On the 8 Spot

“Inequality,” she says, “really holds us back.”

Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says.

In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.

The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.

The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.

via Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter.

This was an excellent write up of a speech/lecture? Prof Randy David gave. It’s an interesting read!!!

Quest for political stability

David observes that Filipinos are “sick and tired” of politics. In other societies, people are not overburdened with politics. And normally citizens think only about it during elections. The fact the politics consumes much of our national imaginary has both good and bad effects, he says. It is good in that citizens are kept informed. It is bad in that the constant politicking leaves little room to do much of anything else. It is time spent away from thinking about ways to improve education and health, growing businesses and the arts.

He says in the region the Philippines has had the longest experience with elections and yet we cannot seem to get it right. Elections are a good way of making the transition from a ‘traditional’ to a ‘modern’ society.

Here he gives quick yet unerring definitions of these broad concepts. A ‘traditional’ society is one of hierarchies. One might also call them ‘feudal’, ties and associations based on families. He also calls this society ‘limited-access’ in that only certain people enjoy monopolies of power and influence. A ‘modern’ society is ‘open-access’ and allows associations not based on familial or personal ties but through functions. They are ‘functionally differentiated’, allowing for clear divisions between politics and business, politics and religion, politics and other public realms. One might argue that a modern society is also more democratic.

David then makes an astonishing claim, one that many of us will probably instantly recognize but which we have not yet articulated, most of all to ourselves. I know I was struck by it. David claims we cannot seem to make that transition from being a ‘traditional’ (i.e. hierarchical, monopolistic) society to a ‘modern’ (i.e. truly democratic) society. We are stuck somewhere in the middle, exhibiting characteristics of either model. And here is where David makes a crucial point. He asks, why is it important to modernize?

via “A Message of Modern Politics” by Randy David | Filipino Voices.

This is an intersting read. What could this bracket be for the Philippines?? Can we even make a similar graph from data BIR has? NSO ?

Sometimes wish a day has 2400 hours.(not too often)

That said, there is an interesting qualitative change in the structure of income that starts to happen around this cutoff for the “rich” which actually suggests that taxpayers above that threshold are rich in most important ways. The most recent (2007) tax stats from the IRS now reflect the peak of the late bubble and show that the $100K-$200K AGI bucket is the last one that more-or-less resembles middle-income categories in their dependence on labor as the all-but exclusive source of income. (Think of pensions and proceeds of retirement accounts as representing deferred wages or salaries.) This graph shows the shares of AGI from some major income sources, and the average incomes for various brackets. (*)

Sources of Individual Income, 2007 SOI Tax Stats

(May be embiggened by clicking here.)

Starting with the $200-500K category, the share of earnings from labor begins a marked decline. By the time you hit mid-six figures, average earnings from income, dividends, and capital gains become high enough to provide middle-class or better incomes without (necessarily) working. Tax returns in the upper-six-figure bucket, on average, show more income from other sources collectively than from salaries, and at the top of the income scale even interest and dividend income exceeds wages and salaries. (**) I suggest that if you can provide yourself with a better-than-average living without working, a very rare luxury indeed, you are in fact rich.

(Revised and slightly expanded.)

via The Rich *Are* Different | Angry Bear.

from the Daily Beast an Excerpt of Yunus’ book Creating A World Without Poverty!

First, we need to broaden the concept of business by including social business in the framework of the marketplace. Making it easy for individuals and companies to see how business practices can be applied to solving social problems, especially those spawned by poverty, while reinvesting profits in the growth and expansion of the benefits thus created can create a “virtuous cycle” of ever-improving conditions for the planet’s least-fortunate citizens.

Second, we need to create inclusive social services that can reach out to every person on earth. These include services normally treated as part of the for-profit sector (such as financial services, food supply, and housing), those usually provided by government or non-profit institutions (such as education), and those that may traditionally be provided on either a for-profit or a not-for-profit basis (such as healthcare). It is absurd that after thousands of years of social and economic development, our systems in all these areas have such enormous blind spots—black holes into which hundreds of millions of people fall, simply because they don’t fit in the existing “business models.”

Third, we need to design appropriate information technology devices and services for the poorest and most underprivileged members of society and to make sure those devices and services get into the hands of those who need them. Information is power. If we guarantee that our most powerless citizens (men and women, young and old) have access to wireless telephony, Internet service, global television and news services, and other emerging forms of information technology, we will quickly find these people becoming more effective advocates for their own rights and interests.

…..

For anyone who is wondering, “How can I contribute?” my answer is this: Start by designing a business plan for a social business. Decide which social problem you’d most like to tackle. Figure out what resources you can use to address it. Develop a plan for applying these resources efficiently and effectively. Then try turning that plan into reality. The social business you create based on your plan may be small, but if it works, it could end up being replicated in thousands of locations—and so end up changing the world.

How to Save the Developing World – The Daily Beast.

I think I’d do a series of posts on musings about social business.

In a country where they require people to have at least two years of college to work in a call center. Where even jobs in sales require you to have a BA, can’t help but agree.

Down with the B.A., and Long Live Education

That could be the rallying cry of Charles Murray in this month’s Cato Unbound. Suppose, he argues, we were to give the job of designing our higher education system to an expert, and that expert gives us the following proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that often has nothing to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a “BA.”

Mad, says Murray. A terrible system.

Down with the B.A., and Long Live Education (Cato-at-liberty).

from the previous linked dave letterman video

3 billion dollars is enough to say that no kid goes to school hungry!

36 billion dollars wall st bonuses probably 2007 christmas bonuses

This is something I would also like to know. I’ve always loved my teachers but I’ve always hated the school system. Science is not about memorization. School should be about the joy of learning. As I see how my younger cousins are educated in school, or even younger people  about 3-6 years younger than I. It is becoming ever more apparent that what we have is a system that would like to propagate society as it is. and for all the beauty and the joy that the society I am in has brought to me, I cannot but hope that society progresses and for it to progress we must learn to subvert the things that try to propagate this system I have come both to love and hate.

They say crazy is doing something again ang again ang expecting different results. So I say that we are crazy to believe that the world is not changing, and because the world is changing it is crazy to expect that the way that society progressed what starting 150 years ago up to the present is the way for us to progress even more. We need a modern system of educating people. We have sold the arts short by not teaching it well. We have sold science and math short by not showing people how beautiful it is.

I hope that by the time I have a child, I wouldn’t have to put up a herculean effort just to give my child a proper education.!

What interests me is whether the present system actually produces more success or heavily limits it.

Would a different system with less emphasis on conformity produce more of our best and brightest? Or does the annealing effect of being crushed by the system help to produce those best and brightest?

If you look at those who have commonly advanced our thinking, our abilities, our technologies, and our economy (through business sense), many did poorly in schools, yet they persisted. The persistence may have been the critical element, and it would have perhaps been lost had they been encouraged more.

So does this mean we need more of those mediocre middle school and high school teachers acting as the forge to both create the worker bees we need, as well as the best [and most successful] by trying to destroy them?

Thoughts?

Do Good Grades Predict Success? – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

I was telling my sister how hard it is to teach hungry children anything, how useless one feels when children can’t concentratee because they did not have breakfast. Makes you feel good that there are still people who find the time to volunteer in School Feeding Programs such as:

• Jollibee
• GMA Kapuso Foundation
• Senator Edgardo Angara

I don’t know why the massacre post from freakonomics lead to a post on school feeding programs, but the thing is It is hard to think with an empty stomach so if we really want to make an impact we must think of the whole problem of poverty not as separate things like education, hunger, lack of social mobility but as an interconnected net of conditions that create a somewhat insurmountable barrier, for probably everyone save for people with extraordinary luck and maybe skill.

old research in impact of School Feeding Program in the Philippines

PS I’d gladly add other companies to this list just email me.

A recession bound USA offers probably more opportunities for enrichment than our small country the Philippines. Sad but there are tens of thousands of teachers from the Philippines without work. I remember a conversation I had with the Filipino Couple we had met on the hotel in Thailand a couple of years back. They had two house helps who graduated as Education Majors , or even the feature in a GMA documentary of a Domestic Helper working in Hong Kong who also graduated with a degree in education, or I could go on and on. The problem is not how many teachers our country has but that the best are leaving to educate the young ones of another country. A country that could at least pay them a higher percentage of what they really are worth. That’s modernday international trade for you. Welcome to the Philippines the No Exporter of Human Resources.

Filipino teachers continue to fly to US for higher pay

By Cynthia Balana
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 17:51:00 08/28/2008

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MANILA, Philippines—More and more competent Filipino teachers are flocking to the United States where they are paid more, according to the Philippine Embassy in Washington.

The embassy, in a statement, said that only last week, 93 Filipino teachers arrived in the US and were welcomed by Philippine Ambassador to Washington Willy Gaa.

The new arrivals attended orientation seminars organized by the embassy where they were also given “practical advice” to ease their transition into a new teaching environment.

The 93 teachers will be teaching special education classes, focusing on Mathematics, Science and English subjects in public schools in Prince George’s County in Maryland.

Gaa said the new recruits followed a group of 115 teachers who were also welcomed by the embassy last July.

The first batch of Filipino teachers moved to Maryland in 2005. As of the fall of 2006, 400 Filipino teachers were already in Baltimore City alone.

Minor quibble, a side line is something you do aside a job/ or side by side a job. When it is your main means of making a living no matter how small or how far from a normal job it is , that is your work and not your sideline.

from Inquirer Blogs here please do read the whole thing:

Pushing trolleys to make ends meet
08/26/08
Posted under Everyday People, Videos

By Izah Morales
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines – An economic crisis pushes people to engage in sidelines or extra jobs aside from the regular job they are already doing. But for 21-year-old Rodel Rosario of Los Baños, a sideline means the only way of making ends meet.

Pushing a trolley from “Crossing” to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños has become Rodel’s “sideline” for two years now.

“Kung walang trabaho, ito ‘yung sideline ko ang mag-tulak ng trolley[If I have nothing else to do, I push trolleys for sideline], ” he said.

Every morning and afternoon, he is like an ice skater gliding on the train tracks, his feet alternately stepping on the steel (instead of ice) to move the makeshift trolley forward. However, his movement is not as smooth and graceful like an ice skater because his “skating rink” is the railway and his so-called performance is to push the trolley that carries a maximum of five passengers.

A trolley ride costs P25, according to Rosario.