women in the workforce

337 results back to index


pages: 241 words: 78,508

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Although pundits and politicians, usually male, often claim that motherhood is the most important and difficult work of all, women who take time out of the workforce pay a big career penalty. Only 74 percent of professional women will rejoin the workforce in any capacity, and only 40 percent will return to full-time jobs.14 Those who do rejoin will often see their earnings decrease dramatically. Controlling for education and hours worked, women’s average annual earnings decrease by 20 percent if they are out of the workforce for just one year.15 Average annual earnings decline by 30 percent after two to three years,16 which is the average amount of time that professional women off-ramp from the workforce.17 If society truly valued the work of caring for children, companies and institutions would find ways to reduce these steep penalties and help parents combine career and family responsibilities.

I have heard these criticisms in the past and I know that I will hear them—and others—in the future. My hope is that my message will be judged on its merits. We can’t avoid this conversation. This issue transcends all of us. The time is long overdue to encourage more women to dream the possible dream and encourage more men to support women in the workforce and in the home. We can reignite the revolution by internalizing the revolution. The shift to a more equal world will happen person by person. We move closer to the larger goal of true equality with each woman who leans in. 1 The Leadership Ambition Gap What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

Almost all of my male classmates work in professional settings. Some of my female classmates work full-time or part-time outside the home, and just as many are stay-at-home mothers and volunteers like my mom. This mirrors the national trend. In comparison to their male counterparts, highly trained women are scaling back and dropping out of the workforce in high numbers.1 In turn, these diverging percentages teach institutions and mentors to invest more in men, who are statistically more likely to stay. Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the first woman to serve as president of an Ivy League university, once remarked to an audience of women my age, “My generation fought so hard to give all of you choices.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

In the United States, for every two men who will receive a BA this year, for example, three women will do the same. Of the fifteen job categories projected to grow the most in the United States over the next decade, twelve are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the US economy is becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: Professional women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill. Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and women making all the decisions.

The 2010 sitcom season was populated by out-of-work husbands, meek boyfriends, stay-at-home dads, killer career wives, and a couple of men who have to dress up like women in order to get a job. For the first time, a slew of new sitcoms were shot with the premise that women go out to work while men stay home to take care of the house, stock the refrigerator with low-fat yogurt, or pretend to be taking care of the baby while watching a hockey game. “Women are taking over the workforce. Soon they’ll have all the money, and the power, and they’ll start getting rid of men,” laments one character in a new show called Work It. “They’ll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves.” For the last few years, romantic comedies, sitcoms, and advertising have been producing endless variations on what Jessica Grose at Slate dubbed the “omega male,” who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack.

Traditionally feminine attributes, like empathy, patience, and communal problem-solving, began to replace the top-down autocratic model of leadership and success. For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men. Upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, filling the ever-growing ranks of the creative class—publicity assistant, wine critic, trail mix creator, sustainability consultant, screenwriter. And that, in turn, creates an industry of jobs based on the things those women used to do for free—child care, food preparation, elder care.


pages: 445 words: 122,877

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin

coronavirus, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, financial independence, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, job automation, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, occupational segregation, old-boy network, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, remote working, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

But, as I noted then, Group Five includes women who are even younger, and its end date is not yet clear. 222  “Pandemic Will ‘Take Our Women 10 Years Back’ …”    Amanda Taub, “Pandemic Will ‘Take Our Women 10 Years Back’ in the Workplace,” New York Times, September 26, 2020. 222  “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers,”    Patricia Cohen and Tiffany Hsu, “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers,” New York Times, June 3, 2020. 222  “How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward.”    Julie Kashen, Sarah Jane Glynn, and Amanda Novello,“How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward,” Center for American Progress, October 30, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/10/30/492582/covid-19-sent-womens-workforce-progress-backward/. 222  “… you’re allowed only a kid or a job.”    Deb Perelman, “In the Covid-19 Economy You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” New York Times, July 2, 2020.

Some in Group Three must have been caught by surprise as states changed their divorce laws to “unilateral,” meaning either member of the couple could dissolve the marriage. Women who had specialized in the home and had scant job experience would have had little bargaining power in their households. Most of the women in Group Three who left the workforce when they had children later returned in a variety of positions, especially as teachers and office workers. Most are not familiar names, but some who eventually found their métier are. They include Erma Bombeck, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Grace Napolitano, and, ironically, Phyllis Schlafly, who made a career of trying to curtail other women’s careers.

The other includes the men and women in the graduating class of 1961. Class of 1957 In January 1958, the Women’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor surveyed a sample of the June 1957 graduating class of women. A follow-up survey of these women was taken seven years later, motivated by concerns that some college-graduate women who had left the workforce for a time to raise children were finding reentry difficult and might need additional training. The initial survey of the 1957 class, done six months after their graduation, obtained completed responses for about six thousand graduates. Since eighty-eight thousand women received a bachelor’s degree in June 1957, the number of surveys collected was fully 7 percent of the total class.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Brazil is one of the countries where the growing imbalance between workers and retirees most threatens the shaky edifice of Bismarckian retirement systems. On this front too governments are struggling to keep up with the effects of the depopulation bomb. What Happened to Women in the Workforce? The worldwide movement of women into the workforce that energized much of the postwar era has stagnated in the past twenty years, with the average female labor force participation rate stuck at around 50 percent. Typically women participate in the labor force at a very high rate in poor rural countries, where feeding the family requires all hands to work in the fields.

Womenomics includes improving childcare services and parental leave, cutting the “marriage penalty” that taxes a family’s second earner at a higher rate, and encouraging Japanese corporations to put more women in executive positions. During the first three years of Abe’s term, some eight hundred thousand women entered the workforce, and he claimed his campaign was also pushing more women into corner office jobs. In Canada, an effort to open doors to women produced quick results. Only 68 percent of Canadian women participated in the workforce in 1990; two decades later that figure had increased to 74 percent, largely on the back of reforms including tax cuts for second earners and new childcare services. An even more dramatic boom in the number of working women came in the Netherlands, where the female labor participation rate has doubled since 1980 to 74 percent today, as a result of expanded parental leave policies and the spread of flexible, part-time working arrangements.

The cultural barriers are real but not insurmountable. Latin America, which has a reputation for harboring some of the world’s most macho cultures, is also making rapid gains in bringing women into the workforce. Between 1990 and 2013 only five countries increased their female labor force participation rate by more than 10 percentage points, and all were Latin countries. In first place was Colombia, where the share of adult women active in the workforce rose by 26 percentage points, followed by Peru, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico. The reasons for this boom are complex, but one is that Latin educational systems have opened up to women; in Colombia, Profamilia, a private group founded in the 1970s by wealthy women, has played a major role.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

To Toffler, the nuclear family represents “the second wave” of human existence, which is being replaced by a more flexible “third wave” lifestyle.126 “Just as the nuclear family was promoted by the rise of the factory and office work,” Toffler suggests, “any shift away from the factory or the office would also exert a heavy influence on the family.”127 Family ties have also been undermined by the fierce competition of this highly globalized “third wave” economy. Firms often demand long hours of their workers in order to keep up with their rivals or to meet the demands of clients and customers. Increasingly, many of these workers are women. This has an inevitable effect on birth rates and the nature of families. Women’s growing involvement in the workforce, notes author Stephanie Coontz, has been necessary for decades in order for couples to afford children, but it also makes it more difficult for them to raise them.128 This rise of female participation in the workforce has been widespread not only in the United States but also in Europe and most especially in eastern Asia.

See also Suburbs in Britain, 148–149 and changes in US suburbs, 156–158 and class warfare in suburbs, 147–148 as common reality, 6 economics of, 183–185 evolution of, 143–145 globalization of, 153–155 and homeownership, 151–153 human city approach to, 167–168 of jobs, 9 as model for future urban growth, 76–77 and multiracial suburbs in other countries, 158–159 and social stability/cohesion, 160–164 and suburbs as “new slums,” 159–160 and suburbs as place for families, 164–167 trend toward, 14–15 in United States, 149–151 and war against suburbia, 145–147 Duany, Andrés, 10, 161 Dubai, 81, 82, 85, 97, 100 Dubai-Sharjah, 87–88 Durham, 9 Düsseldorf, 196 E Earnshaw, Martin, 139 Easterbrook, Gregg, 2 Eastern Asia birth rates in, 15 fertility rate in, 16 middle class move to periphery, 116 post-familialism in, 119–122, 130, 133 secularism in, 126 women in workforce in, 135 in world economy, 8 Eastern Europe, 35, 138 Ebbsfleet, 197 Eberstadt, Nicholas, 123–124 Eco-cities, 10 Economic growth, 1, 51, 76–77 Economy “connected” cities in, 84–85 employment locations, 8–9 future role of central city in, 185–186 home-based, 187–189 in new consumer cities, 37–38 “third wave,” 135 Ectopia (Callenbach), 194 Ecuador, 53 Education, 165–166 Ehrlich, Paul, 194 Emerging Cities Outlook (A.

Kearney), 55 Employment dispersion of, 184–185 in global cities, 82 and immigration of skilled workers, 99 in innovative firms, 8–9 in Mumbai, 64 in new consumer cities, 36–39 plutonomy structure for, 39–40 shifted to rural areas, 74 STEM jobs, 8–9 in technology, 185 in transactional cities, 32 Enclosure Act of 1801 (Britain), 27 EnergyAustralia, 10–11 Engelen, Theo, 129 Engels, Friedrich, 27–28, 58 England, garden cities in, 29 English language, 83 Entertainment, 38 Environmental issues, 9–11 adjusting to environmental change, 196 air pollution, 66–67 greener suburbs, 189–191 greenhouse gas emissions, 10–11, 190 urban heat island effect, 190–191 Erdoǧan, Recep Tayyip, 13 Estonia, 138 Ethnicity(-ies) in Dutch cities, 26 and homeownership, 160 in suburbs, 156–159 in US cities, 156–157 Europe carbon emissions in, 190 city squares in, 22–23 colonialism by, 60–61 connecting regions in, 185 desire for children in, 180 dispersion in, 154–155 emigration from, 86 glamour zones in, 81 housing affordability in, 133, 160 immigrants to, 98 improved sanitation in, 116 inequality in cities of, 95 infrastructure of, 67 megacities in, 52 middle class move to periphery, 116 migration to, 137–138 millennial living preferences in, 172 post-familialism in, 117–119, 133 renovation of cities in, 59, 60 secularism in, 125–126 Singaporean immigrants from, 99 suburbs as “new slums” in, 159 women in workforce in, 135 workforce in, 138 Everyday life, 2, 19–47 and geography of inequality, 39–42 in the human city, 45–47 in imperial cities, 23–25 in industrial cities, 26–28 and move to suburbs, 28–31, 162 in new consumer cities, 36–38 in producer cities, 25–26 religion and culture in ancient cities, 21–22 sacred space in, 21–23 in socialist cities, 32–36 and sustainability, 20, 43–45 in transactional cities, 31–32, 42–43 Expanding city, 6, 193.


pages: 318 words: 93,502

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

No, the real solution lies elsewhere—in addressing the reasons behind the bidding war and helping all families, both dual- and single-income, to get some relief. The Two-Income Trap is thick with irony. Middle-class mothers went into the workforce in a calculated effort to give their families an economic edge. Instead, millions of them are now in the workplace just so their families can break even. At a time when women are getting college diplomas and entering the workforce in record numbers, their families are in more financial trouble than ever. Partly these women were the victims of bad timing: Despite general economic prosperity, the risks facing their families jumped considerably. Partly they were the victims of optimistic myopia: They saw the rewards a working mother could bring, without seeing the risks associated with that newfound income.

Having Children, Going Broke This book will tell the story of how having children has become the dividing line between the solvent and the insolvent, and how today’s parents are working harder than ever and falling desperately behind even with two incomes. It is also the story of how this state of affairs is not some unavoidable feature of the modern economy, or, for that matter, the inevitable by-product of women’s entry into the workforce. We write this book so that Ruth Ann and all the mothers like Ruth Ann, along with politicians and pundits, child advocates and labor organizers, pro-family conservatives and liberal feminists, will take a serious look at the economic forces that have battered the American family. We want them to see the hard numbers—and to gasp.

Similarly, a modern mother with a three-month-old infant is more likely to be working outside the home than was a 1960s woman with a five-year-old child.55 As a claims adjuster with two children told us, “It never even occurred to me not to work, even after Zachary was born. All the women I know have a job.” Even these statistics understate the magnitude of change among middle-class mothers. Before the 1970s, large numbers of older women, lower-income women, and childless women were in the workforce.56 But middle-class mothers were far more likely to stay behind, holding on to the more traditional role of full-time homemaker long after many of their sisters had given it up. Over the past generation, middle-class mothers flooded into offices, shops, and factories, undergoing a greater increase in workforce participation than either their poor or their well-to-do sisters.57 Attitudes changed as well.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

With these considerations in mind, we can see today a number of value differences both within and between countries where those differences seem highly contingent. Antiabortion attitudes are strongest, and the laws against abortion strictest, in the Catholic countries of Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vatican City, and Malta.76 For women’s workforce participation, though there’s a weak U-shaped trend with respect to GDP per capita (with the poorest and richest countries more likely to have greater workforce participation), there is an enormous amount of variation across countries. Muslim-majority countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have particularly low levels of female labour force participation, though of course there are exceptions, such as Kazakhstan.

Muslim-majority countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have particularly low levels of female labour force participation, though of course there are exceptions, such as Kazakhstan. Figure 3.3. Proportion of women age fifteen and older who were economically active in 2019 against national per-capita income (adjusted for price differences between countries). Women’s workforce participation is reflected in cultural attitudes, too: Egypt and Peru both have a GDP per capita of about $12,000, but in Egypt about 80 percent of people think men have more right to a job than women do and fewer than 20 percent of women participate in the labour force, while in Peru only about 20 percent of people think men have more right to a job than women do and 70 percent of women participate in the labour force.77 Attitudes towards new biomedical technologies such as cloning and genetic enhancement vary substantially across countries, too.

increasing scientific research efforts, 152 maintaining the Long Peace, 114 moral motivation during periods of, 160 predicting stagnation, 150 the slowing rate of technological advances, 145–150, 155 theories of abolition, 70 economic status COVID-19 pandemic, 107 effects of immigration on, 93 the risks of great power conflict, 115 UK’s foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, 109 education: corporal punishment, 53 effective altruism, 237, 239–240, 242–243 efflorescences, 143–145 egalitarianism, 206–207 Egypt: women’s workforce participation, 62 80,000 Hours, 235, 238, 244 Einstein, Albert, 151 Eltis, David, 66 emulation, AGI using, 83 energy production civilisational collapse through fossil fuel depletion, 139 climate change progress, 134–136 deaths per TWh of electricity production, 25(fig.) engineered pandemics, 26, 36, 112–113, 162, 242.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Sociologist Paula England called it in the 2010 paper “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled”: “Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs.” At the same time women were joining the workforce, from the 1960s onward, men have been leaving the workforce, partly because the population has been aging. So in January 2020, with unemployment at a fifty-year low, women crossed over 50 percent of the paid workforce. This was hailed as a milestone and a sign of greatly equal things to come. Then lockdowns put the economy into a medically induced coma. Women lost just over half of the jobs that vanished in March and April 2020, the first recession in US history where women lost most of the jobs.

DAD SOS The other part that I’m still stewing over is the part where 97 percent of the married heterosexual cisgender dads are MIA in this. Biden, or any president, can’t fix that. The unequal division of domestic labor during the pandemic, as women were driven from the workforce, occurred even in countries that had a decent safety net for caregivers. In Australia, nearly a tenth of women exited the workforce. In the UK, mothers with small children were 10 percentage points more likely than fathers to lose their jobs. In Japan, women lost jobs at nearly twice the rate of men. In Germany, one-third of families relied exclusively on mothers as caregivers when other options were closed, whereas just 4 to 6 percent relied on fathers.

The proposal was for a national network of federally funded childcare centers open to all families on a sliding scale. “Because the focus was on children… I assumed this would not be a controversial bill,” Mondale recalled. Hahahaha, that’s a sweet thought, guy. It was the dawn of second-wave feminism. Women were streaming into the workforce. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was ascendant. So why did this proposal fall flat? Anna Danziger Halperin, a historian at the New-York Historical Society, has done some provocative work on what happened. NOW’s advocacy for the Child Development Act was limited in part by budget; these were volunteer-run organizations using the boss’s phone lines and copy machines after hours.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

In line with his thesis, recent evidence suggests that kinship ties do indeed differ significantly across Italian regions, as they do more generally across countries. Likewise, tighter nuclear family bonds do tend to adversely affect levels of social trust, political participation, the status of women in the workforce and geographic mobility.[17] And since, as the Nobel Prize–winning American economist Kenneth Arrow noted, business deals often rely on trust while its absence harms trade, lower levels of trust outside of the family setting might have diminished the level of economic development in southern Italy compared to the north.[18] But how did these differences in trust levels and family ties emerge in the first place?

Indeed, based on a survey conducted by the Afrobarometer across sub-Saharan African countries, there appears to be a substantial gap in levels of interpersonal trust between areas affected by the slave trade and those that were spared, more than a century after that trade came to an end.[22] Yet, the persistence of cultural traits is perhaps most clearly observable among migrants and their descendants. As you would expect, adaptation to a sudden change in environmental conditions and governing institutions can be a lengthy process. Among migrants into Europe and North America, attitudes towards women’s role in the workforce and children’s independence, for example, converge quite rapidly with those that prevail in the settled local population; however, when it comes to religious beliefs and moral values, even fourth-generation immigrants to these areas tend to maintain part of their traditional native culture.[23] This adaptation gap may reflect the fact that some cultural values do not have a significant impact on economic prosperity and so the incentive for rapid cultural adaptation is limited; in these circumstances, individuals are more likely to preserve their parental values and traditions.

Evidence from Chinese regions suggests that the suitability of land for the cultivation of rice – which requires large-scale and therefore shared irrigation systems – has contributed to more collectivist, interdependent culture, whereas land that is suitable for the cultivation of wheat, which requires a lower degree of cooperation, has contributed to the emergence of more individualistic cultures.[33] Likewise, comparison between countries suggests that land suited to more labour-intensive crops is also associated with the emergence of more collectivist cultures.[34] Gender Roles One of the key drivers of the transition from stagnation to growth was the greater number of women entering the paid workforce. Industrialisation was a primary cause, and the resulting decline in the gender wage gap incentivised smaller families and hastened the demographic transition. But the prevailing attitude of different societies towards gender roles was also – and continues to be – an important factor, fostering women’s arrival in the workplace and the development process in some places and hindering it in others.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Only 37% of tech start-ups had a woman on the board in 2020 (SVB Women in Technology Report). According to a 2019 EQUALS research report, overall, women make up between 17% and 20% of humans involved in AI, computing, and tech. Software engineers are mostly male, at a ratio of 80% to 20%. In the hugely influential, and profitable, gaming industry, women make up at best 24% of the workforce overall, but that figure disguises the low number of women on the tech side, and is boosted by graphics and writing. Chinese gaming giant Tencent has no women on its executive team (Forbes). Women graduates in STEM subjects account for about 36% of intake worldwide. But for women who go on to work in STEM subjects, that figure drops to about 25%.

The firing tables used complex equations to evaluate fixed and variable conditions – such as the effect of wind on a moving missile. Women with maths degrees were hired as human computers – literally meaning someone who does a computation. The women were given paper, a pen, and a calculator. It took around 40 hours to establish each trajectory. This wasn’t an entirely new departure for American women. In the 1880s a fully female workforce was employed by the Harvard Astronomy Department. Even earlier in time, in Britain, the first woman to have worked as a ‘computer’ was Mary Edwards. During the 1770s Mary calculated astronomical positions for the Admiralty. Without such information ships could not plot their course.

In the 1980s a young computer programmer called Kathy Kleiman came across an old photo of the ENIAC and tried to find out who the women were. An employee at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, told her they were ‘refrigerator ladies’, a term for models draped around a product to help it sell. * * * As in the UK, programming was seen as a version of clerical work. In the USA, though, women stayed in the workforce. In 1967, the legendary computer genius Grace Hopper wrote an article in Cosmopolitan magazine, urging women to study programming: ‘Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.’ It was Grace Hopper who pulled a moth out of Harvard’s malfunctioning room-sized computer back in 1947 and who wrote in her notes, ‘First actual case of bug being found.’


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

High divorce rates combined with longer life spans means a greater likelihood of women’s reentering the dating market. In fact, according to a 2004 survey conducted by AARP, 66 percent of “late-life divorces”—those that occur in a couple’s 40s, 50s, or 60s—are initiated by the women, not the men. Women’s success in the workforce means that some women want a man with a less developed career—so that he can move if she needs to, and perhaps be their kids’ primary caretaker. (Of course, men have pursued that arrangement for years.) But according to Valerie Gibson, it’s all about sex. A woman’s sexual peak is more aligned with that of the younger man.

(For many, the discovery is not so subtle: In another survey, by Hotjobs, a remarkable 44 percent of respondents said they’ve actually caught co-workers “getting amorous” on the job.) But the bottom line is: No one really minds. Fully 75 percent of workers think that romantic and sexual relationships between co-workers—at least if they are peers—are totally okay. Why the surge? In the long term, it’s of course because of the growing equality of men and women in the workforce. The gap has been steadily closing for decades. In the shorter term, it has to do with the rise of working singles. There are more of them than ever in the workforce (up 22 percent since 1995), and singles aged 25–34 are working more hours per week than they used to—up about 8 percent since 1970.

(Finance and technology, much more dominated by men, are the least likely fields to spawn a fling.) I’m the CEO of a public relations firm and the president of a consulting firm. I am proud to say we have had several interoffice marriages that started as office romances, so a lot of good can come from this—now that men and women are in the workforce with greater equality, and can find people at work with similar skills and interests. We’re not alone in having nurtured office romances into long-term love. In a 2006 study by the Society for Human Resource Management, over 60 percent of the HR professionals interviewed said that romances in their offices had resulted in marriage.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Starting in 1970, the number of women in schools of law and medicine steadily increased, until eventually men and women began to graduate from both in equal numbers. In 1984, the year the Macintosh was unveiled, women in tech reached a high point, receiving almost 40 percent of computer science degrees. Unfortunately, that’s when women’s progress in tech suddenly stalled. By that time, women were entering the workforce in droves, and the growing tech industry could have drawn on that influx of smart and ambitious women to staff its expansion. Just as computers began to head into the mainstream, however, women’s participation in the field started to plummet. Today women earn just 22 percent of computer science degrees, a number that has remained basically flat for a decade.

According to recent data, women hold a mere quarter of computing jobs in the United States, down from 36 percent in 1991. The numbers are actually worse at big companies such as Google and Facebook. In 2017, women at Google accounted for 31 percent of jobs overall and only 20 percent of vital technical roles. At Facebook, women make up 35 percent of the total workforce and 19 percent of technical jobs. The statistics are downright depressing for women of color: black women hold 3 percent of computing jobs, and Latina women hold 1 percent. Additionally, this small percentage of women employed in the field don’t necessarily stick with it; women are leaving jobs in technology and engineering more than twice as fast as their male peers.

Then, in 2017, as reports of unwanted advances piled up, women across industries and backgrounds banded together on social media to speak up in a #MeToo campaign. In this moving outpouring, women—including prominent women in technology—shared personal stories of sexual harassment and assault. “I know that so many women in the workforce—and for me, especially in the early years—deal with unwanted advances and harassment the best we can,” Sheryl Sandberg posted on Facebook. “We know that at its core this is about power no one should have over anyone.” While such cases make headlines, there is another type of discrimination in the industry that exists in a subtler, more ambient form, not unlike the attitudes that led to the selection of Lena’s image that turned her into an industry icon.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Lewis argued that “woman gains freedom from drudgery, is emancipated from the seclusion of the household, and gains at last the chance to be a full human being, exercising her mind and her talents in the same way as men.” But if development opened a new set of options for women, the addition of women to the workforce contributed to shape the path of development. Women brought to the workforce a different set of skills that eased the shift from heavy industry to service-based economies in the rich nations of the West. Of equal importance, as women increased their clout over decisions about household investments and expenditures, they helped usher in vast social and economic changes that profoundly altered Western civilization.

For instance, women’s growing clout contributed to the spread of the no-fault, unilateral divorce in the 1970s. The change, which lowered the cost of ending a marriage, increased women’s incentive to work as a form of economic insurance in case it ended. Women’s labor supply grew sharply throughout the twentieth century. In 1920 less than 10 percent of married women aged thirty-five to forty-four were in the workforce. By 1945 the share was around 20 percent. Women’s educational attainment also grew by leaps and bounds. Outside the American South, high school graduation rates for women jumped fivefold from 1910 to 1938, to 56 percent. This produced a stream of qualified workers prepared for the new clerical jobs opening up across the economy.

By 2008, the graduation ratio had flipped to 1.34 women for each man. And most of these highly educated women worked. In 2000, women accounted for some 40 percent of first-year graduate students in business, and about half of those in medicine and the law. About 60 percent of American women of working age are in the formal workforce, either holding a job or looking for one. This is still about 11 percentage points below men’s labor participation. But it is 15 percentage points above women’s share forty years ago. Differences remain in men’s and women’s positions in the workplace. In 2009, women’s median income had risen to about 80 percent of that of men.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Blau, “Trends in the Well-Being of American Women,” Journal of Economic Literature, March 1998: 112–65) estimated that about 45 percent of women comparable to Kurtzig in age, educational level, race, and marriage status (with a working spouse at home) were in the workforce. 5. “Women in the Workforce,” 2009 Census presentation at https://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/women_workforce_slides.pdf. Ninety-eight percent of women-owned businesses in 1972 were sole proprietorships. Discussion and Comments on the Major Issues Facing Small Business: A Report of the Select Committee on Small Business, United States Senate to the Delegates of the White House Conference on Small Business, Dec. 4, 1979: 55. 6.

Her commission check from GE, due at the end of the year, would be about $2,000. She could stake her new business with that, and if she ran through the money without making any more, she would fold the company and find a new sales job. The second concern was tougher. In the early 1970s, women made up roughly 40 percent of the workforce but only 1 percent of engineers4 and 17 percent of managers5 at any level. Helen Reddy’s song with its smash opening line “I am woman, hear me roar” had been released several months earlier, but in fields like the one Kurtzig was proposing to enter, there were few women to roar.

., 59, 81, 168, 230 New Yorker, 246, 351 New York Stock Exchange, 4–5, 317 New York Times, 133, 157, 172, 187, 257, 264n, 347, 371 NeXT, 372 Nintendo, 348 Nixon, Richard, 37, 120, 143, 158 NLS (oNLine System), 24 Nobel Prize, 133, 144, 188, 190, 193, 258, 263–64 Noyce, Robert, xi, 51, 54, 126n–27n, 129, 149, 190n, 235, 254n, 285, 302 Nutting Associates, 116 Office of Naval Research, 58 Opalka, Josephine, 138–40, 204 “Open Letter to Hobbyists” (Gates), 212 Oracle, 38, 78, 185, 364, 371 orchards, 4, 43, 46, 49, 149, 180, 370 order-processing systems, 148–49, 247 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), 186 Ornstein, Severo, 95, 100 Orwell, George, 158 Osborne Computer, 358 Oshman, Ken, 44–46, 165, 319–22, 371 Packard, David, xi, 86, 254n, 255 packet switching, 21 PAC-MAN game, 345 Page, Larry, xii, 351 Pake, George, 94–95, 101, 217–23, 335–39 Palevsky, Max, 93n, 101 Palo Alto, Calif., 74, 80–84, 89, 93, 179, 207, 216–18, 221, 225, 235, 334, 342, 369 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), xii–xiii Pake as director of, 94–95, 101, 217–21 Scientific Data Systems and, 90, 93, 101–2, 149, 215, 249 Sun technology and, 364 and women in workforce, 99–101 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Computer Science Laboratory at, 89–106, 146, 157, 213–14, 215–24, 285, 289 Alto system and, 92, 101–6, 141, 146, 215–17, 221–24, 285–88, 334 “dealer” meetings at, 99–103, 226, 340 personal computers and, 91–92, 101–6 paperless office, 224 Patent and Trademark Office, U.S., 144 patents, 59–62, 112, 132–37, 142–44, 157, 187–89, 257, 263, 349, 374 Peddle, Chuck, 212n People’s Park, 33–35, 55–56, 211, 226 peripheral devices, 209–10, 230, 246 Perkins, Tom, 128, 190–93, 197, 200–201, 254–60, 263 personal computers, xii, xv, 74, 91, 101–6, 141, 148, 213, 231, 239, 246–50, 269, 285, 301–3, 358, 366 pharmaceutical companies, 189, 235, 256–58, 266, 375 Philco-Ford, 58–59 pinball machines, 109, 113–14, 117–18, 273 Pitfall!


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Dying jobs Shorthand secretary Switchboard operator Receptionist Bookbinder Printer Typist Supermarket cashier Photo processor Tollbooth operator Video store owner Call center operator Data entry clerk Record store manager Fighter pilot Newspaper delivery boy Freight handler Butcher Baker Candlestick maker Translator Unskilled agricultural worker Computer operator Elevator operator Errand boy Mail clerk/post boy Order clerk Train driver Bank teller Travel agent Blacksmith Roof thatcher Cinema projectionist Women at work This last factor is especially significant. A generation or two ago women were largely absent from the workforce in many countries or were restricted to relatively menial jobs. Furthermore, this revolution has taken place with relatively little friction. A few nations defy the trend, but skills shortages and aging populations will almost certainly result in even more women being brought into the workforce in the future. Why has this happened? One reason is political, but a stronger factor has been the expansion of higher education. What are the implications of more women at work?

The list of factors impacting on work is a long one, and includes: globalization, automation, digitalization, artificial intelligence, workforce aging, skilled labor shortages, job mobility, open collaboration, outsourcing, transparency, business ethics, educational practices, regulatory changes, fluid networks, resource shortages, climate change, shifts in organizational structures and the impact of more women in the workforce. Dying jobs Shorthand secretary Switchboard operator Receptionist Bookbinder Printer Typist Supermarket cashier Photo processor Tollbooth operator Video store owner Call center operator Data entry clerk Record store manager Fighter pilot Newspaper delivery boy Freight handler Butcher Baker Candlestick maker Translator Unskilled agricultural worker Computer operator Elevator operator Errand boy Mail clerk/post boy Order clerk Train driver Bank teller Travel agent Blacksmith Roof thatcher Cinema projectionist Women at work This last factor is especially significant.

Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank, estimates that in Italy and Spain, increasing the number of women in work to a level comparable to men would boost GDP by 21 percent and 19 percent respectively. As a result, expect to see a growth in flexible contracts and conditions and more focus on intuition and empathy. The rising numbers of women in workforces may very well lead to lower pay too: women are often in areas where work is poorly paid and in some instances pay drops to fit the number of women available to do the work. “The underlying source of anguish for many people in work today is an antiquated system of employment and management designed for an industrial age.”


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Table Ba393-400, Ba406-413, Aa226-237, Aa260-271, http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/HSUS EntryServlet; 2000–2010: Statistical Abstract of the United States 2012 (SAUS) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), Table 7 and 587. See also Gordon, 2016, figure 8-1. Clearly, the increase in the numbers of women entering the workforce was not just due to the labor-saving impact of technology. Cultural and social factors also played an enormous role, but they are beyond the scope of this book. What’s evident is that many women entered the workforce despite the continuing pressure on women to stay at home, and technology made it easier for them to do so. Just as the mechanization of in-home production increased the supply of women able and willing to enter the labor market, office machines increased the demand for them.

Just as the mechanization of in-home production increased the supply of women able and willing to enter the labor market, office machines increased the demand for them. Like the typewriter, which first appeared in 1874, office machines spawned large offices and sparked an early ascent of women in the clerical workforce. Writing in Scientific American, Vincent E. Giuliano explained: With the typewriter came an increase in the size of offices and in their number, in the number of people employed in them and in the variety of their jobs. There were also changes in the social structure of the office. For example, office work had remained a male occupation even after some women had been recruited into factories.

The computer revolution, which has also been an underlying facilitator of globalization, has meant diminishing opportunity for the unskilled across the board: routine work is now disappearing in parts of the developing world as well.48 In America, this process has been going on for decades, yet it was hidden by other factors. Though many blue-collar men have seen their incomes decline in real terms, family incomes were still rising for some, as more and more women joined the workforce. Women helped offset the work deficit among men up until 2000, when the growth in female labor force participation was reversed. But there was still another source of relief: the everyday consequences of technological change for the middle class were counterbalanced by subsidized mortgages for low-income households, which meant that consumption was broadly unaffected even as incomes fell.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

WOMEN LEFT BEHIND Ginni Rometty and Mary Barra made it to the very top of the business hierarchy, where women and minorities are still relatively scarce. The pandemic also exposed some deep inequities that exist for women further down the ladder. About 55 percent of job losses from COVID in 2020 were suffered by women, and more than two million women disappeared from the paid workforce during that time. Women also accounted for a majority of frontline workers in deeply affected industries like retail, food service, hospitality, and health care, and also picked up a disproportionate share of the additional loads of schoolwork, housework, and elderly care. Projections based on economic scenarios modeled by McKinsey and Oxford Economics estimate that employment for women may not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2024—two full years after a recovery for men.

According to the 2020 Women in the Workplace study coauthored by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, one in four women are now considering leaving the workplace or downshifting their careers.5 While the stressors they experience aren’t limited to those affecting parents, a massive increase in caregiving responsibilities at home and at work jeopardizes women’s ability to stay in the workforce and progress. Forty percent of mothers (compared to 27 percent of fathers) have added three or more additional hours of caregiving a day to their schedules—the equivalent of a part-time job. This extra burden affects women at all levels, but those in senior roles feel an additional pressure to be “always on.”

And the thing that surprised me while I was in my final years at PepsiCo, and most certainly now, post-PepsiCo, is all the talk about the future of work, the future of offices. Everyone talks about hybrid work, automation, remote work, technology, disruption. But the word family and helping young families and women balance family and work seems to be absent.” This pains Nooyi because we need women in the workforce. “Women are getting all the top degrees—they are wicked smart. They are graduating in larger numbers. They want economic freedom, and the country needs their talents. At the same time, women are also primary family builders. We want them to build families too, if they want to. Somehow the fact that we need young women to do both doesn’t enter the equation at all.


pages: 277 words: 80,703

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In this context, my first objective is to show that the globalization of the world economy has caused a major crisis in the social reproduction of populations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and that a new international division of labor has been built on this crisis that harnesses the labor of women from these regions for the reproduction of the “metropolitan” workforce. This means that women across the world are being “integrated” in the world economy as producers of workers not only for the local economies, but for the industrialized countries as well, in addition to producing cheap commodities for global export. I argue that this global restructuring of reproductive work opens a crisis in feminist politics, as it introduces new divisions among women that undermine the possibility of international feminist solidarity and threaten to reduce feminism to a vehicle for the rationalization of the world economic order.

Coalition of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). http://www.cosatu.org.za/shop/shop1006-08.html. Cobble, Dorothy Sue, ed. The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Cock, Jacklyn. “Trapped Workers: The Case of Domestic Servants in South Africa.” In Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and in the Workforce, edited by Sharon B. Stichter and Jane L. Parpart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988. Cohen, Roberta. The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labor. Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing Co., 1987. Cohen, Roberta, and Francis M. Deng. Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement.

In Warm Hands in Cold Age, edited by Nancy Folbre, Lois B. Shaw, and Agneta Stark, 7-36. New York: Routledge, 2007. Steady, Filomina Chioma. Women and Children First: Environment, Poverty, and Sustainable Development. Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1993. Stichter, Sharon B., and Jane L. Parpart, eds. Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and in the Workforce. Boulder & London: Westview Press, 1988. _____. Women, Employment and the Family in the International Division of Labour. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990. Stienstra, Deborah. Women’s Movements and International Organizations. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Stone, Martin.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

This divergence has led some to suggest that “feminism is the new natalism,” which is overstated; again, the more liberal societies’ openness to immigration explains some of the differences here, and the plunging birthrate in gender-egalitarian Finland is a clear counterexample to any feminism-as-natalism claim. But there may be kind of a trap for societies, like Italy and Japan, that maintain certain traditionalist gender norms while welcoming (or hustling) women into the workforce—almost as if when women are expected to play traditional homemaker roles and also work full-time, they go on a kind of reproductive strike. The biggest question of all, meanwhile, is: Why has fertility settled this low? It made sense that it would fall dramatically from its premodern heights, but why has it ended up subreplacement?

., 109 white supremacists, 153 Why Liberalism Failed (Deneen), 215–17 “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (Slaughter), 97 Wikipedia, 106 Wilder, Gary, 208 Wild Wild Country (documentary), 101–2 Wills, Garry, 110 Winemiller, Roger, 62 Wire, The (TV show), 95 Wired, 211 Wolfe, Tom, 96–97, 109–10 women, in workforce, 24 workers, as less likely than before to change jobs, 27 workforce participation: decline in, 23 virtual entertainments and, 124 women and, 24 World Trade Organization, China’s entry into, 29 World War II, 109, 183 Wright, Robin, 134 Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle), 240 Xi Jinping, 114, 167 Yemen, 199 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 143 Young, Michael, 170–71, 172 YouTube, 194 AVID READER PRESS An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2020 by Ross Douthat All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Stern et al., “A Rust Belt City’s New Working Class,” New Republic, March 31, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161867/rust-belt-citys-new-working-class-pittsburgh-review. 35. Kamala D. Harris, “Kamala Harris: The Exodus of Women from the Workforce Is a National Emergency,” Washington Post, February 12, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kamala-harris-women-workforce-pandemic/2021/02/12/b8cd1cb6-6d6f-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html. 36. Joan Entmacher et al., Underpaid & Overloaded: Women in Low-Wage Jobs, National Women’s Center, 2014, https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/final_nwlc_lowwagereport2014.pdf. 37.

Women are overrepresented in the low-wage service economy of restaurants, hospitality, and retail, and are more likely to work part-time, factors that explain most of the disparity. Seventy-five percent of the healthcare workers who contracted the virus early in the pandemic were women, for example. Over the last three decades, women have steadily increased their participation in the paid workforce; in 2019, they held more than half of all jobs. The pandemic recession reversed this trend: by January 2021, women’s labor force participation rate had fallen below 56 percent, about the same as it was in 1987. By December 2020, men had gained a net 16,000 jobs while women, nearly all of them women of color, had lost 156,000.34 Vice President–elect Kamala Harris called it a “national emergency” for women.35 African Americans and Latinos also faced higher rates of unemployment during the pandemic.


pages: 126 words: 37,081

Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt

business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, deindustrialization, financial innovation, full employment, illegal immigration, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral hazard, post-work, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population

For women twenty-five-to-fifty-four, the work rate was 34 percent in 1948; in 2015, it topped 70 percent. In arithmetic terms, this enormous influx of new workers completely offset the decline in work rates for prime-age men—and then some (see figure 3.1). Thanks to the progressive entry of ever-greater proportions of women into the workforce, overall work rates for every grouping of Americans between the ages of twenty and sixty-four also increased substantially between the late 1940s and the late 1990s. Around the late 1990s, however, the escalation of work rates for U.S. women stalled and, over the past decade and a half, fell from their all-time highs.

Between 1990 and 2015, Japan’s prime-age male workforce rates slipped by just two percentage points, next to America’s five-point drop. The share of prime-age American men neither working nor looking for work is now over two and a half times higher than the Japanese figure. Presumed “cultural” factors (e.g., restricted workforce opportunities for Japanese women) cannot explain away this differential. As we shall see later, workforce participation rates for prime-age women are now higher in Japan than the United States. Another point worth exploring about the unusual nature of the modern American male’s flight from work relates to how strikingly these contrast with the work habits (or work ethic) of the great majority of working-age American men and women who hold down paid jobs.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He likes to move to different parts of his house, to break up his work shift, rather than sit anchored to the desktop computer that he set up in the foyer that serves as his home office. Like Zaffar, 85 percent of workers on LeadGenius are between the ages of 18 and 37.27 Slightly more than 70 percent of LeadGenius’s ghost workforce—called researchers—have at least a bachelor’s degree. Globally, women make up 49 percent of the platform’s workforce, although among our surveyed India workers there were 10 percent more men than women. Almost 75 percent of workers on the platform use LeadGenius and at least one other platform to do on-demand work. When Zaffar first applied to LeadGenius, he was still working full-time on MTurk but hadn’t made his daily goal of $20 in more than a month.

But union strategies did not prioritize or recognize the specific burdens or costs women faced leaving contract labor or home-based piecework behind. Unions quickly abandoned their focus on recruiting young women to the factory floor. And none imagined that advocating for gender equality in the home to reduce women’s household workload might be a necessary strategy for unionizing women in the workforce.15 Instead, they shifted their attention to blocking the uptake of newer technologies that sped up the work pace. Some unions did manage to shut down piecework and press shop owners into creating better-paying, stable employment for skilled and unskilled workers. Invariably, trade unions’ core membership and base of white, able-bodied men were the first—sometimes the only—group to find their way to less precarious work.16 Headlines of faulty machinery mangling children’s limbs in meatpacking plants, textile workers trapped in shop-floor fires behind locked factory doors, and toxic fumes that enveloped workers mining phosphorus for matchsticks filled newspapers across the country for the first two decades of the 20th century.

Workers can make ghost work a navigable path out of challenging circumstances, meeting a basic need for autonomy and independence that is necessary for pursuing other interests, bigger than money.32 GLASS CEILINGS On-demand jobs offer those in the U.S. and India who face workplace discrimination—particularly historically marginalized communities, women, and people with disabilities—digital literacy, a sense of identity, respect among family, and financial independence. Women who dropped out of the workforce to care for young children face barriers when they try to return. Women in the U.S. and India come from different religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, educational levels, and social roles, but women in the two countries share similar challenges in receiving fair pay and recognition for their contributions in the workplace, at the same time that they, paradoxically, go unpaid for their irreplaceable work as caregivers in their households.33 Kumuda, 34, is a Hindu mother of two who lives in Chennai, a coastal city in Tamil Nadu.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Christine Lagarde, “Dare the Difference, Finance & Development,” IMF 50(2) (June 2013), https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2013/06/straight.htm; Renee Montagne and Christine Lagarde, “IMF’s Lagarde: Women in Workforce Key to Healthy Economies,” NPR, March 28, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/03/28/294715846/imfs-lagarde-women-in-workforce-key-to-healthy-economies; Christine Lagarde, “Women and the World Economy,” Project Syndicate, September 24, 2013, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-to-increase-women-s-participation-in-the-workforce-by-christine-lagarde. 48. “The 2011 International Best-Dressed List,” Vanity Fair, August 3, 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/08/revealed-vfs-2011-international-best-dressed-list; Diane Johnson, Christine Lagarde, Vogue, August 22, 2011, http://www.vogue.com/865416/christine-lagarde-changing-of-the-guard; Gillian Tett, “Lunch with the FT: Christine Lagarde,” The Financial Times, September 12, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4c506aec-3938-11e4-9526-00144feabdc0.xhtml; Molly Guinness, “Is This the World’s Sexiest Woman (and the Most Powerful)?”

Since they are treated differently and have a harder time rising through the ranks, they often suffer from poor confidence. When successful, many feel they just got lucky or—worse—like imposters, while men tend to ascribe their successes to their exceptional ability.25 THE FAILURE GAP: DEMOTING PROMOTIONS There is only one area where women are favored: When the financial industry tanks and the workforce must be reduced, it is “ladies first.”26 However, while women are often the first ones to receive the axe in a downturn, the cases in which they are actually promoted are usually a curse in disguise and a setup for failure. Michelle Ryan, an associate professor of psychology at Exeter University, coined the term “glass cliff” to describe the phenomenon of women being promoted in times of crisis.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

Second, we can try and compensate for the weakness in the WAP by encouraging people who are generally under-represented at work to go to work, or stay on. Typically, these people tend to be women and older citizens. In China, where, according to Mao Zedong’s dictum, ‘women hold up half the sky’, women used to participate much more in the workforce than they do nowadays. Getting more women into the workforce is a possibility, but it is more problematic than simply providing better maternity and childcare benefits, which in China are already quite generous. The government needs to focus on other barriers to child-bearing such as the high cost of education, healthcare and housing.

Thus, the largest falls in participation occurred in the 15–24 and 25–34 age groups. In and of itself, this is no bad thing, especially if higher skilled and educated young people enter work later, but with the opportunity to contribute much more. For the rest, the bulk of the fall in participation was due to the earlier withdrawal of women from the workforce, especially in urban areas. Women aged 25–34 in particular have tended to leave the labour force – a trend that may have been attributable to various factors, including the consequences of state-owned enterprise reforms and subsequent restructuring, which were generally more favourable to male employees, a decline in the amount of publicly funded childcare, gender wage differentials, and discrimination.

–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (i) Hua Guofeng (i) Huangpu district (Shanghai) (i) Huawei (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) hukou (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Human Freedom Index (i) Human Resources and Social Security, Ministry of (i) Hunan (i) Hungary (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) ICORs (incremental capital-output ratios) (i), (ii), (iii) n4 IMF Article IV report (i) on broadening and deepening of financial system (i) China urged to devalue (i) China’s integration and (i) concern over smaller banks (i) concern over WMPs (i) credit gaps (i) credit intensity (i) GP research (i) ICOR (i) n4 laissez-faire ideas (i) pensions, healthcare and GDP research (i), (ii), (iii) Renminbi reserves (i) risky corporate loans (i) Special Drawing Rights (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) WAPs (i) immigrants see migrants income inequality (i) India Adam Smith on (i) ASEAN (i) BRI misgivings (i) BRICS (i), (ii) comparative debt in (i) demographic dividend (i) economic freedom level (i) frictions with (i) Nobel Prize (i) pushing back against China (i) regional allies of (i) SCO member (i) Indian Ocean access to ports (i) African rail projects and (i) Chinese warships enter (i) rimland (i) shorelines (i) Indo-Pacific region (i), (ii) Indonesia Asian crisis (i) BRI investment (i) debt and GDP (i) GDP (i) rail transport projects (i) RCEP (i) retirement age (i) trade with China (i) Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (i), (ii) Industrial Revolution (i), (ii) industrialisation (i), (ii) Industry and Information Technology, Minister of (i) infrastructure (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) (i) Inner Mongolia (i), (ii) innovation (i), (ii) Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) (i) Institute for International Finance (i) institutions (i), (ii) insurance companies (i), (ii), (iii) intellectual property (i) interbank funding (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) investment (i), (ii), (iii) Iran (i) Ireland (i), (ii), (iii) Iron Curtain (i) ‘iron rice bowl’ (i) Israel (i), (ii) Italy (i), (ii), (iii) Jakarta (i), (ii) Japan acts of aggression by (i) aftermath of war (i) ASEAN (i) between the wars (i) bond market (i) Boxer Rebellion and (i) Chiang Kai-shek fights (i) China and (i) China’s insecurity (i) credit gap comparison (i) dispute over Diaoyu islands (i), (ii) export-led growth (i), (ii) financial crisis (i) friction with (i) full-scale war with China (i), (ii) growth (i) high-speed rail (i) India and (i) Liaodong peninsula (i) Manchuria taken (i), (ii), (iii) Mao fights (i) middle- to high-income (i) migrants to (i) Okinawa (i) old-age dependency ratio (i) pensions, healthcare and GDP research (i) pushing back against China (i) RCEP (i) Renminbi block, attitude to (i) research and development (i) rimland (i) robots (i) seas and islands disputes (i) Shinzō Abe (i) TPP (i) trade and investment from (i) yen (i) Jardine Matheson Holdings (i) Jiang Zemin 1990s (i) Deng’s reforms amplified (i), (ii), (iii) influence and allies (i) Xiao Jianhua and (i) Johnson, Lyndon (i) Julius Caesar (i) Kamchatka (i) Kashgar (i) Kashmir (i) Kazakhstan (i), (ii) Ke Jie (i) Kenya (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i) Kharas, Homi (i) Kissinger, Henry (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Korea (i), (ii), (iii) see also North Korea; South Korea Korean War (i), (ii) Kornai, János (i), (ii), (iii) n16 Kowloon (i), (ii) Krugman, Paul (i) Kunming (i) Kuomintang (KMT) (i), (ii) Kyrgyzstan (i) Kyushu (i) labour productivity (i) land reform (i) Laos (i), (ii), (iii) Latin America (i), (ii), (iii) Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (i) leadership (i) Leading Small Groups (LSGs) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Lee Kuan Yew (i) Lee Sodol (i) Legendary Entertainment (i) Lehman Brothers (i) lending (i) Leninism governance tending to (i) late 1940s (i) party purity (i) Xi’s crusade on (i), (ii) Lenovo (i), (ii) Lewis, Arthur (i) Lewis turning point (i) LGFVs (local government financing vehicles) (i) Li Keqiang (i), (ii) Liaodong peninsula (i), (ii) LinkedIn (i) Liu He (i), (ii), (iii) Liu Xiaobo (i) local government (i), (ii), (iii) London (i), (ii), (iii) Luttwak, Edward (i), (ii), (iii) Macartney, Lord George (i), (ii), (iii) Macau (i), (ii) Made in China 2025 (MIC25) ambitious plans (i) importance of (i) mercantilism (i) priority sectors (i) robotics (i) Maddison, Angus (i), (ii), (iii) n3 (C1) Maghreb (i) major banks see individual entries Malacca, Straits of (i) Malay peninsula (i) Malaysia ASEAN member (i) Asian crisis (i) high growth maintenance (i) Nine-Dash Line (i) rail projects (i), (ii) Renminbi reserves (i) TPP member (i) trade with (i) Maldives (i) Malthus, Thomas (i), (ii) Manchuria Communists retake (i) Japanese companies in (i) Japanese puppet state (i), (ii), (iii) key supplier (i) North China Plain and (i) Pacific coast access (i) Russian interests (i) targeted (i) Manhattan (i), (ii) see also New York Mao Zedong arts and sciences (i) China stands up under (i) China under (i) Communist Party’s grip on power (i) consumer sector under (i) Deng rehabilitated (i) Deng, Xi and (i) east wind and west wind (i) Great Leap Forward (i) industrial economy under (i) nature of China under (i) People’s Republic proclaimed (i) positives and negatives (i) property rights (i) women and the workforce (i) Xi and (i) Maoism (i) Mar-a-Lago (i) Mark Antony (i) Market Supervision Administration (i) Marshall Plan (i), (ii) Marxism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Mauritius (i) May Fourth Movement (i) McCulley, Paul (i) n18 Mediterranean (i) Menon, Shivshankar (i) mergers (i) MES (market economy status (ii)) Mexico completion of education rates (i) debt comparison (i) GDP comparison (i) NAFTA (i) pensions comparison (i) TPP member (i) US border (i) viagra policy (i) Middle East (i), (ii), (iii) middle-income trap (i), definition (i) evidence and argument for (i) governance (i) hostility to (i) hukou system (i) lack of social welfare for (i) low level of (i) migrant factory workers (i) patents and innovation significance (i) significance of technology tech strengths and weaknesses (i) total factor productivity focus (i) vested and conflicted interests (i) ultimate test (i) World Bank statistics (i) migrants (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Ming dynasty (i) Minsky, Hyman (i) mixed ownership (i), (ii) Modi, Narendra (i) Mombasa (i) monetary systems (i) Mongolia (i), (ii) Monogram (i) Moody’s (i) Morocco (i) mortality rates (i) see also population statistics mortgages (i) motor cars (i), (ii) Moutai (i) Mundell, Robert (i) Muslims (i) Mutual Fund Connect (i) Myanmar ASEAN (i) Chinese projects (i) disputes (i) low value manufacturing moves to (i) Qing Empire in (i) ‘string of pearls’ (i) ‘Myth of Asia’s Miracle, The’ (Paul Krugman) (i) NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) (i) Nairobi (i) Namibia (i) Nanking (i) Treaty of (i), (ii) National Bureau of Statistics fertility rates (i) GDP figures (i) ICOR estimate (i), (ii), (iii) n4 SOE workers (i) National Cyberspace Work Conference (i) National Development and Reform Commission (i), (ii), (iii) National Financial Work Conferences (i) National Health and Family Planning Commission (i) National Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (i) National Natural Science Foundation (i) National People’s Congress 2007 (i) 2016 (i) 2018 (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) National People’s Party of China (i) National Science Foundation (US) (i) National Security Commission (i) National Security Strategy (US) (i), (ii) National Supervision Commission (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Needham, Joseph (i) Nepal (i), (ii) Netherlands (i) New Development Bank (i), (ii) New Eurasian Land Bridge (i) New Territories (i), (ii) New York (i) see also Manhattan New Zealand (i), (ii), (iii) Next Generation AI Development Plan (i) Nigeria (i) Nine-Dash Line (i) Ningpo (i) Nixon, Richard (i) Nobel Prizes (i), (ii) Nogales, Arizona (i) Nogales, Sonora (i) Nokia (i) non-communicable disease (i) non-performing loans (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) North China Plain (i) North Korea (i) see also Korea Northern Rock (i) Norway (i) Nye, Joseph (i) Obama, Barack Hu Jintao and (i) Pacific shift recognised (i) Renminbi (i) US and China (i), (ii) OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) China’s ranking (i) GDP rates for pension and healthcare (i) GP doctors in (i) tertiary education rates (i) US trade deficit with China (i) Office of the US Trade Representative (i) Official Investment Assistance (Japan) (i) Okinawa (i) old-age dependency ratios (i), (ii), (iii) Olson, Mancur (i) Oman (i) one-child policy (i), (ii) Opium Wars financial cost of (i) First Opium War (i), (ii), (iii) Qing dynasty defeated (i) Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai (i) Pacific (i), (ii), (iii) Padma Bridge (i) Pakistan Economic Corridor (i) long-standing ally (i) Renminbi reserves (i) SCO member (i) ‘string of pearls’ (i) Paris (i) Party Congresses see numerical list at head of index patents (i) Peking (i), (ii), (iii) see also Beijing pensions (i) People’s Bank of China see also banks cuts interest rates again (i) floating exchange rates (i) lender of last resort (i), (ii) long term governor of (i) new rules issued (i) new State Council committee coordinates (i) places severe restrictions on banks (i) publishing Renminbi values (i) Renminbi/dollar rate altered (i) repo agreements (i) sells dollar assets (i) stepping in (i) Zhou Xiaochuan essay (i) People’s Daily front-page interview (i), (ii) on The Hague tribunal (i) riposte to Soros (i) stock market encouragement (i) People’s Liberation Army (i), (ii) Persia (i) Persian Gulf (i), (ii) Peru (i) Pettis, Michael (i) n12 Pew Research (i) Peyrefitte, Alain (i) Philippines (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Piraeus (i) PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) (i) Poland (i), (ii), (iii) ‘Polar Silk Road’ (i) Politburo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) pollution (i) Polo, Marco (i) Pomeranz, Kenneth (i) population statistics (i) see also ageing trap; WAP (working-age population) consequences of ageing (i) demographic dividends (i), (ii) hukou system and other effects (i) low fertility (i), (ii), (iii) migrants (i), (ii) old-age dependency ratios (i), (ii), (iii) one-child policy (i), (ii) places with the most ageing populations (i) rural population (i) savings trends (i) technology and (i) under Mao (i) women (i) Port Arthur (i) Port City Colombo (i), (ii) Portugal (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) pricing (i), (ii) private ownership (i), (ii) productivity (i), (ii) Propaganda, Department of (i) property (i) property rights (i) Puerto Rico (i) Punta Gorda, Florida (i) Putin, Vladimir (i) Qianlong, Emperor (i) Qing dynasty (i), (ii), (iii) Qingdao (i) Qualcomm (i) Qualified Domestic Institutional Investors (i), (ii) Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (i), (ii) Qiushi, magazine (i) rail network (i), (ii) RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) (i), (ii), (iii) real estate (i), (ii) reform authoritative source warns of need for (i), (ii) different meaning from West (i) of economy via rebalancing (i), (ii) as embraced by Deng Xiaoping (i) fiscal, foreign trade and finance (i), (ii) Hukou (i) of ownership (i) state-owned enterprises (i) third plenum announcements (i) in Xi Jinping’s China (i) ‘Reform and Opening Up’ (Deng Xiaoping) (i), (ii), (iii) regulations and regulatory authorities (financial) (i), (ii) Reinhart, Carmen (i) Renminbi (i) 2015 mini-devaluation and capital outflows (i), (ii) appreciates (i) banking system’s assets in (i) bloc for (i) capital flight risk (i) devaluation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) dim sum bonds (i) efforts to internationalise (i) end of peg (i) foreign investors and (i) fully convertible currency, a (i) growing importance of (i) IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (i) Qualified Institutional Investors (i) in relation to reserves (i) Renminbi trap (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) share of world reserves (i) significance of (i), (ii) Special Drawing Rights and (i), (ii) US dollar and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) repo markets (i), (ii) research and development (R&D) (i), (ii) Resources Department (i) retirement age (i) Rhodium Group (i) rimland (i) Robinson, James (i) robots (i) Rogoff, Kenneth (i) Roman Empire (i) Rotterdam (i) Rozelle, Scott (i) Rudd, Kevin (i) Rudong County (i) Rumsfeld, Donald (i) Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (i) rural workers (i) Russia see also Soviet Union 19th century acquisitions (i), (ii) ageing population (i) BRI and (i) BRICS (i), (ii), (iii) C929s (i) China’s view of (i) early attempts at trade (i) fertility rates (i) Human Freedom Index (i) middle income trap and (i) Pacific sea ports (i) Polar Silk Road (i) Renminbi reserves (i) SCO member (i) Ryukyu Islands (i) Samsung (i) San Francisco (i) SASAC (i), (ii) Saudi Arabia (i) savings (i), (ii), (iii) Scarborough Shoal (i) Schmidt, Eric (i) Schumpeter, Joseph (i) SCIOs (i) Second Opium War (i) Second World War China and Japan (i), (ii) economic development since (i) Marshall Plan (i), (ii) US and Japan (i) Senkaku islands see Diaoyu islands separatism (i), (ii) Serbia (i) service sector (i), (ii) Seventh Fleet (US) (i) SEZs (special economic zones) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) shadow banks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix) n18 see also banks Shandong (i), (ii) Shanghai 1st Party Congress (i) arsenal (i) British influence in (i) central bank established (i) Deng’s Southern Tour (i) firms halt trading (i) income per head (i) interbank currency market (i) PISA scores (i) pollution (i) property price rises (i) stock market (i), (ii), (iii) Western skills used (i) Shanghai Composite Index (i), (ii) Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) (i), (ii), (iii) Shanghai Free Trade Zone (i), (ii), (iii) Shanghai–Hong Kong Bond Connect Scheme (i) Shanghai–Hong Kong Stock Connect Scheme (i), (ii) Shanghai World Financial Centre (i) Shenzhen first foreign company in (i) n3 (Intro.)


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

For her, it had been a career that paid her as much as the factory jobs that had built the American middle class—though with no union and with that modern innovation, a 401(k), rather than a pension. “Most of the people my age—I am sixty—grew up with stay-at-home moms,” she said. Now, women make up most of the workforce in retail and service, and many of them are moms like her, supporting a family. After nearly ten years at the big Toys “R” Us store in Huntington, Long Island, Reinhart transferred to a new Babies “R” Us store. The holidays were calmer, without the mad rush every year at the toy store, and she was able to spend more time with her kids.

Walmart, and the other companies that followed its lead, worked to infuse a sense of belonging into its workers that would make up for low pay—and would make them better at projecting the aura of care that helped the company succeed. 20 Walmart’s spread across America and the world coincided with—but barely acknowledged—the feminist revolution, even as it relied heavily on the labor of women entering the workforce in droves. While middle-class women were going to work to find meaning, though, working-class women were going to work to find a paycheck, and the work they found was all too similar to the work they did in the home. Retail and food-service jobs didn’t pay well, and managers often treated their workers abominably; in such an environment, the pains that Walmart took to at least acknowledge the efforts and care of its workers made it a better employer than many.

Retail and food-service jobs didn’t pay well, and managers often treated their workers abominably; in such an environment, the pains that Walmart took to at least acknowledge the efforts and care of its workers made it a better employer than many. And as it continued to grow, factories were shrinking, closing, or departing for lower-wage countries; Walmart (or its distribution centers) might soon be one of the few jobs in town. In this way, even as women moved into the workforce, more men moved into jobs that looked like women’s work, where they, too, had to learn to do the emotional labor that, in women, was taken for granted. It wasn’t the equality feminism had dreamed of: men and women both cobbling together a living from multiple low-paying jobs as the conditions of women’s work became more and more widespread. 21 The Walton family expanded its reach politically as well as economically.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

And the government’s role expanded enormously from 9% of GDP in 1939 to almost 47% at the peak in 1943.96 As with the First World War, the 1939–45 conflict brought more women into the workforce, largely to cover for males who had been drafted into the military. The emblematic American figure was “Rosie the Riveter”, a cartoon character used in government campaigns. At the end of the war, many women lost their jobs again. Still, by 1950, the proportion of American women who were in paid employment was around 10 percentage points higher than it had been in 1939.97 Women would enter the workforce in much greater numbers in subsequent decades. The good news While the geopolitical environment may have been toxic, the 1914–45 era saw both new technological innovations and the diffusion of previous advances.

The obvious answer is that each worker is also a source of demand. Each immigrant spends the money they earn on local goods and services. Economists talk about the “lump of labour” fallacy; a belief that there is only a certain amount of work to do. The fallacy has been used to argue that women should stay out of the workforce to leave more jobs for men, and that older workers should retire early to create jobs for the young. Immigration may have an impact on the real wages of unskilled labour. A study by Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, on the effect of US immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries found that a one percentage point increase in the foreign-born share of the population may have reduced wages by 1–1.5%.59 The influx may also have persuaded workers in the eastern US to move to the Midwest and the West Coast.

The US economy was the biggest beneficiary of the conflict, as it was able to supply its European allies. It was in recession at the start of the war but started a boom that pushed unemployment down from 7.9% in 1914 to 1.4% in 1918. With many able-bodied men in uniform, there was huge demand for labour. The German unemployment rate was down to 0.8% by early 1918, for example. Many women joined the workforce for the first time. In Germany, female employment rose 45%.17 In Britain, the labour force participation rate among women rose from 24% in 1914 to 37% in 1918, meaning that 2 million joined the workforce. In 1917, around 80% of the country’s munitions were made by women, who also worked as conductors on buses and trams, while another 260,000 joined the “land army” to work on farms.18 Their efforts were rewarded in 1918 when those over 30 were granted the vote.19 As if the population of Europe had not suffered enough, an outbreak of influenza, dubbed “Spanish flu”, swept the continent in 1918.


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

I will hire someone with whom I worked on a launch at two o’clock in the morning and who has proven themselves to be dependable and reliable—someone who really pulled through and that I could count on. That takes the diversity where it takes it. In my day, there weren’t a lot of women majoring in engineering in college—and not enough women engineers in the workforce. But that’s changing, and it will eventually open doors for more women at the senior management level as well. Ghaffari: What is your succession planning strategy? Ford: For me personally, succession planning is very important. In the early years, I was the chief cook and bottle washer.

The Apgar Prize recognizes a faculty member “who motivates students’ interest, curiosity, and love of learning; proposes and applies new teaching concepts and methods; and serves as a mentor to stimulate students’ intellectual development.” Dr. Hart is also responsible for the creation and direction of several entrepreneurial executive programs and HBS alumnae programs for women re-entering the work-force, including Women Leading Business: A New Kind of Conversation; Charting Your Course: Working Options; and A New Path: Setting New Career Directions. She served as chair/director of the Marjorie Alfus/Committee of 200 Case Writing Initiative (1998), which created more than seventy-five Harvard Business School business case studies with women in the protagonist/leadership role.

All of the accounting/consulting firms have figured out that if they are hiring 50 or 60 percent of the college graduates who are female, yet the women leave, then companies are going to have to find leaders from only 40 percent of their recruits. That doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not smart. So instead, they want to make sure that they actually nurture, recognize, and develop the women in their workforce. And they want to make sure that they don’t have hidden barriers in either expectations or opportunities for the women. So I’m very optimistic. On the other hand, I’m unhappy about how slowly it’s going. Actually, the number of women on corporate boards is still kind of pitiful—about 17 to 18 percent.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The baby boomers also had a benign effect on economic growth. There were simply more of them than in the preceding (and succeeding) generations. As a result, once they reached adulthood, a higher proportion of the population was economically active. In addition, more baby-boomer women joined the workforce, increasing the pool of potential employees. (The addition of women to the workforce became a classic case of a feedback effect. If one family has two earners, they will be able to afford a better standard of living; for example, buying a bigger house. But that will increase the incentive for women in other families to go out to work, so they can keep up.)

In the developed world, the ability to have a career gives women an economic freedom that they did not have in the nineteenth century, when most were dependent on a husband’s income (in 1911,90 per cent of British wives did not have paying jobs).3 In addition, children are an economic burden, not an asset, in rich countries. They cost money to bring up, are not allowed to work by law and remove women from the workforce during some of their peak earning years. Nor is it now usual for children to support their parents in their old age; state benefits are designed to do that. The fertility rate in Europe, measured by the number of children per woman, has fallen from an average of 2.58 in the period from 1960 to 1965, to 1.41 in 2000 – 05.

The initial result was an inflation problem in the 1970s, but from the 1980s onwards, this extra money seemed to flow into the asset markets. Helping to constrain the rise in consumer prices was the entry into the global economy of China and the former communist states of the old Soviet Union, technological advances, and the greater role of women in the workforce, all of which improved productivity. But the model depended on rising asset prices and rising populations to service the higher debt levels. Like a shark, it had to keep swimming forward to survive. For much of the developed world, the model broke in 2007 – 08. Central banks then faced the problem of reconciling their twin aims of safeguarding the value of the currency and protecting the financial system.


pages: 105 words: 25,871

A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic by Nicholas Eberstadt, Nick Eberstadt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, family office, income inequality, informal economy, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, reserve currency, women in the workforce, working-age population

Since 1948 the U.S. female labor force participation rate has soared: from about 32 percent to almost 60 percent. But over those same years, the male labor force participation rate plummeted: from about 89 percent to just 73 percent. Labor force participation rates for men and women are closer today than ever before—not only because of the inflow of women into the workforce but also because of the withdrawal of men. Under the force of these trends, men are literally becoming less important than women in keeping America at work. Over the past twenty years (1991–2011), for example, roughly 12 million of the country’s new adult jobholders were women—but just 10 million were men.31 A multiplicity of social changes help explain the postwar feminization of the U.S. labor force, but the great decline in work by America’s men also demands notice and requires explanation.

Still, although men and women are equally eligible to participate in these programs, they seem to have responded quite differently, at least in the aggregate. For example, nearly as many women (4.1 million) as men (4.5 million) receive disability benefits, but that has not kept the ranks of women in the paid workforce from swelling. Labor economists do not agree with Eberstadt’s causal argument. For example, they point out that in recent decades, women have been far more willing than men to take advantage of expanding educational opportunities, and the enhanced labor market options that come with them.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Britain saw this ‘structural’ unemployment in the 1980s when the mass closure of factories during Margaret Thatcher’s anti-inflationary policies threw onto the dole large numbers of people who could not find work in the service industries that were taking their place. Friedman included demographic changes such as women joining the workplace or younger workers entering the workforce. In other words the NAIRU is not a fixed number but something that shifts in line with other changes in the labour market. To bring down that rate, governments should look to improve the way the labour market works, such as providing extra training – what economists call supply side responses – rather than using fiscal or monetary policy to push employment up.

It also explains why most firms make promotions 202 The Great Economists from within the organisation rather than through hiring, as new workers need time to learn about a firm’s structure and ‘culture’. Since workers with specific skills tend to earn more from their firm they are able to negotiate for higher pay, as can be seen in the annual round of bankers’ bonuses. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this phenomenon in action is the marked change in the number of women joining the workforce over the last four decades. Traditionally, women had been far more likely than men to work part-time and intermittently, partly because they usually withdrew from the labour market for a while after having children. Social changes, greater working rights for women and the growth in service sector jobs have encouraged more women into the labour market, so providing incentives for investing in higher education.

Roosevelt) 148 New Keynesianism 159, 163 New Neoclassical Synthesis 111 Nicholas I, Tsar 52 NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assets) homebuyers 61–2 Nixon, Richard 109, 146 Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow (1972) 191, 213 Gary Becker (1992) 194, 195–6 Ronald Coase (1991) 73 Peter Diamond (2010) 179 Eugene Fama (2013) 160, 187 Milton Friedman (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 Lars Peter Hansen (2013) 160 Friedrich Hayek (1974) 137 Daniel Kahneman (2002) 218, 220 Paul Krugman (2008) 180, 191 Simon Kuznets (1971) 148 Robert Lucas (1995) 202 Robert Merton (1997) 187 Edmund Phelps (2006) 213 Paul Samuelson (1970) 168 Myron Scholes (1997) 187 Vernon Smith (2002) 218 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 Nordhaus, William 171, 178 North American Free Trade Agreement 41, 187 North, Lord 23 Obama, Barack 162, 190 offshoring of jobs 41 OPEC 22 opportunity cost concept 201, 205 optimism bias and overconfidence 226–7 outsourcing 21 overlapping generations (OLG) model 178–80 Pareto, Vilfredo 182 Pareto efficiency 182 pensions and pension funds 178 permanent income hypothesis (Friedman) 148–50 Perot, Ross 41 Phelps, Edmund 154, 213 Philip, Prince 158 Pigou, A.C. 95 Pinochet, Augusto 161 political economy 28, 74, 93 population growth theories Malthus 31 Ricardo 31, 32–3 Posner, Richard 215 Predictably Irrational (Ariely, 2009) 234 prejudice economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 price, as interaction of supply and demand (Marshall) 75–9 prices and knowledge (Hayek) 131–3 Prices and Production (Hayek, 1931) 126, 130 Principles of Economics (Marshall, 1890) 72, 76, 77–8, 87–8, 188 private savings, influence of taxation policy 43–4 private sector windfalls, impact of stimulus measures 43–4 privatisation of state-owned monopolies 21 246Index productivity, and division of labour 11–14 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 protectionism 22–3, 33–5, 41–2, 185 public goods economics 175–8 purchasing price parity (PPP) measures 186 quantitative easing 162, 163 quantity theory of money, criticism by Keynes 97 Rae, John 23 rational choice model (Becker) 197, 212–15, 216 challenge from Kahneman 221–33 rational expectations hypothesis 111, 137 Reagan, Ronald 19, 20, 139, 146, 158, 160 recession drivers of (Keynes) 101 see also Great Recession (2009) reflection effect 229 revealed preference theory 180–1 reverse elasticity 84 Ricardo, Abraham 28–9 Ricardo, David (1772–1823) 27–46, 183 attack on the Corn Laws 33–5 early life and influences 28–30 from finance to economics 30–1 global free trade 40–2 government debt 38–9 influence of Adam Smith 30 international trade and comparative advantage 35–8 key ideas 46 long-term legacy 40–4 on the general workings of the economy 31–3 on wealth creation and distribution 31–3 political career 30 population growth theories 31, 32–3 The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) 28, 31–3, 188 Ricardian equivalence 38–9 Ricardo effect 33 verdict 45–6 wine and cloth example 35, 37, 40–1 Ricardian equivalence 38–9 Ricardo effect 33 Robbins, Lionel 122, 129 Rogeberg, Ole 211 Rogoff, Kenneth 189–90 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 148 Samuelson, Paul (1915–2009) 37, 106, 137, 159, 167–92 autarky concept 184 early life and influences 169–70 economics in action 190–1 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 efficient markets 187 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 explaining trade imbalances 184–5 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 financial economics 187 Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) 168, 169–70 global public goods 177–8 influence of Keynes 171–2 influence on economic theory 189–90 intergenerational economics 178–80 international economics and trade 183–7 key economic theories and writings 171–87 long-term legacy 188–91 mathematical approach to economic issues 169–70 microeconomic market system 172–3, 174 multiplier effect 174–5 Index247 neoclassical synthesis 174 neo-Keynesianism 168–9, 173–5 Nobel Prize in economic sciences (1970) 168 oscillator model of business cycles 174–5 overlapping generations (OLG) model 178–80 public goods and public finance 175–8 public goods economics 175–8 revealed preference theory 180–1 understanding consumer behaviour 180–1 verdict 191–2 warrant pricing 187 welfare economics 181–3 Scholes, Myron 187 Schwartz, Anna 150–1, 162 Scottish Enlightenment 3 Second World War 95, 96 self-interest theory of Adam Smith 2–3, 6, 8–9, 20 Skidelsky, Robert 114, 128 slavery 10–11 Smith, Adam (1723–90) 1–25, 97, 230–1 A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) 2, 5–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 drivers of rates of pay 12–13 early life and character 3–5 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free international trade 13–14 from philosophy to economics 6–7 functions funded by general taxation 16 functions of the state 16–18 functions that users should pay for 16–17 idea of ‘natural liberty’ 8 idea of ‘sympathy’ of people for each other 6 key ideas 25 long-term legacy 19–23 market price of a commodity 15–16 on slavery 10–11 personal legacy 23 pin factory example 11–13 role of the state in the economy 9, 10 self-interest theory 2–3, 6, 8–9, 20 taxation principles 17–18 the evil of cartels and monopolies 10–11 the invisible hand 7–9 the market mechanism 15–16 The Wealth of Nations (1776) 2–3, 6, 7–25, 188 verdict 23–4 Smith, Vernon 218 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (US) 42 social security systems 179 social welfare function 182–3 socialism 134–6 sovereign debt crisis in Greece 113–14 Soviet Union, collapse of 140, 158 Sraffa, Piero 130–1 stagflation in the 1970s 154, 173–4 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey 21 state-owned monopolies, privatisation programmes 21 Statecraft (Thatcher, 2002) 19 status quo bias 227–8 stimulus measures, debate over effects of 43–4 stimulus versus austerity debate 43–4, 140–1 Stockholm School of Economics 168 Stolper, Wolfgang 184–5 Stolper–Samuelson theorem 184–5 Strachey, Lytton 94 structural unemployment 155 substitution effect, response to price change 82, 83 Summers, Anita 190 Summers, Lawrence 190 Summers, Robert 190 Sunstein, Cass 234 248Index supply and demand market mechanism 8–9, 15–16, 75–84 supply side economics 127, 201 surplus value of labour (Marx) 54–6 taxation policy influence on private savings 43–4 views of Adam Smith 16–18 taxpayers, view of government debt (Ricardo) 38–9 Thaler, Richard 232, 234, 235 Thatcher, Margaret 19, 138–9, 155, 160–1 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes, 1936) 99–106 The Principles of Political Economy (Mill, 1848) 188 The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Ricardo, 1817) 28, 31–3, 188 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek, 1944) 135, 138, 140 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776) 2–3, 6, 7–25, 188 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2012) 226–7, 234 time factor and the value of capital (Hayek) 124–6 in the supply and demand model 77–9 Townshend, Charles 5, 6–7 Toyota, production systems 21 trade barriers 22–3, 41–2, 185 Corn Laws 33–5 trade imbalances, Samuelson’s explanation 184–5 trade unions 19 transient income concept 149 Treatise on Human Nature (Hume) 4 Treaty of Versailles 95–6 Tversky, Amos 218, 220, 221–5, 228–33, 235 Ulam, Stanislaw 37 uncertainty and investment volatility 104–5 unemployment causes of (Keynes) 101 frictional 155 ‘natural’ rate of (Friedman) 153–5 relationship with inflation 153–5 structural 155 United States housing market crisis (2008) 61–2, 112 import tariffs after the Wall Street Crash 42 savings and investment imbalance with China 113 trade imbalance with China 45 US Federal Reserve 111–12 action to control inflation 161 and the 2008 financial crisis 235 influence of monetary policy 159 money supply and the Great Depression (1930s) 150–2 quantitative easing (2009 onward) 162 role in the Great Depression (1930s) 159 utilitarianism 31, 182 value and costs of production 75–7 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 surplus value of labour (Marx) 54–6 Voltaire 7 wages drivers of wage rates (Smith) 12–13 effects of reducing (Keynes) 101–2 relationship to rents and profits 32–3 surplus value of labour (Marx) 54–6 Wall Street Crash (1929) 23, 42 Wallich, Henry 190–1 warrant pricing (Samuelson) 187 wealth creation and distribution, view of Ricardo 31–3 Index249 welfare economics 181–3 White, Harry Dexter 108 Wilberforce, William 10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121 women in the workforce 202 Wood, Kingsley 106 Woolf, Leonard 94 World Bank Group 109 World Trade Organization (WTO) 22, 40–1, 185


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

This was still very high and a major contributor to continuing population growth, but the speed of the fall was the harbinger of what was to prove a very low Russian fertility rate. That fertility rates fell so fast in Russia should not be a surprise; the country was undergoing a forced, rapid, top-down transformation. Many of the goals closest to the heart of the new Soviet regime–general and particularly female literacy, urbanisation and the participation of women in the workforce–are now understood to be closely associated with lower fertility rates. The ideal Soviet woman was politically conscious (and therefore, almost by definition, literate), living in a town or city and probably employed in a factory; she was bound to have fewer children than her illiterate peasant mother.

A large and growing population was also required to ensure the workforce continued to expand and make its economic contribution in fulfilment of the plan. There were, however, countervailing pressures at work which tended to make Party bosses less keen on large families. These included the need to keep Soviet women in the workforce: while encouraging their childbearing would help meet future requirements for the workplace, it detracted from the more immediate requirements of the day. Childcare facilities could be put in place to encourage childbearing and prolong workforce participation, but there were other demands on resources.

If you are married, and if both husband and wife work like this, there’s a slim chance to have a baby. No time or no energy left. If you want a baby, you (typically your wife) face a choice–continue to work or quit your job and have a baby. There’s a trade-off here.32 As seen in Europe, in an era of female education and emancipation, cultures in which life is not made conducive for women to enter the workforce, to rise within it and to be able to combine its demands with those of childbearing and child-rearing will be countries with low fertility rates. It is hardly surprising therefore that the World Economic Forum consistently rates Japan one of the worst places in the developed world for economic equality in the workplace.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Many employees have dropped out of the labor market as their skills have been devalued by the economy; older workers are choosing, or having imposed on them, early retirement, while younger workers are deferring entry into the workforce, choosing to accumulate more education. The rise in female labor force participation from the 1930s through the 1990s has also run its course; labor force participation is roughly equal by gender.56 The percentage of women in the workforce has plateaued since the turn of the century. The percentage of men has dropped.57 There is no indicator suggesting that this is likely to reverse significantly, and certainly not pass the previous peak. Americans now work fewer hours over their career than their working grandparents, and probably their parents (for annual hours, see Figure 3.3,58 which shows little change over the past 7 decades).

But there are a number of important trends and developments relevant for understanding the changes in participation of different subgroups of the population: • Increased participation by older Americans, which may be attributable to an increase in skills among this population and also to changes in Social Security retirement benefits; • Reduced participation by younger Americans as they stay in school longer; • Continuation of an at least 65-year long trend of declining male labor force participation, which is especially stark for young minority men; and • Tapering of the long-term trend of increasing female labor force participation, which dates back to before World War II." http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/cea_2015_erp.pdf 55 Figure 3.2 Source; US Department of Labor - Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015) Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000. 56 Women and the US workforce, see: US Department of Labor - Women's Bureau (n.d.) "Women in the Labor Force in 2010" http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/Qf-laborforce-10.htm 57 Even recent decreases of labor force participation are a consequence of productivity gains among those remaining, as the long-standing connection between productivity and workforce participation has severed.


Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

* * * The last one hundred years have seen profound changes in the lives of women in the United States and beyond. American women were granted the right to vote in 1920, in a move that initially mostly benefited white women, but was eventually broadened out to include all women in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. Women have gone from representing one third of the workforce in 1950 to just under half today.4 As of 2019, women represented half of the college-educated workforce. Starting in 1974, we no longer needed a husband or a male family member’s signature to apply for credit or a credit card.5 In 1972, birth control was legalized for all, and in 1973 abortion became legal, giving women greater control over their own bodies and the planning and course of their economic, social, and political lives.

As of February 2022, there were 31 women holding CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies, representing an abysmally low 6.2 percent total.10 In 2021, the ten wealthiest people in America were all men and were all white.11 On the flip side, women continue to be more likely to be living in poverty than men and are more likely than men to be among the working poor, with the greatest rate among Black and Hispanic women.12 Yes, we have made progress, but this is a society that is still plagued by male domination, and in which it is no coincidence that women are expected to take on the lion’s share of emotional labor. And frankly, we have reached breaking point. During the worst years of the COVID-19 epidemic, economists reported that women were quitting their jobs at twice the rate men were.13 By the beginning of 2022, while men had recouped job losses, there were still one million fewer women in the workforce than there had been two years prior. In the space of just a couple of years, women’s economic advancement was said to have been set back by a generation.14 This disparity was due to women being far more concentrated in the lowest-paying, high-contact service jobs on the front lines of the epidemic15 and was also due to women being far more likely to assume increased childcare and caregiving responsibilities.

Avery, the law professor, explained that old-fashioned, classist, and racist views dating back to the nineteenth century still expect respectable women—in other words white middle- or upper-class women—to stay home, and women working in drinking establishments to be sex workers. “There is a long thread that has continued there. Women’s place is in the home. Well, if they are leaving the home, then what are they doing it for?” Avery asked, taking on the perspective of a male harasser. Women may now occupy close to half of the formal workforce, but public spaces are still seen as male, so when women enter them, it is still assumed to be according to men’s rules, for the male gaze, or for male entertainment.20 This leap that associates a status of sex object or sex worker with a woman worker helps entrench a lower status that justifies poor—even punitive—treatment across the board.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

“In order to calculate the size of the cake which will be left by civilian consumption,” he wrote, the government would have to estimate various things, including the economy’s “maximum current output,” the sustainability of drawing on foreign reserves to pay for imports, and the amount it would need to spend on guns, aircraft, and soldiers. According to his rough-and-ready calculations, output could probably be increased by 15–20 percent by bringing boys and women into the workforce and by lengthening overtime. But, he complained, “the statistics from which to build up these estimates are very inadequate. Every government since the last war has been unscientific and obscurantist, and has regarded the collection of essential facts as a waste of money.” Only the state, he concluded, was in a position to collect and process such statistics.

If, however, she works in a care home looking after someone else’s father-in-law—and earning a wage while she’s at it—then the exact same activities contribute to national income. In the same way, if I charge to paint someone’s house, I am adding to the economy. But if I volunteer to paint my neighbor’s living room for free, my work is statistically invisible. In Japan women did enter the workforce in record numbers after Prime Minister Abe came to power, although this may well have had more to do with pinched family finances than a direct response to his plan. Many of the women who joined the labor force took on low-paid part-time work. More than half of all paid work done by women in Japan falls into this category.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, quoted in Steven Brill, “The Bitter Pill.” 8. These numbers are taken from ibid. 9. In fact Japan’s economy had not been performing quite as badly as commonly assumed. Nominal GDP had stalled, but adjusted for prices and a shrinking population, real per-capita growth in Japan was reasonable. 10. Leo Lewis, “Japan, Women in the Workforce,” Financial Times, July 6, 2015: www.ft.com. 11. Sarah O’Connor, “America’s Jobs for the Boys Is Just Half the Employment Story,” Financial Times, February 7, 2017. 12. This example was provided by Angus Deaton during a conversation with the author. 13. Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?


I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

G4S, rent stabilization, women in the workforce

You can blame the women’s movement for it—one of the bedrock tenets of the women’s movement was that because so many women were entering the workforce, men and women should share in the raising of children; thus the gender-neutral word parenting, and the necessity of elevating child rearing to something more than the endless hours of quantity time it actually consists of. Conversely, you can blame the backlash against the women’s movement—lots of women didn’t feel like entering into the workforce (or even sharing the raising of children with their husbands), but they felt guilty about this, so they were compelled to elevate full-time parenthood to a sacrament.


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Such complex forms of inequality cannot be explained—or remedied— in simplistic terms that pit women’s economic interests against men’s. As Guy Standing argues, “The era of flexibility is . . . an era of more generalized insecurity and precariousness, in which many more men as well as women have been pushed into precarious forms of labor” (Standing 1999, 583). Rather than illustrating women “catching up” to men in the region’s high-tech workforce, the data suggest that work in the region is being feminized, both in the sense that a larger share of employment is going to women and in the sense that employment itself has shifted to have characteristics associated with women’s labor force participation: lower pay, contingent and temporary work arrangements, and little or no job training (ibid.).20 Generalized imputations of “women’s economic interests” and “men’s economic interests,” which underlie prescriptions to fill the high-tech pipeline with marginalized people or empower women to break into the boys’ club of science and technology, overlook the feminization of work and obscure and marginalize important differences among women by race.

One in six children overall, and one in three African American and Latino children, are growing up poor, even by the (inadequate) official poverty measure. There is a strong link between the percentage of full-time workers being paid low wages and high child poverty rates. The gender wealth gap is wide. The typical minimum-wage earner is an adult woman. While women make up just under half the total workforce, two out of three minimum-wage workers are women. The racial wealth gap is wider. White non-Hispanic families had a median net worth (household assets, including home equity, minus debt) of $94,900 in 1998, while nonwhite or Hispanic families had a net worth of $16,400—one-sixth that of whites. 196 Appendix C Inequality is bad for your health.

Lack of health insurance is generally associated with a 25 percent higher risk of death. Uninsured women are nearly 50 percent more likely to die four to seven years following an initial diagnosis of breast cancer than insured women. The gender wealth gap is wide. The typical minimum-wage earner is an adult woman. While women make up just under half the total workforce, two out of three minimum-wage workers are women. The racial wealth gap is wider. White non-Hispanic families had a median net worth (household assets, including home equity, minus debt) of $94,900 in 1998, while nonwhite or Hispanic families had a net worth of $16,400—one-sixth that of whites.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Just under one third were concerned about increasing the number of female politicians.28 A British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey found that nearly half of women chose a kinship role as their primary identity, with 49 per cent of respondents giving priority to mother, wife or partner rather than an occupational or more public role.29 And a more recent BSA survey in 2012 found that younger women were more likely to have more traditional attitudes to the family, prioritising home and children—closer to their grandmothers than the baby boomer generation in between.30 This must all, of course, be seen in the context of a permanent shift away from the conventional male breadwinner model. According to the BSA survey in 1984, 41 per cent of women agreed with the proposition that ‘A man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job to look after the home and family’, compared with just 12 per cent in 2012 (men had almost identical responses).31 And the big shift of women into the workforce from the 1970s—initially prior to establishing a family and then alongside it—has produced a corresponding support for pro-work values: it is just normal as, in fact, it has been for thousands of years. The number of ‘only housewife’ women with children has fallen sharply from about half in 1970 to about 10 per cent today (and the proportion for men is just 0.6 per cent).

And while great efforts are made to encourage women into science and engineering almost nothing is done to try to address the huge female preponderance in teaching, especially at primary level. Unemployment is persistently higher for men, including among graduates. Public sector employment (about 16 per cent of all jobs) is skewed towards women, with 67 per cent of the workforce female. Women increasingly dominate in the professions, though less so at the top if they take career breaks to raise a family—a central focus of public policy and Anywhere concern. Graduate women are far more likely than non-graduate women to work full-time and though they can suffer a motherhood penalty, if they cut their hours or go part-time, it has fallen fast in recent years.

As Belinda Brown points out, revising the assumption that men and women have the same priorities and that gender equality means encouraging men and women to behave in the same way in the public and private spheres could also, paradoxically, boost real equality. She writes: ‘It is seldom acknowledged that high rates of female employment have a negative effect on equality itself. Pushing women into the workforce leads to increased gender segregation and pay differentials. This is because the women who work are no longer those who prioritise their careers, but all of us. And as work is less important to the majority of women than our home life we choose less demanding jobs, go part-time and do not push for promotion.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In addition, the mills recruited skilled male workers from England and Scotland for specialized jobs for which there was no pool of qualified native workers, including calico printing and producing woolens. A small number of children worked in the mills, too (though the Lowell mills generally did not hire anyone under age fifteen), as did a few older, married women. The Hamilton Manufacturing Company was probably typical in 1836, with women making up 85 percent of its workforce. Over time, the percentage of female workers dropped, at least modestly. In 1857, excluding the all-male Lowell Machine Shop, the Lowell textile workforce as a whole was a bit over 70 percent female.36 The Lowell-style mills rarely had to advertise for workers. Young women—a sample of Hamilton workers found their average age on hiring just under twenty—came on their own after hearing about the mills, often joining or sending for sisters, cousins, or friends.

Between 1846 and 1847 alone, immigration from Ireland more than doubled, and by 1851 it more than doubled again. There were always Irish workers in Lowell and other mill towns; Irish men dug the canals and helped build the factories. But before 1840, the textile companies generally spurned Irish women; in 1845, only 7 percent of the Lowell mill workforce was Irish. Necessity ended the discrimination; by the early 1850s, about half the textile workers in Lowell and other mill towns were Irish. At the Hamilton mill, by 1860 over 60 percent of the employees had been born abroad.66 The increasing number of immigrant workers brought other changes.

More children began being hired in Lowell-style mills, especially boys, as whole families needed to work to support themselves, a reversion to the pattern in the early Slater-type mills. The gendered division of labor broke down as male immigrants accepted jobs once reserved for women, paid wages that in the past only women would take. At Hamilton, in 1860, 30 percent of the workforce consisted of adult men. Immigrant family labor contributed to the decline of the boardinghouse system and company paternalism. Lowell firms put up mills at a faster pace than they built housing, and after 1848 they stopped building housing entirely. Institutional arrangements once needed to attract rural young women and reassure their parents became increasingly superfluous, as the companies acknowledged in the 1850s when they dropped requirements for church attendance and boardinghouse residence for single women.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

In its four years, millions died in Europe and economic life was never the same again. The war was expensive. Britain abandoned the Gold Standard for the duration of the war much as it had done in 1797 during the Anglo-French War. To negate the adverse impacts of losing large swathes of the male populace to the war effort, women were, controversially, recruited into the workforce. The principal combatants – Britain, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, France and Russia – suffered a lot of economic damage and loss of population. Russia witnessed a revolution which rejected capitalism and embarked upon the experiment of building a communist society on principles other than those of the market and private property.

(i), (ii) Rothschilds (i) Roubini, Nouriel (i) Royal Charter, grants of monopoly (i) rules of competition (i) Russia (i), (ii) Russian revolution (i), (ii) saltwater economists (i), (ii) Samuelson, Paul (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) “Analytical Aspects of an Anti–Inflation Policy” (with Robert Solow) (i) Say, Jean-Baptiste (i) Say’s Law (i), (ii) scarcity value (i) Scholes, Myron (i), (ii), (iii) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) The Theory of Economic Development (i) Schwartz, Anna, A Monetary History of the United States (with Milton Friedman) (i) Scottish Enlightenment (i) Second International (i) secular stagnation (i) securitization of mortgages (i) seigniorage privilege (i) self-interest (i) self-organizing society (i) self-sufficiency (i) service sector (i), (ii) servomechanism (i) shadow banking structure (i) shares (i) Sherman Act (i) Shiller, Robert (i), (ii) shocks (i), (ii), (iii) contagion (i) debt crises (i) political (i) see also oil shock short cycles (i) short-run rate of interest (i) Silesian weavers (i) single global currency (i) skills, types needed (i), (ii) slack (i) slavery, abolition of (i) Slutsky, Eugen (i), (ii), (iii) Smith, Adam (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) the founding of the political economy (i) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (i), (ii) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (i), (ii) social science, founding (i) Socialist International (i) society regulation (i) self-organizing (i) Solow, Robert (i), (ii), (iii) “Analytical Aspects of an Anti–Inflation Policy” (with Paul Samuelson) (i) sovereign debt crises (i), (ii) Soviet Union, break up (i), (ii) speculation (i) speculative motive (i), (ii) stag-deflation (i) stagflation (i), (ii), (iii) Stalin, Joseph (i) static vision (i) statistics (i) development of (i) historical research (i) usefulness (i) sterling, as reserve currency (i) stochastic calculus (i) stock market crash, London (i) stock markets bull run (i) competition (i) computer technology (i) stock prices, randomness (i) Stockholm School (i) Stop-Go cycle (i) policy (i) Summers, Larry (i) surplus value (i) sustainable recovery, sources of (i) Sutcliffe, Robert (i), (ii) sweetwater economists (i), (ii) Sweezy, Paul (i) System of Natural Liberty (i) T bills (i), (ii), (iii) tatonnement (i) tax cut, US (i) technical progress, role of (i) technological innovations author’s experiences (i) displacement effect (i), (ii) and manufacturing location (i) see also computer technology technological shocks (i) telecommunications (i) Thailand, Crisis, 1997 (i) Thatcher, Margaret (i) theories, need for validation (i) theory of economic behavior of the household (i) Thornton, Henry (i) time, role of (i) time series data (i) Tinbergen, Jan (i) Tobin, James (i) Tobin tax (i) total money supply, and prices (i) total output, heterogeneity (i) trade doctrine see under Ricardo trade-off, unemployment and inflation (i) trade surpluses, banking (i) trade unions effect on money wage (i) as harmful (i) power (i) rise of (i) strengthening (i) weakening (i) transactions motive (i) transmission mechanism (i) Troubled Assets Recovery Program (TARP) (i) true costs of production (i) Truman, Harry (i) trusts (i) Tugan-Baranowsky, Michael (i) Turkey (i) Turner, Adair, Lord (i) Two Treatises on Government (Locke) (i) uncertainty (i) underemployment equilibrium (i), (ii), (iii) undersaving (i), (ii) unearned income (i) unemployment aggregate level (i) cycles (i) effect of wages (i) explaining (i) and inflation (i) involuntary (i) and money wage (i) natural rate (i) see also Keynesian models unifying principle (i) unique static equilibrium, and moving data (i) unit labor costs (i) United Kingdom budget deficit elimination (i) deindustrialization (i) economic trajectory (i) Great Depression (i) monetarism (i) recovery strategy (i) see also Britain United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) (i) United States budget deficit (i) deindustrialization (i) econometric modeling (i) economic trajectory (i) economic weakness, post WWI (i) fiscal boost (i) Gold Standard (i) Great Depression (i) interest rates (i) Keynesianism (i) post-World War I power (i) post-World War II (i) Progressive Movement (i) prosperity (i) recovery strategy (i) seigniorage privilege (i) tax cut (i) trade deficit (i) welfare state expansion (i) westward expansion (i) withdrawal of currency (i) see also America unorthodoxy (i) urbanization (i) US House of Representatives, Greenspan’s testimony (i) usury defining (i) laws (i) prohibition (i), (ii) utopianism (i), (ii) valuation of assets, theory of (i) of capital (i) value vs.price (i) as price (i) relative (i), (ii) value added (i) value of goods, determination (i) variable costs (i) variables (i) Vietnam War (i) visions of economy (i) vocabulary, economic (i), (ii), (iii) volition (i) wage agreements, voluntary (i) demands, post-World War I (i) downward trend (i) effect on unemployment (i) rates, and unemployment (i) restraint (i) rises (i) share: declining (i); developed and developing economies (i); rise in (i), (ii) wage/profit distinction (i) units (i), (ii) see also money wages; real wages Walras, Antoine Auguste (i) Walras, Léon (i), (ii) Walrasian model (i) wars, financing (i) wealth distribution (i) inequality of (i) indicators (i) Smith’s theory (i) weaving, mechanization (i) welfare economics (i) welfare state, levels of support (i) White, Harry (i) Wicksell, Knut (i), (ii) basis of Hayek’s theory (i) later development of ideas (i) Wicksellian boom, developing countries (i) Wicksellian cycle, combined with Kondratieff cycle (i) William III (i) women, in workforce (i) workers dependence on capitalists (i) living standards (i) migration (i) productive/unproductive (i) workforce, recruitment of women (i) World Trade Organization (WTO) (i), (ii) World War I (i) World War II, outbreak (i) yields (i) Zombie firms (i)


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

But working families had few options. The assembly lines that men toiled on to build the cars and the parts that went into them changed the way work was organized and, by extension, how ordinary people made a living. Eighteen-year-old “boys” were suddenly earning a “man’s wages” (which, alongside the entry of women into the paid workforce, encouraged early marriage), while men in their forties and fifties were routinely let go, deemed too old for the assembly line.11 Nineteen twenties America may be a bygone era, but the parallels between the moment described by the Lynds and the present are striking. The automobile, like the smartphone today, brought both a sense of wonder and intense anxiety.

Conglomerates such as Match Group, which owns Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, and PlentyOfFish, are creating marketplaces for love (and sex), but they aren’t the reason we’re looking for love on the small screen. The emergent digital lovescape is rooted in much bigger shifts. The birth control pill, second-wave feminism, and the upsurge of women entering the waged workforce in the 1980s brought changes in attitudes about male and female roles. In the late seventies, roughly 60 percent of women agreed that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” By 2011, only 25 percent of women agreed.

During an active-shooter event at its YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California in April 2018, only permanent employees received a warning text about the situation, prompting an outcry and broader scrutiny of Google’s employment culture.27 Moreover, while Google prides itself on its diverse and inclusive workplace, recent reports call into question its commitment to equality. Government vendors, of which Google is one, are randomly audited to make sure they are following federal diversity protocols. A random inspection by the Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Program found “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.”28 The disparities, based on data from over twenty thousand Google employees, showed nearly seven standard deviations between males’ and females’ pay across job classifications. Google workers were likely well aware of this state of affairs, but there is intense pressure inside the firm to present a sunny public face, as one email written by a Google exec demonstrates: “If you’re considering sharing confidential information to a reporter—or to anyone externally—for the love of all that’s Googley, please reconsider!


pages: 290 words: 86,718

The Estrogen Fix: The Breakthrough Guide to Being Healthy, Energized, and Hormonally Balanced by Mache Seibel

longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), traumatic brain injury, women in the workforce, working poor, Yogi Berra

Part of the reason for this decline in women aged 45 to 54 was attributed to the fact that most employers do not offer flexible schedules for workers caring for elderly family members and their own dependent children and young adults living at home. According to the New York Times article, AARP’s Public Policy Institute estimated that women 50 and older who permanently left the workforce to care for a parent lost nearly $325,000 each in wages and benefits. Why isn’t more being done to help women at this time of life, especially in light of all the evidence? Is it just the challenges of work and life that caused one million women to depart the workforce in their prime? Could they have coped better and been better able to continue working if their menopausal symptoms had been treated? A report in the March 2015 issue of the journal Menopause reported on their review of the insurance records of half a million women at Fortune 500 companies for a diagnosis of hot flashes.92 Of the approximately 500,000 women, half (250,000) were treated for their hot flashes and the other 250,000 were not.

An article in the New York Times reported that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although the total number of women in the workplace has continued to grow, the participation rate of a single age group has decreased over the past decade: ages 45 to 54. All other age groups of women have increased in the workplace.91 According to the bureau, one million women aged 45 to 54 have dropped out of the workforce during the last decade despite absolute numbers increasing. While we can’t say with total certainty that this decline is due to not taking estrogen, the fact that this huge group would mysteriously disappear from the workforce at a time of life when they are most productive is at best puzzling.

Those dropping out include bank presidents, head nurses, and self-employed business owners. We know from studies of work ability that the symptoms of menopause make it challenging for women in this age group to handle the demands of work. This translates into 3.5 percent of the 45-to-54-year-old women dropping out of the workforce since 2007 (5 years after the findings of the 2002 WHI were reported). For younger women the rate of decline was about 2 percent, mostly due to taking care of children; for those age 55 and older, there was an increase of 4.2 percent. Part of the reason for this decline in women aged 45 to 54 was attributed to the fact that most employers do not offer flexible schedules for workers caring for elderly family members and their own dependent children and young adults living at home.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

While the Saudi government2 publicly announced a surplus of some 100 billion barrels of oil as defense against severe economic misfortune, the fact remained that the country’s deficits were pinned to the price of oil on the world market. The country’s demographics and employment data were another source of concern. Unemployment remained above 10 percent nationally and, typically for the twenty-first century, youth unemployment was far higher. Women, although now representing almost 15 percent of the workforce, were three times as likely to be without work as men in 2007.3 Even those with advanced degrees found it difficult to secure any work. Men and women with means and ambition often went abroad to study and then remained in their host countries. Many who stayed home complained the education they received left them uncompetitive in an increasingly technical world.

While some of Cairo’s needs are applicable to any urban landscape, the particulars must reflect local conditions and the needs of its people. The ICT master plan would need to address the following: • The creation of innovation clusters, which would promote the development and outreach of the city’s small and medium businesses. • Promote remote worksites to decrease traffic and bring more women into the workforce. • Encourage FDI and the creation of new worksites on the outskirts of Cairo. 6th of October City and New Cairo have not achieved “tipping point” popularity with Cairenes because they are removed from economic centers. Business, digital technology, and teleworking need to be brought into new developments to make them attractive enough to relieve pressure on the downtown

A Pew study from 2010 found that 54 percent of Egyptians favored segregation between the sexes in the workplace, a higher percentage than in Nigeria, Jordan, or Indonesia.4 Poor women in agricultural communities often leave school early, although middle and upper-class Egyptian women have more opportunities. Additionally, women from all classes face the threat of sexual harassment in the streets. This is a serious deterrent to women who must travel to work. Digital employment opportunities can play an important role in pulling women into the workforce. Digital remote work centers could be a useful bridge technology between old and new. Close to schools and residential neighborhoods, they would dramatically reduce working women’s commuting needs. A pilot program could consist of a few family-friendly remote work centers—“office space as a service”—with broadband connectivity, IP and video capabilities, and a supervised space for children to play while their mothers work.


pages: 476 words: 148,895

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

This probably owes to the fact that, historically, the priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, whereas the European labor movement has fought harder for time—a shorter workweek, longer vacations. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take home cooking seriously, as they do in much of Europe, they also have more time to devote to it. It’s generally thought that the entrance of women into the workforce is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but the story turns out to be a little more complicated, and fraught. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking—but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: In both cases, it has fallen about 40 percent since 1965.* In general, spending on restaurant and take-out food rises with income.

And instead of arguing about who should get dinner on the table, or how that work might be equitably shared, the food industry stepped into the breach with an offer that proved irresistible to everyone, male or female, rich or poor: Why don’t you just let us cook for you? Actually food manufacturers had been working to convince us they should do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the workforce. Beginning after World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell Americans—and American women in particular—on the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant and superconvenient everything.

The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating. Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the workforce, or even from feminists eager to escape the drudgery of the kitchen, but was mainly a supply-driven phenomenon. Processing food is extremely profitable—much more so than growing it or selling it whole. So it became the strategy of food corporations to move into our kitchens long before many women had begun to move out.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In recent years, global growth has remained significantly lower than during the pre-crisis period.132 Across the political spectrum, economists are warning that fundamental changes to the economy mean growth may have settled into a permanently lower state.133 Moreover, firms that are leading growth sectors – such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – simply do not create jobs on the scale of classic firms like Ford and GM.134 In fact, new industries currently only employ 0.5 per cent of the American workforce – hardly an inspiring record of job creation.135 And after a steady decline, the average new business creates 40 per cent fewer jobs than it did twenty years ago.136 The old social democratic plan to encourage employment in new industries falters in the face of low labour-intensity firms and sputtering economic growth. Still, it might be imagined that, with the right political pressure and policies, a return to full employment could be an option.137 But, given that the height of the social democratic era required the exclusion of women from the waged workforce, we should in fact wonder whether full employment has ever been possible. If full employment remains operative only as an ideological mystification, its normalisation of work still extends to the unemployed. The transformation of welfare and the rise of workfare – forcing people to work in order to receive benefits – represent an increasingly insidious example of this.

The near century-long push for shorter working hours ended abruptly during the Great Depression, when business opinion and government policy decided to use make-work programmes in response to unemployment.66 Soon after World War II, the working week stabilised at forty hours across much of the Western world, and there has since been little serious consideration of changing this.67 Instead there has been a general expansion of work in the ensuing decades. First, there has been an increase in time spent at jobs throughout society.68 As women entered the workforce, the working week remained the same, and the overall amount of time devoted to jobs therefore increased.69 Secondly, there has been a progressive elimination of the work–life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of our waking lives. Many of us are now tied to work all the time, with emails, phone calls, texts and job anxieties impinging upon us constantly.70 Salaried workers are often compelled to work unrecognised overtime, while many workers feel the social pressure to be seen working long hours.

The trend from here on out will be a general decline in the importance of this mechanism for producing surplus populations. 28.We note here that while the first two mechanisms are integral to capitalist accumulation (changes in the productive forces and the expansion of capitalist social relations), the third is a logic distinct from just accumulation. The empirical characteristics of this group also change over time (as with, for instance, the integration of women into the workforce over the past four decades). Lynda Yanz and David Smith, ‘Women as a Reserve Army of Labour: A Critique’, Review of Radical Political Economics 15:1 (1983), p. 104. 29.In other words, these dominations can often be functional for capitalism, even if their function does not explain their genesis. 30.A full 36 million people are considered to be in slavery today: Global Slavery Index 2014 (Dalkeith, Western Australia: Walk Free Foundation, 2014). 31.Edward E.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

At the start of World War II, with men by the hundreds of thousands joining the war effort and large and lucrative war contracts waiting to be filled, the United States faced a drastic labor shortage. This void led to the creation of the fictional character “Rosie the Riveter,” a caricature that became part of the propaganda campaign created to entice women out of their homes and into factories, shipyards, and war plants. When the United States entered the war, 12 million women (one-quarter of the workforce) were already working, according to the National Park Service’s exhibit, “Rosie the Riveter: Women Working During World War II.” But, by the end of the war, the number was up to 18 million (one-third of the workforce). All told, between the years 1940 and 1945, female workers in defense industries grew by 462 percent.10 After the war, sexism was re-entrenched in the workplace.

Women were either laid off or found themselves (once again) relegated to low-paying jobs. Men basically resumed their dominant positions in the workforce. It wasn’t until 1964 and the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, that women gained the opportunity to exert themselves somewhat equally into the workforce. We should note the dramatic drop in poverty between the years 1939 and 1959. Census data collected after 1939 showed that by the end of the Great Depression, 40 percent of all working households under the age of 65 earned poverty wages, which were about $900 per year for a family of four.

According to Katz and Stern, it dipped again in the 1970s and ’80s and, tragically, by 1989, poverty rates in America were back at 1940-era levels. Due to the rising cost of living, it became harder for one-salary families to stay above the poverty level. In the late 20th century, it was the increased proportion of married women in the workforce and two-income families that helped keep most American families above the poverty line. On the other end of the spectrum, the poverty rate between male- and female-headed households widened. According to the Katz and Stern report, by 1990, the poverty rate for women in male-headed households was 14 percent while households headed by females stood at the higher rate of 17 percent.15 By the late 1970s, the face of poverty had reverted to 19th-century levels, and the poor were once again blamed for their circumstances.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

To explain this dramatic uptick after 1970, Claudia Goldin identifies several factors that encouraged women to seek higher education, especially career-oriented education: the influence of post-Sixties feminism in encouraging an independent mind-set, an increase in divorce rates and women’s resultant need to support their families economically, the advent of the birth control pill, which allowed delayed childbearing, and young women seeing older counterparts participating in the workforce in greater numbers and with greater longevity. “As a result,” Goldin concludes, FIGURE 7.3: GENDER BALANCE IN GRADUATE DEGREES, 1870–2017 Source: U.S. Census; Current Population Survey; National Center for Education Statistics. [young women] increased their investments in formal schooling, majored in career-oriented subjects, and continued on to professional and graduate schools in far greater numbers.

Data for 1860 exclude slaves. Over the course of the entire century, more and more women worked outside the home, and women became an ever-larger percentage of the wage labor force, ultimately representing roughly 47 percent of all paid workers today.26 As Figure 7.4 indicates, the entry of women into the workforce began to tail off as the twenty-first century opened, a fact which scholars attribute mostly to the ongoing lack of family-friendly work policies and affordable and/or public childcare options, but also to a recent resurgence of traditional attitudes about male breadwinning and female homemaking, two facts to which we will return.

In fact, when charting male and female participation in paid work side by side over the full century (Figure 7.5), we see a clear and more or less steady closing of the gender gap, with almost no interruptions. This trend toward growing parity holds for all ethnic groups and ages, with the important exception of women over 55. However, exactly when and how women of different races entered the workforce varies somewhat.27 The trend also holds at every level of family income—however, labor force participation in the twentieth century increased much more rapidly in high-income than low-income households. This is due largely to the opening of white-collar jobs for educated women in the clerical, sales, and service sectors.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Both the new factories at home, turning out exports for the US, and the deliriously appreciating houses abroad rested on the premise of continuously rising American incomes. But among Americans, wage growth had ceased and household incomes could no longer be supplemented by the mass entry of women into the workforce, something already accomplished. The issuance and securitization of debt alone could substitute for present income. In the end, so much fictitious capital could not be redeemed. Whatever the destination of future Chinese savings gluts, they are unlikely to sponsor American consumption in the same way.

It would only have enriched Jameson’s work if he had directed his attention to the cultural fallout of other novel features of the latest stage of capitalism: Mandel mentioned not only computerization and the rise of the service industries, themes Jameson has occasionally taken up, but also accelerated turnover time for fixed capital (i.e. a shorter period in which to recoup one’s investment), and the replacement of the gold standard by floating currencies. It’s not hard to imagine these transformations of the base percolating up through the superstructure. The mass introduction of women into the paid workforce, the expansion of advertizable space, the displacement of cash by credit cards and digital transactions: these are a few of the other economic changes in recent decades that come to mind as having suffused the superstructure too. Perhaps the outstanding virtue of David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity (1989) was his correlation of sped-up cultural change with a general “space-time compression” operating in contemporary capitalism across such disparate features as a casualized labor market, expanded international trade, shorter-term investment and so on—though it should be added that Harvey’s work along these lines followed Jameson’s and might not have been possible without it.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The February 2015 annual report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) looked at productivity growth in America post–World War II and labeled the years from 1948 to 1973 “The Age of Shared Growth,” because of the way that all three factors—productivity growth, distribution, and participation—aligned to benefit the middle class from 1948 to 1973 … Income inequality fell, with the share of income going to the top 1 percent falling by nearly one-third, while the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent rose slightly. Household income growth was also fueled by the increased participation of women in the workforce … The combination of these three factors increased the average income for the bottom 90 percent of households by 2.8 percent a year over this period … This period illustrates the combined power of productivity, income equality, and participation to benefit the middle class. I came of age exactly during that era.

Louis Park High newspaper) e-commerce economic disparity Economist economy, U.S.; Cold War growth in; postwar; progressivism and ecosystems; degradation of; resiliency of Edison, Thomas education: Common Core standards for; concentration and; mentors in; population growth and; self-motivation and; self-ownership in; skill sets and; socioeconomic disparity and; of women; workforce and education, innovation in; advances in connectivity and; in age of accelerations; global flows and; intelligent assistants and; online courses in; supernova and; tax deductions for; see also lifelong learning Edwards, Bruce edX Egypt; 2011 revolution in; U.S. military aid to Egyptian Army elections, U.S.: gerrymandering and; ranked-choice voting in Electronics El Salvador e-mail; messaging apps vs.

David Time Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Tipirneni, Ashok Tocqueville, Alexis de topsoil “topsoil of trust” Torvalds, Linus Toynbee, Arnold Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) translation software Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) transparency, in workplace Transparent (TV series) Trestman, Marc tribalism Tropic of Chaos (Parenti) Truman, Harry Trump, Donald trust: community and; financial flows and; as human quality; politics and; sharing economy and; as social capital; social technologies and Trust (Fukuyama) truth, live video and Tunisia TurboTax Turki, Karim Turner, Adair 24/7 Customer Twenty-Fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit Twin Cities Business Twin Cities Metropolitan Council Twitter 2G wireless networks typewriters Uber; surge pricing algorithms of Udacity Uganda, population growth in Ukraine; 2014 uprising in unemployment, political instability and Unesco United Bearing United Nations; Human Development Report Office of; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of; Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of; Population Division of; Refugee Agency (UNHCR) of United Press International (UPI) United States: China’s relations with; global dependence on; illegal immigration into; immigrant entrepreneurs in; Madagascar and; Middle East policy of; population growth in; post–Cold War hegemony of; Russia’s relations with UPS USA Today value sets: of author; community and; cultural identity and; in opinion writing; sustainable vs. situational; see also ethics, innovation in van Agtmael, Antoine Vedantam, Shankar Venezuela Venmo Ventura, Jesse Veritas Genetics Verizon version control systems Vestberg, Hans video, live, empathy and video games Vietnam Vietnam War Visa Vital Signs of the Planet (NASA report) voice prints Volkswagen Beetle Vox.com wage insurance Wakefield Research Walensky, Norm Walker, Robert Wall Street Journal Walmart, online operations of Wanamaker, John Wanstrath, Chris Warburg, Bettina Waryan, Don Washington Post Waters, Colin water scarcity Watson, Thomas Watson (computer) Watson (software): medical applications of weak signals, detection of weak states: in age of accelerations; biodiversity loss in; breakers and; building stability in; civil wars in; climate change and; in Cold War era; contrived borders of; dwindling foreign aid to; global flows and; infrastructure in; Internet and; population growth in; risk to interdependent world of We Are All Khaled Said (Facebook page) Webster University WeChat Weekend Edition (radio show) Weiner, Jeff Weisman, Alan Welby, Justin Wells, Lin Welsh, Tim West Africa; Ebola outbreak in; migration from WhatIs.com WhatsApp “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism” (Haidt) White House, 2015 drone crash at White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) Whitman, Meg “Why ‘Keep Your Paddle in the Water’ Is Bad Advice for Beginners” (Levesque) “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work” (Miller) Wieseltier, Leon Wikipedia Williams, Jake Wilson, Dan wind energy Windows Wired wireless networks wisdom, patience and Wolf, Frank women: education of; empowerment of WomenNewsNetwork.net workforce, innovation in; accelerated pace of; blending of technical and interpersonal skills in; computerization and; connectivity and; disruption in; education and; empowerment in; high-wage, middle-skilled jobs in; intelligent assistance in, see intelligent assistance; intelligent assistants and; lifelong learning and; mentors in; middle class and; new social contracts in; on-demand jobs in; retraining in; self-motivation and; self-reinvention and; skill sets and, see skill sets; technological change and; transparency and; see also job seekers World Bank World Cup (2014) World Is Flat, The (Friedman) World of Disorder World of Order World Parks Congress, Sydney “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision” (U.N.)


How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

Her book The Sisterhood: A Love Letter to the Women Who Have Shaped Me explores the love and ferocity that exist between women, and I asked her about the challenges of female-centric working environments, considering the vast amount of experience she has with them in her own family. ‘When we talk about women in the workforce, it’s assumed that we’re all on each other’s side,’ she says. ‘We’re also assumed to have the same goals, ambitions and motivations. And if we find other women at work difficult or irritating, it makes us bad, unsupportive feminists.’ Daisy brings up an excellent point, because at the moment, it feels like there is zero allowance for criticism of women by women on an individual level – or perhaps of any kind.

If we internalize the narrative of ‘older woman is threatened by younger woman and probably wants her dead’, and we’re not taught how to process feelings of envy, or come to terms with what healthy competition feels like, the ‘she’s just jealous’ explanation probably isn’t a true explanation of what’s going on. It’s never just one thing and not the other. Is it correct to say that women with more experience and more seniority, who have grown up in much different circumstances from the women just entering the workforce, feel threatened, envious, competitive or territorial when it comes to their younger women counterparts? Yes, sometimes it is. But not always. Is it also true that younger women don’t realize when they’re stepping on someone’s toes, that their ambition may leave a few blind spots in their behaviour, and that they can accidentally be dismissive of their more senior leader’s accomplishments or experience?


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Before the war, those who endured poor pay and long working hours had had two options: find a better job (not always possible) or go on strike (which might lead to the sack). During the war, employers and government needed the workers – not only skilled artisans, but the unskilled labourers and former servants who staffed the munitions factories. At least 1 million women joined the workforce during the conflict. Labour leaders were able to strike new bargains over wages and working hours with employers and the government – and to establish a permanent place at the national negotiating table. In 1914, 437,000 women and 3,708,000 men had belonged to trade unions. By 1920 over 1 million women and 7 million men were union members.4 But if the shared experience of war work was important in the rise of the modern working class, so too was the aftermath of war.

By 1933, 3,661,000 men and 731,000 women were members of trade unions, a decline of over 50 per cent for both sexes since 1920. But from the mid-1930s trade union membership began to increase, as more workers were recruited to light manufacturing plants, and they in turn joined trade unions. In 1939, 1,010,000 women were trade unionists, 16 per cent of the female workforce; 5,288,000 men were trade union members, 39 per cent of the male workforce.13 These new trade unionists were often engaged on unskilled and semi-skilled factory work. In 1929 Llewellyn Smith’s New Survey of London noted that ‘a great proportion of the additional labour which has recently entered the metal-working trades, and the larger part especially of female labour, is engaged on what are virtually new industries, rendered possible on a large scale by the invention of mass-production processes.’14 While many men were facing unemployment, new manufacturing industries were employing growing numbers of younger men and women.

The Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) finally admitted women in 1942. These new factory workers were just as conscious as the craftsmen that the high demand for workers strengthened their bargaining rights. They expanded the trade unions, which had represented 39 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women in the workforce in 1939, but by 1943 were representing 46 per cent and 30 per cent respectively.16 But this workforce remained one stratified by class. In 1941 the government introduced conscription for women, beginning with the young and single, but reaching married women by 1942. In practice, though, conscripts were almost exclusively working class.


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Margaret Mitchell calls this the ‘sea of dudes’ problem.35 Over the past five years she’s worked with around ten women and ‘hundreds’ of men. Across ‘professional computing’ as a whole in the US, 26% of jobs are held by women compared to the 57% of jobs women hold across the entire US workforce.36 In the UK, women make up 14% of the STEM workforce.37 As well as a rash of sexy robots, the sea of dudes leads to products like the ‘enormous robot research prototype called PR2’ that computer scientist and co-founder of a robotics company Tessa Lau encountered when she worked for robotics research lab Willow Garage.

These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we’ve seen, this isn’t just a matter of justice: it’s also a matter of simple economics. By accounting for women’s care responsibilities in urban planning, we make it easier for women to engage fully in the paid workforce – and as we will see in the next chapter, this is a significant driver of GDP. By accounting for the sexual violence women face and introducing preventative measures – like providing enough single-sex public toilets – we save money in the long run by reducing the significant economic cost of violence against women.

The non-career-track option is mainly administrative, offers few opportunities for advancement, and is known informally as the ‘mommy’ track – because ‘mommies’ don’t fit into the kind of work-culture that is required for someone on the career-track.122 Combined with the impact having children has on a woman’s chances of promotion (dependent on her ability to demonstrate loyalty through consecutive years worked at a single company), it is unsurprising that 70% of Japanese women stop working for a decade or more after they have their first child, compared to 30% of American women, with many remaining out of the workforce forever.123 It is also unsurprising that Japan has the sixth-largest gender gap in employment and the third-largest gender pay gap in the OECD.124 Long-hours culture is also a problem in academia – and it is exacerbated by career-progression systems designed around typically male life patterns.


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

For the entire climate to change nationally as it changed in Chicago, good unions need to engage the broader community in the fight, so that the community, of which the workers are an organic part, transforms along with the workplace. That is an organizing model with a bottom-up strategy, capable of movement building rather than mere moment actualization. The large numbers of women in today’s workforce—saddled with wage work and endless nonwage work—don’t separate their lives in the way industrial-era, mostly male workers could, entering one life when they arrived at work and punched in, and another when they punched out. The pressing concerns that bear down on most workers today are not divided into two neat piles, only one of which need be of concern to the union, while the other is divided up among a dozen single-issue interest groups, none of which has the union’s collective strength.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

India will also need policies that address the balance of power for women in the workforce. The economist Abhijit Banerjee, who works at the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has emphasized that educating women is a very effective means of improving our social indicators, particularly those related to fertility and health. An educated woman, for instance, insists on educating her children, which is why, as Abhijit notes, “when you educate a woman, you typically educate a family.” He points out how education would greatly empower women in participating in the workforce, boosting a group that has long been under-represented in the Indian economy.

The resources that are normally put into building up the economy—in infrastructure, capital and savings—are being diverted to raise children . . . you are not building as many bridges, digging as many harbors, or creating as many ports.” Additionally, as the number of children per woman in East Asia fell from six to two, women were able to join the workforce and contribute to GDP growth. This demographically rich generation drove East Asia’s rise as a manufacturing and technology power—including the growth of Singapore in manufacturing and retail, of Hong Kong in finance and of Taiwan in electronics. In all, Bloom and Williamson discovered, this wave of young workers contributed to as much as one third of East Asia’s economic rise between 1965 and 1990.l “We showed,” David tells me, “that particular kinds of population growth could dramatically drive the country’s growth, not impede it as economists used to believe.”

In Ireland it was the legalization of birth control that fueled its demographics—there were few infant deaths, but when this deeply Catholic country finally legalized contraceptives in 1979, Ireland’s high fertility rate began to fall rapidly. David writes, “In 1970, the average Irishwoman had 3.9 children; by the mid-1990s, that number was less than two.” As the number of dependants plunged and Irish women joined the workforce, Ireland’s dividend became a springboard for its economy and its growth rates averaged 5.8 percent—higher than that of any other European country. However, in all these examples, we are clearly talking of demographic bulges that are past—in David’s words, “of the pigs that have already passed through the python.”


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

I wondered what life he would have chosen had he been able to. The mantra in King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia, repeated ad nauseam by government officials and Saudi academics, was “evolution, not revolution.” The kingdom was politically stable, as far as anyone knew, and the old king was a reformer, in his way. He had lifted regulations to allow women to enter the workforce; appointed a group of women to the Shura Council, a royal advisory body; and vowed to let women vote and run in municipal elections. Most Saudis welcomed those changes but were keenly aware of the chaos that the Arab Spring uprisings had unleashed in neighboring countries. That made them happy to take it slow and leave governance to the royals, as long as they kept paying the bills.

The private fatwa sector sometimes got unruly, so the government tried to impose consistency with official fatwa institutions. But their fatwas provoked laughter, too, like the one that deemed spending money on Pokémon products “cooperation in sin and transgression.” Others contradicted government policy. The state, since King Abdullah, had been trying to push more women into the workforce, an effort further advanced by MBS. But the state fatwa organization warned against the “danger of women joining men in their workplace,” calling it “the reason behind the destruction of societies.” While digging around on the organization’s website, I was shocked to find a fatwa in English from the previous Grand Mufti that called for infidels to be killed or taken as slaves until they became Muslims.

According to one estimate, car sales would grow by 9 percent each year through 2025 and 20 percent of Saudi women would be driving by 2020. The ride-hailing company Uber planned to recruit women, and dealerships set aside women-only shopping hours. The lifting of the ban would change Saudi society in myriad ways in the years ahead, facilitating women’s entry into the workforce and giving them greater control over their social, economic, and even romantic lives. But first, most needed to learn to drive. On my last visit to Saudi Arabia in the spring of 2018, I spent a day at a women’s university in Jeddah where the Ford Motor Company Fund was giving a drivers’ safety workshop.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Bureau of Labor Statistics Notes: Percent is labor force participation within each group. In earlier years, statistics for women with children are only available broken down by marital status; married women are shown as they are the largest marital status group of women with children. However, women’s growing participation in the workforce in the 1950s and 1960s hid a stark truth. Take a look at Figure 2.3, which shows the percent of higher degrees earned by women. Figure 2.3: Percent of higher degrees granted to women, U.S., 1900–1975 Source: Digest of Education Statistics and the Statistical Abstract, U.S. Census Bureau Notes: The shaded area shows the years of World War II and the peak years of soldiers going to college on the GI Bill.

Given that childcare costs have far outpaced inflation, the lack of paid parental leave and the high cost of childcare may be key reasons behind the birth rate decline. That’s especially true because of the narrowing gender gap in pay we saw earlier; Millennial families lose more income than previous generations did when women leave the workforce to care for children. However, the economists’ paper found that states with rising childcare costs did not show bigger declines in birth rates—if anything, the opposite was true, suggesting the rise in childcare costs might have been driven by higher birth rates and thus more demand. Another reason for the falling birth rate is more complex: Raising children takes more effort than it used to.

Wade, 92, 286, 314, 437, 480 Survey of Consumer Finances, 265 Swarbrick, Chlöe, 312 T Tea Party movement, 228–29 tech industry, 190, 232 technology, 6–8, 29, 54, 59, 136, 140, 151, 156, 163, 164, 226, 293, 445, 452, 514–15 birth rate and, 480 Boomers and, 79 children’s use of screen media, 456–59 divorce and, 55 generations theory based on, 6–8, 9, 11 individualism and, 8–14, 18, 34, 39, 79 middle class and, 12 pace of, 27–28 regulation of, 495–98 slow life trajectory and, 8, 14–18, 59, 374 wide-reaching effects of, 7, 7 and women in workforce, 44 television, 12, 39, 69, 79, 114, 137, 256, 414, 415 Gen X and, 150, 151, 157–59, 177 Terry, Brandon, 500 texting, 232, 254, 347, 449 13th Gen (Howe et al.), 159, 188 thirtysomething, 93, 114–15, 124 This Is How You Lose Her (Díaz), 286 Thomas, Clarence, 117–18, 428 Thomas, Susan Gregory, 159 Thompson, Derek, 277, 401, 466 TikTok, 156, 255, 360, 421, 423–24, 469 Time, 33, 85, 247, 311 Tinder, 288–90, 369 Tomaine, Gina, 281, 286–88 Tometi, Opal, 315 transgender people, 13, 349, 352, 353, 354–62, 355, 356, 357, 358, 361, 475 trigger warnings, 387–88, 388, 467 Truman, Harry, 41 Trump, Donald, 76, 120, 132, 138, 143, 229, 304, 307, 307, 311, 332, 338, 343, 346, 383, 384, 389, 403, 404, 432, 437, 441, 481, 485, 494, 499 Republican or conservative voters for, 431, 431 trust, 143, 203, 224 in government, 199–201, 200, 207, 494 income inequality and, 198–99, 199 individualism and, 203 in medicine, 201–3, 202 in news media, 200–201, 201 in others, 62, 63, 196, 197, 197, 198 Turkle, Sherry, 413 Twitter, 219, 260, 306, 338, 340, 346, 379–80, 423, 438, 452, 496 U UPS, 474 Urban, Tim, 334 U.S.


pages: 291 words: 88,879

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

Bureau of Labor Statistics rose from 18 million to 66 million while the proportion of women working jumped from 33 percent to 60 percent.25 Most other advanced nations have experienced similar changes during the past half century, such that today the level of men’s and women’s participation in higher education and the paid workforce is more balanced than ever before. Women’s assertion of control over their own bodies has also changed the terms of modern relationships, resulting in delayed marriage, a longer transition to adulthood, and increased rates of separation and divorce. In the United States, divorce rates have climbed steadily since the mid-nineteenth century, but in the 1960s they began to rise sharply, and by 2000 marriages were twice as likely to end in divorce as they were in 1950.26 Today, neither breaking up with a spouse nor staying single means settling for a life of unwanted abstinence.

These men are struggling to shake off a heavy load of burdens: substance abuse, a criminal record, poverty, unemployment, and disease are common, and often overlapping. The ranks of men in this situation have grown steadily since the 1970s, due not only to the collapse of the industrial labor market and the fact that employers in the service sector are reluctant to hire them, but also to the rise of women in the paid workforce, the vast expansion of the penal system, and the retrenchment of social services for the poor.4 In 2006 the New York Times reported, “About 18 percent of men ages forty to forty-four with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter century ago.


pages: 200 words: 72,182

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

A book that has changed assumptions about American prosperity and hardship, Nickel and Dimed makes an especially compelling selection for reading groups. The questions that follow are designed to enhance your personal understanding or group discussion of this provocative, heartfelt—and funny—account of life in the low-wage trenches. Questions for discussion 1. In the wake of recent welfare reform measures, millions of women entering the workforce can expect to face struggles like the ones Ehrenreich confronted in Nickel and Dimed. Have you ever been homeless, unemployed, without health insurance, or held down two jobs? What is the lowest-paying job you ever held and what kind of help—if any—did you need to improve your situation?

Mediamark Research reports a 53 percent increase, between 1995 and 1999, in the number of households using a hired cleaner or service once a month or more, and Maritz Marketing finds that 30 percent of the people who hired help in 1999 had done so for the first time that year. Managers of the new corporate cleaning services, such as the one I worked for, attribute their success not only to the influx of women into the workforce but to the tensions over housework that arose in its wake. When the trend toward hiring out was just beginning to take off, in 1988, the owner of a Merry Maids franchise in Arlington, Massachusetts, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I kid some women. I say, 'We even save marriages. In this new eighties period you expect more from the male partner, but very often you don't get the cooperation you would like to have.


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Is the Business Growing Because of Secular Trends? Secular growth trends are sustained trends driven by demographic or social changes. These demographic or social changes can create an extended period of demand for products or services. For example, think of the growth in the number of women entering the workforce: From 1948 to 2000, women grew from 29 percent of the workforce in 1948 to about 50 percent by 2000.6 This was a social change, and it drove the secular trends of women purchasing more workplace clothing, the growth in popularity of frozen foods (because there was limited time to cook a meal), and other social changes caused by women having less available time.

One business that Lister’s firm invested in because it met the majority of Imperial Capital’s criteria (75 out of 100) was Associated Freezers Corporation, a refrigerated warehousing company. There were several factors that attracted Lister and his team to Associated Freezers, including these: Underlying demand was strong. As women entered the workforce, frozen foods made up a larger part of people’s diets. Supermarkets showed evidence of this increased demand as they increased the number of frozen foods aisles. The quality of frozen foods improved. The old style TV dinner was replaced with more popular choices and higher-quality ingredients.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

., June 30, 2020, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_749399.pdf; Courtney Connley, “Women’s Labor Force Participation Rate Hit a 33-Year Low in January, According to New Analysis,” CNBC Make It, February 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/womens-labor-force-participation-rate-hit-33-year-low-in-january-2021.html; Catarina Saraiva, “Women Leaving Workforce Again Shows Uneven U.S. Jobs Recovery,” Bloomberg News, May 7, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-07/women-leaving-workforce-again-shows-uneven-u-s-jobs-recovery. 13 Till von Wachter, “Lost Generations: Long-Term Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis on Job Losers and Labour Market Entrants, and Options for Policy,” Fiscal Studies 41, no. 3 (September 2020): 549–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12247; Kenneth Burdett, Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, and Melvyn Coles, “The Cost of Job Loss,” Review of Economic Studies 87, no. 4 (July 2020): 1757–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa014. 14 “The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Equity and Inclusion: Supporting Vulnerable Students during School Closures and School Re-openings,” OECD, November 19, 2020, https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/the-impact-of-COVID-19-on-student-equity-and-inclusion-supporting-vulnerable-students-during-school-closures-and-school-re-openings-d593b5c8/. 15 “UN Report Finds COVID-19 Is Reversing Decades of Progress on Poverty, Healthcare and Education,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, July 7, 2020, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/sustainable/sustainable-development-goals-report-2020.html; “America’s Huge Stimulus Is Having Surprising Effects on the Poor,” Economist, July 6, 2020, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/07/06/americas-huge-stimulus-is-having-surprising-effects-on-the-poor; Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah, “COVID-19 Is Increasing Multiple Kinds of Inequality.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And that was, he points out, a real boon for the students, patients, and bosses who might otherwise have been taught, cared for, and served by a less talented pool of applicants.51 Today, while glass ceilings still exist, opportunities for women to work outside the home have expanded dramatically.52 Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, the percentage of working-age American women engaged in work outside the home grew from roughly one-third to 70 percent.53 That change—an indelibly Third Wave phenomenon—has become a broadly accepted norm of American life. By 2005, 81 percent of Americans approved of a woman working outside the home—even if her husband made enough to support the family alone.54 The birth-control pill has certainly played some role in women’s emergence into the professional workforce. Fewer children—and children born at a more predictable pace—have reduced burdens that once compelled many women to stay at home. At the same time, the old burdens haven’t been lifted entirely. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins has argued, the contemporary expectation that women will take a professional role outside the home has not diminished the pressure many feel to fulfill the domestic responsibilities their mothers and grandmothers shouldered.55 That said, new job opportunities do not account entirely for the flood of women in the workforce.

As New York Times columnist Gail Collins has argued, the contemporary expectation that women will take a professional role outside the home has not diminished the pressure many feel to fulfill the domestic responsibilities their mothers and grandmothers shouldered.55 That said, new job opportunities do not account entirely for the flood of women in the workforce. Many have been pushed into breadwinning positions purely by a demand for income. Whether it’s to keep up with the Joneses or to make up for the diminishing spending power of middle-class salaries, women who might once have chosen to work at home (or not at all) now feel compelled to earn a second household salary.56 The composite result is clear: adults today spend more hours at work than they once did.

Even more than in 1985, the discussion networks we measured in 2004 are the closest of close ties.”10 Evidence coming from inside family portraits reveals much the same picture. Conventional wisdom assumes that children are seeing less of their parents—that our propensity for longer working hours, combined with the stampede of women into the professional workforce, has depleted the time adults have to rear their children. But that supposition has been upended by underreported studies that suggest parents are actually spending more time with their kids than they were in the mid-1970s. The average number of weekly hours that mothers spent caring directly for their children grew from ten in 1965 to thirteen in 2000; among fathers, the number more than doubled from three to seven over the same thirty-five-year span.11 As Fischer once explained to me, our perception is that families are eating at home less, but if the substitute is to go out for dinner, the net outcome may reveal that their time together has not diminished at all.12 By another standard, in fact, the problem isn’t that American children are getting too little parenting—it’s that they’re getting too much.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

The increased availability of capital, from both the shift from a capital-intensive economy to a knowledge-intensive economy in high-wage economies and the high saving rates in many low-wage economies, like China’s, accelerates investment offshore that reduces manufacturing employment in high-wage economies. Productivity gains from capital investment now hollow out manufacturing employment and drive unskilled workers to the harder-to-manage service sector, where productivity growth has been slower. Meanwhile, the baby boom, the increased participation of women in the workforce, immigration, and international trade greatly increased the supply of labor, especially lower-skilled labor. Displaced workers must depend on entrepreneurial risk-takers, properly trained talent, and investors to find and commercialize new sources of employment with productivity and wages comparable to their prior capital-intensive manufacturing jobs.

.* Interestingly, a breakdown of growth by income quintiles into economic cycles shows that virtually all the growth in income inequality occurred in the 1980s and has largely held steady since. No surprise, 1980s-era tax reform shifted the reporting of income for tax purposes from corporate to personal tax returns after it lowered personal income tax rates. The 1980s were also a time when women and baby boomers flooded into the workforce and the economy grew relative to the individuals who composed it.* Visit bit.ly/2c1Yc87 for a larger version of this image. Demagogues similarly manipulate the commonly cited evidence to claim that wages have stagnated while productivity has soared.27 This claim also collapses under closer scrutiny.

See labor unions United Kingdom government investment, 147 incentives and taxes, 74 productivity growth, 23 test scores, 219, 220 upward mobility, myth of decline, 177–86 vocational education, 234, 235 wage growth slowdown, 37–61, 163–64 empirical studies on trade and immigration, 54–59 growth in incomes by level of income, 10, 10–11 income inequality and, 9, 10–11, 13–14 low-skilled immigration straining constrained resources, 47–52 trade deficits straining economy’s capacity and willingness to take risk, 52–54 trade with low-wage economies, 40–47 wages and workforce productivity, 37–39, 210–12 Walmart, 24, 210, 213 wealth inheritance, 90–91 Weinstein, David, 46 welfare, 204–10. See also government benefits “what if” planning scenarios, 18 Whitehurst, Grover, 232 women, marriage value and growing success of, 156, 166–69 workforce participation rate, 11, 79, 204, 206–7 workforce productivity and wages, 37–39, 210–12 work incentives, 204–10 working hours, 197, 206–7 World War II, 41, 127, 188 zero lower bound, 149, 149n 0.1 percent. See top 0.1 percent Zuckerberg, Mark, 12 *I have rounded numbers throughout this book.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But they are also an economic unit, dividing labor and sharing the costs of bringing up children or putting a roof over everyone’s head. Economic changes—which is to say, rational responses to changing incentives—were behind the rapid rise of divorce in the 1970s; they are also behind the dramatic but as yet unfinished strides women are taking toward equality in the workforce. We’ll see how rational reactions have turned divorce, the contraceptive pill, and women’s achievements in the workplace into a reinforcing loop: These matters are all connected closely to the negotiations between men and women in long-term relationships. First of all, though, it’s time to dispose of an age-old question.

Instead, the divorce revolution was driven by a more fundamental economic force: the breakdown of the traditional division of labor identified by Adam Smith. At the beginning of the twentieth century, housework took many hours, and only the poorest and most desperate married women had jobs. As the decades rolled past, technological change made housework less time-consuming. It became easy—and quite common—for older women to enter the workforce after their children were grown and housework was more manageable. Once divorce rates began to climb, it was no surprise that they increased dramatically. There was a rationally self-reinforcing loop at work: The more people divorced, the more divorcées—that is, potential marriage partners—you could meet.

He…generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Smith’s argument applies just as well to ironing and baking cookies, his use of the male pronoun notwithstanding. Division of labor creates wealth but can sap our lives of variety. The serious entry of married women into the workforce has meant that they spend a little less time baking cookies, and perhaps also that their husbands spend a little more time with the children. It has empowered women to leave marriages that are not working, making them happier and safer from abuse. It has truly been a revolution, and the price of that revolution is more divorce and less marriage.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the ongoing debates over raising taxes and cutting services, aid to local governments has consistently been the lowest of priorities. Now that local governments’ finances are desperately fragile, so is the state government they thought was their benefactor. Another example of short-term gains through efficiency came with women entering the workforce in increasing numbers. While there were, and still are, strong gender-equity arguments for making the workplace more welcoming to women, it wasn’t only liberation that most women were seeking by taking on additional labor outside the home. It was a paycheck, and the increased standard of living that extra income provided.

And, in another example of long-term consequences, that added income didn’t ultimately result in broader prosperity and financial stability for families. Over time, it merely increased prices for family essentials, like housing, daycare, and education. Instead of the economy having to adjust downward to meet productivity levels – a painful constraint – women entering the American workforce bailed out the economy by adding their capacity. For economists, another macro constraint avoided. In the 1960s, a family could live comfortably in the middle class with just one wage earner. Now they need two, at least. We must applaud the empowerment aspect of expanding opportunity for women, and having women in the workplace has benefits beyond economic growth, but it’s quite a stretch to think of the person forced to clean hotel rooms, work a gas station counter, or stock shelves at a big-box store, just to make ends meet, as enjoying any meaningful form of liberation.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As I noted, jobs slowly returned from the depths of the Great Recession, but in order to get them, many workers had to accept lower pay than before. Over the last three and a half decades, middle-class families continued to spend, the breakdown of the basic bargain notwithstanding. Their spending was at first enabled by the flow of women into the workforce. In the 1960s, only 12 percent of married women with children under the age of six were working for pay; by the late 1990s, 55 percent were in the paid workforce. When that way of life stopped generating enough income, Americans went deeper into debt. From the late 1990s to 2007, the typical household debt grew by a third.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

One strategy could be self-­censorship, the tendency for people to remain silent when they feel that their views are in opposition to the majority, for fear of social isolation or reprisal.51 Another could be adaptation, as groups gradually come to accept the profound cultural shifts which have become mainstream during their lifetimes, such as growing acceptance of women’s equality in the paid workforce and public spheres.52 A third could be a retreat to social bubbles of like-­minded people, the great sorting, now easier than ever in the echo chamber of social media and the partisan press, thereby avoiding potential social conflict and disagreements. We theorize that an alternative strategy, however, is the authoritarian reflex, a defensive reaction strongest among socially conservative groups feeling threatened by the rapid processes of economic, social, and cultural change, rejecting unconventional social mores and moral norms, and finding reassurance from a collective community of like-­minded people, where transgressive strongman leaders express socially incorrect views while defending traditional values and beliefs.

Paralleling these changes is a decline in respect for authority.’25 The European Social Survey illustrates these trends; Figure 4.3 displays some of the substantial shifts in social values by birth cohorts in a wide range of more than 30 European societies, with the younger birth cohorts being substantially more liberal and cosmopolitan than their parents or grandparents, whether monitored by feelings toward European Union unification, the positive impact of immigrants for multiculturalism, tolerance of gay and lesbian lifestyles, more secular identities, and egalitarian attitudes toward the role of women in the paid workforce. The tipping Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 97 <<<<< Socially-Conservative ----- Socially-Liberal >>>>> .40000 .20000 .00000 Women should not cut down paid work for family –.20000 Men should not have more right to job Gays & lesbians should be free to live life as they wish –.40000 EU unification should go further Cultural life is enriched by immigrants Immigrants make the country a better place to live –.60000 Not at all religious Low 2.00 3.00 4.00 High Education Cases weighted by Design weight Figure 4.4.

The evidence confirms that the silent revolution during the second half of the twentieth century was closely associated with processes of intergenerational value change. This was also reinforced by the expansion of university education in knowledge societies that demand more skilled employees, by growing gender equality as women enter the paid workforce and political leadership, and by urbanization as younger professionals Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 123 leave rural areas to study, work, and live in multicultural metropolitan cities. These findings are in line with many previous studies, which have also found that libertarian and authoritarian values vary substantially by birth cohort.


pages: 296 words: 86,188

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, classic study, demographic transition, Drosophila, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, mouse model, out of africa, place-making, scientific mainstream, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, women in the workforce

I hope he will one day read this book, because I wrote it with his future in mind. REFERENCES Introduction Women’s Engineering Society. “Statistics on Women in Engineering.” Revised March 2016. http://www.wes.org.uk/sites/default/files/Women%20in%20Engineering%20Statistics%20March2016.pdf. WISE. “Woman in the STEM Workforce.” September 7, 2015. https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/resources/2015/09/women-in-the-stem-workforce. National Science Foundation. “Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2015.” http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15311/digest/nsf15311-digest.pdf. Summers, Lawrence H.

Figures from WISE, a campaign in the United Kingdom to promote women in science, engineering, and technology, reveal that in 2015 women made up a little more than 14 percent of their workplaces overall. The picture is similar in the United States: according to the National Science Foundation, although women make up nearly half the scientific workforce, they’re underrepresented in engineering, physics, and mathematics. Standing on that playing field by myself at age sixteen, I couldn’t figure it out. I belonged to a household of three sisters, all brilliant at math. Girls stood among boys as the highest achievers at my school.


pages: 504 words: 147,722

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Helicobacter pylori, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Joan Didion, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microaggression, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, phenotype, pre–internet, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk, women in the workforce

., “A Census of Actively Licensed Physicians in the United States, 2014,” Journal of Medical Regulation 101, no. 2 (2015), www.fsmb.org/media/default/pdf/census/2014census.pdf. The proportion of practicing ob-gyns who are women . . . Center for Workforce Studies, 2014 Physician Specialty Data Book (Association of American Medical Colleges, November 2014), https://members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/Physician%20Specialty%20Databook%202014.pdf. Currently, 60 percent of pediatricians are women . . . Center for Workforce Studies, 2014 Physician Specialty Data Book. In recent years, women have made up about . . . Lyndra Vassar, “How Medical Specialties Vary by Gender,” AMA Wire, February 18, 2015, https://wire.ama-assn.org/education/how-medical-specialties-vary-gender.

One textbook in the 1970s declared that dysmenorrhea “is generally a symptom of a personality disorder, even though hormonal imbalance may be present.” Rather quickly, women went from having to resist medicine’s pronouncement that their periods were, as a rule, so disabling they disqualified women from being equal participants in the workforce to having to insist that some women did indeed experience debilitating periods. To some extent there’s been a swing back to seeing women’s reproductive functions and transitions as pathological. With menopause, this shift was especially extreme. In 1966, Robert A. Wilson argued in his book Feminine Forever that menopause was a “curable” state that “no woman need suffer” thanks to treatment with supplemental estrogen.

Of course, Meigs, writing at the height of eugenicist thinking in American medicine, wasn’t concerned about endometriosis in all women. He claimed that the disease wasn’t as common among “less well-to-do patients” and advocated “early marriage and early childbearing among our people”—by which he meant his own “successful” Anglo-Saxon, well-educated upper class. By the sixties, as more and more women began to flagrantly break “nature’s rules” and enter the workforce, endometriosis came to be called “the career women’s disease.” The typical patient was thought to share a particular psychological profile. “The patient is said to be mesomorphic but underweight, overanxious, intelligent, egocentric and a perfectionist. These characteristics represent a personality pattern in which marriage and childbearing are likely to be deferred and therefore predispose to prolonged periods of uninterrupted ovulation.”


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Even in this moment of temporary respite, Black unemployment stood at 16 percent; in 1968, Pittsburgh’s Black unemployment rate surpassed that of all other major cities, including Newark, Detroit, and St. Louis. Moreover, the region’s labor force participation rate, 54 percent, was among the lowest in the country. This figure was a combined product of the low rate of women’s workforce participation, the gradual ejection of Black men from industrial work, the overall aging of the workforce, and the departure of the young—all related to steel’s long-term prevalence and slow decline.12 Job loss was racialized because it tracked the industrial workplace’s internal labor market hierarchy.

The market in men’s labor contracted sharply, and the market in women’s labor expanded. These dynamics were also racialized. Industrial employers tended to lay off Black men sooner, and for longer, than white men. For this reason, Black women long had participated in larger numbers than white women in waged work. The workforces that grew most during this time were those in which Black women had already spent years participating, laboring in the lower strata of the hierarchy: doing the laundry, cooking and serving the food, changing the sheets, and cleaning the bodies. While it was common for observers to note the numerical replacement of high-wage industrial jobs with low-wage service jobs, few perceived any connection between these processes.


pages: 375 words: 109,675

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India by Christian Wolmar

Beeching cuts, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, James Dyson, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghnad Desai, Ponzi scheme, railway mania, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, women in the workforce

Enterprises ref1 Sealdah ref1 Second Afghan War (1878–80) ref1, ref2 second class ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Second World War (1939–45) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Shastri, Lal Bahadur ref1 shipping ref1, ref2, ref3 Sibi ref1 Sibi–Quetta line ref1 Sikhs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Siliguri ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Silk Road ref1, ref2 Simla line ref1, ref2 Sind desert ref1, ref2 Sind Pershin State Railway ref1 Sind, Punjab & Delhi Railway ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Sindh (locomotive) ref1 Sindh Province ref1 sleeper-trains ref1, ref2 sleepers, railway ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 SNCF ref1 Soane Bridge ref1, ref2 Solani aqueduct ref1 South-Eastern Railway ref1 South Indian Railway ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Southern Mahratta Railway ref1 Southern Zone ref1 Soviet Union ref1, ref2 standards, disparity in ref1, ref2, ref3 stationmasters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 stations ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35 steam locomotive see locomotives Stephenson, George ref1, ref2 Stephenson, Macdonald ref1 Stephenson, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Stephenson, Rowland ref1 Stevens, Frederick William ref1 strikes see industrial disputes Strachey, Sir Richard ref1, ref2 Sultan (locomotive) ref1 supply industry, rail ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 Sutlej River, Ferozepur ref1 Sweeney, Stuart ref1 Tagore, Dwarkanath ref1 Taj Mahal ref1 Tamil Nadu ref1 Taptee valley ref1 tax/taxpayer, Indian ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 tea industry ref1, ref2, ref3 terrorism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 textile manufacturers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Thailand ref1 Thal Ghats ref1, ref2, ref3 Thana ref1, ref2 see also Bombay–Thana line Thana River ref1 Thane ref1 theft ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Theroux, Paul ref1, ref2 Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) ref1 third class ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35 Thomas Cook and Son ref1 Thomas, John ref1, ref2 Thomason (steam locomotive) ref1 timber sources ref1, ref2 Tinkusia ref1 Tirhut ref1 toilets ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Trade Unions Act (1926) ref1 train-wrecking incidents ref1, ref2 Trans-Baluchistan ref1 Trans-Caspian Railway ref1, ref2, ref3 transfer stations ref1 transport network, India ref1 Transsiberian Railway ref1, ref2 Tredwell, Alice ref1, ref2 Tredwell, Solomon ref1, ref2, ref3 Trichinopoly ref1 Tully, Mark ref1, ref2 Tuticorin ref1 Twain, Mark ref1 Umballa ref1, ref2 Unesco World Heritage Site ref1 United States of America (USA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 Upper Doab famine (1860–1) ref1 Urdu Guide ref1 Uttar Pradesh ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Varady, Professor Paul ref1 Verne, Jules: Around the World in Eighty Days ref1 Victoria Terminus (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) (‘VT’), Bombay/Mumbai ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Vithoba temple ref1 Vitznau-Rigi line, Switzerland ref1 Vulcan Foundry, Newton-le-Willows ref1 wages ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18 Wales, Prince of (later, King Edward VIII) ref1 Wall Street Crash (October, 1929) ref1, ref2 Wanti, Shrimati Laj ref1 wastage ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 water provision ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Wedgwood Committee (1936–7) ref1, ref2, ref3 Wedgwood, Lady Iris ref1, ref2 Wedgwood, Sir Ralph ref1, ref2 West Pakistan ref1, ref2 Western Ghats ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Western Zone ref1 Westwood, J. N. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Willingdon, Marquess of ref1 Wilson, James ref1, ref2 wodders or wudders (earthworks/stone specialists) ref1 women: railway workforce ref1, ref2, ref3; travel arrangements for ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 workforce, railway ref1; career ladder for white men ref2; caste and racial groups, particular jobs associated with ref3, ref4; construction of railways ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15; Eurasian see Eurasian railway workers; European see European railway workers; Indian Christians ref16; Indian worker efficiency, criticism of ref17; Indian worker variety of functions ref18, ref19; Indianization of workforce, policy of (1870) ref20, ref21; industrial disputes see industrial disputes; local work processes and ref22; Partition and ref23; railway communities, establishment of ref24, ref25, ref26; recruitment ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33, ref34, ref35, ref36, ref37; regulations and ref38; safety-critical tasks, apprehension over employing Indians for ref39, ref40; Second World War and ref41, ref42; security used as reason for not employing Indians ref43; size of workforce ref44; supply industry/workshops ref45, ref46, ref47, ref48, ref49, ref50, ref51, ref52, ref53, ref54, ref55, ref56, ref57, ref58, ref59; wages see wages workshops ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 Zahidan, Persia ref1, ref2, ref3 zamindars (landed gentry) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christian Wolmar is an award-winning writer and broadcaster, specializing in transport.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

The result was that wages for women were systematically lower than wages for men even in comparable work. For example, women weavers, skilled workers, were paid the same wages as unskilled men, labourers, rather than the wages paid to male mule spinners, who, like coal getters and engine drivers, were paid at skilled rates.10 This was an important reason men resisted letting women into the workforce and kept them out of some trade unions (for example, the engineers until the Second World War). Similarly wages for boys and apprentices were systematically lower than for older men. About half the number of women worked for wages as did men. Women nearly always worked indoors, most obviously in the case of domestic service, but also in industry.

The housewife performed laborious, skilled tasks, which were central to respectability, which men only did on board ship, or in the armed forces.12 More visible has been the work of women in the home of others: paid ‘domestic service’ was the second major feminine occupation until the Second World War, one dominated by young, unmarried women. In the interwar years about one-quarter of young women and girls were in domestic service: in 1931 1.4 million women worked as ‘indoor servants’. The next most common occupations for women were as textile workers (an industry whose workforce was two-thirds female), makers of clothing, shop assistants, teachers and nurses.13 Female shop assistants often slept above the shop. Then came work in factories and shops and offices, generally also for unmarried women only. Much of this industrial work, though certainly not all, was in industrial kitchens, or working on industrial looms, spindles or sewing machines, industrial variants of domestic machines.

That was a major advance in that a real and longstanding discrimination was removed, but the crucial issue of comparability between different jobs into which men and women were still segregated was not addressed.32 These were just signs of a revolution in the position of women which would take decades. Women entered the workforce in new ways, the public sphere and the professions. One important way in which things changed subtly but importantly was in the breakdown, by earlier standards, of gender segregation at work. This was very evident in the world of graduates. The proportion of female students was increasing from the 1960s but accelerated in the 1970s, reversing the masculinization of the 1930s to the 1950s.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Between 1949 and 1973, US median household incomes roughly doubled, from about $25,000 to $50,000. Growth in median incomes during this period tracked nearly perfectly with per capita GDP. Three decades later, median household income had increased to about $61,000, an increase of just 22 percent. That growth, however, was driven largely by the entry of women into the workforce. If incomes had moved in lockstep with economic growth—as was the case prior to 1973—the median household would today be earning well in excess of $90,000, over 50 percent more than the $61,000 they do earn.12 Figure 2.1 shows the relationship between labor productivity* (which measures the value of workers’ hourly output) and compensation (which includes wages and benefits) paid to ordinary private sector workers from 1948 onward.

In the wake of the 2008–9 economic crisis, it was often the case that the unemployment rate fell not because large numbers of new jobs were being created, but because discouraged workers exited the workforce. Unlike the unemployment rate, which counts only those people actively seeking jobs, labor-force participation offers a graphic illustration that captures workers who have given up. As Figure 2.5 shows, the labor force participation rate rose sharply between 1970 and 1990 as women flooded into the workforce. The overall trend disguises the crucial fact that the percentage of men in the labor force has been in consistent decline since 1950, falling from a high of about 86 percent to 70 percent as of 2013. The participation rate for women peaked at 60 percent in 2000; the overall labor force participation rate peaked at about 67 percent that same year.26 Figure 2.5.

The real question—and the primary subject of this book—is, What will be most important in the future? Many of the forces that heavily impacted the economy and political environment over the past half-century have largely played out. Unions outside the public sector have been decimated. Women who want careers have entered the workforce or enrolled in colleges and professional schools. There is evidence that the drive toward factory offshoring has slowed significantly, and in some cases, manufacturing is returning to the United States. Among the forces poised to shape the future, information technology stands alone in terms of its exponential progress.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And if immigrants are paid to do jobs of childcare, looking after the sick and elderly, cleaning and cooking, that enables natives (who were formerly doing this as unpaid labour) to also join or rejoin the workforce. In the patriarchal structure of most nations, this has meant that highly skilled women have been able to join the workforce when there were more migrants around. Enterprising migrants start businesses that employ more migrants and natives. Some of these businesses help generate greater social, economic and cultural productivity, driving a whole new economy. Think of the Chinatowns, Little Greeces and Little Italys, for example.

Kung peoples; lack of water resources; low levels of migration to; migration from as relatively low; poor infrastructure and city planning; population rise in; rainfall due to Indian irrigation; remittances from urban migrants; and restoring of planet’s habitability; Transaqua Project of water diversion; transatlantic slave trade; transport infrastructure in; urbanization in African Union agoraphobia AI and drone technology aid, development/foreign air-conditioning/cooling airships or blimps Alaska algae Aliens Act (UK, 1905) Alps, European Amazon region Americas Anatolia Anchorage, Alaska Anderson, Benedict animals/wildlife; global dispersal of; impact of fires on; impact of ice loss on see also livestock farming Antarctica; ice sheet Anthropocene era; four horsemen of Aravena, Alejandro Archaeology architecture/buildings: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; energy-efficiency retrofits; floating infrastructure; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-carbon concrete; prefabricated and modular housing; in successful migrant cities; wooden skyscrapers; zero-carbon new-builds Arctic region; first ice-free summer expected; opening up of due to climate change Argentina Arrhenius, Svante Asia: cities vulnerable to climate change; drought-hit areas; extreme La Niña events; extreme precipitation in monsoon regions; Ganges and Indus river basins; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; huge populations of South Asia; lack of water resources; rivers fed by glaciers; small hydropower installations; urbanization Aswan High Dam asylum-seekers: Australia’s dismal record on; Britain’s proud history on; dominant hostile narratives about; drownings in English Channel; limbo situation due to delayed claim-processing; misinformation about see also refugees Athens Australia: Black Summer (2019–20); energy-supply economy; impact of climate emergency; indigenous inhabitants; low population density in; migration to; and mineral extraction in Greenland; renewable power in; treatment of asylum-seekers; White Australia Policy aviation Aztecs Babylon bacteria, in food production bamboo Bangkok Bangladesh; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; Burmese Rohingya refugees; impact of climate emergency; migration across Indian border; population density in; relocation strategies; training for rural migrants Bantu people Barber, Benjamin Barcelona Beckett, Samuel Belarus Belgium Bergamo, Italy Bhutan Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam) biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; coral reefs as probably doomed; crash in insect and bird populations; depletion of fish stocks; due to agriculture; due to farming; four horsemen of the Anthropocene; and human behaviour; Key Biodiversity Areas; links with climate change; and marine heatwaves; and overuse of fertilizers; restoring of; species extinction; and urban adaptation strategies see also environmental sustainability bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) biotech industry birds black soldier flies black-footed ferrets BoKlok (IKEA spinoff) Bolivia Borneo Bosch, Carl Boston, Massachusetts Boulder, Colorado Brazil Brexit Brin, Sergey British Columbia Brown, Pat bureaucracy Burke, Marshall Burma business/private sector Cairo California; forest fires in Cambodia Cameroon Canaan Canada; and charter cities model; Climate Migrants and Refugee Project; economic benefits from global heating; expansion of agriculture in; first carbon-neutral building in; forest fires in; indigenous populations; infrastructure built on permafrost; regional relocation schemes Capa, Robert, capitalism Caplan, Bryan Caprera (Italian warship) carbon capture/storage; BECCS; ‘biochar’ use in soil; carbon capture and storage (CCS); direct capture from the air; by forests; in grasslands; Key Biodiversity Areas; in oceans; by peatlands; by phytoplankton; vegetation as vital carbon pricing/taxing carbon/carbon dioxide: amount in atmosphere now; Arrhenius’ work on; and biomatter decay in soil, ‘carbon quantitative easing’; continued emitting of; decarbonizing measures; effect on crop growth; emissions cut by building from wood; emissions from farming; emissions from human energy systems; emissions from urban buildings; geoengineering to remove; during last ice age; Miocene Era levels; new materials made from; ocean release of; released by wildfires; tree-planting as offsetting method; in tropical rainforests Carcassonne, France Card, David Cardiff Castro, Fidel Çatalhöyük, ancient city of Central African Republic Central America Chad ‘char people’ charcoal (‘biochar’) Chicago children: childcare costs; deaths of while seeking safety; ‘invisible’/living on the margins; left behind by migrant parents; and move to cities; numbers at extreme risk; in refugee camps; and sense of ‘belonging’ Chile China: adaptation for heavy rainfall events; Belt and Road Initiative; cities vulnerable to climate change; demography; desertification of farmland in north; economic domination of far east; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; extreme La Niña events; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou mega-region; hukou system; integrated soil-system management; internal migration in; migrant workers in Russia’s east; and mineral extraction; net zero commitment; small hydropower installations; South-to-North Water Diversion Project; ‘special economic zones’; Uyghur Muslim communities in; and water scarcity; ‘zhuan‘ documents Chinatowns Churchill (town in Manitoba) Churchill, Winston cities: adapting to net-zero carbon economy; city state model; coastal cities; as concentrated nodes of connectivity; ‘consumption cities’ in Africa; control of migration by; deadly urban heat; demand for cooling; devolving power to communities; in eighteenth/nineteenth-century Europe; entrenched assets; and extreme flood risk; flood defences; as focal points for trade networks; food production in; genetic impacts of; in high altitude locations; large megacities; merging into mega-regions; as particularly vulnerable to climate change; phased abandonment of; population densities in; private gardens in; relocation of; relocation strategies within; sprawling shanty towns in; strategies against impact of heat; zero-carbon new-builds see also migrant cities; migration, urban citizenship; patriotism of welcomed migrants; ‘UN/international passport’ idea Clemens, Michael climate change, historic: Cretaceous–Palaeogene meteorite impact event; in late-bronze-age Near East; and migration; in Miocene Era; and transition to farming climate change/emergency; 3–5° C as most likely scenario; as affecting all of Earth; cities as particularly vulnerable to; destruction of dam infrastructure; enlisting of military/security institutions against; every tenth of a degree matters; extreme weather events; global climate niches moving north; global water cycle as speeding up; greenhouse gas emissions as still growing; impact of cities; impact on lives as usually gradual; inertia of the Earth’s climate system; lethality by 2100; links with biodiversity loss; near-universal acceptance of as human made; net zero pledges; Paris Agreement (2015); path to 3–4° C-hotter world; situation as not hopeless; slow global response to; as threat multiplier; warming as mostly absorbed by oceans see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; drought; fires; floods; heat climate models: future emissions scenarios; heating predictions; impact of 4° C-hotter world; IPCC ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs); optimum climate for human productivity; threshold for mass migrations coastal areas: coastal cities; migration from; retreating coastlines; seawater desalination plants cochineal scale insect Colombia colonialism, European Colorado Columbia Concretene construction industry copper coral reefs Cornwall Costa Rica cotton Covid-19 pandemic; cooperation during cross-laminated timber (CLT) Crusaders Cruz, Abel Cuba cultural institutions/practices: cultural losses over time; diversity as improving innovation; migration of; in well-planned migrant cities cyclones Cyprus Czech workers in Germany Dar es Salaam Death Valley Delhi Democratic Republic of Congo demographic changes/information: and decline of nationality viewed in racial terms; depopulation crisis; elderly populations in global north; GenZ; global climate niches moving north; global population patterns; global population rise; ‘household formation’; huge variation in global fertility rates; migrants as percentage of global population; population fall due to urban migration; population-peak projection; post-war baby boom; and transition to farming Denmark Denver, Colorado desert conditions Dhaka Dharavi (slum in Mumbai) diet and nutrition: edible seeds of sea grasses; genetically engineered microbes; global disparities in access to nutrition; and Haber–Bosch process; insects as source of protein and fats; loss of nutrition due to heat stress of crops; move to plant-based diet; vitamin D sources; zinc and protein deficiencies dinosaurs direct air capture (DAC) disease; waterborne Doha Domesday Book (1086) Driscolls (Californian berry grower) drone technology drought; as affecting the most people; in Amazon region; impact on farming; in late-bronze-age Near East; and rivers fed by glaciers; and sulphate cooling Dubai Duluth, Minnesota Dunbar, Robin economies; Chinese domination of far east; economic growth; forced move towards a circular economy; GDP per capita measure; Global Compact for Migration; global productivity losses due to heat; immigrant-founded companies; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; migration as benefitting; mining opportunities exposed by ice retreat; and nation state model; need to open world’s borders; new mineral deposits in northern latitudes; northern nations benefitting from global heating; ‘special economic zone’ concept; taxing of robots see also employment/labour markets; green economy; political and socioeconomic systems; trade and commerce education: availability to migrants; as key to growth; and remittances from urban migrants; systems improved by migration Egypt; Ancient electricity: current clean generation as not sufficient; decarbonizing of production; electric vehicles; grid systems; hydroelectric plants; and net zero world; renewable production Elwartowski, Chad employment/labour markets: amnesties of ‘illegal’ migrants; and arguments against migration; and automation; controlled by city authorities; and global labour mobility; and the green economy; impact of heat on jobs; indentured positions; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; jobs in growth industries; jobs restoring diversity; jobs that natives don’t want to do; mechanization/automation slowed down by migrant workers; migrants bring greater diversity to; need for Nansen-style scheme; occupational upgrading of locals due to immigration; refugees barred from working; role of business in migrant integration; rural workers moving to cities; skilled migrants; support/access for migrants; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in USA; workforce shortages in global north energy systems: access to in global south; air-conditioning/cooling demand; and carbon capture; ‘closed-loop’ radiator construction; decarbonizing of; and economic growth; geothermal production; global energy use as increasing; new dam-construction boom in south; nuclear power; oceans as source; poor grid infrastructure in global south; power outages; power sharing as not equitable; reducing growth in demand; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; transmission/transport see also electricity English Channel Environmental Protection Agency, US environmental sustainability: decarbonizing measures; decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions; and economic growth; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-energy plastic recycling methods; and migrant cities; need for open mind in planning for; phytoplankton as hugely important; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; zero-carbon new-builds see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse environmentalists; negative growth advocates; opponents of geoengineering equatorial belt Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europe: 2003 heatwave; depopulation crisis; eighteenth/nineteenth-century shanty towns; impact of climate emergency; medieval barriers to movement; Mediterranean climate moving north; migrant indentured labour in; migration of women working in domestic service; small hydropower installations; three mass migrations in Stone and Bronze Ages European Union: free movement within; fund for aid to Africa; Green New Deal; no ‘asylum crisis’ within; nuclear power in; open-border policy for refugees from Ukraine; as popular migrant destination; seeks quota system for refugees; as successful example of regional union; war against migrants Fairbourne (Welsh village) farming: in abandoned areas in south; in Africa; ancient transition to; bad harvests as more frequent; barns/storehouses; benefits of warming in Nordic nations; biodiversity loss due to; cereal crops; closing the yield gap; early nineteenth century expansion of; ever-decreasing, sub-divided plots of land; expanded growing seasons; fertile land exposed by ice retreat; genetic research to produce new crops; genetically modified crop varieties; global disparities in food production; Green Revolution; greenhouse gas emissions from; in Greenland; Haber–Bosch process; heat-tolerant and drought-resistant crops; high-yielding wheat and rice variants; impact of climate emergency; indoor industrial systems; modern improvement in yields; nutrient and drip-irrigation systems; pre-twentieth-century methods; relying on new forms of; Russian dominance; salt-tolerant rice; smallholder; and solar geoengineering; solar-powered closed-cycle; urban vertical farms; use of silicates; and water scarcity; wildflower strips in fields see also livestock farming Fiji Fires fish populations: artisanal fishers; boost of in Arctic region; and decommissioned offshore oilrigs; fish farming; future pricing of fish products; as under huge pressure; insects as farmed-fish feed; land-based fish-farming Five Points slum, New York floods; flash floods; low-lying islands and atolls; sea walls/coastal defences; three main causes; in urban areas; water-management infrastructure Florida food: algal mats; carbon-pricing of meat; impact of soaring global prices; insect farming; kelp forest plantations; lab-grown meats; meat substitutes; for migrant city dwellers; move to plant-based diet; need for bigger sources of in global north; need to cut waste; photosynthesizing marine plants and algae; plant-based dairy products; reduced supplies due to temperature rises; refrigerated storage; replication of Maillard chemical reaction; sourced from the oceans see also diet and nutrition; farming; livestock farming food security Ford, Henry forests: advance north of in Nordic nations; deforestation; impact of climate emergency; ‘negative emissions activity’; replanting of; Siberian taiga forest fossil fuels; carbon capture and storage (CCS); as embedded in human systems France Fraser, Sean freedom of movement French Polynesia Friedman, Patri Gargano, Gabriele gas industry Gates, Bill gender: heat related inequalities; physical/sexual danger for female migrants; women in domestic service in Europe; women rejoining workforce genetic modification genetics, population Genghis Khan geoengineering; artificial sill proposals; cloud-brightening idea; as controversial/taboo; and ideal temperature question; possible unwanted effects; proposals for dealing with ice melt; to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide; solar radiation reduction tools; sulphate cooling concept; thin-film technology; tools to reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth geology GERD dam, Ethiopia Germany; Syrian refugee resettlement in Ghana Glasgow climate meeting (2021) Global Parliament of Mayors global south; benefit of solar cooling idea; capital costs of deploying new renewables; cutting of food waste in; future repopulation of abandoned regions; global income gap as rising; little suitable landmass for climate-driven migration; migration to higher elevations with water; need for improved infrastructure; need for sustainable economic growth; new dam-construction boom in; new domestic sources of energy; population rise in; remittances from urban migrants; resource extraction by rich countries; and vested interests in the rich world see also Africa; Asia; Latin America and entries for individual nations golf courses Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Gothenburg Grand Inga hydroelectric dam project (Congo River) Granville, Earl grasslands Great Barrier Reef Great Lakes region, North America Greece; Ancient green economy; and building of fair societies; Green New Deals; migration as vital to; multiple benefits of see also environmental sustainability; renewable power production; restoring our planet’s habitability greenhouse gas emissions; charging land owners for; in cities; emitters trying to avoid/delay decarbonization; from farming; national emissions-reductions pledges; underreporting of; unfair global impact of see also carbon/carbon dioxide Greenland; ice sheet; potato farming in Gulf states Haber, Fritz Hangzhou Hawaii health: climate change as threat multiplier; dementia care; diseases of poor sanitation; healthcare in successful migrant cities; heat related inequalities; lethality of extreme heat; and life in cities; mental illness and migration; migration as benefitting social care systems; pathogens in frozen tundras; rural living as single largest killer today; and smoke pollution heat: 35°C wet bulb threshold crossed; climate model predictions; cloud and water vapour feedbacks; combined with humidity; and demand for cooling; extreme hotspots; global productivity/work hour losses; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact on farming/food supplies; infrastructure problems due to; lethality by 2100; lethality of extreme temperatures; Paris pledge of below 2°C; solar radiation reduction tools; subtropical climate spreading into higher latitudes; temperatures above 50°C; threshold for mass migrations; ‘threshold of survivability’; urban adaptation strategies; urban heat island effect; ‘wet bulb’ temperature calculations Held, David Hernando, Antonia HIV Höfn, southeastern Iceland Holocene epoch Honduras Hong Kong horses, domestication of housing: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; controlled by city authorities; equitable access to; floating infrastructure; in flood-affected areas; and heat related inequalities; and migrants; planning and zoning laws; policies to prevent segregation; prefabricated and modular; twentieth-century social programmes see also slum dwellers Hudson Bay Huguenot immigrants human rights, universal Hungary hunter-gatherers hurricanes hydrogen ice age, last ice loss; as accelerating at record rate; in Antarctica; in Arctic region; artificial reflective snow idea; artificial sill proposals; and flash floods; loss of glaciers; permafrost thaw; reflective fleece blankets idea; retreat of ice sheets; rising of land due to glaciers melting; tipping points for ice-free world Iceland ICON, construction company identity: accentuation of small differences; and ancient transition to farming; borders as ‘othering’ structures; language as tool of self-construction; mistrust of outsiders; pan-species; sense of ‘belonging’; social norms of ‘tribe’; social psychology; stories crafting group identity see also national identity immigration policies: bilateral or regional arrangements; deliberately prejudicial policy; development of since later nineteenth-century; and harnessing migrant potential; immigrant inclusion programmes; immigration lottery schemes; move needed from control to managing,; points-based entrance systems; poorly designed; quota systems; responses to terrorist incidents; restrictions as for people not stuff; restrictive border legislation; Spain’s successful policy Impossible Foods India; crop irrigation in; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; falling fertility rate in; Ganges Valley; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; impact of climate emergency; internal migration in; lime-washing of roofs in; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); National River Linking Project; population density in; young population in indigenous communities Indo-European language Indonesia industrial revolution inequality and poverty: and access to reliable energy; benefit of solar cooling to south; climate change as threat multiplier; climate migration and social justice; and demand for cooling; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; and environmental destruction; and European colonialism; as failure of social/economic policy; and geoengineered cooling; global disparities in access to nutrition; and global food prices; global income gap as rising; heat related; and impact of flooding; increased by ancient transition to farming; as matter of geographical chance; migration as best route out of; and modern farming; and national pride; need for redistributive policies; the poor trapped in vulnerable cities; and post-war institutions; rural living as single largest killer today; slow global response to crisis of; superrich and private jets; tribalism as not inevitable; and vested interests in the rich world insects; collapsing populations; farming of; as human food source insulation insurance, availability of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Energy Agency (IEA) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) International Labour Organization Iquique (Chile) Ireland iron, powdered Islam islands, small/low-lying Israel Italy Ithaca, city of (New York) Jakarta Japan Jobs, Steve Johnson, Boris Jordan kelp Kenya Khan, Sadiq Khoisan Bushmen Kimmel, Mara King, Sir David Kiribati knowledge and skills: better environment for in rich countries; ‘brain drain’ issue; channelled through migrant networks; diversity as improving innovation; global knowledge transfer; Global Skill Partnerships model; impact of European colonialism; migrants returning to origin countries; and Nansen-style schemes; need for rapid transference of; and points-based entrance systems Kodiak Island, Alaska krill Kuba Kingdom, West Africa !


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

In response, the grand mufti at that time issued a fatwa denouncing women driving as “a source of undeniable vices.”8 The lifting of the ban in June 2018 removed the onus of being the last country in the world to forbid women driving. It also had major economic purpose—providing the mobility that would enable more women to join the workforce and thus spur higher productivity and economic growth. But a few weeks before the removal of the ban, several women activists, including some who had participated in the original 1990 protest, were summarily arrested. When Canada’s foreign minister criticized the arrests in a tweet, spurred by the fact that one of the arrested women had family in Canada, Saudi Arabia broke diplomatic relations and recalled seven thousand Saudis studying at Canadian universities.

Instead of the laborious process of applying for a visa in advance, said MBS, non-religious tourists will be able to “book a room in a hotel or an apartment” and get their visa on arrival at the airport or even online. There are multiple other targets—improve access to housing and health care, create six million new jobs, increase the percentage of women in the workforce (women already outnumber men in universities), and, notably, “cut tedious bureaucracy.”12 A top priority is to generate jobs for Saudis in a private sector that is meant to become less dependent upon government spending. Yet nothing so clearly demonstrates the difficulties than the employment structure itself.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

“Women are not expected to grow up to find out who they are, to choose their human identity,” Betty Friedan wrote in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. “Anatomy is woman’s destiny.” Friedan’s book and the feminist movement that gradually came into being—with a strong assist by the Food and Drug Administration’s 1960 approval of the first birth-control pill—altered that destiny. Although growing percentages of women (even married women) joined the workforce throughout the twentieth century, as recently as 1970 most women still didn’t work; their participation in the civilian labor force was 43 percent. By 1980 that rate had risen to 52 percent, and since 1990 it’s hovered around 60 percent.9 Harvard’s Goldin observed a particularly dramatic change in women’s attitudes toward work around 1970, partly in reaction against the previous generation’s experience.

With women, it’s a bit different. Women have not contributed to the Great Divergence, and they have also, by some significant measures, avoided its effects. This is illustrated on the next page by a bar graph by David Autor, an MIT labor economist. During the past three decades, women outperformed men in the workforce at all skill levels. Both men and women (in the aggregate) moved out of moderately skilled jobs (secretary, retail sales representative, steel-worker, etc.)—women more rapidly than men. But women were much more likely than men to shift upward into higher-skilled jobs—from information technology engineer and personnel manager on up through various high-paying professions that require graduate degrees (doctor, lawyer, etc.).12 These findings reflect feminism’s victories in the workplace, but they also reflect something else: diminishing job opportunities for working-class males.


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

The appointment of a women’s advisory committee by the ICTU in 1959, though hardly making huge waves, did provide a platform for the discussion of women’s issues. There was still only a tiny fraction of married women working: 5.2 per cent, compared to 20.6 per cent in England and Wales and 20 per cent in Finland. Overall, in 1961, women accounted for 29 per cent of the workforce and sex segregation continued to the extent that, in 1962, 77 per cent of women were in occupations where women accounted for 90 per cent of the workforce.83 Politics remained largely a male preserve; in the 1967 local authority elections, women won only 20 seats nationally, only seven more than in 1934, and it was not until 1969 that Ireland’s first elected feminist since Constance Markievicz, Mary Robinson, arrived in the Senate.

The research of Caitríona Clear makes clear there was precious little idealisation of the household in popular magazines and literature aimed at women.168 Interestingly, much the same gender ideology (taking its lead from the papacy) was also in evidence in Fascist Italy, where modern dress, the participation of women in athletic pursuits and attempts to limit women’s participation in the workforce were also matters of public and political discourse.169 A Catholic teacher-training college for women, Mary Immaculate in Limerick, launched the Mary Immaculate Modest Dress and Deportment Crusade in 1927, in response to Catholic bishops’ appeals for women to cover up. The rules included a ban on the wearing of dresses ‘less than four inches below the knee’ or those ‘cut in a suggestive style, or so loosely or low about the neck as to allow the collar-bone to appear, or cut equally low at the back’.170 Officially, the work of many Irish women remained hidden, a consequence of the pervasiveness of the ‘family economy’ in the Irish Free State.

These were evident in its commitment to use land legislation to empower the Land Commission to expropriate land deemed suitable for redistribution among small farmers. They also introduced measures to improve housing, increase unemployment assistance, and provide for the aged, blind and widowed. These initiatives coincided with a continuance of censorship and laws governing sexual morality, and an overt discrimination against women in the workforce. From the perspective of cynics writing in the 1980s, it was 1930s oppression, and a failure to modernise, which meant that Ireland was simply not an interesting place to live during this era. This, as Brian Fallon has recognised, ignores the degree of cultural vitality that continued to exist in Ireland; and just because much of this culture was imported does not mean it should be ignored.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Employers will therefore have to become more flexible about how and where people work and how they are rewarded. Gen Y is also hyper-connected, so virtual and collaborative networks will grow in importance as a way of getting things done. Workforces will also become more balanced. There will be a greater spread of ages, more ethnic diversity and more women in the workforce, the latter significantly contributing to a shift away from the white middle-aged alpha male culture that has Work and Business 277 been dominant for so long. Decisions will be made using prediction markets and innovation will be run using open or distributed innovation principles. Work/life balance Instead of working less and enjoying a leisure society, we are working more.

Ford expected 280 FUTURE FILES the percentage of its employees aged over 50 to have risen by 100% in Europe between 2006 and 2008. A global labor shortage will mean that there will be a push to recruit more immigrants into domestic labor forces and in some cases we may even see the return of paid immigration. There will also be more women in the workforce. In the US 25% of employees already work for a female-owned company; this percentage is certain to increase, not least because women possess skills that will be highly sought after in the future. Women make somewhere in the region of 50–90% of all purchasing decisions, so in theory putting more of them in charge of corporations would seem to make sense.


pages: 364 words: 102,528

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

See also fast foods kaiseki, 218 kale, 171 Kaminsky, Peter, 193 Kansas, 21 Kansas City, Missouri, 86 Kashmiri food, 126 Kennedy, Diana, 199, 248 Kentucky, 26, 107, 111 Kenya, 146 King, Brayden, 174 kitchen equipment, 252–57 Klein, Daniel, 247 knödels, 250 Kobe beef, 183–84 Konya, Turkey, 241 Korea and Korean food, 26–27, 50, 75–76, 104–5, 126–27 kosher foods, 200 Kraft, 36, 198–99 Kreuz Market, 95, 259 Kroc, Ray, 82 labeling of foods, 163 labor costs and barbecue, 93–96, 103, 104 and catering, 245 composition-intensive dishes, 59 and ethnic supermarkets, 42 and French food, 225, 228–29 and home cooking, 257 and immigrants, 69, 76, 77–78 and Indian food, 224 and Mexican food, 191, 209 and restaurant workers, 69–72 and rules for finding good food, 59 and women in the workforce, 34–35 lamb, 110, 136, 173–74, 246 language barriers, 41–42, 216, 251 Laos and Laotian food, 212–13 La Paz, Nicaragua, 4 lard, 199–201, 221, 246 Laredo, Texas, 106 Las Delicias, 76–77, 244, 245 Latin America. See also specific countries and Chinese food, 130 and ethnic supermarkets, 50 and food markets, 194 and food trucks, 76 immigrants from, 41–42 Latin-Asian fusion cuisine, 80 restaurants of, 73 La Villette, 226 laws and legal issues, 36.

., 171, 172 weddings, 97 Wegmans, 110, 191–92 Western Europe, 33–34 Western food, 218–19. See also specific cuisines West Hollywood, 75 wheat, 145, 157, 202 whiskey, 23 white cheeses, 5 Whitely, Mike, 86–87 Whole Foods, 3, 46, 191–92 Willard’s, 102 Windows on the World, 66 wines, 23, 63 Wolfgang Puck Pizza, 62–63 women in the workforce, 34–35 work styles, 255–56 World Bank, 159 World Trade Center, 66 World War I, 65 World War II, 18–19, 24–25, 29–30, 146 Yam Khao Pot (recipe), 251 Yelp.com, 47, 54, 134 Yemen, 157 Zagat, 80 Zambia, 163 Zengo, 80–81 Zhong, Chen-Bo, 169 Zimbabwe, 163 Zola, 227 zoning issues, 182 Zurich, Switzerland, 222


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Then the pill powered the ’60s, the women’s liberation movement, and the surge toward the Equal Rights Amendment. Along with it came, increasingly, economic power. The proportion of women in the workforce climbed rapidly, and every reproductive technology that came along continued to drive workforce participation higher, from IVF in 1978, to using donated eggs in 1983, and cryopreservation of eggs in the 1990s. By the late 1990s, the number of women in the workforce had doubled. Fifty years ago, 7 percent of teen girls had a baby. Today it’s 2 percent, the lowest ever. Women earn twice as much annual income in their late thirties compared to their early twenties; having the power to delay childbirth allows them to earn way more.


Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

agricultural Revolution, Corn Laws, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gentrification, informal economy, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, labour mobility, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Nonetheless, we have two clearly discernible groups of women – those who did some form of paid employment after marriage and those who did 4017.indd 95 25/01/13 8:21 PM 96 earning a living not – which inevitably prompts us to ask: what determined whether or not women went out to work after they had married? One of the most curious features of married women’s retreat from the workforce is the fact that it was not related to the opportunities that existed in their area. The previous two chapters on men and children revealed that industrialisation substantially increased the amount and variety of work available, resulting in higher wages and fuller employment in the industrial districts.

It is undeniable that much more work was available in the cities than in the country. This was why the population was migrating towards the towns. This was why many adult men were starting to enjoy full employment and taste all the benefits that came with it. This was why children were being hustled into the workplace at ever younger ages. Yet married women did not move into the workforce en masse to take advantage of these opportunities. As the chance of earning a good wage improved, families clung more tightly to the traditional model of a breadwinning husband and a homemaking mother. We are led, therefore, to an inescapable conclusion. There was something about marriage and motherhood that militated against women making a sustained contribution to the labour force, even in areas where there was clearly a need for nimble hands and strong backs.

His life was despaired of, and although he survived, he lost the use of his left arm.93 Such sad tales illustrate how difficult it was for mothers to undertake full-­time paid work without a trustworthy family member to take over the care of their children. The absence of effective childcare emerges as the most significant obstacle in the way of women returning to the workforce. Small families and employment could be combined, but caring for larger families required considerable time and energy. Unless a woman’s mother or mother-­in-­law was able and willing to do this, paid work was almost impossible. There is one final point that deserves consideration, and that is the casual and intermittent nature of much of the work that women performed.


pages: 165 words: 48,594

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Often this happened through participation in the women’s liberation movement, which became socially powerful and influential in the 1970s. No longer satisfied with traditional roles as wives, housekeepers, and providers of childcare and other unpaid household labor, many women sought full-time paid employment. The supply of labor surged as women entered the workforce by the millions. This development coincided with a new wave of immigration into the United States, this time mostly from Latin America, especially Mexico and Central America. Once again, capitalism’s uneven development drove mass worker emigration from these areas—and, for many, the United States was the most attractive destination.

If real wages per hour were no longer rising, then they would work more hours per week, take a second or even a third job, and encourage other members of the household to take on regular paid work. Millions of families pursued these strategies to cope with the changes in the economy. Women, who in the wake of the women’s liberation movement had their own reasons to enter the workforce, found themselves under new pressure to seek paid employment. Since the stagnant wages of male workers alone could no longer support the American Dream, married families needed the addition of women’s paid labor to provide needed household income. And over the next thirty years, women, especially in middle- and upper-income groups, moved steadily and massively into the paid labor markets.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

So it’s not much of a stretch to see, from both a financial and cultural perspective, why it’s usually the mother who steps back.27 Women are twice as likely as men to work part-time.28 And because part-time pay tends to be crappy, with the average part-time worker in sales, for example, earning 58 cents for every full-time worker’s dollar, the cycle of lower earnings for mothers becomes self-reinforcing.29 The ideal worker is a big reason why some educated mothers simply disappear from the workplace, more so in the United States than in any other industrialized country.30 Jane Leber Herr, an economist at the University of Chicago, analyzed national surveys of college graduates and found that fifteen years after graduating, nearly all the childless men and women were still working. But close to 30 percent of women with MBAs who had become mothers were out of the workforce, as were about one-quarter of the lawyers and those with master’s degrees who had become mothers. Around 15 percent of Ph.D. mothers were gone. The one outlier was mothers with medical degrees. Fully 94 percent were still on the job, largely because doctors have the power to control and predict their own schedules.31 “You would think that, given the rise in education of women, their experience, their presence in high-investment, high-income, high-value fields, the proportion of those who leave the labor force would have gone down,” Herr told me.

Fully 94 percent were still on the job, largely because doctors have the power to control and predict their own schedules.31 “You would think that, given the rise in education of women, their experience, their presence in high-investment, high-income, high-value fields, the proportion of those who leave the labor force would have gone down,” Herr told me. “What’s shocking is that it hasn’t.” Some have called this disappearance of women “opting out” of the workforce and choosing to stay home, and they worry about the consequences if their marriages end: Divorced older women are more likely to live in poverty.32 But Joan Williams said the ideal worker often gives women no choice. “Women are being pushed out both by gender discrimination and by this ‘all-or-nothing’ workplace,” she said.

Directly behind him, a gold-plated pitchfork encased in glass stands against the wall like a grandfather clock. On the wall over his right shoulder, the Irish Catholic who grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, has hung a portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. To prepare for our meeting, I’d read up on the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971. As more women and mothers entered the workforce in the late 1960s, public opinion polls showed that majorities of both men and women favored setting up “many more day care centers” and felt that the government should provide them. “Maternal employment was regarded as either a social good or a basic reality of modern life,” writes Kimberly Morgan in her fascinating history of the politics of child care.6 President Richard Nixon, influenced by emerging research on the importance of early learning to shape a child’s future, appointed a task force that ultimately recommended “a system of well-run child care centers available to all pre-school children” as well as after-school programs for older children.7 Buoyed by this declaration, a coalition of bipartisan lawmakers, early childhood educators, civil rights activists, feminists, and labor leaders came together to craft federal legislation to create a high-quality, universal child-care system for all Americans run by community organizations, much like federally funded Head Start preschool programs.


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

We’ve argued that many of these technologies resemble an idealized 1950s’ housewife, subservient to the needs of her family. These smart wives are already performing a range of wifework, including housekeeping, homemaking, caring, and sex. As we have shown, delegating women’s or wives’ traditional work to this new smart workforce has benefits and drawbacks. The idea of outsourcing is no doubt appealing. Most countries with advanced economies are in the midst of a wife drought—underpinned by growing divorce rates, greater participation by women in the workforce, continuing stigma associated with men staying at home to parent children, and a lack of corresponding support for the unpaid and invisible labors that have historically fallen to women.

And yet the domestically inept man-child is just as much a part of the smart wife story as is his subservient wifebot. In promoting this typecast, smart home marketing not only aggravates and does a disservice to the many domestically competent men but also justifies the continuing need for women (and an emerging workforce of smart wives) to pick up after their seemingly hopeless husbands. Early promotional videos (those aired between 2012 to 2018) for digital home voice assistants, which we analyzed for this book, employed similar stereotypes, and usually went something like this: dad brings the new device into “his” home and demonstrates “her” amazing abilities, such as helping with the dinner by providing an appropriate recipe, answering children’s questions, or waking the family up in the morning.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In the postwar world, however, unions’ clout extended far beyond the ability to negotiate wages with individual employers or even across an industry. They became full partners at the political bargaining table, advocating powerfully for higher minimum wages, protections from dismissal, paid sick leave and holidays, and old-age pensions. In some countries, unions played a role in raising pay for the women who entered the workforce in large numbers, giving an added boost to the incomes of two-earner families. In some cases, national union leaders even bargained with the heads of business organizations and government officials to set the share of national income that would be paid out in workers’ wages and the share that would be paid out in profits, evening out the distribution of income by limiting the amount that could go to corporate shareholders or the owners of small businesses.4 But as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, one of the most significant causes of greater equality in the postwar world had less to do with economic policy than with tragedy.

As productivity growth declined and business profits took a tumble, the growth of workers’ wages began to slow. The growth of the welfare state did not. On the contrary, millions of workers displaced amid the economic slowdown lined up to collect unemployment benefits. Millions more, convinced that they were too old to find new occupations, drew their pensions early. By 1980, most women in Western Europe were out of the workforce before their sixty-first birthday; most men were out by sixty-three. Spending on benefits that were based on income, such as housing assistance and food aid, rose as well, as more families became eligible. Outlays under the US government’s food stamp program, for example, doubled between 1974 and 1976 as the number of beneficiaries rose almost by half.20 Social insurance bore the burden.

In 1980, the year before Mitterrand took office, twenty-two million French men and women held paid employment. Through strongly socialist policies and strongly antisocialist policies, all pursued by the same Socialist president, that number would remain unchanged for seven years. Although more women joined the workforce, the number of men at work fell by more than half a million over that period, reflecting the distress of France’s manufacturers and their unwillingness to replace retiring workers with new hires. Unemployment, low until the middle of the 1970s, became a permanent feature of the French economic landscape.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

The decisive factor can be found in the changing structure of the economy in combination with the role of women in the workforce. Sunday opening in Britain came on the heels of a shift from industry to services, which gave the retail sector and unions with shop assistants among their members greater weight than in Germany or France. In Britain, the shop workers’ union (USDAW) switched from opposing to supporting partial deregulation in order to defend jobs. Retail was at the vanguard of part-time work and its workforce was disproportionately female. Since it is women who do most of the shopping, the more women entered the workforce, the stronger became the case for flexible shopping.

If labour-saving devices did not erase the ‘double burden’, time-use data since then suggests it at least reduced it for women in employment.113 In general, the influence of appliances was probably smaller than often thought. The most extensive recent review of time-use data in twentieth-century America finds little evidence that the arrival of appliances prompted women to join the workforce. Female housework in the 1930s–’60s did shoot up, but this had less to do with hoovers and washing machines and more with the fact that single women were increasingly living in their own apartments rather than in boarding houses or with their families.114 There is no simple cause–effect relationship between what is done at home and what is bought in the marketplace.

Interestingly, the former also socialize more than the latter, the very opposite of what the harried model would predict. Socializing has declined in some countries, such as the Netherlands. Overall, however, visiting and chatting have been remarkably resilient, and this in spite of materialist temptations and more women joining the workforce. Americans today socialize less with neighbours than two generations ago but in exchange spend more time with friends and family. In Britain, socializing has been stable since the 1970s. In Germany, it may even have increased. And families spend more time with their children. Ironically, and notwithstanding the advance of fast food and eating out, the family meal at home is stronger than ever in some affluent societies today.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

(In marriage, the money that was previously paid to the housekeeper as a reportable paycheck is normally enlarged and given voluntarily to the wife, thus escaping the national and tax-accounts.) In the seventies, the great ferment of family transformation, with higher rates of divorce and remarriage and more prolonged singleness, conferred a net upward impetus to income totals. A more important factor is the effect of inflation and taxes on the number of women in the workforce. Inflation lifts incomes into higher brackets without raising purchasing power. In effect, taxes become more progressive, taking increasingly more as incomes rise. As the 1980s began, the marginal tax rate (the rate applying to the next dollar earned above current income) was nearly 50 percent for the average American. 14 That means half the money earned through additional work went to the government, in one way or another, either through giving up welfare and other transfers or through payments of taxes on the federal, state, and local levels.

The chief problem is the anguish inflicted on both the husband and the wife and thus on their relationship when the woman is forced to work despite the intensely increasing need for her in the home. Despite all the celebrations of working women, the earnings statistics show that most women prefer to avoid full commitment to the workforce. Their work effort, measured in annual hours and earnings, declines rapidly as family income increases.17 After age twenty-five, they are eleven times more likely to leave the labor force voluntarily than men.18 Women tend to favor part-time jobs and informal services. The men’s pattern contrasts dramatically.

But though such effects were everywhere visible to the casual observer, economists often failed to see them because of the large expansion of the workforce during the late seventies. Aggregate analysis seemed to show an increase rather than a decrease of work effort. Indeed, higher marginal rates do tend to bring more women into the workforce, often holding part-time jobs.32 But the quantitative increase in workers conceals a deterioration and fragmentation of work effort, a decline of career commitments, a breakdown of families, and a vast movement into the underground economy.33 Altogether these trends indicate that the U.S. economy is high on the Laffer curve and that cuts in tax rates would cause dramatic shifts from sheltered to taxable activity while also improving productivity and growth.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Journalists are taught to be skeptical. We tell each other, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Over the years, I heard people repeat the same promises about the bright technological future, but I saw the digital world replicate the inequalities of the “real” world. For example, the percentage of women and minorities in the tech workforce never increased significantly. The Internet became the new public sphere, but friends and colleagues reported being harassed online more than they ever were before. My women friends who used online dating sites and apps received rape threats and obscene photos. Trolls and bots made Twitter a cacophony.

Many of the human computers of the 1940s and 1950s were women, but when the (mostly male) developers made the decision to push forward with digital computers, the women’s jobs disappeared. As computing became a highly paid profession, women were also edged out. It was the result of deliberate choices. People chose to obscure the role of women in early computing and chose to exclude women from the workforce. We can change that starting now. I thought about the distance between the ENIAC and the computers in the Windows PC and Linux PC labs. These machines represent so much human effort, so much ingenuity. I have enormous respect for the history of science and technology. What computers get wrong, though, they get wrong because they’re created by humans in particular social and historical contexts.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

See populism authority, deference to, 5 autocracy vs. democracy, 202–3, 202, 470n15 automation, 118–19, 300, 331 Availability heuristic, 41–2 awareness of, 369, 381, 383 critical thinking courses and, 378 doomsday prophecies and, 293, 302 media coverage and, 42–4, 201 superforecasters and awareness of, 369 terrorism and, 42, 195 Axial Age, 23, 264, 411 Azerbaijan, 158 Baby Boomers, 225 and crime boom of the 1960s, 173–4 depression and, 280–81 emancipative values and, 226 happiness underachievement of, 273, 283–9, 288 opioid overdoses and, 184–5 and populism, 341–2, 342 secularization and, 437 suicide and, 279–80 Babylon, 253–4 Bacon, Francis, 383 Bailey, Ronald, 464n45 Ball, Lucille, 186 Balmford, Andrew, 122 Banaji, Mahzarin, xix Bangladesh democratization and, 442 environment of, 130 escape from poverty of, 85, 86 famine and stunting in, 71, 71, 72 fertility as decreasing in, 126 industrialization and women in the workforce, 94 War of Independence (1971), 160, 161 Bannon, Stephen, 430, 448, 449, 455n1 Banting, Frederick, 63 Baron, Jonathan, 369 Barrett, Clark, 17 Basque ETA movement, 195 Batbie, Anselme, 341 Baudelaire, Charles, 30 Bauer, Peter, 79 Bauman, Zygmunt, 397 Baumeister, Roy, 267, 477n20 Bayesian reasoning, 369–70, 380, 381, 393 Bazile, Leon, 376 Beatles, 257, 274 beauty in art, 395, 406, 407 counter-entropic patterns as, 18 evolutionary psychology of, 18, 407, 408, 426 intrinsic value of, 18, 35, 248, 414, 433–4 in religion, 432 from science, 34, 260, 386, 407–8, 433–4 Beccaria, Cesare, 12, 174, 417 BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), 151 Beckett, Samuel, 456n10 Belarus, 209, 313 Belgium, 169, 170, 259 Bell, Daniel, 390 Benin, 203, 475n30 Benjamin, Walter, 39–40 Benny, Jack, 333 Bentham, Jeremy, 223, 417 Bergman, Ingmar, 280 Berlin, Isaiah, 344 Berlin Wall, 163, 200–201, 203 Berry, Ken, 316 Best, Charles, 63 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 45–6 battle deaths (1946–2016), 159–60, 159 capital punishment, 209, 211 democracy vs. autocracy, 202 genocide deaths, 161 hate crimes, 220 homicide rates, 171 homosexuality, decriminalization of, 223 most recent year of data, 156, 466n1 objections to reliance on data in, 43–7 racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions, 216 rape and domestic violence, 221 terrorism deaths, 194 trends of, generally, 156 victimization of children, 229 war between great powers, 157–8, 157 Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, 282, 404 Bettmann, Otto, 178–9, 185, 186 Bible antihumanistic content of, 440 crucifixion in, 208 despotism in, 199 in fabric of human knowledge, 433 famine in, 68 life expectancy in, 58 literal truth of, belief in, 489n53, 490n84 maternal pain and suffering in, 57 morality as relative in, 429 on the poor, 89 prophets in, 49, 293 suicide in, 278 See also God Bierce, Ambrose, 428 Big Bang, 17, 385, 424 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 66 bin Laden, Osama, 443 biochar, 150 bioethics, research and committees for, 402 bioterrorism, 300–302, 305, 306–7 Birdzell, L.

See under commerce Georgia (country), 86, 203, 335 Georgia (state), capital punishment in, 211 Germany and authoritarian charismatic regimes, 343 Berlin Wall, 163, 200–201, 203 East and West, 91, 202 and escape from poverty, 85 literacy in, 236 nuclear power and, 147 populism and, 341 romantic militarism/nationalism of, 165–6, 398 secularization and, 489n68 social spending in, 108, 115 Trump and, 336 woman as leader of, 214 Get Smart (TV), 300 Ghitza, Yair, 342 Gide, André, 446 GI Generation, 225 depression and, 280–81 secularization and, 437 suicide and, 280 Glazer, Nathan, 274 Gleditsch, Nils Petter, 455n19, 466n6, 470n4, 490n91 Global Burden of Disease project, 59, 467n13 Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, 435, 489n65 globalization, 120 consumption and, 117 and economic inequality, 103–4, 111 and Great Escape from poverty, 92 and income distribution, global, 111–13, 111 lower middle classes of the rich world as losing out in, 112, 113, 118–19, 339, 340 Trump’s power limited via realities of, 337–8 women in workforce and, 93–4 and working conditions, 92–3, 94 Global Terrorism Database, 192, 193 Global Zero, 315–17, 320–21 goal-directed behaviors, 21–2. See also purpose, absence of in nature Gobineau, Arthur de, 398 God anthropomorphic, reason and rejection of, 8 arguments for the existence of, refuted, 421 deism, 8, 18, 22, 422, 430 pantheism, 8, 422 as testable hypothesis, 422, 423, 428 See also religion; theism and theistic morality Golden Rule, 412 Goldman, Emma, 400 Goldstein, Joshua, 160, 429 Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger, xix, 421, 429, 455nn4,7, 456n17, 474n7, 485n104, 487nn3,5, 488nnn32,42,45, 489n54 Goodman, Paul, 456n1 Google searches, prejudice revealed through, 217–19, 218, 339–40, 471n13 Gopnik, Adam, 408 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 316 Gordon, Robert, 329 Gore, Al, 122, 145–6, 255, 382, 465n76 Goths, 398 Gottschall, Jonathan, 408 Gould, Stephen Jay, 394, 486n32 government climate change response, role in, 141, 145–6, 148, 149–50, 152 economic inequality amelioration by, 119 Enlightenment ideal of, 12 environmental protection, role in, 133–4, 136 evidence-based policy (behavioral insights), 381 famine exacerbated by, 78, 459nn35–36 nurturing role of, 108 regulations, 90, 335 regulations compatible with markets, 364, 365 terrorism, overreactions to, 197 theocracy, 201 utilitarian principles for, 416–17, 418 vehicle safety regulations, 177–8 violent crime rates and legitimacy of, 174 voice in, and emancipative values, 224 workplace safety regulations, 186, 187 See also authoritarian governments; colonial governments; communism; democracy; fascism; freedom; human rights; imperialism; postcolonial governments Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction (GRIT), 318, 320, 383 Grass, Günter, 447 gravitas market, 49, 293, 452 Gray, John, 191 Grayling, A.

See food and food security; poverty hunter-gatherer peoples child mortality in, 55 diet of, 23 and egalitarianism vs. inequality, 102–3 life expectancy of, 53–4, 58, 457n4 persistence hunting, 353–4 reason and, 353–4 scientific skepticism among, 354 violence among, 199, 470n1 See also Hadza people; San people Huntington, Samuel, 200 Hussein, Leyla, 442–3 Hussein, Saddam, 199, 291, 366, 447 Hutu people, 161 Huxley, Aldous, 418 Ibsen, Henrik, 284 Iceland, 171, 475n30 ideas democracy as, 206 as historical forces, 347, 349–50, 405, 443, 448 and infectious disease improvement, 67 language and communication of, 27 as patterns in matter, 22 identity politics, 31, 342, 375 identity-protective cognition blue lies and, 358–9 cognitive dissonance and, 377 institutions of reason as mitigating, 27–8, 376–7 media and intellectuals and, 366–7 and politics as predicting scientific belief, 356–8 rationalization vs. reason and, 359 scientific literacy as no cure for, 403 and Tragedy of the Belief Commons, 358 unappreciated, 379, 383 See also cognitive biases Illusion of Explanatory Depth, 379–80 immigrants and immigration cuisines introduced by, 259–60 literature written by, 284 social spending and, 110 Trump and, 335, 336 immortality, 60–61 imperialism blamed on science, 34, 388, 399 Muslim countries and, 439 See also colonial governments income, 85–7, 86, 95–6 and class distribution, 114–15 disposable (after taxes and transfers) vs. market, 115–16, 116, 118, 254–5, 254 global distribution of, 111 after Great Recession, 115 happiness as increasing with, 268–71, 269 universal basic income, 119 India agriculture in, 76 Axial Age and, 23 calories available per person in, 70, 70 carbon emissions of, 143, 143–4 civil wars in, 160 colonial government of, 78 democratization and, 200, 203 education in, 238 equal rights, moderate support for, 222 escape from poverty of, 85, 86, 90 famine in, 69, 72, 78 GDP of, 85 globalization and, 111 industrialization and women in the workforce, 94 liberalization of economy, 90 liberal Muslim rule of 16th century, 442 nuclear power and, 150 nuclear weapons and, 307–8, 317, 318 partition of, 49, 160 per capita income of, 86 as permit bureaucracy (“license raj”), 90 population-control program of, 74 poverty in, 89 refugees and displaced persons, 160 secularization and, 436 social spending in, 109 and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 419 women’s rights and, 222 indigenous peoples, 123, 199.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

With so many factories shuttered, typical “men’s work” steadily eroded and lower-paying service jobs took its place. As the economic contribution of these former working-class heroes to our nation dwindled, millions of men became zeroes in many people’s minds. They seemed to be a dusty anachronism in a sparkling new economy. Meanwhile, the ranks of women in the workforce grew steadily during the 1980s and 1990s, and waves of immigration began to change the ethnic and racial composition of the workforce. Seeking refuge from the economic dislocation, millions of Americans earned bachelor’s and advanced degrees, a process that perversely exacerbated already hardened lines of privilege, with whites earning college degrees at a much greater rate than blacks or Latinos.


pages: 235 words: 74,200

We're Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union

double helix, equal pay for equal work, jitney, old-boy network, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce

Because we’ve all seen a pal replaced for a younger, cheaper model with lower expectations and more free time for overtime or courting clients. Modern business is set up to squeeze out women who “want it all”—which is mostly just code for demanding equal pay for equal work. But the more empowered women in the workforce, the better. The more that women mentor women, the stronger our answer is to the old-boys’ network that we’ve been left out of. We can’t afford to leave any woman behind. We need every woman on the front lines lifting each other up . . . for the good of all of us and the women who come behind us.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

He began to open up when he realized I was not an American coming to bash the German model. Remember, at this time Clinton had just signed a bill ending “welfare as we know it,” even when the only welfare we “knew” was welfare for nursing mothers, or with small little kids, and the idea of kicking these women into the workforce . . . well, it repelled a lot of people in Europe. Of course, one could think up a “politically correct” case for it, namely, that the mothers themselves were so sick, impoverished, drugged-up, physically and sexually abused, that it was better to separate them from the kids. But of course that wasn’t the reason we were doing it.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

By the end of April, he’d be on the cover of an issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine detailing the transformation plan for Saudi Arabia that the consultants had prepared. Vision 2030 had taken hundreds of Saudi and foreign consultants months to finish, and it laid out broad goals the United States and World Bank had been suggesting for years. An economy with incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation and freedoms for women to join the workforce would certainly create a stronger nation, the foreigners argued. Mohammed’s plan set an almost ludicrously ambitious timeline for reaching those goals, considering Saudi Arabia was a country with roughly the same economic structure as when oil money started flowing about a half century earlier.

It was his ideas about the role of the 1979 events in pushing Saudi Arabia into deep conservatism that Mohammed learned and began repeating in private and public forums. The change was welcome for many inside and outside the kingdom. But missing from Mohammed’s promises of reform was any mention of civil or political freedom. While he talked about music and movie theaters and women in the workforce, free speech was never brought up. Criticizing the monarchy—or even publicly questioning Mohammed’s policies—could be a crime. Royal Court officials would label critics as traitors, accusing them of taking money from hostile foreign regimes. This was by design. Mohammed felt there was no room for public dissent as he moved ahead with big economic and social changes all at once.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Putting race and sex together, we discover that white men, though still the best paid demographic group on average, have been sHpping over the last two decades; white women have been gaining; some black men have been entering high-wage work, while others have been sHpping into 94 After the New Economy low-wage work, chronic unemployment, and prison (though the tight labor markets of the late 1990s helped narrow the racial/ethnic gap in male earnings rather sharply); some black women have been trickling into high-wage employment, though most remain concentrated in low-wage sectors; and Latino men and women have been entering the workforce in large numbers, though mostly at the poorly-paid end, with minimal penetration of higher-wage sectors (Williams 1999). Why race and gender gaps?^ According to classic economic theory—most notably that enunciated by Gary Becker—discrimination is "irrational" under capitalism and it should be competed away That is, if firms paid white men more than nonwhite nonmen for the same work, then those indulging their prejudices would make less money than those who'd transcended prejudice—and since no sane capitalist would ever forego a profit opportunity, over time discrimination should disappear.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Mitchell would have been a familiar figure to the great entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century: a man obsessed with using mechanical innovations to wrestle resources out of the unforgiving soil. But this era also saw two momentous developments that would have shocked Rockefeller and company far more than using water to extract oil out of rock: the replacement of blue-collar workers with knowledge workers at the heart of the economy and the advance of women in the workforce. Reagan, Bush, and Clinton didn’t just preside over a technological revolution. They also presided over a social revolution that reached into almost every American home. THE NEW WORKFORCE The America of the golden age had been dominated by men and machines. It was overwhelmingly a manufacturing economy: in 1950, 36 percent of nonfarm private-sector workers were employed in manufacturing.

Gore; made up some 51 percent of professional workers; earned almost 60 percent of university degrees; and started about 40 percent of new firms. The feminist revolution has been so successful that it is easy to forget how recent this change was. Women made early advances in some professions: by 1920, women comprised 50 percent of the clerical workforce, up from 2.5 percent in 1870, and about 90 percent of typists and stenographers. But those professions were isolated, specialized, and frequently low status. America also harnessed female labor power during the Second World War, when “Rosie the Riveter” redefined women’s expectations and 5.2 million women entered the labor force.


pages: 269 words: 104,430

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

This statistic may not surprise, since so many of the families we know own more than one car, yet the multivehicle household is a relatively new phenomenon. Over the last several decades, middle-class Americans have come to call it a necessity for each driver in the family to have his or her own car. Teens now often get one soon after their first license, though the steepest growth in the number of cars per family came as women began entering the paid workforce in larger numbers back in the 1960s. At the beginning of that decade, just 20 percent of households owned a second car; now over 65 percent do.2 More and more families also happily buy a third or even fourth vehicle as a recreational or weekend car or as a collectible.3 We don’t just have more cars, of course, but more car.

Why Americans across the country are forced to “just deal with” such terrible traffic is the result of a combination of factors. Sprawl is just one part of the picture. Another is the sheer quantity of cars on the road, a number that has increased drastically over the past few decades. Overall population growth and the entry of women into the workforce are key reasons the number of workers in the United States doubled between 1960 and 2000, from 66 million to 128 million.10 Because the number of licensed drivers, car owners, and owners of multiple vehicles also increased, the number of vehicles more than tripled in that same period.11 132 Carjacked As most commuters no longer take the traditional suburb-to-city commute, according to the Transportation Research Board, the greatest flow of commuters—more than two-thirds—is now from suburb to suburb, and this type of flow has only grown over time.12 Across the nation, so-called reverse commutes are also growing as companies move out of downtown areas but some of their employees continue to live there.13 This traffic-exacerbating sprawl seems out of our control.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

See also Great Leveling; S curves labor: globalization and, 18, 87, 106, 143, 192, 207–208, 215, 223–226, 230–232; more-educated, 53; scarcity of, 63; transfers from agriculture, 70, 93, 99; Kuznets cycles and, 72–73; classical explanation and, 80; supply of skilled, 84; short twentieth century and, 86; China and, 87, 106, 180; substitution by capital, 93, 109–110, 181–182; twentieth-century politics and, 94; power versus capital, 106, 182; capital goods cost and, 109–110; rich peoples’ effort and, 140; right of movement and, 147; rich peoples’ income from (1979 and after) and, 156, 184–188, 216, 260n22; rich people’s labor income (1979–2013), 184–188; women in workforce (US 1960s and after), 188; unfree, 192; one hundred years ago compared, 241n2; hours per person per year (2013), 255n20, 256n21. See also migration; security services; service sector; skill-biased technological progress; unions; wages labor/land ratios, 84, 124 Lakner, Christoph, 16, 18, 121, 122, 184, 185 Landes, David, 251n40 land/labor ratios, 124 land ownership, 167, 218 land rent/wages ratios, 59–61, 63, 64 law, rule of, 137–138 laws and legal equality, 227, 229–230 Lenin, Vladimir I., 96 Lewis, Arthur, 178 Limits to Growth (Club of Rome), 257n3 Lindert, Peter, 52, 71, 74, 207, 254n7 Lithuania, 33 localism, 192 location-based inequality (citizenship premium), 5, 125–137, 143, 237–238, 254n10.


pages: 295 words: 90,821

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath

active measures, additive manufacturing, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, falling living standards, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, old age dependency ratio, patent troll, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, women in the workforce, working-age population

Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, and Guillaume Vandenbroucke have reviewed a large literature on how the spread of labor-saving household appliances changed the opportunities available to women. Leaving aside the question of why it was that women were expected to handle the vast majority of household chores in the first place, by reducing the time they spent on chores, these technologies enabled women to more easily enter the workforce. Once in the workforce, this raised the opportunity cost of having kids, similar to Becker’s original argument, and fertility fell. Furthermore, these technologies made remaining single a more attractive situation—for both men and women—and contributed to the delay in the age of marriage and a reduction in the marriage rate overall.

Research by Martha Bailey, along with other work by the same Goldin and Katz I previously cited, has shown the significant effects of the introduction of the pill on a variety of labor market outcomes. For women, access to the pill led to a later age of marriage, increased women’s representation in professional occupations (e.g., medicine, law), increased the number of women in the workforce, raised the annual number of hours they worked when in the labor force, and reduced the likelihood of having a first birth before age 22. For the purposes of thinking about the growth slowdown, what is material here is that the availability of the pill, combined with the continued rise in wages over time, led to a significant and sustained drop in fertility during the twentieth century.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Joe likes the coincidence and decides to peg Pronto salary increases to median family income wherever it goes. “What I did not foresee was that all these women would go to work,” he says. In 1957, America was overwhelmingly a country with one breadwinner per family and so median family income essentially was median employee income. But within ten years, as women poured into the workforce, that calculation is toast. Joe, stubbornly clinging to his decision to pay individual employees family income, now had access to a far higher class of worker. The second decision is an even greater break with tradition. He decides that nothing in the actual store is essential. Rather than worry about which items his customers expected, he becomes obsessed with products that have a high value relative to size.

See also distribution centers War of 1812, 6 waste, 137 Watson, LeRoy, 280–81n, 288n Waymo, 270 Webb, Ezra, 55–56 Webster, Steven, 227 Wegmans, 63 Whole Foods, 5, 128, 128–29n25, 137, 157–74, 181–84, 270 365 brand, 63 Amazon and, 259–65 buyers and, 133, 261–62 customer foot traffic at, 174 customer service at, 160–61, 164–65, 164–65n35, 167–69, 184 decentralized structure at, 261–62 efficiency at, 160–62, 160n33, 182n38 employees of, 157–84, 182n38, 270, 301n fish counters at, 1–4, 12, 164–65, 164–65n35, 167–69, 171–74, 183–84, 270 green mindset at, 160–62, 160n33, 161n34 health insurance and, 183, 270 hiring sessions at, 182 human resources and, 157–63, 301n JANA Partners and, 259 job restructuring at, 184 job security and, 183 “just-in-time scheduling” at, 181 libertarianism and, 262–63, 262n49 logistics and, 174–81 management at, 157–63, 168–69, 172, 301n media and, 253–54 myth of abundance and efficiency at, 182 private labeling at, 63 produce at, 161, 166 sales per square foot, 36, 286–87n scheduling abuses at, 183 seafood at, 1–4 story of, 159–60 supply chains and, 253–54 training at, 157–63, 169 value-added products at, 172–73 wages at, 181–82 wholesale price, 126 wholesalers, 45, 55, 60, 128 wine connoisseurs, health food nuts and, 58 wines authentic variability and, 57 distribution of, 55 domestic, 56 imported, 55–56 resistance to continuous product, 57 Trader Joe’s and, 54–57, 64–65n16 wholesalers of, 55 women, in the workforce, 43 Wood, Desiree, 100–102, 107, 296n World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, 29 Yeltsin, Boris, 34n7 yoga, 266–67 yogurt, Greek, 114, 139 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABOUT THE AUTHOR BENJAMIN LORR is the author of Hell-Bent, a critically acclaimed exploration of the Bikram Yoga community that first exposed guru Bikram Choudhury as a sexual predator.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Just for reference, the United States granted women the right to vote in 1920, Switzerland in 1971, and Saudi Arabian women got to vote for the first time in 2015.1 The fiscal structure of the kibbutz also allowed for women’s financial liberation, or at least equality, which was not available anywhere in the world at the time. The women were paid exactly the same amount as their bosses or their husbands, and as such, they had unique freedoms, especially in those days when most women were not an integral part of the world’s workforce. Another revolutionary contribution women made to the kibbutz was communal childcare. The kibbutz regarded “work” as a value in and of itself, and therefore there was no real possibility for a woman to choose to be a stay-at-home mom or a homemaker. The women realized that in order for them to be treated as equals, they needed help raising their kids.

Though she’s paid a personal price, her work seems to be gaining traction, as there are loud voices from within the community, both men and women, who are demanding change. Women of the Charedi sector are better represented in the higher education system than men, and they are pushing themselves into the public sphere, understanding full well a change is needed. There are trailblazers like Racheli Ibenbuim, who started an organization to help Charedi women join the Israeli workforce; community leader and politician Omer Yankelevich; and Charedi feminists Estee Ryder Indursky and Estie Shoshan, who founded Elect, an organization committed to forcing Charedi politicians to allow their women to get elected in the Charedi parties. All of these activists are sacrificing their own personal comfort and reputations to improve a community that’s highly resistant to change.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Seeking paid work was not a viable way to refuse domestic work: “Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink” (Dalla Costa and James 1973, 33). Given that capitalist economies have responded to the feminist rejection of prescribed domesticity by continually increasing the number of women in the workforce, and that women often do not escape the primary responsibility for unwaged reproductive labor even when they work for wages, a broader critique of work is required. We must, Dalla Costa urges, “refuse the myth of liberation through work”—after all, “we have worked enough” (47). If the demand for wages was not meant to celebrate domestic work, neither was it intended to sanctify it.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

It was also suggested that I had a very one-dimensional view of the working class: that what I was actually talking about was a male, white working class. But in fact many of the key examples of demonized figures portrayed as representative of larger groups of people were women-Karen Matthews, Jade Goody and Vicky Pollard, for example. Indeed, class hatred and misogyny often overlap. Ialso wanted to emphasize the explosion of women in the workforce in the last few decades: indeed, they now account for over half of all workers-though of course itmust be pointed out that women have always worked, as well as doing much of the unpaid housework men traditionally refused to do. 'A low-paid, part-time, female shelf-stacker' was one of my suggestions for a symbol of the modern working class.

As chan- cellor in the late 1960s, for example, he confronted the devaluation camp head-on by accusing: 'Those who advocate devaluation are calling for a reduction in the wage levels and the real wage standards of every member of the working class.' That is not to deny old Labour's flaws. It was top-down and bureau- cratic, and its celebration of working-class identity did not adapt to the entry of women and ethnic minorities into the workforce. 'Basically, what the London left was doing [in the 1970s and 1980s] was rebelling against that old Labour culture because it was quite sexist and racist,' recalls former London Labour mayor Ken Livingstone. 'It had huge weaknesses, and in a sense so much of what we were doing in the 1970s and 1980s was forcing the labour movement in London to recognize that it had to organize women and ethnic minorities.'


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

But what about the future? Since this question is the focus of parts three and four, we will save the discussion for then. ASSUMPTION 2: There are, in effect, an infinite number of jobs. In 1940, only about 25 percent of women in the United States participated in the workforce. Just forty years later, that percentage was up to 50 percent. In that span of time, 33 million women entered the workforce. Where did those jobs come from? Of course, at the beginning of that period, many of these positions were wartime jobs, but women continued to pour into the labor force even after peace broke out. If you had been an economist in 1940 and you were told that 33 million women would be out looking for jobs by 1980, wouldn’t you have predicted much higher unemployment and much lower wages, as many more people would be competing for the “same pool of jobs”?


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

Americans’ first impulses to pay for all that extra life were generous. Social Security, which had been a fixed amount for life, would receive numerous boosts from Congress to cover rising prices, before the cost-of-living-adjustment was made automatic in the 1970s. Provisions for early retirement were also added, allowing men and women to leave the workforce at sixty-two in return for permanently reduced benefits. The federal government also sought to buttress the private pension system in the 1970s with the establishment of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA, as it is known, also allowed for the establishment of the first individual retirement accounts, where those who were not covered by pensions or other workplace retirement plans could deposit $1,500 in pre-tax income annually.

According to historian Nancy Marie Robertson, many fell victim to the economic crisis of the Great Depression and would not be reestablished in the more conservative postwar environment, where women were expected to stay home, raise their children, and polish their kitchen floors to perfection, while men took on the heavy lifting of everything from paid work to investing for the family. It would take the wholesale entry of women into the paid workforce in the last quarter of the twentieth century, combined with the bull market of the 1990s for banks and investment houses to once again set up initiatives to attract women’s business. Citibank’s Woman & Co. is one of the longest lasting of these initiatives, having initially debuted in 2001.


pages: 241 words: 90,538

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

They came to be seen as very distinct social groups, whereas previously the boundary had been more fluid, because working class people in particular worked for as long as they were able, from financial necessity.18 In the 1950s, concern about the ageing population and shrinking workforce declined, as it became apparent that the birth rate had continued to rise since the war. Growing immigration (see Chapter 2) and the increasing participation of women in the labour market (see Chapter 5) expanded the workforce. Government efforts to diminish ageism in employment vanished. The confident projections of the 1930s and 1940s of a future of continuously low birth rates and an ageing population appeared to be wrong, at least in the short term. In the 1950s and early 1960s, research revealed continuing high levels of poverty among older people, especially for women, who were the majority of over 65s.19 Appalling conditions were also exposed in some residential homes.20 In popular discourse, ‘old age pensioner’ was equated with retirement and poverty, although the term ‘elderly’ came increasingly into use to indicate greater respect than ‘old’.

Generally, the movement operated in localized, non-hierarchical groups, rather than as a mass movement holding big demonstrations on the model of the early twentieth-century movement, although some spectacular demonstrations occurred, particularly when a group of feminists disrupted the televised Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall. 1968 TO EARLY 1980s The trend towards married women’s greater participation in the workforce continued, as did the growth in part-time employment: part-time work accounted for 39 per cent of women’s employment in 1975 and 42.8 per cent in 1985.15 More women were entering universities, although by the 1970s, when about 7 per cent of all 18-year-olds went to university, the proportion of women was still about 25 per cent and subjects studied were still gender-divided, most science students being male and arts students female.

This may in part explain the falling birth rate, combined with the evidence that fathers in two-parent households took only marginally more responsibility for child rearing than in the 1970s. Mass male unemployment exposed the fragility of the male-breadwinner ideal, the emotional and psychological impact of which was conveyed in the television series Boys from the Black Stuff. Although many women were also unemployed, rates were lower than among men, and women’s participation in the workforce continued to increase, mostly in low-paid, often part-time, employment. Opinion surveys testified to changing public attitudes to women’s careers. In 1984, 43 per cent of people interviewed for the British Social Attitudes survey agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘A husband’s job is to earn the money; a wife’s job is to look after the home and family.’


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Most Pakistani women marry in their early twenties and have kids soon after, Maria explains, so “full-time jobs are just not possible for most. The Women’s Digital League is a platform for these women to find a whole new way of working.” Maria hopes this is just the beginning. “The idea is to spread out to the Middle East and to the Arab region,” she says with a wide smile. “The way the women are treated or the challenges they face in the workforce are kind of similar around these areas, and I think that something like this online platform—where women with different skill sets, from the very basic to more advanced, can come together—can really make a difference. It’s an emotional difference rather than just a financial difference.”

It does not matter how many men have degrees from MIT if 90 percent of Pakistani women are victims of domestic violence and only 40 percent are literate. The states and societies that do the most for women are those that will be best positioned to compete and succeed in the industries of the future. Treating women well is not just the right thing to do; it makes economic sense. Women are half of every nation’s workforce—or potential workforce. To be a prosperous and competitive country requires access to the best-educated pool of workers. If a country is cutting off half of its potential workforce, it is taking itself out of the game. Countries that are closing the gender gap are competitive; they are the nations of the future, educating boys and girls and ensuring that their entire citizenry is skilled and ready for the global economy.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

Labor force participation of mothers, by age of youngest child, 1975–2015. Participation rates rose steadily through the 1990s, but in the last twenty years have barely improved—and sometimes have dropped. To different degrees, in the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, women’s full-time participation rates in the workforce decline when they have young children and take years to recover; even after they return to work full-time, they often earn less than men (including fathers with dependent children) and have lower lifetime earnings. Managing part-time or flexible work while raising children even has a measurable impact on women’s health: a recent study of stress-related biomarkers (which provide a more objective measure of stress than surveys) found that women with children who worked part-time or in flexible schedules actually had higher stress levels than women working full-time.

It boosts recruitment and lowers turnover. It helps service workers be more engaged, creative workers more imaginative, chefs and servers more energetic, and salespeople more focused. It distributes productivity gains, using the one commodity even the richest of us can’t buy—time. It helps level the hidden obstacles that drive women out of the workforce, that burn out hard-charging professionals, and that undermine valuable employees. It helps people give equal attention to work and family life and to derive satisfaction from being good workers and great parents. I became convinced of the need for this sort of systemic change when I was promoting my last book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Growing numbers of Latin American and Asian immigrants created a new pool of noncitizens who could be treated as workers without rights. The unraveling of the social safety network, combined with deindustrialization, severely undermined the primary sector of the labor market. But as the primary labor force was contracting the secondary labor force was expanding. As women entered the workforce in larger numbers and people had to work longer hours to support a middle-class lifestyle, many of the services connected to the reproduction of the labor force moved out of the home and into the private sector. Fast food, child care, elder care, and home health care became rapid-growth sectors.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

A common misperception is that women got into computing during World War II simply because men were at the front, but the gendering of computing work existed before the war, and before computers were electronic. The feminization of this work continued through and after the war, with women returning to the civilian workforce to perform computing work with electromechanical and later electronic systems—everything from programming and operation, to systems analysis, to hardware assembly. Building a Broken System As computers began to percolate out of the military and academia into industry and government more broadly, women’s computing work became ever more intertwined with computers, and critical to the functioning of the economy.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Census Bureau data, which were not available until early 2001, based on 5.5 million firms and more than 100 million employees. Axtell notes that the distribution of firm sizes is insensitive to changes in political and regulatory environments, waves of mergers and acquisitions, new firm and bankruptcy trends, and even large-scale demographic transitions within the workforce (e.g., women entering the U.S. workforce).6 The implication is that there are important underlying mechanisms that create the order we see. EXHIBIT 35.1 Rank and Size of U.S. Cities, 1790-1990 Source: Batten, Discovering Artificial Economics, 165. Reproduced by permission of Westview Press, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As National Organization for Women (NOW) representative Lynne Litwiller testified, “in a country where credit is more important than money . . . women are summarily excluded, at best tenuously eligible conditioned upon remaining forever single. Any woman who is married, has been married, or who may ever get married, 90 percent of all women, will find that credit follows the husband.”93 Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as so many middle-class married women entered the workforce, women still depended on their husbands for their economic identity. For feminists, credit dependency on their husbands was a tangible reminder of how institutions defined them as an economic appendage of their husbands. Much more so than single women, married women confronted challenges in acquiring credit if they wanted it independently from their husbands.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

With just a scrap of maternity or paternity leave, many parents choose to have just one child, as my husband and I did, because it’s all they can manage economically. Our family was far from alone. Only 14 percent of American workers have paid family leave. And that’s part of the reason why many American women can’t afford simply to exit stage left from the workforce for a few months when we start to breed, then return to our jobs. There is always the threat that the precarious, biology-denying market might annihilate us. One needn’t travel far to see a different kind of workplace. Women in France, Britain, Chile, the Netherlands, and South Africa all pay less for vaginal deliveries in hospitals, and much or all of that cost is covered by insurance or the state.

So she’d grit her teeth and say nothing about the “La La Land” of upper-class New Yorkers, with their gifted-and-talented test tutors for three- and four-year-olds. It depressed her, she said. How would she and her husband pay off six years of student loan debt on top of everything else? In 2015, only an estimated 16 percent of women in the workforce, across all professions and the whole of the country, made $75,000 or more, so Professor Bellamy was privileged. (The percent of black women who make $75,000 or above is even lower today than the percent of white women: the former earn roughly 65 cents to white men’s dollar, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which is roughly 16 cents less than white women, who make 81 cents to the dollar.)


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., 21, 58–59, 61, 63, 138, 165, 166 Wagers, Amy, 298 wait time: for doctors, 185–86 Walford, Roy, 92–93 waste, 223, 225 See also consumption water, consumption of, 284, 288 wealth, 231–34, 277, 293 See also income; poverty; standard of living weight, 25, 95, 109, 124, 304 See also obesity Wells, H.G., 236, 262 Werner, Otto, 83 Werner syndrome, 32–34, 42–43, 83 WeWork, 284 whales, 55–56, 57, 60 Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), 290, 291 whooping cough, 203 why we age, 12–13 Williams, George C., 11, 152 Wilmut, Ian, 16, 159, 161 Wilson, Edward O., 241 Wnt, 167 women: in workforce, 254, 258 work/workforce age discrimination in, 251–53, 254, 258–59 automation and, 254 and concern about the future, 293 elderly in, 229, 251–56 and five-day work week, 290 and funding for aging, 269 reentry into, 258–59 rethinking about, 290–92 and skillbaticals, 291 women in, 254, 258 See also retirement World Health Organization, 68, 124, 196, 221, 224, 277, 285–86, 302–3 worms longevity genes in, 56, 57 and as precursors of human experiments, 141 and reprogramming, 173 See also roundworms wounds, 74–75, 124, 132, 165, 297 wrinkles, 32, 37, 38, 73, 79, 82, 94, 165, 300 Wu, Lindsay, 297 Wyss-Coray, Tony, 299 X chromosome, 183 X factors, 307 X-rays, 44, 48 xenohormesis, 131 xenotransplantation, 206–7 Xiao Tian, 296–97 Yamanaka factors, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172 Yamanaka, Shinya, 163–64 Yang, Jae-Hyun, 296 Yang, Luhan, 206–7 Yankner, Bruce, 298 yeast aging in, 29–35, 38, 39, 40–44 calorie-restricted, 130–31 cause of aging in, 127–28 DAF-16 genes in, 56 death of, 69 and diet, 91 DNA and, 30–35, 38, 39, 40–44, 152 early studies about, 24, 29–35, 38, 40–44, 91, 111, 127–28 and epigenetics, 38 and hallmarks of aging, 43 lessons from studies of, 39 longevity gene in, 56, 57 measuring aging in, 130 and NAD, 135, 155 as precursors for human experiments, 141 rapamycin and, 121 resveratrol and, 130, 132 and retrotransposons, 155 and sequencing of yeast genome, 32 Sir2 in, 137, 149 and sirtuins, 24, 34–35, 38, 39, 40–41, 43 and sugar, 44 survival circuit and, 35, 45, 47, 48 and temperature, 111, 112 universal regulators of aging in, 147 and why we age, 39 See also specific researcher or topic YouGov, 247 youthfulness: prolonged, 265 Yuancheng Lu, 167–69, 171, 296 Zhang, Kang, 52 Zhigang He, 169 Zika virus, 196 Zipkin, Robert, 130, 133 zombie cells.


pages: 263 words: 89,368

925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire a Millionaire So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World by Devin D. Thorpe

asset allocation, buy and hold, call centre, diversification, estate planning, fixed income, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, junk bonds, knowledge economy, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, payday loans, random walk, risk tolerance, Skype, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Unless you have a lot of money and it really has been a long time since you took a vacation, don’t treat this time like a vacation. You’ve got a new job looking for a job. With a focus on the task at hand, you’ll be back in the game soon. How Do I Go From Homemaker To The Workforce? Many women take time out of the workforce to be at home with their children when they are young and then seek to return to the work force later. Having hired a number of such women, I offer the following tips to help you in your transition (these ideas will generally work as well for men who’ve been playing the role of a stay-at-home father): Take heart.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

It would free up time for people to act as equal partners, with professionals and other public service workers, in co-producing well-being. A robust and prosperous economy. Shorter working hours could help to adapt the economy to the needs of society and the environment, rather than subjugating society and environment to the needs of the economy. Business would benefit from more women entering the workforce; from men leading more rounded, balanced lives; and from reductions in work-place stress associated with juggling paid employment and home-based responsibilities. It could also help to end credit-fueled growth, to develop a more resilient and adaptable economy, and to safeguard public resources for investment in a low-carbon industrial strategy and other measures to support a sustainable economy.”


pages: 214 words: 71,585

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

delayed gratification, demographic transition, Donald Trump, financial independence, happiness index / gross national happiness, index card, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Multics, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, Skype, women in the workforce

Western fertility started to dive in the 1970s—the same era in which, ironically, alarmist population guru Paul Ehrlich was predicting that we would all soon be balancing on our one square foot of earth per person, like angels on the head of a pin. Numerous factors have contributed to the Incredible Shrinking Family: the introduction of reliable contraception, the wholesale entry of women into the workforce, delayed parenthood and thus higher infertility, the fact that children no longer till your fields but expect your help in putting a down payment on a massive mortgage. Yet I believe all of these contributing elements may be subsidiary to a larger transformation in Western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on what life is for


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

In 1985 these activities were taking up 43.6 hours a week; by 2005, 48.6 hours.23 Three-quarters of the Dutch workforce is feeling overburdened by time pressures, a quarter habitually works overtime, and one in eight is suffering the symptoms of burnout.24 We have been working progressively less (up to 1980) The number of annual work hours per capita has taken a nosedive since the 19th century. Yet after 1970, the figures are misleading as an increasing number of women joined the workforce. As a consequence, families have been increasingly pressed for time, even though the numbers of hours worked per employee was still decreasing in some countries. Source: International Labour Organization What’s more, work and leisure are becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

For example, the Negative Income Tax—a pilot program of guaranteed income support that was tested in the 1960s and ’70s, and which provided women with an independent basis of economic security—actually raised the divorce rate by ostensibly providing some wives an exit route from an unhappy domestic situation.6 The entry of women into the workforce has also been blamed by some researchers as directly causing higher divorce rates for the simple reason that other attractions, intimacies, and affairs are more likely to happen in gender-integrated workplaces as opposed to the time when women and men occupied very distinct social realms of home and work.


Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

Migrant workers, and in particular those without legal immigration status and therefore employment rights, are particularly at risk. There are also additional pressures on workers who attempt to balance paid work and unpaid work, for example workers carrying out home and family responsibilities as well as employment. This remains primarily a demand on women in the workforce and increases the likelihood of employment in non-standard jobs that are temporary or casualised. It is therefore possible to say that the most precarious and vulnerable are those in low-paid, ‘non-standard’ jobs, without trade union organisation as they are not covered by either of the ‘three regulatory regimes – collective bargaining, employment protection rights and the national insurance system’.38 Much academic literature is concerned with ‘the unionized workforce’, yet ‘the non-unionized themselves, who comprise the majority of employees, have been marginalized’, something that Pollert and Charlwood argue demands renewed attention.39 138 Precarious Organisation the limitations of trade unions The problems of casualisation are compounded by the falling levels of trade union membership in the UK.


pages: 351 words: 101,051

Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors by Caroline Elton

Alvin Roth, fear of failure, feminist movement, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, Rubik’s Cube, traumatic brain injury, women in the workforce

In 1962 just over 20 percent of UK medical students were women, but twenty years later the proportion had risen to 45.3 percent. By 1992 female students outnumbered their male colleagues, and that is the way it has stayed ever since. Latest figures for the UK show that 55 percent of medical students are women. The feminization of the US medical workforce has consistently lagged behind. While women were admitted to Oxford Medical School from 1916, they were denied this option at Harvard and Yale until after the Second World War. In fact, it was only after a significant change in legislation in 1972 (Title IX of the Education Amendments) that discriminatory admissions policies were outlawed in institutions receiving federal funds.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

Boesky agreed to pay $100 million in forfeitures and penalties, and Michael Milken admitted to six felonies and agreed to pay $600 million in fines. The amount of the fines was staggering, but more revealing was the corporate raider lifestyle the investigations uncovered. In the early 1980s Milken was reportedly making $550 million a year.12 Overall, the freeing of the market for corporate control had important benefits for women in the workforce. College-educated women moved into fields like business, engineering, medicine, and law. ‘‘The result was that women as a whole, whose average earnings had been 58 percent of those of men in 1979, earned 68 percent ten years later.’’13 Professional women began moving into managerial positions where they soon faced the problem of how to combine motherhood and career.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In a 1989 paper published in a legal journal, Crenshaw develops the metaphor of a crossroads of two avenues—one denoting race, the other gender—to illustrate how certain types of discrimination can manifest at the intersection of two identities.3 She argues that those who focus on each individual road ignore the way that intersecting traits can amplify the discrimination that occurs. In her paper, Crenshaw cites a 1976 discrimination lawsuit against General Motors. Emma DeGraffenreid and several other Black women argued that Black women were excluded from the General Motors workforce. Women were invited to apply for jobs held exclusively by white people, and Black people were invited to apply for jobs exclusively held by men. As a result, even though some women and some Black people secured jobs at General Motors, no Black women were hired. The court dismissed the claim because General Motors was not entirely excluding Black people or women.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

In this case, we see 1867 as representing an important step toward political equality in Britain. We have less to say on the extension of suffrage to women. In almost all European countries, voting rights were first given to adult men and subsequently extended to women. This reflected the then-accepted gender roles; when the roles began to change as women entered the workforce, women also obtained voting rights. It is likely, therefore, that the mechanisms that we propose better describe the creation of male suffrage than the extension of voting rights to women. Our dichotomous distinction between democracy and nondemocracy makes sense and is useful only to the extent that there are some important elements central to our theory and common to all democracies but generally not shared by nondemocracies.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

The First and Second World Wars, too, ushered thousands of women into the workplace as typists, clerks, and telephone operators, to say nothing of riveters. But it was the telephone companies that were the first mass employers of a female workforce. In 1891, eight thousand women worked as telephone operators; by 1946, nearly a quarter million. Women were a nimble workforce. capable of working collaboratively in networks and fluid groups—we still speak of secretarial “pools”—adaptable to the needs of the enterprise. They staffed switchboards, kept records, took dictation, and filed documents. These rote office tasks are now increasingly performed electronically by digital assistants and automated telephonic systems, many of which still speak, in the default, with female voices.


pages: 290 words: 98,699

Wealth Without a Job: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Freedom and Security Beyond the 9 to 5 Lifestyle by Phil Laut, Andy Fuehl

Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business process, buy and hold, declining real wages, fear of failure, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, index card, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce

Income decline, although experienced by many, is discussed by almost no one. One clear response to the wage decline has been a larger per- ccc_laut_ch02_19-26.qxd 7/8/04 12:23 PM Page 21 The Economy and the Media centage of women with young children entering the workforce. (See Table 2.1.) Clearly, everyone benefits from equal employment opportunities for women. Freedom for women to enter the workforce in greater numbers and earn greater incomes than ever before must be a sign of economic vitality. That many dual-income couples find it necessary for both people to work just to make ends meet can hardly be a sign of economic well-being.


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

Many families do not allow women out without a guardian, and often they travel together in taxis or are chauffeured in cars driven by foreign workers who send money out of the country. Allow women to drive and you save the money spent on drivers, increasing disposable income, and bringing more women into the workforce to take the place of foreign workers. Exact numbers of the foreign populations are unclear, but projections from embassies suggest that of the 34 million inhabitants there are over 12 million, including 2 million Bangladeshis, 1.5 million Filipinos and 1 million Egyptians. This population growth, the presence of foreigners and urbanization have happened relatively recently and at a pace not seen anywhere else in the world.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

also evidence that transnational social frequently subsidized by the superexploitation of ^"^"^ networks are women. ^"^^ The increasing shift in the social reproductive function of the house- hold from the local family farm to the provision of labor for export generates new disadvantages for women. With the male workforce in California, for example, the remain behind in the Aguililla or so much of women who San Miguel must shoulder even and wage larger burdens of child care, domestic toil labor. Like- wise, female immigrants are often shunted into sweatshop apparel or servile house-cleaning jobs that offer the least opportunity for or vertical immigration to big US to young women girls even cities horizontal may Although mobility.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Many of Franklin Roosevelt’s wealth-equalizing New Deal economic policies continued, with the top tax rate peaking at 91 percent throughout the 1950s, and remaining at 70 percent throughout most of the 1970s. In the meantime, The Wealth of the Nation 31 lower- and middle-class workers benefited from a variety of economic changes. With World War II came full employment, abundant overtime, and, at least temporarily, a growing number of women in the workforce. Union membership surged, wages went up, and bluecollar prosperity took hold, but wartime rationing meant that there was relatively little to buy, so savings rates reached historical highs. The middle class swelled while the gap between the rich and poor narrowed, a pattern that economists Claudia Golden and Robert Margo called ‘‘the great compression.’’5 Ironically, it was the growing middle class that laid the groundwork for the new wave of wealth.


pages: 261 words: 16,734

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister

A Pattern Language, An Inconvenient Truth, cognitive dissonance, DeepMind, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Parkinson's law, performance metric, skunkworks, supply-chain management, women in the workforce

They get job offers quickly, usually from your competitors who think they’re conducting a raid. 3) The new people at Destiny City are better than the ones you left behind and they’re infused with enthusiasm because they’ve been exposed only to your best people.1 1. R. Townsend, Up the Organization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 64. What this is, to use a technical term, is the purest crap. One thing Townsend seems to have missed entirely is the presence of women in the workforce. The typical person being moved today is part of a two-career family. The other half of that equation is probably not being moved, so the corporate move comes down hard on the couple’s relationship at a very delicate point. It brings intolerable stress to bear on the accommodation they’re both striving to achieve to allow two full-fledged careers.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

I found it reassuring to see companies focused on biotech, robotics, health care, renewable energy—staid and serious organizations that did not reflect the startup giddiness of consumer tech to which I had grown accustomed in San Francisco. Among the computer science majors, I felt vaguely out of place, then embarrassed to have impostor syndrome at a conference designed to empower women in the workforce. I made sure to keep my identification badge, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup, over my T-shirt, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup. I stood behind the booth and handed out stickers of the octopus-cat costumed as Rosie the Riveter, the Statue of Liberty, a Día de los Muertos skeleton, and a female engineer—swooshy bangs, ponytail, cartoon hoodie decorated with the octopus-cat.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

In the United States, networking marketing as we know it got its start in the 1930s, post–Great Depression, as a reaction to employment regulations introduced by the New Deal. Although it wasn’t until a few years later, after World War II, that the direct sales industry really exploded. That’s when it became a women’s game. During WWII, women entered the workforce in unprecedented droves while men fought abroad. But after the fighting ended, those women were sent back into the home to care for their children and veteran husbands. In the 1950s, twenty million Americans migrated to suburbia, where there were few job opportunities for women, many of whom missed the excitement, independence, fulfillment, and cash that came with professional life.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

Home and work relationships will transform A longer life with more years post the age of raising children has great potential to reduce gender inequality and to transform personal relationships, marriage and child-rearing. Traditionally the home was a place of specialization – men worked and women looked after the home and children. This has changed in recent decades, as women increasingly entered the workforce and dual incomes became the norm rather than the exception. However, while family roles have changed, the narrative of the three-stage life as typical of the male career remains dominant. While women are more likely to have multi-stage lives, this is still seen as unusual and not the norm.

Work and home An important part of the equation of home and personal lives is work, and particularly the extent to which women work. The twentieth century saw major changes in the role of women in the workplace, and an excellent summary is provided by the Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin.15. She shows that there has been a narrowing between men and women in terms of their participation in the workforce and the hours they spend at work – both at home and in the workplace, the type of jobs and sectors in which they work, as well as in terms of wages. Women and work However, while differences have narrowed, there still remain substantial gaps and blockages that disadvantage women.


pages: 425 words: 116,409

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

I can put names to almost fifty black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory from 1943 through 1980, and my intuition is that twenty more names can be shaken loose from the archives with more research. And while the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA, they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the majority of Langley’s computing workforce over the years have hardly been recognized for their contributions to the agency’s long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in 1958. “Everyone said, ‘This is a scientist, this is an engineer,’ and it was always a man,” she said in a 1990 panel on Langley’s human computers.

See also supersonic flight See also wind tunnels National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) black employees, xiv, 217–219, 227–228, 241–242 charter of, 171 cost of space program, 240–241, 251–252 deputy assistant administrator Ruth Bates Harris, xiii Federal Women’s Program Manager, 256–257 Langley Research Center as epicenter, 183 “math aides” for human computers, 190, 210 NACA into, 170–171, 183, 304 NASA Group Achievement Awards, 249 open house on first anniversary, 184 quickest route into space, 164, 187 Space Task Group, 183–184. See also Space Task Group Technical Assistant to Division Chief of Space Systems, 258 transparency of, 170–171, 217, 222 West Computing dissolved, 171–173, 204, 218–219 women engineer increase, 255 workforce reduction, 253 National Defense Education Act (1958), 158 National Technical Association, 197 “Negro” use in book, ix. See also black Americans Newport News (VA) East End segregation, 29–30, 61–63 John Glenn hero’s welcome, 225 racial tensions, 31 shipyard, 38, 120 V-J Day, 64–65 as war town, 27–29, 79–80 Newsome Park (Newport News, VA), 29, 61–63, 64, 66–67, 131–132, 241, 252 newspapers.


pages: 487 words: 147,238

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

Because the porn that children and teenagers most often see presents an image of women and young women and even teenage girls that is, frankly, degrading. We can’t deny any longer the influence this is having on the lives of girls. But violent porn that is degrading to women doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Its popularity is indicative of a culture in which, despite the welcome gains of women in education and the workforce, women and girls continue to experience sexism and misogyny. The fact that there are still people who would deny this seems indicative of a lack of education. I think we also need to start educating girls and boys about the history of the women’s movement, in order to help them develop a better understanding of women’s experience and to help them grow compassion—boys for girls, girls for one another.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

And, whether fancy or basic, they often arouse passionate emotions in their users, who refer to them as “hubs of interaction” and “fraternities of mutual interest.”4 Woman Power Only a generation ago, working women performed menial jobs and were routinely subjected to casual sexism, as Mad Men, a program about advertising executives in the early 1960s, brilliantly demonstrates. Today, women make up almost half of the American workforce and 60 percent of university students. They constitute the majority of professional workers in many countries (51 percent in the United States, for example) and run some of the world’s most successful companies, such as PepsiCo, Archer Daniels Midland, and W. R. Grace. In the European Union, women have filled six of the eight million new jobs created since 2000.

Professional service firms reward lucrative partnerships only to the most dedicated. The reason for the income gap is arguably the very opposite of prejudice. It is precisely because women are judged by exactly the same standards as men that they have to choose between having children or staying on the treadmill. The rise of women is part of a bigger process: the diversification of the workforce. Today’s workers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They may include sixty-year-olds who grew up listening to vinyl LPs (and thinking they were very cool doing so) and twenty-year-olds who live in a virtual world. They may include hardcore company types and associates who have only just walked in through the virtual door.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

He realizes he never had options after all, but that choice itself was an illusion produced by the powerful. If only his mother would realize the same. On August 7, The New York Times ran an article called “The Opt Out Generation Wants Back In”—a follow-up to a 2003 story about highly accomplished, well-educated American women who left the workforce to stay at home with their children. Ten years later, the mothers are seeking work that befits their abilities but most are unable to find it, causing them to question their original decision. The New York Times piece frames the mothers’ misgivings as a result of questionable planning and poor marriage partners, paying mere lip service to the tremendous change in the economy over the past ten years.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

A leading student of burgeoning suburban commerce contended that “developers viewed it as a truism that office buildings had an indisputable advantage if they were located near the best-educated, most conscientious, most stable workers—underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringes of the old urban areas.”81 In the 1960s, corporations had moved out of New York to take advantage of this suburban asset, and the preference of suburban women for suburban jobs seemed to be of increasing significance to office location in the 1970s and 1980s as the number of women entering the workforce soared. Between 1957 and 1990, the share of married women in the age category twenty-seven to fifty-four who were employed outside the home rose from 33 to 68 percent.82 And a large proportion of these women were finding jobs in suburbia, a relatively short commute from their homes. During the 1980s, the growth in suburban office space and commercial development in general attracted increasing attention among journalists and scholars who attempted to understand this new world that defied traditional notions of a business core and residential fringe.


pages: 113 words: 36,039

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

Though the government has established no dress code, he sees fewer skirts and dresses on the street, and more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. It seems that non-Muslim women have spontaneously adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq describes so chillingly in his other novels. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women begin to leave the workforce, taking advantage of new family subsidies to care for their children. François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, inspired by a religion he knows little about, and which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned.


pages: 282 words: 82,107

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, carbon footprint, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

In urban areas, meanwhile, parents may take the view that it makes sense to have a smaller number of children, given the cost of housing, clothing, and educating them. This is sometimes characterized as a switch from emphasizing child “quantity” to child “quality.” In addition, as female literacy improves and women enter the workforce, they may delay marriage and change their attitude toward childbearing. And governments in industrializing countries generally introduce reforms banning child labor and making education compulsory, which means that children are a drain on household resources until they reach working age.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Whitlock (2016), ‘How Britain’s Olympic success makes the case for a basic income’, Huffpost Sport UK, 31 August. 31. J. O’Farrell (2016), ‘A no-strings basic income? If it works for the royal family, it can work for us all’, Guardian, 7 January. 32. E. Green (2016), ‘What America lost as women entered the workforce’, Atlantic, 19 September. 33. K. W. Knight, E. A. Rosa and J. B. Schor (2013), ‘Could working less reduce pressures on the environment? A cross-national panel analysis of OECD countries, 1970–2007’, Global Environmental Change, 23(4), pp. 691–700. 34. D. Graeber (2016), ‘Why capitalism creates pointless jobs’, Evonomics, 27 September. 35.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

But women are also significantly less likely to be employed in relatively higher-productivity occupations. According to Lanjouw’s analysis, a man is twice as likely to be in a high-productivity activity than a woman. The Entry of Wives into the Labor Force during Shocks Evidence from Ecuador and other countries suggests that as economic need arises, households respond by sending women into the workforce to compensate for their husbands’ unemployment or to supplement shrinking household income (Moser 1997; Cunningham 2001; World Bank 2001). This assertion is supported by the fact that more than twice as many women vis-à-vis men who have never worked are now seeking work, as shown in table 5.1.


pages: 293 words: 81,183

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Immigrants “take” jobs, but they often take jobs that natives are unwilling to do (such as fruit picking), and they also create jobs, because they demand services in the economy. Moreover, they need to be managed and supervised, and these positions normally go to natives, who usually have better education and a better grasp of English. In areas in the United States where immigration is higher, more women enter the workforce because childcare is cheaper. Among those who estimate that immigration would have a negative effect on the incomes of natives, the effect is very small. A review by Professors Rachel Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt, for example, found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of immigrants in the population reduces native wages by about 1 percent, and found no evidence of significant reductions in native employment (“The Impact of Immigrants on Host Country Wages, Employment and Growth,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, no. 2 [Spring 1995]: 23–44).


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

By late 1917, the government was giving shops across the country signs to display in their windows reading, “Beware of Thrift and Unwise Economy” to help encourage repetitive consumption.17 Advertisers touted mass-disposable goods as more convenient, time-saving, and hygienic than reusable products. They became increasingly attractive in the early fifties as more women entered the workforce, were pressed for time, and had greater disposable income. It is not surprising that it was against this backdrop that entire lines of disposable products flooded the market, including Kleenex tissues, Q-tips, Band-Aids, paper towels, paper straws, disposable shopping bags, and so on. And along with these products came the boxes and cartons they were packaged in and the ads, catalogs, and window displays to promote them; more stuff used and then thrown away.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Those who drove Britain’s “Age of Ambition” in the sixteenth century were particularly concerned with “family feeling” and the advancement of their heirs and relations.46 Much the same can be said of Britain’s offspring in the early United States, where, as Tocqueville noted, sentiment about family was one of the primary restraints on excessive individualism, and where the lack of aristocratic privilege and set class positions granted to family relations “an energy and sweetness” unseen in European nations.47 The notion that things will improve for the next generation—and that parents would work to assure that result—has been intrinsic to the American experience.48 This ethos survived the disruptions of the Industrial Age, the Depression, and the Second World War, as well as the entrance, en masse, of women into the workforce. After dropping in the 1950s, starting in the 1960s more families began to depend on women’s earning. In 1967, for example, barely a third worked outside the home but by 2000 barely one-third of children under six in married households had a stay-at-home mother.49 The Decline of Marriage and the Failure to Launch Although the entrance of women into the workplace made it possible for families to support their children’s education, the institution of marriage has also begun to weaken.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

After I spoke, a firefighter from the Seattle area picked up the microphone. Workers had been watching their standard of living get whittled away for decades, he said, and up till now they had always been able to come up with ways to get by. The first adjustment they made, he recalled, was when women entered the workforce. Families “added that income, you got to keep your boat, or your second car, or your vacation, and everything was OK.” Next, people ran up debt on their credit cards. Then, in the last decade, people began “pulling home equity out,” borrowing against their houses. “All three of those things have kept the middle class from having to sink down into abject poverty,” he said.


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

You may well be familiar with psychometric tests and may have even undertaken some yourself; in fact, over 95% of the FTSE 100 companies use psychometric testing to select their staff, as do the police, the civil service, airlines and even football clubs such as AC Milan (Guardian, 2002). Basic psychometric testing was developed during the Second World War to try to identify the jobs that would best suit different women entering the workforce in support of the war effort and the resulting Myers-Briggs test is still widely in use today. The construction of a risk profile test – let’s call it a questionnaire, as it sounds less intimidating – therefore requires far more than just putting together a list of ten questions to score.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It’s senseless to pine for a bygone era of Jim Crow, Mad Men–style casual sexual harassment and gender apartheid, police raids of underground gay bars and sodomy prosecutions, and laws against interracial marriage. The second era of equality has dismantled many (though certainly by no means all) of the legal and cultural structures that regulated and enforced these brutal inequalities of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and trends suggest that in the very near future, women will surpass men in all levels of educational attainment. While women still make on average 23 percent less than men, that gap has shrunk markedly since 1980, when women made on average 40 percent less. As for racial equity, the gains are decidedly more mixed, but one unambiguous achievement of the second era of equality is that the elite has undoubtedly become more diverse.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The United Nations Population Fund has found that educated women are likely to marry later and have smaller and healthier families. As female education rises, studies show that infant mortality rates fall and family health improves. Children of educated mothers are themselves more likely to achieve higher levels of education, feeding into a virtuous cycle. An increase in female education also translates into more women in the workforce, which boosts household income and GDP. And none of that even begins to engage broader questions of morality, gender equality and social justice. Consider the situation of a woman in Uganda working as a reporter for the Ugandan Broadcasting Corporation. She may decide, as Deborah did, to hold off on getting married until later in life.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

As women become better educated, and are more knowledgeable about contraception, they can spend more time working and less time having children. The opportunity cost of childbirth rises, thereby placing downward pressure on the fertility rate. The size of the workforce increases because of both the increased number of infants surviving to adulthood and the higher participation of women in the workforce. With an expanded workforce, the volume of savings increases, allowing funds to be channelled to investment projects, which lift incomes even further. And, with a more educated workforce, human ingenuity can lift productivity, allowing more outputs for given inputs of raw materials. Like a surfer, it’s not always easy to jump onto these demographic waves.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

While the impact on labor force participation for men has been the most dramatic, the overall statistics show a broadly similar story over the two decades since the turn of the century. Figure 2 shows the workforce participation rate for all workers aged eighteen to sixty-four, including both men and women.8 The rising participation rate up to the year 2000 reflects the entry of more women into the workforce. After that peak, however, the trend has been downward as both men and women have exited the labor market. In other words, even as the unemployment rate fell to historic lows, there has been an ever-increasing mass of completely disenfranchised workers who remained largely invisible as the overall narrative pointed to a booming job market.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Northern Europeans dressed from the Paleolithic Age through the nineteenth century primarily in a fabric that is now rarely worn except by small numbers of the elite: linen. The oldest fabric in the archeological record is made from linen or related vegetal fibers, and this section looks to fabric’s early beginnings. Clothmaking has in many cultures been women’s work. Women represent more than two thirds of the modern garment workforce. The value of women’s labor and women’s wages has been shaped by cloth production, and vice versa, and this section looks at the importance of women’s work at the dawn of industrial fabric production. Next comes cotton. Cotton is an incredibly thirsty crop, and it is also chemically intensive, accounting for almost 20 percent of the global usage of pesticides.

These quotas, like Kennedy’s, would have unexpected consequences. Foreign manufacturers, faced with per-piece quotas, looked for new opportunities to increase the value of their exports by making more expensive “fashion products.” They began to produce products that targeted the large numbers of American women who were entering the workforce in the 1970s. “Career wear” was born. In 1945, women had brawled for nylons: rabid with desire to secure a product that they had been told could secure them men’s affection as they were abruptly shoved from the job market. In the early 1970s, they marched back to work, now draped in polyester.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

DISPOSABLE PRODUCTS FOR WOMEN In the early decades of the twentieth century, manufacturers who had embraced disposability as a viable way to achieve repetitive consumption realized that in catering mainly to men, they severely limited their potential market. Urbanization and industrialization had changed American gender roles, and single women were entering the workforce in greater numbers. Brochures published by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston record the variety of employment opportunities available to women. Many of the suggested positions were previously restricted to men. They included work in publishing, real estate, probation, industrial chemistry, and bacteriology.13 Changes in laws concerning inheritance and the integrity of life insurance policies, and especially improvements in their enforcement, were also putting more money into widowed women’s hands.14 Furthermore, America had shifted from a subsistence agrarian economy to an industrial one, and as a result more and more married women found themselves in cities, shopping for their families’ needs in the hours that their husbands worked and their children went to school.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Our modern era of economic stagnation is a fundamentally different proposition. Many of the factors that led to such scintillating rates of economic expansion in the Western world in earlier decades are no longer working their magic: the forces of globalization are in retreat, the boomers are ageing, women are thankfully better represented in the workforce,3 wages are being squeezed as competition from the emerging superpowers hots up and, as those superpowers demand a bigger share of the world's scarce resources, Westerners are forced to pay more for food and energy. In the 1990s, it looked for a while as though new technologies might overcome these constraints.

With the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, countries that had been trapped in the economic equivalent of a deep-freeze were able to come in from the cold, creating new opportunities for trade and investment: trade between China and the US, for example, expanded massively. Women, sorely underrepresented in the workforce through lack of opportunity and lack of pay, suddenly found themselves in gainful employment thanks to sex discrimination legislation. In the early 1960s, fewer than 40 per cent of US women of working age were either in work or actively looking for work: by the end of the twentieth century, approaching 70 per cent were involved.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

At various points in the past, the value of jobs changed, and new kinds of work appeared. Before the First World War, clerking was a man’s job and considered highly skilled – it was well paid as a result. After the war, clerking became women’s work. Because, under capitalism, women are treated as primarily concerned with reproducing the workforce by mothering them, most employers – and many male trade unionists – relegated them to a secondary role in the workforce. After the First World War, it suited many employers to employ a large number of female clerks on tasks considered skilled twenty years earlier, but increasingly defined as routine, and therefore paid less.

Since the late nineteenth century, many large institutions – banks and the civil service among them – had imposed a marriage bar on female clerks. Female office workers had to leave their jobs as soon as they married. This rule, which many local authorities also imposed on teachers, was designed to restrict women’s prospects as their numbers in the workforce grew. The marriage bar ensured that men retained positions of seniority. Men were not subject to a marriage bar. But male clerks in most of Britain’s major banks, including the Bank of Scotland, were not allowed to marry without the permission of their branch manager. This was rarely granted before they reached their late twenties and were earning a salary that their employer considered commensurate with keeping a family.

In Britain, steelworkers, miners and textile workers were among those most likely to be unemployed. Many Liberal, Conservative, and some Labour politicians blamed unemployment on women taking men’s jobs during the Great War, or on people’s idleness. Neither explanation was true: most of the million women who entered the workforce between 1914 and 1918 took up entirely new jobs, while returning servicemen were eager to find work when the Armistice came. The fault lay with employers and with post-war Liberal and Conservative governments’ failure to rebuild Britain after 1918. There was no plan to integrate ex-servicemen into the workforce, and no strategy for returning industry to a peacetime footing.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

pages: 288 words: 92,175

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

The department already had three women, which the manager, a man, had determined was the ideal number. Unlike Macie, he saw the fairer sex as unstable employees, liable to leave as soon as they were enticed by marriage or children. Perhaps he was letting his personal life color his view of women in the workforce—both his mother and wife had stayed home to raise children—despite the fact that the women in his department had been there for years and had no plans to leave. Although Marie couldn’t work in chemistry, there was an available computer position, and she decided to apply. She was nervous as Macie interviewed her.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He helps out with survival training at Draper University, and he regularly creates situations that become legendary. He came up with the idea that teams should be tied together for most of their first day of school to get to know each other better, and he made two of the male students paint themselves pink because they missed a class on women in the workforce. I remember a time when I was very nervous going up an elevator to meet with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Frank wrapped his arms around me from behind and lifted me off the ground. I didn’t appreciate it at the time because I was going over what I was going to discuss with Arnold and I lost my concentration, but I appreciate it now.


pages: 357 words: 88,412

Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight From Fashion Designers by Teri Agins

Donald Trump, East Village, haute couture, new economy, planned obsolescence, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, women in the workforce

Nine West set a new fashion standard for working women’s shoes by introducing real variety: trendy pumps, sandals, and boots in many shades and novelty styles, priced affordably, from $20 to about $100. Nine West designers traveled to Italy and France scouting for unusual boutique styles they could reinterpret for American customers. Fashion footwear was in huge demand after millions of American women entered the workforce in the 1980s and started buying wardrobes of shoes for their pantsuits, dresses, and casual clothes. By the late 1980s, footwear experts believed that every woman in America owned at least a couple of pairs of Nine West shoes. Camuto became chief executive officer of Nine West in 1993 when the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, with annual sales of $552 million, and Brazilian factories turning out 130,000 pairs of shoes a day.


pages: 279 words: 90,278

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

Class and its implications for literacy and access decide what feminism looks like in action. For those of us who would have been holding rifles at the mine entrance rather than lobbying lawmakers in Topeka, one result of that legacy was that we were often the “breadwinners” of our households well before middle-class women flooded the workforce in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s. There was in our family, therefore, no semblance of the notion that a woman should or might be “taken care of.” There never had been, back to my great-great-grandmother Irene on the Boeing factory line and beyond. For the women I knew, work wasn’t a liberation from the home or a revelation of self.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Cooperative networks enable small- and medium-size enterprises to remain dominant in a region that exports world-renowned food, automobiles, and packaging equipment. In part because of its culture of cooperatives, Emilia-Romagna has the highest median family income in Italy, with the lowest unemployment rate and the highest participation of women in the workforce.32 This is the outcome of a curious convergence. A showroom of dental chairs at a factory for Cefla, a manufacturing cooperative near Bologna. Emilia-Romagna was, starting in the late nineteenth century, a leftist stronghold. Communists and socialists dominated the first national cooperative association, Legacoop, founded in 1886.


pages: 302 words: 83,116

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

Even when the analysis included only full-time, full-year employees and controlled for college major, profession, and other variables, Goldin and Katz found that the Harvard women still earned about 30 percent less than their male counterparts. What can possibly account for such a huge wage gap? There are a variety of factors. Women are more likely to leave the workforce or downshift their careers to raise a family. Even within high-paying occupations like medicine and law, women tend to choose specialties that pay less (general practitioner, for instance, or in-house counsel). And there is likely still a good amount of discrimination. This may range from the overt—denying a woman a promotion purely because she is not a man—to the insidious.

As of 1940, an astonishing 55 percent of all college-educated female workers in their early thirties were employed as teachers. Soon after, however, opportunities for smart women began to multiply. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were contributing factors, as was the societal shift in the perception of women’s roles. As more girls went off to college, more women emerged ready to join the workforce, especially in the desirable professions that had been largely off-limits: law, medicine, business, finance, and so on. (One of the unsung heroes of this revolution was the widespread use of baby formula, which allowed new mothers to get right back to work.) These demanding, competitive professions offered high wages and attracted the best and brightest women available.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Over the course of their careers, women tended to lose ground compared to men.97 Whereas racially discriminatory legislation had to face the legal test of “strict scrutiny” (no such law could stand without a “compelling state interest”), efforts to achieve gender equality foundered after the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. While the federal government removed some barriers to women’s participation in the workforce, it did little directly to aid that participation. The possibilities of federal daycare had been illustrated during World War II, when the government facilitated the construction of 24-hour care so that women could work in war industries. After the war these daycare centers closed.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

We are not alone. 82 percent of women in the United States now work, a 250 percent increase since the 1950s.11 Fewer than 7 percent of households have only a male breadwinner.12 This is a radical change in our households and lives. As the Industrial Economy gave way to the Information Economy, labor transitioned from a physical to an intellectual endeavor, an important factor in opening doors for women to join the workforce in legions. Despite a persistent glass ceiling at the top of most corporations, women have risen to higher-level roles in steadily increasing numbers, and this has contributed to another core driver of the growth of the Purpose Economy. Economics has historically been a male-dominated profession, and so it is of little surprise that household work was never considered in the calculation of the nation’s economic output.


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

The fast-food chain Pret A Manger says that of 50 applicants who seek employment – and salaries can eventually reach £43,000 a year – only one is British. The rest are hard-working Europeans serving us coffee and well-made sandwiches. The economy was reshaped to be employment-rich but income-poor. As women entered the workforce households still needed to have children looked after, homes cleaned, ageing relatives cared for and goods ordered online delivered to homes by an army of white-van drivers and Deliveroo-type courier services, while new fleets of taxis from Addison Lee or Uber ferried customers around. These low-pay jobs were largely done by immigrant workers from within the EU or further abroad.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

In April 2017, the Fair Labor Association, a watchdog that grew out of the sweatshop scandals in the nineties, issued a report disclosing that workers in a factory in China producing for a major supplier of Ivanka’s dresses and blouses put in close to 60 hours a week, and earned what works out to a little over $1 an hour (well below the average wage for urban Chinese manufacturing workers). Most employees also lacked health and maternity benefits—not a good look for an advocate of women in the workforce. The construction of many Trump-branded hotels and towers has been plagued with similar controversies, in the US and abroad. An investigation by Vice, for instance, revealed that the treatment of migrant workers constructing a Trump-branded golf course in Dubai stood out even in a city notorious for slave-like labor conditions.


pages: 287 words: 99,131

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom by Mary Catherine Bateson

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Celebration, Florida, desegregation, double helix, estate planning, feminist movement, invention of writing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Nevertheless, there are significant efforts to ensure that those who live longer can continue to contribute to society, including the work being pioneered by Marc Freedman in the areas of civic engagement and encore careers, and research supported by the Sloan Foundation on how workplaces and jobs need to be structured to optimize the contributions of older adults.9 The movement of women into the workforce created gaps in child care and community life, which are partially being filled by retirees, and many industries are concerned about future shortages of skilled workers. There is already widespread interest in ways of reengaging retirees, either through flexible arrangements for paid work or as volunteers.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

Expenditures on child care by year and income group (in 2015 dollars) 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 All households 140 135 118 104 95 114 108 103 106 110 Top 1% 885 995 1,025 606 596 893 984 1,507 963 2,110 Top 5% 389 380 400 409 354 517 519 564 452 676 Top 10% 383 325 302 342 286 384 378 387 401 429 60–89th percentile 166 160 128 104 99 114 110 100 79 101 40–59th percentile 72 94 68 53 60 56 47 39 60 41 0–39th percentile 47 43 60 35 31 36 29 30 42 31 The findings on labor-intensive inconspicuous consumption align with the extensive work of Suzanne Bianchi and her colleagues. Bianchi finds that despite the fact that there are more women in the workforce today than in the middle of the twentieth century, and despite the fact that parents in general work more than ever, today parents are spending more time with their kids than in the “family-oriented” 1960s. Using time diary data over several decades starting in the 1960s, Bianchi and colleagues find that cultural norms around parenting are changing.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

The long-term trend since the mid-1980s has been a decline in labor participation for people ages twenty to twenty-four as college attendance has become more common, and an increase in the labor participation rate for people ages twenty-five to fifty-four as economic growth recovered from its 1970s malaise and more women entered the workforce. But since 2008, the gap between labor participation for the twenty to twenty-four set and the twenty-five to fifty-four cohort has expanded. From a 6-percentage-point gap in the 1990s—when typically around 84 percent of older people were working compared to 78 percent of young twenty-somethings—the gap widened to nearer 8 percentage points in the 2000s.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The origins of this philosophy, of which Thiel is an advanced standard-bearer, lie in 1920s Vienna. The warrior-entrepreneur The First World War placed unprecedented weight upon the management and restructuring of domestic economies. It required governments to divert resources toward munitions production and saw the widespread use of rationing. Women entered the workforce in much larger numbers than before, and into new areas of the economy such as transport and heavy manufacturing. Conscription saw 60 million people mobilized across Europe. This was also the first major war to feature aerial bombing, an innovation which drew additional civilian resources and infrastructure into the war effort.


pages: 180 words: 61,340

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

They don’t play together but in parallel; they overlap even less organically than men and women in other developed countries, which is really saying something. It isn’t that the women are oppressed, exactly. On paper, by historical global standards, they have it about as good as women anywhere: good public health care, high participation in the workforce, equal rights. What Icelandic women appear to lack—at least to a tourist who has watched them for all of ten days—is a genuine connection to Icelandic men. The Independence Party is mostly male; the Social Democrats, mostly female. (On February 1, 2009, when the reviled Geir Haarde finally stepped aside, he was replaced by Johanna Sigurdardottir, a Social Democrat, and Iceland got not just a female prime minister but the modern world’s first openly gay head of state—she is married to another woman.)


pages: 221 words: 68,880

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle) by Elly Blue

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autism spectrum disorder, big-box store, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, food desert, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, job automation, Loma Prieta earthquake, medical residency, oil shale / tar sands, parking minimums, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, science of happiness, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

The reality was never so rosy, as was so scathingly chronicled in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. And even its imperfect incarnation was available only to a relatively-wealthy middle class of mostly white women. This dream also proved unsustainable as a national economic model. By the 1960s, many of these suburban single-family households needed two incomes to function. Women returned to the workforce but typically still did most of the unpaid labor, in effect working double shifts; but this change came with added expenses, including day care for children—and a second car. Nowadays, these double responsibilities add up to complicated transportation needs. Women make more trips than men, with diverse kinds of trips chained together.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s—when there was little or no civil rights policy—than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.”3 And the number of women in the workplace had been rising steadily for decades: in 1950, one in three women were in the workforce,4 as compared to just 19 percent of working-age women fifty years earlier.5 Across the board, American living standards changed radically for the better as the United States took global leadership. Furthermore, America was hardly a cultural desert. The attempt to paint the American dream as an American nightmare had common currency on the American Left; Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) painted a businessman as an unfulfilled dreamer, coining the term Babbitt as an insult for everyday Americans.


pages: 238 words: 68,914

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care by Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, informal economy, inventory management, job automation, knowledge economy, lifelogging, obamacare, personalized medicine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, web application, women in the workforce, working poor

These women might reasonably point out that they devoted their most fertile years to building athenahealth. Now that we’re a big company with a market capitalization in the billions, we can spend some of that money helping them have babies. Point taken. But imagine if each of us could choose only the health insurance we wanted, à la carte. In such a scenario, maybe only twenty women in our whole workforce would be interested in the expensive in vitro coverage. And a good number of them would no doubt be driven away by the cost, which would presumably skyrocket once the vast majority of customers dropped it. Would that be the end of the story? A service that costs $1 million shrivels and dies for lack of paying customers?


pages: 258 words: 69,706

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

Single mothers become marginalized as “unemployed” and “uncontributing” when they are in fact, as scholar Silvia Frederici observes, reproducing labor power as a key source of capitalist accumulation: “The wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised.”(20) Feminist Ann Ferguson describes the flip side of this phenomenon, arguing that it has been easier to shift the traditional male-breadwinner–female-caregiver model toward female breadwinner than it has been to shift it toward male caregiver.(21) This reveals how, regardless of the numbers of women in the paid workforce, patriarchal relations and an anticommunitarian social ordering of labor are central to the structuring of capitalism. Since single mothers, poor women, women of color, and transfolks are relegated to the lowest ranks of those deemed disposable, gender liberation is at the core of disarming the social and economic hierarchies within border imperialism.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Japan’s current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a conservative who formerly did not display interest in women’s issues. Recently, however, he reversed course and announced that he wanted to find ways of helping mothers return to work—many people suspect, not because of his suddenly developing a concern for women, but because of Japan’s shrinking population and hence shrinking workforce (more about that below). Half of Japanese people in general, and of Japanese university graduates in particular, are women. Hence underemployment of Japanese women constitutes for Japan the loss of half of its human capital. Abe proposed that working mothers should be able to take three years of maternity leave with the assurance of returning to their jobs, that the government expand public child-care centers, and that businesses receive financial incentives to hire women.

One option is for Japan to consider immigration modeled on Canada’s highly successful immigration program, or on the experiences of Japanese emigrants themselves to the U.S. and to South America. An alternative option is for Japan to continue to say no to immigration and instead to put into practice some of the obvious alternatives: e.g., expanding the native Japanese workforce by removing the well-known obstacles keeping women out of the workforce, and greatly expanding the number of term visas issued to guest workers to serve as child-care providers, nurses, and caretakers for old people. There is no secret about these various possible solutions, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. What’s required is to bite the bullet, reach consensus on one solution, and avoid the current continued paralysis.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise


pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

She fell for the foreman at the Dorsey ranch, George Washington Gillespie. They married and raised five sons. FRED WAS IMPRESSED with Tom Gable’s experiment, and quickly moved to adopt it for his entire eating house chain. Feminist scholars would come to see this decision in 1883 as a crucial turning point for American women. There had been only one other significant female workforce in the country—the female mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, from the 1820s through the 1840s. But those mill laborers were often exploited, and had never enjoyed anything like the kind of freedom and empowerment that came from leaving home and reinventing themselves in a new place.

He invoked the family tradition that women not get involved with the business, noting how in 1911 her own father, Ford, had forced his sisters and mother to sell their shares. He demanded that she sell him all the shares she controlled, immediately. According to him, it was the Fred Harvey way. Kitty refused. She didn’t give a damn what her father had said in 1911—it was 1936, and the world had changed. Women were in the workforce, they were even starting their own companies. She was perfectly capable of being on the board of her family’s business. In fact, given her stock holdings, perhaps she should be chairman of the board. Nor was it just a matter of whether she could help influence the company’s future. Kitty also knew that if her uncle bought her out, it would be bad for the business.


pages: 332 words: 104,587

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

agricultural Revolution, correlation does not imply causation, demographic dividend, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

In the late 1920s, street thugs would sometimes seize a woman with short hair and pull out all of her hair or even cut off her breasts. If you want to look like a man, they said, this will do it. Communism after the 1949 revolution was brutal in China, leading to tens of millions of deaths by famine or repression, but its single most positive legacy was the emancipation of women. After taking power, Mao brought women into the workforce and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and he used his political capital to abolish child marriage, prostitution, and concubinage. It was Mao who proclaimed: “Women hold up half the sky.” There were some setbacks for women with the death of ideology and the rise of a market economy in the 1980s, and Chinese women still face challenges.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The reduction in the punitive postwar marginal tax on high incomes (from a top rate of 91 percent through much of the 1950s and the 1960s, through a number of ups and downs, to 35 percent at the time of writing) has increased incentives to earn higher incomes and may thus have contributed to the growing entrepreneurship and inequality.17 The weakness of unions may also have reduced moderately educated workers’ bargaining power, though the loss of high-paying unionized jobs probably has more to do with increased competition and entry as a result of deregulation, as well as competition from imports. A relatively stagnant minimum wage has certainly allowed the lowest real wages to fall (thereby also ensuring that some people who would otherwise be unemployed do have a job), though only a small percentage of American workers are paid the minimum wage. Finally, the entry of women into the workforce has also affected inequality. Because the well-connected and the highly educated tend to mate more often with each other, “assortative” mating has also helped increase household income inequality. The reasons for growing income inequality are, undoubtedly, a matter of heated debate. To my mind, the evidence is most persuasive that the growing inequality I think the most worrisome, the increasing 90/10 differential, stems primarily from the gap between the demand for the highly educated and their supply.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

There are also quicker, often more draconian fixes available. You can drive down the price of oil – a constant foreign policy objective of the United States – which makes the costs of production cheaper. Or you can release new labour into the market or make existing labour cheaper, such as with the entry of women into the workforce in the latter half of the 20th century and the successful attempts by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to weaken the power of trade unions. Another option is to create new markets in sectors that are normally protected from market forces, such as with the privatisation of the railways in Britain and ongoing attempts to dismantle the country’s National Health Service.


file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

Neither the partner's office nor the partner perform work for the company. Due to fluctuations in stock price, the value of stock in the company represents 5.1% of the couple's net worth on particular days. 16. Accounting independence prohibitions were drafted at a time when few women worked outside of the home. Given the prevalence of women in the workforce, both as accounting partners and as workers, managers or executives in public companies, does the SEC agree current independence restrictions are outdated and in need of modernization? Do the restrictions as they stand discourage wives and daughters from participating in the workforce? Please respond to these questions two weeks from the date of receipt of this letter.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

Women’s stories of their struggles with money are shrouded in secrecy and shame, and frequently marked by paralysis and disenfranchisement. Women’s domestic labor is still undervalued to the tune of almost $11 trillion a year; the wealth of twenty-two men in the world is equal to, or surpasses, the wealth of all African women; and the mass exodus of women from the workforce during the Covid pandemic is set to reverse a decade of progress toward global gender equity. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, our silence is clearly not protecting us. Until women begin to talk freely about money, to amass information about money, to reflect critically on how money works in our society and strategize how to change it, until we put as much thought into negotiating our money as we do into maintaining our relationships, plotting our careers, or raising our children, we are at an even greater risk of remaining victims of a predatory financial system.


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

Generally operated by women, these restaurants serve hearty fare and tend to specialize in one type of dish, though the menus are extensive. Bukas are also colloquially known as “Mama Put” restaurants, given that the food is so good, a regular customer might request that the proprietor, a.k.a. the “Mama,” put some more on his plate. “Good cooking takes time. As more and more Lagotian men and women enter the workforce, fewer and fewer cook the old way: long, low and slow preparations that could take hours.” Bukas fill this need for comfort and tradition on the plate. Stella’s Kitchen, in Computer Village, has a reputation for cleanliness, and for being slightly pricier than the typical buka. The kitchen specializes in pounded yam, which goes nicely with its egusi soup, thick with goat, melon seeds, and chilis in a fish stock base.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In other words, if next year is pretty much like this year, the forecast will be accurate. Economists from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (FuUerton 1992, Saunders 1992, Rosenthal 1992) reviewed the Bureau's own employment projections and found similar failings. The 1973 forecast for 1990 greatly underestimated the continuing surge of women into the workforce. Projections of the female labor force participation rate (LFPR) in 1990 made in 1978, 1980, 1983, and 1985 were a lot closer to the mark, but by 1978, women's LFPR had already risen sharply enough to be noticeable. In its macroeconomic projections, the 1978 and 1981 GNP forecasts for 1990 were too optimistic — the 1978 forecast by a margin of 11.5%, a not inconsiderable $386 billion.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

(As we explain in chapter 5, however, these rising costs are largely the consequence of government intervention.) Second, more middle-class families now have two earners, as many women have chosen to enter the workforce rather than become stay-at-home mothers. On the whole, that’s a good thing. But it does complicate the picture, since it means that some amount of this improvement in our standard of living is owed not to pure economic progress, but to more people working. (That said, women constitute only 9 percent more of the workforce than they did in 1970—nowhere near enough of an increase to account for the gains American households have seen.51) Finally, some of these improvements may be a consequence of Americans taking on irrational levels of debt, which is not a sustainable path to growth.


pages: 364 words: 103,162

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Like one quarter of the couples who married in 1947, the royal couple reached their Golden Wedding anniversary in 1997, but by then, the predicament of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard had become little more than an anthropological curiosity: less than one tenth of the couples who married fifty years on were expected to complete the same marathon. By then, women made up almost half the workforce, an astonishing change in light of the meekness fifty years earlier with which most had surrendered their wartime jobs when demobilized men demanded employment. The best part of 200,000 marriages now ended in divorce every year, with proceedings more often than not initiated by women, unprepared any longer to think ‘we must be sensible’.2 By the time of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth’s celebrations, their four children had contracted three marriages, every single one of which had failed.

Those which remain are all my own work. NOTES CHAPTER ONE The Land of Lost Content 1. Geoffrey Gorer: Exploring English Character, p. 303. 2. In 1995, the most recent figures available, 174,000 marriages in England and Wales ended in divorce (source: Office of National Statistics). In September 1997, women made up 46.3% of the workforce: the comparable figure in 1947 was 30%. 3. London Research Centre: Education in London: Key Facts, 1997, p. 18. 4. George Orwell: ‘The Moon under Water’, in the Evening Standard, 9 February 1946. 5. George Orwell: The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 48. 6. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman: 1066, And All That, p. 25. 7.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

The framework co-evolved with Keynesian macroeconomics—the model given physical form by the above-mentioned Phillips machine with its pipes and valves. Its focus is current period flows of income, consumption, investment, and trade, and its philosophical basis is utilitarianism. Assets, stocks of savings, are no more than passive reservoirs. Nature is largely absent. Social change in the form, say, of women leaving the wartime workforce or joining the paid workforce again from the mid-1960s, or the spread of higher education, is absent. So too is innovation. All change, for better or worse, has been squeezed into the national accounts framework, or been rendered invisible. The hunt is on for an alternative framework and system of representation of economic and social progress.


pages: 255 words: 80,190

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

clockwatching, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, imposter syndrome, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, post-truth, profit motive, sensible shoes, Snapchat, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

So either he quit work, which was financially untenable for us, or I worked part-time, or both of us accepted that our children would grow up spending more time in care than with their parents. My ‘choice’ to cut back my hours was framed accordingly. Arguably, if social and cultural barriers did not deny men the choice to work as flexibly as women, the ‘problem’ with women in the medical workforce would cease to be a gendered one. Lawson’s implied solution to the problem of the ‘feminisation’ of medicine – though he chose to insinuate rather than state it explicitly – was to address the diminished productivity of female doctors by reversing their increasing prevalence in the NHS.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

These weak growth numbers endure despite demographic conditions that are the most favorable in the region’s history for a great economic leap forward. Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela all have similar population profiles: rapidly growing labor forces that reflect past birthrates and the increasing participation of women in the workforce, sharply declining birthrates, and favorable dependency ratios—few old people, and not too many children. Only 8–9 percent of the population is over sixty years old, compared to 16 percent in the United States, 22 percent in Europe, and over 25 percent in Japan. The favorable “window” for economic growth will last another twenty-five years.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Her math teacher, impressed by Waydo’s acumen for math and science, told her that she should think about becoming an engineer. “Isn’t engineering something that men do?” Waydo asked him. “When my mom went to college,” Waydo explained to me, “she could be a teacher or a psychologist since that’s what women did. In her generation, there were clear roles for women in the workforce.” But Waydo’s math teacher encouraged her to disregard the historical gender imbalance in engineering and pursue what seemed to her like a gender moonshot. She went on to earn degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering and, on graduation, took a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design Martian rovers—joining the ranks of a burgeoning number of women in the previously men-choked corridors of rocket science.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

So did the heartbreaking photo of a father and his daughter – Óscar Alberto Martinez Ramírez and his two-year-old daughter Angie Valeria, from El Salvador – lying dead on the bank of the Rio Grande, entwined in an embrace, after drowning in their attempt to swim across the border from Mexico to the US in 2019.12 A crucial part of good story-telling is crafting compelling narratives. People tend to understand a complex world through simplifying stories, so ideas that are encapsulated in persuasive narratives are much more effective. I’ve found that comparing immigrants’ impact on the labour market to that of women entering the workforce in the past helps convey the fact that there isn’t a fixed number of jobs to go around. One six-country study found that while correcting people’s misperceptions about immigrant numbers and origins didn’t make locals more likely to favour redistribution towards migrants, an anecdote about a ‘hard-working immigrant’ was more effective.13 Accentuating the positive can make a big difference too.


pages: 426 words: 118,913

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Documenting organizations like the Red Cross, Lions, Elks, League of Women Voters, Boy Scouts and bowling leagues, Putnam finds that, despite steady increases throughout the twentieth century, all such ‘secondary associations’ have recently experienced sudden and substantial declines in membership. He suggests various causes – such as women entering the workforce, home entertainment, social and geographical mobility – but whatever the causes it is certain that oikophilia is likely to be the first victim of those institutions’ decline. The value of ‘little platoons’ is perhaps never better appreciated than when visiting a place where they have been crushed.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

The following year, Congress narrowly passed a resolution that government employees would receive equal pay regardless of gender. During the First and Second World Wars, with American men leaving the country en masse, women began to fill jobs once thought to be only within a man’s domain. The wars not only created space for women in the workforce but also led to unions supporting equal pay; unions realized that if women were paid less for the same work, then management would lower male workers’ wages after they returned from war. Then came the pivotal legislation: almost a hundred years after it first addressed the gender pay gap, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, mandating equal pay for equal work.


pages: 197 words: 53,292

Isn't That Rich?: Life Among the 1 Percent by Richard Kirshenbaum, Michael Gross

Downton Abbey, McMansion, New Journalism, rolodex, women in the workforce

The really successful ones tend to. We don’t need a man for anything.” “Then why be married?” I knew I was pushing Lily’s white buttons. “It’s part of the fear that women have about not having ‘Mrs.’ in front of their names. Today, one has a choice. Marriage is a choice but not a mandate. Many women went charging into the workforce in my day and then bailed. If the husband lets them go spinning and lunching and shopping, many women would rather take that option. “For me and my friends, speaking on the phone to our husbands and going off to the South of France or Siena for the summer couldn’t be more wonderful.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Children were released early from school into part-time jobs. Workhouses emptied, vagrants were rounded up and asylums asked to surrender their able-bodied inmates. Trade union membership in relevant industries rose by 80 per cent in four years. Unprecedented numbers of women were drawn into factories, hospitals and the workforce in general. Most went into clerical work, notably the civil service, but female employment at Woolwich Arsenal rose from 125 to 28,000. The visibility of working women on buses, in shops, in the services and even in the police force was much noted. A newspaper remarked on women ‘who walk through the metropolis at midnight, unprotected, unmolested, safe in the new-found confidence that war work has given to their sex… Before Armageddon this would have been impossible.’


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The aggregate data on work hours are striking, and they show that Americans have fairly positive attitudes toward work. For instance, if we consider weekly work hours per American, that number rose from 22.34 in 1950 to 23.94 in 2000, hardly a sign of work falling out of fashion. Over this period, too, large numbers of women came into the workforce, many because they wanted to work and earn their own incomes. The reality is that preferences for work haven’t declined nearly as much as commentators had been predicting earlier in the twentieth century. Earning and spending money is fun, and many jobs are more rewarding, more social, and safer than they used to be.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

But pitting old against young, or vice versa, is one of the major tactics used by the wealthy and powerful to divide those who might otherwise unite against them in pursuit of a fairer world for all. It’s like pitting groups of low-wage workers against each other, or the interests of stay-at-home moms against women in the paid workforce. The underlying issue is a living wage for all, and redress requires collective action. When issues are instead framed as zero-sum—more for “them” means less for “us”—it’s harder to see that the public good is at stake and the issue affects everyone. Because conflict “sells papers,” the media perpetuate the myth that intergenerational competition is inevitable, and people readily buy into it.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

First, watch mechanisms must be simplified. Second, measurement should be standardized and decimalized. Third, machines should be used to make repeatable parts to the finest tolerances, rather than workers using hand tools to shape and fettle each part to fit. Fourth, division of labor should be taken yet further and women brought into the workforce in large numbers. And, fifth, the elementary-education system, as well as the technical schools, must be transformed in quality and scope. All this would bring costs down without sacrificing quality, just as the Swiss had achieved. But the Brits would not listen to the heretic from Cheapside.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

They got better grades, had higher reading and writing scores, had higher class ranks and more school honors, and were more likely to take advancedplacement tests. This equality for women in education set in motion a chain reaction that has reverberated through other parts of the economy and society. Those highly educated Boomer women enter the workforce and prove that they can do just as good a job as—if not better than— their male colleagues. Over time, their own self-perception changes, as well as the views of the men they work with. As they advance through their careers, they take on more managerial responsibility and leadership roles and begin to change the organization itself and the environment for women who are entering the organization under them.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Public Leadership Fertility choices reflect not only individual tradeoffs in the marketplace but also community norms as to the “appropriate” behavior of young men and women. The age of marriage, the spacing of children, the appropriateness of choosing sterilization (for example, vasectomy or tubal ligation) as a long-term fertility-control method after the family size is complete, and public attitudes toward women in the workforce are all culturally conditioned. Public leadership by authority figures in favor of voluntary fertility reduction has played an important role in shifting cultural norms (for example, in accepting modern contraceptive use) and has emboldened women in tradition-bound rural areas to seek family planning services.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

Candi: Yes, it’s been bullshitized, absolutely. Leslie: Whereas UBI . . . Didn’t Silvia [Federici] write or talk in an interview recently about how the UN and then all sorts of world bodies kind of glommed onto feminism as a way to resolve the capitalist crisis of the seventies? They said, sure, let’s bring women and carers into the paid workforce (most working-class women were already doing a “double day”), not to empower women but as a way of disciplining men. Because insofar as you see an equalization of wages since then, it’s mainly because in real terms, working-class men’s wages have gone down, not because women are necessarily getting that much more.


Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World by Michael Schuman

Admiral Zheng, British Empire, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, land bank, moveable type in China, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Anything to meet national targets! “The older students worked day and night to build steel furnaces on the old sports ground,” recalled one young schoolgirl. “Students, once so attentive, came to class only to fall asleep. Awakened, they spoke excitedly of their great revolutionary production tasks.”38 To free women for the workforce, communal child-care centers and mess halls were established to lift the burden of such household drudgery. Surely China could surpass the Western powers on revolutionary zeal alone. It couldn’t. The homemade steel was useless; the effort to make it distracted farmers from their fields. Agricultural production plunged.


pages: 497 words: 130,817

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

—Marina Keegan, Yale College Class of 20121 The first thing you asked me about [when I started as president] wasn’t the curriculum or advising or faculty contact or even student space. In fact, it wasn’t even alcohol policy. Instead, you repeatedly asked me: “Why are so many of us going to Wall Street? Why are we going in such numbers from Harvard to finance, consulting, i-banking?”… 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce made this choice. —Drew Faust, Harvard University commencement address, 20082 Investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms have become ubiquitous features of life on elite undergraduate, business, and law school campuses. Over the past fifty years, students graduating from these institutions have increasingly pursued corporate careers.


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

In 2018, it was about 40 percent, up from 10 percent in 1970. About one in five children now lives with a single mom. A lot of this is due to the fact that the marriage rate has been concurrently declining. People who study the reasons for this decline cite everything from the introduction of the Pill to more women entering the workforce to falling incomes. But I wonder why they never look at the impact of technology. The biggest and most persistent drop in the marriage rate in nearly 150 years has been since the 1990s, concurrent with the widespread adoption of the Internet and online dating. There seems to be a blind spot over the fact that, for better or worse, this technology has made marriage and committed relationships look less attractive and less necessary, especially for straight men.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

To smoke together, kids need free time, preferably right after school lets out, when the grown-ups are still at work and the world belongs to the young. That window of opportunity, however, is getting smaller. Psychiatrists Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise wrote about this trend in their book Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?, published in 2000. The book suggests that as more women have entered the workforce, and as the number of hours we all work continues to increase, parents have turned to schools, churches, and other local organizations to do some of their parenting for them. Rosenfeld found that over the past twenty years, “ structured sports time” has doubled and “unstructured children’s activities” have declined by 50 percent among children in all socioeconomic groups.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar



pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970)8 provided a close reading of negative representations of women in literary texts by men, and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970)9 argued that women were sexually repressed and alienated from their own bodies and unaware of how much men hated them. These texts all fall within radical feminism, argue that womanhood is culturally constructed and imposed by men (in a top-down power dynamic), and advocate the revolutionary overthrow of patriarchy. In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, feminist scholars looked closely at women’s roles in the family and workforce and at social expectations that women be feminine, submissive, and beautiful, if not sexually available and pornographic. Marxist ideas of women as a subordinated class that exists to support men (who, in turn, support capitalism) abounded, and feminists met for “consciousness-raising” sessions.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

However, we are now seeing a significant rise in the appreciation of the “feminine” values of caring, compassion, cooperation, and more right-brain qualities, heralding a harmonious blending of these human values in our work and life. Conscious businesses certainly embody both perspectives, whether they are led by men or women. Women around the world today have greater access to education, employment, and opportunities than they had before. Women already outnumber men in the workforce in the United States. The increase in women’s access to higher education has been dramatic. A century ago, fewer than 20 percent of college students were women. Today, women account for almost 60 percent of college students at the undergraduate level and 70 percent at the graduate level in the United States.


pages: 1,294 words: 210,361

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

Mary Lasker’s own instruction in sales began in the early 1920s, when, having graduated from Radcliffe College, she found her first job selling European paintings on commission for a gallery in New York—a cutthroat profession that involved as much social maneuvering as canny business sense. In the mid-1930s, Lasker left the gallery to start an entrepreneurial venture called Hollywood Patterns, which sold simple prefab dress designs to chain stores. Once again, good instincts crisscrossed with good timing. As women joined the workforce in increasing numbers in the 1940s, Lasker’s mass-produced professional clothes found a wide market. Lasker emerged from the Depression and the war financially rejuvenated. By the late 1940s, she had grown into an extraordinarily powerful businesswoman, a permanent fixture in the firmament of New York society, a rising social star.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

So, for the next 20 years, I think we’re going to be seeing increasing automation, but we’re also going to be seeing the number of workers not growing as quickly as it did before. Another way that demographic factors work in our favor is that, while for the last two decades, more women were entering the workforce, and the percentage of female participation in the workforce was going up, this affect has now plateaued. In other words, women who want to be in the workforce are now already there. So again, I think that for the next 20 years we’re not going to see the numbers of workers increasing. The risk of automation taking jobs away from people is still serious though I think.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The Arab business community is pushing a professionalized reform that is reminiscent of other intra–second world collective bootstrapping from Eastern Europe to East Asia, lifting tourism in Tunisia and Egypt, agricultural growth from Morocco to Sudan, and other entrepreneurial ventures that create jobs and even liberate many women into the workforce, changing the pattern by which Gulf countries were “richer than they are developed.”11 Yet just because they are rich (again) today doesn’t mean they won’t blow it. The tribal aspects of monarchic control that made prosperity fleeting very much remain in place today.12 “The medieval social structures are regressive even by Arab standards,” pitied one Gulf monarchy watcher in Dubai.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

The cost also included the reintegration of 12 million people into the American civilian economy via such measures as the GI Bill of Rights, which was passed by Congress in June 1944. While the war mobilization had absorbed a large part of the slack in the predominantly male U.S. work force, and even drew in millions of women into the workforce as well, this was not the same as gainful employment in the private sector. The GI Bill provided cash for returning service personnel, unemployment insurance for up to a year, and loans for housing or to purchase a farm or a business. Most important, the GI Bill provided higher education to veterans, many of whom missed completing their formal education in order to go to war.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The point is that economies grow and workers survive regardless of the pain and churn of technological dislocations. Despite the truly astonishing advances of the twentieth century, the share of Americans working rose. The labor market accommodated many of the men squeezed out of manufacturing, as well the influx of tens of millions of women and millions and millions of immigrants into the workforce. When manufacturing went from more than a quarter of American employment to just 10 percent, mass unemployment did not result. Nor did it when agriculture went from employing 40 percent of the workforce to employing just 2 percent. The idea that machines are about to eliminate the need for human work has been around for a long time, and it has been proven wrong again and again—enough times to earn the nickname the “Luddite fallacy” or “lump-of-labor fallacy.”

And lower-income mothers are becoming more and more likely to drop out of the labor force altogether. About one in three stay-at-home moms falls below the poverty line today, compared with just 14 percent in 1970. The effects are profound, with the United States essentially shunting women to lower earnings trajectories and shoving them out of the workforce. A paper by a Princeton economist found that the rising cost of child care between 1990 and 2010 caused a 5 percent drop in employment among all American women, and a 13 percent drop in the employment of women with a child under five. Women’s participation in paid work has been falling in the United States, even as it has grown in many other OECD countries, among them France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

A key issue here is the relative return on time and effort for roles requiring different technical capabilities, as there is a risk that personal services and other currently female-dominated job categories will remain undervalued. If so, the fourth industrial revolution may lead to further divergence between men’s roles and women’s. This would be a negative outcome of the fourth industrial revolution, as it would increase both inequality overall and the gender gap, making it more difficult for women to leverage their talents in the workforce of the future. It would also put at risk the value created by increased diversity and the gains that we know organizations can make from the enhanced creativity and efficiency of having gender-balanced teams at all levels. Many of the traits and capabilities traditionally associated with women and female professions will be much more needed in the era of the fourth industrial revolution.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

They al fol ow the same formula: a stage ful of girls cruel y asking questions of a would-be suitor, saying things like “If you don’t drive a BMW, don’t even think about it,” or “You are so ugly, why are you here?” The girls take themselves out of the running, round after round, by turning off their lights. At the end, the poor guy final y gets to make a choice out of the ones stil il uminated. These shows are a powerful outlet for a wave of young, educated, financial y self-sufficient women who came into the workforce as China was opening up its economy and who have decided not to marry simply for the sake of security or tradition. This group had been teased in society and cal ed The Left Behinds, and these game shows were their way of reclaiming their independence. But to older generations, they also reveal a vapid society that praises money and things over traditional Chinese values of family and home.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Within a few years the word ‘chav’ would gain currency, to describe those who behaved like lads without the income or education to justify their conduct. Meanwhile, there was less talk by the middle of the decade of sexual politics, though the changes wrought by feminism became ever more entrenched. In 1997 the number of women in the national workforce exceeded that of men for the first time in the country’s history, a revolutionary moment that largely passed without notice. This was a relatively recent trend and one that had a profound impact on the male half of the population; in the 1960s there were 15 million men in employment in Britain, thirty years later there were just 11 million.

The welfare state had been created fifty years earlier by the Attlee government, to a blueprint provided by William Beveridge, and had been based on the concept of full employment; without the political will to reinstate that objective, it was unlikely that a genuine return to the principles of Attlee and Beveridge could be achieved. Perhaps too the statistics were unfair to Blair’s administration, if compared with the last Labour government in the 1970s, since they took no account of the rise in the numbers of women in the workforce. There were now three million more people employed in Britain than there had been in the mid-1970s, not all of whom were accounted for by the growth in the population. In any event, it could safely be said that, since its peak in 1992, official unemployment had fallen by two million, half of that fall being achieved during Tony Blair’s first term in office; the downward trend had been maintained.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

More people went to high school and into middle-class jobs, and many baby boomers became the first in their families to go to college and climb up the socioeconomic ladder. For women, climbing up that ladder had an extra dimension. At first slowly, then steadily, emancipation advanced in the West. More women went to college, entered and stayed in the workforce, and made more conscious decisions about their work-life balance. The booming economy had plenty of room for them, but they were also supported by advancements in medical contraception, the increased accessibility of household appliances, and, of course, the emancipation movement.

It was exemplary of a broader trend. Women's liberation in Western societies continued for the remainder of the century and into the 21st. Anno 2021, there are more women than men enrolled in university in many countries around the world, including the US and Saudi Arabia13(!), and women form close to half of the workforce in many countries. Despite this, inequalities related to pay and other factors remain.14 Over the course of those early post-war decades, many countries used their economic windfall to build the foundations of a social market economy. In Western Europe, notably, the state offered unemployment benefits, child and education support, universal health care, and pensions.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

More people went to high school and into middle-class jobs, and many baby boomers became the first in their families to go to college and climb up the socioeconomic ladder. For women, climbing up that ladder had an extra dimension. At first slowly, then steadily, emancipation advanced in the West. More women went to college, entered and stayed in the workforce, and made more conscious decisions about their work-life balance. The booming economy had plenty of room for them, but they were also supported by advancements in medical contraception, the increased accessibility of household appliances, and, of course, the emancipation movement.

It was exemplary of a broader trend. Women's liberation in Western societies continued for the remainder of the century and into the 21st. Anno 2021, there are more women than men enrolled in university in many countries around the world, including the US and Saudi Arabia13(!), and women form close to half of the workforce in many countries. Despite this, inequalities related to pay and other factors remain.14 Over the course of those early post-war decades, many countries used their economic windfall to build the foundations of a social market economy. In Western Europe, notably, the state offered unemployment benefits, child and education support, universal health care, and pensions.


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

The safest properties to buy are those owned pre-1974 by Turkish Cypriots or expats, and those Greek and Maronite properties sold by their owners post-1974. WOMEN IN BUSINESS In both communities women tend not to discuss money unless they are running a business, especially in the South. Cypriot women have always been strongly represented in the workforce in agriculture and as seamstresses, and have embraced the modern skills required in today’s world. At work, they might occupy important but not decision-making positions, in areas such as PR, marketing, advertising, and fashion. However, these positions are providing many with financial independence through their work.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

UK manufacturing productivity is 12 per cent higher than any other sector, and up to half of the productivity growth since 1997 in regions like the north-west and the Midlands has come from manufacturing. This is not to romanticise the past. As I made clear in Little Platoons, the industrial work that kept many communities alive in the past was often dangerous and stressful. It also meant that many women were locked out of the workforce. But that was an argument for modernisation within manufacturing, rather than modernisation without manufacturing; the assumption underlying this economic shift was wrong. Any argument that deindustrialisation was inevitable is deeply flawed and ignores that sector’s success in other countries.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

In the US, unemployment surged, in the name of controlling inflation, to over 10 per cent by 1982. The result: wages stagnated. This was accompanied in the US by a politics of criminalisation and incarceration of the poor that had put more than 2 million behind bars by 2000. Capital also had the option to go to where the surplus labour was. Rural women of the global south were incorporated into the workforce everywhere, from Barbados to Bangladesh, from Ciudad Juarez to Dongguan. The result was an increasing feminisation of the proletariat, the destruction of ‘traditional’ peasant systems of self-sufficient production and the feminization of poverty worldwide. International trafficking of women into domestic slavery and prostitution surged as more than 2 billion people, increasingly crammed into the slums, favelas and ghettos of insalubrious cities, tried to get by on less than $2 a day.

In the last thirty years, for example, some 2 billion wage labourers have been added to the available global workforce, through the opening-up of China and the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe. All around the world the integration of rural and hitherto independent peasant populations into the workforces has occurred. Most dramatic of all has been the mobilisation of women, who now form the backbone of the global workforce. A massive pool of labour power for capitalist expansion is now available. Labour markets are, however, geographically segmented. A daily commuting time of four hours comes close to defining an outer limit for workers to get to their jobs on a daily basis. How far away four hours gets you depends, of course, on the speed and cost of transportation, but the inevitable geographical segmentation of labour markets means that questions of labour supply boil down to a series of local problems embedded in regional and state strategies, mitigated by migratory movements (of both capital and labour).


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

After that, the communist parties stepped in to limit all action to the restoration of democracy only. There was no repeat of 1917–21. But fears of such a repeat would force a hike in workers’ living standards and a tilt in the balance of wealth distribution towards the working class. In the first phase, the rapid post-war expulsion of women from the industrial workforce – as depicted in the documentary film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980) – allowed male wages to rise, causing a narrowing of wage differentials between workers and the middle class. The sociologist C. Wright Mills noted that, by 1948, while the income of American white-collar workers had doubled in ten years, that of manual workers had increased threefold.32 Additionally, the Allies actually imposed welfare states, trade union rights and democratic constitutions on Italy, Germany and Japan, as a punishment for their elites and as an obstacle to their re-emergence as fascist powers.


pages: 431 words: 106,435

pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

While making some people rich, the latter has exposed the severe disparities of income and opportunities, and left many to desperately improvise jaunty masks for themselves in the social jungle. Digital media have unquestionably enhanced the human tendency to constantly compare one’s life with the lives of the apparently fortunate. It is one reason why women who enter the workforce or become prominent in the public sphere incite rage among men with siege mentalities worldwide. But the palpable extremity of desire, speech and action in the world today also derives from something more insidious than economic inequality and unsocial sociability. It has the same source as the myriad Romantic revolts and rebellions of early nineteenth-century Europe: the mismatch between personal expectations, heightened by a traumatic break with the past, and the cruelly unresponsive reality of slow change.


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

This world is known, somewhat poetically, as “the water trade” (mizu shōbai), and is said to provide the informal heart that enables formal business negotiations to be concluded.61 This rosy account rather leaves out, unfortunately, the unwelcome comments and touching endured by these “more and less attractive hostesses,” or how the entire system serves to reinforce oppressive gender norms, a culture of sexual harassment, and the abysmally low participation rate of women in the Japanese workforce. Chinese business banquets can be similarly horrifying experiences for women. An insightful, humorous op-ed by the author Yan Ge concerns her misadventures navigating the alcohol-soaked professional circles of Chengdu, her home city.62 Thinking she had been invited to a casual dinner, but wandering instead into a full-on formal banquet, she plopped down next to what appeared to be the male host and realized with horror that she might be in the spot traditionally reserved for “the girl.”


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

These alternative power centers ensured that America’s vast middle and working classes received a significant share of the gains from economic growth. Over the last four decades, countervailing power has almost disappeared. Grassroots membership organizations have wilted because Americans have had less time for them. As wages have stagnated, most people work more hours in order to make ends meet, including the women who have streamed into the paid workforce to prop up family incomes. Similarly, union membership has plunged because corporations began busting unions—sending jobs abroad, replacing striking workers, illegally firing workers who tried to form unions, and moving to so-called right-to-work states where workers don’t have to pay union dues.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

It is a composite index reflecting inequality between men and women in three areas: reproductive health (measured by a nation’s maternal mortality ratio and adolescent fertility rate), empowerment (measured by the proportion of women in parliament, and by their secondary and higher education attainment levels), and the labour market (measured by women’s participation in the workforce). The index measures the percentage loss in national achievement in these aspects of human development as a result of gender inequalities. ‌ Fig. 4 The higher the tax level, the greater the degree of gender equality8 The Gender Inequality Index indicates that the potential human development loss as a result of gender inequality is only 5 per cent in high-tax Sweden.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The lands confiscated from the kulaks were turned into state farms (sovkhoz), while small farmers were forced to join cooperatives or collective farms (kolkhoz), with a nominal share ownership. Stalin did not follow Preobrazhensky’s recommendation exactly. Actually, he went rather soft on the countryside and did not squeeze the peasants to the maximum. Instead, he imposed lower-than-subsistence wages on industrial workers, which in turn forced urban women to join the industrial workforce in order to enable their families to survive. Stalin’s strategy had huge costs. Millions of people resisting, or being accused of resisisting, agricultural collectivization ended up in labour camps. There was a collapse in agricultural output, following the dramatic fall in the number of traction animals, partly due to the slaughtering by their owners in anticipation of confiscation and partly due to the shortage of grains to feed them thanks to forced grain shipments to the cities.


pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

See also Wasubot wages, 95, 101, 118-20, 153, 182 wakon-yosai ("Japanese spirit-Western learning"), 69 Waldron, Kenneth J., 230 WASCOR (WAseda Construction Robot), 191 Wasubot, 13, 203 Weisel, Walt, 43,144, 200 welding robots, 17,116-17,119 Wiener, Norbert, 31, 48, 55, 58,156,183,199, 207 wire bonder robots, 180-81 women: promoting technology, 26; in workforce, 100-101,158 word processors, 41 workforce: feeling of equity, 153-54; high wages of, 119; need for flexibility, 151-52; shortage in, 119-20 Yamabiko, 221, 224 Yamasaki Seisakujo, 20-21,154,166,176 Yamaura, Eiji, 90 Yaskawa Electric, 114,149,175 Yoke, Hideaki, 98,101 Yokoyama, Mitsuteru, 78 Yonemoto, Kanji, 38-39,122, 213, 233 Yoshikawa, Hiroyuki, 229, 233 Yuta, Shinnichi, 43, 224 Credits The following individuals and organizations graciously allowed reproduction of photographs and illustrations in their possession.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

But it’s an amazing thing that an economy that grows in productivity by 80 to 90 percent still leaves so many people actually worse off.” Working women are now the norm, but the toll on young mothers is stunning. In 1960, only 15 percent of American women with children under six worked, but by 2010 that number had shot up to 64 percent—the highest percentage in the world. In fact, the massive movement of women into the workforce, as Kevin Phillips observed, had by the late 1990s already given the United States “the world’s highest ratio of two-income households, with its hidden, de facto tax on time and families.” Paradoxically, the second income stream wound up putting many middle-class families in an even tighter financial bind because of the sharply rising costs of housing from the 1980s through the 2000s.


pages: 1,000 words: 247,974

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

Children from English poorhouses, Danish Bornehus, Swedish Barnhus, and Russian priiut dlia sirot all ended up in textile factories.21 Child workers’ dormitory, Quarry Bank Mill (illustration credit 7.6) Aside from children, women, especially the young and the unmarried, constituted the cotton workforce. Indeed, cotton manufacturing became the most female-dominated manufacturing industry to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In New Hampshire’s Dover mill in the mid-1820s, as mentioned, 89 percent of all workers were women. In Catalonia’s cotton industry, up to 70 percent of workers were female. Women dominated the cotton textile workforces throughout Europe and the United States, although male workers dominated in Mexico and Egypt.

Migrating into factory labor could give marginal agricultural pursuits another lease on life.17 The survival of detailed pay records allows us to take a closer look at one such early cotton mill, the Dover Manufacturing Company, mentioned above: In the sixty-three weeks following August 9, 1823, a total of 305 women, most of them young and unmarried, labored at one point or another in the factory, constituting 89 percent of the workforce. They worked on average for 25.93 weeks, or 41 percent of the total time possible. Indeed, many women entered the factory on a seasonal basis, working for a few months, then returning to other pursuits. To pick just one example, in mid-October forty-three women, or 32 percent of the workforce, took the week off from mill work, to return the following week. Work patterns at the Dover Manufacturing Company, August 9, 1823–October 16, 1824: sample of all workers whose surname begins with A or B (illustration credit 7.3) The rhythms of agricultural work thus persisted into the factory, and factory work could help families stay on the land.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Less than 2 percent of venture dollars go to start-ups founded by women (less than 1 percent to women of color), and roughly 85 percent of the tech employees at top companies are men. Yet technology is pervasive, and it is changing our lives. When Mary Jane first drove up Sand Hill, women made up barely 40 percent of the overall American workforce. Less than a handful of those women were venture capital partners. But Mary Jane Elmore, the unflappable, fresh-faced girl next door, would go on to become one of the first women in history to make partner at a venture capital firm. Like the bold pink dahlias flourishing in one corner of Sand Hill Road, she and the other pioneering women venture capitalists, the “Alpha Girls,” would figure out a way to take root and thrive.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Incidentally, Tucker points out a fascinating episode in the history of wage bargaining. In the early twentieth century there was a remarkably successful campaign to force employers to pay men higher wages precisely so that their wives would not have to work: the ‘family wage’ movement. Social reformers, far from wanting women to join the workforce, favoured the opposite: allowing them to leave the workforce and spend time with their children, supported by a better-paid husband. The argument they advanced was that if employers would only pay more, then working-class women would be able to join middle-class women in not having to work outside the home.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce


Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Hans Rosling, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Use a line graph if the x-axis is an interval scale such as days, weeks, or months. A vertical bar chart could have been used for this, but the goal was to show the trend and the shape of the data rather than the numbers. Here you can see the “M-curve” in the case of Japan. Many women in Japan drop out of the workforce when they have children (and then reenter the workforce again later). What About Picture Graphs? Picture graphs use visuals to represent the data points. They are very common in popular media because they get your attention—at least that’s the idea. While I am a fan of high-impact visuals, I am not crazy about picture graphs.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 1984, the year I completed school, the North East of England was in a state of terminal decay. It was wracked by brutal unemployment and poverty. Almost 20 percent of the local population was registered unemployed. Others were in poorly paid jobs, barely making ends meet. Real unemployment was far higher than the recorded rate. In the North East, many women were in fact never formally in the workforce, so they weren’t captured in the statistics. As is usually the case, macro-level aggregate figures masked individuals’ daily realities at the micro level. The data concealed the impact of the economic changes on actual people. The prospects for school leavers (high school graduates) like myself were especially grim.

The federal government could fold into a new institution existing activities and funding, such as grants and other measures to alleviate poverty, provide child benefits and unemployment assistance, improve resources for K-12 public school education, and increase access for the majority of the population to lifelong education, new skills development, and retraining, for example. With appropriate legislation, a more focused American development organization could help expand affordable health care, allocate specific resources to bridge the digital and other infrastructure divides, subsidize national child-care networks to help women get back into the workforce, and oversee equity programs to remove racial barriers and close women’s wage gaps. Since 2016, think tanks like the Brookings Institution, congressional task forces, and many development economists have generated ideas like these. They have suggested drawing on the funding of the existing system of federal reserve banks across the country to administer grants and loans for regional reconstruction and setting up a new “American National Investment Bank” with an independent development-focused staff.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

“A Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming in Europe,” Economist, May 16, 2020. 29. H. Ziady, “25,000 Jobs at Risk as Debenhams Closure Follows Topshop Collapse,” CNN, December 1, 2020. 30. H. Gupta, “Why Some Women Call This Recession a ‘Shecession,’ ” New York Times, May 9, 2020. 31. R. Siegal, “Women Outnumber Men in the American Workforce for Only the Second Time,” Washington Post, January 10, 2020. 32. T. Alon, M. Doepke, J. Olmstead-Rumsey, and M. Tertilt, “The Shecession (She-Recession) of 2020: Causes and Consequences,” VoxEU, September 22, 2020. 33. J. Hurley, “COVID-19: A Tale of Two Service Sectors,” Eurofound, February 3, 2021. 34.


pages: 130 words: 43,665

Powerful: Teams, Leaders and the Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord

call centre, data science, future of work, job satisfaction, late fees, Silicon Valley, Skype, subscription business, the scientific method, women in the workforce

But that’s if you’re thinking only about keeping to a budget, rather than about the value the person will generate for you, hopefully for quite a few years beyond your current budget year. Not to mention that pegging salary offers to pay history has perpetuated the pay bias that has led to women being underpaid across so much of the workforce. That, rather than imbalances due to results contributed, is the inequity that companies should find unfair and unacceptable. In my experience, if you focus intently on hiring the best people you can find and pay top dollar, you will almost always find that they make up much more in business growth than the difference in compensation.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

Once a top student at Swarthmore, Myers now apprenticed herself to a noted management consultant, Edward Hay, and learned the arts of testing, statistical analysis, and data validation—all skills she rightly assumed would assist her in developing her mother’s test. Mother and daughter introduced the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in 1944. They hoped it would help the army of women who were entering the workforce to replace their husbands while they were off at war. The business roots of the Indicator touched a chord in the corporate world—and within a decade Myers-Briggs was a standard tool of the HR/personnel/recruiting professions. Appropriately enough, in 1962, the manual written by Myers was acquired by the Educational Testing Service, the people who administered the SAT.


pages: 335 words: 94,578

pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The drop in family size has led to a remarkable phenomenon: The world recently passed what Hans called “peak child”—that is, the number of children under five hit its maximum and is going down.[*4] The benefit? As the United Nations Population Fund explains on its website, “Smaller numbers of children per household generally lead to larger investments per child, more freedom for women to enter the formal workforce, and more household savings for old age. When this happens, the national economic payoff can be substantial.” So: Health is improving nearly everywhere, with big dividends for human welfare. The global health gap is still large, but it is narrowing. As dramatic as this story is, it’s only the background for what we need to know now.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

On average, the economic pie grew at essentially the same rate in the United States as it did in nations where the poor and middle class have continued to enjoy a much larger piece. Indeed, in one important respect, the pie actually grew more quickly in Europe than it did in the United States. Recall that American households are working more hours than they did in the past. The same is true in Europe, but not nearly to the same extent. Women have entered the workforce to roughly the same degree—in fact, the share of the population in the workforce grew more quickly in Europe than in the United States between 1979 and 2006.9 Yet in Europe average work hours for those in the workforce have declined, so the net effect is only a small increase in overall work hours, compared with a much more substantial rise in the United States.10 As a result, GDP per hour worked—perhaps the best single measure of a country’s economic health—actually rose faster in Europe than in the United States between 1979 and 2006.


pages: 420 words: 121,881

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

Albert Einstein, experimental subject, feminist movement, Norman Mailer, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce

Sometimes when Goody returned home from work, Lizzie would tell him in detail which rooms she had vacuumed and cleaned. In later years, her daughter Laura would wonder if Lizzie honestly expected him to care or if she was only saying it so he would appreciate what an ordeal her home life had become. During World War II, when thousands of women were entering the workforce, Lizzie told her husband she was thinking of looking for work as a radio announcer. She never followed up on it. Once again, Goody showed no inclination to pursue a steady job. In fact, at the time when his family seemed to be most pressed for money, he was preparing to take his biggest risk.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

And there is something wrong with a society that doesn’t want to produce them. There may be nothing wrong with a century or so during which fertility rates fall to 1.6. There would be a great deal wrong with a global fertility rate of 1.4 or below. As countries seek to revive their childbearing resources, they may flirt with draconian measures, cutting women out of the workforce and keeping them at home, banning abortions, and restricting access to family-planning services. But that is unlikely to work. Women won’t stand for it. Instead, Dyson says we need a continuation of the ‘renegotiation’ of gender roles under way across most of the world, and most advanced in northern Europe.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K


Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Bernadett Varga

Airbnb, Black Lives Matter, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, high-speed rail, lockdown, Peace of Westphalia, trade route, women in the workforce, work culture


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The median musician earned $20,000 in 2016, some $15,000 less than the median of all other workers. Lee Sims, who hustled to make ends meet, is more representative of musicians than his son Paul Simon. Second, about two-thirds of musicians are men; the gender balance in the overall workforce is much closer to parity. And while women have increased their share of the U.S. workforce since World War II, there has been essentially no change in the two-to-one ratio of male to female musicians since the 1970s. Third, 13 percent of professional musicians are African Americans, which is close to the share of African Americans in the workforce overall. Hispanics, by contrast, represent a much smaller share of musicians than their share of the workforce overall: 10 percent of musicians are Hispanic, versus 17 percent of the workforce.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They did surveys that found one of the biggest attractions for companies was highly qualified graduate staff, so they harnessed the product of the next element feeding the boom: massive education reforms and investment in the 1960s, which by the 1980s were sluicing waves of bright, well-educated Irish school- and college-leavers and graduates into the jobs market. Simultaneously, the European-led emancipation of Irish women was boosting female participation in the workforce, smartly boosting Irish productivity and growth. Over a quarter of the Irish women who worked within the home in 1994 – activity that generally isn’t measured in economic growth figures – had taken outside jobs by 1999, just six years later. The economic benefits were immense.19 Adding further to the workforce was a flood of Irish jobseekers who had fled the country in previous bad economic times, been educated and trained at other countries’ schools and universities, and were now returning home to join the boom.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

This is a blinkered view, argues Sandra Rosenbloom, an urban planning professor at Arizona State University whose specialty is women’s travel behavior. “That was just a middle-class model,” she says. “Lower-class women always worked. Either alongside husbands in stores, or at home doing piecework. Women always worked.” Still, the Leave It to Beaver commute was not a total fiction, given that in 1950 women made up 28 percent of the workforce. Today, that figure is 48 percent. How could the roads not have gotten more crowded? “The rise in the number of cars, driver’s licenses, miles traveled—it totally tracks women going into the labor force,” says Rosenbloom. “It’s not that men wouldn’t have driven more, but you wouldn’t see these astonishing increases in traffic congestion in all indices of travel if women weren’t in the labor force, driving.”

Taking the kids to school or day care or soccer practice, eating out, picking up dry cleaning. In 1960, the average American drove 20.64 miles a day. By 2001, that figure was over 32 miles. Who’s making these trips? Mostly women. This is the kind of social reality that traffic patterns lay on the table: Even though women make up nearly half the workforce, and their commutes are growing increasingly close in time and distance to men’s, they’re still doing a larger share of the household activities that, back in the Leave It to Beaver days, they may have had the whole day to complete (and, as Rosenbloom points out, 85 percent of single parents are women).


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The aggregate concept of growth is inevitably too broad to be very informative and to be considered as the only, or the main, determinant of the change in the welfare of the citizens of a country. High growth may be accompanied by higher or lower employment; by increasing or lower shares of workers in national income; by increasing or decreasing participation of women in the workforce; by increasing or decreasing poverty rates; by increasing environmental concerns; by increasing crime rates or accidents at work; and by a distribution of the income, among the population and also between generations, that raises concerns and that is not considered equitable. A high growth rate that gives an excessive share of the gains in income to a small percentage of the population; that creates growing environmental costs; and that is too focused on the current generation may be considered less desirable than an alternative, lower growth rate that is more equitably shared and that generates fewer environmental costs.


pages: 618 words: 180,430

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

Even most Fabians maintained highly respectable and conventional marriages. The darkest secrets of Edwardian family life, the beating of women by drunken or simply violent husbands, rape, and the unconsummated marriages of homosexual men, were never publicly discussed and only emerge as knowing hints in letters and memoirs. But the arrival of more women in the workforce, and a greater understanding of human biology, were facts which could not be brushed away. The socialism of those days was one which relied wholly on future visions and dreams, not on any established model. Fiction was essential to it. H. G. Wells set his science fiction tales in places like Woking.


pages: 423 words: 126,096

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

Palmer dominated American handwriting instruction with his call for no-nonsense efficiency. Where Spencer had extolled aesthetic contemplation, Palmer taught what we know today as muscular memory: drill and repetition of motions that would make possible rapid and unconscious production of correct letterforms. Perhaps because women were a rapidly growing proportion of the white-collar workforce, Palmer taught writing as a virile, assertive command of the whole forearm rather than the wrist and fingers. In place of meticulous copybook exercises, Palmer’s disciples invoked industrial efficiency. In 1904 one manual described the body as “a machine on which writing is done.”10 The history of script suggests that typewriting was not just the miraculous unfolding of a mechanical marvel but the logical outcome of a social drive to discipline the body.

The governments of northern Europe and North America, especially in the middle and later years of the century, saw increasing economic and military value in extending fluency in reading and writing from the middle class and the cities to the countryside, and later from boys to girls. New industrial processes and military weapons alike made written instructions important throughout the ranks. As we have seen in the history of the typewriter, women were beginning to dominate the clerical workforce. Prussia, the birthplace of the modern eyeglass industry, led the world in establishing a rigorously controlled school network. Matthew Arnold wrote in his 1866 report to the Schools Inquiry Commission that Germany’s educational system “in its completeness and carefulness is such as to excite the foreigner’s imagination,” and the German victory over France in 1871 was widely credited as much to the Prussian schoolmaster as to the drill sergeant.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

See also mindset action by network leaders and evolution of, 192–194 as barriers in strategy shifts, 50 of boards, 106, 108 breaking habits and, 198 mentoring for, 198–199 move to intangible assets and, 46 of network orchestrators, 194–195 new stories needed for, 198 Pinpointing in PIVOT process, 137–139 reinforcing, to realize change, 197–199 mentors, 108, 162, 198–199 Microsoft, 76, 80, 133 millennials, 8, 89, 90, 130, 155, 199 mindset, 28, 113–120 diversification of new ideas and methods in, 115 examples of companies using, 118–119 General Motors’ example of change in, 113–114 move from closed to open in, 115–118, 120, 186 network orchestrators and, 114–115, 118, 202 openness to change and, 114–115 organizational culture supporting, 117–118 questions to ask about, 117 scoring your company on, 121–122 minorities, and board membership, 105, 108 mission, 67, 92, 103–104, 118, 119, 140, 163 mission statement, 117 mobile technology customers’ use of, 156 examples of companies using, 36, 53, 70, 110, 191, 197 as key technology, 32 network orchestrators and, 148 platform choice and, 162 multiplier (price/revenue) market valuation comparison among business models using, 18–19 performance comparison among business models using, 16 use of term, 17–18 Myatt, Mike, 90 NASA, 73 Netflix, 46, 82–83, 196 Net Promoter Score (NPS), 65, 83 network capital business model based on, 15, 132 inventory of, 126, 145, 146, 149–151 mental model values on, 138 network orchestrators’ use of, 16 network platforms and, 160 Network Challenge, The (Kleindorfer, Wind, and Gunther), 7 network leader on teams, 169–170, 178, 179 network leaders in organizations, 189–203 core beliefs of, 192 digital technology changes and, 190 guiding principles of, 192–193 mental model evolution of, 192–194 network orchestrators as, 202 new thinking needed by, 189 responses to rapid pace of change by, 190–191 network orchestrators as allocators, 51, 54 boards and, 106–107 digital platforms used by, 33, 36–37 economic advantages of, 15–16 evaluating organization’s performance as, 135–136 examples of, 14 financial services and, 130 identifying organization’s characteristics related to, 133–135 industry sector adoption comparison for, 22–23 intangible assets and, 42, 44 leadership and, 56, 58–59, 60, 61, 62–63 market valuation comparison for, 17–19 measurement used by, 97 mental models of, 21, 194–195 mindset openness and, 114–115, 118, 202 network capital used by, 15 as network leaders, 202 number of companies analyzed for, 13 number of companies using, 22 overview description of, 14 performance comparison for, 16 PIVOT assessment of business models with, 132–133 possible situations behind slow adoption of, 23 scalability characteristics of, 15–17 tracking network and platform metrics for, 178–179 value creation comparison for, 19–20 Visualizing business model for, in PIVOT process, 157–158 networks best practices of legacy firms compared with companies using, 20 boards and, 104–106, 110–111 customer groups within, 149–150 intangible needs met by, 21 law of increasing returns and, 12 open organizations’ use of, 116 power of, 8, 12, 24, 28 subscription model using, 80 network sentiment, 44, 97, 98, 100, 150, 179, 180 Nickell, Jake, 68 Nike, 53, 70, 82, 160, 161, 171 Nike+, 53, 161, 171 Nordstrom, 76 Ocean Tomo, 97 Oculus VR, 36 online forums, 70, 72, 162 OpenMatters, business models research of, 131 OpenMatters website additional resources and support on, 128, 131, 203 business model resources on, 121 digital tools on, 10, 131 mental model assessment on, 138 survey of organization’s characteristics on, 135 openness examples of companies with, 118–119 mindset with, 114–115, 120 open organizations diverse initiatives and business units in, 116–117 examples of, 118–119 innovation pipeline in, 116 move from closed organization to, 115–118, 120, 186 organizational culture supporting, 117–118 questions to ask about, 117 talent in, 117 Operate step in PIVOT, 126, 127, 169–176, 186 creating platform in, 170–172 Enterprise Community Partners example for, 175–176 goal of, 169 management plan for, 174–175 management practices in, 172–174 selecting network leader and team in, 169–170, 173 organizational culture, and openness, 117–118 Page, Larry, 118, 119 Palmisano, Sam, 50 partners customer contributors as, 34, 58, 59 independent workers as, 89, 90–92, 93 performance business model comparison for, 18–19 Pinpointing in PIVOT process, 135–136 Phone Case of the Month, 81 physical capital business model based on, 15, 132 inventory of, 126, 145, 146, 163 mental model values on, 138 network platforms and, 159 Pinpoint step in PIVOT, 126, 130–141, 185 assessing current business model in, 131–132 defining current business model in, 132–133 defining mental model in, 137–139 Enterprise Community Partners example for, 140–141 goal of, 130–131 identifying organization’s characteristics in, 133–135 reviewing economic performance in, 135–136 Pinterest, 44 PIVOT, 123–186 additional resources and support for, on OpenMatters website, 128, 131 change leader in, 132 Enterprise Community Partners example for, 127 five steps of, 126–127 introduction to, 125–128 Pixar, 68 plans for big data use, 99–100 for filling technology, talent, and capital gaps in platforms, 171–172 for growth, on OpenMatters website, 10 for network management, 174–175 for reallocating capital, 157–158 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 106 principles for network orchestration, 25–122 as challenges and levers for change, 27 list of, 27–28 research identifying, 21, 28 scoring your company on, 121–122 Principles of Economics (Mankiw), 49 Project Loon, 167 Red Hat, 133 referrals, 78, 79, 175, 183 Reichheld, Fred, 65 relationships with customers data collection in, 81–82 as intangible asset, 42 leaders affected by changes in, 56–58 personalized approach to, 82 in subscription model (see subscription model) revenues, 28, 75–83 advantages of subscription models for, 77–78 data acquired with, 78, 81–82 move from transaction to subscription in, 78, 79–82 Netflix versus Blockbuster example in, 82–83 nonrevenue activities in subscription model and, 78–79 recurring, in subscription model, 75–77 scoring your company on, 121–122 reverse mentoring, 108, 162, 199 ride-sharing services, 44, 85, 113, 155, 197 Rouse, Jim, 127, 128, 165, 184 Rouse, Patty, 127 Russell Reynolds, 107 Salesforce.com, 176 scalability advantages of, 31 business model comparison for, 15–17, 132 cloud technology and, 32 costs with, 12, 16, 17, 19, 33, 63, 139 digital technology enabling, 3, 33, 41, 44, 162 economics of scale contrasted with, 17 global access and, 31 of network lodging options, 156 network orchestrators and, 172, 202 Threadless example of, 69 scale economics, 17 service providers evaluating organization’s performance as, 135–136 examples of, 14 human capital used by, 15 identifying organization’s characteristics related to, 133–135 industry sector adoption comparison for, 22 market valuation comparison for, 18–19 number of companies analyzed for, 13 overview description of, 14 performance comparison for, 16 PIVOT assessment of business models with, 132–133 scalability characteristics of, 16, 17 value creation comparison for, 19–20 services as intangible asset, 41 subscription model using, 80 shared vision, and co-creators, 61 sharing-economy companies, 44, 85, 113, 155, 197 show-rooming, 45 Sidecar, 44 Sitaram, Pradip, 140, 152, 164, 175–176, 183, 184 skills assessment, 138 smartphones, 29–30, 32 social media, 29 boards’ use of, 107 CEOs’ use of, 199 customer data from, 97, 98, 101 examples of companies using, 53–54, 143, 180 interactions with companies using, 58, 80, 107, 202 as key technology, 32 leveraging for marketing and communication, 34 network sentiment tracked on, 180 platform choice and, 33, 162 public relations problems from customers’ use of, 42–43 subscription model using, 77–78, 80 Softlayer, 48 software subscription model, 76, 80 Spencer Stuart, 105 Sprint, 81 Stanford University, 107 Starbucks, 53, 109, 143, 190, 191 Starwood Hotels, 4, 43–44 strategy, 27, 47–54 barriers to changing, 48–49, 50 best practices of allocators in, 52–53 capital allocation as focus of, 49–51 IBM as example of shift in, 47–48, 50 move from operator to allocator in, 51–52 Nike-Apple partnership as example of, 53–54 questions to ask about, 52 scoring your company on, 121–122 subscription model advantages of, 77–78 customer contributors and, 77 data acquired in, 78, 81–82 examples of companies using, 75–76 moving customers from transactors to subscribers in, 78, 79–80 Netflix versus Blockbuster example in, 82–83 nonrevenue activities in, 78–79 personalized approach in, 82 recurring revenue from, 76–77 surprising and delighting the customer in, 81 themes in implementing, 80–82 types of offerings in, 80 talent big data collection and, 100 customer contribution of, 69 for digital platform operation, 170–171 experience in digital technologies needed by, 35 innovation and, 168 in open organizations, 117 tangible assets as financial liabilities in, 43–44 market valuation of intangible versus, 40, 46 move to intangible assets from, 44–45 Target, 76 TaskRabbit, 15, 159 Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (McChrystal), 55 technology, 27, 29–37 advantages of using, 31 business models incorporating, 30–31 embracing “digital everything” in, 30–31 essential aspect of, 29–30 importance of understanding and using, 30 management practices for intangible assets related to, 42 mentorships for, 199 move from physical to digital in, 34–37 platforms and, 33–34 questions to ask about, 35 scoring your company on, 121–122 talent needed for, 35 understanding five key technologies in, 32–33 technology creators evaluating organization’s performance as, 135–136 examples of, 14 identifying organization’s characteristics related to, 133–135 industry sector adoption comparison for, 22 intellectual capital used by, 15 market valuation comparison for, 18–19 number of companies analyzed for, 13 overview description of, 14 technology creators (continued) performance comparison for, 16 PIVOT assessment of business models with, 132–133 scalability characteristics of, 16, 17 value creation comparison for, 19–20 Tesla, 114 Threadless, 68–70, 72, 73, 78, 79, 81 3M, 91, 190 Thrun, Sebastian, 168 Topsy, 98 Track step in PIVOT, 126, 127, 177–184, 186 Amazon example of, 177–178 Enterprise Community Partners example for, 183–184 goal for, 178 network and platform metrics for, 178–179 network dimensions used in, 179–180 ongoing experimentation with, 182–183 platform dimensions used in, 180–181 team dimensions used in, 181–182 Trader Joe’s, 78 transactors, customers as, 78, 79–80 TripAdvisor, 10, 14, 44, 159, 174 Trunk Club, 76 Twitter, 42, 59, 60, 66, 72, 78, 79, 89, 97, 100, 107, 148, 171, 180, 199 Uber, 3, 4, 44, 66, 70, 81, 85, 91, 114, 155, 159, 160, 174, 197 United Healthcare, 133 US Board Index, 105 US interstate highway system, 11–12 Upwork, 12, 15, 43 value creation business model comparison for, 19–20 co-creators and, 61, 62–63 mental model beliefs on, 138–139 nonemployees and, 91 values assessment, 138 van Kralingen, Bridget, 47, 48 Verizon, 81 virtual reality (VR) technology, 36 Visa, 133 vision, and co-creators, 61 Visualize step in PIVOT, 126, 127, 156–165, 186 analyzing possible contribution to networks in, 160–161 beginning step for, 157–158 choosing platform in, 162–163, 170 Enterprise Community Partners example for, 163–165 goal of, 156–157 identifying potential networks in, 159–160 network orchestrator business model in, 157–158 overview of process in, 158–159 selecting network for, 161–162 team in, 158 VRBO, 156 Walmart, 4, 14, 76, 110, 133, 144 Wealthfront, 130 Weatherup, Craig, 110 WeChat, 4 Welch, Jack, 108, 199 Werhane, Charlie, 140, 164, 184 Wikipedia, 8, 46 Wind, Jerry, 6, 7 women, and board membership, 105, 108, 109 workforce. See employees Yahoo!, 148 Yegge, Steve, 33–34 Yellow Pages, 8, 197 Yelp, 8, 15, 44, 60, 66, 159, 160, 174 You Are Not So Smart (McRaney), 191–192 Young-Scrivner, Annie, 109 YouTube, 41, 72, 78 Zagat, 8 Zimmer, John, 114 Zipcar, 155 Zuckerberg, Mark, 36 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.


pages: 394 words: 57,287

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Not surprisingly, in the most recent year-end survey about employee priorities, inclusion topped the list. Part of our mission at WeWork was to help achieve equal representation of talented women in all parts of the organization. (See the sidebar “How to Attract Great Women.”) Women already represented 50 percent of the workforce, but those numbers weren’t being reflected at the top, at least not consistently. As part of this work, we invested time in recruiting women we didn’t already know. One lesson from this effort is that even after a long, rigorous recruiting process, getting all the way to the finish line isn’t a given for the category of women-you-don’t-know.


pages: 251 words: 76,225

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

Is it any surprise that the narrative of the “caveman” going out to hunt meat for the tribe while the “cavewoman” stayed home and looked after the children became a staple of American history books during this time—a time when we also put forth the idea it was “normal” for men to go out to work while women stayed at home? (This was a narrative built in part to encourage women to get out of the workforce again so returning male veterans could fill their factory jobs.) I’ve been amused the last twenty years to watch the whole conception about how early hominids lived unraveled from its 1950s frame by more modern archaeologists. Stories are powerfully important to people who are seeking to make sense of their own lives.


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The economic dislocations of the 1970s—inflation and deindustrialization—fundamentally stemmed from this return to normalcy. The stable growth of the postwar period that had rewarded budgeting and borrowing fell apart. With surging inflation and stagnating pay, real wages began to fall. Making up the gap, more married women than ever before entered the workforce, trying to make ends meet. But consumers also began to rely on borrowing to make up the widening gap. Since World War II, the amount borrowed by Americans had been rising, but the amount they could pay back—from good-paying postwar jobs—had kept pace. In the 1970s, that carefully budgeted balance between rising debt and rising income came undone.


pages: 263 words: 72,899

pages: 457 words: 128,640

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times by Lucy Lethbridge

Ada Lovelace, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, country house hotel, decarbonisation, garden city movement, high net worth, invisible hand, Louis Pasteur, new economy, period drama, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social web, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

It was all right for the foreign aristocracy, they were a soft lot, that was why the British Empire was there and would always remain there. It was also why every day I had to collect, clean, trim and fill four hundred lamps.’17 In 1900 domestic service was the single largest occupation in Edwardian Britain: of the four million women in the British workforce, a million and a half worked as servants, a majority of them as single-handed maids in small households. Hardly surprising then that the keeping of servants was not necessarily considered an indication of wealth: for many families it was so unthinkable to be without servants that their presence was almost overlooked.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

.__ more free tim~ The new interest in trading income for leisure reflects a growing 234 THE D AWN 0 F THE P 0 S T - MAR K E T ERA concern on the part of millions of Americans over family obligations and personal needs. Balancing work and leisure has become a serious parenting issue. With a majority of women now in the workforce, children are becoming increasingly unattended in the home. Upwards of 7 million kids are home alone during parts of the day. Some surveys have found that as many as one third of the nation's youngsters are caring for themselves. Between 1960 and 1986, according to one nationwide study, the amount of time parents were able to spend with their children declined by ten hours a week for white households and twelve hours for black ones. 37 The decline in parental supervision has created an "abandonment" syndrome.


pages: 444 words: 128,701

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business by Christopher Leonard

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, commoditize, estate planning, facts on the ground, invisible hand, longitudinal study, mortgage debt, payday loans, price discovery process, price stability, Ralph Nader, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Like everyone else at Tyson, Jackson found himself making up new rules as he went along and building the foundation for a new industry in his wake. As luck would have it, the new industry was arising at the perfect moment in history. American dining habits were fundamentally shifting, opening the door to a new era of poultry production. * * * By the early 1960s, Americans were in a hurry. Women were entering the workforce in ever-larger numbers, and families were starting to redefine the way they ate. The family dinner as they knew it was quickly becoming a relic of the past, with a set table and roasted chicken increasingly relegated to the nostalgic paintings of Norman Rockwell. For the first time, Americans began to demand two things from their food: that it be cheap, and quick to prepare.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

At the same time, while sexism persisted, a growing professional presence for women began to break down stereotypes and patriarchy. Similarly, our proposal to tie the economic fate of hosts and migrants would gradually reduce conflict between the workers of the developing and developed worlds and benefit both. VIP would be less disruptive to the identity of host country workers than women’s entry into the workforce because it would not directly affect existing hierarchies in the highly intimate sphere of the home. The greater fairness of VIP can be seen by comparing it to the present arrangement. Under the H1-B program, as a practical matter, only large and sophisticated employers—the Googles—can sponsor migrant workers.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

If you cannot understand how somebody can simultaneously watch TV and tweet about it on their iPad, you are struggling with the concept—but hurry up: 60 per cent of all young people use a ‘second screen’ while watching TV. Social theorists observed the beginnings of ‘networked individualism’ very early in the development of information technology. Sociologist Barry Wellman identified birth control, divorce laws, women’s participation in the workforce, and the zoning of cities into suburbs and business parks as preconditions to the Internet way of life. Long before Facebook came along, Wellman noticed that people preferred to live with multiple networks, flat hierarchies and weak commitments: Rather than relating to one group, [people] cycle through interactions with a variety of others, at work or in the community.


pages: 449 words: 85,924

Lonely Planet Maldives (Travel Guide) by Planet, Lonely, Masters, Tom

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, haute cuisine, income inequality, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, sustainable-tourism, trade route, women in the workforce

Women tended to their children and household duties during the day, and cooked fish in the evenings. Men spent the day fishing and then rested in the evenings. Modernisation and development changed the traditional way of life and conferred a double burden on many women – income generation plus domestic responsibilities. More opportunities and better education mean that more women are ready to join the workforce or take up income-generating activities at home. This has become a necessity rather than a choice for most women living in Male, as rising expenses and changing lifestyles demand a dual income to meet basic family expenses. Traditionally, a woman could choose a suitor and name a bride-price (rhan).


pages: 291 words: 90,771

pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Having children in this country can, in fact, be the fastest way to having the American Dream disproved. How are we to succeed on our own with young children and without the promise of community or assistance? This was further dramatized during 2020. By October of that year, two million women had fallen out of the workforce, sending us back to 1988 levels, back to the age when being a “workingwoman” was so notable that there was even a magazine of that name featuring cover girls in navy shoulder-pad-heavy blazers. By some estimates this was four times more than the number of men that had fallen out of the American labor force each month for six months straight.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Four years earlier, the Supreme Court had rejected a sex discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of Walmart’s 1.4 million women workers. Originally brought by a fifty-two-year-old African American woman named Betty Dukes, the suit claimed that Walmart managers discriminated against women. Plaintiffs pointed to a workforce that was 72 percent female, and a managerial team that was more than two-thirds male. Lawyers for Dukes showed that Walmart corporate had, at every turn, prevented women from building the kinds of careers that Girshriela Green had been promised. But in the Dukes case, the justices split along partisan lines, with conservatives ruling that lawyers for the plaintiffs had not proven their case for sex discrimination.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The ratio of the two family incomes will be 100 to 60. Now let the assortative mating remain the same, but both women (as today) stay in the labor force: the ratio of the two family incomes becomes 120 to 60, that is, inequality increases. The example shows that under conditions of assortative mating, inequality will go up if women’s participation in the workforce increases. It will go up even more if mating was previously random or disassortative (with richer men marrying poorer women). Some have argued that assortative mating has become much more common in liberal meritocratic capitalism because social norms have changed such that more women are highly educated (in fact, their graduation rates now exceed those of men), and many more work.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Perhaps the Internet’s greatest failing is the convergence of anonymity and misogyny. When Peter Thiel noted that giving the vote to women in the 1920s “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he was reiterating a basic Randian trope—men are makers and women are takers. In tech employment, women make up 29 percent of the workforce even though they comprise 47 percent of the US labor force, according to the US Census Bureau. Even more troubling is that women led only 8 percent of all start-ups funded by venture capitalists in 2015. But what is most disturbing are the attitudes toward women that get displayed in an incident like Gamergate.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

Today, new techniques in oocyte cryopreservation are allowing women to store healthy eggs in their younger years, extending their fertility well into their forties and fifties in many cases. So much of the new freedom in the way we have children now—from lesbian couples or single mothers using sperm banks to conceive, to women giving themselves two decades in the workforce before thinking about kids—would have been impossible without the invention of flash freezing. When we think about breakthrough ideas, we tend to be constrained by the scale of the original invention. We figure out a way to make artificial cold, and we assume that will just mean that our rooms will be cooler, we’ll sleep better on hot nights, or there will be a reliable supply of ice cubes for our sodas.


pages: 220 words: 66,323

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Airbnb, mass immigration, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce, yield curve

How to communicate that he’d never previously considered eating lunch at a restaurant, never mind one like that, carpeted, mirrored, brass ashtrays and solicitous uniformed girls in ponytails? He’d showed up without a tie, and Stephen Johnson took him to Bloomingdale’s, bought him four from Ralph Lauren. G. H. hadn’t known how to put them on; the ones he’d worn at Christmas were clip-on. “I’ve always thought that women need to stick together in the workforce. Or maybe everywhere. I’d be nowhere without my mentors.” This was not entirely true. Amanda had worked for women, but secretly preferred working with men. Their motivations were so simple. “He said to me, ‘We’re all machines.’ That’s it. You get to choose the nature of the machine you are.


Jaws by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, clean water, desegregation, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, out of africa, randomized controlled trial, twin studies, Wall-E, women in the workforce

Not only is breastfeeding helpful in avoiding malocclusion, but pacifier use, in contrast, encourages the development of malocclusion,14 likely because it reduces the amount of breastfeeding.15 Bottle feeding had a similar but less pronounced negative effect, as for example in a study of the feeding patterns of over 1,000 Italian preschool children.16 The whole issue of bottle feeding began to appear rapidly after the mid-18th century in Western Europe, especially in England and France. It was then, as pediatric dentist Kevin Boyd of Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago has pointed out, that women began to enter the textile mill workforce in large numbers. In the initial decades most of the females working there were children or single, but industrialization led to the abandonment of thousands of centuries of patterns of prolonged infant/childhood nursing and weaning. Rather than working at home in a cottage industry and being able to nurse their babies “on demand” for years, the era of bottle feeding dawned for working women with artificial nipples, pumped breast milk, infant formulas, and pacifiers.17 The result was the loss of the nursing environment so essential to the development of normally large, forward-thrust jaws.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

In mid-2017, unemployment was down to 4.3 percent. However, that measured only the portion of those sixteen or older “participating” in the job market, meaning they were working or looking for work. By 2017, this job participation rate had fallen to 62.7 percent. Through the 1990s, by which time women had entered the workforce at rates equivalent to modern levels, the participation rate had been 66–67 percent. The steep decline—more than ten million people—came more from males over sixteen but not yet sixty-five than it did from the increasing number of retirees. The prime members of the nation’s workforce demographic had stopped participating because, although there were a record six million job openings going unfilled, they had given up hope of finding jobs that they were qualified to do.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2012), Statistical Annex, table E (incidence and composition of part-time employment) and table F (incidence of temporary employment). 10. This can be seen in the following table comparing the percentage increase between 1995 and 2011 in the incidence of the practices among women and the overall workforce among OECD nations. Based on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2012, tables E and F). 11. A great deal of what we know about workers and workplaces is based on household surveys administered by the Bureau of the Census and analyzed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

The digital revolution also started in the 1980s, including the invention of PowerPoint, so in that spirit I present this introductory data-point chronicle as a preface to the next several chapters. The Decade When Everything Changed and Our Present Was Created: 57 Data Points Some Key Cultural and Technological Changes in the 1980s The fraction of women in the paid workforce rises from 47 percent in the late 1960s to 75 percent by the end of the 1980s. The fraction of two-income households increases from a small minority to a large majority. The immigrant population doubles from its twentieth-century low of fewer than 10 million in 1970 to nearly 20 million in 1990.


Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Italy 70th worldwide in terms of overall gender equality, up from 82nd position in 2017. It ranked 118th in female economic participation and opportunity, 61st in educational attainment and 38th in political empowerment. According to the report, only 55% of Italian women are in the workforce, compared to 86.1% in Iceland, 75.9% in Norway and 69.3% in Spain. On average, Italian women earn around 35% less than their male counterparts. And though successful Italian businesswomen do exist – among them Poste Italiane chairperson Maria Bianca Farina and Eni chairperson Emma Marcegaglia – almost 95% of public-company board members in Italy are male and, of these, approximately 80% of them are older than 55.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

But as women did more outside the home, traditional roles inside the home buckled under the weight of new obligations and expectations. The Federation of Cuban Women, created in 1960, oversaw a major campaign to bring more women into the labor force. Its goal was to recruit a hundred thousand new women workers every year. And, indeed, between 1969 and 1974, more than seven hundred thousand women entered the workforce. But old norms hindered their incorporation. Of the seven hundred thousand who began working outside the home in that period, only about two hundred thousand continued to work after the first year. For the majority who left the workforce, the single most important factor was the perceived conflict with family obligations at home.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

This is the case when we consider the sexual composition of 8 Why Culture Work s the cultural workforce and the unequal wages of men and women. The issues of equality in culture work are clearly raised here, but there is also potential for differential application of justice under the power relations that define and stratify the work of men and women. Further, the uneven geography of justice within the global cultural workforce adds another twist to our ethical probe of commercialization. Gerald Sussman, a political economist of communication, reminds us of this in his analysis of transnational corporations (TNCs) involved in the Malaysian consumer electronics and information technology sector.


When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures by Richard D. Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, business climate, business process, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, Easter island, global village, haute cuisine, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Kōnosuke Matsushita, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open borders, profit maximization, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Unemployment is high (often 20 percent), and many thousands of males have immigrated to France. Industry is, however, significant inasmuch as Algeria is one of the world’s largest producers of liquefied natural gas. Oil production has declined in recent years. GDP per capita is average for Arab countries. There is a growing managerial class, but women are not very active in the workforce. Veils are more common than in neighboring Tunisia or Morocco. Although 99 percent of Algerians are Muslim, they are influenced by the French in certain aspects of social life. Wine is not taboo except among extreme fundamentalists, and the country actually had the fifth highest wine production in the world in the 1960s.

Although Syrians are consequently conservative in their interpretation of Islam, the influence of the French and the sizeable minority groups in their society have led to the relaxation of certain Muslim rules, especially those regarding the position of women. Education for girls is a long-established right, and veils are worn by almost none of the younger women, who are readily visible in the workforce and in public life. The richness of the Syrian cultural scene is enhanced by the considerable diversity of its population. Minority groups include Christians (10 percent), Kurds (10 percent), Druze, Armenians, Jews and Assyrians. Many languages are heard in public alongside Arabic—Kurdish, Turkish, French, Armenian, English and the ancient Syriac and Aramaic.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

In the working-class United States the fall was from 57 percent in 1992 to 46 percent in 2009, in the working class United Kingdom from 35 percent in 1999 to 30 percent in 2009.49 There is a gender aspect to this, too, as we saw in Chapter Five. Hand work outside the home has traditionally been male dominated and continues to be so. But as women have moved into the workforce in much greater numbers, both at the top and the bottom, some men have been pushed down the occupational ladder and have lost relative status. The ISSP data finds that over the past twenty-five years the average social status reported by women has risen relative to that reported by men in nine out of the twelve countries for which researchers have data.50 So there is certainly some hard evidence for status decline for those in nongraduate jobs in recent years.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

However, unlike the clear labour (or task) objectives involved in driving or delivering food, domestic work can be far more complex. It often lacks specific job descriptions or definitions, as Anderson (2000: 15) found when interviewing domestic workers, who, when asked what they did, would frequently say ‘everything’. There are approximately 67 million domestic workers across the world, with women making up 80 per cent of the workforce (Hunt and Machingura, 2016: 5). In many countries this kind of work is being transformed by platforms like Care.com, Handy and SweepSouth. As Ticona and Mateescu (2018) explain, these platforms ‘formalize employment relationships through technologies that increase visibility’. Workers create profiles and receive feedback and ratings, using this as the basis for repeat work.


The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky

clean water, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

After marrying a man named Holly Seely, she moved to Manhattan and set up what was called an intelligence office on Twenty-second Street just off Fifth Avenue. An intelligence office, a growing business at the time, was an employment agency for butlers, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, valets, and other domestic servants. In 1900, about 1.8 million women, 90 percent of the female workforce in the United States, were domestics. It was, as it still is, one of the most sensitive and difficult employee–employer relationships, and Lida Seely earned a reputation for her skill, tact, and empathy. The book urged employers to allow servants their privacy and never spy on them and entreated servants to overlook their employers’ moments of ill temper.


Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, European colonialism, TED Talk, trade route, women in the workforce

The Brazilian government gave him access to 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) for rubber cultivation and he built Fordlândia, a factory town to house 10,000 workers. It didn’t last long, however: yellow fever, malaria and cultural misunderstandings (Ford specified no alcohol, tobacco, women or football) sapped the will of the local workforce. Botanical naivety among the managers meant that fungal leaf blight and insect pests spread among trees that had been planted too close together and on the wrong soil. Abandoned in 1934, Fordlândia is all but deserted now. By the late 1930s a million tons of crude rubber were exported annually from South East Asia, and it was the single most valuable import into the United States.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The fact that so much of the economic growth in this period went to a relatively small number of people at the top of the distribution is the flip side of the phenomenon of the stagnation of middle-class incomes since the 1970s.10 In the United States and other countries, this stagnation was hidden from view by other factors. The same period saw the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, increasing household income at the same time that many middle-class men found their paychecks getting smaller in real terms. In addition, politicians across the world saw cheap, subsidized credit as an acceptable substitute for outright income redistribution, leading to government-backed housing booms.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

I don’t doubt that those who benefit from any such state of affairs will be able to focus the rage of the permanently disemployed on immigrants and other convenient scapegoats, but eventually they too will be compelled to seek some sort of modus vivendi. The tacit assumption that has held sway in the developed world for most of the past century, and which has only deepened its hold since women began to enter the workforce in great numbers around 1950, is that whatever their degree of skill or education, the vast majority of adults will eventually be able to find employment in the formal economy. And this fact structures virtually everything about everyday experience, not merely economically, but materially, psychically and socially.


pages: 447 words: 126,219

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever by Christian Wolmar

Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, Crossrail, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, invention of the telephone, junk bonds, land bank, lateral thinking, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, South Sea Bubble, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

Indeed, the greatest social impact of the war on the Underground was the employment of women for the first time in the history of the system. They took over the men’s jobs in large numbers and were essential in keeping the network running. At the height of the war, half the 3,000 District’s employees were women, and a third of the 4,000-strong Metropolitan workforce. Whole stations came under the control of women, with the newly opened Maida Vale leading the way, though it shared a male stationmaster with three neighbouring stations. The Railway Gazette grudgingly recognized this as ‘preferable to employing hobbledehoys’ and women continued to take on new tasks, replacing gatemen on trains in 1917, but the roles of guard and driver remained the preserve of men.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

If some Ontario citizens could have their alcohol privileges cut off because of their perceived alcohol-related behavior, others were deprived simply on the basis of their status. Only men and women “of good character” could obtain a permit book, and this ruled out anyone known or reputed to be an alcoholic or heavy drinker. Native people were disqualified by other legislation from drinking alcohol. A married women not in the workforce, and therefore without an independent income, could obtain a passbook only when she provided information on her husband’s occupation. Tourists and transient residents, on the other hand, could apply for a temporary passbook for the duration of their stay in Ontario. In Europe, only a handful of countries had to deal with the perceived challenges posed by easing of restrictive alcohol policies.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

“It will cry if it’s bored; when it gets its bottle, it will be happy.” This association to the idea that robots might “double” for family members brings to mind a story I heard when I first visited Japan in the early 1990s. The problems of the elderly loomed large. Unlike in previous generations, children were mobile, and women were in the workforce. Aging and infirm parents were unlikely to live at home. Visiting them was harder; they were often in different cities from their children. In response, some Japanese children were hiring actors to substitute for them and visit aging parents.2 The actors would visit and play their parts.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

For instance, America’s poor have a life expectancy that is almost 10 percent lower than that of those at the top.56 We noted earlier that the income of a typical full-time male worker has stagnated for a third of a century, and that of those who have not gone to college has declined. To keep incomes from declining even more than they have, work hours per family have increased, mostly because more women are joining the workforce alongside their husbands. Our income statistics do not take into account either the loss of leisure or what this does to the quality of family life. The decline in living standards is also manifested in changing social patterns as well as hard economic facts. An increasing fraction of young adults are living with their parents: some 19 percent of men between twenty-five and thirty-four, up from 14 percent as recently as 2005.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that America’s mission in the First World War was to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ had the benign side-effect of forcing him to abandon his opposition to female suffrage. American women were given the vote in 1920 and British women in 1928. The Second World War provided women another big push. In America, Rosie the Riveter became a symbol of women’s can-do spirit as they took the place of men in factories. In Britain, some 8,000 women, making up 80 per cent of the workforce, worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code-breaking headquarters, operating the cipher machines that, according to some historians, shortened the war by two years.33 Some of the women were recruited in fairly conventional ways, by asking Oxbridge tutors to nominate their brightest students, but some were recruited more imaginatively, by getting women to complete cryptic crosswords at high speed.

One of the most talented Republican women of her generation, Phyllis Schlafly, led a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), intended to enshrine women’s rights in the constitution, on the grounds that it would disadvantage homemakers. Still, their advance quickly built up a remarkable momentum. Starting in the 1980s, a higher proportion of women than men obtained college degrees and voted in elections. And by the second decade of the twenty-first century, women made up more than half the professional workforce in the United States and Great Britain and sat in the top jobs in such corporate giants as General Motors, IBM, PepsiCo, Lockheed Martin and DuPont. Today the appetite for female labour is probably greater than the appetite for male labour: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that women make up more than two thirds of employees in ten of the fifteen job categories likely to grow fastest in the next few years.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Today, college-educated parents, taken together, spend more than an hour per day longer educating their children than do high-school-only parents. For super-elite parents, and especially mothers, the trend is more dramatic still. Roughly half of female Harvard and Chicago MBAs with two or more children, for example, leave the workforce or work part-time in order to care for their children. And motherhood drives elite women lawyers out of the workforce at rates so high that top firms refer to a “flight risk.” Many factors, ranging from gender discrimination in work assignments, pay, and promotions to outright sexual harassment, contribute to this pattern and especially to the fact that so many more mothers than fathers leave the workforce.

Elite women therefore no longer stay home to signal their leisure, as Veblen imagined, but rather to labor intensively at training their children. Employers such as Facebook and Apple will pay tens of thousands of dollars to defray the cost of egg freezing in an effort to encourage superordinate women to delay childbirth and remain in the workforce. But the meritocratic imperatives of dynastic succession overpower these efforts. On the other hand, middle-class men traditionally dominated the jobs—quintessentially in manufacturing—that have been lost or seen wage stagnation in recent decades, even as many of the service jobs that have displaced them are conventionally done by middle-class women.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Those who lived through the reign of Margaret Thatcher can attest to the flaws in this argument. Marissa Mayer, Sandberg’s former comrade at Google, is a shining example of a woman who leaned in to power and influence. Mayer became the first pregnant CEO ever when she took the helm at Yahoo! in the summer of 2012. But instead of using her powerful position to help women, Mayer used it to cut 30 percent of Yahoo’s workforce and eliminate flextime, an arrangement that allowed hundreds of Yahoo workers to work from home one or two days a week so they could care for children, elderly parents, etc. Running against the grain of recent productivity research, Mayer argued that face-time trumps flextime: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home … Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.”27 Flextime was a long-standing policy at Yahoo.



pages: 403 words: 132,736

pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

See also Chicago School utilitarianism, 192 van Gogh, Vincent, 92-96, 137 vectors, 186-89, 191, 192-93 "veil of ignorance," 202, 203 Venter, Craig, 81 venture capital, 123, 124, 169-70 Vickrey, William, 102, 360 video cassette recorders (VCRs), 120 compatibility standards, 261 supply and demand, 139-40, 141 virtual markets, 148-50 voting, 100-101,250-51 results market, 156-57 wages, 76-78,297 competitive standards, 304 as market signal, 231-32 theories of, 353 wallet auction, 222-23, 236, 242 Wall Street, 91, 92,300 Wal-Mart, 272, 298, 299, 300, 301 Walras,Leon, 175,178,179,192 Walras's Law, 175 Walton,Robson,298,299,301 Walton, Sam, 127, 128, 298-99 Wang,An, 107-8,110,113-15,118,121,122 Warren, Robin, 273-74 Watson, James, 83,267,269,274 wealth and greed, 11, 12, 16, 17, 315 individual, 298-300, 321 as measure of personal worth, 12, 315 redistribution of, 202,314-15 See also income/wealth distribution weather derivatives, 155, 158 Weber, Max, 56,291 Webvan, 123,244,246 Welch, Jack, 115-16, 117, 124,214,215,291 welfare economics, 11, 192-94, 314 fundamental theorems of, 194, 197, 198-208 and happiness, 211-12 and property rights, 319 self-interest vs., 316 Will, George, 336 Williamson, Oliver, 206, 219 Wilson, Charles, 316 Wilson, E. 0., 217 Winter Olympics (2002), 95-96, 97, 104 Wolfensohn,James, 207,214,336 Wolfowitz, Paul, 157 women as economists, 337 in workforce, 50, 77 work economic lives, 22-30,37, 38, 48,305 French-U.S. comparison, 50 and general equilibrium, 177-78, 179 and happiness, 211 hours of, 47-50 as institution, 76-78 separation from home life, 77 and social insurance, 350 and structural reform, 242 World Bank, 31,206-7,212-14,218,279, 280,282,283,335,336 WorldCom, 11,342 World Trade Organization, 10,274 Wriston, Walter, 282 Xerox, 117-18, 122 Xerox Pare, 118, 119 Yahoo!


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar


The Radium Girls by Moore, Kate

Charles Lindbergh, information security, life extension, Skype, women in the workforce

“I told him from the cases I had seen, I thought it would be wise to investigate all the [other] cases.”7 Loffler’s phone call was not unexpected to Rufus Fordyce. After all, the firm had in its possession the results of the radioactivity tests of all the women at Radium Dial, taken back in 1928. The results that showed that, of the sixty-seven girls tested that day, thirty-four were suspiciously or positively radioactive. Thirty-four women: more than half the workforce. The company had said in its press statement at the time: “Nothing even approaching symptoms [of radium poisoning] has ever been found.”8 That declaration was not some miscalculation, caused by a misunderstanding of the data. The data was clear: most of the employees were radioactive—a telltale sign of radium poisoning.


What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, lone genius, spice trade, women in the workforce

Christian countries before the adoption of modern legislation. Muslim women, as wives and as daughters, had very definite property rights, which were recognized and enforced by law. In recent changes economic needs were a major factor. As Nam¹k Kemal pointed out, peasant women had from time immemorial been part of the workforce; they had in consequence enjoyed certain social freedoms denied to their sisters in the cities. Economic modernization brought a need for female labor; this need was greatly increased during the years of warfare in which the Ottoman Empire was involved between 1911 and 1922, when much of the male population was in the armed forces, and women were needed to carry on the business of life.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Similar effects were seen in other newly mechanized industries, leading to the destruction of the once powerful guilds. People soon realized that the craft skills they nurtured were no longer valuable in the nineteenth-century economy. As the skill requirement dropped and wages fell in newly mechanized factories, women and children became the preferred workforce, as they could be paid less than men (who were often fired when they reached adulthood and then supported by their factory-bound families). Regardless of gender or age, workers laboured twelve- to fourteen-hour days, servicing, cleaning and resetting machines when they hit a snag.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

The result was rising income for both rich and poor countries, but a fateful divergence in fertility trends. During the twentieth century, fertility rates basically continued to fall in rich countries as they invested in more human capital, especially in higher levels of education. In addition, as demand for human capital grew in rich countries, schooling expanded to include women, who then entered the paid workforce. This further raised the opportunity costs of having children and encouraged further reductions in fertility. On the other hand, poor countries channeled a larger share of their gains from increased international trade into producing more children. As a consequence, “the demographic transition in these nonindustrial economies has been significantly delayed,” asserts Galor, “increasing further their relative abundance of unskilled labor, enhancing their comparative disadvantage in the production of skill-intensive goods, and delaying their process of development.”



From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

We come back to the question of what Khrushchev meant by “standard of living” or what East German leaders had in mind when they spoke of the people’s “welfare.” That standard and that welfare were not entirely about the provision of material goods. State socialism also provided security. There was no unemployment, and little violent crime, homelessness, or drug abuse. Basic food items were affordable, and rents were protected for everyone. Women could enter the workforce in numbers that were unprecedented. In places where the welfare provisions worked best—East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—women could pursue careers (at a slower pace than men to be sure) while having families. In the GDR, women got a paid year off after each child (the “baby year”) and then guaranteed daycare until their children reached school age.

Those who did best were individuals close to state functionaries, those who gamed the system in their favor, or those with family in the West. People who respected official rules to the letter—waiting twenty years for an apartment or for an automobile on a legal queue—were destined to fall behind. Women were admitted to the workforce, but not as equals. They tended to be overrepresented in branches with lower pay, according to traditional patterns. In Yugoslavia in 1970, women made up 73.7 percent of the work force in textiles, 69.7 percent in health services, but only 41.4 percent in retail and trade.69 And if women broke through certain professional barriers (like medicine), those were areas that continued to be poorly paid.


The Rough Guide to Chile by Melissa Graham, Andrew Benson

Atahualpa, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, company town, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, feminist movement, Francisco Pizarro, it's over 9,000, Murano, Venice glass, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, union organizing, women in the workforce

For many, there is still anger and frustration that the former dictator never faced trial for his crimes. Though it may be little solace, in the words of Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti: “formal justice may remain incomplete, but history has judged him and condemned him.” In a country with fewer women in the workforce than anywhere else in Latin America, Bachelet promised to champion the woman’s cause and, in her first year, delivered not only the breast-feeding law but also set up hundreds of nurseries and shelters for victims of domestic violence. By presidential decree, and to the disgust of the Catholic Church, she made the morning-after pill available free to girls as young as 14.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

And similar legislation was passed in France, where employees were restricted to twelve hours. This struggle was going on across the Atlantic as well. The Workingman’s Party of the United States was founded in 1877, as was the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (although women made up a sizable portion of the workforce, most of the early labor unions were exclusively male). Tens of thousands marched in the first Labor Day parade in New York in September 1882. What were they marching for? Limits to working hours. The response to these efforts among the upper class was mostly derisive and sometimes dangerously aggressive.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

And, finally, in low-wage industries where more workers are paid at bargain-basement rates, the authors calculated, generally even in those situations many workers were paid somewhere in between the old and new minimum wages, meaning relatively small wage increases for the majority of employers, combined with larger increases for a minority, would bring the company into compliance with the new federal minimums.9 Finally, the EITC could be revamped so that it doesn’t penalize dual-income households. At the moment, because families lose access to the credit when their total income goes above a certain level, it has the somewhat perverse effect of encouraging many secondary earners, primarily women, to opt out of the workforce. But if each earner was evaluated individually and able to access the EITC based on his or her income alone rather than the combined income of all household earners, it would encourage several million more people to work, and would, Rothstein estimated, help lift millions more families not just out of immediate poverty but into long-term economic security.


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What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

Isabel did not believe people should have to “change and regulate and improve” to make their lives rich and profitable. She had alighted on Jung’s theory not as a personal religion but as a practical tool, first for saving marriages and, now, for safeguarding what she took to be a distinctly American way of life. With the men of the nation off fighting in Europe, more married women had started to enter the workforce, a throwback to the summer days of 1918 when Isabel, alone in her boardinghouse in Memphis, had pondered how men and women could put their “different gifts” toward different tasks. Now she wondered what she could do to stop the Germans from winning and making the world over in their image, imposing a world view that had no respect for feeling and thus no compunction about trampling on people’s inalienable rights.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In the 1980s, the federal government weakened the position of trade unions. The percentage of Americans in unionized jobs fell from about a quarter to under 10%. Private sector union membership fell still more sharply, from about 34% to 8% for men and from about 16% to 6% for women. The productivity of the American workforce grew throughout the period, at about 2% a year, but the wages of traditional workers increased more slowly, if at all. Over the same period, the pay of executives increased, sometimes drastically. At the same time, the United States was very weak on the basic policies that stabilized middle classes elsewhere: retirement pensions, public education, public transport, health care, paid vacation, and parental leave.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

If the population is growing, quality is not important, but if the population is stagnant or declining, then there is a need to create a higher-quality population. With technology and automation, the intellectual and moral qualities of workers become more important. There is no place for dull, stupid people in a modern, depatriarchalized system, which also requires women to be integrated into the workforce. They wrote about sterilization policy as the intersection of two lines—the racial hygienic on the one hand and social pedagogic (the ability to change people’s behavior, for example by taking youngsters into the care of the state) on the other. The first criterion was “difficult,” the Myrdals wrote, as it required determining which individuals should be regarded as carriers of poor genetic material.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They resented the Durrani glass ceiling Daoud had imposed that blocked their advancement to the top of the military establishment. Daoud had not promoted any officers trained in the Soviet Union to general officer rank. The Parchamis predominated in the civil bureaucracy. Khalqi women and girls stayed at home; Parchami women and girls were often educated and in the workforce. Both factions had one thing in common. They assumed that their powerful Soviet patron would not fail to provide the necessary recurring resources to sustain the gains of their successful Saur Revolution. Puzanov could no more bring Taraki and Karmal together than he could bring the Khalqis and Parchamis together.

It is said that Faisal quietly transferred $4 billion to the American government to cushion the blow. 27 David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 275. 28 While over 50 percent of college graduates in Saudi Arabia are women, they comprise only 7 percent of the workforce. See Craig Smith, “Underneath Saudi Women Keep their Secrets,” New York Times, December 3, 2002, 4. 29 David B. Ottaway, “Pressure Builds on the Key Pillar of Saudi Rule,” Washington Post, June 8, 2004. 30 A more liberal interpretation of this hadith limits the forbidden area to the sacred ground of Mecca and Medina, where only Muslims are permitted to go. 31 Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle, 262. 32 Kechichian, “The Role of the Ulama,” 62. 33 Quoted in ibid., 67. 34 Ibid. 35 Trofimov, Siege of Mecca, 171. 36 This account of the fighting at the Grand Mosque is largely taken from Trofimov’s Siege of Mecca.


pages: 522 words: 144,511

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

addicted to oil, agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, company town, cotton gin, death from overwork, flex fuel, Ford Model T, land tenure, liberation theology, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working poor

See also slavery: early debates on, 33–36 Humboldt, Alexander von, 195 hurricanes, 129, 157 ice cream, 49–50, 351, 354–57 indentured labor: birthrates, 318; British West Indian system, 314–18; Chinese, 340; in Fiji, 329–30; from India, 314, 315–18, 324; Japanese women, 340; living conditions, 318, 325, 329, 334, 337, 344; in Mauritius, 322–24; from Melanesia, 341–45; in Natal, 324–25, 326; and race, 318–19, 322; religious practices, 319; sexual exploitation of women, 318; suicides, 325, 329, 333; treatment of workers, 322–23; wages, 319–21; women and, 314, 315, 318; workforce, 313, 314–15 India: historical references to sugarcane, 12; irrigation, 380; processing techniques, 15; source of indentured labor, 314, 315–18, 324; sugar industry, 377–78, 380 Indian Relief Act, 327 Indian Sugar Committee, 378 Industrial Revolution, 61–70 industrial sabotage, 288–89 Inikori, Joseph E., 185 Inquisition, the, 19 irrigation, 13, 16–17, 87, 336, 380 Isabella, Queen of Spain, 24 Italy, 49 Jackson, Augustus, 50 Jackson, Betty, 50 Jacobson, Michael, 399 Jagan, Cheddi, 322 jaggery, 377 Jamaica: abolition in, 263; and absentee owners, 160–61, 162; and American Revolution, 172, 173; apprenticeship in, 262; Christmas rebellion, 253, 254; colonization of, 37; cultural changes in after emancipation, 268; Deficiency Laws, 195; ethanol production, 404; Haitian Revolution and, 216; labor force, 268, 321; Maroons in, 207–9, 210–11; marronage in, 206; price of sugar, 176; quality of sugar, 47, 167; racism, 190; rum production, 70; slaves, 97, 103, 116, 124, 193; slaves’ resistance, 203, 204; Tacky’s Rebellion, 76, 208, 210–11; value of plantation in, 156; white-black ratio, 40 James, C.L.R., 214 Japa, Antonio, 404 Japan, 305–7, 337, 339–40 Japanese–Mexican Labor Association, 307, 308 Jarvis, Anna, 367 Jawetz, Pincas, 402 Jefferson, Thomas, 50, 280 Jell-O, 351, 371 Jenkins, Edward, 331 Jews, 19 Johnson, Dr.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In 1965 that ratio had been a mere 20.15 As we shall see, there were benefits to the labor market of the 1990s, especially in terms of job creation and declining unemployment. But the increases in the number of jobs was not matched by corresponding increases in pay. The inadequacy of wages forced more and more households to depend on the earnings of two or more members, with women joining men in the workforce in large numbers. In multiple quarters, the increase in percentages of women working was hailed as a feminist advance, signaling employment opportunities for women that had not been there before. But most women did not have a choice about whether they wanted to work; their families required the income.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

After the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, Sullivan focused on demanding services for autistic adults. “There was nothing for adults—zip,” she recalls. “We had to start from scratch.” This was particularly important because the traditional caretakers for autistic adults who were not in institutions were stay-at-home moms, and in the 1960s more and more women were entering the workforce and launching their own careers. Family members that looked to private and public agencies for help were faced with a confusing maze of limited options presided over by underpaid, overworked case managers who often occupied their positions for only a short time. “We cannot allow another generation of our adult children to go without the vital services that any humane society knows is necessary for a life of dignity and worth,” Sullivan wrote.


pages: 239 words: 64,812

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

However, unfortunately, at the managerial level, both within our company, Evalueserve, and the other IT companies mentioned above, the percentage of women managers drops to approximately 10%.74 In terms of the retention of employees, Aggarwal adds, “Among new joinees, 35% are women but within five years, this number comes down to 25% (because some of the women who get married leave Evalueserve India or the work-force altogether—at least on a temporary basis).”75 Cultural narratives about domesticity, children, and the exercise of power outside the home are still very much in place. Still, research in countries as varied as Iran, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Taiwan, and Malaysia has yielded results consistent with those found in studies in India, showing that there is nothing about the field of computing that makes it inherently male.


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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.197 The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights. Though both liberals and conservatives may deny that any such a trend has taken place, consider the fact that no mainstream conservative politician today would invoke tradition, authority, cohesion, or religion to justify racial segregation, keeping women out of the workforce, or criminalizing homosexuality, arguments they made just a few decades ago.198 Why might a disinvestment of moral resources from community, sanctity, and authority militate against violence? One reason is that communality can legitimize tribalism and jingoism, and authority can legitimize government repression.


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Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

There they harassed women who allowed high-heeled shoes to show beneath their black robes, and used wooden batons to round up Saudi men for daily prayers. New Islamic universities rose in Riyadh and Jedda, and thousands of students were enrolled to study the Koran. At the same time the royal family stoked its massive modernization drive, constructing intercity highways, vast new housing, industrial plants, and hospitals. Saudi women entered the workforce in record numbers, although they often worked in strict segregation from men. Secular princes and princesses summered in London, Cannes, Costa del Sol, and Switzerland. There were at least six thousand self-described princes in the Saudi royal family by 1990, and their numbers grew by the year.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

These pay and career differences to the detriment of women are more pronounced in some countries because women have part-time jobs, while in others pregnancy and maternity leave have negative effects on women’s careers, including where they are facilitated by the state.115 Furthermore, recently, we have also seen a sometimes curious reversal of this global trend. In India, women are now dropping out of the workforce as the social standing of families rises, because that means that they are able to stay at home, even with adequate school certificates – a cultural and now increasingly also a political ideal of the Hindutva movement.116 The increase in free wage labour In previous periods, wage workers were still a minority.

Eckert, Andreas & Marcel van der Linden. ‘New Perspectives on Workers and the History of Work: Global Labor History’, in Sven Beckert & Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds), Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 145–61. The Economist. ‘Women in India Have Dropped Out of the Workforce. How Can They be Persuaded to Return to it?’, The Economist, 428(9099) (7–14 July 2018), pp. 14–18. Eggebrecht, Arne et al. Geschichte der Arbeit: Vom Alten Ägypten bis zur Gegenwart (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1980). Ehlert, Martin. The Impact of Losing Your Job: Unemployment and Influences from Market, Family, and State on Economic Well-Being in the US and Germany (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016).



pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Its defenders often point to the liberation of women from conditions of inequality as a significant example of liberalism’s success, and regard any critique of liberalism as a proposal to thrust women back into preliberal bondage. Yet the main practical achievement of this liberation of women has been to move many of them into the workforce of market capitalism, a condition that traditionalists like Wendell Berry as well as Marxist political theorists like Nancy Fraser regard as a highly dubious form of liberation.1 All but forgotten are arguments, such as those made in the early Republic, that liberty consists of independence from the arbitrariness not only of a king but of an employer.


pages: 223 words: 60,909

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WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Unpaid work in the home (mostly done by women) has declined even more sharply, from 58 hours in 1900 to 14 in 2011. One key question is why external paid labor hours have not fallen further in the past fifty years, matching the increase in productivity for domestic labor. The case can be made that the entry of women into the paid external workforce, then global access to workers in low-wage countries, and direct legislative action have reduced the bargaining power of labor, allowing companies to allocate the surplus to corporate profits rather than reducing working hours and paying higher hourly wages, as happened in the past.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

“The action of stretching her arms up above her head, and to the right and left of her, develops her chest and arms,” said Every Woman’s Encyclopedia, “and turns thin and weedy girls into strong ones. There are no anaemic, unhealthy looking girls in the operating rooms.”♦ Along with another new technology, the typewriter, the telephone switchboard catalyzed the introduction of women into the white-collar workforce, but battalions of human operators could not sustain a network on the scale now arising. Switching would have to be performed automatically. This meant a mechanical linkage to take from callers not just the sound of their voice but also a number—identifying a person, or at least another telephone.


pages: 268 words: 76,709

pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture


pages: 474 words: 136,787

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, feminist movement, Gregor Mendel, invention of agriculture, language acquisition, Menlo Park, phenotype, rent control, the long tail, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, University of East Anglia, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

CHAPTER SEVEN: Monogamy and the Nature of Women 1 Møller 1987; Birkhead and Møller 1992. 2 Murdock and White 1969; Fisher 1992 makes the interesting case that sexism, despotism, polygamy and male ‘ownership’ of wives were all invented along with the plough – which removed from women all their share in food winning; as women have come back into the workforce in recent decades, so their say and status has improved. 3 Hrdy 1981; Hrdy 1986. 4 Bertram 1975; Hrdy 1979; Hausfater and Hrdy 1984. A remarkable experiment by Emlen, Demong and Emlen 1989 greatly strengthened the contention that infanticide was an adaptive strategy. By removing territorial females, Emlen induced female jacanas – a role-reversed species – to kill the eggs of males with nests in their newly acquired territories. 5 Dunbar 1988. 6 Wrangham 1987; R.



pages: 326 words: 88,905

pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

“Like much of the service sector that waxed as manufacturing waned, Walmart and retail generally” had come to rely on “categories of employees it could imagine as less than breadwinners,” including wives and mothers. As the decades went by, the picture wasn’t quite as sexist, but the underlying pattern remained intact: at the moment Cindy Murray and other early OUR Walmart members began to mobilize, women made up about 57 percent of the company’s workforce, but they accounted for nearly 72 percent of its sales associates and only 41 percent of its managers and corporate executives. From the beginning, OUR Walmart sought to galvanize around the energy and passion—and pique—of Walmart’s frontline employees. “The first thing we did was a deep, deep listening process with thousands of people who worked at Walmart to identify what are the things that they really wanted and needed,” said Andrea Dehlendorf, another Justice for Janitors alum who joined Schlademan in early 2011 to help oversee OUR Walmart.


pages: 396 words: 112,832

pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The OECD, which is a think tank centred on advanced economies, finds that the average wage of a temporary worker versus a permanent one is as much as 50 per cent lower in the worst case (Spain) and nearly 20 per cent lower even at the more equal end (Germany). In Japan, the proportion of temporary workers in the labour force has doubled since 1999. A large portion of those on temporary contracts are women. Almost 40 per cent of the workforce has comprised casual and part-time employees, whose wages are often much less than half of those with permanent employment contracts. The lifetime employment system that was part of the Japanese miracle in the 1980s ended up with the collapse of that system a decade later. After the crash, Japanese companies were looking for short-term profits so had to reduce labour costs.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

The OECD, which is a think tank centred on advanced economies, finds that the average wage of a temporary worker versus a permanent one is as much as 50 per cent lower in the worst case (Spain) and nearly 20 per cent lower even at the more equal end (Germany). In Japan, the proportion of temporary workers in the labour force has doubled since 1999. A large portion of those on temporary contracts are women. Almost 40 per cent of the workforce has comprised casual and part-time employees, whose wages are often much less than half of those with permanent employment contracts. The lifetime employment system that was part of the Japanese miracle in the 1980s ended up with the collapse of that system a decade later. After the crash, Japanese companies were looking for short-term profits so had to reduce labour costs.


pages: 352 words: 96,692

Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney by Bill Hare

business climate, fake news, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, McMansion, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, vertical integration, walking around money, warehouse automation, women in the workforce

Petersburg Times, 258 Steinmetz, Herb, 68 stock market crash, 42-43, 51-54 strip-center full-line stores, 100 suburban stores, 100 Sullivan, Kathleen, 195, 223 synergism, 256-257 Index T Taj MaHowell, 169 Thomas, John, 263 thrift, 15 tipping, 8-12 Torrey, Homer, 39-41, 81, 99 transaction recorder, 119-126 tris-treated merchandise, 138 truth, internal, 89 Tygart, Barger, 235-236, 250 Index U-V uniformity of merchandise, 81 Unitas, Johnny, 3 United Way drives, 216 Index W-Z Wal-Mart, 234, 242, 243 Wanda Wonder, 259 warehouses, 126, 271 Warrington College speech, 231-235 Wayne, John, 42-43 Weitz, Bart, 217, 232 White, Bob, 239-240 women and inclusion program, see inclusion in Penney workforce, 128-129 and Spirit of the American Woman campaign, 174-175 working hours, 32, 33 World War II, 95-96 Wright, Cece, 101, 102, 110, 111, 116 Wright, Lee, 134, 143 List of Sidebars Chapter 3: Bumpkins in the Big Apple The Body of Doctrine


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

In Europe as well as Japan, and even in the once relatively fecund United States, fertility rates are nearing historic lows, even though young women state a wish to have more children.29 This demographic stagnation, another throwback to the Middle Ages, has various explanations, including women’s high levels of participation in the workforce and a desire for more leisure time. Other reasons are economic, including a shortage of affordable family housing. Liberal capitalism in its heyday built large stretches of affordable housing for the upwardly mobile middle and working classes, but the new feudalism is creating a world where fewer and fewer people can afford to own homes.30 A trend of diminishing expectations has weakened support for liberal capitalism even in solidly democratic countries, particularly among younger people.31 Far more than older generations, they are losing faith in democracy, not only in the United States but also in Sweden, Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.


pages: 251 words: 63,630

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Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey


pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

They had not divided their time so strictly between work and leisure, and they were largely their own masters. People typically ate five times a day, beginning with soup for breakfast. With the advent of textile and iron mills, workers migrated to the cities, where the working classes lived in appalling conditions. As women and children entered the organized workforce, there was less time to run a household and cook meals. Those still trying to make a living at home were paid less and less for their work. Thus, European lacemakers in the early nineteenth century lived almost exclusively on coffee and bread. Because coffee was stimulating and warm, it provided an illusion of nutrition.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Born into a middle-class family in New Jersey, Stewart learned her homemaking skills from her grandparents, who taught her to can fruits, and her parents, who taught her to sew and garden. After stints as a model and a stockbroker, she opened a catering outfit in Westport, Connecticut, an upscale suburb near New York City. Stewart pitched herself at women who were interested in high-end homemaking—an ever-larger group as more and more middle-class women made their way into the workforce. She wrote a best-selling cookbook, then started a TV show based on her decorating magazine, Martha Stewart Living, and not long after that, a line of houseware items at Kmart. In 1997 she consolidated her publishing, TV, and merchandising ventures into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

You’ve got to keep a stiff upper lip and keep everything inside and not talk about it.”24 Female graduates from the 1960s through the present have expressed disappointment that HBS, supposedly a school that addresses the whole person, and the whole life, spent so little time discussing the various trade-offs and challenges that women face in the workforce and in the decisions to start a family or not. By 2005, 35 percent of students in the MBA program were women.25 But problems persisted, including a lack of female protagonists in case studies, a marked differential in grades between the genders, and the occasional episode of outright sexism.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

MacArthur Foundation 14 John Deere 67 John Lewis 195 Johnson & Johnson 100, 111 Johnson, Warren 98 Jones, Don 112 jugaad (frugal ingenuity) 199, 202 Jugaad Innovation (Radjou, Prabhu and Ahuja, 2012) xvii, 17 just-in-time design 33–4 K Kaeser, Joe 217 Kalanick, Travis 163 Kalundborg (Denmark) 160 kanju 201 Karkal, Shamir 124 Kaufman, Ben 50–1, 126 Kawai, Daisuke 29–30 Kelly, John 199–200 Kennedy, President John 138 Kenya 57, 200–1 key performance indicators see KPIs Khan Academy 16–17, 113–14, 164 Khan, Salman (Sal) 16–17, 113–14 Kickstarter 17, 48, 137, 138 KieranTimberlake 196 Kimberly-Clark 25, 145 Kingfisher 86–7, 91, 97, 157, 158–9, 185–6, 192–3, 208 KissKissBankBank 17, 137 Knox, Steve 145 Knudstorp, Jørgen Vig 37, 68, 69 Kobori, Michael 83, 100 KPIs (key performance indicators) 38–9, 67, 91–2, 185–6, 208 Kuhndt, Michael 194 Kurniawan, Arie 151–2 L La Chose 108 La Poste 92–3, 157 La Ruche qui dit Oui 137 “labs on a chip” 52 Lacheret, Yves 173–5 Lada 1 laser cutters 134, 166 Laskey, Alex 119 last-mile challenge 57, 146, 156 L’Atelier 168–9 Latin America 161 lattice organisation 63–4 Laury, Véronique 208 Laville, Elisabeth 91 Lawrence, Jamie 185, 192–3, 208 LCA (life-cycle assessment) 196–7 leaders 179, 203–5, 214, 217 lean manufacturing 192 leanness 33–4, 41, 42, 170, 192 Learnbox 114 learning by doing 173, 179 learning organisations 179 leasing 123 Lee, Deishin 159 Lego 51, 126 Lego Group 37, 68, 69, 144 Legrand 157 Lenovo 56 Leroy, Adolphe 127 Leroy Merlin 127–8 Leslie, Garthen 150–1 Lever, William Hesketh 96 Levi Strauss & Co 60, 82–4, 100, 122–3 Lewis, Dijuana 212 life cycle of buildings 196 see also product life cycle life-cycle assessment (LCA) 196–7 life-cycle costs 12, 24, 196 Lifebuoy soap 95, 97 lifespan of companies 154 lighting 32, 56, 123, 201 “lightweighting” 47 linear development cycles 21, 23 linear model of production 80–1 Link 131 littleBits 51 Livi, Daniele 88 Livi, Vittorio 88 local communities 52, 57, 146, 206–7 local markets 183–4 Local Motors 52, 129, 152 local solutions 188, 201–2 local sourcing 51–2, 56, 137, 174, 181 localisation 56, 137 Locavesting (Cortese, 2011) 138 Logan car 2–3, 12, 179, 198–9 logistics 46, 57–8, 161, 191, 207 longevity 121, 124 Lopez, Maribel 65–6 Lopez Research 65–6 L’Oréal 174 Los Alamos National Laboratory 170 low-cost airlines 60, 121 low-cost innovation 11 low-income markets 12–13, 161, 203, 207 Lowry, Adam 81–2 M m-health 109, 111–12 M-KOPA 201 M-Pesa 57, 201 M3D 48, 132 McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) 84 McDonough, William 82 McGregor, Douglas 63 MacGyvers 17–18, 130, 134, 167 McKelvey, Jim 135 McKinsey & Company 81, 87, 209 mainstream, frugal products in 216 maintenance 66, 75, 76, 124, 187 costs 48–9, 66 Mainwaring, Simon 8 Maistre, Christophe de 187–8, 216 Maker Faire 18, 133–4 Maker platform 70 makers 18, 133–4, 145 manufacturing 20th-century model 46, 55, 80–1 additive 47–9 continuous 44–5 costs 47, 48, 52 decentralised 9, 44, 51–2 frugal 44–54 integration with logistics 57–8 new approaches 50–4 social 50–1 subtractive method 48 tools for 47, 47–50 Margarine Unie 96 market 15, 28, 38, 64, 186, 189, 192 R&D and 21, 26, 33, 34 market research 25, 61, 139, 141 market share 100 marketing 21–2, 24, 36, 61–3, 91, 116–20, 131, 139 and R&D 34, 37, 37–8 marketing teams 143, 150 markets 12–13, 42, 62, 215 see also emerging markets Marks & Spencer (M&S) 97, 215 Plan A 90, 156, 179–81, 183–4, 186–7, 214 Marriott 140 Mars 57, 158–9, 161 Martin Marietta 159 Martin, Tod 154 mass customisation 9, 46, 47, 48, 57–8 mass market 189 mass marketing 21–2 mass production 9, 46, 57, 58, 74, 129, 196 Massachusetts Institute of Technology see MIT massive open online courses see MOOCs materials 3, 47, 48, 73, 92, 161 costs 153, 161, 190 recyclable 74, 81, 196 recycled 77, 81–2, 83, 86, 89, 183, 193 renewable 77, 86 repurposing 93 see also C2C; reuse Mayhew, Stephen 35, 36 Mazoyer, Eric 90 Mazzella, Frédéric 163 MBDC (McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry) 84 MDI 16 measurable goals 185–6 Mechanical Engineer Laboratory (MEL) 52 “MEcosystems” 154–5, 156–8 Medicare 110 medication 111–12 Medicity 211 MedStartr 17 MEL (Mechanical Engineer Laboratory) 52 mental models 2, 193–203, 206, 216 Mercure 173 Merlin, Rose 127 Mestrallet, Gérard 53, 54 method (company) 81–2 Mexico 38, 56 Michelin 160 micro-factories 51–2, 52, 66, 129, 152 micro-robots 52 Microsoft 38 Microsoft Kinect 130 Microsoft Word 24 middle classes 197–8, 216 Migicovsky, Eric 137–8 Mikkiche, Karim 199 millennials 7, 14, 17, 131–2, 137, 141, 142 MindCET 165 miniaturisation 52, 53–4 Mint.com 125 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 44–5, 107, 130, 134, 202 mobile health see m-health mobile phones 24, 32, 61, 129–30, 130, 168, 174 emerging market use 198 infrastructure 56, 198 see also smartphones mobile production units 66–7 mobile technologies 16, 17, 103, 133, 174, 200–1, 207 Mocana 151 Mochon, Daniel 132 modular design 67, 90 modular production units 66–7 Modularer Querbaukasten see MQB “mompreneurs” 145 Mondelez 158–9 Money Dashboard 125 Moneythink 162 monitoring 65–6, 106, 131 Monopoly 144 MOOCs (massive open online courses) 60, 61, 112, 113, 114, 164 Morieux, Yves 64 Morocco 207 Morris, Robert 199–200 motivation, employees 178, 180, 186, 192, 205–8 motivational approaches to shaping consumer behaviour 105–6 Motorola 56 MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten) 44, 45–6 Mulally, Alan 70, 166 Mulcahy, Simon 157 Mulliez family 126–7 Mulliez, Vianney 13, 126 multi-nodal innovation 202–3 Munari, Bruno 93 Murray, Mike 48–9 Musk, Elon 172 N Nano car 119, 156 National Geographic 102 natural capital, loss of 158–9 Natural Capital Leaders Platform 158–9 natural resources 45, 86 depletion 7, 72, 105, 153, 158–9 see also resources NCR 55–6 near-shoring 55 Nelson, Simon 113 Nemo, Sophie-Noëlle 93 Nest Labs 98–100, 103 Nestlé 31, 44, 68, 78, 94, 158–9, 194, 195 NetPositive plan 86, 208 networking 152–3, 153 new materials 47, 92 New Matter 132 new technologies 21, 27 Newtopia 32 next-generation customers 121–2 next-generation manufacturing techniques 44–6, 46–7 see also frugal manufacturing Nigeria 152, 197–8 Nike 84 NineSigma 151 Nissan 4, 4–5, 44, 199 see also Renault-Nissan non-governmental organisations 167 non-profit organisations 161, 162, 202 Nooyi, Indra 217 Norman, Donald 120 Norris, Greg 196 North American companies 216–17 North American market 22 Northrup Grumman 68 Norton, Michael 132 Norway 103 Novartis 44–5, 215 Novotel 173, 174 nudging 100, 108, 111, 117, 162 Nussbaum, Bruce 140 O O2 147 Obama, President Barack 6, 8, 13, 134, 138, 208 obsolescence, planned 24, 121 offshoring 55 Oh, Amy 145 Ohayon, Elie 71–2 Oliver Wyman 22 Olocco, Gregory 206 O’Marah, Kevin 58 on-demand services 39, 124 online communities 31, 50, 61, 134 online marketing 143 online retailing 60, 132 onshoring 55 Opel 4 open innovation 104, 151, 152, 153, 154 open-source approach 48, 129, 134, 135, 172 open-source hardware 51, 52, 89, 130, 135, 139 open-source software 48, 130, 132, 144–5, 167 OpenIDEO 142 operating costs 45, 215 Opower 103, 109, 119 Orange 157 Orbitz 173 organisational change 36–7, 90–1, 176, 177–90, 203–8, 213–14, 216 business models 190–3 mental models 193–203 organisational culture 36–7, 170, 176, 177–9, 213–14, 217 efficacy focus 181–3 entrepreneurial 76, 173 see also organisational change organisational structure 63–5, 69 outsourcing 59, 143, 146 over-engineering 27, 42, 170 Overby, Christine 25 ownership 9 Oxylane Group 127 P P&G (Procter & Gamble) 19, 31, 58, 94, 117, 123, 145, 195 packaging 57, 96, 195 Page, Larry 63 “pain points” 29, 30, 31 Palmer, Michael 212 Palo Alto Junior League 20 ParkatmyHouse 17, 63, 85 Parker, Philip 61 participation, customers 128–9 partner ecosystems 153, 154, 200 partners 65, 72, 148, 153, 156–8 sharing data with 59–60 see also distributors; hyper-collaboration; suppliers Partners in Care Foundation 202 partnerships 41, 42, 152–3, 156–7, 171–2, 174, 191 with SMBs 173, 174, 175 with start-ups 20, 164–5, 175 with suppliers 192–3 see also hyper-collaboration patents 171–2 Payne, Alex 124 PE International 196 Pearson 164–5, 167, 181–3, 186, 215 Pebble 137–8 peer-to-peer economic model 10 peer-to-peer lending 10 peer-to-peer sales 60 peer-to-peer sharing 136–7 Pélisson, Gérard 172–3 PepsiCo 38, 40, 179, 190, 194, 215 performance 47, 73, 77, 80, 95 of employees 69 Pernod Ricard 157 personalisation 9, 45, 46, 48, 62, 129–30, 132, 149 Peters, Tom 21 pharmaceutical industry 13, 22, 23, 33, 58, 171, 181 continuous manufacturing 44–6 see also GSK Philippines 191 Philips 56, 84, 100, 123 Philips Lighting 32 Picaud, Philippe 122 Piggy Mojo 119 piggybacking 57 Piketty, Thomas 6 Plan A (M&S) 90, 156, 179–81, 183–4, 186–7, 214 Planet 21 (Accor) 174–5 planned obsolescence 24, 121 Plastyc 17 Plumridge, Rupert 18 point-of-sale data 58 Poland 103 pollution 74, 78, 87, 116, 187, 200 Polman, Paul 11, 72, 77, 94, 203–5, 217 portfolio management tools 27, 33 Portugal 55, 103 postponement 57–8 Potočnik, Janez 8, 79 Prabhu, Arun 25 Prahalad, C.K. 12 predictive analytics 32–3 predictive maintenance 66, 67–8 Priceline 173 pricing 81, 117 processes digitising 65–6 entrenched 14–16 re-engineering 74 simplifying 169, 173 Procter & Gamble see P&G procurement priorities 67–8 product life cycle 21, 75, 92, 186 costs 12, 24, 196 sustainability 73–5 product-sharing initiatives 87 production costs 9, 83 productivity 49, 59, 65, 79–80, 153 staff 14 profit 14, 105 Progressive 100, 116 Project Ara 130 promotion 61–3 Propeller Health 111 prosumers xix–xx, 17–18, 125, 126–33, 136–7, 148, 154 empowering and engaging 139–46 see also horizontal economy Protomax 159 prototypes 31–2, 50, 144, 152 prototyping 42, 52, 65, 152, 167, 192, 206 public 50–1, 215 public sector, working with 161–2 publishers 17, 61 Pullman 173 Puma 194 purchasing power 5–6, 216 pyramidal model of production 51 pyramidal organisations 69 Q Qarnot Computing 89 Qualcomm 84 Qualcomm Life 112 quality 3, 11–12, 15, 24, 45, 49, 82, 206, 216 high 1, 9, 93, 198, 216 measure of 105 versus quantity 8, 23 quality of life 8, 204 Quicken 19–21 Quirky 50–1, 126, 150–1, 152 R R&D 35, 67, 92, 151 big-ticket programmes 35–6 and business development 37–8 China 40, 188, 206 customer focus 27, 39, 43 frugal approach 12, 26–33, 82 global networks 39–40 incentives 38–9 industrial model 2, 21–6, 33, 36, 42 market-focused, agile model 26–33 and marketing 34, 37, 37–8 recommendations for managers 34–41 speed 23, 27, 34, 149 spending 15, 22, 23, 28, 141, 149, 152, 171, 187 technology culture 14–15, 38–9 see also Air Liquide; Ford; GSK; IBM; immersion; Renault; SNCF; Tarkett; Unilever R&D labs 9, 21–6, 70, 149, 218 in emerging markets 40, 188, 200 R&D teams 26, 34, 38–9, 65, 127, 150, 194–5 hackers as 142 innovation brokering 168 shaping customer behaviour 120–2 Raspberry Pi 135–6, 164 Ratti, Carlo 107 raw materials see materials real-time demand signals 58, 59 Rebours, Christophe 157–8 recession 5–6, 6, 46, 131, 180 Reckitt Benckiser 102 recommendations for managers flexing assets 65–71 R&D 34–41 shaping consumer behaviour 116–24 sustainability 90–3 recruiting 70–1 recyclable materials 74, 81, 196 recyclable products 3, 73, 159, 195–6 recycled materials 77, 81–2, 83, 86, 89, 183, 193 recycling 8, 9, 87, 93, 142, 159 e-waste 87–8 electronic and electrical goods (EU) 8, 79 by Tarkett 73–7 water 83, 175 see also C2C; circular economy Recy’Go 92–3 regional champions 182 regulation 7–8, 13, 78–9, 103, 216 Reich, Joshua 124 RelayRides 17 Renault 1–5, 12, 117, 156–7, 179 Renault-Nissan 4–5, 40, 198–9, 215 renewable energy 8, 53, 74, 86, 91, 136, 142, 196 renewable materials 77, 86 Replicator 132 repurposing 93 Requardt, Hermann 189 reshoring 55–6 resource constraints 4–5, 217 resource efficiency 7–8, 46, 47–9, 79, 190 Resource Revolution (Heck, Rogers and Carroll, 2014) 87–8 resources 40, 42, 73, 86, 197, 199 consumption 9, 26, 73–7, 101–2 costs 78, 203 depletion 7, 72, 105, 153, 158–9 reducing use 45, 52, 65, 73–7, 104, 199, 203 saving 72, 77, 200 scarcity 22, 46, 72, 73, 77–8, 80, 158–9, 190, 203 sharing 56–7, 159–61, 167 substitution 92 wasting 169–70 retailers 56, 129, 214 “big-box” 9, 18, 137 Rethink Robotics 49 return on investment 22, 197 reuse 9, 73, 76–7, 81, 84–5, 92–3, 200 see also C2C revenues, generating 77, 167, 180 reverse innovation 202–3 rewards 37, 178, 208 Riboud, Franck 66, 184, 217 Rifkin, Jeremy 9–10 robots 47, 49–50, 70, 144–5, 150 Rock Health 151 Rogers, Jay 129 Rogers, Matt 87–8 Romania 2–3, 103 rookie mindset 164, 168 Rose, Stuart 179–80, 180 Roulin, Anne 195 Ryan, Eric 81–2 Ryanair 60 S S-Oil 106 SaaS (software as a service) 60 Saatchi & Saatchi 70–1 Saatchi & Saatchi + Duke 71–2, 143 sales function 15, 21, 25–6, 36, 116–18, 146 Salesforce.com 157 Santi, Paolo 108 SAP 59, 186 Saunders, Charles 211 savings 115 Sawa Orchards 29–31 Scandinavian countries 6–7 see also Norway Schmidt, Eric 136 Schneider Electric 150 Schulman, Dan 161–2 Schumacher, E.F. 104–5, 105 Schweitzer, Louis 1, 2, 3, 4, 179 SCM (supply chain management) systems 59 SCOR (supply chain operations reference) model 67 Seattle 107 SEB 157 self-sufficiency 8 selling less 123–4 senior managers 122–4, 199 see also CEOs; organisational change sensors 65–6, 106, 118, 135, 201 services 9, 41–3, 67–8, 124, 149 frugal 60–3, 216 value-added 62–3, 76, 150, 206, 209 Shapeways 51, 132 shareholders 14, 15, 76, 123–4, 180, 204–5 sharing 9–10, 193 assets 159–61, 167 customers 156–8 ideas 63–4 intellectual assets 171–2 knowledge 153 peer-to-peer 136–9 resources 56–7, 159–61, 167 sharing economy 9–10, 17, 57, 77, 80, 84–7, 108, 124 peer-to-peer sharing 136–9 sharing between companies 159–60 shipping costs 55, 59 shopping experience 121–2 SIEH hotel group 172–3 Siemens 117–18, 150, 187–9, 215, 216 Sigismondi, Pier Luigi 100 Silicon Valley 42, 98, 109, 150, 151, 162, 175 silos, breaking out of 36–7 Simple Bank 124–5 simplicity 8, 41, 64–5, 170, 194 Singapore 175 Six Sigma 11 Skillshare 85 SkyPlus 62 Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1973) 104–5 “small is beautiful” values 8 small and medium-sized businesses see SMBs Smart + Connected Communities 29 SMART car 119–20 SMART strategy (Siemens) 188–9 smartphones 17, 100, 106, 118, 130, 131, 135, 198 in health care 110, 111 see also apps SmartScan 29 SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) 173, 174, 175, 176 SMS-based systems 42–3 SnapShot 116 SNCF 41–3, 156–7, 167 SoapBox 28–9 social business model 206–7 social comparison 109 social development 14 social goals 94 social learning 113 social manufacturing 47, 50–1 social media 16, 71, 85, 106, 108, 168, 174 for marketing 61, 62, 143 mining 29, 58 social pressure of 119 tools 109, 141 and transaction costs 133 see also Facebook; social networks; Twitter social networks 29, 71, 72, 132–3, 145, 146 see also Facebook; Twitter social pressure 119 social problems 82, 101–2, 141, 142, 153, 161–2, 204 social responsibility 7, 10, 14, 141, 142, 197, 204 corporate 77, 82, 94, 161 social sector, working with 161–2 “social tinkerers” 134–5 socialising education 112–14 Sofitel 173 software 72 software as a service (SaaS) 60 solar power 136, 201 sourcing, local 51–2, 56 Southwest Airlines 60 Spain 5, 6, 103 Spark 48 speed dating 175, 176 spending, on R&D 15, 22, 23, 28, 141, 149, 152, 171, 187 spiral economy 77, 87–90 SRI International 49, 52 staff see employees Stampanato, Gary 55 standards 78, 196 Starbucks 7, 140 start-ups 16–17, 40–1, 61, 89, 110, 145, 148, 150, 169, 216 investing in 137–8, 157 as partners 42, 72, 153, 175, 191, 206 see also Nest Labs; Silicon Valley Statoil 160 Steelcase 142 Stem 151 Stepner, Diana 165 Stewart, Emma 196–7 Stewart, Osamuyimen 201–2 Sto Corp 84 Stora Enso 195 storytelling 112, 113 Strategy& see Booz & Company Subramanian, Prabhu 114 substitution of resources 92 subtractive manufacturing 48 Sun Tzu 158 suppliers 67–8, 83, 148, 153, 167, 176, 192–3 collaboration with 76, 155–6 sharing with 59–60, 91 visibility 59–60 supply chain management see SCM supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model 67 supply chains 34, 36, 54, 65, 107, 137, 192–3 carbon footprint 156 costs 58, 84 decentralisation 66–7 frugal 54–60 integrating 161 small-circuit 137 sustainability 137 visibility 34, 59–60 support 135, 152 sustainability xix, 9, 12, 72, 77–80, 82, 97, 186 certification 84 as competitive advantage 80 consumers and 95, 97, 101–4 core design principle 82–4, 93, 195–6 and growth 76, 80, 104–5 perceptions of 15–16, 80, 91 recommendations for managers 90–3 regulatory demand for 78–9, 216 standard bearers of 80, 97, 215 see also Accor; circular economy; Kingfisher; Marks & Spencer; Tarkett; Unilever sustainable design 82–4 see also C2C sustainable distribution 57, 161 sustainable growth 72, 76–7 sustainable lifestyles 107–8 Sustainable Living Plan (Unilever) 94–7, 179, 203–4 sustainable manufacturing 9, 52 T “T-shaped” employees 70–1 take-back programmes 9, 75, 77, 78 Tally 196–7 Tarkett 73–7, 80, 84 TaskRabbit 85 Tata Motors 16, 119 Taylor, Frederick 71 technical design 37–8 technical support, by customers 146 technology 2, 14–15, 21–2, 26, 27 TechShop 9, 70, 134–5, 152, 166–7 telecoms sector 53, 56 Telefónica 147 telematic monitoring 116 Ternois, Laurence 42 Tesco 102 Tesla Motors 92, 172 testing 28, 42, 141, 170, 192 Texas Industries 159 Textoris, Vincent 127 TGV Lab 42–3 thermostats 98–100 thinking, entrenched 14–16 Thompson, Gav 147 Timberland 90 time 4, 7, 11, 41, 72, 129, 170, 200 constraints 36, 42 see also development cycle tinkerers 17–18, 133–5, 144, 150, 152, 153, 165–7, 168 TiVo 62 Tohamy, Noha 59–60 top-down change 177–8 top-down management 69 Total 157 total quality management (TQM) 11 total volatile organic compounds see TVOC Toyota 44, 100 Toyota Sweden 106–7 TQM (total quality management) 11 traffic 108, 116, 201 training 76, 93, 152, 167, 170, 189 transaction costs 133 transparency 178, 185 transport 46, 57, 96, 156–7 Transport for London 195 TrashTrack 107 Travelocity 174 trial and error 173, 179 Trout, Bernhardt 45 trust 7, 37, 143 TVOC (total volatile organic compounds) 74, 77 Twitter 29, 62, 135, 143, 147 U Uber 136, 163 Ubuntu 202 Uchiyama, Shunichi 50 UCLA Health 202–3 Udacity 61, 112 UK 194 budget cuts 6 consumer empowerment 103 industrial symbiosis 160 savings 115 sharing 85, 138 “un-management” 63–4, 64 Unboundary 154 Unilever 11, 31, 57, 97, 100, 142, 203–5, 215 and sustainability 94–7, 104, 179, 203–4 University of Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (EDC) 194–5 Inclusive Design team 31 Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) 158–9 upcycling 77, 88–9, 93, 159 upselling 189 Upton, Eben 135–6 US 8, 38, 44, 87, 115, 133, 188 access to financial services 13, 17, 161–2 ageing population 194 ageing workforce 13 commuting 131 consumer spending 5, 6, 103 crowdfunding 137–8, 138 economic pressures 5, 6 energy use 103, 119, 196 environmental awareness 7, 102 frugal innovation in 215–16, 218 health care 13, 110, 208–13, 213 intellectual property 171 onshoring 55 regulation 8, 78, 216 sharing 85, 138–9 shifting production from China to 55, 56 tinkering culture 18, 133–4 user communities 62, 89 user interfaces 98, 99 user-friendliness 194 Utopies 91 V validators 144 value 11, 132, 177, 186, 189–90 aspirational 88–9 to customers 6–7, 21, 77, 87, 131, 203 from employees 217 shareholder value 14 value chains 9, 80, 128–9, 143, 159–60, 190, 215 value engineering 192 “value gap” 54–5 value-added services 62–3, 76, 150, 206, 209 values 6–7, 14, 178, 205 Vandebroek, Sophie 169 Vasanthakumar, Vaithegi 182–3 Vats, Tanmaya 190, 192 vehicle fleets, sharing 57, 161 Verbaken, Joop 118 vertical integration 133, 154 virtual prototyping 65 virtuous cycle 212–13 visibility 34, 59–60 visible learning 112–13 visioning sessions 193–4 visualisation 106–8 Vitality 111 Volac 158–9 Volkswagen 4, 44, 45–6, 129, 144 Volvo 62 W wage costs 48 wages, in emerging markets 55 Waitrose, local suppliers 56 Walker, James 87 walking the walk 122–3 Waller, Sam 195 Walmart 9, 18, 56, 162, 216 Walton, Sam 9 Wan Jia 144 Washington DC 123 waste 24, 87–9, 107, 159–60, 175, 192, 196 beautifying 88–9, 93 e-waste 24, 79, 87–8, 121 of energy 119 post-consumer 9, 75, 77, 78, 83 reducing 47, 74, 85, 96, 180, 209 of resources 169–70 in US health-care system 209 see also C2C; recycling; reuse water 78, 83, 104, 106, 158, 175, 188, 206 water consumption 79, 82–3, 100, 196 reducing 74, 75, 79, 104, 122–3, 174, 183 wealth 105, 218 Wear It Share It (Wishi) 85 Weijmarshausen, Peter 51 well-being 104–5 Wham-O 56 Whirlpool 36 “wicked” problems 153 wireless technologies 65–6 Wiseman, Liz 164 Wishi (Wear It Share It) 85 Witty, Andrew 35, 35–6, 37, 39, 217 W.L. Gore & Associates 63–4 women 87, 103, 122, 140 work environment 70, 80 workforce, ageing 13, 29, 49, 153 “workspaces” 128 World Business Council for Sustainable Development 194 World Economic Forum 9, 81, 194 X Xerox Research Centre India 169 Y Yahoo! 38 Yamazaki, Tomihiro 29–30 Yatango Mobile 146 yerdle.com 85 young people 79–80, 85, 122, 139 as consumers 16, 85, 86, 122, 124, 131 as employees 14, 79–80, 124, 204 YouTube 17, 29, 108, 144, 147 Z Zara 55 Zipcar 10, 63 Zopa 10 Praise for Jugaad Innovation GAPPAA .ORG ‘Innovation is a western word.


pages: 323 words: 107,963

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Downton Abbey, feminist movement, financial independence, Kickstarter, messenger bag, period drama, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, women in the workforce

Wilbur was a lot tougher than how Woodward played her. By the time Dr. Wilbur first met Shirley Ardell Mason—the girl who would become known as Sybil Isabel Dorsett—she had been fighting for years to be taken seriously as a psychologist by her male colleagues. During World War II, women had a unique opportunity to enter the workforce because so many men had been drafted. When the men returned from the war, women who had enjoyed higher education and subsequently had careers were displaced. Connie Wilbur was no different. Despite the fact that she was purportedly quite a brilliant psychologist, who could have easily excelled on the higher rungs of psychoanalysis, once the male physicians returned from the war she was pushed aside.


pages: 267 words: 79,905

pages: 364 words: 108,237

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, job-hopping, mass affluent, payday loans, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

It’s also going to be the people at the freight yard who won’t be needed to unload parts for GM, and the little shops that won’t have enough customers because people stop buying in hard times, and the construction workers who already didn’t have houses to build, and the carpet layers and plasterers whose customers already couldn’t afford them. All these men and women who once made up a prosperous, flourishing workforce now at home with their kids, not needing Mrs. Sheridan, this nice lady who is hugging her again and thanking her for the mattresses and navy comforters and all the rest, including the donated purse Deri has brought for her with a gift certificate inside for Eagle Inn Family Restaurant a few blocks away on Center Avenue, because even people whose day care centers are dying in this economy deserve to get out to eat, at least once in a while.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Among the professions with significant gaps were CEOs (11 percent of the images in the Google image search result were women, compared with 27 percent of U.S. CEOs who are women), authors (25 percent of images for this search result were women, compared with 56 percent of U.S. authors who are women), and telemarketers (64 percent of the images were women compared with 50 percent in the workforce).43 Another study examined advertisements for the web page of a highprofile, historically black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, which celebrated its Economic and Social Perspectives 127 one hundredth birthday. Among the algorithm-generated ads on the website were ads for low-quality, highly criticized credit cards and ads that suggest the audience member had an arrest record.44 What remains unclear is why a black fraternity website attracts ads about one’s criminal history, and why men get career coaching ads for boosting their salary, but not women.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A few years later, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed new charges against the company, claiming that problems of bias in hiring and promotion had not ended. Target and Best Buy have been accused of age discrimination in several suits alleging that workers over forty (who are often more experienced and make more) are far more likely to be laid oƒ. Costco and Wal-Mart are facing national class-action sexdiscrimination lawsuits. While women make up half of Costco’s workforce, they account for only 17 percent of its managers. At Wal-Mart, not only are women underrepresented in management, they earn significantly less than 60 BIG-BOX SWINDLE their male counterparts, in every job category from cashier to regional vice president. The 115 women who have testified in the case describe giving years of their lives to the company and getting little in return.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

If one takes the last pay week of October 1950 in all manufacturing industries, the average earnings of women (over 18) compared with the earnings of men (over 21) amounted to about 53 per cent. In the 1950s as a whole, full-time female workers earned only 51 per cent of the average weekly pay of male workers. It was not so much a pay gap as a pay chasm.10 At a national policy level, the official desire by 1946/7 to see women back in the workforce (following their return home at the end of the war) was readily understandable in the context of the prevailing labour shortage, but, among other things, it ran up against an equally prevailing anxiety that the war and its immediate aftermath had done significant damage to the social fabric, which would be more readily repaired if women stayed in their traditional homemaking capacity.


pages: 927 words: 236,812

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

The tractor drivers were the first to go, leaving the collective farms without workers trained to use the machinery.20 In 1942 the peasants were reduced to sowing and harvesting 79 per cent of the grain by hand.21 It was not uncommon for the peasant women to resort to yoking themselves to the plough in place of draught animals. Almost the entire burden of providing food for the Soviet Union fell on women, children, the elderly and the infirm. By 1945 women made up 92 per cent of the agricultural workforce.22 Victor Kravchenko and his fellow army recruits, walking across snowbound Tataria as they were evacuated east in November 1941, were ‘amazed to see great fields of wheat, unharvested, under the snow and now and then even sheaves of harvested grain. Later a peasant gave us the explanation: “with all able-bodied men taken for the army and horses commandeered for the fronts, only women, children and cows” remained to do the harvesting and immense quantities of produce could not be carried off.’23 The collective farms were pushed into a vicious cycle of over-extraction, falling yields and demotivation.

Those working in the heaviest industries received four or five times as much as those at the bottom of the scale.71 In Rostov the women working in heavy industrial factories were there because the work entitled them to a ‘first- or second-category food ration card, that is to say eight hundred or six hundred grams of bread’.72 One former worker recalled, ‘[I did] not underestimate the six hundred grams of bread that came with my job.’73 By the end of the war, women made up just over half the heavy industrial workforce, and 80 per cent of the workers in light industry.74 Alongside the women, worked many young boys and teenagers. Agrippina Mikhailovna Khromova, who worked as a lathe turner in an electromechanical plant in Moscow, recalled that as the men were called up to the front, ‘schoolboys and teenagers arrived at the plant.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Market populists generally fail to get worked up about the persecution of Vietnam vets (they sometimes even equate new-style management theories with the strategy of the Vietcong); they have abandoned the “family values” of Reagan; they give not a damn for the traditional role of women or even of children. The more who enter the workforce the merrier. By the middle of the nineties, this was a populism in the ascendancy. Leftoid rock critics, Wall Street arbitrageurs and just about everyone in between seemed to find what they wanted in the magic of markets. Markets were serving all tastes, markets were humiliating the pretentious, markets were permitting good art to triumph over bad, markets were overthrowing the man, markets were extinguishing discrimination, markets were making everyone rich.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

Only a handful of the great scientists celebrated in a long photographic mural at Shanghai’s Science and Technology Museum are women. The Communist Party after 1949 tried to outlaw old customs and put women on equal footing with men. It abolished arranged marriages and encouraged women to get an education and join the workforce. Women were allowed to keep their maiden name upon marriage and leave their property to their children. In its quest for equality during this period however, the Communist Party seemed to ‘desexualise’ women, fashioning instead a kind of idealised worker/mother/peasant paradigm.


pages: 431 words: 118,074

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

According to McConnell, Low mentored him and encouraged him to continue his studies and get his doctorate in aerospace physics. He also brought him to Washington as his career progressed to increasing levels of responsibility.82 After the passage of the Equal Employment Act, Low put McConnell in charge of NASA’s EEO efforts. NASA Headquarters had improved on its hiring of women and minorities—bringing their percentage of the workforce up to the double digits, in raw percentage terms. Still, most of those jobs were in relatively low-level clerical functions. The field centers, where most of NASA’s higher-paying technical jobs resided, were performing the worst. Most were in the single digits, in percentage terms, and it brought the agency’s overall average down to the lowest level of all federal agencies.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

The people who make these decisions hold all types of values, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy, which is well documented in studies of Silicon Valley and other tech corridors. For example, in the midst of a federal investigation of Google’s alleged persistent wage gap, where women are systematically paid less than men in the company’s workforce, an “antidiversity” manifesto authored by James Damore went viral in August 2017,1 supported by many Google employees, arguing that women are psychologically inferior and incapable of being as good at software engineering as men, among other patently false and sexist assertions.


pages: 306 words: 92,704

Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy

California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, land tenure, low cost airline, megaproject, off-the-grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, women in the workforce

In spite of these advances, women still face many obstacles in Panamanian society. Machismo and gross stereotypes are more prevalent in rural areas than in urban ones, but even in the cities women have to face lower wages and sexual harassment, and are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed. Although women make up nearly half of the workforce, they remain underrepresented in positions of power and in public service, with 17% representation in parliament. Overall, women are having fewer children and are having them later in life. Many postpone motherhood to enter the workplace – a pattern that exists in Europe and the USA.


The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Far beyond Cape Canaveral, the weekend and evening hours that men spent building a better self with their Brethren–memorising and performing rituals and absorbing their ethical lessons, discussing which charities to support, eating, drinking and back-slapping–were all paid for by more time in the kitchen for their wives. It could not last. Over the coming decades, the feminine mystique mouldered. Women went back into education and the workforce. They got married later. They had fewer children. They got divorced. Tellingly, in the early 1970s, there was a rash of marital break-ups among NASA astronauts. Men changed too. Bringing up a family became more of a two-carer enterprise. And the nine-to-five, college-to-the-retirement-carriage-clock pattern of white-collar work became increasingly rare, eating further into the free time available for fraternalism.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

* * * — WHATEVER JAMES HILL managed to learn about El Salvador and Salvadorans before he arrived from England, there were still certain things about the place and people that surprised him. One of these was the women. At the height of cotton manufacturing in Manchester, women made up more than half the workforce of the city’s mills, and sometimes as much as two-thirds.14 El Salvador was different. While many women worked in the coffee mills as limpiadoras, that specialized job lasted only as long as the harvest season, roughly November to February. The rest of the year, Hill had been surprised to learn, women didn’t work.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

Most troubling might be the overt, and dreadfully one-sided, sexualization of young female characters. Girls and women were twice as likely as boys and men to be shown in sexually revealing clothing, and five times as likely to be called out for their good looks. In the world of film, women account for less than one third of the workforce while they represent two thirds of its sex objects. This study was no outlier. Women accounted for just 30 percent of all speaking or named roles in the top one hundred scripted films in the United States between 2007 and 2015, according to a report from the University of Southern California.


pages: 326 words: 29,543

The Docks by Bill Sharpsteen

affirmative action, anti-communist, big-box store, collective bargaining, Google Earth, independent contractor, intermodal, inventory management, jitney, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, new economy, Panamax, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, women in the workforce

So by then I was hot.” And yet incredibly, in the end, Williams tells me without a hint of irony, “This has been the most successful affirmative action program in the country. Ever.” As for the Golden Consent Decree, Judge Takasugi ruled in 1999 that his 1983 court order had done its job. Women were now a permanent part of the waterfront workforce. Williams agrees. Now a ship planner, working in an office before a computer for the most part, she says women have been largely accepted at the docks. She tells how once at ╯ The Womenâ•… /â•… 219 the Matson Shipping terminal, a group of men threw a baby shower for a woman coworker.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

First, a pressing current question is: why has monogamy already begun to fall apart in ­developed societies? I suspect that the increase in life expectancy over the last century may have had a bit to do with it, but surely the advent of truly effective contraception and the entrance of women fully into the paid workforce are far more significant factors. One commentator noted that before the twentieth century, marriage was not often based on romantic love, but could well be described as an alliance in which a man and woman stood together, back to back, ­fending off attacks on their family. As the modern world became less economically and socially threatening, marriage partners turned toward each other seeking more emotional support and often found it lacking.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

(Cowan notes that in 1950 the American housewife produced singlehandedly what her counterpart needed a staff of three or four to produce just a century earlier.) Who could have predicted that the development of “labor-saving devices” had the effect of increasing the burden of housework for most women? Similarly, the introduction of computers into the workforce failed to produce expected productivity gains (Tetris was, perhaps, part of some secret Soviet plot to halt the capitalist economy). The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow quipped that “one can see the computer age everywhere but not in the productivity statistics!”


The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay

Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, haute couture, women in the workforce

Before the outbreak of the war, the Dresden site employed some 2,700 people, but the composition of the workforce making their way daily through the factory gates on Hamburger Strasse was now very different. In the absence of fighting-age men, the great majority of those who worked here were female, many of them forced labour: Jewish women and even women from the USSR. The degradation of the workforce had developed stage by inexorable stage during the war, and by 1945 these slave labourers – haggard, haunted, inadequately clothed – had somehow become accepted by Dresdeners as part of the normal world. The nature of the work in the factories had changed dramatically too. And the purpose of the finished products – from detonating fuses for shrapnel shells to ignitors for depth charges and anti-aircraft guns – was kept strictly secret even from those who were working long hours to produce the parts for them.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Support for Communist parties in western Europe had never been greater. Most of the new Communists were young people who had come of age during the war. In their eyes Communism and the Soviet example were first and foremost about much-needed reform in their home countries. They wanted full employment and social services. Women who had joined the workforce during the war did not want to be forced back into patriarchal domesticity. Communists were genuinely admired by many for their role in the resistance to German occupation, including by people who regretted their own failure at taking up weapons. Now Nazism and Fascism were dead, and Europe could renew itself.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Science and technology have long had prominent female pioneers, including Marie Curie, who remains the only person to twice win the same Nobel Prize, and Bertha Benz, the first person to show the world the automobile’s potential.31 But while men were prepared to acknowledge the contributions of these women as individuals, the world of technology remained stubbornly slow in recognizing and creating opportunities for women more broadly. At most tech companies, women still represent less than 30 percent of the workforce, and an even lower percentage of technical roles. Similarly, African Americans, Hispanics, and Latinos typically account for less than half of what one would expect based on their representation in the American population. Thankfully, in the past few years this view has finally started to change.


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

High School Grads FIGURE 3.4: Unemployment Rates by Education (2011) FIGURE 4.1: Education Premiums in Selected Nonacademic Occupations FIGURE 4.2: Median Education Premiums by Occupational Category FIGURE 4.3: Effect of a Year of National Education on National Income FIGURE 5.1: The Effect of Education on Compensation for a Good Student (2011) FIGURE 5.2: The Effect of Education on Unemployment for a Good Student FIGURE 5.3: The Selfish Return to Education for Good Students FIGURE 5.4: The Naive Selfish Return to Education for All Students FIGURE 5.5: The Effect of Education on Compensation by Student Ability (2011) FIGURE 5.6: Degree Completion Probability by Student Ability FIGURE 5.7: Selfish Degree Returns by Student Ability FIGURE 5.8: Freshmen’s Selfish Degree Returns by lfish Degree Returns by Major FIGURE 5.9: Freshmen Selfish Degree Returns by College Quality FIGURE 5.10: College Freshmen’s Selfish Degree Returns by Out-of-Pocket Costs FIGURE 5.11: School Lovers’ and School Haters’ Selfish Degree Returns FIGURE 5.12: Men and Women’s Selfish Degree Returns FIGURE 5.13: Married Men and Women’s Selfish Degree Returns FIGURE 5.14: Workforce Participation for 25-to-64-Year-Olds, by Education (2011) FIGURE 5.15: Selfish Degree Returns, Correcting for Workforce Participation FIGURE 6.1: Two Signaling Scenarios FIGURE 6.2: The Effect of Education on Compensation and Productivity for a Good Student (2011) FIGURE 6.3: Average Annual Social Cost of Crime by Education (2011 Dollars) FIGURE 6.4: Degree Returns to Education for Good Students with Cautious Signaling FIGURE 6.5: Social Degree Returns to Education with Cautious Signaling FIGURE 6.6: Social Degree Returns to Education with Reasonable Signaling FIGURE 6.7: Social Degree Returns to Education for Excellent Students by Signaling Share FIGURE 6.8: Social Degree Returns to Education for Good Students by Signaling Share FIGURE 6.9: Social Degree Returns to Education for Fair Students by Signaling Share FIGURE 6.10: Social Degree Returns to Education for Poor Students by Signaling Share FIGURE 6.11: Social Degree Returns to Education by Sex with Reasonable Signaling FIGURE 7.1: Total U.S.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Women bear a substantial “child penalty” in the labor market, which is responsible for a large fraction of the remaining gender gap in earnings in advanced economies.77 Even in progressive Denmark, while there is almost no difference in the earnings of men and women before childbirth, the arrival of a child creates a gender gap in earnings of around 20 percent in the long run. Women start falling behind men in terms of their occupational rank and their probability of becoming managers right after the birth of their first child. Moreover, new mothers switch jobs to join companies that are more “family friendly,” as measured by the share of women with young children in the firm’s workforce. About 13 percent permanently drop out of the labor force.78 Expanding highly subsidized quality whole-day care is one very effective way to raise incomes among low-income women by, quite simply, making work pay. Elder care is another area with tremendous scope for expansion, since the United States has very little in-home care of the elderly and very few publicly funded old-people’s homes.


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Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

So successful is the industry that an estimated 70% of the roses sold in the UK come from here. But such success comes at a price. A decade ago, an international NGO called Women Working Worldwide (www.women-ww.org) exposed appalling conditions on many of the farms. Tighter regulations have generally led to improved working conditions – with the women making up the majority of the workforce, some farms now offer maternity leave and childcare facilities. There remain concerns, however, that not all farms have improved conditions for their workers, with low salaries, long hours and limited protection from harmful chemicals among the major concerns. There are also environmental concerns.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Deprivation of work, particularly among men, is strongly associated with depression and violence. Landing a job after release from prison is no small feat. “I’ve watched the discrimination and experienced it firsthand when you have to check the box,” says Susan Burton, an ex-offender who founded a business aimed at providing formerly incarcerated women the support necessary to re-establish themselves in the workforce. The “box” she refers to is the question on job applications in which applicants are asked to check “yes” or “no” if they have ever been convicted of a crime. “It’s not only [on] job [applications],” Burton explains. “It’s on housing. It’s on a school application. It’s on welfare applications.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

“I don’t think anyone that Alan ever dated would say that he harassed them. They might be upset only because he quit dating them.”26 Upset or not, the staff at Townsend-Greenspan consisted entirely of women. When it came to the junior positions, this was typical of the times. In the years after World War II, women who had formed the backbone of the industrial workforce were pushed back into female-only jobs, especially in the rapidly growing service sector; as one historian put it, “Rosie the Riveter had become a file clerk.”27 But Greenspan was unusual in promoting women to positions of responsibility as well. In addition to Eickhoff, there were Bess Kaplan, an expert on government data, and Lucille Wu, who were steeped in the emerging science of economic modeling.

Time characterized Reagan as a “romantic conservative,” while others dismissed him as naïve.20 “Reagan steps out of the pages of Reader’s Digest,” sniffed the New Republic. “He is as direct as Daffy Duck.”21 But whatever one’s view of the candidate, his position on inflation was clear. He excoriated rising prices not just for disrupting the economy but also for threatening “family life itself.” Inflation was the demon that compelled women to forsake their homes and join the workforce. Back in September, at the meeting in Marina del Rey, Reagan had invited Greenspan to endorse his favorite cure for inflation: the gold standard. Gold appealed both to the romantic within him and to Daffy Duck; it evoked the heroic individualism of the nineteenth century—rugged pioneers paying for homesteads with leather pouches of metallic coin—and it was seductively simple.


Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

As recently as 1980, Ticos lived on family farms, listened to state radio and shopped at the neighborhood pulpería (corner grocery store). Today, shopping at supermarkets is a matter of course, satellite TV and wireless internet are the norm, and American-style malls are all the rage. Furthermore, with economic empowerment has come tremendous social change. More women have entered the workforce though opportunities in the tourist and service sectors. The divorce rate has increased and family size has shrunk. More Ticos are entering higher education, and they are doing so in Costa Rica. Migrant laborers from Nicaragua and Colombia work the coffee plantations, while Tico tenants seek better jobs in the city.


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A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Thus, the accelerating closure of abortion clinics, the renewed drama over anything relating to fetal tissue, sex ed, evolution, and other matters that were and/or should have been settled long ago.21 Gender, Generations, and Greens Most conceptions of “goodness” involve fairness, and fairness has not been a Boomer priority. Economic inequality expanded greatly during Boomer tenure—helped along by bipartisan cuts to capital gains and estate taxes, and the strangulation of quality public schooling. Gaps, however, were not limited to those between rich and poor. Although women have been a significant part of the workforce for decades, they still do not receive equal pay for equal work. The Equal Rights Amendment would have provided a foundation for redress. ERA even had Republican champions in the White House through the 1970s, and nearly achieved ratification. The amendment’s momentum evaporated just as the Boomers were rising to power.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional


pages: 535 words: 144,827

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

These were spheres in which workers in general were both poorly paid and often subject to the whims of oppressive employers, and in which there were, as a consequence, serious shortages.25 However, even though there were almost a million non-working but employable single women of that age, and more than 5 million similarly placed but childless married women in Germany, such dictatorial powers over the female workforce never came close to being fully applied in peacetime. Perhaps the sexist ruling attitude made male officials reluctant to press ‘ladies’ into such service. Before the autumn of 1939, in any case, only 50,000 or so young women were affected by the law.26 Up to 1937, the share of women in the labour market had declined from 37 to 31 per cent, but by 1939 the proportion had risen once more to 33 per cent, including traditional areas of activity such as agriculture and domestic service but also, increasingly, clerical and secretarial work in both the private and state sectors.



Lancaster by John Nichol

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Louis Blériot, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

‘They could not believe women could fly these aeroplanes, so it was a huge surprise for them to see me – a slim, blonde, 5ft 2in female flying such a giant aircraft.’5 Regardless of stature, women adopting those major and important roles in the war effort was something new wherever it occurred. When Sophie Pape started work at the Woodford Lancaster factory she remembered that, ‘The presence of the first women employees caused some disquiet among the predominantly male workforce. On my first day, two other girls and I had to wait while the union officials met to consider the reaction of their members to our arrival. I was sent to work on the shop floor where the Lancasters were assembled. As my small stature was ideal for working in restricted spaces, I joined the team that fitted oxygen systems into the aircraft.


pages: 667 words: 186,968

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, conceptual framework, coronavirus, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, index card, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, means of production, scientific management, seminal paper, statistical model, the medium is the message, the scientific method, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

In 1918 the Red Cross counted thirty million Americans—out of a total population of 105 million—as active supporters. Eight million Americans, nearly 8 percent of the entire population, served as production workers in local chapters. (The Red Cross had more volunteers in World War I than in World War II despite a 30 percent increase in the nation’s population.) Women made up nearly all this enormous volunteer workforce, and they might as well have worked in factories. Each chapter received a production quota, and each chapter produced that quota. They produced millions of sweaters, millions of blankets, millions of socks. They made furniture. They did everything requested of them, and they did it well.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

., 168 Thoughtless Acts (Fulton Suri), 179, 297 Three Mile Island (TMI), 38–43, 351n31; accident at, 15–21, 26–32, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 78, 83, 95, 103, 105, 338–39; control panels at, 28–31, 40–43, 105; feedback and, 28, 32, 40, 42; Norman and, 24–25, 30, 38, 338–39; PORV (pilot-operated release valve) light at, 28, 29; simulated control room at, 39–40; worker pairs at, 41–42 Tibbets, Linden, 297–98 Tilley, Alvin, 88–89, 92, 337 “time is money” metaphor, 133–34, 135 Tinder, 256 TiVo, 163, 342 toothbrushes, 163 Toperator washing machine, 69, 87, 335 touchscreens, 41, 104, 127, 145–47, 343 Toyota, 135 traffic signs, 85 Trion-Z, 217 Trump, Donald, 250, 262, 264–67 trust, 107, 119; in digital assistants, 193–94, 208; self-driving cars and, 114; social mores and, 108, 112, 114; and suit to augment muscles of the elderly, 107–108 Turri, Pellegrino, 199, 205 Tversky, Amos, 96 Twitter, 134, 255, 261, 318 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hal 9000 in, 105, 117 typewriters, 64, 199, 200, 203, 205; QWERTY keyboard for, 332 Uber, 121, 259–60, 287, 355n26 UC San Diego, 23–24 U.K. government, 345, 369n2 understanding, 113, 299; in design, 42, 56, 68, 80, 289; incomplete, 271 UNICEF, 315, 369n2 United Nations, 263, 369n2 United States, 59–63, 93 University of Texas, 244 usability research, 171 user-centered design process, steps in, 305–28; building on existing behavior, 314–17; climbing the ladder of metaphors, 317–19; exposing the inner logic, 319–22; extending the reach, 322–25; form follows emotion, 325–27; making the invisible visible, 311–13; moment of truth, 327–28; starting with the user, 306–308; walking in the user’s shoes, 308–10 “user experience,” first use of term, 22, 338 user-friendly design, 3–11, 87, 95, 96, 163, 180, 245, 257, 261, 264, 269, 273–74, 288, 301–302; Apple advertisements and, 8; behavioral economics and, 96; definition of, 3; Dreyfuss and, 71; future of, 196, 297; milestones in, 331–47; paradox of, 272, 273; practitioner’s perspective on, 302–30; use of term, 4, 7, 9–10, 338; user in, 207, 242; user’s entire journey in, 323, 324 user personas, 178, 207, 261, 341 vacation industry, 238; see also cruise ships; theme parks vacuum cleaners, 157, 158, 172, 173, 286, 339, 370n16 VCRs, 26, 177, 230, 257 Velez, Pete, 19–21, 351n31 Venus Snap, 155 Viemeister, Tucker, 305 Visual Basic, 361n22 Vitruvian Man, 89 Volkswagen, 157, 355n5; self-driving cars, 103–104, 113–14, 117 Volvo, 101 von Hippel, Eric, 184 Wable, Akhil, 248, 249 Walkman, 242, 342 washing machine, 69, 87, 335 watches, 46 Watson, Dave, 137 Watson, John, 81 WeChat, 192 Wedgwood, Josiah, 90 Weiser, Mark, 233, 296, 369n11; “The Coming of Age of Calm Technology,” 341 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 337–38 West, Harry, 286–87 What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), 189 Whyte, William, 167 Wiener, Norbert, 32–33, 36, 42, 336, 369n5 Wizard of Oz technique, 193, 312 women, 63–64 Word, Clippy assistant in, 112 work-arounds, 316 workforce, 44–45 World Bank, 284 World War I, 60–61, 77, 81, 86 World War II, 6, 25, 32, 43, 72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 84–86, 88, 188, 190, 261; airplane crashes in, 77, 81–85, 102–103, 106, 121, 257; B-17 Flying Fortress in, 83–84, 335–36; lost pilots in, 75–78, 86, 87; radar in, 32, 76–79, 83, 87; radio in, 76, 77, 79, 84–85 World Wide Web, 131, 132, 147 Wozniak, Steve, 270 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 371n17 Wu, Tim, 242, 273 Xbox, 197, 205–206 Xerox, 178; Apple and, 8, 139–44, 146 Xerox PARC, 8, 127, 146; Smalltalk system at, 140–44 Yerkes, Robert Mearns, 81 YouTube, 243 Zald, David, 254 Zeigarnik, Bluma Wulfovna, 323 Zuckerberg, Mark, 131, 248, 249, 267–68, 344 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING Find us online and join the conversation Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/penguinukbooks Like us on Facebook facebook.com/penguinbooks Share the love on Instagram instagram.com/penguinukbooks Watch our authors on YouTube youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin Penguin books to your Pinterest pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Listen to audiobook clips at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover your next read at penguin.co.uk This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.


pages: 908 words: 262,808

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Kwajalein Atoll, means of production, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, plutocrats, RAND corporation, South China Sea, technological determinism, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Whereas all the other economies of the war saw budgeting as a rivalry between guns and butter, in the United States the economy grew so vast that there was room for both the largest military and civilian economies in the nation’s history. The Relative GDP of the Major Allied and Axis Powers, 1938–1945 Such American hyperefficiency was largely a result of bringing women and the unemployed into the workforce in record numbers, increasing work hours, improving techniques of mass production, building far larger and more modern factories, stepping up worker productivity, tapping into vast domestic supplies of cheap fossil fuels, and raising and freeing up untold amounts of capital. In contrast, Germany imported far less-productive slave workers to factories that after 1942 were bombed, and was without safe rails and highways or dependable supplies of oil and minerals.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

As they rose to power, they temporarily brought relative stability to parts of the country by outlawing the poppy production, looting, general lawlessness, rape and other crimes against women. Yet in a short time, Afghans started resenting the Taliban’s strict, fundamentalist imposition of Islam and its restrictions on the majority of society, including the banning of education for women, exclusion of women from all sectors of the workforce, persecution of academics and professionals, and violence against targeted minority groups, particularly the Hazaras and the Tajiks. However, the Taliban’s increasing military power enabled them to defeat mujahideen forces all over Afghanistan, and as they gained greater control of territory, more refugees fled their homes (Ruiz, 1996). 176 Nations with Large Immigrant Populations The Rise and Fall of the Taliban (1996 to 2001) The increasing political power of the Taliban culminated in September 1996 with their seizure of Kabul from the Northern Alliance (a group of mujahideen forces that had banded together against the Taliban), and between 1996 and 1999 approximately 900,000 refugees fled to Pakistan despite UNHCR and the World Food Program’s (WFP) decision to end food aid in the camps in Pakistan in 1995 (USCR WRS, 2000; Ruiz, 2002).


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Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Communities also must face the tourism boom舗s nasty side effects of rampant child prostitution and drug addiction. With economic change has come social change. Call it the hamburger effect, but the ubiquitous rice and beans has been upgraded to regular doses of American fast food. Homes are changing, divorce rates have increased and family size has shrunk. More women have entered the workforce though opportunities in the tourism and service sectors. More Ticos are entering higher education while migrant laborers from Nicaragua work the coffee plantations. Rightly or wrongly, immigrants are often blamed for increases in crime, fueling ongoing animosity between Nicas and Ticos.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

In fact, fascist and neofascist movements from Mussolini to Pinochet have recognized the powerful role played by women, particularly when cast in their supposedly “natural” role as mothers and protectors of nationalist traditions and healthy bloodlines (e.g., Giorgia Meloni). Hitler rewarded women deemed of good Aryan stock who agreed to quit the workforce and become baby-making machines. Wolf, with her “10 Easy Steps” she claims every autocratic leader follows, appeared to have missed this historical detail. By the 2022 midterm elections, Wolf would join Bannon in full-blown election denialism, refusing to accept the legitimacy of the results in New York State.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The French Salaire Minimum Interprofessionnel de Croissance (SMIC) is also adjusted annually based on recommendations from the independent National Commission on Collective Bargaining. That commission also has the authority to further increase the SMIC during the year should inflation exceed 2 percent. In 2012, the SMIC was raised 2.3 percent, while inflation was 1.3 percent, meaning wages for the 2.6 million men and women at the bottom rung of the French workforce that year received a 1 percent wage hike in real terms.38 Germany has minimum wages in selected industries and is debating setting a comprehensive nationwide wage because it has the highest proportion of low-wage workers in northern Europe, 20.6 percent in 2010.39 It has also seen a rise in part-time employment and a tripling of temporary work assignments to nearly one million since labor markets were deregulated in 2003.40 A second signal of their importance in family capitalism is that violators of minimum wage laws are aggressively prosecuted, as we learned earlier.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

A firm believer in investing in the personal growth of employees, Lever wrote, “There is an awakening amongst the people for what they know they ought to have . . . and that means development.”11 And he provided it: Lever employees were offered free courses in such subjects as English, foreign languages, accounting, science, and engineering. As the company grew ever more profitable, Lever reduced the workday from eight to six hours—while paternalistically introducing two hours of compulsory education. Perhaps Lever’s most radical, and farsighted, employment practice was gender equality. The women who constituted a high percentage of his workforce were given equal pay for equal work and promoted to management alongside men. They also were provided with safe and sanitary working conditions, and secure separate housing was available for unmarried women. As early as 1903, Lever was a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage, and thirteen years later—a dozen years before all British women over twenty-one were enfranchised—he was publicly backing the cause, saying “The old idea of woman has to go . . . and it can only be done if she receives an equal education in every way and an equal equipment with man.”12 Then there was the dancing!


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

With no shortage of applicants, Abir exploited a dubious privilege of being able to hire on condition that agents increased production at their assigned posts by one-half to two tonnes per month. Production could be increased either by bringing more villages under the control of the posts, or by raising quotas, thus forcing women and children to join the workforce. Both methods were used. Abir exported nearly 1,000 tonnes of rubber in 1903, its peak year, and by 1906 had 47,000 rubber-gatherers listed on its register. By then Abir was recording annual profits of a magnitude that prompted its directors to remark that ‘such a result is perhaps without precedent in the annals of our industrial companies’.68 The result of these excesses was nothing if not predictable.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

This latter idea is particularly important, as cleaning, child care, cooking, and many other domestic tasks that are labor-intensive and time-consuming have long been diminished as not “real” work. That, in turn, helps to hollow support for feminist movements, the rights of homemakers, and a strong social safety net which, for example, would provide child-care services that would allow women to put aside their domestic labor and enter the paid workforce. The sharing economy is loaded with shadow work, which you might discover when you learn you’re required to clean out your Zipcar but not the (similarly priced) rental from Hertz or Enterprise. Shadow work also includes many tasks—driving, paying for gas, maintaining equipment, buying office supplies to make up for a budget shortfall—that hit poor people hardest.



pages: 1,509 words: 416,377

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Forty-five percent in 1981, according to the Souths National Unification Board. By 1989 (as demographers Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister reported in North Korea: Population Trends and Prospects [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990]), the far greater participation of women in the North’s workforce was reflected in a total participation rate for both men and women of 78.5 percent. That compares with an official South Korean workforce participation rate for the same year of 58.3 percent (Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas in Development, p. 92). 11. This factory evidently was one of the installations most frequently visited by the Great Leader.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

The ‘Electric Painting Machine’ was used at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and was described as enabling three men to do the work of twenty. A photograph shows the machine to have been much as Crass describes: <http:// columbus.gl.iit.edu/dreamcity/00034032.html> ‘Another thing is women’: working-class women made up a significant part of the workforce during the nineteenth century as domestic servants, mill workers, and as wives of farmers and shop owners. Towards the end of the century, middle-class, particularly single, women started to take up employment as clerks, typists, and shop assistants, while others agitated for entry into the professions.





pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Though women make up almost 60 percent of university students and about half of the students majoring in many fields of science, the proportion advancing to the next career stage diminishes as they go from being undergraduates to graduate students to postdoctoral fellows to junior professors to tenured professors. Women make up less than 20 percent of the workforce in science, engineering, and technology development, and only 9 percent of the workforce in engineering.57 Readers of the flagship journals Science and Nature have seen two decades of headlines such as “Diversity: Easier Said Than Done” and “Efforts to Boost Diversity Face Persistent Problems.”58 A typical story, commenting on the many national commissions set up to investigate the problem, said, “These activities are meant to continue chipping away at a problem that, experts say, begins with negative messages in elementary school, continues through undergraduate and graduate programs that erect barriers—financial, academic, and cultural—to all but the best candidates, and persists into the workplace.”59 A meeting in 2001 of the presidents of nine elite American universities called for “significant changes,” such as setting aside grants and fellowships for women faculty, giving them the best parking spaces on campus, and ensuring that the percentage of women faculty equals the percentage of women students.60 But there is something odd in these stories about negative messages, hidden barriers, and gender prejudices.



pages: 2,020 words: 267,411

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer, Paula Hardy

air freight, Airbnb, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, Day of the Dead, Dr. Strangelove, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, place-making, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

As of 2004, Morocco’s Mudawanna legal code guarantees women crucial rights with regard to custody, divorce, property ownership and child support, among other protections. Positive social pressure has greatly reduced the once-common practice of hiring girls under 14 years of age as domestic workers, and initiatives to eliminate female illiteracy are giving girls a better start in life. Women now represent nearly a third of Morocco’s formal workforce, forming their own industrial unions, agricultural cooperatives and artisans’ collectives. The modern Moroccan woman’s outlook extends far beyond her front door, and women visitors will meet Moroccan women eager to chat, compare life experiences and share perspectives on world events.


Greece by Korina Miller

car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, flag carrier, Google Earth, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, invention of the printing press, pension reform, period drama, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Old attitudes towards the ‘proper role’ for women have changed dramatically since the 1980s, when dowry laws were abolished, legal equality of the sexes established and divorce made easier. While there have been many benefits for mothers in the public sector (such as leaving work earlier to pick up school children and earlier retirement for women with school-age children), Greek women generally do it tough in the male-dominated workplace. Women are significantly under-represented in the workforce compared with their EU or international counterparts, often earning less than men and struggling to even find the corporate ladder. There are capable women in prominent positions in business and government, though more often than not they also happen to be the wives or daughters of prominent or wealthy men.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

13 There were political risks in asking for a figure bigger than $1 trillion. But there were risks to undershooting as well. By 2010, America’s unemployment was still stuck above 10 percent. Foreclosures and forced sales were destroying entire communities. Millions of young people left schools and colleges without jobs. Men and women in the prime of life were shut out of the workforce. Many would not return. In the elections of 2010 and 2012 the Democrats fought on the back foot against the backdrop of a limping economy and resurgent Republican activism. They retained the presidency but lost control of Congress. Obama’s administration never built the constituency of Democrats-for-life that was shaped by Roosevelt’s New Deal.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In 1966, the National Organization of Women (NOW) was founded in response to this rebuff. Its president was Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique gave voice to a generation of women who felt marginalized by both workplace practices and the expectations of home-making.52 Women were steadily becoming a vital part of the American workforce (40 percent by the start of the 1970s) and were increasingly disinclined to accept second-rate pay and conditions. Friedan was an effective publicist and used her role as the head of what was a relatively small organization to gain media attention for her views and those of her colleagues.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Given impending Italian elections and a brewing scandal involving ‘Papi’ Berlusconi and a teenage starlet, this move was not the most media-savvy: the EU parliamentary selections were broadly denounced in Italy’s press, and Berlusconi’s party suffered significant losses at the polls. * * * Return to beginning of chapter THE PEOPLE Who are the people you’d encounter every day as an Italian? On average, about half your co-workers will be women — quite a change from 10 years ago, when women represented just a quarter of the workforce. But a growing proportion of the people you’ll meet are already retired. One out of five Italians is over 65, which explains the septuagenarians you’ll notice on parade with dogs and grandchildren in parks, affably arguing about politics in cafes, and ruthlessly dominating bocce tournaments.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

As in other parts of Asia, life revolves around the family; there are often several generations living under one roof. Poverty, and the transition from a largely agricultural society to that of a more industrialised nation, sends many people seeking their fortune to the bigger cities, and is changing the structure of the modern family unit. Women make up 52% of the nation’s workforce but are not well represented in positions of power. Vietnam’s population is 84% ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) and 2% ethnic Chinese; the rest is made up of Khmers, Chams and members of more than 50 minority people, who mainly live in highland areas. * * * THE NORTH–SOUTH DIVIDE The North–South divide lingers.