Recently, McDonald’s decided to raise wages for many of its hourly restaurant workers. The rise is modest, from about $9 to about $10, but already the company’s executives claim that they are seeing improvements in service quality:
“It has done what we expected it to -- 90 day turnover rates are down, our survey scores are up—we have more staff in restaurants,” McDonald’s U.S. president Mike Andres told analysts at a UBS conference... “So far we’re pleased with it."
So far the company’s financial results haven't suffered -- just the opposite; sales are rising.
With stagnant wages one of the hottest topics these days, and calls to raise minimum wages resounding across the country, stories like this one are obviously eye-catching. If raising wages improves worker performance enough to help the bottom line, then there’s no tradeoff between how much companies can afford to pay workers -- at least within reason -- and how many workers they can afford to employ. Obviously if you raise wages high enough -- imagine mandating $1,000 an hour! -- a lot of people will be put out of work. But it could be that most American companies are in a safe zone where hiking wages modestly makes economic sense.
But why? If it helps the bottom line to raise wages, why haven’t companies done it already?...
Lately the media have been going wild mocking Donald Trump’s plans to put 45 percent tariffs on imports from China. They are partly right. It’s not clever to indiscriminately impose large tariffs on major trading partners in violation of existing trade agreements.
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But what is even more striking is the selective concern over tariffs. While Trump wants to put large tariffs on imports from some of our major trading partners, President Obama is actively pushing to have far larger tariffs imposed on a wide range of goods in his trade deals, most importantly the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Measures in the TPP pushed by U.S. negotiators will raise the price of many items by several thousand percent above the free market price.
If you missed this discussion, it’s because these trade barriers are referred to as “intellectual property,” which takes the form of patent and copyright protection. But markets don’t care what term politicians use to describe a government imposed barrier. If a patent monopoly raises the price of a protected drug by 10,000 percent it leads to the same sort of waste and corruption as if the government imposed a tariff of 10,000 percent, except that in the case of prescription drugs, high prices can also threaten lives.
If a price increase of 10,000 percent sounds high, you haven’t been paying attention to what the drug industry charges for its new drugs. For example, the list price for the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi is $84,000 for a three-month course of treatment. A recent analysis found that Indian manufacturers can profitably produce the drug for just $200 per three-month course of treatment, suggesting a tariff equivalent of more than 40,000 percent.
No one factor explains the difference, but I’d compare the danger along several dimensions. The first to consider is simply the goals of the Islamic State, though this is ultimately unsatisfying. As I’ve argued elsewhere, in contrast to Al Qaeda’s anti-U.S. emphasis, Islamic State leaders have primarily focused on their state-building project in Iraq and Syria. Developing provinces in the Muslim world is another goal. Although most Islamic State attacks still strike regional targets, attacks on the West have risen on the priority list, particularly after the United States and allies in Europe began an air campaign against the Islamic State. But given that the United States is the leader of the coalition (and supplying the vast majority of the strike assets), Washington should be at least a rung above Europe on the enemies list. And within Europe, Belgium should be relatively low on the ladder given its minimal contribution to the anti-Islamic State campaign, even discontinuing military operations late last year. So looking solely at the Islamic State’s enemies list is not enough.
It’s more useful, then, to focus on how easily the Islamic State can strike Europe in comparison to the United States. And here the contrast is clear. Over 5,000 Europeans have gone to fight in Iraq and Syria; less than 200 Americans have joined the struggle. Europe also shares a land border with Iraq and Syria via Turkey and is logistically far more accessible for Islamic State fighters to go back and forth, while the United States is protected by two great oceans. Even putting foreign fighters and simple geography aside, Muslim communities in Europe have more radicalized individuals who stay in Europe, and thus a greater native pool of recruits for lone wolf and other attacks.
Beyond foreign fighters and radicalized stay-at-homes, the integration challenge is far greater in Europe. The specifics vary by country, but almost everywhere, the situation is bad. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no direct correlation between education or poverty and terrorism. However, when such problems are rampant within one community, they suggest a problem that is apparent to anyone who walks a Muslim neighborhood in a major European city: a lack of integration...
But illegality was never the crux of the scandal triggered by those NSA revelations. Instead, what was most shocking was what had been legalized: the secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless spying in human history. What was scandalous was not that most of this spying was against the law, but rather that the law — at least as applied and interpreted by the Justice Department and secret, one-sided FISA “courts” — now permitted the U.S. government and its partners to engage in mass surveillance of entire populations, including their own. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer put it after the Washington Post’s publication of documents showing NSA analysts engaged in illegal spying: “The ‘non-compliance’ angle is important, but don’t get carried away. The deeper scandal is what’s legal, not what’s not.”
Yesterday, dozens of newspapers around the world reported on what they are calling the Panama Papers: a gargantuan leak of documents from a Panama-based law firm that specializes in creating offshore shell companies. The documents reveal billions of dollars being funneled to offshore tax havens by leading governmental and corporate officials in numerous countries (the U.S. was oddly missing from the initial reporting, though journalists vow that will change shortly).
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If Panama or the Cayman Islands were acting to undermine the integrity of the global pharmaceutical patent system, the United States would stop them. But the political elite of powerful Western nations have not acted to stop relatively puny Caribbean nations from undermining the integrity of the global tax system — largely because Western economic elites don’t want them to. …
… But even though various criminal money-laundering schemes are the sexiest possible use of shell companies, the day-to-day tax dodging is what really pays the bills. As a manager of offshore bank accounts told me years ago, “People think of banking secrecy as all about terrorists and drug smugglers, but the truth is there are a lot of rich people who don’t want to pay taxes.” And the system persists because there are a lot of politicians in the West who don’t particularly want to make them. …
… Incorporating your hedge fund in a country with no corporate income tax even though all your fund’s employees and investors live in the United States is perfectly legal. So is, in most cases, setting up a Panamanian shell company to own and manage most of your family’s fortune.
Now the fear people may experience instantaneously in response to this idea is, “If we promote the idea that ‘sex feels good,’ girls will have MORE of it, which will only increase their risk,” and to this I say: Nope.
Why do girls have sex? According to Orenstein’s reporting (and Deb Tolman’s almost 15 years ago – amazingly little seems to have changed since her Dilemma’s of Desire was published), middle class American girls have sex because they are trying to do what they believe they are supposed to do, obeying the rules of their culture, performing their feminine role, in order to meet their partner’s expectations, or because porn and the rest of their culture has taught them that sex is about WHAT YOU DO, not about how it feels inside your body.
They are NOT having sex because it feels good – pleasure doesn’t enter the conversation.
Of all the unresolved conflicts that erupted as the Soviet Union broke up, the one between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over Nagorno-Karabakh has always been the most menacing.
Now Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the wider world have been reminded that this conflict is a tinderbox that can still ignite to disastrous effect. The 1994 ceasefire has been shattered. The main victims amongst several dozen dead are the young conscripts who serve in the armed forces on either side.
Threats constantly change, yet our political discourse suggests that our vulnerabilities are simply for lack of resources, commitment or competence. Sometimes, that is true. But mostly we are vulnerable because we choose to be; because we've accepted, at least implicitly, that some risk is tolerable. A state that could stop every suicide bomber wouldn't be a free or, let's face it, fun one.
In the video segment, I note how the evolution and erosion of the nuclear winter hypothesis (which two climate scientists, Stephen H. Schneider and Starley Thompson, later concluded would be more like a “nuclear autumn”) fit a cycle often seen in consequential science:
There’s a pattern to how some phenomena and stories play out. The first idea is very stark and then the scientific process is like piranhas that nibble away at the soft stuff and whatever is left is the hard skeleton of the ideas – the enduring part.
The video also explores the relationship of nuclear winter studies to one way to “geoengineer” a cooler climate — lofting sun-blocking sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere.
