10 posts tagged with society and economics. (View popular tags)
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How Wal-Mart's values are shaping America's economy -- and why this is a very bad thing:
Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Walton was furious. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure. Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.
Tyler Cowen on why it's OK to pay for sex [more inside]
posted by reenum
on Jul 22, 2009 -
111 comments
British academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett believe they've discovered the underlying cause of all modern society's ills: inequality. In their book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, they explain how health and social problems follow a strikingly similar pattern, being closely correlated with income distribution (pdf). To spread the word, they've founded The Equality Trust
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth
on Mar 15, 2009 -
99 comments
Depression 2009: What would it look like? "Lines at the ER, a television boom, emptying suburbs. A catastrophic economic downturn would feel nothing like the last one." [Via]
posted by homunculus
on Nov 21, 2008 -
48 comments
Overcoming Bias [via]
posted by fantabulous timewaster
on Sep 10, 2008 -
26 comments
Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science,
invention, space travel,
colonisation,
immortality, water
shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse,
extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI,
Asia,
economics, demographics, goverance, cities.
What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey
on Oct 5, 2006 -
54 comments
The avuncular state - "A smarter, softer kind of paternalism is coming into style"
posted by Gyan
on Apr 12, 2006 -
9 comments
The Measurement of Poverty
posted by Gyan
on Mar 29, 2006 -
6 comments
Economist Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, has long posited a controversial thesis that legalized abortion help reduced crime, by reducing unwanted children, prone to crime. However, a new paper argues that Levitt (& Donohue) made serious errors in their research. Properly analysed, abortion has no significant effect on crime. Levitt disagrees, of course.
posted by daksya
on Dec 4, 2005 -
46 comments
One Year After Seattle -- "A year has passed since the World Trade Organization's "Millennium Round" collapsed under clouds of tear gas in Seattle," writes Mark Weisbrot, in this useful overview of what was -- and is -- at stake. "The debate over globalization has been altered, perhaps permanently, to include some of the concerns of civil society: poverty and inequality, economic instability, and the environmental costs of globalization...."
posted by johnb
on Nov 30, 2000 -
30 comments