Thomas Pikketty's Capital. Economist. EVERY ten minutes, black Volkswagen shuttle vans ferry delegates from their hotels in Davos, Switzerland, to this year’s World Economic Forum, held from January 17th to 20th. If you could squeeze the world’s eight richest men into one of these vans, they might feel cramped. But they could comfort themselves with an extraordinary statistic: according to Oxfam, a charity, they own as much wealth ($426bn) as half the world’s population combined ($409bn). To make this striking calculation, the charity draws on data from Forbes magazine, which lists the wealth of the billionaires, and Credit Suisse, which estimates the smaller holdings of everyone else, thanks to painstaking work by three scholars of wealth, Anthony Shorrocks, Jim Davies and Rodrigo Lluberas. Pedants can nonetheless criticise Oxfam’s headline-grabbing comparison for its handling of debt, the dollar, labour and data.
The Credit Suisse team converts the world’s wealth into dollars at market rates. Which countries are best at converting economic growth into well-being? It’s been described as one of the most important numbers in economics. It’s also one of the most controversial. For while gross domestic product is great at measuring the goods and services produced by a country, it does a pretty shoddy job of capturing the things that actually matter to most of us. After all, what good is a booming economy if very few people benefit from it?
But while most experts agree that GDP has its limitations, nobody quite knows what to replace it with. If GDP is a poor assessment of the things that matter, what could be a more accurate measure? A new way of measuring progress Researchers at the Boston Consulting Group have found an alternative: the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment. By measuring how countries perform across all these dimensions, the SEDA establishes which countries are managing – or in some cases failing – to use both their absolute wealth and their economic growth to improve the lives of their citizens. Image: Boston Consulting Group. Will cutting interest rates increase inequality? Image copyright Reuters The Bank of England might decide to cut interest rates this week.
If it does, the aim will be to stimulate stronger growth and higher, yes higher inflation. But such a move would have other consequences too. What, for example, would it mean for inequality? There is no guarantee that there will be a rate cut. In fact, some members of the Bank's rate setting body, the Monetary Policy Committee, have been cautious about an early move. The main alternatives open to the bank are a cut in its official policy interest rate from the current all-time low of 0.5%, or a resumption of its quantitative easing (QE) programme which involves buying financial assets with newly created money.
These policies also have the potential to alter the distribution of income and wealth. So what is the evidence so far? Much ink has been spilled over the rather wider question of how inequality has developed in the years since the onset of the financial crisis. Image copyright Getty Images. The Prophet Motive. "I was talking to a guy before coming over," said Dhruv before folding his hand. "He said you'd tell me that you thought of the $70K minimum-wage thing while on a hike, and it's bullshit. But I think any PR is good PR, whether it be Trump and the wall or whatever. You've got a hook. " Price and Dhruv talked about the downside of being an entrepreneur, always trying to hack solutions when you should just be, you know, a human being.
"Yes," shouted Price. The game changed to seven-stud high-low, in which the best and worst hand split the pot. Dhruv dropped his cards and his eyes lit up. "You're going for the high and low: You're going for the capitalist and socialist—you must be getting laid a lot! "Hey, I'm a narcissist, like all millennials," said Price. Price reached across the table and gave Dhruv a high-five. In November 2015, INC Magazine put Price on its cover above the headline 'Is This The Best Boss in America? ' And then the deluge. Geekwire. Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are 'Devastated' By... Bernie Sanders is right the economy is rigged. He’s dead wrong about why.
The economy is rigged. Everybody thinks so. Donald Trump thinks so. Hillary Clinton thinks so. Bernie Sanders really, really thinks so. "Wall Street and the billionaire class," Sanders has said, "has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country. " Even Charles Koch, Sanders’s go-to "billionaire class" villain, thinks so.
Well, not everybody thinks the economy’s rigged. Sanders thinks Koch and his billionaire comrades did it, more or less. Why Bernie’s wrong According to Sanders, failure to maintain a relatively equal distribution of income and wealth allows the rich to "buy elections," which allows them to exploit the political system to rig the economy in their favor — and to prevent non-rich voters from doing anything about it. This is a poor theory, and it’s not very useful for helping us understand how we might unrig the economy. In any case, the influence of the rich isn’t all in an anti-progressive direction.
A crystal clear explainer of Rajan’s exit from RBI and what it means to you. By Kaushik Anand Over the last week, there has been a lot written about Dr.Rajan’s departure from the RBI. Most of these have either used his pedigree to paint a doomsday scenario or attacked him using his US residency status. In this blogpost, I am not going to indulge in any of these irrelevant facts. The criticism raised and Dr.Rajan’s public responses have however raised some fascinating academic questions. The purpose of this blogpost is to explain arguments from both sides and to let you make your own decision. Before getting to them, let us first understand what the RBI (or any other federal bank) really does. Note: If you have a good understanding of monetary policy, you can skip the beginning portions and start directly at debate point 1.
What does RBI really do? RBI’s (or any other federal bank’s) primarily role is to control the money supply in the economy. The simplest way is by printing or revoking money from the system. Reducing or increasing interest rates (repo rates). Note: Seizing the Momentum: ‘But For’ These Foundations, Less Impact in Investing | Impact Alpha.
Baltimore, Md. – There’s a tendency for some hardcore finance types to look down their noses at philanthropic foundations. Soft-headed. Concessionary. Anti-business. It may be time for a new view: Pioneering. Catalytic. Risk-taking. ImpactAlpha is in Baltimore this week for the Mission Investors Exchange conference, the annual gathering of foundation executives who are embracing a broader set of financial tools to drive their philanthropic missions. Impact investing is not yet widespread in the sometimes stodgy world of philanthropy. ImpactAlpha Full Stack Capital has explored the ways foundation capital, generally in the form of “program-related investments” can help make deals work.
Along with our regular podcasts, and #Dealflow columns, Full Stack Capital is chronicling this new, invigorated approach to philanthropy. Here’s a sampling of what else is happening: Funds, Deals, Commitments Impact fund for Chicago. Innovation fund for U.S. cities. Policy Research and Trends Tools New Metrics. How to measure prosperity: GDP is a bad gauge of well-being. WHICH would you prefer to be: a medieval monarch or a modern office-worker? The king has armies of servants. He wears the finest silks and eats the richest foods. But he is also a martyr to toothache. He is prone to fatal infections. It takes him a week by carriage to travel between palaces. The question is more than just a parlour game. Faulty speedometer Defenders of GDP say that the statistic is not designed to do what is now asked of it.
Yet it is often wildly inaccurate: Nigeria’s GDP was bumped up by 89% in 2014, after number-crunchers adjusted their methods. If GDP is failing on its own terms, as a measurement of the value-added in an economy, its use as a welfare benchmark is even more dubious. With a few exceptions, such as computers, what is produced and consumed is assumed to be of constant quality. Stop counting, start grading Measuring prosperity better requires three changes. Blended finance: The fad for mixing public, charitable and private money. What blended finance hath wrought MEETING the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals will require additional investments of $2.5 trillion a year in things like health care and education for the world’s poorest people, according to UNCTAD, a UN agency. A further $13.5 trillion is needed by 2030 to implement the Paris climate accord, according to the International Energy Agency, a watchdog group. It is enough to drive development types to drink—which may be how they came up with the term “blended finance”, a heady cocktail of public, private and charitable money.
The phrase is being floated at all manner of gatherings, from the recent meetings of the IMF and the World Bank to the World Economic Forum in Davos, as a way to make the limited pool of money available for worthy causes go further. The new name notwithstanding, however, the idea of using public funds to attract private money is a venerable one. Social-impact bonds are promising.
Forget 'The Innovators': 'Maintainers' Conference Advances Alternative Histor... We need more stories about the labor that sustains society, a group of scholars say. New technologies and their inventors are often celebrated as society’s heroes. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page: These are all contemporary “innovators” whose “visionary ideas” and “creative leaps” led to “disruptive realities”—that is, if you buy the rhetoric of certain books and novelty-oriented publications (including, sometimes, your very own CityLab).
But those who’ve questioned whether technology really is society’s salve aren’t alone. Lee Vinsel, an assistant professor of science and technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology, wrote a dissertation on innovation and regulation in the early days of the automobile. But lately, he finds that the word “innovation” is overused to the point of meaninglessness—and worse, that it can obfuscate the bleak realities of the status quo. How so? Be ashamed, very ashamed. How do you put the lives of 1.25 billion Indians into perspective on the back of economics and various studies? It seems, anybody who earns less than Rs942 per month in rural areas or Rs1,407 in cities lives below the poverty line. And that, as a nation, we are doing a pretty damn good job of raising incomes and the quality of people’s lives.
Each year, reports indicate that more people are crossing over that cursed line. We are, apparently, on our way to become a superpower. However, the truth is that these reports on the “Other India”, as writers like me and readers like you condescendingly describe them, are a tub of shit. It started to fall into place two weeks ago when, for reasons I don’t intend to delve into, I thought it appropriate to terminate the services of a driver whom I had hired a few months ago. As is the wont in Indian homes, when domestic help is needed, word travels and people come knocking. The first number I called was answered by a candidate’s mother. “Rs16,000.” Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for ... Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines (An alternate version of this article was originally published in the Boston Globe) On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago.
Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words. Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. The language is a new class of machine learning known as deep learning, and the “whispered word” was a computer’s use of it to seemingly out of nowhere defeat three-time European Go champion Fan Hui, not once but five times in a row without defeat. What actually ended up happening when they faced off? Why Bernie Sanders Is Adopting a Nordic-Style Approach. Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses. Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders’s Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they’d never work in the U.S. The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children—good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. That’s probably how Nordic people seem to many Americans, too. A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S.
But this vision of homogenous, altruistic Nordic lands is mostly a fantasy. When I lived in Finland, as a middle-class citizen I paid income tax at a rate not much higher than what I now pay in New York City. Aviation in Africa: Africa is ripe for air travel. America's Real Criminal Element: Lead. Illustration: Gérard DuBois When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege. Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD's new commissioner.
The results were dramatic. But even more remarkable is what happened next. All in all, it seemed to be a story with a happy ending, a triumph for Wilson and Kelling's theory and Giuliani and Bratton's practice. The PB Effect Did Lead Make You Dumber? How Marlboro Used a Network of Young Smokers to Skirt the Laws Against Tobacco Promotion. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015, which amended the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000, was passed in the winter session of the parliament in December 2015, and came into effect on 15 January 2016. The act allows juveniles between the ages of 16 and 18 years, charged with heinous crimes, to be tried as adults. It was passed amidst the public outcry that followed the release of the juvenile accused of the rape of Jyoti Kumar Pandey in 2012, and was widely criticised for being passed in haste.
The act also makes it illegal to serve children any tobacco products, alcohol, narcotic drugs, and psychotropic substances. The amendments make these offenses punishable by upto seven years in jail and a fine of upto one lakh rupees. The new law is the latest addition to many laws that govern tobacco products and their sale in India. Marlboro’s youth marketing programme, of which the connectors were a part, is something of an industry secret. The Gift of Death. Damage of six years has been reversed in a matter of a year: Ridham Desai. Few and far between. Damn Right Amazon Runs a Fucking Deficit and So Should America. How Wealthy People Protect Their Money.
What Google's Victory Against the Authors Guild Means for Readers and Libraries. Here's What Really Happened at That Company That Set a $70,000 Minimum Wage.