Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Several weeks ago we revealed the “The Mystery Of America’s Missing Wage Growth” in which we showed why matter how hard the Fed tries to push the S&P 500 higher (and it has certainly done an admirable job of manipulating the market to record highs), it has over the past 7 years failed to trickle…
In San Francisco’s “culture war,” both sides espouse oddly similar-sounding values. Credit Illustration by Christian Gralingen In the spiritual geography of San Francisco, Davies Symphony Hall—a glass-and-concrete half rotunda much resembling R2-D2’s neckline—sits between hills steep with layered mansions and the urban basin where the city’s gritty elements now rest. John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” premièred here;…
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. By Robert Putnam. Simon & Schuster; 386 pages; $28 and £18.99. THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s…
Buy Photo Reporters interview Gov. Mike Pence.(Photo: Charlie Nye / The Star)Buy Photo Soon after Gov. Mike Pence signed the religious freedom bill into law Thursday, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff announced on Twitter that he would no longer send employees or customers to Indiana. “Today we are canceling all programs that require our…
What frustrates Hanna Newberg about her life right now isn’t just that she’s working as a waitress at a chain restaurant or renting a small apartment in western Massachusetts. The problem, Newberg says, is that she did everything she was told she was supposed to do — went to college, went to graduate school —…
How Much (Or Little) The Middle Class Makes, In 30 U.S. Cities “My family’s household income is $250,000 a year, but I promise you I am middle class.” That’s from a recent article in a college newspaper by a student who grew up in Silicon Valley. And it’s the kind of thing you hear pretty…
Employees of Amtrak, the publically-funded railroad service, earned themselves a round of bonuses because their agency only lost $214 million last year. A second set of bonuses was scrapped after Amtrak fell far short of its customer satisfaction goals, according to the agency’s inspector general. RELATED: Why we’re not going to get Northeast Corridor high-speed…
Story highlights David Wheeler: Silicon Valley doesn’t create jobs; it’s wiping out middle-class jobs Young college graduates are struggling with lack of jobs, yet many still idolize Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is tossing millennials aside like yesterday’s laptop. The commonly held belief is that with hard work and a good education, a young person in…
The typical woman born between 1955 and 1959 has lost $531,502 in cumulative lifetime earnings because of America’s gender-pay gap, according to a new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Losses from the gap accumulate over the course of a woman’s lifetime, and each year represented tens of thousands of lost dollars, the…
We hear about the superior tech savvy of people born after 1980 so often that we tend to assume it must be true. But is it? Researchers at Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) expected it to be when they administered a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Sponsored by…