“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Riders on the Storm
An examination of Colorado’s mental health care system after the Aurora theater shooting. The state passed a $25 million initiative to restructure its crisis system for mentally ill patients, but still has a lot of work to do: Colorado has underfunded mental health care for decades. Exactly how much is uncertain because there are at […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The 40-Year Slump
A bleak picture of working in the United States. Meyerson points to 1974 as the pivotal year in which worker pay stopped rising in accordance with productivity, and traces all the changes have since wiped out the American middle class: All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Wall Street Isn’t Worth It
Who’s providing the real value in our economy? Quiggin argues that we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss the idea of dramatically shrinking the financial sector, which now makes up more than 20 percent of the U.S. GDP: I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Making Marijuana Legal Might Not Save Police Money
“When legal marijuana goes on sale, sometime next spring, the black market will not simply vanish; over-the-counter pot will have to compete with illicit pot. To support the legal market, Kleiman argued, the state must intensify law-enforcement pressure on people who refuse to play by the new rules. A street dealer will have to be […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Growth of Financial Services in the U.S.
“The financial services sector as a whole accounts for more than 20 percent of US GDP, and this share has grown by around 10 percentage points since the 1970s. Additional expansion has taken place in the business services sector, encompassing law and accounting firms and other outgrowths of a financialized economy. Overall, it seems reasonable […]
Posted inUncategorized
“In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object, valued by how many times it’s been bought—or, in our electronic age, how many times it’s been clicked on. ‘Images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate,’ British philosopher Nina Power observed […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Down Town
The city of Wilmington in Ohio, a “poster child of the Great Recession,” saw its unemployment rate shoot up to 19 percent after DHL, one of its biggest employers, left. The story of how the city is bouncing back: Ironically, Wilmington’s reputation as the face of the recession ended up working in its favor. The […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not
Susan Faludi’s takedown of “Lean In,” and a brief history of feminism and its relationship with capitalism: “In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object”: “In 1834, America’s first industrial wage earners, the ‘mill girls’ of Lowell, Massachusetts, embarked on their […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Like Being in Prison with a Salary’: The Secret World of the Shipping Industry
An excerpt from Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything on the current state of the shipping industry, which often gets underreported despite it driving our global economy: “Yet the invisibility is useful, too. There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive […]
