1
Science
Climate Talks Yield Commitment to Ambitious, but Unclear, Actions
Delegates agreed to extend the increasingly ineffective Kyoto Protocol and other unspecified actions to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases.
2
N.Y. / Region
The Great Divide, Now in the Toy Aisle
Parents who can afford to shop only at mass-market retailers won’t find the kinds of playthings, like games of logic or sequence, that can help their children advance.
3
U.S.
Arithmetic on Taxes Shows Top Rate Is Just a Starting Point
Despite hints that President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner might compromise on the tax rate paid by top earners, a host of other tax questions could still derail a fiscal deal.
4
5
Fashion & Style
A Price on Friendship
What to do about friends who charge for business services, a psychiatrist who interrupts, a smelly son and people who want to borrow cookie recipes.
6
Opinion
A Step Toward E-Mail Privacy
Congress has made some progress in updating federal laws to protect the digital communications of citizens from inappropriate prying.
7
World
Cuba’s Free-Market Farm Experiment Yields a Meager Crop
Although the government has liberalized many aspects of agriculture, inefficiencies caused by central control mean the food situation has gotten worse in some ways.
8
Fashion & Style
Ebony Looks to Its Past as It Moves Forward
Ebony magazine has served as a repository for major events that have happened to African-Americans.
9
World
A Family, for a Few Days a Year
Hundreds of children have been stranded in orphanages in Guatemala for years as authorities there weigh whether to approve their adoptions to families in the United States.
10
U.S.
Proposed Rules on Fracking Gain Cautious Praise
Environmentalists and even some in the oil industry are welcoming Texas’ update of rules that address the broad process of oil and gas drilling.
11
N.Y. / Region
Rally Protests Coalition in New York State Senate
The Rev. Al Sharpton organized the rally in Harlem to draw attention to breakaway Democrats who have said they would join with Republicans in the next state legislative session.
12
Opinion
Next Civil Rights Landmark
The battle over marriage equality finally lands on the Supreme Court’s docket.
13
Fashion & Style
Forging a Bond in Mud and Guts
Extreme obstacle course races are becoming the macho sport of choice for Type A cubicle-bound masses yearning to breathe free.
14
U.S.
Supreme Court Will Take Up Two Cases on Gay Marriage
A California case could establish or reject a right to same-sex marriage, while a New York case contests a law requiring the federal government to deny benefits to couples married in states that allow it.
15
N.Y. / Region
Empty Offices Seem Poised to Remain So for Months
An absence of phone lines in Lower Manhattan is testing tenants and the real estate market after Hurricane Sandy.
16
N.Y. / Region
Far Above the Flooding, Yet Still Feeling a Hurricane’s Sting
A family found that living on the top floor of a high rise in Queens did not shield them from hardships imposed by Hurricane Sandy.
17
Opinion
Egypt’s Agony
President Mohamed Morsi should delay the vote on the draft constitution as a step toward resolving the nation’s latest crisis.
18
Business Day
American Airlines All Clear for Bankruptcy Exit
The pilots union approved a new contract, freeing American Airlines to come out of bankruptcy, and possibly pursue a merger with US Airways.
19
U.S.
Washington: Senator Kirk Returning After Stroke
Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois will return to the Senate on Jan. 3, nearly a year after having a stroke, his office said Thursday.
20
Fashion & Style
A Rare Gathering of Cartier's Best
The Art of Cartier, a show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, retraces the jeweler's evolution in a selection of 420 historic pieces.Not my style.
You will have to have yags if you want that much bling.
Even the Windsors reuse Victoria's jewelry.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology-or-monopoly-power/
Technology or Monopoly Power?
More on robots and all that: first, here’s the chart from the BLS (pdf), which focused on nonfarm business:
Dean
Baker warns me that the trend is a bit slower if you look at net
output, because depreciation is a rising share of the total. Still,
something major is happening.
Nick Rowe makes a good point, however, which is not so much a critique of the robot story as a general puzzle. Income has been shifting to capital, which would seem to increase the return to investment; but real interest rates are low by historical standards, and were low even before the financial crisis, suggesting that maybe the return to investment is if anything low. You might be able to make some headway here by stressing the different between safe assets and risky investments, but it is a puzzle.
Rowe suggests that a third factor, land, may be soaking up the excess returns and being misclassified as part of capital income. Logically, this could be true; I have doubts about whether it can be a major factor empirically, although obviously the thing to do is check it out
But there’s another possible resolution: monopoly power. Barry Lynn and Philip Longman have argued that we’re seeing a rapid rise in market concentration and market power. The thing about market power is that it could simultaneously raise the average rents to capital and reduce the return on investment as perceived by corporations, which would now take into account the negative effects of capacity growth on their markups. So a rising-monopoly-power story would be one way to resolve the seeming paradox of rapidly rising profits and low real interest rates.
As they say, this calls for more research; but the starting point is to realize that there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, but it’s potentially really important.
Nick Rowe makes a good point, however, which is not so much a critique of the robot story as a general puzzle. Income has been shifting to capital, which would seem to increase the return to investment; but real interest rates are low by historical standards, and were low even before the financial crisis, suggesting that maybe the return to investment is if anything low. You might be able to make some headway here by stressing the different between safe assets and risky investments, but it is a puzzle.
Rowe suggests that a third factor, land, may be soaking up the excess returns and being misclassified as part of capital income. Logically, this could be true; I have doubts about whether it can be a major factor empirically, although obviously the thing to do is check it out
But there’s another possible resolution: monopoly power. Barry Lynn and Philip Longman have argued that we’re seeing a rapid rise in market concentration and market power. The thing about market power is that it could simultaneously raise the average rents to capital and reduce the return on investment as perceived by corporations, which would now take into account the negative effects of capacity growth on their markups. So a rising-monopoly-power story would be one way to resolve the seeming paradox of rapidly rising profits and low real interest rates.
As they say, this calls for more research; but the starting point is to realize that there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, but it’s potentially really important.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
"The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But
corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s
simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation
are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is
doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense. Wait — are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t
that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in
our modern information economy? Well, that’s what many people thought;
for the past generation discussions of inequality have focused
overwhelmingly not on capital versus labor but on distributional issues
between workers, either on the gap between more- and less-educated
workers or on the soaring incomes of a handful of superstars in finance
and other fields. But that may be yesterday’s story.
More specifically, while it’s true that the finance guys are still
making out like bandits — in part because, as we now know, some of them
actually are bandits — the wage gap between workers with a college education and those without, which grew a lot in the 1980s and early 1990s, hasn’t changed much since then.
Indeed, recent college graduates had stagnant incomes even before the
financial crisis struck. Increasingly, profits have been rising at the
expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that
were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.
Why is this happening? As best as I can tell, there are two plausible
explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that
technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the
other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in
monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one
side, robber barons on the other.
About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile
industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all,
kinds. For example, one of the reasons some high-technology
manufacturing has lately been moving back to the United States is that
these days the most valuable piece of a computer, the motherboard, is basically made by robots, so cheap Asian labor is no longer a reason to produce them abroad.
In a recent book, “Race Against the Machine,”
M.I.T.’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that similar stories
are playing out in many fields, including services like translation and
legal research. What’s striking about their examples is that many of
the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of
technology isn’t limited to menial workers.
Still, 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?
As I said, this is a discussion that has barely begun — but it’s time to
get started, before the robots and the robber barons turn our society
into something unrecognizable".
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