Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo The Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan. Goldman and other Wall Street firms are evaluating their work policies. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images Earlier this year, a 22-year-old first-year analyst at the Goldman Sachs office in San Francisco was feeling overwhelmed by the all-nighters and 100-hour workweeks. The analyst, Sarvshreshth Gupta, a graduate of the University…
CREDIT: Shutterstock Every three months, the government takes the temperature of the economy by releasing Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, figures. GDP goes up: the economy is supposedly healthy. GDP goes down: there’s a bug (or an all-out contagion, as during the Great Recession). But GDP — which adds up the value of work being…
There is no state in the union where a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment for less than 30 percent of his paycheck (which is a standard measure of housing affordability). That’s the depressing takeaway from a new report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. The paper includes this map tallying…
Yesterday, Gawker Media announced that we will be holding an election next week to vote on whether our editorial staffers want to form a union. The purpose of this post is to allow our writers to discuss how they’re voting, and why. The vote next week is to decide whether we want to agree to…
Work is getting in the way of much-needed vacations, according to the latest executive survey by recruitment and HR consulting firm Korn Ferry. Two-thirds (67%) of the more than 400 U.S. executives surveyed online earlier this month said they had postponed or canceled vacation plans in the past year due to demands at work. While 83%…
Release Date: May 27, 2015 sDate For release at 12:00 p.m. EDT The Federal Reserve Board’s latest survey of the financial and economic conditions of American households released Wednesday finds that individuals’ overall perceptions of financial well-being improved modestly between 2013 and 2014 but their optimism about future financial prospects increased significantly. The 2014 Survey…
Planning to retire? Not long ago, many of us would have automatically answered “yes” to that question, and with good reason. In the 20th century, retirement became the norm—something most people did. Thanks to generous programs like Social Security (enacted in 1935) and Medicare (1965), millions of people who once might have worked till they…
Photo Credit Christophe Vorlet It is hard to avoid the feeling that our current economic problems are more than just a cyclical downturn. We know that the economy has gone through some bad times. But what exactly are we experiencing? One relatively optimistic view is that observed deficiencies — like slow growth in real wages…
WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and…
I woke up this morning to the news that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced increased employment law regulation and enforcement in response to last week’s blockbuster New York Times investigation of nail salons, effective immediately. Workers will be required to wear gloves and masks to prevent the spread of skin diseases and protect…