Finish up your 3 day weekend with our not coincidentally employment and labor related reads:
• Is Overwork Killing You? (Harvard Business Review)
• How Trains are Easing America’s Trucking Crisis (National Journal)
• Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics? (IEEE Spectrum)
• The Oil-Sands Glut Is About to Get a Lot Bigger (Bloomberg)
• College Calculus: What’s the real value of higher education? (New Yorker)
• Financial Leaders Agree to Act to Bolster Growth (NYT) see also Global economy survives the China and commodity shocks – so far (FT)
• Productivity and Pay (Krugman)
• Climate Change Means One World’s Death and Another’s Birth (Wired)
• Transmedics’ Heart-in-a-Box Could Help with Organ Transplant List (MIT Technology Review)
• Stop Playing Monopoly With Your Kids And Play These Games Instead (fivethirtyeight)
What are you reading?
Should Companies Publish Difference Between CEO Pay and Employees?
Source: Morning Consult
With no irony Labor Day is a holiday from work after all.
A World Without Work
What does the “end of work” mean, exactly? It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States remotely likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs. Eventually, by degrees, that could create a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.
NB: Interesting article and mostly well thought out even though the subtitle is misleading (a stab at getting more eyeballs past the fold I guess) and historical myths about Luddites are gratuitously repeated, more for effect than because they are essential to the argument.
“…a nation is really rich if no interest is paid for the use of capital, if the working day is only 6 hours rather than 12. Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more.” —Charles Wentworth Dilke
Oil Sand Glut.
Is it good money after bad?
Could they build nuclear plants up there to reduce the carbon ‘price’ of [oil sand] bitumen extraction?
When is next advance on photo-voltaics (PV), and how many homes are mission out already?
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~sgallen/Of%20mice%20and%20economics.pdf
Merkel demands EU partners share in burden of human tide
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article34231680.html
Glad to see Putin taking up his fair share.
I wonder if this group of immigrants will continue to have a high birth rate, an unwillingness to assimilate a third of who believe Sharia should apply to everyone (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/). What could go wrong?
I didn’t know about game rankings on boardgamegeek, that’s great! I’ve been using Mensa Select to find new games:
http://mindgames.us.mensa.org/about/winning-games/
It’s amazing what’s available now. Don’t forget about cards, I think there’s a bigger renaissance happening there.
Should Companies Publish Difference Between CEO Pay and Employees?
Yes. But companies already publish the pay for CEOs. Workers already know they get just a fraction of 1% of what the top guy gets.
The real news coming 2017 is publishing the median worker’s pay. Workers are now going to see that they are 5%, 10%, 20% above or below the median worker, or that the competition pays much better, and that’s going to cause some trouble.
good, thats means the difference it what companies will become public info. and companies will then have to compete, it’s what they always say hey like to do isnt it?
Good. Free markets need information to operate.
Get the labor market moving with published pay.
With robots taking over so many jobs going forward, they won’t care. Those who have jobs will be happy to stay on in them.
50 is the new 42: technology is making brains of middle-aged younger
The increasing mental demands of technology is making older people sharper than previous generations, scientists have shown
By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
8:00PM BST 31 Aug 2015
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11834903/50-is-the-new-42-technology-is-making-brains-of-middle-aged-younger.html
The insane reason why Chinese drivers intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit
Geoffrey Sant, Slate
Sep. 5, 2015
In April, a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head.
As the girl’s grandmother shouted, “Stop! You’ve hit a child!” the BMW’s driver paused, then switched into reverse and backed up over the girl.
The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time.
When she finally got out from the BMW, the unlicensed driver immediately offered the horrified family a deal: “Don’t say that I was driving the car,” she said. “Say it was my husband. We can give you money.”
It seems like a crazy urban legend: In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them.
And yet not only is it true — it’s fairly common; security cameras have regularly captured drivers driving back and forth on top of victims to make sure that they are dead. The Chinese language even has an adage for the phenomenon: “It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.”
….
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-drivers-kill-pedestrians-intentionally-2015-9
The stupid, it burns…
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/gop-congress-climate-pact-paris-213382#ixzz3l4ZFGoas
You’re getting screwed by Reagan.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/09/06/productivity-and-pay/
“…The divergence between pay and productivity — a lot of productivity gains, almost total failure to trickle down — is one of the most striking features of American economics these past 40 (!) years…”
What is sad for the GOP elite (and good for America) is that some of The Base are realizing this and supporting Trump. When Trump breaks his deal to support the GOP the way the GOP broke their deal with Grover Norquist to get rid of Obama’s temporary TARP tax cuts, the GOP elite will have to stop being so ridiculous and become centrist.
In the mean time they should start concocting their apologies to Obama.
Bergdahl was a Misbehavior
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2015/09/07/military-selects-rare-charge-in-bergdahl-case/
If you misbehave, Boehner, McConnell, Reince Priebus and Rupert Murdoch will leave you behind.
Unless you’re Rebekah Brooks…
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/01/rebekah-brooks-rehired-rupert-murdoch-work-us-news-corp
Or…
“…Sarah Palin agrees with Roger Ailes: she was rehired at Fox News to “piss off the people who wanted her dead…”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sarah-palin-agrees-roger-ailes-669713
Ex-Governor Palin, I don’t want you dead. I want you to keep talking about how the GOP wants you as Energy Secretary. Stay healthy. Eat Right.
Perhaps more than any other holiday Labor Day limns the historical reality of a United States that is far more complex and less straightforward than the latest political slogan or corporate news bite.
The Forgotten Radical History Of Labor Day
It’s become commonplace to complain about how the true meanings of our American holidays have been forgotten in favor of weekend sales, cookouts and family gatherings. But the problem is particularly clear when it comes to Labor Day. While holidays like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July still feature prominent collective and media reminders of their historical and cultural significance alongside the barbeques and beach trips, Labor Day has become almost entirely divorced from its origins and associated instead with one last burst of summer fun before the fall and new school year commence in earnest. ….