Search Results for: economy

Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy

Kevin Bales | Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World | Spiegel & Grau | January 2016 | 34 minutes (9,162 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Blood and Earth, by Kevin Bales, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

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We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones.

It’s never a happy moment when you’re shopping for a tombstone. When death comes, it’s the loss that transcends everything else and most tombstones are purchased in a fog of grief. Death is a threshold for the relatives and friends who live on as well, changing lives in both intense and subtle ways. It’s the most dramatic and yet the most mundane event of a life, something we all do, no exceptions, no passes.

Given the predictability of death it seems strange that Germany has a tombstone shortage. It’s not because they don’t know that people are going to die; it’s more a product of the complete control the government exerts over death and funerals. Everyone who dies must be embalmed before burial, for example, and the cremated can be buried only in approved cemeteries, never scattered in gardens or the sea. Rules abound about funerals and tombstones—even the size, quality, and form of coffins and crypts are officially regulated. All this leads to a darkly humorous yet common saying: “If you feel unwell, take a vacation—you can’t afford to die in Germany.”

Granite for German tombstones used to come from the beautiful Harz Mountains, but now no one is allowed to mine there and risk spoiling this protected national park and favorite tourist destination. So, like France and many other rich countries, including the United States, Germany imports its tombstones from the developing world.

Some of the best and cheapest tombstones come from India. In 2013 India produced 35,342 million tons of granite, making it the world’s largest producer. Add to this a growing demand for granite kitchen countertops in America and Europe, and business is booming. There are more precious minerals of course, but fortunes can be made in granite. In the United States, the average cost of installing those countertops runs from $2,000 to $8,000, but the price charged by Indian exporters for polished red granite is just $5 to $15 per square meter—that comes to about $100 for all the granite your kitchen needs. The markup on tombstones is equally high. The red granite tombstones that sell for $500 to $1,000 in the United States, and more in Europe, are purchased in bulk from India for as little as $50, plus a US import duty of just 3.7 percent.

Leaving aside what this says about the high cost of dying, how can granite be so cheap? The whole point of granite, that it is hard and durable, is also the reason it is difficult to mine and process. It has to be carefully removed from quarries in large thin slabs, so you can’t just go in with dynamite and bulldozers. Careful handling means handwork, which requires people with drills and chisels, hammers and crowbars gently working the granite out of the ground. And in India, the most cost effective way to achieve that is slavery. Read more…

The Assistant Economy

Longreads Pick

The low-paid labor that keeps our most accomplished artists and leaders running on time.

Source: Dissent
Published: Apr 7, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,432 words)

Shut-Ins and the Sharing Economy

Photo by PixaBay

With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, plus the goods and services at reduced cost through Alfred’s hookups. Alfred won first place in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference last year.

Shutting people out is an important part of being a shut-in: When signing up, customers can choose the option of not seeing their Alfred, who will come in when they’re at work. Alfred’s messaging is aimed at sweeping aside any middle-class shame.

“We’re trying to remove the taboo and the guilt that you should have to do it,” says Alfred’s CEO Marcela Sapone over the phone. “We’re empowering you to let others do it for you. You’re the manager of your life. It’s against the stigma of ‘People use this because they’re lazy.’ Absolutely not. They’re using this because they’re extremely busy.”

Lauren Smiley, in an essay for Matter about the “sharing economy,” where anything and everything is now deliverable with a single click. Smiley sees the on-demand economy as less about sharing and more about serving, creating a world where one is either “pampered, isolated royalty,” or a “21st century servant.”

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The Shut-In Economy

Longreads Pick

The “sharing” economy has enabled on-demand everything, but there are drawbacks to a lifestyle where one can have all their needs met with the click of a button.

Source: Matter
Published: Mar 27, 2015
Length: 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Pixel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In The Gig Economy

Longreads Pick

Kessler spends a month trying to make a living wage using new tech platforms like TaskRabbit and Postmates. The results aren’t promising:

My experiences in the gig economy raise troubling issues about what it means to be an employee today and what rights a worker, even on a assignment-by-assignment basis, are entitled to. The laws regarding what constitutes an employee have not yet caught up to the idea that jobs are now being doled out by iPhone push notification.

Source: Fast Company
Published: Mar 18, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,445 words)

Secrets of the Fiction Writing Economy

There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 1,269! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments — though these abound — but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared with other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers — what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts — but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation — of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength — is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

Everyone knows this. But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, California, to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Tallahassee, Florida (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at The New Yorker offices on 42nd Street).

The Art of Fielding author Chad Harbach, in n+1, on the state of the MFA and literary cultures across the U.S.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Post-GMO Economy: Our Longreads Member Pick

Longreads Pick

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to “The Post-GMO Economy,” a new story by Elizabeth Royte that will be published next week by Modern Farmer, in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also now buy Longreads Gift Memberships to send this and other great stories to friends, family or colleagues. 

Source: Modern Farmer
Published: Nov 28, 2013
Length: 6 minutes (1,700 words)

The Post-GMO Economy: Our Longreads Member Pick

Elizabeth Royte | Modern FarmerFERN | December 2013 | 7 minutes (1,700 words)

 

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to “The Post-GMO Economy,” a new story by Elizabeth Royte that will be published next week by Modern Farmer, in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also now buy Longreads Gift Memberships to send this and other great stories to friends, family or colleagues. 

Thanks to Elizabeth Royte, Modern Farmer and FERN for sharing this story, and thanks to the Longreads community for your support.

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As an invulnerable tween, Chris Huegerich, the child of a prosperous farming family, wiped out on his motorcycle in tiny Breda, Iowa. Forty years on, folks still call Huegerich “Crash.” And though he eventually went down a conventional path (married, divorced) and bought out his parents’ farm, Huegerich has recently reverted to his daredevil ways — at least when it comes to choosing what kind of corn to plant.

It’s late November, and Huegerich’s 2,800 acres in central Iowa have been neatly shorn to sepia-and-umber stubble. His enormous combines and cultivators have been precision parked — wheel nut to headlight — inside his equipment sheds. But in Huegerich’s office, between the fields and the sheds, chaos reigns. A dozen dog-eared seed catalogs litter a table, along with marked-up spreadsheets and soil maps. For farmers choosing next year’s crop, this is decision time.

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Photo by erdquadrat, Flickr

The McRib Economy

“The one thing we can say, knowing what we know about the scale of the business, is that McDonald’s would be wise to only introduce the sandwich (MSRP: $2.99) when the pork climate is favorable. With McDonald’s buying millions of pounds of the stuff, a 20 cent dip in the per pound price could make all the difference in the world. McDonald’s has to keep the price of the McRib somewhat constant because it is a product, not a sandwich, and McDonald’s is a supply chain, not a chain of restaurants. Unlike a normal restaurant (or even a small chain), which has flexibility with pricing and can respond to upticks in the price of commodities by passing these costs down to the consumer, McDonald’s has to offer the same exact product for roughly the same price all over the nation: their products must be both standardized and cheap.”

From Willy Staley’s now-classic conspiracy theory about the McDonald’s McRib sandwich, in the Awl.

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Photo: ruocaled, Flickr

The End of Illth: In Search of an Economy That Won’t Kill Us

Longreads Pick

The writer looks at a network of worker-owned businesses in Cleveland called Evergreen Cooperatives, which has created environmentally sustainable jobs in low-income neighborhoods and a work environment that gives workers real input into company decisions and a share of the profits:

“While about 11,000 U.S. companies offer some form of employee stock ownership, far fewer give workers real input into decisions. OCS operated on a one-worker/one-vote model, for everyone from the CEO to the newest hire. They all gathered at 7:30 on Monday mornings to discuss company business. ‘It’s like we’re part of the board,’ Bey told me. ‘We don’t look at Steve as a superior. He’s equivalent to us.’ And Kiel was paid accordingly, at least compared with the average American CEO, who makes 300 times more than the average employee at his firm. OCS’s bylaws, Kiel told me, stipulated that the highest-paid member of the cooperative could never be paid more than five times the earnings of the lowest-paid member.

“After a six-month apprenticeship period, OCS employees could apply to join the broader Evergreen Cooperatives. If voted in, they received a $3 per hour raise and began buying into the company through a payroll deduction of 50 cents per hour. In about three years, this would add up to $3,000, an ownership stake that, based on the co-op’s projections, could be worth $65,000 in another six years. (Median household income in the neighborhood is $18,000.) Still, Bey told me, ‘Being an owner is nice, but it isn’t the most important thing. We’re a team, and for a team to win, it has to be profitable. So everybody has to do the best they can to help the team. That’s what makes it work.'”

Author: Erik Reece
Published: Oct 4, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,710 words)