Business & Economics

Obama’s Deal with Jon Kyl

By Elvin Lim

Obama is a politician, and that’s why he’s made an estate tax deal with Jon Kyl in return for Kyl’s support for ratifying the START treaty.

As Senator Chuck Schumer has suggested, the Democratic party would probably benefit by allowing the Bush era tax cuts to expire, but this is not what Obama is proposing because he has something up his sleeve.

Consider if Democrats allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire. People would be angry for a few days, but then come 2011, Democrats would be in a better bargaining position to play chicken with Republicans. Democrats would then be able to dare Republicans to

“Undercover Boss”: Lying to Tell the Truth

Clayton P. Alderfer

Undercover Boss, one of reality TV’s newest additions, is based on a truth that many thoughtful CEOs grasp: they do not have a thorough understanding of what goes on at the middle and bottom of their organizations. There are multiple reasons why. Immediate subordinates do not know either. Middle and lower ranking managers withhold their understanding from those above them. First level managers cut deals with hourly workers that permit the employees to do well enough financially while not working too hard – lest the employees act disruptively. CEOs hired from outside have even less of an idea about what goes on, as insiders feel resentful about being subject to outsider rule and choose not to tell what they know. The reasons why CEOs face this predicament are thus far reaching. The question for CEOs who grasp this tough reality is whether they can do anything about it.

Paycheck Fairness Act Fails in Senate

By Mariko Lin Chang

Last week, the Senate Republicans defeated the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill would have strengthened the Equal Pay Act by providing more effective protections and remedies to victims of sex discrimination in wages, including prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees who discuss their wages with another employee, requiring employers to prove that wage differences between women and men doing the same work are the result of education, training, experience, or other job-related factors, and providing victims of sex discrimination in wages the same legal remedies currently available to those experiencing pay discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.

Was the bill perfect? Probably not (few, if any bills could be considered perfect). But the Republican senators threw the baby out with the bath water.

Memo From Las Vegas: What’s the Matter with Casino Capitalism?

Tweet By Sharon Zukin Taking a position on Las Vegas is like taking an option on a company’s stock: if you like the place, you’re betting that free markets, human power over nature and boundless shopping opportunities will continue to rule the world.  If you don’t like it, you’re a killjoy…or a sociologist. I made […]

Oil Companies Can’t Watch Themselves – And They Know It

Tweet By Benjamin Ross The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been plugged, but the fire on another oil platform recently is a disturbing reminder of the unfinished business that it leaves behind. The root cause of the disaster – an absence of outside supervision that allows profit-driven managers to set their own priorities – has […]

An Open Letter on Taxes to Bill Gates, Sr.

Dear Mr. Gates:

You have, by dint of your intelligence and sincerity, become a major spokesman for wealthy Americans calling for higher taxes. Since the nation’s budgetary problems will only be solved by combining spending reductions with tax increases, this is a compelling claim.

However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Allow me to call three details to your attention:

Killer app: Seven dirty words you can’t say on your iPhone

By Dennis Baron
Apple’s latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.

This week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages whie doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, “that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.”

Turnover at the White House and a Crisis of Confidence

By Elvin Lim
The Obama White House has announced a series of personnel changes in recent weeks, ahead of the November elections. The aim is to push the reset button, but not to time it as if the button was plunged at the same time that voters signal their repudiation on election day. But the headline is the same as that of the Carter cabinet reshuffle in 1979: there is a crisis of confidence in the Oval Office.

George Martin Goes Independent, 2 Sept 1965

By Gordon Thompson
When George Martin first entered the recording industry in the early 1950s, assisting Oscar Preuss at EMI’s Parlophone, he encountered the end of the mechanical era. The company’s facilities on Abbey Road in genteel St. John’s Wood still used lathes to record sound by cutting grooves in warm wax with energy provided by weights and pulleys, like a child of Big Ben. The sheer mechanics of this kind of professional recording demanded large…

Corporate science: The good, the bad, and those in between

By Roderick D. Buchanan
The corporate corruption of science is a familiar theme to anyone whose reading stretches beyond celebrity tattle-tale. The well-documented venality of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma have become cautionary fairy tales for modern times.

Good grammar leads to violence at Starbucks?

Apparently an English professor was ejected from a Starbucks on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for–she claims–not deploying Starbucks’ mandatory corporate-speak. The story immediately lit up the internet, turning her into an instant celebrity. Just as Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who couldn’t take it anymore, became the heroic employee who finally bucked the system when he cursed out nasty passengers over the intercom and deployed the emergency slide to make his escape, Lynne Rosenthal was the customer who cared so much about good English that she finally stood up to the coffee giant and got run off the premises by New York’s finest for her troubles. Well, at least that’s what she says happened.

Public Offices for Sale: The Emerging Dominance of Multimillionaire Candidates

by Edward Zelinsky
I live in Connecticut. The Nutmeg State’s 2010 election campaign is a prime example of the emerging domination of American politics by self-funding multimillionaires. This troubling trend has been exacerbated by what is euphemistically called campaign finance reform. The law of unintended consequences strikes again. There is, I suggest, a better way.
Former Connecticut congressman Rob Simmons had been the front-runner for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate until Linda McMahon declared her candidacy. Mrs. McMahon has never held public office. She is, however, along with her husband Vince, a founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and a multimillionaire.

Is Greece Relevant? Seven Lessons for the U.S. From the Greek Fiscal Crisis

Are Greece’s fiscal woes relevant to the United States? Responding to the simmering national debate on this issue, Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, answers with an emphatic “no.” “America isn’t Greece,” Professor Krugman confidently tells us. With equal assurance, Charles Krauthammer on Fox News comes to the opposite conclusion. Given current trends in U.S. public finance, Dr. Krauthammer contends, Greece is our “future.” In a similar vein, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan approvingly cites the analogy between Greece and the U.S. as setting “the stage for a serious response” to the United States’ budgetary challenges. The Greek experience is not inevitable, but it is instructive.

Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Part III: On Africa, aid, and the West

This third and final part of our ‘Ethiopia Since Live Aid’ blog feature is an original post by Peter Gill, in which he discusses the West’s view of aid and Africa. If you missed it, on Tuesday we read an excerpt from the book, and yesterday we ran an exclusive Q&A with Peter.

Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Part II: A few questions for Peter Gill

This exclusive Q&A is the second of three OUPblog posts from Peter Gill. Yesterday we read an excerpt from his book, and check back tomorrow for an original post by him.

Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Part I: An Excerpt

Kicking off three great OUPblog posts on Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid is a short excerpt from the first chapter. Come back tomorrow for an exclusive Q&A with Peter Gill, followed by an original post by him on Thursday.