Happy July Fourth. Pour yourself a tall glass of iced coffee, and settle in for our longer form weekend reads:
• American Failure: The 401(k) is hailed as the future, but it’s horribly flawed. A select few firms are trying to change that. (Chief Investment Officer)
• This Is How Uber Takes Over a City (Bloomberg)
• The Surprisingly Imperfect Science of DNA Testing (Frontline)
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce Works Globally to Fight Antismoking Measures (NYT) see also “The poor, the young, the black and the stupid”: Inside Big Tobacco’s plans to kill a billion people (Pando Daily)
• 5 Days That Left a Confederate Flag Wavering, and Likely to Fall (NY Times)
• Silicon Valley High: Going to the same high school as Steve Jobs and liking it are two different things. (Morning News) see also Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem? (NY Mag)
• Who, What, Where, When, Weird: How oddball items came to dominate the news business, and became normal in the process. (Pacific Standard)
• London: the city that ate itself: The things that make it special – the markets, pubs, high streets and communities – are becoming unrecognisable (The Guardian) see also Why I’m leaving London (BoingBoing)
• The Father-Son Feud that Built an Empire of Food: How a great culinary institution was born. (Narratively)
• Humanity’s Most Problematic Attempts to Get All the Water (Nautilus) see also Rich Californians balk at limits: ‘We’re not all equal when it comes to water’ (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Omega Advisor’s Leon Cooperman.
What I’d Be Trumpeting If I Were Tspiras
Source: Macro Man
The New New US Job Market
As the Baby Boomers age and retire, there is a change in employment specifically the workforce participation rate. No big surprise there but as the impact of the bulge in the aging population becomes reality, our world is changing. People that can afford to retire are retiring in droves.
http://www.businessinsider.com/theres-a-new-normal-in-americas-job-market-and-it-isnt-pretty-2015-7
“The percentage of Americans in the workforce — defined as those who either have a job or are actively seeking one — dropped to 62.6 percent, a 38-year low, from 62.9 percent. (The figure was 66 percent when the recession began in 2007.) Fewer job holders typically means weaker growth for the economy. The growth of the labor force slowed to just 0.3 percent in 2014, compared with 1.1 percent in 2007.”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/03/politics/george-takei-clarence-thomas-star-trek/index.html
Actually the characterization of Clarence Thomas as a “Clown in a Black face” is about as precise as anything I have ever heard. He does have the skin color, but he simply doesn’t have the black experience if he can postulate that “slaves did not lose their dignity”. Nor would a white person say such an absurd thing (so he is not a white person in a black face). The rare glimpses of Thomas we get when he say something suggests that although he can put words together to create sentences, he is incapable of putting thoughts together to create sentences – he is a clown – entertaining and perpetuating the stereotypes of the right wing plutocrats.
May I echo DD’s sentiments.
& an excellent piece by Steve Waldman on GR: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html
Barry, thank you for providing this reliable resource of quality reading material on weekend mornings. Of all the blogs I read you are the one who shows the most care for his readers.
Good source for timely Greece updates at the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/live/2015/jul/04/greek-debt-crisis-countdown-to-polling-day-live
What to Read to Gain Perspective on Economics
* Robert Heilbroner’s _The Worldly Philosophers_ …
* Partha Dasgupta, _Economics: A Very Short Introduction_ ;
* Robert Allen, _Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction_ ; and
* Milton and Rose Director Friedman, _Free to Choose_ .
…
* Jonathan Schlefer, _The Assumptions Economists Make_
…
*Tom Slee, _Nobody Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart .
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” –John Maynard Keynes
Robert Reich – On Patriotism
http://robertreich.org/post/123057453760
That Steve Yuhas clownstick mentioned in the Bloomberg article about water wasters is a RW talk radio host in southern California. Judging from his Wikipedia entry, he is short on good qualities.
I lived in Marin County, CA during a severe 2-year drought in the mid-1970s. The water district installed flow-restrictors on the meters of people who weren’t doing their share to conserve. Given the severity of the crisis, shaming is insufficient treatment for people with green lawns.