June 2013
Play
“Three digital accelerators have been driving the transition from change to transformation for many years, but due to their predictable exponential rate, they have now reached an inflection point — a point where processes, products, services, and careers no longer change; rather, they transform. The three digital accelerators are processing power, digital storage, and digital bandwidth. The impact of these three accelerators—the enormous gains in power, miniaturization, product intelligence, interconnectivity, cloud services, mobility and a raft of other technological dimensions—will be felt in every industry, every corner of the globe, and every nook and cranny of society.”
—Transform Now… or Struggle To Survive | LinkedIn (via futuristgerd)
Beyond NYC: Other places adapting to climate →
sfgate.com
BONN, Germany (AP) â
“
In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Gore compared talk of adapting to climate change to laziness that would distract from necessary efforts.
But in his 2013 book “The Future,” Gore writes bluntly: “I was wrong.” He talks about how coping with rising seas and temperatures is just as important as trying to prevent global warming by cutting emissions.
Like Gore, governmental officials across the globe aren’t saying everyone should just give up on efforts to reduce pollution. They’re saying that as they work on curbing carbon, they also have to deal with a reality that’s already here.
” —“Climate talks shift from CO2 to adaptation” - NYTimes. (via climateadaptation)
Colorado Public Radio: Why People Keep Moving Into Fire-Prone Areas →
cpr.org
Images of the Black Forest fire near Colorado Springs show how devastating a wildfire can be. Why are more homes being built in these kinds of areas?
What a great exploration of how our communities are built. Click through and press “listen” if you can. The answers are surprising, especially if you’re new to urban planning, disaster management, and land use development.
Stowe Boyd: Water War Between Egypt And Ethiopia? →
stoweboyd.com
Morsi has such problems confronting him in Egypt that he is sabre-rattling, fulminating about going to war with Ethiopia as that upstream country is proceeding with plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile. In principle, damming the river for hydro-power shouldn’t lead to long-term…
The 90-plus population is expected to more than quadruple between 2010 and 2050 →
money.usnews.com
On the one hand, Obamacare just got a boost. On the other, the U.S. tax base is about to implode (bad news for growth-economists). There are so many implications from this, like the suburbs will empty even further and the need for nursing homes will increase exponentially. There won’t be much new land development, which I suppose is good news for environmentalists.
Living to age 90 is a worthy goal Americans are increasingly meeting. The number of people age 90 and older almost tripled from 720,000 people in 1980 to 1.9 million in 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report. And the 90-plus population is expected to more than quadruple between 2010 and 2050. Here’s a look at what life is like in the United States after age 90.
More women. Between 2006 and 2008, about three-quarters (74 percent) of the 90-and-older population were women. In 2006, life expectancy at age 65 was 19.7 years for women and 17 years for men. Women also experienced more rapid improvements in life expectancy than men between 1929 and 2006. Over the past eight decades, older women have added almost seven years to their life expectancy, or a 54 percent extension, compared with 5.3 years for men, a 45 percent extension. Among the age 90-and-older population, there are just 35 men for every 100 women. After age 95, there is approximately one man for every four women.
Married men and single women. Most women who make it to age 90 (84 percent) are widows. Only 6.3 percent of women in this age group are married. On the other hand, 43 percent of 90-something men are married and about half are widowers. “Women tend to marry older men. Traditionally, there is a four- to five-year age difference,” says Wan He, a Census Bureau demographer and co-author of the report. “When they get to age 90-plus, older men are very difficult to find.”
Living alone. Just over a third (37 percent) of people in their 90s live alone. About the same number of people (37 percent) live in a household with family members or unrelated individuals.
One-Third of Americans Now Own Tablet Computers →
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
In a new study, affluent, middle-aged, college-educated users are driving the growth of tablets. Some say that the sales of tablet computers will soon surpass laptops.
“Apple now holds about 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market, director Keith Moerer said in court Tuesday… Most estimates had placed Apple’s U.S. ebook market share at around 10 percent, with Amazon’s Kindle at 50 to 60 percent and Barnes & Noble’s Nook at 25 percent. But Moerer said the iBookstore’s market share was 20 percent in the first few months after the iBookstore’s launch, Publishers Weekly reports, and is about 20 percent now. (If this is true, the other retailers’ market shares would need to be adjusted downward, since Google and Kobo likely hold 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. ebook market.) From PW:”
—Apple: We have 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market — paidContent (via interestingsnippets)
“
Can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.
What about robber barons? We don’t talk much about monopoly power these days; antitrust enforcement largely collapsed during the Reagan years and has never really recovered. Yet Barry Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation argue, persuasively in my view, that increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.
I don’t know how much of the devaluation of labor either technology or monopoly explains, in part because there has been so little discussion of what’s going on. I think it’s fair to say that the shift of income from labor to capital has not yet made it into our national discourse.
Yet that shift is happening — and it has major implications. For example, there is a big, lavishly financed push to reduce corporate tax rates; is this really what we want to be doing at a time when profits are surging at workers’ expense? Or what about the push to reduce or eliminate inheritance taxes; if we’re moving back to a world in which financial capital, not skill or education, determines income, do we really want to make it even easier to inherit wealth?
” —Pauk Krugman, Robots and Robber Barons
Krugman is making the economic argument for society demanding more from the corporations on behalf of people. He refers back to this post in his piece today, Sympathy for the Luddites, in which he takes this several steps farther, arguing that more education may not be the answer for the work force being pushed from highly skilled jobs.
Paul Krugman
A much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.
I’ve noted before that the nature of rising inequality in America changed around 2000. Until then, it was all about worker versus worker; the distribution of income between labor and capital — between wages and profits, if you like — had been stable for decades. Since then, however, labor’s share of the pie has fallen sharply. As it turns out, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. A new report from the International Labor Organization points out that the same thing has been happening in many other countries, which is what you’d expect to see if global technological trends were turning against workers.
And some of those turns may well be sudden. The McKinsey Global Institute recently released a report on a dozen major new technologies that it considers likely to be “disruptive,” upsetting existing market and social arrangements. Even a quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.
So should workers simply be prepared to acquire new skills? The woolworkers of 18th-century Leeds addressed this issue back in 1786: “Who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task” of learning a new trade? Also, they asked, what will happen if the new trade, in turn, gets devalued by further technological advance?
And the modern counterparts of those woolworkers might well ask further, what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy no longer wants those skills?
Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).
So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.
I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?
They won’t propose something new: they will — through their actions — set the stage for neo-feudalism, in which the dispossessed become the wards of the nation state, and treated like the mentally-ill or refugees. Meanwhile, corporations will seek to become extranational, outside of national obligations to be taxed or otherwise support any non-globalist economic system. And, or course, they will publicly argue that they aren’t actively doing anything to carve the world into corporate spoils, but if they were such as system is inexorable, beneficial, and inescapable. And in private, they will advance social Darwinist arguments that explicitly state that the elite deserve the status they have earned, and that those dispossessed by this transition deserve their fate.
(via stoweboyd)
