Good jobs, that is.  Not to be a cassandra, but I have concerns about the structure of the economy.  History has shown that the high standard of living in late-Renaissance Venice wasn’t sustainable [*].  While the relatively expensive goods of Venice were often of high quality, cheaper, mass-market goods produced in Britain, France, and the Netherlands were gaining in popularity.  Will the US suffer from the same fate?  In other words, are the high wages and standard of living in the US sustainable, economically?  Robert Reich has a gloomy outlook on his blog::

“But here’s the real worry. The basic assumption that jobs will eventually return when the economy recovers is probably wrong. Some jobs will come back, of course. But the reality that no one wants to talk about is a structural change in the economy that’s been going on for years but which the Great Recession has dramatically accelerated.

Under the pressure of this awful recession, many companies have found ways to cut their payrolls for good. They’ve discovered that new software and computer technologies have made workers in Asia and Latin America just about as productive as Americans, and that the Internet allows far more work to be efficiently outsourced abroad.

This means many Americans won’t be rehired unless they’re willing to settle for much lower wages and benefits. Today’s official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which Americans are already on this path. Among those with jobs, a large and growing number have had to accept lower pay as a condition for keeping them. Or they’ve lost higher-paying jobs and are now in a new ones that pays less.”

I think he might be on to something and I tend to be an optimist.  If this were 1992, I’d say we’re going to grow out of the recession the US was in back then.  Innovation, efficiency, and productivity increases would be part of the upswing in the ever-present business cycles.  But, are we in a different economic situation?  Have we maxed-out efficiency?  What about innovation?  Will we still be competitive in that arena?

I have two main concerns.  One is of industrial organization and the other is of income inequality, which I believe are inter-related.

1. Industrial organization.  In the US, smaller businesses are expected to create the most new jobs, but the deck is stacked against them, which is also a political and policy issue.  There’s a pressure towards increased scale and size.  Larger enterprises may be more efficient, but often are less innovative, categorically, due to constraints on “dynamic capabilities” {ability to innovate, learn, or continuously reposition itself more effectively than its rivals} and disincentives in the form of disruptions to current income streams {e.g., pharmaceuticals selling several profitable on-patent drugs in a category of drugs having little incentive to develop and market a “cure” for a particular disease in a new category of drugs.  Hence “incremental” innovations of slight modifications and new patents based on them.}
2. Income distribution.  I feel that over time, the pressure towards increased the scale of organizations will put downwards pressure on wages and the standard of living for most employees.  Why?  If industries are dominated by a few players there will be a tendency towards oligopsony {few “buyers” and many “sellers”} in labour markets.  Employees will have less bargaining power because the few employers will tend to tacitly collude.  If global competition inhibits growth, there will be further pressure to cut wages and/or outsource.

The feather in the US’s cap is human capital talents and a large skilled labour pool, but these matter the most in innovative and high value-added firms.  If the US starts to lose its innovative edge, there will be less demand for skilled workers and managers.  More income inequality.  While hardly definitive, the gini coefficient measures this::

In the US, the gini is on the rise, indicating a growing gap between the wealthy and poor.  What would be really telling is to examine what’s happening to the middle class over time, i.e., the shape of the Lorenz curve}.  I think for the vast majority of Americans, there may be more diminished expectations in store.  The top 2% have no worries.

So, I agree with much of what Reich has to say.  The goal isn’t just jobs, but good paying ones.  In my opinion, part of this in the private sector {as opposed to public sector efforts, such as stimulus spending} is more basic R&D that fuels innovation and more entrepreneurship, which will require policies to support it.

Twitterversion:: #RobertReich blogs on jobs in US. Given his take, are big firms&lack of innovation a big part of problem? #ThickCulture http://url.ie/3f80 @Prof_K

Song:: The Bleeding Heart Show-The New Pornographers

On my other blog, I did a post about driving pet peeves and a close call I had on the mean streets of Toronto.  I made a passing reference to the idea of “crowdsourcing” a database on boorish road behaviours.  Well, it turns out there’s a website that does just that, Zapatag.com {blog, Twitter}.  What is Zapatag?  According to their “about us” page::

“Report bad drivers, track license plates, zap a tag and upgrade your commute. Compliment a carpooler. Lash a litterer. Tattle on a tailgater. Snap at a speeder. Bring accountability back to our streets the Web 2.0 way. Don’t get mad on the road. Get even online.”

Technologically, it was inspired by Twitter, but the more interesting implication on this blog is how such sites might affect us in the future.  What about issues of::

• Privacy.  Is it a breach of privacy to link licence plate numbers to alleged incidents?
• Defamation.  Is it defamation to link a vehicle to alleged bad/illegal behaviour?
• Antisocial behaviours.  Will this lead to harassment, in terms of posting or retaliation for posting?

One of our fellow bloggers had a disturbing incident on a Thousand Oaks, CA thoroughfare.  I thought a site like this might be useful in cataloguing habitual offenders, but the technology does enable issues like those three listed above and probably more.  Privacy has been declared dead thanks to the Internet for over a decade.  What about defending one’s “reputation” online?  Where are the lines drawn between transparency and defamatory statements?  With the Internet and the decline of privacy, will the definition of defamation change?  A whole post could be on the antisocial behaviours angle.  What springs to mind is the cyberbullying mom case.

Invoking Bentham’s panopticon and doling out Foucauldian logics to each and every one of us {we all have the power of surveillance and voice with Web 2.0+}, will this lead to übertransparency and more mindful actions -or- will it create a anarchic free-for-all of accusations and defamation?

Song:: I Think Im Paranoid – Garbage

Twitterversion:: @Zapatag allows crowdsourcing of bad driving behaviours. It’s an interesting intersection of technology & society.  @Prof_K

I made a trip south of the border yesterday.  I drove all day to South Bend, IN to drop off a proposal and had dinner in Grand Rapids, MI, so I missed Obama’s Afghanistan speech.  I didn’t miss hearing the fallout from both the left and the right.  So, I’m wondering about what’s going to happen in next year’s midterm elections and I’m curious on what my fellow bloggers and the readers have on the subject.

Let’s turn back the clock.  Sixteen years ago, in late November of 1993 and Bill Clinton’s approval rating dipped under 50%.  Recently, Barack Obama’s ratings also dipped below 50%.  This got me thinking about some other trivia tidbits::

• A complex health care reform plan was under attack by William Kristol.  The “Harry and Louise” ads, funded by lobbyists aired to cast doubt on Clinton’s reform, using the catchy phrase, “they choose, we lose.”

• Clinton, a moderate Democrat, was being pushed around by conservative Democrats in Congress.  They felt he didn’t have a mandate with 43% of the popular vote [1] and won only because Ross Perot split the Republican vote.
• The Democrats enjoyed an 82 seat advantage in the House in 1993.  The current margin is 79 seats.  The Democrats had a 56/44 advantage in 1993.  The current advantage is  59/41.
• The stock market was on an upswing in 1993 {DJIA}.  This year, the market has spent the year recovering and is about where it was in 2004 [2].

On the other hand::

• Unemployment was 6.5% in December 1993, not 10.2% {Nov. 2009} [3]
• The Gulf War {Desert Storm} was a fading memory in 1993, while in 2009 Obama is gearing up for a Afghanistan surge at a $30B/year pricetag.

Historically, in 1994 there was a Republican landslide and the GOP took over both the House and Senate {although Clinton won re-election handily in 1996}.  Will history repeat itself?  I’m not sure.  In 1994, there was a clear and concerted effort by the Republicans.  Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America” captured the imagination of many voters.  I’m not sure the GOP can pull that off in 2010.

While the Obama Administration has faced criticism from the right, he’s also under fire from the left on the issues of the economy and the war in Afghanistan.  While the Democratic Party machine would resist this, will the current circumstances provide opportunities for left-leaning Congressional candidates a rare window of opportunity?  What about the Republicans?  Will they regroup?  What about Libertarians?  Is this an opportunity for them?

Twitterversion:: Politically in the US, it feels strangely familiar to 1993.But,it’s not. What will happen in 2010 midterms? #ThickCulture http://url.ie/3d5n  @Prof_K

Please indulge my shameless self promotion, but his particular piece of academic hucksterism happens to dovetail well the mission of the blog. The inaugural edition of the Journal of Integrated Social Science, of which I am the Political Science editor and co-blogger Bryan Rasmussen is the Humanities editor, has just been published. In particular, I draw your attention to the editorial introduction which lays out the aims of the journal. Here’s an excerpt that captures the mission of the journal:

Today we find that scholars are becoming very specialized in one particular field of study thereby often under-emphasizing how their area of expertise relates to other fields of study. Having experts on given topics is, without doubt, absolutely essential in order to advance our understanding of human functioning. It is with this in mind that we are hereby launching the new Journal of Integrated Social Sciences (JISS) – a renewed collaborative effort, following the spirit of the intellectual pioneers from the 1860s, to bring together the rich and diverse set of disciplines through the new technology now available to us in the 21st century.

I encourage those of you with an interest in integrative, cross-disciplinary inquiry to submit their work and take advantage of a unique platform to engage in a broader scholarly conversations that those to which we are accustomed.

I have a sweet little cousin on the trembling, angst-ridden edge of puberty, and my sister had come up with what she thought was a fantastic idea for a holiday gift: a journal. 

“See, when I was her age,” my sister told us excitedly, “I’d write a little message in my journal, and then give it to my best friends.  They’d write a reply or their thoughts, and then give it back.  We’d just pass it back and forth between one another!”

My fiancee laughed and said, “isnt’ that what little girls are calling ‘Facebook’ these days?”  She’s right, you know: some of us might be able to understand the purpose of a pen and paper, but my little cousin surely woudn’t.  And I think she’s missing something.

A few years ago at Christmas, I came across an old box in the garage and rifled through its contents to find an old letter from my grandpa to my grandma.  Both of them are gone now – as a matter of fact, my grandpa passed away when I was only 2 – and reading the letter was a wonderful and surprising treat.  His wit and charm, his warmth, shined easily through the yellowing, crinkly paper.  I’d never realized how much my Mom’s handwriting had looked like his.   

As grateful as I was for the “Happy Thanksgiving” messages I got on Facebook this year, or the many singing photoshopped-head elf Christmas e-cards I expect to get in the coming weeks, the cards I treasure most come from the 1970s and 80s when I was a kid and our family and friends would send them via (gasp!) snail mail.  And there’s a practical reason I like these cards: I can put them on the windowsills or the mantle.  And my grandfather’s note can be passed around among his great-grandchildren who never knew him.  What on Earth is my cousin going to do with her page of Facebook greetings 20 years from now?

As ironic as it is for me to be writing this in a weblog – which, after all, is just a journal that I’m passing around to all of you to read if you wish – don’t forget to write this holiday season.  Let’s not lose all our books to Kindle, all our cards to jibjab.com, all our sentimentality to e-mail. 

If the pen is mightier than the sword, it stands to reason it ought to be mightier than the microprocessor as well.

Not sure why I’m drawn to this visualization by Pedro Cruz, but I am:

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

It does highlight a few things. First, the visualization reveals the sheer speed with which post-colonialism moved in the 1950’s and 1960’s. From the perspective of the power elite, this must have been a chaotic and challenging time. You could also see where the romanticism of the 1960’s emerged. Such a significant paradigm shift from the hegemony of major colonial powers to the sudden fragmentation of that power into hopeful, independent nation states must have been thrilling to those supportive of post-colonial movements. The reality that “colonialisms” take multiple forms probably hadn’t fully set in yet.

HT: Chart Porn (my favorite blog name BTW)

I’ve been discussing with a few friends the NY Times bestseller The Four-Hour Work Week (www.fourhourworkweek.com), which calls us all to less distracted work habits, to free up our time. Tellingly, however, the book seems equally as interested in pursuits like this: “Or forget about traveling. A brand-new black Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, fresh off the showroom floor at $260,000, can be had for $2,897.80 per month. I found my personal favorite, an Aston Martin DB9 with 1,000 miles on it, through eBay for $136,000—$2,003.10 per month.”

I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole self-help genre of such books, which constitute a veritable industry unto themselves, but would be interested to know what others think. There seems to be definite inspirational value in such works—they can empower people with new visions and goals worth pursuing. As we know, such works can definitely “grow their own legs,” becoming “self-fulfilling prophecies,” of sorts (the key to “The Secret,” anyone…?). But my basic problem is that The Four-Hour Work Week provides a too partial, overly incomplete picture of how such dreams are made (this is before we even get to the value of the dream he’s setting forth), and in whose interests. That is, it’s a problem of looking at American public life accurately. By ignoring the systemic, structural, and social factors which can impede such opportunities, I think the author effectively neuters possibilities for political action by ignoring societal power dynamics.

One critical lens through which to examine such works may be Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus”— roughly one’s deeply ingrained, acquired ways of speaking, acting, and being in the world inherited from one’s group/s, which act as signals of whether one is “in” or “out” culturally within certain contexts. If one has been fortunate enough to inherit the “preferred” ways of communicating in any given context, a four-hour work week becomes more of a possibility. If we ignore these dynamics, on the other hand, we will fail to see that the “the playing field ain’t equal” in terms of such opportunities–and the individual becomes the focus, without an understanding of the larger, material social forces which are also implicated here. Basically, the American authors of such books are failing to think in terms of sociology, instead assuming an individualistic default position for such writing that perpetuates power imbalances. — Don Waisanen

I’ll admit that Web 2.0 advocates can be a bit too sanguine in their vision of a networked participatory future. But what makes the proliferation of information technology so exciting is the ability to easily capture and disseminate what James Scott calls the “hidden transcript” of marginalized people’s all over the world.

TechPresident reports on a project called Viva Favella, an effort by Brazilian journalists to document life in Brazil’s fabled low-income neigborhoods. The site is:

The first Internet portal in Brazil designed exclusively around the needs and interests of low-income communities, Viva Favela has a team made up of journalists and “community correspondents” – favela residents qualified to act as reporters and photographers.

With their “inside” perspective, they help expose all of the human, historical, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of these areas.

Sites like these empower communities to be able to structure the ways in which they present themselves to the world. However, making a hidden transcript visible doesn’t necessarily do much to alter power relations. The key question is how do Web 2.0 tools affect the ways in which marginalized peoples are socially constructed. There are strong power dynamics that support and reinforce specific stories of “favella as slum.” Of interest is how these local indigenous images merged with a rhetorical campaign to re-frame perceptions in ways that alter power relations?

I present you the 193% chart.

So this one’s easy to mock. But I’m often frustrated by my inability to get my students in political science to recognize how important statistics and data presentation are to politics and power…and this is coming from a qualitatively inclined scholar. I think part of it is because we fail to treat statistics as a discourse. I may have enchantment on the brain (see Brian Rasmussen’s and Don Waisenan’s posts), but it seems like we either imbue statistics with an mystical, impenetrable quality above everyday conversation or we treat is as an illegitimate discourse easily manipulable by elites. This makes them either reject it or embrace it Kool-aid style. There needs to be a sweet spot in our public life between viewing statistics as somehow separate from everyday discourse and viewing as an illegitimate discourse (i.e. the language of Sarah Palin’s famous New York elites).

Here’s the video. Isn’t there a WTF moment as this guy is reading the prompter?

HT: Flowing Data

Thierry Henry’s no look pass to William Gallas in injury time (extra time) against the Republic of Ireland at the Stade du France last Wednesday sent Les Bleus to the 2010 World Cup. One problem: Henry used his hands, which even those most ignorant of the world’s game know is a no-no.

This has created outrage in most of the soccer/football/futbol loving world, with most of the ire being foisted upon Henry, a soccer superstar in the early part of the decade. Our American readers might recognize him as the “unknown foreign guy” in that Gillette razor commercial along side Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. The former Arsenal great and current Barcelona striker has been accused of being a “cheat” – mostly by English and Irish commentators.

The controversy has also reignited a movement to bring instant replay into the world’s game. FIFA, the global governing body for the game has staunchly resisted adding video replay to ensure the validity of on-field decisions. Contrast this to the popular sports in the United States (Football, Basketball and Baseball), all of which have adopted some form of instant replay. Why are American sports willing to adopt new technology while the world’s most watched sport reject’s its use?

America’s soccer exceptionalism might provide some answers. America’s pragmatic, individualist, consumerist, innovation-centric culture might provide a more welcome environment for technological intrusion into sport. The U.S. is a political culture that presumes people rise and fall based on merit rather social/structural conditions. Inasmuch as sporting culture can be viewed as a mirror reflection of a culture’s myths, a culture of individualistic merit demands that its sports give the impression of merit. This I think explains American’s general displeasure at diving in soccer (although they seem to have no problem with faking fouls in basketball). Any effort to use guile to affect the outcome of a game is seen as offensive to American sensibilities.

In the main, the rest of the world might look doesn’t share this individualistic/pragmatist/consumerist view of the world. Thus they don’t demand the precision and constant dynamism that U.S. culture and sport demands – there must be a winner and scoring must be profligate. Soccer, by contrast, can be inherently unfair and cruel. Because scoring a goal is so difficult, a team can dominate possession of the ball but fail to score while another team can be completely outclassed but still score a goal off of a deflection or a moment of individual brilliance. Not very meritocratic.

I love soccer partly because it is absurd. It is existential. It is more like a novel than a technical manual. It doesn’t always provide clear meaning. Hence the oft scorned 0-0 draw. No one scored. No one won. It’s the sport equivalent of Waiting for Godot. This confounds tons of American sports writers and fans to no end. But to me and to most of the rest of the world, it more closely mirrors reality.

The rest of the world is not as wedded to an strict individualist-merit based view of the world but instead see the world as it is messy, unfair, bound up in social relations, etc. As an example, South Americans use terminology that likens soccer to a novel. A goal scorer is often referred as el autor del gol or un protagonista a protagonist. A dynamic play-maker is often called (my personal favorite) un desequilibrante a destabilizer/mischief maker. This language suggests a world that is hermeneutic rather than positivistic, constructivist rather than explanatory. The rest of the world might not demand that their sporting culture produce absolute certainty and meaning. Instead, much of the world sees human error and failing is part of the story of soccer.

However, as the United States slowly embraces the world’s game, it might stand to borrow a page from the U.S.’ steely eyed pragmatism in its professional sports. The world has rightly eschewed calls to Americanize the game by making the goalposts bigger, getting rid of offsides or having penalty “shootouts” to decide winners. These are artificial mechanisms to alter the life of the game for no other reason than to “make it more exciting” by introducing a rapid-fire consumerist ethic to the sport. This need to extract constant feedback from sport is what makes basketball tediously unwatchable until the last 2 minutes of the game.

These approaches would change the essential character of the game. Instant replay is different. Rather than change the rules to create some banal sensation of constant scoring or false decisiveness, it change soccer by setting up rules that encourage fairness. A quick review of a handball or ball crossing the goal line does not detract from the game’s chimerical quality.

Currently the global game is dealing with a corruption scandal. As the sport enters a World Cup year, it must consider how it evolves. Emerging soccer nations like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United States bring their own aesthetic to the game. The sport should borrow what it can from the “developing soccer world” so it can remain the world’s game.