Rethinking the Economy

Via Bob Herbert, a Rockefeller Foundation study using a new index for measuring economic insecurity — the percent of Americans who had a net loss of 25% or more of their financial income — shows that for many Americans, life got less secure, not more over the last few decades:
In 1985, at a time [...]

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Yesterday’s post, about how some regulations help businesses and save jobs as well as lives, was based on a theoretical example. But you can find plenty of examples in the real world. In 2007, for example, after years of pressing the Bush administration to strip away as many pro-consumer regulations as they could, some businesses [...]

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In a recent Grist magazine interview, Newt Gingrich was asked:
You have supported nuclear, solar, wind, smart grid, and other emerging technologies. Do you see incentives as the only way to push these markets to evolve?
He replied:
Absolutely. There’s no evidence in American history that regulations and punishments work to create a better future.
Obviously [...]

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Professor Teresa Ghilarducci on a major piece missing from the finance Reform Bill: reinventing the 401(k).
In a perfect world, an average worker could amass something like $400,000 in a 401(k) by retirement. After nearly three decades of 401(k) contributions, though, the average account balance for people nearing retirement age is about $60,000, far [...]

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My latest idea for tinkering with the values-based framework — reorganize v 0.1 so instead of having a section on myths followed by a section on alternatives, break it into pairs of myths and alternatives.
NOTE: This post is mostly for me — to help me get this next step out of my [...]

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Seriously freaky:

I bumped into this because I want to see if Emotiv, a company that’s trying to create off the shelf mind-controlled gaming tools, had gotten any further since they blew their much-hyped launch a year or two ago. I’m interested because if I could read rss feeds & surf the web without using [...]

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One other interesting point from Desai, Brief, and George’s paper, on the problems with relying on the actions of individual corporations to stop the crazy CEO compensation problem we’ve got:
J. P. Morgan declared that top executives’ compensation should be capped at twenty times the wage of an average worker. However, unless all organizations adopt this [...]

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Plenty of studies have shown that when CEOs get insanely big paychecks, it doesn’t pay off in terms of performance — in short, it’s bad for shareholders. Now comes a study from Desai, Brief, and George that shows it’s bad for employees too.
higher income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in executives perceiving themselves [...]

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You probably know the oil industry gets a lot of subsidies. But you may not know that, according to the New York Times,
an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
[...]

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I’ve been wrestling with bits and pieces of a framework, but no matter how much I play with them, the end result is all over the place. So, time to get it out of my head. Here’s a quick dump of where I am:
Creating a Values-based Economy
A. The way we usually talk about the [...]

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