Seattle misreads Thomas Piketty as its minimum wage mascot | Money. Thomas Piketty, the economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has ignited the economic left in a way that hasn't been seen since the first flames of the Occupy movement. The nerdy, unassuming Frenchman has become the patron saint of the class struggle. But did everyone read every page of Piketty's entire 600-page tome before quoting it? Nope, if Seattle's new minimum-wage law is any evidence. First, the basics: the new Seattle law promises to raise the minimum wage in the city from $9 an hour to $15 an hour, citing the statistic that nearly one-fourth of the city's employees earn less than that.
The fines can add up for scofflaws: a company could pay a maximum of $20,000 for violating the law. The push for the higher minimum wage in Seattle far predates the publication of Piketty's blockbuster book this spring. One problem: Piketty didn't write that. Still, the spirit of the quote in the Seattle bill is sound. But $15 an hour may be another story in Piketty's eyes. Thomas Piketty Says Labor’s Share of Income Is Declining, But Is It? Joseph Stiglitz: Thomas Piketty gets income inequality wrong. This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has been writing about America’s economically divided society since the 1960s. His recent book,The Price of Inequality, argues that this division is holding the country back, a topic he has also explored in recent research supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and others.
On December 4, Stiglitz chaired the eighth INET Seminar Series at Columbia University, in which he presented a paper, “New Theoretical Perspectives on the Distribution of Income and Wealth Among Individuals.” In the interview that follows, he explores the themes of this paper, the work of Thomas Piketty, and the need for the field of economics — and the country — to come to terms with the growing gulf between haves and have-nots. Lynn Parramore: You’ve mentioned that economic inequality was the subject of your Ph.D studies. How did you come to be interested in how income and wealth get divided up in society? JS: Yes. Chris Weller, “A Dutch city is giving residents free money, no strings attached — here's why it could work”
Maria Sanchez Diez, “A Dutch city is giving money away to test the ‘basic income’ theory” FRANCE: Opinion Poll Shows 60% Support for Basic Income. According to a recent opinion poll, 60% of people in France support the idea of a Basic Income. The survey was sponsored by national television channel i-télé, and the liberal think tank Génération Libre [Free Generation], as part of a survey focusing on ‘Liberalism and French people’. The 968 respondents, representative of the French population, were asked: “Are you in favour of the introduction of a guaranteed Basic Income for all citizens that would substitute most existing benefits?” 16% said they were “absolutely in favour” of the concept, while 44% were “somewhat in favour”. Although there is stronger support for Basic Income among left-wing citizens, the poll shows a majority in favour on all sides of the political spectrum. The survey was released while the French Movement for Basic Income was holding a major conference at the French Senate (the upper house of Parliament), where several MPs and former minister Delphine Batho expressed their interest in the idea.
Andrew Coyne: Guarantee a minimum income, not a minimum wage. With a new government — the first really new government in 44 years — Alberta politics is alive with possibilities for new directions and fresh approaches. Two ideas in particular have the province’s political class abuzz. The first is the possible introduction of a guaranteed minimum income, known to be an area of interest to the province’s new finance minister, the former city alderman and poverty activist Joseph Ceci. The second is an increase in the province’s minimum wage to $15, as promised in the NDP’s election manifesto.
The two might be thought to work in parallel, both with “minimum” in their name, both aiming — or professing to do so — to improve the lot of the worst off in society. In fact, they are opposites. The guaranteed minimum income has been the desideratum of generations of economists and welfare theorists, from the left and the right. But notice how it works. The market can do many things, but one of the things it can’t do is bring about a just distribution of income. The Conservative Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income. Politics Creating a wage floor is an effective way to fight poverty—and it would reduce government spending and intrusion.
Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > Last week, my colleague David Frum argued that conservative welfare reformers need to focus on simplification. Meanwhile, the intellectual wing of reform conservatism likes these plans because they reduce government and offer citizens more control, at least in theory. In any case, these ideas are circumscribed by traditional boundaries. The idea isn’t new. More recently, in a 2006 book, conservative intellectual Charles Murray proposed eliminating all welfare transfer programs, including Social Security and Medicare, and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone 21 years and older. Apart from lifting millions out of poverty, the plans promote efficiency and a shrinking of the federal bureaucracy. Is it feasible? Naturally, the idea is not without flaws. Psmag. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who remembers Kozmo.com, the start-up that delivered snacks to your home or business by messenger in the late '90s.
Does that sound familiar? Or maybe you’ve heard of Fresh Direct, which has been delivering groceries to New Yorkers for more than a decade? Or temp agencies? Have you heard of temp agencies? The current frenzy over “the sharing economy” makes it seem as though on-demand delivery services and exploitive freelance labor models are new. The current frenzy over “the sharing economy,” “the gig economy,” “the 1099 economy,” “the on-demand economy”—whatever you want to call it—makes it seem as though on-demand delivery services and exploitive freelance labor models are new. But this is not new. For decades, the service sector has comprised the bulk of job growth in the United States. Is Dominos a tech company now that it has an app?
If a freelance labor model is the gig economy's true innovation, it’s late on that one as well. The Long Tail - Wired Blogs. Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:46:19 “Priced and Unpriced Online Markets” by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman. Discusses tradeoffs in market such as email, IP addresses, search and dial-up Internet. “Reminiscent of the old adage about losing money on every unit but making it up in volume, online markets challenge norms about who should pay, when, and why.”
I found this typically academic: dated, dry and pretty unilluminating. But it got published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives. Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:53:50 From Mashable: “Freezly is a lot like Tweetmeme in that it finds link and tweets and shows you their popularity based on retweets. Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:08:25 From Cellular News. Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:54:23 From the LA Times: “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply.
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:07:00 Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:09:38 Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:37:31. Essays. The Future of Retail In The Age of Abundance. Posted December 11, 2014 Posted in Blog, Branding, Store Experience, Strategy, The Future, Trends By Doug Stephens In an astonishingly short period of time (about two decades), the developed world has evolved from a scarcity-based retail economy to one of unimaginable abundance. Consider that it wasn’t so long ago that consumers, lacking any other means of access, depended entirely on retailers for information on, and access to, new brands and products. To be successful, all a retailer had to do was be an efficient and affordable pipeline. In the digital age, however, the entire notion of scarcity is almost nostalgic. As a consequence, in this new era of abundance, the consumer’s challenge is no longer accessing the things we lack, but rather navigating the mind-boggling abundance of available choices that we already have.
The Transition From Value to Values This brings with it an historic shift in what we need from the retailers we shop. Products Can Be Reverse Engineered. Abundance: A Landscape for Change in Healthcare. I had the privilege of interviewing Ayelet Baron during the 2014 BEI, Back End of Innovation conference where she converged the concept of abundance and business agility. Ayelet is not only a futurist, but inspires action within the healthcare community by challenging all of us to think differently. She is the Chief Instigator at Simplifying Work, where she helps organizations thrive in the 21st century through her writing, speaking and life’s work. Imagine what could happen if we changed our mindset and decided to see the possibilities that are right in front of us, in healthcare today, and all we saw was abundance.
Business as usual in healthcare is over because we live in an open and connected world. We are living in an era of abundance that demands business agility and human-centered design to survive. Innovation is no longer a buzzword but a reality of how we stay relevant. Abundance in Play Conscious Leaders Drive an Abundance Mindset Wait!
Book Bytes - 114: New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed Civilizations. February 07, 2013 New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed Civilizations Lester R. Brown The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. This new era is one of rising food prices and spreading hunger. This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people.
Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food security. This safety cushion was not to last either. Food shortages undermined earlier civilizations. How to sell green energy in an era of abundant gas and oil. Since the middle of the last decade, well before the worldwide run-up in fuel prices during 2008, it has been widely believed that we are entering a new era of scarcity in carbon-based fuels such as oil and natural gas.
Such concerns are not new, having first become prevalent in the 1970s. But a rather quiet revolution is taking place on both fronts, leading to a new era of abundance that may prove as problematic as scarcity. US production The United States, long an international symbol of profligate energy consumption, with a thirsty appetite for imported oil and gas, is, according to a recent Bloomberg News report, on track to achieve energy self-sufficiency by 2020. US crude oil production has increased 25% since 2008, and may rise another 10% in 2012. US natural gas production is rising even faster. All of these trends are moving the US towards energy independence, or even to being a net exporter of energy in five to ten years. Canada Australia BRIC nations Fracking Where to now?
Drill, Baby, Drill: Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a New Era of Energy Abundance? Post Carbon Institute. Drill, Baby, Drill: Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a New Era of Energy Abundance? David Hughes February 19, 2013 Missing Attachment In this landmark report, PCI Fossil Fuel Fellow David Hughes takes a far-ranging and painstakingly researched look at the prospects for various unconventional fuels to provide energy abundance for the United States in the 21st Century. Abstract It’s now assumed that recent advances in fossil fuel production – particularly for shale gas and shale oil – herald a new age of energy abundance, even “energy independence,” for the United States. About the Author J.
Four decades, including 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada as a scientist and research manager. As Team Leader for Unconventional Gas on the Canadian Gas Potential Committee, he coordinated the recent publication of a comprehensive assessment of Canada’s unconventional natural gas potential. Praise & Reviews. Forbes / The next technology revolution will drive abundance and income disparity. This post also appears on Forbes.com. There have been and will continue to be multiple big technology revolutions, but the most impactful on human society may be the one that finally builds systems with judgment and decision-making capability more sophisticated and nuanced than trained human judgment. Machine learning, sometimes called big data or artificial intelligence, is making rapid progress in complex decision-making (for instance: driving a car was thought to be too difficult for computers even five years ago).
Without speculating on what is probable, it is at least possible that such systems may even be better at creativity, emotion and empathy than human beings (for instance: writing the best music, love story or creative fiction). At the very least these systems may be able to handle much more data to which we now have access and use it to make better judgments than humans with their supposed instinct, gut, holistic and integrative decision capability.
STOP COMPLAINING! Study Shows New Era Of Abundance In Music, Entertainment [INFOGRAPHIC] The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance. By Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Steve Burgess. Overview Molecular manufacturing coupled with AI could bring about a “personal manufacturing” revolution and a new era of abundance. But abundance could be highly disruptive, so we need to design a new economics of abundance so society is prepared for it. The coming era of abundance. Report For centuries, we have built cultures and economies around scarcity. The advent of PNs should bring the cost of most nonfood necessities to near zero. We can no longer think short-term. However, nearly all businesses act primarily in the interest of the short-term. We need a new version of capitalism for the jobless future. This board is about to get a lot smaller.
(Simon Dawson/Bloomberg) “There are more net jobs in the world today than ever before, after hundreds of years of technological innovation and hundreds of years of people predicting the death of work. The logic on this topic is crystal clear. Because of that, the contrary view is necessarily religious in nature, and, as we all know, there’s no point in arguing about religion.” These are the words of tech mogul Marc Andreessen, in an e-mail exchange with me on the effect of advancing technologies on employment. I wish he were right, but he isn’t. I am optimistic about the future and know that technology will provide society with many benefits.
Andreessen agrees that there will be disruption and that professions will disappear because of the productivity improvements that technology will enable. Another technologist whom I hold in high regard, Vinod Khosla, worries as I do about the effect of increasing income disparity. Peter Diamandis on incentive prizes driving an era of abundance | Beedie Newsroom. Manufacturing revenue growth in an era of abundance.
Razorsight Blog. Welcome to Forbes. Javier Creus: "We are entering an era of abundance!" As oil prices tank, new era of abundance seen dawning. GOP plans for 'era of abundance' in energy.