Economics – Page 66 – artdiamondblog.com

“I’ll Be Lucky When I’m in England”

(p. A4) CALAIS, France — The sun had barely set when a 23-year-old Eritrean woman who gave her name as Akbrat fell into step with dozens of other men and women and started scaling the fence surrounding the entrance to the French side of the Channel Tunnel.
The barbed wire cut her hands, but she did not feel the pain. The police seemed to be everywhere. She thought of her 5-year-old son back in Africa and ran, zigzag through the falling shadows, once almost colliding with an officer in a helmet.
Then she was alone. She slipped under the freight train and waited, clambering out just as it began moving.
But before she could hurl herself onto the train bed transporting trucks filled with Britain-bound produce, a French officer caught up with her, she recalled in an interview on Thursday. Blinded by tear gas, she stumbled and bruised her right ankle. After being ejected from the complex around the tunnel, it took her five hours to limp the nine miles back to the refugee camp of makeshift shelters that its 3,000 inhabitants call the “jungle.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” someone told her.
“I’m not lucky,” she responded. “I’ll be lucky when I’m in England.”
. . .
For many of the migrants who have been coming to the Continent from Africa, the Middle East and beyond, Calais, a mere 21 miles from the white cliffs of Dover, is their last stop. If they make it across to Britain, many believe they will have reached safety and a better life.

For the full story, see:
KATRIN BENNHOLD and ALISSA J. RUBIN. “Migrants Taste Freedom at Tunnel’s Door.” The New York Times (Fri., JULY 31, 2015): A4 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 30, 2015, and has the title “Migrants in Calais Desperately Rush the Channel Tunnel to England, Night After Night.”)

“The Countryside Was Romantic Only to People Who Didn’t Have to Live There”

(p. C4) Mr. Meyer’s motivation for writing his book is simple and straightforward. “Since 2000, a quarter of China’s villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders,” as the country urbanizes, he notes early on, adding: “Before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing.”
“In Manchuria” shifts back and forth among various genres. It is part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage and part memoir, but it is also a love offering to Mr. Meyer’s wife, Frances, who grew up in the unfortunately named Wasteland, the village that Mr. Meyer chooses as his base near the start of this decade, and to the unborn son she is carrying by the time “In Manchuria” ends.
. . .
After a year in Wasteland, Mr. Meyer was ready to move on, and he now divides his time between Singapore and Pittsburgh, where he teaches nonfiction writing. But his interlude in Manchuria clearly taught him many lessons, perhaps the most fundamental being this: “The countryside was romantic only to people who didn’t have to live there.”

For the full review, see:
LARRY ROHTER. “A Vanishing Way of Life for Peasants in China.” The New York Times Book Review (Mon., MARCH 8, 2015): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MARCH 8, 2015, and has the title “Review: Michael Meyer’s ‘In Manchuria’ Documents a Changing Rural China.”)

The book under review, is:
Meyer, Michael. In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015.

Dynamism “in Danger of Being Stultified by Planners”

(p. A25) . . . , the attempt to tame the market will end up stultifying it. Everybody knows that capitalism’s creative destruction can be rough. But over the last few decades, a ragged version of global capitalism in places ranging from China to Nigeria has brought about the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. America’s fluid style of capitalism attracts driven and talented immigrants and creates vast waves of technological innovation. This dynamism is always in danger of being stultified by planners who think they can tame it and by governing elites who want to rig it. We should not take it for granted.
The coming debate about capitalism will be between those who want to restructure the underlying system and those who want to help people take advantage of its rough intensity. It will be between people who think you need strong government to defeat oligarchy and those who think you need open competition.

For the full commentary, see:
David Brooks. “Two Cheers for Capitalism.” The New York Times (Fri., July 31, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Communist Party Destroying Dissenting Civic Groups in China

“Yang Zili of the Transition Institute of Social and Economic Research went into hiding.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) BEIJING — First, the police took away the think tank’s former graphic designer, then the young man who organized seminars, and eventually its founder. Another employee fled China’s capital, fearing he would be forced to testify against his colleagues in rigged trials.

“The anxiety is overwhelming, not knowing if they are coming for you,” said the employee, Yang Zili, a researcher at the Transition Institute of Social and Economic Research in Beijing, who has been in hiding since November. “It’s frightening because as they disappear, one friend after another, the police are not following any law. They just do as they please.”
These are perilous days for independent civic groups in China, especially those that take on politically contentious causes like workers’ rights, legal advocacy and discrimination against people with AIDS. Such groups have long struggled to survive inside China’s ill-defined, shifting margins of official tolerance, but they have served as havens for socially committed citizens.
Under President Xi Jinping, however, the Communist Party has forcefully narrowed the bounds of accepted activity, setting off fears that these pockets of greater openness in China’s generally restrictive political landscape may soon disappear.
. . .
The campaign has focused on groups deemed sanctuaries for dissent. From its cramped offices in the university district of northwest Beijing, the Transition Institute championed a mix of free market economics and support for the downtrodden, conducting research on the exploitation of taxi drivers, school policies that shortchange rural children and the environmental costs of the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. But the institute also attracted advocates of democratic reform, some of whom had prior run-ins with the authorities.
“We always hoped to eke out survival in tough circumstances,” said Mr. Yang, 43, the researcher now in hiding, who spent eight years in prison for holding informal discussions with a group of friends about multiparty elections and a free press. “But the more independent NGOs,” he added, referring to nongovernmental organizations, “especially the ones that criticize government policies or don’t help the government’s image, have encountered a policy of containment, even destruction.”
. . .
(p. A6) With his colleagues disappearing one by one, Mr. Yang decided to go underground. He was in the institute office one morning in late November when a police officer called and told him to go to a station for questioning. Instead, Mr. Yang left an Internet message for his wife, shut off his cellphone, and slipped away, taking only the clothes on his back. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,” he said in an interview.
Meeting with a reporter at a location several hours’ drive from Beijing, he said he missed his wife and 4-year-old son, and visibly nervous, he talked about his fear of being returned to prison.
Mr. Yang said he would turn himself in should a warrant be issued for his arrest, but he was not interested in cooperating with what he described as an extralegal persecution of his colleagues.
“I still don’t understand what we did wrong,” he said. “We were just trying to help improve China.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS and CHRIS BUCKLEY. “In China, Civic Groups’ Freedom, and Followers, Are Vanishing.” The New York Times (Fri., FEB. 27, 2015): A4 & A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 26, 2015.)

Keeping Growth Rate High in China Achieved by More Misallocation of Capital

(p. A11) . . . , it is Beijing’s recent moves to ease fiscal policy that will ensure that this year’s growth target can be met. Unlike traditional Keynesian stimulus programs, which are typically conducted at the central-government level, in China fiscal easing primarily involves providing additional state-bank money to local governments.
This has a more immediate and powerful effect on GDP growth and job creation, but it comes at a high cost: overinvestment in local projects and the misallocation of capital. China’s landscape is littered with unused highways and airports, redundant steel and cement plants, unnecessary municipal office buildings and “ghost cities” filled with empty high-rises and deserted shopping malls.
From 2009-13, “ineffective investment” amounted to a stunning 41.8 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion), according to research published in 2014 by Xu Ce of China’s National Development and Reform Commission and Wang Yuan of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research.
That China is heading down this path again can only mean that it has no other way to reach its growth target. It is also an indication of how little the economic system has changed despite the leadership’s much vaunted reform initiatives and efforts to tackle corruption at all levels of government.

For the full commentary, see:
MARK A. DEWEAVER. “Why China Will Still Reach Its Target Growth Rate; The stock market crash won’t stop Beijing from shoveling trillions into wasteful local projects.'” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 30, 2015.)

From Self-Funding, and Sony, Khanna Builds PlayStation Supercomputer to Advance Science

“Gaurav Khanna with a supercomputer he built at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics department using 200 Playstation 3 consoles that are housed in a refrigerated shipping container.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) This spring, Gaurav Khanna noticed that the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics department was more crowded than usual. Why, he wondered, were so many students suddenly so interested in science?”

It wasn’t a thirst for knowledge, it turns out. News of Dr. Khanna’s success in building a supercomputer using only PlayStation 3 video game consoles had spread quickly; the students, a lot of them gamers, just wanted to gape at the sight of nearly 200 consoles stacked on one another.
. . .
Making a supercomputer requires a large number of processors — standard desktops, laptops or the like — and a way to network them. Dr. Khanna picked the PlayStation 3 for its viability and cost, currently, $250 to $300 in stores. Unlike other game consoles, the PlayStation 3 allows users to install a preferred operating system, making it attractive to programmers and developers. (The latest model, the PlayStation 4, does not have this feature.)
“Gaming had grown into a huge market,” Dr. Khanna said. “There’s a huge push for performance, meaning you can buy low-cost, high-performance hardware very easily. I could go out and buy 100 PlayStation 3 consoles at my neighborhood Best Buy, if I wanted.”
That is just what Dr. Khanna did, though on a smaller scale. Because the National Science Foundation, which funds much of Dr. Khanna’s research, might not have viewed the bulk buying of video game consoles as a responsible use of grant money, he reached out to Sony Computer Entertainment America, the company behind the PlayStation 3. Sony donated four consoles to the experiment; Dr. Khanna’s university paid for eight more, and Dr. Khanna bought another four. He then installed the Linux operating system on all 16 consoles, plugged them into the Internet and booted up the supercomputer.
Lior Burko, an associate professor of physics at Georgia Gwinnett College and a past collaborator with Dr. Khanna, praised the idea as an “ingenious” way to get the function of a supercomputer without the prohibitive expense.
“Dr. Khanna was able to combine his two fields of expertise, namely general relativity and computer science, to invent something new that allowed for not just a neat new machine, but also scientific progress that otherwise might have taken many more years to achieve,” Dr. Burko said.
. . .
His team linked the consoles, housing them in a refrigerated shipping container designed to carry milk. The resulting supercomputer, Dr. Khanna said, had the computational power of nearly 3,000 laptop or desktop processors, and cost only $75,000 to make — about a tenth the cost of a comparable supercomputer made using traditional parts.

For the full story, see:
LAURA PARKER “An Economical Way to Save Progress.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 23, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 22, 2014, and has the title “That Old PlayStation Can Aid Science.”)

No Increase in Public’s Concern with Income Inequality Since 1978

(p. 4A) DENVER (AP) — Income inequality is all the rage in public debate nowadays. Political figures from Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the left to Republican presidential prospect Jeb Bush on the right are denouncing the widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else.
But ordinary Americans don’t seem as fascinated by the issue as their would-be leaders. The public’s expressed interest in income inequality has remained stagnant over the past 36 years, according to the General Social Survey, which measures trends in public opinion.
In 2014 polling, Republicans’ support for the government doing something to narrow the rich-poor gap reached an all-time low. Even Democrats were slightly less interested in government action on the issue than they were two years ago.
The survey is conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. Because of its long-running and comprehensive questions, it is a highly regarded source on social trends.
In the latest survey, made public last week, less than half of Americans — 46 percent — said the government ought to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. That level has held fairly steady since 1978. Thirty-seven percent said the government shouldn’t concern itself with income differences, and the rest didn’t feel strongly either way.

For the full story, see:
AP. “Income Inequality? Pols Want to Talk about It; Public Yawns.” Omaha World-Herald (Monday, March 23, 2015): 4A.

For more details on the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Survey (GSS) results through 2014, see:
Inequality: Trends in Americans’ Attitudes URL: http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/inequality-trends-in-americans-attitudes0317-6562.aspx#study

Pentagon Seeks Innovation from Private Start-Ups Since “They’ve Realized that the Old Model Wasn’t Working Anymore”

(p. A3) SAN FRANCISCO — A small group of high-ranking Pentagon officials made a quiet visit to Silicon Valley in December to solicit national security ideas from start-up firms with little or no history of working with the military.
The visit was made as part of an effort to find new ways to maintain a military advantage in an increasingly uncertain world.
In announcing its Defense Innovation Initiative in a speech in California in November, Chuck Hagel, then the defense secretary, mentioned examples of technologies like robotics, unmanned systems, miniaturization and 3-D printing as places to look for “game changing” technologies that would maintain military superiority.
“They’ve realized that the old model wasn’t working anymore,” said James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “They’re really worried about America’s capacity to innovate.”
There is a precedent for the initiative. Startled by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, at the Pentagon to ensure that the United States would not be blindsided by technological advances.
Now, the Pentagon has decided that the nation needs more than ARPA, renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, if it is to find new technologies to maintain American military superiority.
. . .
The Pentagon focused on smaller companies during its December visit; it did not, for example, visit Google. Mr. Welby acknowledged that Silicon Valley start-ups were not likely to be focused on the Pentagon as a customer. The military has captive suppliers and a long and complex sales cycle, and it is perceived as being a small market compared with the hundreds of millions of customers for consumer electronics products.
Mr. Welby has worked for three different Darpa directors, but he said that Pentagon officials now believed they had to look beyond their own advanced technology offices.
“The Darpa culture is about trying to understand high-risk technology,” he said. “It’s about big leaps.” Today, however, the Pentagon needs to break out of what can be seen as a “not invented here” culture, he said.
“We’re thinking about what the world is going to look like in 2030 and what tools the department will need in 20 or 30 years,” he added.

For the full story, see:
JOHN MARKOFF. “Pentagon Shops in Silicon Valley for Game Changers.” The New York Times (Fri., FEB. 27, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 26, 2015.)

Starting in Late Middle Ages the State Tried “to Control, Delineate, and Restrict Human Thought and Action”

(p. C6) . . . transregional organizations like Viking armies or the Hanseatic League mattered more than kings and courts. It was a world, as Mr. Pye says, in which “you went where you were known, where you could do the things you wanted to do, and where someone would protect you from being jailed, hanged, or broken on the wheel for doing them.”
. . .
This is a world in which money rules, but money is increasingly an abstraction, based on insider information, on speculation (the Bourse or stock market itself is a regional invention) and on the ability to apply mathematics: What was bought or sold was increasingly the relationships between prices in different locations rather than the goods themselves.
What happened to bring this powerful, creative pattern to a close? The author credits first the reaction to the Black Death of the mid-14th century, when fear of contamination (perhaps similar to our modern fear of terrorism) justified laws that limited travel and kept people in their place. Religious and sectarian strife further limited the free flow of ideas and people, forcing people to choose one identity to the exclusion of others or else to attempt to disappear into the underground of clandestine and subversive activities. And behind both of these was the rise of the state, a modern invention that attempted to control, delineate, and restrict human thought and action.

For the full review, see:
PATRICK J. GEARY. “Lighting Up the Dark Ages.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 30, 2015): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 29, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Pye, Michael. The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe. New York: Pegasus Books LLC, 2014.

More Tech Stars Skip College, at Least for a While

(p. B1) The college dropout-turned-entrepreneur is a staple of Silicon Valley mythology. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all left college.
In their day, those founders were very unusual. But a lot has changed since 2005, when Mr. Zuckerberg left Harvard. The new crop of dropouts has grown up with the Internet and smartphones. The tools to create new technology are more accessible. The cost to start a company has plunged, while the options for raising money have multiplied.
Moreover, the path isn’t as lonely.
. . .
Not long ago, dropping out of school to start a company was considered risky. For this generation, it is a badge of honor, evidence of ambition and focus. Very few dropouts become tycoons, but “failure” today often means going back to school or taking a six-figure job at a big tech company.
. . .
(p. B5) There are no hard numbers on the dropout trend, but applicants for the Thiel Fellowship tripled in the most recent year; the fellowship won’t disclose numbers.
. . .
It has tapped 82 fellows in the past five years.
“I don’t think college is always bad, but our society seems to think college is always good, for everyone, at any cost–and that is what we have to question,” says Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook.
Of the 43 fellows in the initial classes of 2011 and 2012, 26 didn’t return to school and continued to work on startups or independent projects. Five went to work for large tech firms, including a few through acquisitions. The remaining 12 went back to school.
Mr. Thiel says companies started by the fellows have raised $73 million, a record that he says has attracted additional applicants. He says fellows “learned far more than they would have in college.”

For the full story, see:
DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI. “College Dropouts Thrive in Tech.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., June 4, 2015): B1 & B10.
(Note: ellipses added. The phrase “the fellowship won’t disclose numbers” was in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date June 3, 2015, and has the title “College Dropouts Thrive in Tech.”)