Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

Swap-a-Skill.com Chicago Booth Blog: Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan - Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan CHICAGO – To understand how to achieve a sustained recovery from the Great Recession, we need to understand its causes. And identifying causes means starting with the evidence. Two facts stand out. Persuasive explanations of the crisis point to linkages between today’s tepid demand and rising income inequality. Rising house prices gave people the illusion that increasing wealth backed their borrowing. This emphasis on anti-worker, pro-rich policies as the recession’s primary cause fits less well with events in Europe. So consider an alternative explanation: Starting in the early 1970’s, advanced economies found it increasingly difficult to grow. Greater competition and the adoption of new technologies increased the demand for, and incomes of, highly skilled, talented, and educated workers doing non-routine jobs like consulting. The short-sighted political response to the anxieties of those falling behind was to ease their access to credit. The alternative narrative has more to say.

"Fast Food’s “Ethnic Insights”" by Andrew Billo Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – There is no denying the fast-food industry’s contribution to America’s obesity epidemic. Now, Asians and Asian-Americans could follow on this path, as major fast-food chains like McDonald’s target them disproportionately. Although Asian-Americans amount to only 6% of the United States’ population, the marketing magazine Advertising Age reports that for every nine focus groups that McDonald’s organizes, two (22%) are Asian-focused, while another four center on other minorities. At the Asia Society’s Diversity Leadership Forum earlier this month in New York, McDonald’s Director of Ethnic Marketing Vivien Chen described how the company has focused its marketing on the ethnic consumer. Chen claims that its strategy – called “Leading with ethnic insights” – shows the company’s commitment to the Asian-American consumer. In fact, this link represents the scope of Asia’s incipient obesity problem.

"Rio’s Unsustainable Nonsense" by Jagdish Bhagwati Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – If George Orwell were alive today, he would be irritated, and then shocked, by the cynical way in which every lobby with an axe to grind and money to burn has hitched its wagon to the alluring phrase “sustainable development.” In fact, the United Nations’ Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development is about pet projects of all and sundry – many of them tangential to the major environmental issues, such as climate change, that were the principal legacy of the original Rio Earth Summit. Thus, the International Labor Organization and trade-union lobbies have managed to insert “Decent Jobs” into the seven priority areas at the Rio conference. I would love for everyone, everywhere, to have a decent job. No one should pretend that we can magically offer decent jobs to the huge numbers of impoverished but aspiring workers in the informal sector. In the end, therefore, water availability cannot properly be called a “right.”

"Labor’s Paradise Lost" by Robert Skidelsky LONDON – As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped governments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused by slumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished between unemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called “technological unemployment” – that is, “unemployment due to the discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Keynes reckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in the future. But its emergence, he thought, was a cause for hope, rather than despair. At the same time, “technological unemployment” has been on the rise.

Dancing on the Sand - By Bruce Jones At 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, 1,000 or so advanced delegates at Rio+20 (formally, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development) laid down their pens and shut off their laptops. At noon, Brazil's worldly foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, gaveled through the Outcome Document from the chair. And by mid-afternoon, Rio was full of a sound to which that joyous city is unaccustomed: the collective moan of 40,000 environmentalists disappointed about the results. (Yes, you read that right: 40,000. That the Rio outcome fell short of the highest expectations was not only predictable, it was predicted -- by everybody. There were some avoidable mistakes. In practice, though, the best-organized process in the world wasn't going to produce serious outcomes on environment issues, either in Rio or Mexico City. What's more, the outcomes from Rio aren't all bad. The hard truth is, of the unrealistic and unhelpful voices on multilateral process, the environmental lobby stands out.

In Praise of Leisure - The Chronicle Review By Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week. They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. Given when it was written, it is not surprising that Keynes's futuristic essay was ignored. He asked something hardly discussed today: What is wealth for? We in the West are once more in the midst of a Great Contraction, the worst since the Great Depression. The first defect is moral. Second, the crisis has exposed capitalism's palpable economic problems. Finally, Keynes's essay challenges us to imagine what life after capitalism might look like (for an economic system in which capital no longer accumulates is not capitalism, whatever one might call it). So let us imagine that everyone has enough to lead a good life. The remaining objections cut deeper. It was not ever thus.

Don't Sweat the Bond Markets The ongoing eurozone debacle has driven home certain straightforward lessons: the fiscal rules enshrined in the EU's 1997 Stability and Growth Pact had almost no teeth, government bonds of EU nations are not a risk-free asset, and voters do not readily tolerate economic austerity. Beyond these, however, the last few years have also contained subtle lessons about the relationship between governments and capital markets. More specifically, they have shown that our understanding of the pressures that private capital markets place on governments is incomplete. Although holders of government debt certainly would react markedly to a change in the membership of the eurozone, they would not likely react strongly, or over the longer term, to many other government policy decisions and political outcomes. And these reactions have varying consequences for governments, depending on how governments have managed their debt profiles. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register

"The Female Economy" by Nena Stoiljkovic Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space WASHINGTON, DC – Today, women own roughly 35% of small and medium-size enterprises in developing countries, and make up approximately 40% of the global workforce. Women’s consumer spending is projected to reach $28 trillion globally in 2014. And yet recent research by the World Bank Group documented discrepancies between treatment of women and men in 102 of 141 countries surveyed – policies and practices that severely limit women’s economic opportunities. Gender-based barriers to investment not only put women at a disadvantage; they also reduce the entire economy’s growth potential. Three fundamental and interrelated gender-specific challenges must be addressed to make countries’ investment climate more woman-friendly. To be sure, the investment climate in some countries is slowly becoming more responsive to women entrepreneurs’ needs. But women entrepreneurs need better access to finance.

"Share the Work" by Barry Eichengreen Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space BERKELEY – The United States today is facing a crisis of long-term unemployment unlike anything it has seen since the 1930’s. Some 40% of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more, which, as US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke noted in a recent speech, is far higher than in any other post-World War II recession. This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. The most famous such study, of the long-term unemployed in New Haven, Connecticut, was conducted by E. For those unfortunate enough to experience it, long-term unemployment – now, as in the 1930’s – is a tragedy. What is not well known, however, is that in the 1930’s, the United States, to a much greater extent than today, succeeded in mitigating these problems. The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic.