Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo Ada Colau, center, a leftist candidate, won a race for mayor of Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city. Another left-leaning candidate, Manuela Carmena, is poised to become Madrid’s mayor. Credit Josep Lago/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images MADRID — Ada Colau, 41, was not even born when Manuela Carmena, 71, joined Spain’s underground Communist party and started…
La Razon, May 25, 2015 “Instability,” reads the Monday headline of conservative Madrid daily La Razon, after the strong showing of two upstart parties in Spain’s local and regional elections threatened the longstanding two-party duel between the Popular and Socialist parties. The conservative Popular party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suffered its worst local results in a generation, losing some of its support in Sunday’s voting to…
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…
Submitted by Dark Bid In society, exclusivity creates desirability. Whether it’s that special country club or elite college, privilege is defined by the rejection rate. In the previous era, the Ivy League was one of those prized organizations, and McDonald’s was the exact opposite. Now, the New Normal has seized our social convention and turned…
Every jobs report there remains a cohort of people who say, “There’s still no evidence of wage growth, and plenty of evidence that lots of labor slack remains.” It’s based primarily on these three charts. 1) Average Hourly Earnings (I prefer to use the series with production and nonsupervisory employees since the data goes back farther):…
Peaceful protesters have been pleading their case against police brutality for months in Baltimore. I kept hearing people say, “Baltimore is not Ferguson,” meaning, I suppose, that we do not repress our issues of wealth and racial disparity or deny them. Baltimore, after all, has been a city in recovery for half a century now….
A small rebellion against the American higher education system is gaining steam. On Tuesday, a group of strikers and organizers who call themselves “the Corinthian 100” met with officials from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education and the Department of Treasury to demand that their federal student loans be forgiven. The…
TIME World Greece Greece Seeks $305 Billion in WWII Reparations From Germany Louisa Gouliamaki—AFP/Getty Images Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis arrives to present his ministry’s new secretaries at a press conference in Athens on March 4, 2015. Amid a continuing negotiation over debt relief from the European Union bailout Greece released its first quantifiable demand…
As the 2016 election approaches, the debate among the intelligentsia appears like it will center around the question of inequality. While income is distributed unequally in the country, what few people know is how much more unequally wealth, financial assets and inheritances are distributed. As the chart below shows, income is only part of the…