Capital - The end of middle management? As the US election season gets underway, American politicians are rolling out their usual lines about creating jobs for the middle class. It’s a terrific sentiment, but if they’re talking about the middle class that used to populate middle-management jobs in offices around the country, I’m sorry to report that that train has left the station. The sad truth is that middle management is on its way to becoming virtually extinct. We should no longer expect traditional job ladders for managers to move up the ranks, or even retaining the notion that middle managers are the glue that connects workers and ensures goal alignment up and down the hierarchy. This is different. Replaced by computers While lauded, technological advances have already taken their toll on lower-level jobs. Further up the chain, the problem gets much worse, particularly for some professions. A cultural shift The demise of middle management isn’t due to technological advances alone. Millennials at work Moving forward
The Logic of Surveillance Capitalism This post was originally published on Philosophical Disquisitions. You have probably noticed it already. There is a strange logic at the heart of the modern tech industry. The famous Harvard business theorist Shoshana Zuboff refers to this phenomenon assurveillance capitalism and she believes that it has its own internal ‘logic’ that we need to carefully and critically assess. And that’s what I want to do in this post. Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism. Each of these four features has important social repercussions. 1. First, you need to understand the sources of the data, i.e. what it is that makes it fair to refer to this as the era of ‘big data’. Second, you need to understand the relationship between the data-extracting companies, like Google, and the users of their services. It is worth dwelling on this functional independence for a moment. One final point about data extraction and analysis. 2. (Zuboff 2015, 81) 3. 4. (Zuboff 2015, 85) 5.
The Myth of the Ethical Shopper - The Huffington Post Michael Hobbes There’s this video that went viral earlier this year. On Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, a vending machine is selling plain white T-shirts for €2 each. “Do you still want to buy this shirt?” For a generation now, buying better has been one of our most potent forms of protest. It all started in the mid-’90s, when anti-sweatshop mania burst into the mainstream of American culture. And for a while there, it worked. But in the past 25 years, the apparel industry, the entire global economy, has undergone a complete transformation. This year, I spoke with more than 30 company reps, factory auditors and researchers and read dozens of studies describing what has happened in those sweatshops since they became a cultural fixation three decades ago. translation missing: en.parallax1_caption If you’ve ever been to a corporate social responsibility conference, you’ve undoubtedly heard the story of the three fire extinguishers. This is the world that No Logo built. It’s the same in Burma.
Ban cash, end boom and bust This may all sound far-fetched, but the idea has been developed in some detail by a Norwegian academic, Trond Andresen*. • Get the best investing ideas from Telegraph Investor once a week by email • Get sent the best of Telegraph Money once a week by email In this futuristic world, all payments are made by contactless card, mobile phone apps or other electronic means, while notes and coins are abolished. Having everyone’s account at a single, central institution allows the authorities to either encourage or discourage people to spend. Faced with seeing their money slowly confiscated, people are more likely to spend it on goods and services. The recipient of cash responds in the same way, and also spends. What about the opposite situation – when the economy is overheating? So whenever you use the money in your account to buy something, you pay a small penalty. • Interest rates predictions: 'July 2016 for first rise' • Nikkei at 20,000: will it hit '63m' by 2025?
A true crime tale of comic books, corruption, and a $9 million vanishing act By Russell Brandom & Colin Lecher | Illustrations by Jun Cen ou don’t see an All Star Comics #3 every day. Published in 1940, it’s a milestone in what’s known as the Golden Age of comic books: the debut of the first bonafide superhero team, the Justice Society of America. There’s hardly a plot, only a meeting of some of DC’s biggest stars — Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman — taking turns sharing tales as if they were telling ghost stories at a campfire. Spectre recounts a battle with a monster from the moon; Hawkman remembers a crisis on the island of Krakatoa. The masked vigilantes on the cover are a friendly lot, decades removed from the gritty realism that would come to dominate the industry later. So when an All Star Comics #3 surfaced at Heritage Auctions’ first big sale of 2012, collectors took notice. But someone bidding at the Heritage auction was willing to pay significantly more. All Star #3 wasn’t the only mid-tier comic suddenly going for outrageous prices at the 2012 sale.
Who Will Lose in the War on Contractors? The haters of the sharing economy are rallying around a plan for destroying the most spectacular ad innovative sector of modern economic life. It’s taken them a few years, during which the digital revolution seemed unstoppable. The hint came from a speech by Hillary Clinton at the New School in which she suggested that current “contractors” be redefined as “employees.” According to her, this means that the workers can then enjoy new human rights, as if by magic. Hillary’s comments amount to a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. Hillary poses as a spokesperson for the worker. A good case in point is what happened to Zirtual, a fabulous California that enabled personal-assistant contracting. Faced with some fear and ambiguity about the legal status of contractors in California, the management of Zirtual made them all employees and put them on the payroll. And it’s not just about the workers. Who benefits by forcing contractors to become employees? Small Change, Big Effects
theconversation There has been a great deal of attention given to the development of the “sharing economy” in recent years. It’s the latest in a series of labels trying to sum up the increasing use of digital online platforms which bring customers and providers of goods and services together to bargain directly. The best known examples are Uber and Airbnb, although the definition can stretch to cover eBay, a range of social and community enterprises and non-market transactions such as charity donations. Meanwhile, a subset of the sharing economy has been identified, called the “gig economy”. Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong job and the economic security that came with it, having been replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers. A look at the data The latest labour market statistics published do not entirely support the “gig economy” thesis. Another indicator might be an increase in working at home.
Capitalists from Outer Space When the aliens stop trifling with crop circles, bumpkin abduction, and indelicate probes and finally introduce themselves to the rest of humanity, will they turn out to be partisans of central planning, interventionism, or unhampered markets? This is not the question asked by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, but whether or not the institute’s scientists realize it, the answer is crucial to their search. Signs of Intelligent Life The SETI Institute was founded by Frank Drake and the late Carl Sagan. The scientific search for evidence of advanced alien societies began in 1960, when Drake aimed a 25-meter dish at two nearby stars. The Truth Is Out There Before we can ask after advanced alien political economy, we must confront the more basic question: Is there anybody out there? In an attempt to address, if not answer, the question, Drake proposed an equation in 1961 to summarize the concepts scientists think are relevant to any educated guess.
China Falters, and the Global Economy Is Forced to Adapt HONG KONG — The commodities giant spent heavily for years, mining iron ore across Australia, digging for copper in Chile, and pumping off the coast of Trinidad. The company could be confident in its direction as commodities orders surged from its biggest and best customer, . Now, BHP is pulling back, faced with a slowing Chinese economy that will no longer be the same dominant force in commodities. Profit is falling and the company is cutting its investment spending budget by more than two-thirds.
How China Inflated A Global Bubble In Fine Wine & Spirits - And Then Popped It The Liv-Ex 50, a price index of the 5 Bordeaux First Growths, surged over 340% from 2005 to an all-time high in 2011. It has been falling ever since. In 2005 the demand for fine wine in China began to explode, pulled along by massive economic growth. The nation’s newly minted millionaires went looking for places to spend their money — and they found an outlet in high quality wines and spirits, along with so many other luxury goods. At the same time, executives turned to fine wine as the ultimate gift, which came to convey prestige, status and respect – these gifts were especially prominent in many of the under-the-table deals which were helping to fuel the growth. Seduced by rapidly inflating prices, ultra high end wine producers — particularly Bordeaux’s classified growths — paid little mind as to why Chinese buyers were snapping up their wines. The demand for wine in China got off to a roaring start in 2005. All of this growth obviously impacted the world market as a whole.