerners experienced a lethal case of alienation and an explosive sense of grievance, however mythical the origins of those grievances or horrible their outcomes. Since most of the rural South was unpoliced by Union troops, despite the accusations of colonial “occupation” and “bayonet rule,” white Southerners unleashed a bloody fury against blacks and white Republicans born of lost battles, lost mastery, alleged political repression, and the need for “scapegoats” in their scorn for a racial order turned upside down.
  • too much of the political process of Reconstruction became war by other means. By whippings, rapes, the burning of houses, schools and churches, the violent disruption or intimidation of local Republican party meetings, and hundreds of murders and lynchings over a period of less than a decade the Klan and its minions (called variously “Red Shirts” or “white leaguers” and many other names) sought to win back as much of a status quo antebellum as they could achieve. Their victims were teachers, black students, white and black politicians, and uncounted numbers of freedmen and their families who participated in politics or gained some economic autonomy. The record of Reconstruction violence has been clinically detailed, but it is a piece of history that most Americans still prefer to avoid
  • This litany of horror and blood can become almost endless, and it represents the one time in American history when sustained uses of terror successfully worked to transform political regimes. In a process Southerners called “Southern Redemption,” eight of the 11 ex-Confederate states came back under white supremacist, Democratic party control by 1875
  • Much has changed in the fifty years since the crises of 1963—in law, in schooling, in scholarship, in race relations. But whatever the engines of history actually are, what seems apparent is that the legacies of the American Civil War have tended to subside and reemerge in a never-ending succession of revolutions and counter-revolution
  • the presidency of Barack Obama might be seen as a robust new chapter in this story. A significant segment of American society hates the President and cannot seem to abide a black family living in the White House.
  • equality is process of historical change. It forever tacks against the trade winds of individualism, self-interest, material accumulation, and widely varying notions of the idea of “liberty” from which it draws momentum.
  • Yes, the Civil War was rooted in states’ rights, but like any other constitutional doctrine, it significance rests with the issue in whose service it is employed. States’ rights for or to do what? For whom or against whom
  • In 1860 and 1861, some Southerners exercised “state sovereignty” as an act of revolution in the interest, as they said over and over themselves, of preserving a racial order founded on slavery
  • far-right federalists, who dominate the movement called the Tea Party, and who have found a vigorous leadership position at the heart of the Republican Party and on the federal judiciary, have much in common with the secessionists of 1861. Both groups are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power due to congressional districting practices and effective use of conspiracy theories about centralization and the “leviathan” state
  • One acted in revolution to create and save a slaveholders’ republic; the other seems determined to render the modern federal government all but obsolete for any purpose beyond national defense and the protection of private citizens from having to participate in a social contract with their fellow citizens in tax-supported programs such as Social Security, Medicare, public education, environmental protection, or disaster relief
  • Both groups claim their mantle of righteousness in the name of “liberty,” privatization, hyper-individualism and racial supremacy (one openly, the other covertly
  • Both vehemently claim the authority of the “Founders” as though the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution have no history. Modern-day states’ rightists and sometimes nullifiers embrace versions of federalism that might once have been thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War, or in the imperatives of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, or in the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, or in the battle over the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • The radical wing of the conservative movement in America, still ascendant in Congress and dominant in most of the South, seems determined to repeal much of the twentieth-century social legislation, and even tear up its constitutional and social roots in the transformations of the 1860s.
  • History may seem to have its lulls when it slows down and impinges less on our lives; then we are hit with massive crises, often to our utter surprise, and history speeds up beyond human comprehension.
  • It is impossible to grasp a turning point in history until it has happened, and understanding it may take a generation or more
  • “Misunderstanding of the present,” wrote Bloch, “is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.”
  • Making “men equal on earth in the sight of other men,” to borrow again from Baldwin, is a long-term proposition, and for that matter, a definition of the meaning of America.
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Eli Pariser on the future of the Internet - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html personalization filtering bubble politics values net-neutrality
shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.
  • What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.
  • The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • So there's this enormous flood of bits, and we need help trying to sort through it. We turn to these personalization agents to sift through it for us automatically and try to pick out the useful bits. And that's fine as far as it goes. But the technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in. At the end, it's a set of code, it's not a person, and it locks us into a specific kind of pixelated versions of ourselves. It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience. I don't think with this information explosion that you can go back to an unfiltered and unpersonalized world. But I think you can bake into the code a sense of civic importance. You can have a sense that there are some things that we all need to be paying attention to, that we all need to be worried about, where you do want to see the top link on BP for everyone, not just investment information if you're interested in investments.
  • change happens on a bunch of levels, and the first is on an individual level. You can make sure that you're constantly seeking out new and interesting and provocative sources of information. Think of this as your information diet. The narcissistic stuff that makes you feel like you have all the right ideas and all the right opinions -- our brains are calibrated to love that stuff because in nature, in normal life, it's very rare. Now we have this thing that's feeding us lots of calories of that stuff. It takes some discipline to forgo the information junk food and seek out stuff that's a little more challenging.
  • the second piece is we've had institutions that have been mediating what we get to know for a long time. For most of the last century they were newspapers that produced about 85 percent of the news in that model. They were always commercial entities. But because they were making so much money, they were able to afford a sense of civics, a sense that the New York Times was going to put Afghanistan on the front page, even if it doesn't get the most clicks. So newspapers found this kind of happy medium that didn't always work perfectly, but it worked better than the alternative. I think now the baton is passing to Google, to Facebook, to the new filters to develop the same kind of sense of ethics about what they do. If you talk to the engineers, they're very resistant because they feel like this is just code, it doesn't have values, it's not a human thing. But of course they're writing code, and every human-made system has a sense of values.
  • the Internet was built on the principle that it would carry all different types of data. And it didn't really care what kind of data it was carrying. It was going to make sure that it got from Point A to Point B. That's the Internet: There's kind of a social contract between all the machines on the Internet that says, "I'll carry your data if you carry my data, and we'll leave it to the people on the edges of the network -- to your home PC or the PC that you're sending something to -- to figure out what the data means." That's the net neutrality principle.
  • big companies like Verizon and Comcast are looking at how the Internet is eroding their profit margins. They're saying to themselves, what can we do to get a piece of this growing pie? They want a tiered Internet where you can pay them to go to the front of the line with your data. That will really erode that amazing thing we all know the Internet facilitates: that anyone with an idea can reach the world. You talk to venture capitalists and they're scared. They say a new start-up is just never going to be able to buy the speed that a Google or a Microsoft will be able to. Incumbent industries will be able to get their data to you quickly and new start-ups won't have a chance. And as a result, you'll have a drying up of the entrepreneurialism that's happened on the Internet. And you'll have a drying up of the Wikipedias, the nonprofit projects. Wikipedia works because it's just as fast as Google. When Wikipedia starts to slow way down relative to Google, you're more likely to just go to Google
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Germany's role in the world: Will Germany now take centre stage? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/17305755 germany foreign policy role history europe economy
shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The German question never dies. Instead, like a flu virus, it mutates.
  • It is among Germany’s long-standing west and south European partners that the German question feels debilitating, and where a dangerous flare-up still seems a possibility. Germany’s answer to the question matters not only to them. It will shape Europe, and therefore the world.
  • they want to “draw a line under the past”. That does not mean ignoring its lessons or neglecting to teach them to the next generation.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • But Germans are no longer so ready to be put on the moral defensive or to view the Nazi era as the defining episode of their past. Even non-Germans seem willing to move on. Recent books like “Germania” and “The German Genius” suggest that English-language publishing may be entering a post-swastika phase. Germany still atones but now also preaches, usually on the evils of debt, the importance of nurturing industry and the superiority of long-term thinking in enterprise. Others are disposed to listen. “Everyone orients himself towards Germany,”
  • A third of Germans think the country is overrun by foreigners, according to a newly published poll; a majority favour “sharply restricting” Muslim religious practice. Over a tenth would even welcome a Führer who would govern with “a strong hand”—a sign that the embers of extremism still glow.
  • the Bavarian sister party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), declared this month that Germany needs no further immigration from Turkey or the Arab world. Germany is “not an immigration country”, he insisted, contradicting a hard-won consensus among conservatives.
  • the Berlin republic is a different sort of character from its westward-leaning, Bonn-based predecessor. Scholars had struck several awkward coinages to describe war-chastened Germany: it was a “tamed power” engaged in “attritional multilateralism”. These no longer seem apt for today’s more confident and self-willed Germany. But its identity is still unformed
  • Despite their economic strength, Germans fear the worst. They believe their country “has passed its zenith”, says Mrs Kocher, the pollster. This pessimism shapes Germany’s dealings with the rest of the world. Unlike most countries, Germany is not driven by any great ambition, but rather by the fear that “things could fall apart if they don’t hold on to stability,”
  • These unEuropean outbursts startled not just Greeks, who brandished swastikas in response, but Europeans generally. They had grown up believing that the Germans saw their own interests as inseparable from those of their fellow Europeans. Now they glimpsed a different, ugly German, smug about his economy and untroubled by his past.
  • The crisis has created a new pecking order, at least temporarily. Germany, with its high-competitiveness, low-debt economy, is on top. The rest are having to adjust, including France, traditionally a joint leader of the European project. This is unsettling. “You get an enormous sense of German self-righteousness, which is very difficult to take, especially when there are solid foundations for it,” says François Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. France, which has lagged behind Germany in making structural reforms, feels its influence waning. “France has to do its homework to be able to restore some level of influence in Europe,
  • Germany’s brightest business prospects do not involve its slow-growing neighbours but the charismatic economies of Asia and Latin America. A German acceptance of Turkish membership of the EU looks less likely than ever.
  • “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And the Acropolis while you’re at it,” demanded Bild, a popular tabloid
  • Germany’s overall direction is obscure. It is torn, intrigued by its new possibilities but painfully aware that alone it does not count for much in the world. Its population is already shrinking. Europe will lose economic and demographic bulk relative to China, India and Brazil. The EU was virtually ignored at last year’s Copenhagen summit on climate change, even though it had taken the lead in setting targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. This was “an enormous shock”, says Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who now leads the liberals in the European Parliament. “It shows we need one voice.” Fear of war launched the European project; he hopes that fear of irrelevance will drive it forward.
  • in military terms, Germany remains a midget compared not just with America but with Britain and France, which together account for 70% of the EU’s military research and development and 60% of its deployable forces.
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The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved With Euros - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16Europe-t.html economic crisis europe economics
shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • the odds are that the current tough-it-out strategy won’t work even in the narrow sense of avoiding default and devaluation — and the fact that it won’t work will become obvious sooner rather than later. At that point, Europe’s stronger nations will have to make a choice. It has been 60 years since the Schuman declaration started Europe on the road to greater unity. Until now the journey along that road, however slow, has always been in the right direction. But that will no longer be true if the euro project fails. A failed euro wouldn’t send Europe back to the days of minefields and barbed wire — but it would represent a possibly irreversible blow to hopes of true European federation. So will Europe’s strong nations let that happen? Or will they accept the responsibility, and possibly the cost, of being their neighbors’ keepers?
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Germany's Cuts vs. America's Stimulus - Economic Scene - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...23leonhardt.html economics stimulus crisis policies budget financial
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Well, it turns out the German boom didn’t last long. With its modest stimulus winding down, Germany’s growth slowed sharply late last year, and its economic output still has not recovered to its prerecession peak. Output in the United States — where the stimulus program has been bigger and longer lasting — has recovered. This country would now need to suffer through a double-dip recession for its gross domestic product to be in the same condition as Germany’s.
  • Hoover’s austere instincts worsened the Depression. Roosevelt’s postelection reversal helped, but he also prolonged the Depression by raising taxes and cutting spending in 1937. Only the giant stimulus program known as World War II finally ended the Depression. When the private sector is hesitant to spend, the government has to — or no one will. Our recent crisis serves up the same lesson. Germany isn’t even the best example. Its response to the crisis has had some successful features, like an hours-reduction program to minimize layoffs, and Germany’s turn to austerity has not been radical. Britain’s has been radical, with a tax increase having already taken effect and deep spending cuts coming. Partly as a result, Britain’s economy is now in worse shape than Germany’s.
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The Earth Is Full - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...08friedman.html environment crisis cultural sustainability
shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.
  • we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem
  • the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.
  • We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less.
  • “We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”
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