Innovation | Social Capital Blog. Flickr photo by moominsean CNN reports the projected extinction of western religion. A few major caveats: 1) The underlying paper on which this report is based only focuses on Western Europe (which has seen rising rates of secularization much faster than in the US). While rates of “nonery” (those saying “none” to a question of what their religious tradition is) have risen dramatically in the US (see “American Grace“), most of these “nones” still actually believe in God, they just haven’t found the right church; and 2) Relatedly, these projections assume that people flip to be “secular” to mirror the populations around them, but assumes that the religious environment itself doesn’t change to attract these seculars. Excerpt from “American Grace“: In the nineteenth century, the American frontie4r presented a problem for religious leaders. The quote from Peter Berger at the end of the CNN story is telling.
Obviously Berger’s prediction hasn’t materialized. The World Factbook. The Office of Public Affairs (OPA) is the single point of contact for all inquiries about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). We read every letter, fax, or e-mail we receive, and we will convey your comments to CIA officials outside OPA as appropriate. However, with limited staff and resources, we simply cannot respond to all who write to us. Contact Information Submit questions or comments online By postal mail: Central Intelligence Agency Office of Public Affairs Washington, D.C. 20505 Contact the Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties Contact the Office of Inspector General Contact the Employment Verification Office Before contacting us: Please check our site map, search feature, or our site navigation on the left to locate the information you seek.
Roubini: Five reasons to be gloomy about the world economy in 2013. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images The global economy this year will exhibit some similarities with the conditions that prevailed in 2012. No surprise there: We face another year in which global growth will average about 3 percent, but with a multispeed recovery—a subpar, below-trend annual rate of 1 percent in the advanced economies, and close-to-trend rates of 5 percent in emerging markets. But there will be some important differences as well. Painful deleveraging—less spending and more saving to reduce debt and leverage—remains ongoing in most advanced economies, which implies slow economic growth. But fiscal austerity will envelop most advanced economies this year, rather than just the Eurozone periphery and the United Kingdom. Indeed, austerity is spreading to the core of the Eurozone, the United States, and other advanced economies (with the exception of Japan).
Moreover, several risks lie ahead. Finally, serious geopolitical risks loom large. Star-Wars-Economics-Infographic.jpg (600×2477) Money as You Grow – Kids and Money – President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability. Oil barons and tech hipsters share a dark side. Photo by Hunter Martin/Getty Images Oil barons and technology hipsters seem very different. But they share a dark side. The chief executive of U.S. explorer SandRidge Energy and some of his peers jet around at shareholders’ expense, while at Facebook and Google founder-bosses are insulated from owners by super-voting rights. Clubby boards also feature in both sectors.
The U.S. oil and gas industry plumbs the depths of weak corporate governance and social responsibility, with 15 companies getting the worst F grade from consultancy GMI Ratings - far more than would be suggested by their weighting in the sample. Silicon Valley’s governance shortcomings aren’t so brash. Although it manifests itself in different ways, the two sectors thus share a certain disregard for regular owners.
A tendency for boards to overlap and feature friends of executives may also owe something to the geographical clustering of the two industries. Entrenched managers and boards make these tough fights. A more complete picture of the iTunes economy. As it did yesterday, on occasion Apple reports the cumulative total downloads and payments to developers. Since this is done in variable time intervals, it makes analysis of the value of the app store difficult. But not impossible. The provision of developer revenues means we can determine the pricing of apps.
The pricing of apps and the download totals allows us to determine the revenue of the store. Using the time stamps of the reports allows us to determine these quantities over time. I’ve combined the data we have so far into the following graph. It shows three quantities (on three separate scales) at a monthly resolution: Download rate (in millions/day, interpolated from download totals) Payment rate to developers (reported change in payment to developers/reported time interval) Resulting revenue per download (in red, trailing average over a 10 month period) Having a price and quantity of app downloads allows for a complete picture of App Store revenues over time, shown below:
Robot economics are overblown: Labor-saving technology isn't new. Derek Thompson throws a bit of cold water on excessive hand-wringing over robots taking our jobs, but I want to throw more and icier water on this. The deployment of labor-saving technology is a real thing and people really do lose their jobs over it. But the use of the word "robots" as a synonym for "labor-saving technology" is a rhetorical trick to make long-standing trends seem new and alarming. The cotton gin was labor-saving technology. So was the forklift and the shipping container. Typesetters were put out of work by desktop publishing software in the late-'80s and early '90s, and digital photography cost jobs in the film development sector. None of this involves "robots," (unless everything related to computers is robots) but it all involves productivity-enhancing technological progress that increases overall economic output while negatively impacting specific individuals.
Manufacturing rebound: Is it real? Project Syndicate economists | Business. How Cash Keeps Poor People Poor, Digital Money Is Future. Want to help the poor? Start by taking money out of their hands. More specifically, cash — coins and paper bills are the silent enemy of the poor, with costs often out of proportion with their day-to-day convenience.
On one level, it’s ridiculous to think of cash as problematic; if you have a mountain of paper money, you aren’t exactly impoverished. And at times cash seems like exactly what we need. The irony of this line of thinking is that most of the people espousing the virtues of cash simultaneously enjoy the safety and cost savings of electronic money. (MORE: How the U.S. In contrast, the poor — tens of millions of people in the U.S. and billions of people worldwide — often have no option but cash, and pay dearly because of it. Psychologists will tell you that we are more careful with our money when operating in cash because forking over those funds is a more salient experience than swiping a debit or credit card. (MORE: What TV’s Pawn Stars Teach Us About Good Value)
A Giant Statistical Round-Up of the Income Inequality Crisis in 16 Charts - Derek Thompson. Now we are engaged in a great tug-of-war over a few points in the top tax rate in Washington. But even if the White House pulls hardest, it won't amount to much of a victory for the long-suffering middle class. The sources of their income stagnation are too deep, too varied, and too long-term for Clinton-era tax rates to cure them. "There is a huge amount of focus on progressive taxes in our policy world but progressive taxes are not much of a solution to this," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
"We need to get unemployment down rapidly. We need to greatly change our labor standards. We need to raise the minimum wage. " He's right: The middle class crisis -- and its resulting income inequality -- is the most important economic story of our time. Here we go: The income of a typical working-age family grew considerably in the late 1990s.
Where did the gains from productivity go? This is not a new trend. So, there's your crisis. History: As you were. Study: Income Inequality Kills Economic Growth. Corporate chieftains often claim that fixing the US economy requires signing new free trade deals, lowering government debt, and attracting lots of foreign investment. But a major new study has found that those things matter less than an economic driver that CEOs hate talking about: equality. "Countries where income was more equally distributed tended to have longer growth spells," says economist Andrew Berg, whose study appears in the current issue of Finance & Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund. Comparing six major economic variables across the world's economies, Berg found that equality of incomes was the most important factor in preventing a major downturn.
(See top chart.) In their study, Berg and coauthor Jonathan Ostry were less interested in looking at how to spark economic growth than how to sustain it. So how important is equality? Berg and Ostry aren't the first economists to suggest that income inequality can torpedo the economy. Photos of Children From Around the World With Their Most Prized Possessions. Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi Shot over a period of 18 months, Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti‘s project Toy Stories compiles photos of children from around the world with their prized possesions—their toys. Galimberti explores the universality of being a kid amidst the diversity of the countless corners of the world, saying, “at their age, they are pretty all much the same; they just want to play.” But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country.
Galimberti found that children in richer countries were more possessive with their toys and that it took time before they allowed him to play with them (which is what he would do pre-shoot before arranging the toys), whereas in poorer countries he found it much easier to quickly interact, even if there were just two or three toys between them. There were similarites too, especially in the functional and protective powers the toys represented for their proud owners. Stella – Montecchio, Italy Pavel – Kiev, Ukraine. ATUS and productivity: Why so much economics data is garbage and how that distorts policy. iStockphoto/Thinkstock. Economists are a smart bunch, and in San Diego over the weekend for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association lots of impressive analytical chops were on display. Sometimes, though, the analysis seems to badly overreach the data. A well-attended panel discussion about whether economics is hopelessly riven by ideological disagreement, for example, proceeded even though the IGM Chicago survey it’s based on isn’t even close to being a statistically valid survey.
And the issue recurs even outside the realm of such “fun” discussions and infects much more sober research. A worse-attended, dramatically lower-charisma discussion occurred the following day about a dully titled paper on “Cyclical Variation in Productivity Using the ATUS” by Michael Burda, Daniel Mamermesh, and Jay Stewart. The point of the paper is that theories of the macroeconomy often depend crucially on ideas about the direction of productivity in the labor force.