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Business Day
After DNA Patent Ruling, Availability of Genetic Tests Could Broaden
The Supreme Court’s decision in effect ends a nearly two-decade monopoly by Myriad Genetics on genes that correlate with increased risk of some cancers.
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Business Day
In Fight Over Bank Rules, Regulator Calls for Compromise
Bart Chilton, a Democratic member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, called on his agency to strike a compromise over plans to rein in risky trading overseas.
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Opinion
Indifferent About the Less Fortunate
A reader says we are less compassionate toward the poor and the unemployed.
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Business Day
That’s a Good Idea. But First, Can You Put It in Writing?
He leads by setting a thoughtful strategy and recruiting talent to work at his company.
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Science
120,000 Years of Cancer
A tumor found in the rib of a 120,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen is the oldest occurrence of the disease in the human fossil record, a new study reports.
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World
Argentina Falls From Its Throne as King of Beef
Consumption in the country has decreased so much over the decades that the nation recently fell from its perch as the world’s top per capita consumer of beef.
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U.S.
Lack of Local Revenue Limits Federal Money for Health Projects
The federal government’s financing of 1,100 experimental projects in Texas is pegged to funds raised by 20 regions.
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U.S.
Record Corn and Soybean Yields Are Predicted
The Department of Agriculture estimated that 14 billion bushels of corn will be produced this year, but late planting may reduce the harvest.
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N.Y. / Region
A Diet Program for Dads
Metropolitan Diary: A harried father describes a 10-step program that began with taking his child to the park.
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Business Day
Getting More Bang for the Buck in Higher Education
The federal government could do much more to take advantage of the investment in higher education by pressing colleges to be more accountable and flexible, an economist writes.Devaluing Human Capital
Nancy Folbre
suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly speaking, the
era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach
in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She
may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade
seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many
skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or
both.
I’d just like to add a sort of footnote, inspired by a conversation I had the other day with a Congressional aide. Has there ever before, he asked, been a time when technology undermined skilled labor, instead of making it more necessary than ever?
And the answer is of course yes, once you realize that there are many kinds of skill, and book learning hasn’t always been the one that mattered.
As it happens, I’m in my Princeton office right now – and it’s worth thinking about why Princeton was founded. It wasn’t as a prep school for investment bankers, even though that’s largely what the school became, for a while anyway. It was to train ministers. In the 18th century, there really weren’t that many places where anything even vaguely resembling a modern college education was valuable, and surely many if not most of those places involved preaching.
Yet there were skilled laborers, who were paid much more than their peers; it’s just that those skills tended to involve craftsmanship rather than pushing around words and other symbols. And – crucially – the truth is that quite a few of those skills did indeed end up being devalued by technology. Remember, the Luddites weren’t unskilled manual workers; they were skilled weavers and others who found themselves displaced by such technologies as the power loom.
After that, by the way, institutions like Princeton evolved into something more like finishing schools, where the elite acquired manners and connections. (Yes, there’s still more than a bit of that aspect today). The role of higher education as a creator of human capital came along quite late. And maybe, as Nancy Folbre says, this role is already waning.
And you know what? I wrote about this way back in 1996, when the Times Magazine, on its 100th birthday, asked various people to write articles as if looking back from 2096. Some of it looks dated, but not too bad, I’d say."
I’d just like to add a sort of footnote, inspired by a conversation I had the other day with a Congressional aide. Has there ever before, he asked, been a time when technology undermined skilled labor, instead of making it more necessary than ever?
And the answer is of course yes, once you realize that there are many kinds of skill, and book learning hasn’t always been the one that mattered.
As it happens, I’m in my Princeton office right now – and it’s worth thinking about why Princeton was founded. It wasn’t as a prep school for investment bankers, even though that’s largely what the school became, for a while anyway. It was to train ministers. In the 18th century, there really weren’t that many places where anything even vaguely resembling a modern college education was valuable, and surely many if not most of those places involved preaching.
Yet there were skilled laborers, who were paid much more than their peers; it’s just that those skills tended to involve craftsmanship rather than pushing around words and other symbols. And – crucially – the truth is that quite a few of those skills did indeed end up being devalued by technology. Remember, the Luddites weren’t unskilled manual workers; they were skilled weavers and others who found themselves displaced by such technologies as the power loom.
After that, by the way, institutions like Princeton evolved into something more like finishing schools, where the elite acquired manners and connections. (Yes, there’s still more than a bit of that aspect today). The role of higher education as a creator of human capital came along quite late. And maybe, as Nancy Folbre says, this role is already waning.
And you know what? I wrote about this way back in 1996, when the Times Magazine, on its 100th birthday, asked various people to write articles as if looking back from 2096. Some of it looks dated, but not too bad, I’d say."
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Business Day
How Money Affects Morality
A study by researchers at Harvard and the University of Utah finds that the simple idea of money makes people more likely to subordinate their ethical standards.
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U.S.
Department of Energy’s Crusade Against Leaks of a Potent Greenhouse Gas Yields Results
An effort at the Department of Energy has stanched leaks of sulfur hexafluoride equivalent to 1.1 million tons of carbon dioxide.
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Fashion & Style
Mommy Blog or a Glossy Fashion Magazine?
New mothers nurturing both a baby and their inner stylish selves find an audience online through their blogs.
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Opinion
Chemical Plant Safety
Bob Perciasepe, the E.P.A.’s acting administrator, responds to an editorial, “A Failure to Police Chemical Plants.”
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N.Y. / Region
Arrested After His Vulgar Response to Traffic Ticket, Man Files Suit
Willian Barboza, 22, who was arrested after he mailed a profanity-laced letter with his payment for a traffic ticket in upstate New York, is suing over the right to free speech.
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Opinion
Clarity on Patenting Nature
The Supreme Court correctly found that there can be no monopoly rights on human genes.
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Opinion
The Call of Mars
Going to Mars means staying on Mars. If our mission succeeds, we will become a two-planet species.
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Style
I Got Pregnant at 14. Ask Me About Plan B.
When I became a mother for the first time at 15, I was old enough to give my consent for adoption — but I would not have been old enough to purchase emergency contraception under the old F.D.A. rules.
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Technology
Tip of the Week: Go Offline With Google Maps for Android
The Google Maps app for Android has an offline mode that lets you store maps on your phone for those times when you can’t get a data-network connection.
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N.Y. / Region
A Diet Program for Dads
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Business Day
Getting More Bang for the Buck in Higher Education
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Opinion
The Real War on Reality
The outsize role of private intelligence firms and their willingness to manufacture “truth” constitutes a sort epistemic warfare.
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Opinion
Clarity on Patenting Nature
The Supreme Court correctly found that there can be no monopoly rights on human genes.
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Opinion
G.O.P. Spendthrifts Preserve Government Expansion
Republicans in the House want to keep doling out $1.6 million per prisoner per year at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.
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Autos
The Secret Buried Cars of North Carolina's Core Banks
Back when beach driving was completely unregulated, people would leave cars on the beach for fishing, then abandon them when they died. Some still remain.
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Business Day
How Money Affects Morality
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Opinion
Chemical Plant Safety
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Technology
Tech Pushes to Keep Its Spoils in Immigration Bill
Human resource department heads from eight of the country’s largest technology companies popped into the offices of more than a dozen members of Congress.
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Opinion
The Call of Mars
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1
U.S.
Researchers Find Biological Evidence of Gulf War Illnesses
New research is bolstering the view that mysterious symptoms in Persian Gulf war veterans are fundamentally biological in nature, as opposed to psychological, the result of combats stress.
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Business Day
When Bernanke Confounds, Wall Street Reaches for Theories
Amid the current turmoil in global markets, one question is being obsessively debated on Wall Street: Just what was Ben S. Bernanke thinking three weeks ago when he said that the Federal Reserve might soon cut back its stimulus efforts?
Inflation (Economics);
Interest Rates;
United States Economy;
Wall street is upset because the flow of free money may stop.
It will make no difference to the rest of us.
11 Comments
Still, every once in a while we should step back and consider the awesomeness of the situation. Normally, we expect governments to have trouble containing demands that they spend more and/or tax less. Normally, we expect the IMF to be a fiscal scold, telling spendthrift governments to make tough choices; the old joke is that IMF stands for It’s Mostly Fiscal.
But now we’re in a situation — a liquidity trap — in which more government spending is a good thing, because it helps put unemployed resources to work; meanwhile, the cost in terms of future debt service is minimal, because interest rates are so low. Both ends of the intellectual case for austerity — the claim that spending cuts are actually expansionary and the claim that terrible things happen when debt rises even if interest rates are low — have collapsed. What could be easier, then, than for politicians to make constituents happy by spending more on things voters like?
So what happens? More austerity, because a party dedicated to the proposition that less government is always more blackmailed Obama into accepting the sequester, and now uses its blocking power to prevent any solution; and it’s true, Obama has chosen not to make this a central political issue. There are many ways to show how big the government shortfall is; here’s a comparison of the track of overall government spending (federal, state, and local) during the last recession and aftermath with the Great Recession and aftermath, just in dollar terms (if we did it in, say, real per capita terms you’d see that spending is falling fairly quickly):
If government spending had grown at normal rates since 2007, it would
be hundreds of billions higher than it is — and the unemployment rate
would probably be 6 percent or less. At this point austerity is the main
reason we’re still in an inadequate recovery.
But there isn’t even a hint of significant movement on fiscal policy. It’s really amazing"
Wall street is upset because the flow of free money may stop.
It will make no difference to the rest of us.
11 Comments
Against Stupidity, The IMF Itself Contends In Vain
Yesterday the IMF chided the United States for spending too little and cutting its budget deficit too fast — and most people, if they heard about it, just shrugged. To be honest, that was my initial reaction too: we’ve come to accept the sheer stupidity of our current economic policies, and the fact that apparently nothing can be done about it, as part of the “new normal”.Still, every once in a while we should step back and consider the awesomeness of the situation. Normally, we expect governments to have trouble containing demands that they spend more and/or tax less. Normally, we expect the IMF to be a fiscal scold, telling spendthrift governments to make tough choices; the old joke is that IMF stands for It’s Mostly Fiscal.
But now we’re in a situation — a liquidity trap — in which more government spending is a good thing, because it helps put unemployed resources to work; meanwhile, the cost in terms of future debt service is minimal, because interest rates are so low. Both ends of the intellectual case for austerity — the claim that spending cuts are actually expansionary and the claim that terrible things happen when debt rises even if interest rates are low — have collapsed. What could be easier, then, than for politicians to make constituents happy by spending more on things voters like?
So what happens? More austerity, because a party dedicated to the proposition that less government is always more blackmailed Obama into accepting the sequester, and now uses its blocking power to prevent any solution; and it’s true, Obama has chosen not to make this a central political issue. There are many ways to show how big the government shortfall is; here’s a comparison of the track of overall government spending (federal, state, and local) during the last recession and aftermath with the Great Recession and aftermath, just in dollar terms (if we did it in, say, real per capita terms you’d see that spending is falling fairly quickly):
But there isn’t even a hint of significant movement on fiscal policy. It’s really amazing"
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U.S.
Boehner Endorses House Farm Bill
The House measure received a major endorsement when Speaker John A. Boehner said he would support the agriculture and nutrition legislation the chamber is to begin work on this month.
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Business Day
Despite Recovery, Younger Households Are Slower to Make Gains
American households, taken as a whole, have recovered from the financial crisis and Great Recession, but a different picture emerges from looking at the median.
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Business Day
Hong Kong’s Old Airport Reopens as Cruise Ship Terminal
The new terminal’s two berths will be able to accommodate the largest cruise ships in the world — behemoths more than 300 meters long that can carry thousands of passengers.
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Opinion
Keeping Up With Medical Knowledge
Stakeholders in the “curation” of medical research respond to an Op-Ed article.
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Opinion
Clarity on Patenting Nature
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Opinion
The Real War on Reality
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Opinion
The E.P.A. Backs Off on Factory Farms
Toxic waste from factory farms is the leading cause of impaired water quality, but the federal government has failed to regulate the industry.
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Business Day
An Old-Fashioned Business Copes With Modern Tech Issues
What do you think? Should Mr. Reed automate — or delegate — more of his operational tasks? Should he change his e-commerce platform?
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Business Day
Food and Gas Drove Wholesale Prices Up in May
Outside those volatile categories, the Labor Department said, inflation was mild.
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N.Y. / Region
Ethics Panel Fines Lopez $330,000 in Harassment Case
The fine was the largest ever issued by the legislative panel, whose scathing report had outlined former Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez’s history of sexual harassment of female staff members.
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