Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The morbid joke about the Great Recession was that it turned Americans’ 401(k)s into 201(k)s. Indeed, the nation’s 401(k)s and IRAs lost about $2.4 trillion in the final two quarters of 2008, and the average loss that year for workers who had been on the job for 20 years was, according to one estimate, about…
JOAN RIVERS, a comedian who died last year, did not let chores get in the way of a career in showbusiness. “I hate housework,” she joked. “You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again.” An escape from unpaid drudgery into paid work seems a…
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit,…
Photo Prof. Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. Credit Larry Levanti/Princeton University, European Pressphoto Agency Prof. Angus Deaton, a British economist, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday for improving the accuracy of basic economic gauges, including measures of income, poverty and consumption. Professor Deaton,…
Live from (Outside of) New York ComicCon: We Have (Close to the Equivalent of) Replicators: So Why Do We (Still) Have Non Personal-Service Jobs? We grow things–but fewer and fewer of us do. We make things–but fewer and fewer of us do. We provide personal services–non-information and information. What else do we do? It strikes…
The rules that govern cross border profits enable systemic tax avoidance, because they allow profits to be shifted away from where they are generated to another country with a lower (or zero) tax rate – all as a matter of accounting rather than real economic activities. These rules frequently serve the economic interests of the…
On May 1st, International Workers’ Day, I will be publicly discussing my job title, my experience and my salary on #talkpay and I urge everyone to do so as well. Pay inequality is an oft-discussed topic. There are measurable pay discrepancies between groups when looking at race and gender which are further exacerbated when someone…
With the rise of coding bootcamps, it’s become a popular notion that being able to code is simply a matter of will, not dollars. “Learn how to code and become a developer, it’s easy! Take an eight-week course!” But this couldn’t be further from the truth: Becoming a developer is difficult and often out of…
For “subprime”, read “non-prime”. Yield-hungry investors are ready to endorse a revival of bonds backed by riskier US residential mortgages, as lenders warm to housebuyers who do not meet strict borrowing guidelines introduced after the financial crisis. More ON THIS TOPIC VW car loan securities at risk of losses EU plan to revive ABS faces…
Venezuela, a country that is struggling to import food and keep its currency from falling to worthless lows, has just “minted” the world’s largest chocolate coin. The candy money, made to look like a one bolivar coin, weighs a massive 870 kilos [1,900 pounds] and measures six feet in diameter. It was presented to the…