After the jump, four pointers to things following up on previous posts on praising idleness, smart SF authors, currency wonkery, and unhappy grammar nazis.
Those of you who were interested in my look at Russell‘s In Praise of Idleness will also probably be interested in The Overworked American. It’s not as acerbic as Russell, but the points are well-laid out:
The rise of worktime was unexpected. For nearly a hundred years, hours had been declining. When this decline abruptly ended in the late 1940s, it marked the beginning of a new era in worktime. But the change was barely noticed. Equally surprising, but also hardly recognized, has been the deviation from Western Europe. After progressing in tandem for nearly a century, the United States veered off into a trajectory of declining leisure, while in Europe work has been disappearing. Forty years later, the differences are large. U.S. manufacturing employees currently work 320 more hours—the equivalent of over two months—than their counterparts in West Germany or France.
The decline in Americans’ leisure time is in sharp contrast to the potential provided by the growth of productivity. Productivity measures the goods and services that result from each hour worked. When productivity rises, a worker can either produce the current output in less time, or remain at work the same number of hours and produce more. Every time productivity increases, we are presented with the possibility of either more free time or more money. That’s the productivity dividend.
Since 1948, productivity has failed to rise in only five years. The level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We actually could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or, every worker in the United Stares could now be taking every other year off from work-with pay. Incredible as it may sound, this is just the simple arithmetic of productivity growth in operation. But between 1948 and the present we did not use any of the productivity dividend to reduce hours. In the first two decades after 1948, productivity grew rapidly, at about 3 percent a year. During that period worktime did not fall appreciably. Annual hours per labor force participant fell only slightly. And on a per-capita (rather than a labor force) basis, they even rose a bit. Since then, productivity growth has been lower, but still positive, averaging just over 1 percent a year. Yet hours have risen steadily for two decades. In 1990, the average American owns and consumes more than twice as much as he or she did in 1948, but also has less free time.
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You may recall I was previously quite impressed with some of what Karl Schroeder had posted at one of his blogs.
Well, Karl continues to impress. You should check out his recent posting on the nature of consciousness/identity in science fiction. It’s pretty insightful, and even more impressive if you’ve read his (really excellent) novel Lady Of Mazes:
When I say that the immortality of consciousness is a modern idea, I mean that it preserves the essential alienation of modernism. This vision of immortality identifies the person with the subjective ‘I’, which by necessity exists in opposition to everything else. There’s me, and then there’s the rest of the world; the subject versus the object, if you will. Science fiction pushes this dichotomy until it becomes almost a parody: ‘I’ becomes only some vaguely-defined principle of consciouness which is separable from the body (soul, anybody?) and in fact separating the ‘I’ from the body becomes not only reasonable, but inevitable. Martin Luther’s ‘Brother Ass’ is left in the dust as we ascend on wings of data into the rapture of the nerds.
The logic of this process leads us inexorably to devalue the material world–indeed everything other than consciousness–or, to put it another way, perpetuates and infinitely intensifies the traditional loathing of the physical that we’ve inherited from our Sky-Father religions. A horror of the body; a loathing of matter that’s not been transformed into ‘smart matter’ by nanotech; a hatred of the vast silence of the cosmos; a terror of losing one’s carefully nurtured identity–these are the sensibilities that the merely immortal will inherit.
So, I’ve posted a lot over the years on US currency issues, and in particular the result of Bush’s policies on the value of said dollar. David Smith, the economics editor for the Times just wrote a piece on the subject entitled “Dollar starts the big slide against major currencies“, and it’s contents line up nicely with a lot of what I’ve posted.
Analysts say that without interest-rate support, the dollar will be weighed down heavily by America’s imbalances.
“I think this is it,” said Tony Norfield, global head of currency strategy at ABN Amro. “The dollar has been supported by high yields but markets are saying that is no longer enough. The question for policymakers is going to be how to manage the dollar’s decline. It won’t be a one-way street but the fall is likely to be biggest against Asian currencies.”
The euro has already risen to an 11-month high of more than $1.26, while the dollar is at a three-month low of 113.70 against the yen. The Canadian dollar, known by traders as the “loonie”, rose to a 28-year high on Friday, boosted by a hike in Canadian interest rates.
I do think he glosses over the possibility of a total crash or “hard landing” scenario (see Roubini or DeLong) but I do think this is another clear sign that everyone in the world, except US policy makers, understands the necessary consequence of the fiscal policies of the Bush administration.
Oh, and you should totally be subscribed to the feed for Smith’s blog if you’re interested in global economics (albeit with a UK focus), by the way.
I may have mentioned my penchant for grammar nitpickery in the past. An article at the Guardian about misuages that are overpowering the “proper” usages both makes me want to laugh and to cry. The title though, did make me want to laugh.
According to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.
“Straight-laced” is used 66% of the time even though it should be written “strait-laced”, according to lexicographers working for Oxford Dictionaries, who record the way English is spoken and written by monitoring books, television, radio and newspapers and, increasingly, websites and blogs.
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Other examples of common mistakes include “slight of hand” instead of “sleight”, “phased by” when it should be “fazed by”, “butt naked” instead of the correct “buck naked” and “vocal chords” for “vocal cords.”
