From Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere, with 1200+ videos covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance.

Salman Khan (Sal) founded the Khan Academy with the goal of using technology to educate the world. Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He also holds a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and a BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ed

Building a Green Economy, by Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist

Environmental Econ 101

If there’s a single central insight in economics, it’s this: There are mutual gains from transactions between consenting adults. If the going price of widgets is $10 and I buy a widget, it must be because that widget is worth more than $10 to me. If you sell a widget at that price, it must be because it costs you less than $10 to make it. So buying and selling in the widget market works to the benefit of both buyers and sellers. More than that, some careful analysis shows that if there is effective competition in the widget market, so that the price ends up matching the number of widgets people want to buy to the number of widgets other people want to sell, the outcome is to maximize the total gains to producers and consumers. Free markets are “efficient” — which, in economics-speak as opposed to plain English, means that nobody can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Now, efficiency isn’t everything. In particular, there is no reason to assume that free markets will deliver an outcome that we consider fair or just. So the case for market efficiency says nothing about whether we should have, say, some form of guaranteed health insurance, aid to the poor and so forth. But the logic of basic economics says that we should try to achieve social goals through “aftermarket” interventions. That is, we should let markets do their job, making efficient use of the nation’s resources, then utilize taxes and transfers to help those whom the market passes by.

But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions — any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window. So what should we do? Environmental economics is all about answering that question.

Ed

Another fine legacy of free market fundamentalism:

The old reliable formula of universities, research, VCs, startups and a decent incubation environment to house growth is in serious jeopardy. Universities are raising price and denying natives for more money from overseas students, however, the problem with that is with opportunity down in America but up in the rest of the world, fewer and fewer of these foreign students are sticking around, instead going elsewhere, with little recourse for colleges to remain solvent (or so they say), but to go from training people to join us to training people to beat us .

Gee, thanks guys,

Ed

I like Stewart’s contrasting the non-reaction of Exxon’s profit and taxes, $35B in profits with $15B in taxes, of which not a cent went to the U.S., but instead to foreign governments

Ed

I recant. It’s a terrific idea:

It fixes world problems. Usury is a crime, so any form of interest-bearing loan is illegal. Loans themselves would be illegal – Men shall not pay for with work they have’t done yet. The military-industrial complex will beat all those swords into plows. If people want fruitful transactions, then yea, they shall then go forth and multiply, planting much seed from which shall issue the labor for pulling those plows around the ground that will be thy sole sustenance.
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Big Banks Draw Big Profits from Microloans to Poor

In recent years, the idea of giving small loans to poor people became the darling of the development world, hailed as the long elusive formula to propel even the most destitute into better lives.

Actors like Natalie Portman and Michael Douglas lent their boldface names to the cause. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who pioneered the practice by lending small amounts to basket weavers in Bangladesh, won a Nobel Peace Prize for it in 2006. The idea even got its very own United Nations year in 2005.

But the phenomenon has grown so popular that some of its biggest proponents are now wringing their hands over the direction it has taken. Drawn by the prospect of hefty profits from even the smallest of loans, a raft of banks and financial institutions now dominate the field, with some charging interest rates of 100 percent or more from their impoverished customers.

“We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks,” Mr. Yunus recently said at a gathering of financial officials at the United Nations. “Microcredit should be seen as an opportunity to help people get out of poverty in a business way, but not as an opportunity to make money out of poor people.”

Still hard to get a loan in America   . Well, sharks follow the food supply.

Ed
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Ed

This was inspired by Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama poster and The Depression. Just a quick and dirty curiosity, but I think I’ll do a variation for some printed items, with clipping paths for scalable art.

© 2009, Delmondo.org and Ed Riehl

Ed

Where has all the income gone? Just look up, from way down under.

The 400 American households with the highest incomes also have enjoyed a much faster pace of income growth than the vast majority.  And, because tax rates applied to their income have fallen by a third, their after-tax incomes grew substantially faster than their pre-tax incomes.  The figure looks at inflation-adjusted pre-tax and after-tax income growth for the 400 top-income families between 1992 and 2007, based on new data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service. It shows that while pre-tax income grew by a staggering 409% over that 15-year period, after-tax income increased even more, by 476%.

The third line in the figure offers some perspective by showing the change in the pre-tax median household income over the same period, which grew just 13.2%. The median pre-tax household income for a family of four in 2007 was $50,233, while the top-earning 400 households earned a median $345 million, almost 6900 times as much income.  In contrast, in 1992 the ratio was just a sixth as large, with the top 400 households having 1124 times as much income.

Productivity Growth, Jobs Report, and Misery

According to Ben Bernake, productivity growth is the source of improvement in living standards.    That’s “Old Economy” and it is based on the illusion that monetary measures are accurate representations of living standards.     I suppose that could be somewhat true, in aggregate, if living standards were really a function of money.     Or, if money was stable.    Or, if accumulated monetary wealth represented real lasting wealth, or future productive ability of real goods, or what we can purchase in a college education for our children and grandchildren.    Perhaps if the hour of labor counted was an hour of satisfied employment with job security, a reasonable workload, a few moments for rest or reflection, a lack of harassment, no death by a thousand goals, the ratio might mean a little something more.

However, it is time to rescind that statement.     It has become perverse.    Now productivity growth means maintaining or growing output as measured in monetary terms while minimizing payroll and benefits.     Add a dollar of sales and cut pension contributions and you get productivity growth.     Raise prescription co pays and you get productivity growth.      Increase salaries in the Executive Suite, offset with decreases in the ranks by the same amount plus $1.00, and you get productivity growth.

That is not productivity growth.     Let no one say when GDP increases from its abysmal prior year levels, and employment is frozen, and real wages growth is negative, and gun shop sales are booming, that we had productivity growth. . . Read full article

Free Market Fundamentalism

The attack memo that changed America forever.

America’s Second Gilded Age has been scoured of its glitter, along with the platitudes that its town criers preached — “too much government,” “market infallibility,” and “prosperity forever.” The policies and ethical failures that sprang from this gospel are under intense scrutiny. After 30 years, the self-serving creed of a right-wing coalition of wealth and power — ideologues, promoters, corporate executives, and the American aristocracy of money – is under assault, its system failures increasingly apparent. Their ideology tantalized millions with the promise of “getting the government off our backs!”

The consequences of this readily marketable guff have led us to drastically altered economic circumstances — a ruinous drop in both stock values and ethical standards that has weakened the economy; far worse, a global loss of confidence in the American economic system, and in a pro-market administration that is squandering America’s good name and credibility among allies and friends . . . Read full article

Ed