globalization, art, culture, technology, etc.
This graph from the NYT makes it very clear how big the wage gap is between men and women in various professions. In some, like surgeons, it’s as much as 40% less.
It would be nice if there was more detail exploring the varied reasons for male-female wage gaps.
Photo: Taking a break from reading @ Yri Cafe in Hongdae
Started reading Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. It’s pretty comprehensive making the case for the importance of policy change and institutional shift in favor of openness and freedom for information technologies (away from incumbent industries’ and government support for proprietary models that stress ownership and access control). His key argument is that there is potential in the network communications paradigm for advancing justice, democracy, and freedom. How much of this potential will be realized depends on key decisions made now – regarding network neutrality, copyright and patent policy, the DMCA, DRM, etc. etc.
It’s dense though, I’ll write more when I have time to digest it. But so far so good – it makes a lot of points that I was trying to get at in my thesis, but only marginally succeeded in supporting.
Here’s a talk given by the author @ MIT It’s really fast paced but worth a listen.
I never understand people who claim liberal bias in the media. The picture is obviously more complicated than that, with various motivating factors influencing what stories are covered and how.
This is during the news cycle when the stimulus was being covered.
Source: Yglesias / Thinkprogress
For a while now, a Korean blogger under the name Minerva has drawn a lot of attention for his writing on the economic collapse going against the official line of the Korean government. Some speculated that he was an insider posting anonymously.
Now someone alleged to be Minerva has been arrested, and he turns out to be a 30-something with little more than a 2 year degree. It’s part of a seemingly wider effort to curtail freedom of speech and press, as the major broadcasters are coming under threat of greater control and some officials advocate legislation to do away with anonymity on the Korean parts of the internet.
Among governments struggling to contain the global financial crisis, South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.
The man, known throughout South Korea by the pen name of Minerva – after the Roman goddess of wisdom – upset the government with his doomsayer’s forecasts for the economy and his satirical attacks on President Lee Myung Bak’s policies.
But when some of his predictions on the markets proved right, he gained a huge following among South Koreans fretting over an uncertain economic future.
Park Dae Sung’s arrest on Saturday on charges of spreading false online information with a harmful intent – a crime punishable by up to five years in prison – came as the South Korean government was escalating its efforts to fight the fallout of the global financial turmoil.
[...]
The government camp hopes that Park’s case will lend weight to the Lee government’s attempt to regulate the country’s vigorous and unruly online communities. But the main opposition Democratic Party has accused the government of gagging the Internet, a popular venue for anti-government criticism.
The story is less about the content of Minerva’s posts than the government response, which is a great embarrassment and disappointment. Korea is so advanced in many fields of IT development, yet displays such backwardness in action and policy.
IHT story here.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers’ access if they ignore repeated warnings.
The move ends a controversial program that saw the Recording Industry Association of America sue about 35,000 people since 2003 for swapping songs online. Because of high legal costs for defenders, virtually all of those hit with lawsuits settled, on average for around $3,500. The association’s legal costs, in the meantime, exceeded the settlement money it brought in.
Though their new strategy, issuing warnings and then getting ISPs to shut off service to file sharers, isn’t much better. And I wonder how legal it is.
On why “no one” saw the financial meltdown coming:
One answer to these questions is that nobody likes a party pooper. While the housing bubble was still inflating, lenders were making lots of money issuing mortgages to anyone who walked in the door; investment banks were making even more money repackaging those mortgages into shiny new securities; and money managers who booked big paper profits by buying those securities with borrowed funds looked like geniuses, and were paid accordingly. Who wanted to hear from dismal economists warning that the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme?
I just finished Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism. The most valuable take-away was his constant refrain that deregulation and increased global competition has simultaneously empowered consumers and investors by aggregating and enhancing their collective power, while shafting workers and average people.
Increased competition has lead to a race to the bottom to maintain competitive advantages predicated on cutting labor costs, and indeed any cost that might reduce shareholder profits. This negatively impacts wages, job security, working conditions, retirement plans, union participation, health care, the environment, and society as a whole.
Profits for corporations and their shareholders have gone way up, but they have not been shared with society or with workers. Instead, the rich have gotten far richer, and the rest have done merely okay, benefiting from lower cost goods but losing stability and income growth. This is in contrast to the post-WWII social contract (see Fordism) that emerged between unions and large oligopolies sharing profits with labor, ballooning America’s middle class, providing social mobility, and fueling American economic growth and the mass-consumption/mass-production economy. For a variety of reasons, that arrangement broke down and we can’t turn back the clock, nor should we try. But that doesn’t mean the current system is good or that it can’t be changed for the better.
Reich’s aim is to encourage political engagement. The problem is not greed or corporations in and of themselves; these are distractions. The underlying problem is that the current way of doing things perversely incentivizes myopic self-interest, speculation, short term investment and profit maximization, rather than sustainability and public good. That we let our consumer-selves get the better of our citizen-selves, and that this shows in our tacit acceptance of the status quo where profit is the sole concern and social well-being is completely missing from the equation.
The problem is finding a balance between the good and the bad. Increased choice, lower costs, more competition, greater economic dynamism, efficiency and innovation are all good things. But they need to be accompanied by policies that mitigate the negative impacts on labor, inequality, quality of life, environmental degradation, the exploitation of labor abroad, the blind eye turned towards oppresive regimes we trade with and invest in, etc.
His conclusion was a bit sparse, but I think the point was that the solution is necessarily political and democratic, requiring the force of legislation, and that we can’t let the monied interests and corporate lobbies continue to define the rules of the game, on either side of the political spectrum…
A lot of people are excited by the Obama win. It is, no doubt, historic and promising. I wonder though if any smart people in the campaign or surrounding it have plans to channel and repurpose the high degree of interest and engagement generated by Obama’s message, especially among the young and generally apathetic. The passage of Proposition 8 is a reminder that progressive change isn’t assured.
Can the virtual and social infrastructure built up to win the presidency be retooled? Didn’t Obama create a sort of online social network with a fair amount of success? It would be interesting to see that idea taken beyond the election to play a role in progressive governance, mobilization of support and activism, etc.
UPDATE:
Apparently, the answer is yes (or maybe).
Check it. Though right now it seems quite Web 1.0, churning out press releases. Kinda lame. We’ll see if it turns into anything more exciting. With a domain name like ‘change.gov’ I’d expect something more…
The Obama campaign has purchased virtual advertising on billboards that line the roads in racing videogames like XBox 360’s ‘Burnout Paradise.’
I guess that’s what you can do when you’re raking in donations. I think it’s kinda cool. Ripe for irony depending on the candidate and the game world.
I could imagine seeing McCain campaign flyers appearing in a counter-terrorism themed game. Etc.
I’m not too savvy on economics, but I wonder to what extent this current crisis might lead to a referendum on the past decades of deregulation, trickle-down economics, and the rise of finance capitalism?
From a policy perspective, how would a shift in the US play out on the nature of globalization? It seems like this could be a catalyst for change, depending on who wins the US election and the degree of freedom they have to act. In progressive hands, the Federal takeover of such large financial institutions and the mandate to enact reforms and take bold steps seems like an apt time to reverse many of the dominant policies that favor the interests of the richest few.
What exactly is the historical relationship between the current crisis, and the overall chronology of US economic policy since the shifts in the 1970s? Specifically, I’m wondering how directly it is tied to the end of Fordism, the generally conservative political climate since then, and the dominance of neoliberalism as the guiding economic and political ideology.
I’m currently reading former labor secretary Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism to try to get a better grasp on that history…
UPDATE: By way of Matt Yglesias, an article by Fareed Zakaria that hints atleast in part at what I was thinking.
This crisis has—dramatically, vengefully—forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today’s pain will translate into gains in the long run.
And over at John Robb’s blog, doom and gloom about ‘hollow states.’ I agree with a lot of what he says, but I think his take is much more pessimistic. What of the alternative to a hollowing out, worst case scenario?
This is a good one:
This chart is slightly less intuitive but still makes a point:
It’s quite clear whose interests each candidate is looking out for. Who’s the elitist?
The Freakonomics blog has more charts, as well as a brief discussion of the layout of the charts. Chart making is full of challenges from a design perspective.
