The Rise of the New Global Elite - Magazine F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that.
Globalisation and higher education: Different degrees of success David Hummels, Rasmus Jørgensen, Jakob R. Munch, Chong Xiang , 10 December 2011 Fuelled by concerns over rising income inequality, Occupy Wall Street has grown into a global movement in slightly over 2 months, with protests in over 900 cities worldwide. Protestors have been criticised for lacking a specific set of policy demands, but in this the protestors are hardly alone. Nor is there consensus regarding the policies likely to ameliorate inequality. However, there is a growing concern that college isn’t enough. Early work on offshoring and college premium in the 1980s focused on industry-level data and examined average wage bills. When we focus on workers who remain employed with the firm, we find that offshoring raises the college wage premium, both by increasing wages (elasticity +3.6%) for college-educated workers and lowering wages (elasticity -1.6%) for workers without a college education. Does globalisation leave all non-college-educated employees behind? Figure 1. Figure 2.
How Technology is Recreating the 21st-century Economy W. Brian Arthur, PARC Visiting Researcher series: Entrepreneurial Spirit 4 August 20115:30-7:00pmGeorge E. about PARC forum description Every 50 years or so a new body of technology comes along and slowly transforms the economy. Brian Arthur -- an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, pioneer of complexity theory, and longtime PARC Visiting Researcher – will attempt to answer these and other questions in this PARC Forum talk. Digital technology runs deeper than merely providing computation, internet commerce, and social media. presenter(s) W. Arthur pioneered the modern study of positive feedbacks/ increasing returns in the economy -- in particular, their role in magnifying small, random economic events -- and this work became the basis of our understanding of the high-tech economy. Arthur was the Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford University, and the first director of the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. audio
The Future of Advertising Brainstorming 2.0: Making Ideas That Really Happen One of the most common questions we hear at 99U is: “How do I get more out of my brainstorming sessions?” While brainstorming sessions have become perhaps the most iconic act of creativity, we still struggle with how to give them real utility. The problem of course is that most brainstorming sessions conclude prematurely. We all love to dream big and come up with “blue sky” ideas. We’re less fond of diving into the nitty-gritty details of creative execution. As a result, we spend 90% of our time coming up with a bunch of great ideas, and maybe 10% (if any!) So how can we retool our approach to brainstorming to make it more effective? Disney’s rigorous creative process involves 3 distinct phases of idea development, each of which is designed to unfold in a separate room. Step 1 asks “WHAT are we going to do?” It’s all about dreaming big. Room Setup: Airy rooms with high-ceilings are the best locations for thinking big. Mentality: Any idea is fair game. Step 3 asks “WHY are we doing this?”
The 'Trophy Kids' Go to Work The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO: 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. In fact, it is not even as faceted as many other sectors of SEO in which practitioners have to perform many more nuanced SEO tasks (and often by themselves). So why is Enterprise SEO so underserved and why do so few large organizations embrace it properly? Because Enterprise SEO is much more like Supply Chain Management than it is Marketing. As an executive considering investing in an Enterprise SEO initiative, hopefully you can learn from this primer and my experiences over the last decade leading large institutions into SEO. Setting The Stage 1. I have seen dozens of large business deploy a ton of money into an Enterprise SEO initiative only to find out that Organic Search just was not as critical to their business as they would have hoped. 2. Not only will the executives drive the cultural shift, but Enterprise SEO is not cheap. 3. 4. 5. Search engines are truly the scoreboard of the Internet. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
Global Risks | World Economic Forum-Global Risks Global Risks 2014 report The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected, but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. Post date: December 30, 2013 Global Risks 2013 - Eighth Edition - Japanese The Global Risks Report 2013 analyses 50 global risks in terms of impact, likelihood and interconnections, based on a survey of over 1000 experts from industry, government and academia. Post date: August 7, 2013 Resilience: What it is and why it’s needed Lee Howell addresses the question: What does it mean for a country to show resilience in the face of risks it cannot manage alone? Post date: February 27, 2013 Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition - Korean Post date: February 14, 2013
Global Risk and Reward in 2011 - Nouriel Roubini Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – The outlook for the global economy in 2011 is, partly, for a persistence of the trends established in 2010. But there are downside and upside risks to this scenario. The United States represents another downside risk for global growth. In China and other emerging-market economies, delays in policy tightening could fuel a rise in inflation that forces a tougher clampdown later, with China, in particular, risking a hard landing. Moreover, currency tensions will remain high. Furthermore, several major geopolitical risks loom, including military confrontation between North and South Korea and the lingering possibility that Israel – or even the US – might use military force to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Finally, in the face of political opposition to fiscal consolidation, especially in the US, there is a risk that the path of least resistance becomes continued monetization of fiscal deficits.
Noam Chomsky chooses Obama over GOPs as 2012 President Noam Chomsky has said, "I’m not a great enthusiast for Obama, as you know, from way back, but at least he’s somewhere in the real world." He stated that the 2012 candidates are "Off the International Spectrum of Sane Behavior." The extended view by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman with Noam Chomsky --- world-renowned activist, linguist, public intellectual and Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author and one of the most influential political analysts of our day and age --- represents what American GOP middle-class voters are lamenting, "If only we had another candidate to pick from." This is even made more evident in Amy Goodman's latest article, "Republicans Divided, Citizens United," saying that "the Republicans are not enthusiastic about any of their candidates." In her article, Goodman forecasts that the 2012 presidential election promises to be long, contentious, extremely expensive and perhaps more negative than any in history. Read more...
Now In Beta: Pinwheel Lets You Drop Virtual Notes Anywhere This is Pinwheel, a new iOS app for leaving and finding virtual notes anywhere in the real world. It’s in private beta right now, but you can join in if you ask nicely and leave your email address in the box of the Pinwheel home page. Pinwheel is the brainchild of former Flickr and Hunch co-founder, Caterina Fake. She announced on her blog yesterday: On Pinwheel you can find and leave notes all around the world. In short, she said, it’s Flickr for places. It’s also another social network to sign up for. It might also pop up with something resembling an advertisement, because Sponsored Notes is how Pinwheel plans to make money.
The Post-Office Generation A recent post on MinimalMac posits an interesting case for the slow, growing sense of the irrelevance of Microsoft, at least in the applications space. Go and read the piece – it’s excellent – but the gist is that for years Microsoft banked on Office being as important to users as, say, Windows. Office is Microsoft’s biggest money maker and for most of this decade no self-respecting IT department would consider any alternatives, even though they existed. You needed it to get work done. OpenOffice? However, with the rise of tablets, office workers have suddenly noticed that they don’t need Office anymore. Patrick Rhone calls this a “miss” but I call it a paradigm shift. The story of office automation has been one of slow and inexorable change. But old habits die hard and although we’re not even close to a paperless office yet, I think the rise of tablets will move us that final step towards a place of no printers. But what is the paradigm now? And what was Access (remember Access?)