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A Layman's Explanation of the Current Financial Crisis
Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Berlin. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).
Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood Into Heidi's bar.
Taking advantage of her customers' freedom from immediate payment constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.
A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank Recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit.
He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral.
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed.
Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the securities become top-selling items.
One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager (subsequently of course fired due his negativity) of the bank decides that slowly the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar.
However they cannot pay back the debts.
Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy.
DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95 %. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %.
The suppliers of Heidi's bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new situation.
Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor.
The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties.
The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied against the non-drinkers.
Showing posts with label America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label America. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2009
51st State? American trends challenge British ways
LONDON – Anyone searching for a sepia-tinted rugby photo, antique cuff links or a precious piece of art deco jewelry at the Antiquarius Center had better come fast.
Blink and it will be gone. The dozens of diverse, very British shops on the chic King's Road in Chelsea face eviction to make way for Anthropologie, an American-based chain planning an American fashion emporium, much like the stores it operates in St. Louis and Miami Beach.
"There used to be three antique centers in Chelsea, soon there will be none," said Sue Norman, who has sold hand-painted 19th-Century china here since 1972. "I think it's very sad. It seems the younger generation much prefers American-style things to English style."
The pending loss of the Antiquarius Center is part of the wider, inexorable Americanization of Britain, where rich veins of eccentricity are being snipped as American customs catch on.
Remember the dapper English gentleman? Shoes polished and dressed to the nines? He's often found in blue jeans, an open shirt, and sneakers these days.
And those bad English teeth, neglected for years? Tooth-whitening is catching on, a l'americaine. There has been a surge of cosmetic surgeries as more women — and teenagers — embrace the Hollywood ideal and have their breasts enhanced and wrinkles Botoxed. Pillbox psychiatry is catching on too, with record numbers gobbling antidepressants, and Britons are turning to fast food at such an alarming pace that obesity among young people is reaching epidemic proportions.
A Prozac-popping, surgically enhanced nation of overweight slobs? Sometimes it seems dear olde England could almost be the 51st state.
The cultural mood is changing along with the physical landscape. Harried British physicians are more likely than ever to prescribe antidepressants, in part because the waiting list for individual psychological therapy under the government-run National Health Service is so long. The mental health charity MIND reports that roughly 34 million prescriptions were written in Britain in 2007, more than a 20 percent increase over the 27 million prescribed just two years earlier.
Alison Cobb, senior policy director at MIND, said publicity from America is an important reason why growing numbers of British doctors turn to antidepressants as a first resort.
"Part of it is the literature and endorsement message we were getting from the USA," she said. "In terms of the profile, and the brand recognition, with Prozac in particular, there was an American influence in that."
Another factor is the public's increasing desire to seek treatment for depression rather than endure it with typical British stoicism. The days of the "stiff upper lip" seem numbered.
Attitudes toward cosmetic surgery have also evolved. The nonprofit British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reports the number of operations has more than tripled since 2003, with breast augmentation increasing by 30 percent in the last year alone.
And British men are turning to the scalpel. There were only 22 male breast reductions in 2003, but that figure rose to 323 last year as more men sought a sculpted look.
Much-maligned British dentistry is changing too.
It's long been a national stereotype that many Brits have awful teeth made worse by years of neglect. There's a tendency to postpone trips to the dentist until there is a real emergency, but in recent years the use of cosmetic dental techniques pioneered in America has increased.
Dr. Jonathan Portner, a spokesman for the British Dental Association, said there is still a push to inform many Britons about the need for regular appointments and the harm caused by a sugary diet, but at the same time there has been a new zest for the use of implants, veneers, advanced orthodontics, and tooth-whitening. The goal for many, he said, is a Tom Cruise-style Hollywood smile.
Some of his adult patients did not have orthodontic work when they were young — it was not common in Britain several decades ago — and are having the work done now.
"Things have changed," said Portner. "There is a lot more elective dentistry now. People are more concerned about the appearance of their smile and the color of their teeth and the impact it has on their social life and careers and general confidence. I'm finding my male patients are more vain than the women."
The British are also eating more American fast food. The fast food chain KFC, for one, already has more than 700 chicken restaurants here, with plans to add another 200 to 300 in the next five years. Sales are up 14 percent so far this year despite the economic gloom.
Health officials in Britain blame the popularity of American-style fast food for a startling rise in childhood obesity. One of three British schoolchildren is either overweight or obese by the time they enter high school, said Tam Fry, spokesman for the National Obesity Forum.
"It is basically your U.S. fast food, which is mass processed, available everywhere, and probably comes out of some factory in Illinois," he said. "It is breaking all the rules in terms of fat, sugar and salt."
The trend toward Americanization is not new: In 1925, Time Magazine reported that dollar-rich American financiers had invaded London, infusing the postwar British capital with "American engineering and American habits and customs." But it's picked up pace in the last decade, said Mark Glancy, a history professor at the University of London who has written about the impact of Hollywood films on the British psyche.
"It's much more Americanized now, because it's so much more affluent," he said. "People's purchasing power has gone up so dramatically in the last 10 or 15 years that they've become very caught up in the American consumer lifestyle."
He said the British infatuation with Hollywood movies — dating back to the silent film era — has shaped the public's view of glamour and style and given Britons a taste for American rebels who challenge authority.
"There are different values at work in American films," he said. "Authority in British films is respected, not challenged — partly because of British film censorship — and American films tend to challenge authority and make heroes out of ordinary people."
Today it is American urban music — primarily rap — that is setting the style agenda for British youth, Glancy said.
"The low-cut baggy jeans, the gold chains, the rap style, really extends to a huge swath of British people under 20," he said. "It's a defiance of middle class values."
It's hard to tell how far the Americanization will go, and whether it's only skin deep, essentially a fashion statement.
After all, church attendance is still very low in Britain compared to the United States, and U.S. sports have not caught on — nothing can dent Britain's passion for soccer, rugby and cricket. Tea remains very popular despite the proliferation of U.S.-style coffee bars.
But in general the move toward American ways is clear, and not just in London but also in the towns and cities of the bucolic British countryside.
Michael Harling, an American who moved to the town of Horsham in West Sussex 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of London, said small, quirky British shops have gradually been replaced by chain stores and burger shops, including many of American origin.
Most upsetting, he said, is the loss of all but one of the town's tea shops.
"It's becoming like America in that you have the same McDonald's and the same stores in every town," said Harling, author of "Postcards from across The Pond."
"It's hard to stop this American invasion because people like fast food and cheap stuff, but it's very sad. If I had wanted that, I would have stayed in America."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090411/ap_on_re_eu/eu_americanization_spreads
LONDON – Anyone searching for a sepia-tinted rugby photo, antique cuff links or a precious piece of art deco jewelry at the Antiquarius Center had better come fast.
Blink and it will be gone. The dozens of diverse, very British shops on the chic King's Road in Chelsea face eviction to make way for Anthropologie, an American-based chain planning an American fashion emporium, much like the stores it operates in St. Louis and Miami Beach.
"There used to be three antique centers in Chelsea, soon there will be none," said Sue Norman, who has sold hand-painted 19th-Century china here since 1972. "I think it's very sad. It seems the younger generation much prefers American-style things to English style."
The pending loss of the Antiquarius Center is part of the wider, inexorable Americanization of Britain, where rich veins of eccentricity are being snipped as American customs catch on.
Remember the dapper English gentleman? Shoes polished and dressed to the nines? He's often found in blue jeans, an open shirt, and sneakers these days.
And those bad English teeth, neglected for years? Tooth-whitening is catching on, a l'americaine. There has been a surge of cosmetic surgeries as more women — and teenagers — embrace the Hollywood ideal and have their breasts enhanced and wrinkles Botoxed. Pillbox psychiatry is catching on too, with record numbers gobbling antidepressants, and Britons are turning to fast food at such an alarming pace that obesity among young people is reaching epidemic proportions.
A Prozac-popping, surgically enhanced nation of overweight slobs? Sometimes it seems dear olde England could almost be the 51st state.
The cultural mood is changing along with the physical landscape. Harried British physicians are more likely than ever to prescribe antidepressants, in part because the waiting list for individual psychological therapy under the government-run National Health Service is so long. The mental health charity MIND reports that roughly 34 million prescriptions were written in Britain in 2007, more than a 20 percent increase over the 27 million prescribed just two years earlier.
Alison Cobb, senior policy director at MIND, said publicity from America is an important reason why growing numbers of British doctors turn to antidepressants as a first resort.
"Part of it is the literature and endorsement message we were getting from the USA," she said. "In terms of the profile, and the brand recognition, with Prozac in particular, there was an American influence in that."
Another factor is the public's increasing desire to seek treatment for depression rather than endure it with typical British stoicism. The days of the "stiff upper lip" seem numbered.
Attitudes toward cosmetic surgery have also evolved. The nonprofit British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reports the number of operations has more than tripled since 2003, with breast augmentation increasing by 30 percent in the last year alone.
And British men are turning to the scalpel. There were only 22 male breast reductions in 2003, but that figure rose to 323 last year as more men sought a sculpted look.
Much-maligned British dentistry is changing too.
It's long been a national stereotype that many Brits have awful teeth made worse by years of neglect. There's a tendency to postpone trips to the dentist until there is a real emergency, but in recent years the use of cosmetic dental techniques pioneered in America has increased.
Dr. Jonathan Portner, a spokesman for the British Dental Association, said there is still a push to inform many Britons about the need for regular appointments and the harm caused by a sugary diet, but at the same time there has been a new zest for the use of implants, veneers, advanced orthodontics, and tooth-whitening. The goal for many, he said, is a Tom Cruise-style Hollywood smile.
Some of his adult patients did not have orthodontic work when they were young — it was not common in Britain several decades ago — and are having the work done now.
"Things have changed," said Portner. "There is a lot more elective dentistry now. People are more concerned about the appearance of their smile and the color of their teeth and the impact it has on their social life and careers and general confidence. I'm finding my male patients are more vain than the women."
The British are also eating more American fast food. The fast food chain KFC, for one, already has more than 700 chicken restaurants here, with plans to add another 200 to 300 in the next five years. Sales are up 14 percent so far this year despite the economic gloom.
Health officials in Britain blame the popularity of American-style fast food for a startling rise in childhood obesity. One of three British schoolchildren is either overweight or obese by the time they enter high school, said Tam Fry, spokesman for the National Obesity Forum.
"It is basically your U.S. fast food, which is mass processed, available everywhere, and probably comes out of some factory in Illinois," he said. "It is breaking all the rules in terms of fat, sugar and salt."
The trend toward Americanization is not new: In 1925, Time Magazine reported that dollar-rich American financiers had invaded London, infusing the postwar British capital with "American engineering and American habits and customs." But it's picked up pace in the last decade, said Mark Glancy, a history professor at the University of London who has written about the impact of Hollywood films on the British psyche.
"It's much more Americanized now, because it's so much more affluent," he said. "People's purchasing power has gone up so dramatically in the last 10 or 15 years that they've become very caught up in the American consumer lifestyle."
He said the British infatuation with Hollywood movies — dating back to the silent film era — has shaped the public's view of glamour and style and given Britons a taste for American rebels who challenge authority.
"There are different values at work in American films," he said. "Authority in British films is respected, not challenged — partly because of British film censorship — and American films tend to challenge authority and make heroes out of ordinary people."
Today it is American urban music — primarily rap — that is setting the style agenda for British youth, Glancy said.
"The low-cut baggy jeans, the gold chains, the rap style, really extends to a huge swath of British people under 20," he said. "It's a defiance of middle class values."
It's hard to tell how far the Americanization will go, and whether it's only skin deep, essentially a fashion statement.
After all, church attendance is still very low in Britain compared to the United States, and U.S. sports have not caught on — nothing can dent Britain's passion for soccer, rugby and cricket. Tea remains very popular despite the proliferation of U.S.-style coffee bars.
But in general the move toward American ways is clear, and not just in London but also in the towns and cities of the bucolic British countryside.
Michael Harling, an American who moved to the town of Horsham in West Sussex 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of London, said small, quirky British shops have gradually been replaced by chain stores and burger shops, including many of American origin.
Most upsetting, he said, is the loss of all but one of the town's tea shops.
"It's becoming like America in that you have the same McDonald's and the same stores in every town," said Harling, author of "Postcards from across The Pond."
"It's hard to stop this American invasion because people like fast food and cheap stuff, but it's very sad. If I had wanted that, I would have stayed in America."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090411/ap_on_re_eu/eu_americanization_spreads
Saturday, February 28, 2009
On Demand Workforce: Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Amazon has made deep forays into the cloud computing arena with EC2 & S3 services that were launched some time ago. Now, expanding the horizons of the cloud computing arena further, Amazon is introducing an on demand workforce platform for all tasks that require human intervention, precisely like the BPO work done by outsourcers.
After Standoff, Calif. Reaches Budget Deal
Legislators Patch Nation's Largest Shortfall
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 20, 2009; A01
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 19 -- In a pre-dawn bargain, California legislators on Thursday passed a budget that closes a $42 billion hole, the worst state budget shortfall in U.S. history, after spending 45 straight hours locked in the Capitol trying to find a solution.
The drama in Sacramento served as a warning to other states that their budget problems have the potential to turn into full-blown crises.
While some of the issues are unique to California, nearly all states are feeling pressure from falling revenue and rising costs as tax collections decline and demand for services increases. At least 46 states are facing shortfalls this year or next, and the combined budget gaps are estimated to total more than $350 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Lawmakers in California finally reached a deal after bowing to the demands of a moderate Senate Republican, whose price was a ballot measure allowing voters to opt to loosen the state's restrictive primary election laws.
"These reforms were possible because we were in a crisis," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) said afterward. "And as I've always said . . . crises also provide opportunities."
Many state offices will still be shuttered Friday, in keeping with Schwarzenegger's decision to furlough all 238,000 state employees two days a month. The budget deal calls for $1.4 billion in savings from employee compensation, and negotiations are underway with unions that will help determine how to achieve the savings.
The deal includes tax increases that are designed to expire in two years, underscoring the temporary nature of the patch. But analysts warn that California faces the prospect of chronic revenue shortfalls, grounded in some ways in Proposition 13, the taxpayer revolt that 30 years ago put a cap on property taxes and made the state more reliant on income tax revenue, which rises and falls with the economy.
"California's revenues are extra sensitive to the health of the economy," said Jed Kolko, associate director of research at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, in a December interview. "Most states are running a budget shortfall right now, but the degree of the crisis is so much greater in California."
Analysts also fault California lawmakers for writing a new budget each year rather than adopting a multiyear process that sets targets.
With an economy larger than those of all but seven nations, California lumbered into the downturn carrying the nation's biggest revenue shortfall, in terms of dollars as well as percentages.
Already hit harder than any other state's by the housing slide, the California treasury took a huge blow when the stock market dived, cutting by more than half its projections of revenue from the wedge of wealthy taxpayers who provide an outsize portion of revenue.
Revenue from capital gains -- the 9 percent that California takes from the sale of a stock or property -- accounted for 11.5 percent of the state's general fund in the past fiscal year. That was estimated to drop to 5 percent in the current year and lower still the next.
Then-Gov. Gray Davis (D) faced a similar shortfall after the tech bubble burst in 2001, causing the torrent of tax revenue flowing out of Silicon Valley to drop precipitously.
"I think a lot of people would say that California never really fully addressed the problem from 2001, which was that they had an upturn in revenues largely fueled by stock options and capital gains, and that evaporated fairly quickly," said Tracy Gordon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, who studied the California economy for seven years.
Schwarzenegger swept into office more than five years ago after angry voters recalled Davis for his handling of the budget crisis, one less forbidding than the current shortfall. Analysts noted that among the $12 billion in taxes that Schwarzenegger negotiated with Democrats this week was a doubling of the very tax that more than anything hastened Davis's departure from office. The budget package, which Schwarzenegger promised to sign Friday, will double the state's infamous car tax to 1.15 percent.
It will also raise the state income tax by a point, to 8.25 percent, and impose a 2.5 percent surcharge on income tax bills. The $15 billion in spending cuts come mostly from education. The balance of the patch will come from borrowing and California's share of the federal stimulus.
New York is in the next worst budget condition after California, with Gov. David A. Paterson (D) locked in negotiations with the Democratic-controlled legislature over how to plug a looming $13 billion deficit, which could total $48 billion over several years. Paterson has proposed painful cuts to health-care funding and education, but some members of the General Assembly favor a tax increase on the wealthy.
Like the federal stimulus, the California package passed with only three GOP votes in the legislature's upper chamber. But the narrative gave Schwarzenegger a fresh opportunity to talk about bipartisanship, a favorite topic. Last year he championed the passage by voters of Proposition 11, which calls for legislative districts to be drawn by an expert panel, rather than lawmakers.
The budget deal could lead to the next step in election reform. In exchange for supporting it, GOP Sen. Abel Maldonado won a promise to let voters opt for "open primaries."
Open primaries, if conducted as in Washington state, would replace party primaries with a single primary, with the top two vote-getters proceeding to the general election. Depending on how the rules are written, candidates might be able to choose whether to be identified by party; in Washington state, they can pick their own phrase.
"We've got to bring people to the center," Schwarzenegger said after the deal was reached. "We have legislators that are so out to the right and so far out to the left, it's very hard to get them together."
Democratic lawmakers resisted the change, saying it was too dramatic to be considered in the eleventh hour of a budget crisis. But Bruce Cain, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, said open primaries tend to help incumbents -- chiefly because, on a crowded or confusing ballot, name familiarity is paramount.
Students of California government point to other structural issues that make the state less than a model, including the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority to pass a budget.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021900462.html
Is It Time to Name This Recession?
By Stephen J. DubnerAs evidenced by this chart from the betting site Intrade, the probability of Slumdog Millionaire winning the Oscar for Best Picture has risen over the past two months right along with the probability that 2009 will be a year of recession (i.e., two negative quarters of G.D.P.):
This correlation isn’t meaningful in any way. Lots of things rise (or fall) in lockstep all the time without having anything to do with one another. Intrade sent this picture around just for kicks, pointing out the presence of “a feel-good movie for feel-bad markets.”
But it did get me to thinking. However you want to characterize this economic storm we’re living through — Gordon Brown “mistakenly” called it a depression while Richard Posner has called it a depression outright — the fact is that it doesn’t yet have a proper name, just as many historic events don’t have a name until long after the fact.
I am now wondering if “Slumdog,” a new word that has burst into public consciousness, shouldn’t be the name, or at least part of it. It’s got the requisite feel-bad connotations — slums, dogs, etc. Are we living through the Great Slumdog? The Slumdog Recession/Depression? The Day of the Slumdog?
Source: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/is-it-time-to-name-this-recession/
To the citizens of the United States of America |
Monday, January 5, 2009
Bushisms over the years
By The Associated Press
President George W. Bush will leave behind a legacy of Bushisms, the label stamped on the commander in chief's original speaking style. Some of the president's more notable malaprops and mangled statements:
___
• "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." — September 2000, explaining his energy policies at an event in Michigan.
• "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?" — January 2000, during a campaign event in South Carolina.
• "They misunderestimated the compassion of our country. I think they misunderestimated the will and determination of the commander in chief, too." — Sept. 26, 2001, in Langley, Va. Bush was referring to the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
• "There's no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail." — Oct. 4, 2001, in Washington. Bush was remarking on a back-to-work plan after the terrorist attacks.
• "It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." — April 10, 2002, at the White House, as Bush urged Senate passage of a broad ban on cloning.
• "I want to thank the dozens of welfare-to-work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves." — April 18, 2002, at the White House.
• "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." — Sept. 17, 2002, in Nashville, Tenn.
• "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." — Aug. 5, 2004, at the signing ceremony for a defense spending bill.
• "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." — Sept. 6, 2004, at a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo.
• "Our most abundant energy source is coal. We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge." — April 20, 2005, in Washington.
• "We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job." — Sept. 20, 2005, in Gulfport, Miss.
• "I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs." — Sept. 5, 2005, when Bush met with residents of Poplarville, Miss., in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
• "It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship. After all, 60 years we were at war 60 years ago we were at war." — June 29, 2006, at the White House, where Bush met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
• "Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." — Dec. 7, 2006, in a joint appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
• "These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved." — June 11, 2007, in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• "Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction. Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit." — September 2007, in Sydney, Australia, where Bush was attending an APEC summit.
• "Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome speech." April 16, 2008, at a ceremony welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to the White House.
• "The fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." — May 27, 2008, in Mesa, Ariz.
• "And they have no disregard for human life." — July 15, 2008, at the White House. Bush was referring to enemy fighters in Afghanistan.
• "I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office." — June 26, 2008, during a Rose Garden news briefing.
• "Throughout our history, the words of the Declaration have inspired immigrants from around the world to set sail to our shores. These immigrants have helped transform 13 small colonies into a great and growing nation of more than 300 people." — July 4, 2008 in Virginia.
• "The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country there's a lot of prayer — prayer for those whose lives have been turned upside down. And I'm one of them. It's good to come down here." — Sept. 3, 2008, at an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., after Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast.
• "This thaw — took a while to thaw, it's going to take a while to unthaw." Oct. 20, 2008, in Alexandria, La., as he discussed the economy and frozen credit markets.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090103/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bushisms
By The Associated Press
President George W. Bush will leave behind a legacy of Bushisms, the label stamped on the commander in chief's original speaking style. Some of the president's more notable malaprops and mangled statements:
___
• "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." — September 2000, explaining his energy policies at an event in Michigan.
• "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?" — January 2000, during a campaign event in South Carolina.
• "They misunderestimated the compassion of our country. I think they misunderestimated the will and determination of the commander in chief, too." — Sept. 26, 2001, in Langley, Va. Bush was referring to the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
• "There's no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail." — Oct. 4, 2001, in Washington. Bush was remarking on a back-to-work plan after the terrorist attacks.
• "It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." — April 10, 2002, at the White House, as Bush urged Senate passage of a broad ban on cloning.
• "I want to thank the dozens of welfare-to-work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves." — April 18, 2002, at the White House.
• "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." — Sept. 17, 2002, in Nashville, Tenn.
• "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." — Aug. 5, 2004, at the signing ceremony for a defense spending bill.
• "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." — Sept. 6, 2004, at a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo.
• "Our most abundant energy source is coal. We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge." — April 20, 2005, in Washington.
• "We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job." — Sept. 20, 2005, in Gulfport, Miss.
• "I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs." — Sept. 5, 2005, when Bush met with residents of Poplarville, Miss., in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
• "It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship. After all, 60 years we were at war 60 years ago we were at war." — June 29, 2006, at the White House, where Bush met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
• "Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." — Dec. 7, 2006, in a joint appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
• "These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved." — June 11, 2007, in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• "Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction. Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit." — September 2007, in Sydney, Australia, where Bush was attending an APEC summit.
• "Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome speech." April 16, 2008, at a ceremony welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to the White House.
• "The fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." — May 27, 2008, in Mesa, Ariz.
• "And they have no disregard for human life." — July 15, 2008, at the White House. Bush was referring to enemy fighters in Afghanistan.
• "I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office." — June 26, 2008, during a Rose Garden news briefing.
• "Throughout our history, the words of the Declaration have inspired immigrants from around the world to set sail to our shores. These immigrants have helped transform 13 small colonies into a great and growing nation of more than 300 people." — July 4, 2008 in Virginia.
• "The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country there's a lot of prayer — prayer for those whose lives have been turned upside down. And I'm one of them. It's good to come down here." — Sept. 3, 2008, at an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., after Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast.
• "This thaw — took a while to thaw, it's going to take a while to unthaw." Oct. 20, 2008, in Alexandria, La., as he discussed the economy and frozen credit markets.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090103/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bushisms
New Impacts on Outsourcing in 2009
By Kathleen Goolsby
New impacts on outsourcing in 2009 include service-oriented architecture (SOA), service provider "DNA," green IT, the changing role of physicians, and what the future holds because of the convergence of technology and business process. This article looks at what you need to know about each of these impacts.
Service-Oriented Architecture
"I'm really excited about SOA," says Gianni Giacomelli, head of BPO Strategy and Marketing, SAP. "Conceptually, it's a revolution in outsourcing that will take it to the next level."
Software implementations today are constrained by yesterday's way of writing code. As Giacomelli explains, software developers wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code that, together, handle a business process (such as finance and accounting). But the code is not clearly segmented into functions or subprocesses (such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, collections, general ledger, and fixed assets). It's often difficult to take out the lines of code for subprocesses and give them to another company. And, at times, companies have to implement an entire system even if they only want to use one segment of the code.
In contrast, SOA makes the code accessible in pieces, so to speak, that are very easy to map to business subprocesses. So if a company only wants to implement a system for collections or a system for the general ledger, for example, SOA enables that option.
"By being able to do that, you enable one simple thing: specialization," explains Giacomelli. He compares it to automobile manufacturers that use subcontractors to build almost of the components that make up a car. "Those components became a natural breeding ground for organizations that are specialized in doing specific things such as making brakes or transmissions. Without specialization, we wouldn't be able to have cars that cost what they do today. Cars were expensive and extremely rudimentary decades ago because there was no specialization in the components in the car."
SOA has the potential to generate that specialization in the outsourcing industry because it enables providers to take much more granular pieces of a process and concentrate on them. "By concentrating only on one piece or on a few pieces, service providers can actually choose the ones in which they are really, really good, the ones in which they really can create significant economies of scale for 100 or 200 customers," says the SAP exec.
That's a value proposition that Giacomelli points out is still sometimes lacking in BPO today. "Many providers are not bringing to the fore significantly different economies of scale that the client can't replicate because many providers have at best only a handful of clients running on the same platform."
What are the implications for buyers of outsourcing services? The risk and difficulty of outsourcing subprocesses will be much lower. "The connection points between the piece the buyer moved out and gave to the provider and the rest of the retained subprocesses are going to be very clear because they are mapped into the software. It's almost like taking a Lego piece out of a structure; it still recombines fairly well with the rest because the connection points are very regular. SOA is also great for making new and improved pieces fit with the rest of the structure; there's less pain with enhancement, upgrades, and ultimately innovation."
The ideal scenario is one where both the buyer and provider have SOA so that they can communicate in the best way and so there is a minimum amount of "stranded assets" on the client side. "But the reality is most clients don't have SOA in their landscape today for most of the processes. It's changing, and there's a wave of adoption today; however, broader adoption will follow the rhythm of upgrades, so it will take 10 years," says Giacomelli. "This said, the fact that the provider is already able to use SOA on its end to build very focused 'droplets' of subfunctions is game-changing."
The big advantage of SOA in outsourcing is a win-win for buyers and providers. Giacomelli points out, "With SOA, the BPO provider needs to implement and run only a specific piece of the entire application landscape (such as the collections piece of the accounts receivable process). Therefore, the implementation will be much less complex, less lengthy (and costly) than traditional implementations."
Provider DNA
"I think that the biggest thing in the outsourcing landscape over the next year or two is going to be the expectation of the customers of a much different DNA in the suppliers that they work with in the outsourcing space." That's the belief of Keith Higgins, vice president of Worldwide Marketing, at Aricent, a global innovation, technology, and outsourcing company focused exclusively on the communications industry.
In an age where user experience and consumer demands dictate product development, companies are under pressure to innovate and get to market a lot faster than ever before.
"We're moving from cost arbitrage to skills arbitrage," claims Higgins. This is different from the DNA required for just being the recipient of a client's to-do list and doing it globally at lower cost. Outsourcing providers are now moving up the value chain and product life cycle all the way to the whiteboard."
As clients ask for innovation, industry domain expertise will be "paramount to selecting the right outsourcing partner." It will enable more streamlined expertise for the buyer. Higgins believes the trillion-dollar outsourcing market will soon fragment into players focused on domain expertise.
"It will be the death of the mile-wide inch-deep outsourcing deals," he says. "You can't be a jack of all trades in the outsourcing space." He predicts that domain expertise will be a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more customers a provider has in one domain, the better the provider "gets it," and the more customers the provider will gain.
Neeraj Bhargava, CEO of WNS Global Services, agrees. "Successful providers are going to have greater industry specialization." He says the DNA of offshore providers will also change. "The successful offshore companies will add more value by combining their talent with technologies." According to Bhargava, offshore providers like WNS have the momentum of growth at 40 percent per year for the past five years. Now they're adding higher value-added areas such as research and analytics to their DNA. "Areas such as financial research, marketing analysis, and procurement analysis are growing rapidly in the offshore market," says Bhargava.
Debra Kops, chief marketing officer, WNS Global Services, also lists the changing provider DNA as a new impact on outsourcing in the coming year. "What's driving the increased focus on vertical domain expertise is the need for the provider to understand the buyer's industry challenges and changes in business volumes. An example is knowing the context of billing in the utilities industry along with conversion rates and need for accuracy of meter reading."
Changing role of physicians
Look for a new spin on clinical help desks next year. New opportunities for outsourcing are developing in the physician community, according to Greg Baugh, senior director of operations, Siemens. Business processes in hospitals are changing, and physicians' roles are changing, requiring them to do more things in hospitals. For instance, in an effort to reduce medical errors, hospitals are implementing systems that require physicians to take accountability and place their orders themselves instead of having other clinicians do it for them.
"Outsourcers will need to change the way they provide help desk services and on-site services to physicians. We need to help the physicians do what's now being required of them. Physicians can't delay their work while they're held up with IT issues. They need support right away and expect answers immediately."
Physicians are also getting more involved with the electronic medical records (EMR). As companies sell them ambulatory products to handle the EMR, it will create new opportunities for outsourcing services in support of those products.
Green IT
"Companies are really taking up the charge of responsibility to the environment and to society at large," says Arthur Mazor, senior vice president, Offering Management & Marketing, Fidelity HR Services. Fidelity is finding that most companies seeking to create outsourcing engagements are now including interest in and requirements around environmental sustainability contributions in their evaluation criteria for service providers.
"We're finding that this is a significant impact on the way that outsourcing providers must think about and execute their business strategies, solutions, infrastructure footprint, and usage of resources that are environmentally friendly."
According to Mazor, many buyers' RFIs, RFPs, and questions from analysts and sourcing advisors guiding clients are now requiring providers to demonstrate their positions and environmental contributions. The environmental issue is starting to manifest itself in companies requiring electronic distribution and collection of RFPs.
Mazor says the "big question" is to what degree companies will weight the RFP questions related to environmental sustainability compared to the rest of the provider evaluation. "I think that's something that companies are wresting with," he says.
Bob Pryor, senior vice president, Sales and Marketing, HP Outsourcing Services, agrees that the influence of environmentalism in terms of "green" IT is a significant trend shaping the industry today. He ties it together with pressures on data centers for reducing costs of energy and cooling. "These two issues are tightly connected now."
"We're seeing very significant trends in this past year about what customers are asking for and the issues they are facing regarding their data centers not being able to handle the higher demands for power and cooling, especially in higher density environments," says Pryor. Customers are asking about solutions for energy management, conservation, preservation, and alternative energy sources as well as seeking understanding on whether they should build solutions with their own capital, outsource, or do a combination of both.
Convergence of technology and business process
"Although it's happening in pockets, the trend around the convergence of technology and business process hasn't quite taken hold yet. But it's ultimately the new area in outsourcing," predicts Pryor.
In this emerging model, customers move away from doing everything in an isolated pocket (for example, buy an application from one company, outsource computing capacity from another, and outsource accounting to another company). In the model Pryor favors, customers demand and expect that one company "could provide them all of their business process services with all of the people, expertise, and enabling technology and all bundled back to them at a price however they want it (per customer, per volume, per certain service units, the way they bill their customers, etc.)."
"Combining all of these pieces is an early step in offering on-demand services over the Internet," says Pryor. While cloud computing (including the SaaS model as one component) is "a profound trend in the marketplace today," he believes it will take a while before suppliers can deliver everything as a service from an outsourcing standpoint.
"I think you'll see aspects or components of it in outsourcing within the next three to five years," predicts Pryor. The question is, how prominent will that be? The answer depends on how advanced the enabling network and computing environments become." Building the model will shift the risk to providers, along with the significant capital investment.
"It won't be a small undertaking for providers," he adds. "So we'll see it first in niche kinds of services and with early adopters. But as the demand grows, you'll see the investment and the growth curve that says it's truly a big trend in the industry."
Lessons from the Outsourcing Journal:
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) will enable outsourcing service providers to specialize in certain processes and thus create more significant economies of scale for the buyers' benefit; this will create a value proposition that is often still lacking in BPO to date.
SOA will reduce the complexity, time, and costs involved in traditional software implementations.
The outsourcing market is beginning to fragment into providers focused on domain expertise, enabling them to better meet buyer's needs around industry challenges and changes in business volumes.
The influence of environmentalism in terms of "green" IT is now tightly connected with pressures to reduce energy and cooling costs in data centers. Many companies are now starting to include requirements around environmental sustainability contributions in their evaluation criteria for service providers.
Physicians' roles in hospitals are changing as is their use of IT. Accordingly, service providers need to change the way they provide help desk and on-site services to physicians.
Outsourcing will begin moving away from doing work in isolated pockets (buying an application from one provider, computing capacity from another, and outsourcing a business process to another) and move toward providers that can deliver all such aspects in one bundled offering at a pricing structure that suits the buyer's needs. Combining all these aspects is necessary for offering on-demand outsourced services. This movement is beginning to happen now and will increase in niche areas over the next three to five years.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
by Deepak Chopra
When Barack Obama's remarkable eloquence was dismissed as "just words" during the primary campaign, he survived the criticism. Telling the truth and offering inspiration aren't just words. They are incredibly important in keeping a society together. Now Obama faces another challenge where words can make a difference over whether the economy recovers. Injections of billions of dollars have done little good to the financial system so far. What we need is an injection of confidence.
I was reminded of Japan's aging Emperor Hirohito, who went in for surgery on his pancreas in the fall of 1987. He recovered well until a year later when he suddenly collapsed, and from that time onward, his health steadily deteriorated until he died the following spring. What he didn't know is that his surgeons had discovered cancer of the duodenum during the original operation. No one told the emperor he was dying, because in Japan the news of a fatal diagnosis is traditionally kept from the patient.
The connection with the economy is this: When is too much news worse than none? Full disclosure can harm the patient, whether you are talking about a sick emperor or a sick economy. The words "You are dying" have a devastating effect, and I'd say the same is true of the words "worst crisis since the Great Depression." It's a firm belief among doctors that some patients die from their diagnosis; they go into sudden, rapid decline despite assurances that their condition is treatable. There's even a term for this, the nocebo effect, which is the opposite of the placebo effect (where patients get better because they are told they will).
The American public took the news of economic crisis harder than anyone expected. Consumer confidence and spending nose-dived, and much of it was due to "just words." It wasn't just ordinary citizens who reacted this way; sophisticated financial institutions panicked as well.
Which brings up an ethical dilemma. For decades in this country it was standard practice not to frighten patients by telling them that they had a fatal illness. Sometimes even the family wasn't told (the emperor's family wasn't, as I understand it). Then ethics changed, and now we have the opposite practice: full disclosure. Is that an improvement? Nobody knows, really. Most patients demand full disclosure as their right, just as market analysts demand full disclosure from companies. A lot of the current crisis, we are told, was brought on by lying. Banks were doing their best to keep secret their astoundingly foolish risks.
Fortunately, the U.S. economy isn't dying. But it has collapsed, just like Hirohito, when the official press report was that things were just fine. Now we are going through a weird phase in which happy talk is foisted on us, alternating with dire warnings. It's like telling the emperor, "You're dying, but the outlook is rosy." The great economist John Maynard Keynes realized almost a century ago that all markets are psychological. The current crisis is proving how right he was, and how tricky a role "just words" play in the ongoing drama. As a master of words, Obama needs to give us some we can believe.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Team of Rivals
Asked why he had retained controversial FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, President Lyndon Johnson famously said it was probably better "to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."
A century earlier, for similar reasons, Abraham Lincoln surprisingly chose his chief rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination for the top positions in his administration. This experiment was explained in detail in a book called Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. This book has become a sensation now as it has been cited as the most influential book by Barrack Obama & Hillary Clinton. This concept, first practiced by Abraham Lincoln, is now being tried valiantly by Obama as he tries to fill his top cabinet positions with people that called him names, actively worked against him, have ideologies that are really different etc.
The article below is about the same topic, the real dangers of surrounding oneself only with likeminded people & the critical ability to put aside past grudges for the sake of the country in times of need - very interesting!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Defeat Your Opponents. Then Hire Them.
By DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Concord, Mass.
ON the campaign trail, Barack Obama has applauded Abraham Lincoln’s decision to bring his three main rivals for the Republican nomination into his cabinet, suggesting that he might also invite his opponents to join his administration, if it would help create “the best possible government.” Lincoln understood, Mr. Obama said, that personal feelings mattered less than the issue of “How can we get this country through this time of crisis?” John McCain, too, has embraced the idea of moving beyond partisanship: “We belong to different parties,” he has said, “not different countries.”
Certainly, if the next president were to bring former adversaries into his inner circle, in the No. 2 slot or as members of his administration, he would display that rare combination of humility and confidence required to perform wisely at the highest level. But could a president really create a team of rivals today, and would that team actually be able to get anything done? While Lincoln’s model may be more appealing and more needed than ever before, several factors in our current political climate make it considerably more difficult to bring about.
First, our interminable campaigns pit rivals against one another for so many contentious debates, personal attacks and counterattacks, that feelings harden, not only between candidates, but also their staff members, who come to regard opponents as enemies.
To be sure, negative attacks have been a part of our politics from the earliest days, but in Lincoln’s day, and indeed, until the end of the 19th century, those attacks were delivered mainly through the partisan press rather than on television, where distorted words and images are replayed again and again, creating permanent grudges. Back then, it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to take the stump, much less debate in person. And, of course, their election cycles were far shorter.
Second, our 24-hour news cycle significantly lessens the possibility of containing dissenting opinions within the president’s official circle. Lincoln’s cabinet meetings were fiery affairs. Members openly feuded with one another as well as with the president. Yet this information rarely appeared in the newspapers; we know about it mainly through diaries and letters. We learn from the diary of Attorney General Edward Bates that Montgomery Blair, the conservative postmaster general, castigated William Seward, the moderate secretary of state, as “an unprincipled liar,” and called Edwin Stanton, the radical secretary of war, “a great scoundrel.” Stanton refused for a time to sit in cabinet meetings if Blair was present.
If similar feuds were reported by the nightly news, magnified day after day by the cable shows, dissected by countless political blogs, and made fodder for late-night comedy, a team of rivals would collapse.
Third, party lines are now so rigidly drawn that if a sitting Republican or Democratic senator were to accept a top post in the opposite party’s cabinet, he would be viewed with grave suspicion by members of both parties. It wasn’t always this way. Once, politicians in Washington of both parties routinely gathered together on weekends for relaxing nights of poker, drinking and conversation. Today such friendships are less common given the need for constant fund-raising, the convenience of flights home and the numerous distractions of modern life. Four decades ago, when Lyndon Johnson needed to break a filibuster and bring the historic Civil Rights Bill to the Senate floor, he reached out to the Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen, knowing he could rely on their personal relationship, built over years of companionship in the Senate.
Yet, while these factors make it more difficult to construct a 21st-century team of rivals, the scale of the challenges faced by the next president makes such a diverse inner circle all the more necessary. When Lincoln was asked why he had chosen a cabinet made up of rivals and opponents, his answer was simple. The country was in peril. “We needed the strongest men,” he said. “These were the very strongest men. I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”
In selecting Stanton as his secretary of war, Lincoln revealed a critical ability to put aside past grudges. He and Stanton had first met when they worked together on a trial in Cincinnati in the 1850s. At first sight of the ungainly Lincoln, with his disheveled hair and ill-fitting clothes, Stanton dubbed him a “long-armed ape” and remarked that “he does not know anything and can do you no good.” For the rest of the trial, Stanton ignored Lincoln and refused even to open the brief his colleague Lincoln had painstakingly prepared. Lincoln was humiliated.
Yet, six years later, as president, he determined that Stanton’s bluntness and single-minded intensity were precisely the qualities needed to galvanize the War Department.
Similarly, Lincoln refused to fire Salmon Chase, whose open criticisms of the president never ceased, for he believed that Chase was the best man to run the Treasury. “We have stood together in the time of trial,” he later told friends who could not understand his forbearance, “and I should despise myself if I allowed personal differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office.”
By building dissent into his inner circle, a president is also more likely to question his own assumptions and to weigh various consequences, leading ultimately to more farsighted decisions.
The story of the Emancipation Proclamation is a case in point. In the months before Lincoln issued his historic proclamation, he listened intently to the arguments within his cabinet over what to do about slavery. The more radical members wanted Lincoln to move quickly. The conservative members feared that emancipation would “intensify the struggle” with the Confederacy, that the border states would no longer support the Union, that it would cause such an outcry in the North that the Republicans would lose the midterm elections.
Lincoln bided his time, realizing that any assault on slavery would have to await a change in public attitudes. Gradually, he began to see a shift in newspaper editorials, in conversations throughout the North and, most tellingly, in the opinions of his cabinet colleagues, even those who represented the more conservative point of view.
Although he knew that opposition would still be fierce, he came to believe it was no longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.” He told his cabinet that the time for debate was over, and emancipation was declared in 1863. “It is my conviction,” Lincoln later said, “that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.” Because of the heated discussions within his cabinet, his timing was perfect.
Nor is Lincoln alone in reaching out to his rivals. In 1940, after much of Europe had fallen to Nazi Germany, Franklin Roosevelt decided that the time had come for a coalition cabinet.
For secretary of war, he selected a Republican conservative, Henry Stimson, who had held top posts under previous Republican presidents. He chose as Navy secretary Frank Knox, who had been Alf Landon’s running mate on the Republican ticket in 1936. Both men were unsparing critics of the New Deal, but their domestic views were far less important to the president than their willingness to stand against the isolationist tendencies of their party and aid the Allies against Hitler.
There is also the story of a meeting in Roosevelt’s office during which the president advanced a pet proposal. Everyone nodded in approval except a junior brigadier general, George Marshall. “Don’t you think so, George?” the president asked. Marshall replied: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with you at all.” The president looked stunned, and Marshall’s friends predicted that his tour in Washington would soon come to an end. A few months later, reaching down 34 names on the list of senior generals, the president asked Marshall to be chief of staff of the United States Army.
Inviting such in-house dissent may indeed pose greater challenges today than in earlier times, but it’s hard to see that we have any other choice. Polls show that Americans wish to move beyond the combination of extreme partisanship and ideological rigidity that has for decades prevented Washington from addressing the serious problems facing our country. They have seen the damage caused by the creation of like-minded “echo chambers” in Washington. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would do well to keep this in mind as they choose their vice president and cabinet members.
History, after all, reveals how dangerous it can be for a president to surround himself with like-minded people. Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, deliberately chose men for his cabinet who thought as he did and, with the agreement of those around him, did nothing to prevent the secession of the Confederate states. He is now considered among the worst of our presidents.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author, most recently, of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”
The article below is about the same topic, the real dangers of surrounding oneself only with likeminded people & the critical ability to put aside past grudges for the sake of the country in times of need - very interesting!
---------------------------------------------------------------
Defeat Your Opponents. Then Hire Them.
By DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Concord, Mass.
ON the campaign trail, Barack Obama has applauded Abraham Lincoln’s decision to bring his three main rivals for the Republican nomination into his cabinet, suggesting that he might also invite his opponents to join his administration, if it would help create “the best possible government.” Lincoln understood, Mr. Obama said, that personal feelings mattered less than the issue of “How can we get this country through this time of crisis?” John McCain, too, has embraced the idea of moving beyond partisanship: “We belong to different parties,” he has said, “not different countries.”
Certainly, if the next president were to bring former adversaries into his inner circle, in the No. 2 slot or as members of his administration, he would display that rare combination of humility and confidence required to perform wisely at the highest level. But could a president really create a team of rivals today, and would that team actually be able to get anything done? While Lincoln’s model may be more appealing and more needed than ever before, several factors in our current political climate make it considerably more difficult to bring about.
First, our interminable campaigns pit rivals against one another for so many contentious debates, personal attacks and counterattacks, that feelings harden, not only between candidates, but also their staff members, who come to regard opponents as enemies.
To be sure, negative attacks have been a part of our politics from the earliest days, but in Lincoln’s day, and indeed, until the end of the 19th century, those attacks were delivered mainly through the partisan press rather than on television, where distorted words and images are replayed again and again, creating permanent grudges. Back then, it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to take the stump, much less debate in person. And, of course, their election cycles were far shorter.
Second, our 24-hour news cycle significantly lessens the possibility of containing dissenting opinions within the president’s official circle. Lincoln’s cabinet meetings were fiery affairs. Members openly feuded with one another as well as with the president. Yet this information rarely appeared in the newspapers; we know about it mainly through diaries and letters. We learn from the diary of Attorney General Edward Bates that Montgomery Blair, the conservative postmaster general, castigated William Seward, the moderate secretary of state, as “an unprincipled liar,” and called Edwin Stanton, the radical secretary of war, “a great scoundrel.” Stanton refused for a time to sit in cabinet meetings if Blair was present.
If similar feuds were reported by the nightly news, magnified day after day by the cable shows, dissected by countless political blogs, and made fodder for late-night comedy, a team of rivals would collapse.
Third, party lines are now so rigidly drawn that if a sitting Republican or Democratic senator were to accept a top post in the opposite party’s cabinet, he would be viewed with grave suspicion by members of both parties. It wasn’t always this way. Once, politicians in Washington of both parties routinely gathered together on weekends for relaxing nights of poker, drinking and conversation. Today such friendships are less common given the need for constant fund-raising, the convenience of flights home and the numerous distractions of modern life. Four decades ago, when Lyndon Johnson needed to break a filibuster and bring the historic Civil Rights Bill to the Senate floor, he reached out to the Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen, knowing he could rely on their personal relationship, built over years of companionship in the Senate.
Yet, while these factors make it more difficult to construct a 21st-century team of rivals, the scale of the challenges faced by the next president makes such a diverse inner circle all the more necessary. When Lincoln was asked why he had chosen a cabinet made up of rivals and opponents, his answer was simple. The country was in peril. “We needed the strongest men,” he said. “These were the very strongest men. I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”
In selecting Stanton as his secretary of war, Lincoln revealed a critical ability to put aside past grudges. He and Stanton had first met when they worked together on a trial in Cincinnati in the 1850s. At first sight of the ungainly Lincoln, with his disheveled hair and ill-fitting clothes, Stanton dubbed him a “long-armed ape” and remarked that “he does not know anything and can do you no good.” For the rest of the trial, Stanton ignored Lincoln and refused even to open the brief his colleague Lincoln had painstakingly prepared. Lincoln was humiliated.
Yet, six years later, as president, he determined that Stanton’s bluntness and single-minded intensity were precisely the qualities needed to galvanize the War Department.
Similarly, Lincoln refused to fire Salmon Chase, whose open criticisms of the president never ceased, for he believed that Chase was the best man to run the Treasury. “We have stood together in the time of trial,” he later told friends who could not understand his forbearance, “and I should despise myself if I allowed personal differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office.”
By building dissent into his inner circle, a president is also more likely to question his own assumptions and to weigh various consequences, leading ultimately to more farsighted decisions.
The story of the Emancipation Proclamation is a case in point. In the months before Lincoln issued his historic proclamation, he listened intently to the arguments within his cabinet over what to do about slavery. The more radical members wanted Lincoln to move quickly. The conservative members feared that emancipation would “intensify the struggle” with the Confederacy, that the border states would no longer support the Union, that it would cause such an outcry in the North that the Republicans would lose the midterm elections.
Lincoln bided his time, realizing that any assault on slavery would have to await a change in public attitudes. Gradually, he began to see a shift in newspaper editorials, in conversations throughout the North and, most tellingly, in the opinions of his cabinet colleagues, even those who represented the more conservative point of view.
Although he knew that opposition would still be fierce, he came to believe it was no longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.” He told his cabinet that the time for debate was over, and emancipation was declared in 1863. “It is my conviction,” Lincoln later said, “that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.” Because of the heated discussions within his cabinet, his timing was perfect.
Nor is Lincoln alone in reaching out to his rivals. In 1940, after much of Europe had fallen to Nazi Germany, Franklin Roosevelt decided that the time had come for a coalition cabinet.
For secretary of war, he selected a Republican conservative, Henry Stimson, who had held top posts under previous Republican presidents. He chose as Navy secretary Frank Knox, who had been Alf Landon’s running mate on the Republican ticket in 1936. Both men were unsparing critics of the New Deal, but their domestic views were far less important to the president than their willingness to stand against the isolationist tendencies of their party and aid the Allies against Hitler.
There is also the story of a meeting in Roosevelt’s office during which the president advanced a pet proposal. Everyone nodded in approval except a junior brigadier general, George Marshall. “Don’t you think so, George?” the president asked. Marshall replied: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with you at all.” The president looked stunned, and Marshall’s friends predicted that his tour in Washington would soon come to an end. A few months later, reaching down 34 names on the list of senior generals, the president asked Marshall to be chief of staff of the United States Army.
Inviting such in-house dissent may indeed pose greater challenges today than in earlier times, but it’s hard to see that we have any other choice. Polls show that Americans wish to move beyond the combination of extreme partisanship and ideological rigidity that has for decades prevented Washington from addressing the serious problems facing our country. They have seen the damage caused by the creation of like-minded “echo chambers” in Washington. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would do well to keep this in mind as they choose their vice president and cabinet members.
History, after all, reveals how dangerous it can be for a president to surround himself with like-minded people. Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, deliberately chose men for his cabinet who thought as he did and, with the agreement of those around him, did nothing to prevent the secession of the Confederate states. He is now considered among the worst of our presidents.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author, most recently, of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Daily Kos founder: How you can take on the system
By Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
• Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is the publisher and founder of Daily Kos (dailykos.com), one of America's leading online political communities. This essay was adapted from his latest book, "Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era." Copyright by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, Inc., 2008. Printed by arrangement with Celebra, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
By Markos Moulitsas Zúniga
Berkeley, Calif. – You can't change the world without conflict.
Whether you want to change Capitol Hill or Capitol Records, the corporate tower or the ivory tower, conflict must precede change, because in most of the big institutions of our society, we have too many entrenched elites who refuse to give up power without a fight.
Traditionally, these self-appointed and unaccountable gatekeepers have purported to operate in the public interest, but they are grossly out of touch with the public. Rather than empower people, they designed rules to keep the rabble out of the inner sanctums, where our ideas wouldn't infect their decisionmaking process. Whether it was record-label executives; Hollywood studio moguls; editors and producers in the media; or the clubby D.C. politicians, consultants, and lobbyists, many built walls to protect the sanctity of their turf.
The results? A sick body politic and a homogenized culture; a disengaged citizenry, cynical and despondent over its inability to effect change; and a powerful elite unhampered and unchallenged in the dogged pursuit of its own interests over those of society at large.
But all that is changing. Technology has unlocked the doors and facilitated a genuine democratization of our culture. No longer content to sit on the sidelines as spectators, a new generation of participants is taking an active role in our culture and democracy.
The changing media landscape offers this generation new challenges but also new opportunities. Chief among them is the mother lode of modern activism – the ability to dislodge "conventional wisdom" on any given topic.
Conventional wisdom refers to ideas and explanations generally accepted as the truth by the public, the gatekeepers, and the decisionmakers. Effecting societal change often requires changing the conventional wisdom on issues, especially when the "wisdom" isn't so wise.
For instance, the conventional wisdom on the stock market says that Republican administrations are good for the market, while Democratic ones are not. Yet since 1948, Democratic administrations have delivered 15.25 percent gains in the market compared with 9.53 percent for Republican ones, according to Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Clearly, the information has been accruing for more than half a century that Wall Street flourishes under Democratic administrations, yet so powerful is conventional wisdom once set that it often takes cultural or political upheaval to dislodge it. Thus, there is an inherent advantage in being the first to define the "truth," because whoever does so controls the terms of the debate.
Once the exclusive province of elite gatekeepers – media pundits, political party operatives, think tank denizens, lobbyists – shaping conventional wisdom is becoming a far more democratic affair, thanks to the networking nature of the Internet.
While activism was once predicated on influencing those gatekeepers, we can now create infrastructure that bypasses those gatekeepers, meaning that to stay relevant, they either have to be more responsive to the public, or risk losing their relevance.
Consider the British band Arctic Monkeys. Like most bands, they labored in obscurity, without a record label to promote their work. Yet they quickly built a passionate local fan base, which took on those promotional tasks for themselves. Without the band's involvement or permission, they set up a MySpace page, uploaded songs, and got the word out about their work. Word spread quickly. The buzz was so intense that record labels begged to sign the band. And when it finally signed with a small independent label, their first single debuted at No. 1 in Britain.
Record label executives no longer get to decide who succeeds and who fails. People are taking that job over for themselves. And as the Arctic Monkeys example shows, they could bypass not just the record labels, but even the band itself.
It's not just music. New empowering technologies are allowing "amateur" filmmakers to use inexpensive video and editing equipment to create content, then post it on sites such as YouTube free of charge and instant worldwide distribution. Bloggers can launch online publications for the cost of a domain name (about $10), building publications that rival their traditional media counterparts in the celebrity, political, and technology worlds. The media gatekeepers no longer get to decide who can participate in the conversation.
Nowhere has this impact been more noticeable than in politics. In the 2006 election cycle, Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb of Virginia were propelled to the US Senate by an energized online grass-roots network that fueled the two outsiders to victory – despite primary campaigns against well-funded and establishment-backed opponents, and difficult general election battles against entrenched, well-funded incumbents. In fact, Mr. Webb defeated Republican George Allen, who in addition to being a political legend in his state was also the then-front-runner for the GOP nomination for president.
The old gatekeepers in Hollywood, D.C., and New York can no longer determine who will lead us, what we can watch, what we can listen to, and what we can read. The age of seeking permission from authority figures is passing, and those who seize the opportunity offered by new technology to speak, act, create, and connect will be the men and women who change the world.
Whether you want to change Capitol Hill or Capitol Records, the corporate tower or the ivory tower, conflict must precede change, because in most of the big institutions of our society, we have too many entrenched elites who refuse to give up power without a fight.
Traditionally, these self-appointed and unaccountable gatekeepers have purported to operate in the public interest, but they are grossly out of touch with the public. Rather than empower people, they designed rules to keep the rabble out of the inner sanctums, where our ideas wouldn't infect their decisionmaking process. Whether it was record-label executives; Hollywood studio moguls; editors and producers in the media; or the clubby D.C. politicians, consultants, and lobbyists, many built walls to protect the sanctity of their turf.
The results? A sick body politic and a homogenized culture; a disengaged citizenry, cynical and despondent over its inability to effect change; and a powerful elite unhampered and unchallenged in the dogged pursuit of its own interests over those of society at large.
But all that is changing. Technology has unlocked the doors and facilitated a genuine democratization of our culture. No longer content to sit on the sidelines as spectators, a new generation of participants is taking an active role in our culture and democracy.
The changing media landscape offers this generation new challenges but also new opportunities. Chief among them is the mother lode of modern activism – the ability to dislodge "conventional wisdom" on any given topic.
Conventional wisdom refers to ideas and explanations generally accepted as the truth by the public, the gatekeepers, and the decisionmakers. Effecting societal change often requires changing the conventional wisdom on issues, especially when the "wisdom" isn't so wise.
For instance, the conventional wisdom on the stock market says that Republican administrations are good for the market, while Democratic ones are not. Yet since 1948, Democratic administrations have delivered 15.25 percent gains in the market compared with 9.53 percent for Republican ones, according to Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Clearly, the information has been accruing for more than half a century that Wall Street flourishes under Democratic administrations, yet so powerful is conventional wisdom once set that it often takes cultural or political upheaval to dislodge it. Thus, there is an inherent advantage in being the first to define the "truth," because whoever does so controls the terms of the debate.
Once the exclusive province of elite gatekeepers – media pundits, political party operatives, think tank denizens, lobbyists – shaping conventional wisdom is becoming a far more democratic affair, thanks to the networking nature of the Internet.
While activism was once predicated on influencing those gatekeepers, we can now create infrastructure that bypasses those gatekeepers, meaning that to stay relevant, they either have to be more responsive to the public, or risk losing their relevance.
Consider the British band Arctic Monkeys. Like most bands, they labored in obscurity, without a record label to promote their work. Yet they quickly built a passionate local fan base, which took on those promotional tasks for themselves. Without the band's involvement or permission, they set up a MySpace page, uploaded songs, and got the word out about their work. Word spread quickly. The buzz was so intense that record labels begged to sign the band. And when it finally signed with a small independent label, their first single debuted at No. 1 in Britain.
Record label executives no longer get to decide who succeeds and who fails. People are taking that job over for themselves. And as the Arctic Monkeys example shows, they could bypass not just the record labels, but even the band itself.
It's not just music. New empowering technologies are allowing "amateur" filmmakers to use inexpensive video and editing equipment to create content, then post it on sites such as YouTube free of charge and instant worldwide distribution. Bloggers can launch online publications for the cost of a domain name (about $10), building publications that rival their traditional media counterparts in the celebrity, political, and technology worlds. The media gatekeepers no longer get to decide who can participate in the conversation.
Nowhere has this impact been more noticeable than in politics. In the 2006 election cycle, Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb of Virginia were propelled to the US Senate by an energized online grass-roots network that fueled the two outsiders to victory – despite primary campaigns against well-funded and establishment-backed opponents, and difficult general election battles against entrenched, well-funded incumbents. In fact, Mr. Webb defeated Republican George Allen, who in addition to being a political legend in his state was also the then-front-runner for the GOP nomination for president.
The old gatekeepers in Hollywood, D.C., and New York can no longer determine who will lead us, what we can watch, what we can listen to, and what we can read. The age of seeking permission from authority figures is passing, and those who seize the opportunity offered by new technology to speak, act, create, and connect will be the men and women who change the world.
• Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is the publisher and founder of Daily Kos (dailykos.com), one of America's leading online political communities. This essay was adapted from his latest book, "Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era." Copyright by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, Inc., 2008. Printed by arrangement with Celebra, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Maybe it’s time to stop calling America the “land of opportunity.”
by Clive Crook
Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches
Opportunity is the crux of the American idea. Opportunity is what the New World has always represented: struggle, risk, self-determination, and the hope of spiritual and material progress. Even now, to new immigrants, that or something like it is the pull—and for them at least, it is no false promise. If you move to America, you move up, and this is true whether you are rafting across the Rio Grande or negotiating the hazards of the H1B visa program. British emigrants (I am one) are fond of Spain and the United States. They go to Spain to retire; they come here to rise to new challenges. This lure, barely diminished after more than three centuries, has ever been an incalculable source of national strength.
But is America any longer a land of opportunity for the people born here? The evidence, such as it is, points to a surprising and dispiriting answer: no, not especially.
The idea that America is exceptional in its material opportunities is deeply lodged in the culture. For as long as the country had a western frontier with territory beyond, internal migration was just as bold a venture as crossing the ocean had been for the first settlers, and just as promising for the ambitious and self-reliant. The late-19th and early-20th centuries brought extraordinarily rapid industrial development, which nourished the American idea in a new way. Rising incomes made each succeeding generation more prosperous—and they rose so fast that people even felt more prosperous. But that phase, too, has ended. Incomes are now rising more slowly from generation to generation (and for a variety of reasons, the flattening feels worse than it is). Fewer adults today, it seems, expect their children to do better than they did. Pessimism vies with vitality for command of the national consciousness.
Much of this, no doubt, is a natural consequence of growing old. New immigrants notwithstanding, America is a middle-aged country, and striving is not a trait of the middle-aged. Still, an accumulating body of research suggests that the stiffening of America’s socioeconomic sinews is more advanced than the culture, even now, seems willing to admit; worse than the scholars who monitor it had hitherto understood; and—how shaming is this?—worse than in many older, wearier countries.
The American model has been regarded as proposing a kind of bargain. This is not Europe: Here, idleness and incompetence are sternly punished—but merit gets rewarded. Much more than elsewhere, your class background will neither prop you up nor hold you back. If you deserve to succeed, you will.
It is an inspiring, energizing offer—and still a profoundly influential one. It colors the national debate about taxes, health care, and other aspects of economic policy. But it is false advertising.
Most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility—the ease with which successive generations move up or down relative to their parents. As flaws in early postwar studies have been addressed, estimates of mobility have fallen. Before the 1990s, researchers tended to put the correlation between parents’ incomes and their children’s at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. (Zero would imply no connection at all; a correlation of 100 percent would imply that parents’ incomes entirely determined the incomes of their children.) In the 1990s, using better data and techniques, experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent. The finding is not that mobility has fallen since World War II—the studies point to no clear trend. It is that as methods of measuring mobility have improved, the result, across a span of recent decades, has gotten worse. The earlier view that postwar America was an economically mobile society is less and less borne out. Perhaps it was once (before data became available to track such things accurately); but it isn’t now.
More telling, maybe, is the international comparison. America stands lower in the ranking of income mobility than most of the countries whose data allow the comparison, scoring worse than Canada, all of the Scandinavian countries, and possibly even Germany and Britain (the data are imperfect, and different studies give slightly different results).
Strikingly, the research suggests that mobility within America’s middle-income bands is similar to that in many other countries. The stickiness is at the top and the bottom. According to one much-cited study, for instance, more than 40 percent of American boys born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there; the figure for Britain is 30 percent, for Denmark just 25 percent. In America, more than in other advanced economies, poor children stay poor. Other data show that in America, more than in, say, Britain, rich children stay rich as well.
The findings are still tentative, and the causes complicated—hardly a firm basis for prescription. Still, if the government needed another reason to retain the estate tax (aside from the fact that it is one of the most economically efficient taxes), this might serve. In general, a little less tolerance of inherited privilege would not seem amiss (hard for Americans to hear from a Brit, I understand, but look at the facts). Would it hurt, for instance, if the admissions preferences granted by America’s most prestigious universities to the children of benefactors and alumni aroused more disgust, or maybe just some mild disapproval? Or if the richest Americans bequeathed less of their wealth to universities that patently have no need of it (Harvard’s endowment is more than $30 billion), and more to those that do?
Cleansing as such gestures might be, however, aiming to go further, and improve economic mobility with an all-fronts assault on income inequality, would be misconceived, even if it could command political support (which, for now at least, it could not). The sad truth is that such inequality serves a purpose. It spurs effort and ambition—provided, of course, that poor people, through their own skill and industry, can reach the higher tiers.
The real focus of any effort to restore social and economic opportunity in America ought to be ladders out of poverty. An especially good one already exists: the Earned Income Tax Credit. Its coverage should be wider and its terms more generous, but the principle is exactly right: Supplement the wages of the low-paid to reward work, discourage idleness, and relieve poverty. More fundamentally, America needs to improve its worst and poorest schools, which sharply delimit the prospects of many poor children. Education cannot do everything. But dismal school performance is the biggest problem that policy makers concerned with opportunity in America can fix. So far, it ranks low—or not at all—on the list of issues being addressed by the 2008 presidential candidates.
America has no roots in feudalism, no notion of inherited orders of society, no instinct for deference or regard for nobility. And yet the economic mobility that is thought to follow from such freedom, and indeed ought to follow from it, appears to be a myth. Myths that defy the common experience can persist for only so long. Perhaps in the future the country will try harder to foster the opportunity it thinks it already provides. Or perhaps the culture will simply come to accept this un-American reality: a society of rigid economic orders, maintained by inheritance, blessed by its elites, and impotently endured by its underclass.
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706/land-of-opportunity
by Clive Crook
Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches
Opportunity is the crux of the American idea. Opportunity is what the New World has always represented: struggle, risk, self-determination, and the hope of spiritual and material progress. Even now, to new immigrants, that or something like it is the pull—and for them at least, it is no false promise. If you move to America, you move up, and this is true whether you are rafting across the Rio Grande or negotiating the hazards of the H1B visa program. British emigrants (I am one) are fond of Spain and the United States. They go to Spain to retire; they come here to rise to new challenges. This lure, barely diminished after more than three centuries, has ever been an incalculable source of national strength.
But is America any longer a land of opportunity for the people born here? The evidence, such as it is, points to a surprising and dispiriting answer: no, not especially.
The idea that America is exceptional in its material opportunities is deeply lodged in the culture. For as long as the country had a western frontier with territory beyond, internal migration was just as bold a venture as crossing the ocean had been for the first settlers, and just as promising for the ambitious and self-reliant. The late-19th and early-20th centuries brought extraordinarily rapid industrial development, which nourished the American idea in a new way. Rising incomes made each succeeding generation more prosperous—and they rose so fast that people even felt more prosperous. But that phase, too, has ended. Incomes are now rising more slowly from generation to generation (and for a variety of reasons, the flattening feels worse than it is). Fewer adults today, it seems, expect their children to do better than they did. Pessimism vies with vitality for command of the national consciousness.
Much of this, no doubt, is a natural consequence of growing old. New immigrants notwithstanding, America is a middle-aged country, and striving is not a trait of the middle-aged. Still, an accumulating body of research suggests that the stiffening of America’s socioeconomic sinews is more advanced than the culture, even now, seems willing to admit; worse than the scholars who monitor it had hitherto understood; and—how shaming is this?—worse than in many older, wearier countries.
The American model has been regarded as proposing a kind of bargain. This is not Europe: Here, idleness and incompetence are sternly punished—but merit gets rewarded. Much more than elsewhere, your class background will neither prop you up nor hold you back. If you deserve to succeed, you will.
It is an inspiring, energizing offer—and still a profoundly influential one. It colors the national debate about taxes, health care, and other aspects of economic policy. But it is false advertising.
Most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility—the ease with which successive generations move up or down relative to their parents. As flaws in early postwar studies have been addressed, estimates of mobility have fallen. Before the 1990s, researchers tended to put the correlation between parents’ incomes and their children’s at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. (Zero would imply no connection at all; a correlation of 100 percent would imply that parents’ incomes entirely determined the incomes of their children.) In the 1990s, using better data and techniques, experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent. The finding is not that mobility has fallen since World War II—the studies point to no clear trend. It is that as methods of measuring mobility have improved, the result, across a span of recent decades, has gotten worse. The earlier view that postwar America was an economically mobile society is less and less borne out. Perhaps it was once (before data became available to track such things accurately); but it isn’t now.
More telling, maybe, is the international comparison. America stands lower in the ranking of income mobility than most of the countries whose data allow the comparison, scoring worse than Canada, all of the Scandinavian countries, and possibly even Germany and Britain (the data are imperfect, and different studies give slightly different results).
Strikingly, the research suggests that mobility within America’s middle-income bands is similar to that in many other countries. The stickiness is at the top and the bottom. According to one much-cited study, for instance, more than 40 percent of American boys born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there; the figure for Britain is 30 percent, for Denmark just 25 percent. In America, more than in other advanced economies, poor children stay poor. Other data show that in America, more than in, say, Britain, rich children stay rich as well.
The findings are still tentative, and the causes complicated—hardly a firm basis for prescription. Still, if the government needed another reason to retain the estate tax (aside from the fact that it is one of the most economically efficient taxes), this might serve. In general, a little less tolerance of inherited privilege would not seem amiss (hard for Americans to hear from a Brit, I understand, but look at the facts). Would it hurt, for instance, if the admissions preferences granted by America’s most prestigious universities to the children of benefactors and alumni aroused more disgust, or maybe just some mild disapproval? Or if the richest Americans bequeathed less of their wealth to universities that patently have no need of it (Harvard’s endowment is more than $30 billion), and more to those that do?
Cleansing as such gestures might be, however, aiming to go further, and improve economic mobility with an all-fronts assault on income inequality, would be misconceived, even if it could command political support (which, for now at least, it could not). The sad truth is that such inequality serves a purpose. It spurs effort and ambition—provided, of course, that poor people, through their own skill and industry, can reach the higher tiers.
The real focus of any effort to restore social and economic opportunity in America ought to be ladders out of poverty. An especially good one already exists: the Earned Income Tax Credit. Its coverage should be wider and its terms more generous, but the principle is exactly right: Supplement the wages of the low-paid to reward work, discourage idleness, and relieve poverty. More fundamentally, America needs to improve its worst and poorest schools, which sharply delimit the prospects of many poor children. Education cannot do everything. But dismal school performance is the biggest problem that policy makers concerned with opportunity in America can fix. So far, it ranks low—or not at all—on the list of issues being addressed by the 2008 presidential candidates.
America has no roots in feudalism, no notion of inherited orders of society, no instinct for deference or regard for nobility. And yet the economic mobility that is thought to follow from such freedom, and indeed ought to follow from it, appears to be a myth. Myths that defy the common experience can persist for only so long. Perhaps in the future the country will try harder to foster the opportunity it thinks it already provides. Or perhaps the culture will simply come to accept this un-American reality: a society of rigid economic orders, maintained by inheritance, blessed by its elites, and impotently endured by its underclass.
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706/land-of-opportunity
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Global Trends 2025: Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S
Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S. Analyst Previews Report to Next President
By Joby Warrick and Walter PincusWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, September 10, 2008
An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force."
Fingar's remarks last week were based on a partially completed "Global Trends 2025" report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.
"The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished," Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding "at an accelerating pace" in "political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas."
The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the "dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers" that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2, with Sen. John McCain(R-Ariz.) expected to receive one in the coming days, intelligence officials said.
As described by Fingar, the intelligence community's long-term outlook has darkened somewhat since the last report in 2004, which also focused on the impact of globalization but was more upbeat about its consequences for the United States. The new view is in line with that of prominent economists and other global thinkers who have argued that America's influence is shrinking as economic powerhouses such as China assert themselves on the global stage. The trend is described in the new book "The Post-American World," in which author Fareed Zakaria writes that the shift is not about the "decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."
In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.
In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. "There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system," he said.
The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.
For poorer countries, climate change "could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Fingar said, while the United States will face "Dust Bowl" conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.
Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors "begins to approach one to three," he said.
The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan -- countries that are "on a good day, highly chauvinistic," he said.
"We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth," Fingar said.
Energy security will also become a major issue as India, China and other countries join the United States in seeking oil, gas and other sources for electricity. The Chinese get a good portion of their oil from Iran, as do many U.S. allies in Europe, limiting U.S. options on Iran. "So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing -- even if we could do it -- would be counterproductive."
Nearly absent from Fingar's survey was the topic of terrorism. Since the last such report, the intelligence community has projected a declining role for al-Qaeda, which was deemed likely to become "increasingly decentralized, evolving into an eclectic array of groups, cells, and individuals." Inspired by al-Qaeda, "regionally based groups, and individuals labeled simply as jihadists -- united by a common hatred of moderate regimes and the West -- are likely to conduct terrorist attacks," the 2004 document said.
The new assessment saw a continued threat from Iran, however. Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic's attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year's landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003.
He said Iran's ultimate decision on whether to build nuclear weapons depended on how its leaders viewed their "security requirement" -- whether they thought their government sufficiently safe in a region surrounded by traditional enemies.
Iranians are "more scared of their neighbors than many think they ought to be," Fingar said. But he noted that the United States had eliminated two of Iran's biggest enemies: Iraq's Saddam Hussein and theTaliban regime in Afghanistan.
"The United States took care of Iran's principal security threats," he said, "except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat."
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903302.html
By Joby Warrick and Walter PincusWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, September 10, 2008
An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force."
Fingar's remarks last week were based on a partially completed "Global Trends 2025" report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.
"The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished," Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding "at an accelerating pace" in "political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas."
The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the "dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers" that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2, with Sen. John McCain(R-Ariz.) expected to receive one in the coming days, intelligence officials said.
As described by Fingar, the intelligence community's long-term outlook has darkened somewhat since the last report in 2004, which also focused on the impact of globalization but was more upbeat about its consequences for the United States. The new view is in line with that of prominent economists and other global thinkers who have argued that America's influence is shrinking as economic powerhouses such as China assert themselves on the global stage. The trend is described in the new book "The Post-American World," in which author Fareed Zakaria writes that the shift is not about the "decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."
In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.
In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. "There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system," he said.
The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.
For poorer countries, climate change "could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Fingar said, while the United States will face "Dust Bowl" conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.
Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors "begins to approach one to three," he said.
The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan -- countries that are "on a good day, highly chauvinistic," he said.
"We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth," Fingar said.
Energy security will also become a major issue as India, China and other countries join the United States in seeking oil, gas and other sources for electricity. The Chinese get a good portion of their oil from Iran, as do many U.S. allies in Europe, limiting U.S. options on Iran. "So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing -- even if we could do it -- would be counterproductive."
Nearly absent from Fingar's survey was the topic of terrorism. Since the last such report, the intelligence community has projected a declining role for al-Qaeda, which was deemed likely to become "increasingly decentralized, evolving into an eclectic array of groups, cells, and individuals." Inspired by al-Qaeda, "regionally based groups, and individuals labeled simply as jihadists -- united by a common hatred of moderate regimes and the West -- are likely to conduct terrorist attacks," the 2004 document said.
The new assessment saw a continued threat from Iran, however. Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic's attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year's landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003.
He said Iran's ultimate decision on whether to build nuclear weapons depended on how its leaders viewed their "security requirement" -- whether they thought their government sufficiently safe in a region surrounded by traditional enemies.
Iranians are "more scared of their neighbors than many think they ought to be," Fingar said. But he noted that the United States had eliminated two of Iran's biggest enemies: Iraq's Saddam Hussein and theTaliban regime in Afghanistan.
"The United States took care of Iran's principal security threats," he said, "except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat."
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903302.html
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