Search Results for: Economist

A Very European Hero

Longreads Pick

The Economist explores the origins and evolution of Tintin.

Source: The Economist
Published: Dec 18, 2008
Length: 11 minutes (2,842 words)

A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)

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Morning

“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs. Read more…

Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to map a cartography of loneliness. Published in 2012, Laing writes, “What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal.” Four years into my New York experiment, the pang of loneliness has dulled and has been exchanged for a desire to retreat from an overstimulating city with my close friends and a bag of salted caramel.

This brief list takes a dive into the discussion about loneliness and solitude in our contemporary lives—what it is, how we cope, and how it affects our bodies. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, if you have them.

 

1. “American Loneliness” (Emma Healey, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2014)

I’ve been watching MTV’s reality show, Catfish in awe for the past two seasons. I vacillate between heavy feelings of eager empathy and awkward amusement. Healy explores what Catfish reveals about our common loneliness, longing and vulnerabilities as well as how easily we suspend logic in the pursuit of companionship.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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What Lawyers Have In Common With Auto Mechanics and Dentists

Because of its complexity, Hadfield points out, legal help is what economists call a “credence good”—a good “provided by an expert who also determines a buyer’s needs” because the buyer is “unable to assess how much of the good or service they need; nor can they assess whether or not the service was performed or how well.” The classic examples are auto repair and dentistry, but most legal services qualify, too. Just as the average consumer is unable to verify how many cavities he has or how many auto parts he needs replaced, he’s often unable to question a lawyer on just how many hours of lawyering will be sufficient to resolve his problem. The effect is a pernicious lack of transparency “about the actual value of a lawyer.” And since the costs are sunk in the event of a loss, there’s a strong incentive for already-paying clients not to skimp.

The legal profession also operates, Hadfield notes, within what is essentially a “monopoly on coercive dispute resolution”: If you have a legal issue you don’t really much choice about where to go. You have to deal with a system controlled by lawyers, all of whom have come up through the system.

Michael Zuckerman, in The Atlantic, on the challenges of an affordable legal system.

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Opportunity’s Knocks

Longreads Pick

The fastest growing job in America—working as a nurse aide—is also among the hardest. The reporter follows a single mother hoping to find a stable job and build a better life for her family:

“I’m getting desperate, to be honest,” she told her classmates. “I need something good to happen. I’m hoping this might be it.”

Her hope was placed in the fastest-growing job in America – cornerstone of the recovery, what government economists referred to as “the opportunity point” in the greatest economy in the world. It was changing bedpans, pushing wheelchairs, cleaning catheters and brushing teeth. Pay was just better than minimum wage. Burnout rates were among the highest of any career.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 31, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,646 words)

Remembering The Man Who Brought Helvetica To The Masses

This post comes via Longreads contributor Laura Bliss:

In this week’s Economist, a remembrance of “font-god” Mike Parker, the typographer who developed more than 1000 fonts in his 50+ year career. Parker, who died last month at age 84, was a champion of great type: never drawing fonts himself, but rather coaxing others into perfection. His faculty for shape, space, and fine gauge of cultural currents changed the industry, and much more, when Parker brought Helvetica to the masses:

In contrast to the delicate exuberance of 16th-century types, Helvetica was plain, rigidly horizontal – and eminently readable. It became, in Mr. Parker’s hands, the public typeface of the modern world: of the New York Subway, of federal income-tax forms, of the logos of McDonald’s, Microsoft, Apple, Lufthansa and countless others. It was also, for its clarity, the default type of Macs, and so leapt smoothly into the desktop age.

Not everyone liked it. He did not always like it himself; as he roared around Brooklyn or Boston, opera pumping out at full volume from his car, he would constantly spot Helvetica being abused in some way, with rounded terminals or bad spacing, on shopfronts or the sides of trucks. But far from seeing Helvetica as neutral, vanilla, or nondescript, he loved it for the relationship between figure and ground, its firmness, its existence in “a powerful matrix of surrounding space.” Type gave flavour to words: and this was a typeface that gave people confidence in swiftly changing times.

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How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson

I met Nicholas Shaxson last summer at a gay barbecue in Berlin. Shaxson isn’t gay, but he’s the kind of dude who will rock up at a gay barbecue, wife and child in tow, and unself-consciously eat sausage and ribs with the inverts. We discovered, lounging on a blanket, that we both work for small NGOs, live in Berlin, and dabble in journalism. And we both work on issues (me: corporate human rights violations; him: tax havens) that the rest of the world manages to ignore for most of their day.

Last year Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.

Here’s how it works: If you’re a Russian oil billionaire or a Nigerian bureaucro-baron and you want to hide some of your money from national taxes and local scrutiny, London real estate is a great place to stash it. All you need to do is establish a holding company, park it offshore and get a-buying. Here’s Shaxson:

These buyers use offshore companies for three big and related reasons: tax, secrecy, and “asset protection.” A property owned outright becomes subject to various British taxes, particularly capital-gains and taxes on transfers of ownership. But properties held through offshore companies can often avoid these taxes. According to London lawyers, the big reason for using these structures has been to avoid inheritance taxes. […]

But secrecy, for many, is at least as important: once a foreign investor has avoided British taxes, then offshore secrecy gives him the opportunity to avoid scrutiny from his own country’s tax—or criminal—authorities too. Others use offshore structures for “asset protection”—frequently, to avoid angry creditors. That seems to be the case with a company called Postlake Ltd.—registered on the Isle of Man—which owns a $5.6 million apartment on the fourth floor [of One Hyde Park].

Shaxson argues that this phenomenon has taken over the U.K. real estate market—extortionate penthouses for the ultrarich sitting empty while the rest of us outbid each other for the froth below.

Shaxson’s piece was one of the best long-form pieces I read last year (I did in fact believe this before I met him, but you can take that with a grain of salt if you’d like), and last week I asked Shaxson to sit down with me for a proper conversation about how the story came about and whether it achieved what he wanted.

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

Why Hosting the Olympics Makes No Economic Sense

Before the 1990s hosting was usually a low-key affair. Los Angeles was the only bidder for the 1984 Olympics. It funded its games almost entirely with private money, as largely did Atlanta in 1996. Most football World Cups were played in scarcely renovated older stadiums.

But globalisation and new television channels showing sport changed that. Each new host raised the bar, with spiffy new sporting facilities. Politicians, needing to justify the rising cost, claimed that hosting would boost the economy. They invoked hordes of shopaholic visitors, the free advertising of host cities and the long-term benefits of the roads and stadiums that would be built. When Tokyo was named host of the 2020 Olympics, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, said: “I want to make the Olympics a trigger for sweeping away 15 years of deflation and economic decline.”

Yet these claims of economic bonanza are false. Most economists agree that hosting big sporting events is an economic strain, says Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at the University of Michigan, with whom I have co-authored a book.

This is largely because the things a country buys for a sports tournament – stadiums, roads to the stadiums, extensive security – are rarely the things it needs for daily life. Often the venues become white elephants the moment the tournament ends. That happened in South Africa after the World Cup of 2010, and is forecast to happen to many Brazilian stadiums after this year’s tournament. London’s Olympic stadium eventually found a tenant, West Ham United Football Club, but the state is paying most of the costs of revamping the venue.

Simon Kuper, in the Financial Times, on the economics of hosting a major world sporting event. Read more on the Olympics.

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Photo: rapidtravelchai, Flickr

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