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Gregory Clark -- As Economic Disparity Grows, Higher Taxes May Be Only Solution
..the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.
The Wisdom of Fun: Harnessing games & play for useful work - Eventbrite
Sponsored by Vague Innovation.
What Would a Fair-Labor iPod Cost? - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
The results are surprising. An American made iPod Classic costs just 23% more than a Chinese made iPod Classic: $58 more, to be precise. The same relationship holds across the iPod family (price differentials in the 20-30% range) The iPod is a durable good, so that's a difference — but smaller than one might expect.
The Way We Live Now - The New Joblessness - NYTimes.com
The U.S. economy is not only shedding jobs at a record rate; it is shedding more jobs than it is supposed to. It’s bad enough that the unemployment rate has doubled in only a year and a half and one out of six construction workers is out of work. What truly troubles President Obama’s economic advisers is that, even adjusting for the recession, the contraction in employment seems way too high.
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In the 1960s, Arthur Okun, a prominent economist, claimed to have discovered a mathematical relationship between the decline in output (that is, goods and services produced) and the rise in unemployment. It held up pretty well until recently. But this time around, although the decline in output would have predicted a rise in unemployment to 8 percent, the actual jobless rate has soared to 9.5 percent. So this recession is killing off jobs even faster than the things — like automobiles, houses, computers and newspapers — that jobholders produce.
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Explanations for the collapse of the great American job machine begin with the marked absence of what is called labor hoarding. Usually during recessions, firms keep most of their employees on the payroll even as business slows, in effect stockpiling them for better days. In the current downturn, hoarding seems to have gone into reverse. Not only are firms laying off redundant workers, but they seem to be cutting into the bone.
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Knowledge Rules » Blog Archive » Paideia 2.0
the core activities of knowledge production and transmission – research and teaching – are subjected to an inverse trend, as the pervasive use of ICTs allows for the rapid Taylorization of these activities.
Joe Bageant: America's White Underclass
Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need.
Peter Dreier: Labor Pains at UCLA
This year, with the worst state budget crisis in memory, anti-labor forces think they can prevail. UC labor studies, a minuscule part of the state budget, is the only UC program that the Governor specifically targeted for elimination. The combined budgets for these programs is only $5.4 million a year.
Economic Perspectives from Kansas City: A Message to President Obama: Stop Priming the Pump, Hire the Unemployed
So, when the government is called to action, the economic profession has replaced Keynes’s “fiscal policy via public works” with a “leaky bucket pump-priming mechanism.”
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The truth is that no one really knows how fast GDP needs to grow and how large government spending needs to be in order to bring the unemployment rate down. To a large degree, this is because we don’t know how leaky the bucket is. Will indebted households save or spend their tax cuts? Will the unemployed spend much of their unemployment insurance on mortgage payments? How long would layoffs and other cost-cutting measures last before private firms fix their own balance sheets and start hiring? How large a government injection into the private sector is necessary to improve profit expectations and employment conditions?
All of this is rather uncertain, which is why Keynes, never had any “leaky bucket” or “pump priming” idea in mind. For him “the real problem fundamental yet essentially simple…[is] to provide employment for everyone” (Keynes 1980, 267) and the most bang for the buck from fiscal policy would be achieved via direct job creation. This he called “on the spot” employment via public works. -
useful to think of Keynesian fiscal policy, not as aggregate demand management, but as labor demand management. Yes, Keynes believed that priming the pump would prevent severe depressions, but it couldn’t be counted on to bring the economy to full employment. This is in part because it tends to push prices and erode income distribution once the economy begins to recover. To dodge these problems, in all circumstances, government spending had to be targeted to the unemployed themselves. He urged that when the government couldn’t take the worker to the contract, it should bring the contract to the worker.
Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker
Thirty-five years later, a very different biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of “primary America.” Matthew B. Crawford is even more fanatical about motorcycle maintenance than Pirsig’s narrator. He’s never happier than when he’s rebuilding a master cylinder or dislodging a stuck oil seal, and his descriptions of the open road can seem slightly anticlimactic. For him, the journey is just the journey; the garage is the destination. Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where Pirsig had been a grad student), a fellowship at the University of Virginia, and, most important, a scrappy motorcycle-repair shop in Richmond. His book is called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” (Penguin; $25.95), and it’s intended as a challenge, a declaration of gearhead pride in an ever more gearless world.
Joe Bageant: My union brothers are lazy, complacent
The point I'm making here, Mr. Bageant, is that some of the reason the middle class worker is going downhill is due to bad memory and laziness. Yes, laziness. They just want to go home after work and sit in front of the TV. The idea of supporting their local union, ONE NIGHT A MONTH, is unthinkable.
We are witnessing the passing of working-class masculinity - The Globe and Mail
We're also witnessing the passing of something even more profound - a culture of working-class masculinity that has become an anachronism in the modern world.
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