The US Federal Reserve Bank will raise interest rates to 0.5% In the next six months. (The median figure of 200 economists). The UK is the country stat will probably follow the Fed in 3 months. The EU is at least 2 years behind. Even if the Fed thinks the US economy is bounding forward, there are very real consequences to a disconnect in interest rates around the world. One important impact is on currency rates. Should central bankers work together more closely?
Viven Chen writes. People believe genius has a gender—and it is almost always male.
That’s the pitiful news from two new studies about perceptions of intelligence. The attitude is pervasive among ordinary folks as well as those who toil in the ivory towers of academia.
In one study of 2,043 Americans by branding firm Edelman Berland, 90 percent of those surveyed said that geniuses tend to be male, reports Fast Company. What’s shocking is that women (93 percent of men v. 87 percent of women) largely share that view, too.
In another study, researchers from Princeton and University of Illinois surveyed over 1,800 academics in 30 disciplines about the profile of success in their fields, focusing on whether it depends on hard work or brilliance. Here’s how Live Science describes the finding:
The researchers found a trend: The more importance that the academics in a given field placed on being brilliant, the lower the percentage of women with Ph.D.s there was in that field.
Although the researchers found no evidence of an intellectual disparity between the genders, they say that cultural assumptions about intelligence could be keeping women away from certain fields and hindering their success. Instead of being innately brilliant, women are perceived as hardworking:
Women who are presented as intellectually accomplished tend to be portrayed as incredibly hardworking — for example, Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” series, Leslie said. “In this way, women’s accomplishments are seen as grounded in long hours, poring over books, rather than in some special raw effortless brilliance.”
And guess what other group is also perceived to be lacking true genius? African-Americans. The researchers also found that the fields whose members felt that a spark of genius was required for success were less likely to have African Americans with Ph.D.s.
“Like women, African Americans are the targets of negative cultural stereotypes about their intellectual abilities,” said study co-author Andrei Cimpian, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The stereotypes become self-fulfilling prophecies. “Any group that’s stereotyped to lack a trait that a field values is going to be underrepresented in that field,” said Cimpian to Washington Post.
So where does the legal profession fall in this spectrum? I, for one, have no doubt that women in law are saddled with similar stereotypes: Diligent and competent, perhaps, but not much more. Indeed, if you were to picture the ace litigator or ultimate dealmaker, you’d probably envision David Boies or Marty Lipton.
If you think long and hard enough, you can probably come up with some women who meet the smart quota. But off-the charts brilliant and awe-inspiring? Well, that’s still a man’s job. And you’re still baffled why women aren’t getting ahead?
Benjamin Snyder writes: Automaker Toyota has promoted American Julie Hamp, the current head of communications for North America, to managing officer. She’ll be the highest ranking woman in Toyota’s 77-year history. The move is part of a broader push for diversity among Toyota’s executive ranks as part of a restructuring. The company’s leadership culture has been made up mostly of Japanese men. “Toyota has realized that they’re not a Japanese carmaker, they’re a world carmaker,” Edwin Merner, president of Atlantis Investment Research in Tokyo, told Bloomberg. “If they’re going to understand overseas markets and plan, design and build cars, then they have to have people who have a good understanding of those markets.
Toyota characterized the moves this way in a statement:
By appointing talented people from affiliates outside Japan to executive positions, Toyota aims to foster innovation by enabling people from many different backgrounds to contribute and provide input.
The once-untouchable auto firm has had a rough few years. A seemingly unending recall crisis partly dinged the company’s reputation and the global recession hurt sales. But the firm’s fortunes have started to turn around recently.
February sales in the U.S. surged ahead 12.1%, compared to the same month last year. And its Lexus luxury division is making gains against European competitors: Last month marked the fourth straight month of record new Lexus sales, according to the company. Lexus is ranked as the industry’s top brand.
We all know that there aren’t enough women on corporate boards. The percentage is somewhere around 16 to 19 percent, depending on who’s doing the counting and how.
Yet while it’s clear the percentages are low, it’s not always easy to put that into perspective.
It looked at companies in the S&P 1500 at the time of their 2014 annual meetings and found that 2,150 of the 13,850 total board seats were held by women. Then it noticed an interesting detail. Slightly more of the seats — 2,200 of them — were held by men who were named John, Robert, William or James.
(No word on how the numbers would fare if you added every Tom, Dick and Harry.)
The closeness of these numbers is pretty eye-opening and unsettling. ‘The pace of change is absolutely glacial,” says Karyn Twaronite, the firm’s global diversity and inclusion officer. “The idea that we can essentially pick out four common men’s names, at random, and find this shows there’s a long way to go.”
Katherine Sierra writes: In the ’80s, skate culture devolved from a vibrant, reasonably gender-balanced community into an aggressively narrow demographic of teen boys. If you think tech has sexism issues, skate culture makes tech feel like one big Oprah show.
My surfer friends and I would occasionally gather on a summer evening, loosen the trucks on our boards, and carve the lazy hills of the Altadena suburbs. But the space between sessions grew longer, and eventually I was the last remaining woman in our group.
Then I found a new love: programming.
I felt that same beautiful freedom writing code that I knew and loved from skating. Compared with what skate culture had become, everything about tech felt fresh and possible. Where skateboarding now celebrated destruction, computer culture celebrated creation.
Fast forward 30 years. Rodney Mullen believes skate culture has something positive to offer the tech world, and the tech world is paying attention. Rodney can help tech—and I hope tech listens—but only if we decouple Rodney from the toxic, sexist, soul-crushing culture of modern skating. Soul-crushing, that is, for women.
Rodney has the same big heart and cognitive biases of so many men in tech—kind, brilliant, wonderful men that cannot grasp how the community they find so accepting and open can be so … not. Rodney believes open-source and hacking culture has so much in common with skateboarding, a culture in which nobody “owns” a trick and everyone learns from and builds upon what others have done. And Rodney’s right: skating does have the bold, innovative, rule-challenging fear of the status quo that Silicon Valley seems to have lost.
But a fresh POV can never be worth lionizing a deeply sexist culture.
The Economist: The middle classes certainly know how to live in Brazil, with Copacabana and Ipanema just minutes from the main business districts a game of volleyball or a surf starts the day. Hedge-fund offices look out over botanical gardens and up to verdant mountains. But stray from comfortable districts and the sheen fades quickly. Favelas plagued by poverty and violence cling to the foothills. So it is with Brazil’s economy: the harder you stare, the worse it looks.
Brazil has seen sharp ups and downs in the past 25 years. In the early 1990s inflation rose above 2,000%; it was only banished when a new currency was introduced in 1994. By the turn of the century Brazil’s deficits had mired it in debt, forcing an IMF rescue in 2002. But then the woes vanished. Brazil became a titan of growth, expanding at 4% a year between 2002 and 2008 as exports of iron, oil and sugar boomed and domestic consumption gave an additional kick. Now Brazil is back in trouble. Growth has averaged just 1.3% over the past four years. A poll of 100 economists conducted by the Central Bank of Brazil suggests a 0.5% contraction this year followed by 1.5% growth in 2016.
Both elements of that prediction—the mild downturn and the quick rebound—look optimistic. The prospects for private consumption, which accounted for around 50% of GDP growth over the past ten years, are rotten. With inflation above 7%, shoppers’ purchasing power is being eroded. Hefty price rises will continue. Brazil is facing an acute water shortage; since three-quarters of its electricity comes from hydroelectric dams, this is sapping it of energy.
To avoid blackouts the government plans to deter use by raising prices: rates will increase by up to 30% this year. With the real losing 10% of its value against the dollar in the past month alone, rising import prices will bring more inflation.
There is little hope of disposable income keeping pace. One reason is that Brazilian workers’ productivity does not justify further rises. In the past ten years wages in the private sector have grown faster than GDP; cosseted public-sector workers have done even better (see chart 1). Since Brazil’s minimum wage is indexed to GDP and inflation, a recession will freeze real pay for the millions who earn it. Brazil’s Dilemma
Youth unemployment has been at the forefront of political and academic debate since the unfolding of the Great Recession in 2008, exploited to a greater or lesser extent by the contenders of most elections that have taken place across Europe since then. Edited by Juan Dolado of the European University Institute, this eBook takes into account the relevance of policy lessons from recent experience to provide a clear analysis of the factors that affect the impact labour-market policies have on youth unemployment. The contributors present a case-by-case analysis for a range of countries across Europe, spread both geographically and also by the divergent approaches taken. It covers countries with dual vocational training systems; dual labour markets; those where the ratio between youth and adult unemployment is notably high or low; and an overview of the recently launched Youth Guarantee programme. No Jobs for Young People
FIona Hill writes: In Ukraine, and in his whistle-stop trip to Hungary, Putin is out to score points for Russia. He is not out to win friends in Ukraine or Europe. Nor is he out to restore a Russian empire, or build a new Moscow-centric geopolitical order. Putin wants respect for Russia, not external obligations. He wants respect in the old-fashioned, hard-power sense of the word.
Putin is a practitioner of realpolitik in its starkest form. In his interactions with regional leaders, Putin has laid out his view that all the states that emerged from the USSR are appendages of Russia. They should pay fealty to Moscow. Other European countries, including the former great powers of France, Germany and the UK, are satellites of the United States, grouped under the umbrella of NATO and the European Union. The unaligned operate in the shadows of two blocs, as Putin put it once to Georgian leaders. The only open question for Putin is who gets to decide the final borders of his new Yalta, Russia or the United States. The future of Ukraine and the Donbas are one set of decision points. Elsewhere, Russia has announced it will lift border controls between Russia and Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and Putin is questioning other borders in the Soviet Union’s old stomping grounds in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. He is challenging the European Union’s frontiers by appealing to eastern Orthodox countries like Greece and Cyprus, where politicians and populations feel aggrieved at their treatment by the austere Protestant powers of northern Europe who set the tone for European economic reform.
Redrawing borders in Crimea was Putin’s first major victory. Putin has long expressed his personal sense of humiliation when Russia lost its geopolitical position in Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty-five years later, Putin told the world Russia was no longer in retreat.
Right now the West looks weak to Putin. In his view, the tables have been turned. The eurozone crisis has undermined the European Union politically and economically. The United States is overextended after more than a decade of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and seems incapable of dealing with crises in the Middle East. China is the dominant player in East Asia. Putin is taking full advantage of the situation, snubbing his nose at sanctions and running rings around European diplomats who are anxious to end the war in Ukraine. He has rallied the population at home with emotional evocations of Russian imperial glories, Soviet nostalgia and the idea of a unique “Russian world.” He has depicted himself as the leader of an international coalition of conservative politicians and states confronting the excesses of a decadent West. Russian history, imperial nostalgia, religion and values have all proven potent instruments for Putin to reassert Russia’s position.
With no endgame in sight in Ukraine, Putin is now focusing on the European arena.
Michael Bloomberg calls for a Solomoic decision on the Keystone Pipeline. He points out that Democats exaggerate its environmental mpact, Repubican its economic impact. He calls on Preisdent Obama to go to Canada on a diplomatic mission and settle this matter.
Bloomberg is right and this moment after Obama’s veto gives Obama an opening. Secretary of State Kerry has been doing such a good job that Obama would be wise to involve him.
US oil independence depends on Canada, one of our closest allies. A big climate conference in December is going to make both the US and Canada, who rank low on cleaning up the environment, look very bad if they don’t act. The Queen of Sheba could have solved this problem as well as Solomon.
Former Rep. Henry Waxman, who has tangled with industries including Big Tobacco, Big Coal and Big Pharma, thought his congressional experience would position him to help a large law firm advise corporations.
As his retirement from Congress neared, he wrote a business plan, sent it to public-policy group managers and talked to peers who’d preceded him in private practice. A lawyer before he entered Congress 40 years ago, Waxman believed he could “give good counsel to people who have issues that I could help them think through.”
But after more than a month of searching, the fifth most senior Democrat in the U.S. House has changed his mind. K Street, it seems, isn’t for everyone.
Waxman had run up against the contradictions many politicians face when they leave Capitol Hill. He felt comfortable as an advocate, but didn’t want to lobby. He would work hard, but not full-time. He could advise companies, but not be a hired gun to any paying customer.
Few large general-service firms with public policy shops fit this ideal. The firms serve companies across many industries and can be sensitive about offending those clients. And Waxman’s résumé read like a hit list of corporate America.
As a past chairman of the House Oversight Committee and of the Energy and Commerce Committee, he was a force behind passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, which targeted coal power plant emissions; the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act; and the Affordable Care Act.
Even the Hatch-Waxman Act—which Waxman in his business plan calls the “Waxman-Hatch” Act—cut away power and money from brand pharmaceutical companies. On the other hand, it empowered the generic drug industry.
The Chamber of Commerce gets more specific: Waxman voted in line with business interests only 27 percent of the time during his career. That places him among the 25 least business-friendly House members in office as of 2013, as defined by the Chamber.
Waxman said late last week that he would join his son Michael in a four-person D.C. public relations company called Waxman Strategies.
Bidding typically is intense for former lawmakers in D.C. lobbying shops, with former senators going for at least $1 million and House members for about $500,000. “It’s a lot of money. That would be the great advantage. But money’s not everything,” Waxman said of the legal industry.
Waxman added: “I’m not changing my views. I’m proud of the work I’ve done and I want to continue working on things I think work well.”
