Rethinking the Economy

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Mark Mykleby, a friend of Thomas Friedman who works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Office of the Chairman, published a letter in “his hometown paper, the Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina,” about the BP oil disaster. Friedman liked the letter so much he republished it in his column.
This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s [...]

[Read more →]

When I first took a look at the list of projects in Chicago’s 49th Ward’s Participatory Budgeting experiment, I was a little disappointed. Participatory Budgeting sounds so lofty: We the People choosing directly. And yes, some of the items folks get to vote for are pretty cool, like art projects or community gardens. But most [...]

[Read more →]

[Part 6 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
Taking on corporations around the globe may sound insanely ambitious, but boring it’s not. But using local/state government? It’s more Kumbaya than Mortal Kombat. Sure, there’s evil here — just ask the environmental justice groups who fight [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been looking for a phrase to capture a particularly bizarre piece of behavior — when people who want to cut the government complain about the government not doing enough. I think I’m going to call it Pulling a Brady, in honor of representative Kevin Brady of Texas. From the Wall Street Journal a [...]

[Read more →]

If you’re a moderate or conservative, what do you get if you stop pretending that the massive government intervention into healthcare you’re promoting is a “free market” solution? You can build a pro-private sector health insurance system that actually works. Here’s how they do it in the Netherlands:
Health care in the Netherlands [...]

[Read more →]

There’s another reason that we have to choose together if we value work life balance: if we don’t, we’ll hurt kids.
Not the kids of computer programmers. The market’s done a truly terrible job so far at creating computer programming jobs with worklife balance. But as our population ages, the number of people who absolutely have [...]

[Read more →]

Suppose you want to be able to work hard at a job you like but also have time for your family or for a life outside work. Womenomics, new book just excerpted by BusinessWeek, says no problem, the market’s going to take care of it. Why? Because most of us really want it:
• [...]

[Read more →]

If you want to buy a car, you can choose it yourself. Sure, you can get advice from your uncle, who’s like your own personal Car Talk (only without an off button). Or you can watch TV ads that teach you how buying the right ride will bring fun into your life and [...]

[Read more →]