Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
December 16, 2009, 9:30 pm
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Tags:
Costco, East Coast, Heisman Trophy, West Coast
For a native Westerner, the slights from the other end of the country start early, and build through a lifetime: national broadcasters on election night who cannot pronounce Oregon (it’s like gun) or Nevada (it’s not Nev-odda), or a toll-free clerk who thinks New Mexico is part of old Mexico.
“You’ll have to go through your own embassy,” a resident of Santa Fe was told when trying to order Olympic tickets for games on American soil.
Geographic illiteracy from the Eastern Time Zone is a given, especially among the well-educated. A New York book publisher, and Harvard grad at that, once asked me if I ever take the ferry up to Alaska for the afternoon. No, I replied: do you ever go to Greenland on a day trip?
Norman Maclean, the great Montana writer, had a worse experience. He complained that an editor turned down his masterpiece, “A River Runs Through It,” because it had too many trees in it.
A media titan, The Washington Post, recently announced they were calling home their remaining national correspondents, explaining that the paper was perfectly capable of covering the rest of the country from inside the Beltway. By that reasoning, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner can discern what’s happening in the capital from their home base near the Arctic Circle.
Sports is a grievance category all its own. If you Google “East Coast Bias,” up comes a long litany of stories about how the West never gets any respect from those great deciders in the East.
Every now and then those of us who reside on the sunset side of the 100th meridian get a chance to rub one in the other way.
So, naturally, Toby Gerhart of Stanford didn’t receive this year’s Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to the nation’s best college football player, despite leading elite colleges in rushing yards, rushing touchdowns, total touchdowns and points scored. Many of the voters were asleep, or Saturday-night-blotto, when Gerhart was dazzling the football world this fall. The voting map was a geography of bias.
These are all minor annoyances, mind you, in a world with daily reminders that an embittered, small-hearted senator from Connecticut can hold up health care for millions, or some people would rather read a “book” by Hulk Hogan than a short story by Sherman Alexie.
But every now and then those of us who reside on the sunset side of the 100th meridian get a chance to rub one in the other way.
Consider the fuss over Costco landing on the island of Manhattan last month. Costco is the nation’s third largest retailer, with more than 400 warehouse stores in the United States alone. Liberals love Costco because they pay their workers about 40 percent more than their big box rivals.
Conservatives love them because they sell Sarah Palin’s book by the pallet, next to the camo wear.
Costco is a brilliant retail concept, but it’s not news. It’s been around for, oh . . . a quarter-century or so. Some of the gushing posts on New York-based Web sites after Costco opened on East 117th Street have all the breathless urgency of a tourist who has discovered bagels in Boulder.
“It’s amazing how many things you can get for a fairly decent price!” One shopper wrote on Yelp New York, the online review site. Um, that’s the idea. And other observers have seemed befuddled in the big box, overwhelmed by the lure of tube sox and toilet paper to last a lifetime.
Most Westerners may not know schmear from schmaltz, but they can tell a sophisticated urban shopper to stick with the to-die-for olive oil, cold-pressed just a few weeks ago in Tuscany, and the $1.50 quarter-pound hot dog when under the high fluorescent sky of a Costco warehouse.
Speaking of my newspaper — please, it’s the holidays, a time for indulgence in all things — they recently discovered a newsworthy item from the Mountain West: Jews in Montana. Imagine!
One more bit of news on this front: the nation’s first elected Jewish governor was a Western man. And a Democrat. In Idaho. Moses Alexander governed the land of famous potatoes from 1915 to 1919.
As a longtime Western representative of The New York Times, which is well read in these provinces, I feel the rub of faux-rube pandering both ways. Here, people are amazed I can find Twitty, Texas, on a map, and — more surprising, can vouch for the peach cobbler. There, the wonder is that I know which side of the plate to keep the salad fork. Sort of.
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Next Culture War
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By DAVID BROOKS
Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.
“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.
Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.
That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.
When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.
Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.
Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.
Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.
During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.
Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.
These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.
Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.
If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.
It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.
By DAVID BROOKS
Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.
“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.
Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.
That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.
When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.
Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.
Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.
Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.
During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.
Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.
These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.
Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.
If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.
It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The textbook economics of cap-and-trade
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 27, 2009, 10:16 am
The textbook economics of cap-and-trade
I realized, after the last post, that it might be useful to write down just what the Econ 101 version of cap and trade looks like; as it happens, this also helps explain the intellectual sins of Glenn Beck and Martin Feldstein.
So here we go. Bear in mind that something like what follows can be found in just about every intro textbook.
Think of the benefits to the private sector from pollution. Yes, benefits — in the sense that it’s cheaper to pollute than not to, or that it’s easier to produce goods if you don’t worry about whatever emissions result as a byproduct. So we can think of drawing a curve representing the private marginal benefit of emissions, as in this figure:
In the absence of government action, the private sector will increase emissions up to the point where there is no further marginal benefit. That is, emissions will rise to whatever level is implied by profit-maximization, paying no attention to the effects on the environment.
A cap-and-trade system puts a limit on overall emissions, so that emitters have to pay a price for emitting. This price will, as shown in the figure above, equal the marginal benefit of the last unit of emissions allowed.
Now, the cost to the economy of this limit is the benefit the private sector would have gotten by emitting more than is allowed under the cap. It’s shown in the figure as the red triangle labeled “deadweight loss”. CBO puts these losses under Waxman-Markey at 0.2-0.7 percent of GDP in 2020, 1.1 to 3.4 percent in 2050. These costs have to be set against the environmental benefits.
In addition to this overall economic cost, there’s a distributional effect. The creation of cap and trade means that emission permits command a market price, and the value of these permits — the blue rectangle — goes to someone. Under Waxman-Markey, some of it (a growing fraction over time) would be captured by the government through auctions, and used to cut or avoid increases in other taxes — in effect, recycled to consumers. The rest would be passed on to industry — but because the biggest recipients would be regulated utilities, much of this would also be passed on to consumers.
OK, now let’s send in Beck and Feldstein.
Beck got his number from someone who learned about a guesstimate of what the auction value of permits might be (way higher than current estimates, by the way), divided by the number of households, and proclaimed this the cost of the bill. In effect, he looked at a guess about the size of the blue rectangle, which does not represent an economic cost, and called that the cost to the economy.
In a way, though, what Martin Feldstein did was worse. He took the CBO’s estimate of “compliance costs”, which was $1600 per household in an early report (it’s now down to $900, but who’s counting?), and implied that this was the economic cost of the legislation. But “compliance costs” are basically the sum of the blue rectangle and the red triangle; the true economic costs are just the triangle, and are much smaller.
Another way to say this is that under the Feldstein method, any time you try to correct an externality, which necessarily means changing relative prices, all of the negative effects of the price change will be counted as a cost — but none of the positive effects will be counted as a benefit.
Bad stuff. And what you should bear in mind is that all I’m doing here is conventional neoclassical economics, quite literally basic textbook material. What does it say when the people who claim to believe in this stuff throw it out the window as soon as it leads to policy conclusions they don’t like?
September 27, 2009, 10:16 am
The textbook economics of cap-and-trade
I realized, after the last post, that it might be useful to write down just what the Econ 101 version of cap and trade looks like; as it happens, this also helps explain the intellectual sins of Glenn Beck and Martin Feldstein.
So here we go. Bear in mind that something like what follows can be found in just about every intro textbook.
Think of the benefits to the private sector from pollution. Yes, benefits — in the sense that it’s cheaper to pollute than not to, or that it’s easier to produce goods if you don’t worry about whatever emissions result as a byproduct. So we can think of drawing a curve representing the private marginal benefit of emissions, as in this figure:
In the absence of government action, the private sector will increase emissions up to the point where there is no further marginal benefit. That is, emissions will rise to whatever level is implied by profit-maximization, paying no attention to the effects on the environment.
A cap-and-trade system puts a limit on overall emissions, so that emitters have to pay a price for emitting. This price will, as shown in the figure above, equal the marginal benefit of the last unit of emissions allowed.
Now, the cost to the economy of this limit is the benefit the private sector would have gotten by emitting more than is allowed under the cap. It’s shown in the figure as the red triangle labeled “deadweight loss”. CBO puts these losses under Waxman-Markey at 0.2-0.7 percent of GDP in 2020, 1.1 to 3.4 percent in 2050. These costs have to be set against the environmental benefits.
In addition to this overall economic cost, there’s a distributional effect. The creation of cap and trade means that emission permits command a market price, and the value of these permits — the blue rectangle — goes to someone. Under Waxman-Markey, some of it (a growing fraction over time) would be captured by the government through auctions, and used to cut or avoid increases in other taxes — in effect, recycled to consumers. The rest would be passed on to industry — but because the biggest recipients would be regulated utilities, much of this would also be passed on to consumers.
OK, now let’s send in Beck and Feldstein.
Beck got his number from someone who learned about a guesstimate of what the auction value of permits might be (way higher than current estimates, by the way), divided by the number of households, and proclaimed this the cost of the bill. In effect, he looked at a guess about the size of the blue rectangle, which does not represent an economic cost, and called that the cost to the economy.
In a way, though, what Martin Feldstein did was worse. He took the CBO’s estimate of “compliance costs”, which was $1600 per household in an early report (it’s now down to $900, but who’s counting?), and implied that this was the economic cost of the legislation. But “compliance costs” are basically the sum of the blue rectangle and the red triangle; the true economic costs are just the triangle, and are much smaller.
Another way to say this is that under the Feldstein method, any time you try to correct an externality, which necessarily means changing relative prices, all of the negative effects of the price change will be counted as a cost — but none of the positive effects will be counted as a benefit.
Bad stuff. And what you should bear in mind is that all I’m doing here is conventional neoclassical economics, quite literally basic textbook material. What does it say when the people who claim to believe in this stuff throw it out the window as soon as it leads to policy conclusions they don’t like?
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Claim: Lack of Sleep Increases the Risk of Catching a Cold.
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 22, 2009
Really?
The Claim: Lack of Sleep Increases the Risk of Catching a Cold.
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
THE FACTS As cold season approaches, many Americans stock up on their vitamin C and echinacea. But heeding the age-old advice about catching up on sleep might be more important.
Studies have demonstrated that poor sleep and susceptibility to colds go hand in hand, and scientists think it could be a reflection of the role sleep plays in maintaining the body’s defenses.
In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.
Sleep and immunity, it seems, are tightly linked. Studies have found that mammals that require the most sleep also produce greater levels of disease-fighting white blood cells — but not red blood cells, even though both are produced in bone marrow and stem from the same precursor. And researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have shown that species that sleep more have greater resistance against pathogens.
“Species that have evolved longer sleep durations,” the Planck scientists wrote, “appear to be able to increase investment in their immune systems and be better protected.”
THE BOTTOM LINE Research suggests that poor sleep can increase susceptibility to colds.
September 22, 2009
Really?
The Claim: Lack of Sleep Increases the Risk of Catching a Cold.
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
THE FACTS As cold season approaches, many Americans stock up on their vitamin C and echinacea. But heeding the age-old advice about catching up on sleep might be more important.
Studies have demonstrated that poor sleep and susceptibility to colds go hand in hand, and scientists think it could be a reflection of the role sleep plays in maintaining the body’s defenses.
In a recent study for The Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists followed 153 men and women for two weeks, keeping track of their quality and duration of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they quarantined the subjects and exposed them to cold viruses. Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night, it turned out, were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.
Sleep and immunity, it seems, are tightly linked. Studies have found that mammals that require the most sleep also produce greater levels of disease-fighting white blood cells — but not red blood cells, even though both are produced in bone marrow and stem from the same precursor. And researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have shown that species that sleep more have greater resistance against pathogens.
“Species that have evolved longer sleep durations,” the Planck scientists wrote, “appear to be able to increase investment in their immune systems and be better protected.”
THE BOTTOM LINE Research suggests that poor sleep can increase susceptibility to colds.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Paul Krugman: Reform or Bust
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash.
But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms.
The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.
Credit where credit is due: I was delighted when Lawrence Summers, the administration’s ranking economist, lashed out at the campaign the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with financial-industry lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”
Yet protecting consumers from financial abuse should be only the beginning of reform. If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble, followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — which means, inparticular, changing the way bankers are paid.
What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.
The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.
But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.
I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”
That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.
All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over.
It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses.
Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.
It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs.
September 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash.
But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms.
The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.
Credit where credit is due: I was delighted when Lawrence Summers, the administration’s ranking economist, lashed out at the campaign the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with financial-industry lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”
Yet protecting consumers from financial abuse should be only the beginning of reform. If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble, followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — which means, inparticular, changing the way bankers are paid.
What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.
The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.
But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.
I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”
That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.
All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over.
It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses.
Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.
It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs.
Friday, September 18, 2009
36 Hours in Cleveland
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By BRETT SOKOL
“YOU Gotta Be Tough” was a popular T-shirt slogan worn by Clevelanders during the 1970s, a grim period marked by industrial decline, large-scale population flight and an urban environment so toxic the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire. These days it still helps to be at least a little tough; a fiercely blue-collar ethos endures. But instead of abandoning the city, local entrepreneurs and bohemian dreamers alike are sinking roots; opening a wave of funky boutiques, offbeat art galleries and sophisticated restaurants; and injecting fresh life into previously rusted-out spaces. It’s a vibrant spirit best exemplified by Cleveland’s new all-female roller derby league, whose wry name, the Burning River Roller Girls, and home, a former GM auto factory retooled into a 60,000-square-foot sports facility, say it all.
Friday
3 p.m.
1) HELLO CLEVELAND!
Staring at platform shoes worn by Keith Moon or Elvis Presley’s white jumpsuit hardly evokes the visceral excitement of rock music, let alone its rich history, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (751 Erieside Avenue; 216-781-7625; www.rockhall.com; admission, $22) thankfully has a wealth of interactive exhibits in addition to its displays of the goofier fashion choices of rock stardom. There’s a fascinating look at the genre’s initial 1950s heyday, as well as the hysteria that greeted it — preachers and politicians warning of everything from its incipient Communist subversion to its promotion of wanton sexuality. On the top floors, a well-curated exploration of Bruce Springsteen’s career is on display through next spring.
5 p.m.
2) FROM STEEL TO STYLISH
The steelworkers who once filled the Tremont neighborhood’s low-slung houses and ornately topped churches have largely vanished. A new breed of residents has moved in along with a wealth of upscale restaurants, artisanal shops and galleries showcasing emerging artists. Inside Lilly Handmade Chocolates (761 Starkweather Avenue; 216-771-3333; www.lillytremont.com), you can join the throngs practically drooling over the mounds of freshly made truffles. Or grab a glass at the wine bar inside Visible Voice Books (1023 Kenilworth Avenue; 216-961-0084; www.visiblevoicebooks.com), which features scores of small-press titles, many by local authors.
7 p.m.
3) IRON CHEF, POLISH CLASSIC
Cleveland’s restaurant of popular distinction is Lolita (900 Literary Road; 216-771-5652; www.lolabistro.com), where the owner and “Iron Chef America” regular Michael Symon offers creative spins on Mediterranean favorites including duck prosciutto pizza ($13) and crispy chicken livers with polenta, wild mushrooms and pancetta ($7). (Reservations are recommended.) More traditional comfort food is at Sokolowski’s University Inn (1201 University Road; 216-771-9236; www.sokolowskis.com), a beloved stop for classic Polish dishes since 1923. Even if you’re unswayed by Anthony Bourdain’s description of the smoked kielbasa ($7.25) as “artery busting” (from him, a compliment) at least swing by for the view from the parking lot — a panorama encompassing Cleveland old and new, from the stadiums dotting the downtown skyline to the smoking factories and oddly beautiful slag heaps on the riverside below.
11 p.m.
4) CLASSIC COCKTAILS
One aspect of Tremont has remained steady over the years: it’s a night crawlers’ paradise. Nowadays, discerning drinkers head for the nearby Velvet Tango Room (2095 Columbus Road; 216-241-8869; www.velvettangoroom.com), inside a one-time Prohibition-era speakeasy and seemingly little changed: the bitters are housemade, and the bartenders pride themselves on effortlessly mixing a perfect Bourbon Daisy or Rangpur Gimlet. Yes, as their menu explains, you can order a chocolate-tini — “But we die a little bit every time.”
Saturday
11 a.m.
5) FARM FRESH
Start your day with a visit to the West Side Market (1979 West 25th Street; 216-664-3387; www.westsidemarket.com), where many of the city’s chefs go to stock their own kitchens. Browse over 100 vendors selling meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables and baked goods, or just pull up a chair at Crêpe De Luxe’s counter (www.crepesdeluxe.com) for a savory Montréal (filled with smoked brisket and Emmenthal cheese; $6) or the Elvis homage Le Roi (bananas, peanut butter and chocolate; $5).
2:30 p.m.
6) ART CANVAS
For nearly 20 years the William Busta Gallery (2731 Prospect Avenue; 216-298-9071; www.williambustagallery.com) has remained a conceptual-art-free zone — video installations included. “With video, it takes 15 minutes to see how bad somebody really is,” said Mr. Busta, the gallery’s owner. “With painting, you can spot talent right away.” And that’s predominantly what he exhibits, with a focus on exciting homegrown figures like Don Harvey and Matthew Kolodziej. In the nearby Warehouse District, Shaheen Modern & Contemporary Art (740 West Superior Avenue, Suite 101; 216-830-8888; www.shaheengallery.com) casts a wider geographic net with recent solo exhibits from the buzzy ex-Clevelander Craig Kucia, as well as New York-based artists like Mark Fox and Keith Mayerson.
6 p.m.
7) PARIS ON LAKE ERIE
The most talked about new restaurant this year is L’Albatros (11401 Bellflower Road; 216-791-7880; www.albatrosbrasserie.com), which the chef Zachary Bruell opened last December. Set inside a 19th-century carriage house on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, this inviting brasserie serves impeccably executed French specialties like chicken liver and foie gras mousseline ($9), a niçoise salade ($10) and cassoulet ($22).
8 p.m.
8) BALLROOM BLITZ
The polka bands are long gone from the Beachland Ballroom (15711 Waterloo Road; 216-383-1124; www.beachlandballroom.com), replaced by an eclectic mix of rock groups. But by running a spot that’s as much a clubhouse as it is a concert venue, the co-owners Cindy Barber and Mark Leddy have retained plenty of this former Croatian social hall’s old-school character. Beachland draws local favorites like the avant folkie Bill Fox and post-punkers This Moment in Black History, as well as hot touring acts like Neko Case and the Hold Steady. Mr. Leddy, formerly an antiques dealer, still hunts down finds for the basement’s This Way Out Vintage Shoppe.
Sunday
11 a.m.
9) BEETS, THEN BEATS
One of the few restaurants in town where requesting the vegan option won’t elicit a raised eyebrow, Tommy’s (1824 Coventry Road; 216-321-7757; www.tommyscoventry.com) has been serving tofu since 1972, when the surrounding Coventry Village, in Cleveland Heights, was a hippie oasis. The bloom is off that countercultural rose, but the delicious falafel ($5.79) and thick milkshakes ($4.59) endure. The time warp continues through a doorway leading into Mac’s Backs bookstore (No. 1820; 216-321-2665; www.macsbacks.com), a good place to find out-of-print poetry from Cleveland post-Beat writers like d.a. levy, T. L. Kryss and rjs.
2 p.m.
10) FREE IMPRESSIONISTS
For decades, the University Circle district has housed many of the city’s cultural jewels, including Severance Hall, the majestic Georgian residence of the Cleveland Orchestra; the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, one of the country’s best repertory movie theaters; and the lush 285-acre Lake View Cemetery. At the Cleveland Museum of Art (11150 East Boulevard; 216-421-7340; www.clemusart.com), already famed for its collection of Old Masters and kid-friendly armor, the June opening of the museum’s Rafael Viñoly-designed East Wing puts the spotlight on more modern fare, moving from a roomful of Impressionists dramatically centered around one of Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings, up to current work. A visually arresting 2008 drawing by Cleveland’s T. R. Ericsson more than holds its own amidst heavyweight contemporary pieces from Anselm Kiefer and Kiki Smith. A further enticement: admission to the museum’s permanent collection is absolutely free.
THE BASICS
Many major airlines fly nonstop from New York area airports into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. A recent Web search found round-trip fares for fall flights starting at $239. Although a light rail system connects the airport with both downtown and University Circle, a rental car is advised for reaching most other neighborhoods.
The Marriott Downtown at Key Center (127 Public Square; 216-696-9200; www.marriott.com) is a 25-story, 400-room hotel in the heart of the city. The comfortable, amenity-filled rooms provide quick access to downtown attractions; some feature impressive views of Lake Erie. Doubles start at $159.
A boutique-style option is the Glidden House (1901 Ford Drive; 866-812-4537; www.gliddenhouse.com), 60 quaint rooms in a 1910 French Gothic mansion on the Case Western Reserve University campus, an easy walk to most cultural destinations around University Circle. Doubles from $139.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Keeping That New PC Clean and Pure
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
September 3, 2009
By RIVA RICHMOND
School starts soon, and many people are getting spanking-new computers. Ah, the joy of a new and more powerful toy — and a clean slate.
A new PC, whether you know it or not, may well have freed you from many malicious programs that steal credit card numbers and other valuable information or otherwise obstruct your safe and private use of the Internet. Now is the time — while you’re getting everything set up just the way you like it — to take some steps to keep your new machine clean and free of malware. Here is what you need to do before you do anything else.
CHECK YOUR FIREWALL SETTINGS Do this before you even connect your computer to the Internet. Firewalls prevent certain unwanted traffic from reaching your computer, including worms that spread through network connections. New laptops and desktops with Windows Vista (and, come Oct. 22, the next version of the operating system, Windows 7) and netbooks using Windows XP SP2 or higher have a firewall that is built in and turned on by default. You can make sure all is well by going to the Windows Security Center, clicking Start, then Control Panel, then Security Center and Windows Firewall.
Mac users can check and adjust their firewall settings by clicking on the Apple icon and going to System Preferences and clicking on Security and then Firewall. At a minimum, choose “allow only essential services.” A better option is to select “set access for specific services and applications” and play gatekeeper, allowing programs to connect as you need them, said Rich Mogull, founder of the security consultant firm Securosis.
UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE Even though you have a new machine, chances are that security fixes have been issued since the manufacturer loaded the software, so you will want to download those as soon as you get online.
Your new PC may prompt you to check for updates from Microsoft, but, if not, open Windows Update by clicking the Start button, then All Programs and then Windows Update. On the left pane, click “check for updates.” (For more information about Windows Security, see microsoft.com/protect.)
To help you keep Microsoft products up to date, Windows will prompt owners of new machines to sign up for automatic updates. You will see a screen asking if you want to “Help protect Windows automatically.” Choose the first option, “Use recommended settings,” so you get everything and don’t have to worry about it again.
Barring an urgent problem, updates come out on the second Tuesday of the month. To schedule exactly what time your updates are installed — say at 3 a.m., when you are asleep — open Windows Update and select Change Settings and make your choices. This is also a good time to turn on the Internet Explorer Phishing Filter, which can help keep you from turning over personal information to the wrong people.
For Mac users, your computer will automatically check for updates once a week. If you are a paranoid person, have it check more frequently by clicking Software Update in the System Preferences panel and then choose Daily.
ADD SECURITY SOFTWARE Firewalls won’t help fend off viruses or Trojan horses that can come through e-mail messages, Web sites and pop-up ads. Given the frightening number of malicious programs that aim for Windows PCs, owners of these machines really need to use some security software. There are several free antivirus programs, like AVG 8.5 Free, Avast Antivirus and the forthcoming Microsoft Security Essentials, so even penniless students have no excuse to go without. Note that Vista comes with Windows Defender, which blocks spyware and pop-up ads, and that program can be downloaded free by Windows XP SP2 machines.
Since a lot of malicious programs now come through Web sites, you will also want to use one of the many free tools available to help you avoid malicious sites. Microsoft’s newest browser, Internet Explorer 8, will warn you if you try to visit sites it deems unsafe, deceptive or carriers of a common Web attack type called “cross-site scripting” attacks. Other browsers, including Chrome, Firefox and Safari, also warn users about potentially unsafe sites, using a blacklist kept by Google. There is also McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, a free add-on for the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers (the latter works on both Windows and Mac), that shows site reputation information within search results pages, including warnings about potentially dangerous sites.
There are few malicious programs that aim for Macs, so an antivirus program isn’t essential at this point. That said, some Mac experts think that the days of peace and security for Macs may be waning. There have a been a few Trojan horses recently, and some Web attacks don’t care which operating system you use. If you frequent file-sharing sites, or your employer requires it, buy a Mac antivirus program.
SORT OUT THE APPLICATIONS New Windows PCs typically come loaded with all kinds of third-party programs, many of which you will never use.
“In a lot of cases, that’s extra software that might have vulnerabilities” that hackers could exploit, says Chad Dougherty, a vulnerability analyst at the CERT Program at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.
To avoid problems, eliminate the programs you don’t need by clicking the Start button and choosing Control Panel and then Programs to see a list of what is on your machine. Select unwanted programs and then hit the Uninstall button at the top of the program list.
Then sign up for automatic updates from the makers of any software you intend to keep — or that you later install yourself, for that matter. To help you make sure you have checked out everything, download Secunia PSI, a free tool that will help you make sure that all the programs on your PC get security patches.
Speaking of that, always be careful about which software you install from the Internet, whether you have a PC or a Mac. These programs can contain vulnerabilities, and pirated programs and random add-ons may be outright malicious.
September 3, 2009
By RIVA RICHMOND
School starts soon, and many people are getting spanking-new computers. Ah, the joy of a new and more powerful toy — and a clean slate.
A new PC, whether you know it or not, may well have freed you from many malicious programs that steal credit card numbers and other valuable information or otherwise obstruct your safe and private use of the Internet. Now is the time — while you’re getting everything set up just the way you like it — to take some steps to keep your new machine clean and free of malware. Here is what you need to do before you do anything else.
CHECK YOUR FIREWALL SETTINGS Do this before you even connect your computer to the Internet. Firewalls prevent certain unwanted traffic from reaching your computer, including worms that spread through network connections. New laptops and desktops with Windows Vista (and, come Oct. 22, the next version of the operating system, Windows 7) and netbooks using Windows XP SP2 or higher have a firewall that is built in and turned on by default. You can make sure all is well by going to the Windows Security Center, clicking Start, then Control Panel, then Security Center and Windows Firewall.
Mac users can check and adjust their firewall settings by clicking on the Apple icon and going to System Preferences and clicking on Security and then Firewall. At a minimum, choose “allow only essential services.” A better option is to select “set access for specific services and applications” and play gatekeeper, allowing programs to connect as you need them, said Rich Mogull, founder of the security consultant firm Securosis.
UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE Even though you have a new machine, chances are that security fixes have been issued since the manufacturer loaded the software, so you will want to download those as soon as you get online.
Your new PC may prompt you to check for updates from Microsoft, but, if not, open Windows Update by clicking the Start button, then All Programs and then Windows Update. On the left pane, click “check for updates.” (For more information about Windows Security, see microsoft.com/protect.)
To help you keep Microsoft products up to date, Windows will prompt owners of new machines to sign up for automatic updates. You will see a screen asking if you want to “Help protect Windows automatically.” Choose the first option, “Use recommended settings,” so you get everything and don’t have to worry about it again.
Barring an urgent problem, updates come out on the second Tuesday of the month. To schedule exactly what time your updates are installed — say at 3 a.m., when you are asleep — open Windows Update and select Change Settings and make your choices. This is also a good time to turn on the Internet Explorer Phishing Filter, which can help keep you from turning over personal information to the wrong people.
For Mac users, your computer will automatically check for updates once a week. If you are a paranoid person, have it check more frequently by clicking Software Update in the System Preferences panel and then choose Daily.
ADD SECURITY SOFTWARE Firewalls won’t help fend off viruses or Trojan horses that can come through e-mail messages, Web sites and pop-up ads. Given the frightening number of malicious programs that aim for Windows PCs, owners of these machines really need to use some security software. There are several free antivirus programs, like AVG 8.5 Free, Avast Antivirus and the forthcoming Microsoft Security Essentials, so even penniless students have no excuse to go without. Note that Vista comes with Windows Defender, which blocks spyware and pop-up ads, and that program can be downloaded free by Windows XP SP2 machines.
Since a lot of malicious programs now come through Web sites, you will also want to use one of the many free tools available to help you avoid malicious sites. Microsoft’s newest browser, Internet Explorer 8, will warn you if you try to visit sites it deems unsafe, deceptive or carriers of a common Web attack type called “cross-site scripting” attacks. Other browsers, including Chrome, Firefox and Safari, also warn users about potentially unsafe sites, using a blacklist kept by Google. There is also McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, a free add-on for the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers (the latter works on both Windows and Mac), that shows site reputation information within search results pages, including warnings about potentially dangerous sites.
There are few malicious programs that aim for Macs, so an antivirus program isn’t essential at this point. That said, some Mac experts think that the days of peace and security for Macs may be waning. There have a been a few Trojan horses recently, and some Web attacks don’t care which operating system you use. If you frequent file-sharing sites, or your employer requires it, buy a Mac antivirus program.
SORT OUT THE APPLICATIONS New Windows PCs typically come loaded with all kinds of third-party programs, many of which you will never use.
“In a lot of cases, that’s extra software that might have vulnerabilities” that hackers could exploit, says Chad Dougherty, a vulnerability analyst at the CERT Program at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.
To avoid problems, eliminate the programs you don’t need by clicking the Start button and choosing Control Panel and then Programs to see a list of what is on your machine. Select unwanted programs and then hit the Uninstall button at the top of the program list.
Then sign up for automatic updates from the makers of any software you intend to keep — or that you later install yourself, for that matter. To help you make sure you have checked out everything, download Secunia PSI, a free tool that will help you make sure that all the programs on your PC get security patches.
Speaking of that, always be careful about which software you install from the Internet, whether you have a PC or a Mac. These programs can contain vulnerabilities, and pirated programs and random add-ons may be outright malicious.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Good Things Do Come in Pairs
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
DYNAMIC FORCES Mary-Kate, left, and Ashley Olsen have emerged as unlikely designers with their clothing lines The Row, and Elizabeth and James. Above, the twins at their Manhattan warehouse.
By CATHY HORYN
Published: August 26, 2009
“THERE is a certain amount of face time that you need when you have a brand,” Ashley Olsen said. “We just wanted to function more behind the scenes.”
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Splash News
WHO’S WHO? The Olsens have kept their name detached from their brand.
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THE ROW From the fall collection, the Manchester leather jacket and the Ludlow dress.
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The Warrington coat.
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From spring 2010, a classic tank top.
It was a sultry afternoon in August, and Ms. Olsen and her sister Mary-Kate were visiting the production office of The Row, their two-year-old fashion label, on West 39th Street. The Olsens, despite being very rich women, have clearly chosen not to spend money on décor. The furniture is nicked, the windows mossy with grime, and the five employees who share the two-room office have to step around a stack of fabric bolts.
At least a tropical plant on one of the desks offered a bright spot of vitality.
“It’s fake,” Ashley said.
Her sister, the dreamier of the two, looked at the artificial greenery and said in a tone of rising lightness, “The table fell over the other day and the pot didn’t break and I was so mortified and impressed.”
This seems to be the classic response to the Olsen sisters as well. To read blogs devoted to them is to feel a queasiness with the fact of the Olsens — their physical smallness (“the magical millionaire pixies,” as one site refers to them) and, of course, their wayward style (“bad breath and dirty hair,” to quote another). Very few celebrities are either so fascinating or appalling that they manage to get under our skins, as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have, and it may be because they are twins. Yet their success in a field as competitive as fashion is impossible to deny. The Olsens, who are 23, have succeeded with two different labels simultaneously — The Row and the hip, less expensive Elizabeth and James — and without formal design training.
Elizabeth and James (named for two Olsen siblings) is produced under a license with L’Koral Industries, a denim and contemporary sportswear maker, and is sold in 300 stores, according to its president, Jane Siskin. The brand expects to double its apparel sales this year.
The Row is really Ashley’s brain-child, though the sisters share responsibilities. Nearly four years ago, while a student at New York University and ducking the paparazzi hired to follow her and her sister everywhere, Ashley gave herself the goal of creating, in her eyes, the perfect T-shirt. That was the concept behind The Row: beautiful but practical clothes whose fit and luxurious texture (T-shirts in sheer cashmere, leggings in stretch leather) had private meaning to the people who wore them.
Most good designers are mad for fit, and true-blue fashion consumers make choices on that basis, but the Olsens saw fit as a kind of ruthlessly modern sensibility. Their chaste black blazer, for example, has a high armhole because the Olsens liked the way Paris couture jackets fit, with high armholes and narrow sleeves that make your arms look even skinnier and longer. Being small, about five feet tall, they have always had a thing about proportion.
Even though four or five years ago, Mary-Kate and Ashley were the biggest names in tween clothing, thanks to a deal with Wal-Mart, today they’re practically aesthetes.
With The Row outperforming many better-known labels, beleaguered retailers can’t help gushing over the Olsens. The company expects annual sales to be 30 percent higher than last year, and Ashley said the line, which recently added men’s wear, will break even this year. The company’s total sales are estimated at $10 million, company officials say.
“To enter the designer apparel arena and build something, that’s significant,” said Jim Gold, the chief executive of Bergdorf Goodman, which carries the Olsens’ label. “I think the way to think about The Row is that it offers the perfect blank — the perfect schoolboy blazer, the perfect leather leggings, the perfect peacoat. So many designers are intent on the next great trend that some of the basics are neglected.”
“Perfect” was also the word that Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, used to describe the Olsens’ timing. She noted that even before the recession forced a change in spending habits, more and more women were seeking high-quality pieces that didn’t go out of fashion. (For that reason, Barneys and other stores generally do not put The Row on sale. Prices range from about $200 for some of the T-shirts to $3,000 for coats, with the top-selling blazer at Bergdorf’s at $1,150.)
“I don’t think anybody really cares that it’s Mary-Kate and Ashley’s collection,” Ms. Gilhart said. “They’re buying it because they like it.”
Maybe, but you can’t help wondering how this particular fashion success story was written by two former child stars, and not by a designer with years of experience. And that may be the explanation: the Olsen sisters don’t seem to acknowledge the conventional barriers to success, beginning with their famous name. After all, they detached their names from the brand. “The customer who buys the clothes almost never knows we’re involved,” Ashley said.
And though Ashley, the alpha sister, came to the meeting in the production office dressed in a plaid cashmere shirt from The Row’s fall line and a black miniskirt, the label can’t be said to reflect the Olsens’ wildly random style — sometimes, perhaps uncharitably, called Dumpster chic. Mary-Kate, her eyebrows bleached, had on a vintage black leather skirt with a long-sleeve print T-shirt that she last wore, she said, about eight years ago.
“The majority of our customers are 35 to 60,” Ashley said. “Yeah, I wear a lot of stuff because it’s basic. It’s that ageless design that we try to focus on, but it’s not defined by one of us.”
Mary-Kate added, “Also, I think you design things because maybe it’s not you.” She paused. “I have my own pet peeves about things that I don’t wear.”
Like what?
Ashley started to laugh.
“Like tank tops,” Mary-Kate said.
“You’ll never see her in a tank top,” Ashley said.
Her sister, who vaguely, surprisingly, has the face of a 1930s film star — Harlow with bed hair —prefers to be covered up. “So sometimes,” Mary-Kate said, “you design something that you die to wear or love to see somebody else wear.”
It’s also true that the Olsens have the luxury of choice. Unlike most young designers, they are enormously wealthy. Forbes estimated their earnings in 2008 at $15 million. They have been working since they were 9 months old, first sharing the role of Michelle Tanner on the popular sitcom “Full House” and then as entrepreneurs of their own cutesy image. By 2005, when the sisters assumed the leadership of their company, Dualstar Entertainment Group, and bought out their partner, Mary-Kate and Ashley products — videos, makeup, clothing, dolls — were said to generate $1.2 billion in retail sales.
Jill Collage, the executive vice president of Dualstar, said that the company’s new ventures, like Elizabeth and James, reflect the Olsens’ growing up. Ms. Collage, who has worked with the sisters since she was their on-set guardian, declined to reveal sales numbers.
And yet, almost perversely, the atmosphere in The Row’s cramped office on 39th Street is old school — before big brands, indeed before celebrity. The Olsens and their production manager, Joe Karban, a veteran of a number of designer studios, including Ralph Lauren’s, schlep to the sewing rooms and patternmakers in the garment district. (The label is produced entirely in New York, mostly with Italian fabrics.) And while the sisters may attend the odd fashion show, they are not interested in staging their own.
“It’s much like the old days at Polo,” Mr. Karban said. “The kids on the team are really passionate about making clothes. How do you set a proper sleeve? How does a fabric perform? It’s the art of making clothes as opposed to making everything cookie-cutter. Plus everything Mary-Kate and Ashley do turns to gold. Lots of people in the industry are worried about their excess inventory. My reorder business is phenomenal.”
People who know the Olsens say they have uncanny instincts for what the stylishly obsessed want. “There’s no God that said, ‘Create a high-end label and not have your name attached to it,’ ” said a friend, Alex Hawgood, who works as a creative consultant on The Row (and formerly was an editorial assistant at The New York Times Magazine). “That was 100 percent their decision.”
The Olsens don’t do many interviews, but in recent ones they have brought up, almost coyly, the perception that they don’t work and are lollygagging around with their boyfriends (Mary-Kate dates the artist Nate Lowman; Ashley goes out with the actor Justin Bartha). The sisters, in fact, work very hard, but this slightly scripted moment of self-effacement is meant to serve a larger point: they want you to know they don’t really care what people think of them.
Mary-Kate and Ashley are older than their years. Everyone says so.
“I think Ashley has an old soul,” said Ms. Siskin, their partner in Elizabeth and James. “That’s really what it is. She’s not as good with the whole celebrity thing as people might think. She’s longs for a bit of a normal life.”
And Mary-Kate, who continues to seek out acting jobs, is adept at channeling glamour in a cool way; it was really Mary-Kate’s boho layers and oversize glasses that inspired a generational look.
But they are still 23.
“Listen, I used to be in the entertainment industry,” Ashley said. “I decided at 18 that I don’t really want to do this anymore. I wanted to explore other things, and with that came The Row.” She looked across the table at her sister and for a moment their eyes locked.
She continued: “Our lives have been kind of backward. We never got that opportunity in high school to figure out what you want to do. We never had the time to discover, ‘Oh, I love doing this ...’ So for us this experience in fashion has been amazing.”
Friday, August 21, 2009
Travel: 36 Hours in Oslo
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By STUART EMMRICH
THE first thing anyone who knows Oslo says when you mention that you are headed there is, “It’s really expensive.” The second thing they say is, “No, I’m not kidding. It’s really expensive.” And, indeed, a visit to Oslo brings with it immediate sticker shock: a bottle of water costs the equivalent of $6, a small glass of beer will set you back $10 or more, and a bottle of wine at dinner can practically equal a month’s mortgage payment back home. But you quickly, if grudgingly, accept the damage done to your wallet after a few hours strolling around this beguiling city — particularly in summer, when the sun’s last rays still haven’t faded by 11 p.m. and the locals, unshackled from the oppressiveness of the Scandinavian winter, seem to be in a nonstop party mode.
Friday
4 p.m.
1) ROYALTIES
If you walk down Karl Johans Gate, the main drag of central Oslo, a tree-lined promenade bordered by restaurants, cafes and upscale stores, you’ll eventually find yourself face-to-face with the Royal Palace, the mammoth, cream-colored home of the Norwegian royal family. As such, the palace (Henrik Ibsen Vei 1; 47-22-04-87-00; www.kongehuset.no) is open to the public only a few hours each day. In summer, one of those times is 4 p.m. on Friday, when an English-language tour (95 kroner, or $15.15 at 6.27 Norwegian kroner to the dollar) is given to visitors. You’ll get a CliffsNotes version of Norwegian history from the informative guides as well as a spectacular view of the city from the windows that open to the royal balcony.
5:30 p.m.
2) SAY ONKEL
For a predinner drink, you might want to join the lively crowd at Onkel Donald (Universitetsgata 26; 47-23-35-63-10; www.onkeldonald.no), an open-air cafe opposite the National Theater, where the inviting aroma of burgers being cooked on a huge outdoor grill wafts over the young patrons as they share pitchers of Ringnes beer (245 kroner) and bowls of moules frites (159 kroner).
8:30 p.m.
3) FRUIT OF THE SEA
The restaurant Solsiden, set in a converted warehouse on the waterfront, offers an ideal setting for dinner, particularly when staff members roll up the huge canvas window shades and patrons can watch the sun as it begins its slow descent across the Oslo Fjord. Local seafood is the specialty at this spot (Sondre Akershus Kai 34; 47-...; www.solsiden.no; dinner only), which is open only from May to September, with many diners starting off their meal with a huge platter of fruits de mer. Dinner for two, including dessert and wine, should run about 1,600 kroner.
10 p.m.
4) ON THE HOUSE
When the Oslo Opera House (Kirsten Flagstad Plass 1; 47-21-42-21-00; www.operaen.no), designed by the hot Norwegian firm Snohetta, opened in 2008, the Norwegian capital got more than a world-class performing arts center. It also got an unlikely playground. At almost any time of the day or night, hundreds of visitors scramble all over the building’s sleek, gently angled Italian marble surface, inching their way up to the plaza-like rooftop. Think of it as a cultural institution that doubles as a jungle gym.
Saturday
10:30 a.m.
5) ON THE FJORD
The sun’s been up for hours by now, so stir yourself and enjoy its rays while taking a boat trip around the Oslo Fjord, gliding past bucolic islands dotted with the colorful summer homes of the city’s well-to-do residents. Boats (Radhusbrygge 3; 47-23-35-68-90; www.boatsightseeing.com) leave from a dock opposite the Oslo City Hall, and a two-hour ride costs 230 kroner.
1 p.m.
6) ON THE TABLE
After returning to land, head over to nearby Aker Brygge, a lively waterfront development of bars, restaurants and a huge indoor shopping center. There are plenty of dining options here, but probably the best place for lunch is Lofoten Fiskerestaurant (Stranden 75; 47-22-83-08-08; www.lofoten-fiskerestaurant.no), particularly if you can snag an outdoor table. Summer offerings include mussels in white wine (139 kroner) and baked sea pike served with lemon risotto (268 kroner). Reservations essential. Afterward, stroll around the area, popping into the Nobel Museum, City Hall and perhaps the shopping center, where among dozens of shops you will find a stylish Scandinavian housewares store called Kitch’n (Stranden 3; 47-22-83-45-20), selling everything from elegant salad bowls (495 kroner) to brightly colored rolls of toilet paper (29 kroner each).
4 p.m.
7) A PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE
Yes, behind every great man is said to be a woman. But how many women all but chained their elderly husbands to their desk for two and a half hours each morning, demanding that they put in a full quota of work before letting them escape down the street for a leisurely lunch and a welcome drink? That seems to be the legacy of Suzannah Thoresen, the wife of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, as entertainingly recounted by the English-language guides at the Ibsen Museum. (They also let you know that she was so penurious that Ibsen had to go behind her back and secretly order the expensive French fabric he coveted for the drawing room windows.) There’s more here than the retelling of domestic squabbles, however, as you walk through the painstakingly restored home where Ibsen, long self-exiled from his home country, spent his final years and wrote his last two plays, “John Gabriel Borkman” and “When We Dead Awaken.” (Henrik Ibsen’s Gate 26; 47-22-12-35-50; www.norskfolkemuseum.no; 85 kroner for a guided tour.) Don’t miss the short black-and-white film about Ibsen’s life and career, which includes newsreel footage of his funeral. It’s shown in alternating Norwegian and English versions. (The Norwegian one is oddly compelling, even if you don’t speak a word of the language.)
8 p.m.
8) TRY THE REINDEER
For a sampling of traditional Norwegian cuisine, like medallions of reindeer in a sauce of port and raisins, head over to Engebret Café (Bankplassen 1; 47-22-82-25-25; www.engebret-cafe.no), a quietly elegant restaurant set in a low-slung 17th-century building. If the weather is nice, grab one of the 20 or so outdoor tables, where the voices of the other patrons are softened by the sound of the bubbling fountain in the adjoining courtyard. Dinner for two, including dessert and wine, will run about 1,400 kroner.
10:30 p.m.
9) NIGHTCAP OR NIGHT STARTER
After dinner, walk down to the waterfront until you encounter the park surrounding the famed Akershus Castle, a cannon-protected fortress that offers romantic views of the Oslo Fjord. Following the winding path will eventually lead you down to the bars of the Aker Brygge promenade, like the barge-like Lekter’n (Stranden 3; 47-22-83-00-60), where many of the city’s youth are getting ready for their night to shift into high gear.
Sunday
11 a.m.
10) WE ALL SCREAM
Two words: “The Scream.” You can’t visit Oslo without seeing this masterwork by Edvard Munch, which is on view at the National Gallery (Universitetsgata 2; 47-21...; www.nasjonalmuseet.no), with helpful signs leading you along the way. But take a few moments to check out other, lesser-known works, like several pieces by the painting duo of Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, whose “Bridal Voyage on the Hardanger Fjord” is described as “one of the most important in Norwegian art.” A total immersion in Edvard Munch, both of his own work and of the art he collected, can be found across town at the Munch Museum (Toyengata 53; 47-23-4...; www.munch.museum.no).
1 p.m.
11) SCULPTURAL PARK
The Vigeland Sculpture Park (www.vigeland.museum.no) is the work of the sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), who not only designed the park itself but also created the more than 200 sculptures that dot its grounds, including the massive Tower-of-Babel-like centerpiece known as the monolith, with its collection of writhing, naked bodies carved out of a single granite block. The park, which you can reach either on a short ride on the No. 12 tram or through a pleasant walk through a lovely residential neighborhood, is extremely popular with the locals. On a recent afternoon, the crowd included picnickers, sunbathers, families out for a stroll, and even two groups of rival cheerleading squads practicing their routines. (Was “Bring It On” a big hit in Norway?)
THE BASICS
Continental has nonstop flights from Newark to Oslo Airport Gardermoen, with airfares starting at about $610 round trip for weekend trips in September. Slightly lower fares can be found on US Airways and SAS, but they require a stop along the way. The best way to get into downtown Oslo from the airport is Flytoget, the express train, which leaves every 10 minutes and takes about 20 minutes to get to Central Station. The one-way fare is 170 kroner ($27 at 6.27 kroner to the dollar) if you buy it from a vending machine; 200 kroner if you buy it from a ticket clerk. (A taxi could cost as much as 775 kroner, or about $125, one way.)
First Hotel Grims Grenka (Kongens Gate 5; 47-23-10-72-00; www.firsthotels.com/en) is a modern, sleek hotel in the city center, right next to the National Museum of Architecture. Free Wi-Fi in the rooms and a lively bar on the rooftop. Rates for a double room start at about 1,550 kroner, about $247, a night, based on a recent check on the hotel’s Web site.
The Thon Hotel Opera (Christian Frederiksplass 5; 47-24-10-30-00; www.thonhotels.com), part of a popular, midrange Norwegian chain, is across from Central Station. It has views of the nearby Opera House from many of its 434 rooms, as well as from the glass elevator rising from the sleek lobby, the terrace bar on the fourth floor, the inviting Scala restaurant and the treadmills in the hotel’s vest-pocket gym. Rates for a double room start at around 1,140 kroner a night, when booked through the hotel’s Web site.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Fed Views Recession as Near an End
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — Almost exactly two years after it embarked on what was the biggest financial rescue in American history, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that the recession is ending and that it would take a step back toward normal policy.
Though the central bank stopped well short of declaring victory, policy makers issued their most upbeat assessment in more than a year by saying that the downturn appears to have hit bottom and that consumer spending, financial markets and inventory-building by corporations all continued to stabilize.
“Economic activity is leveling out,” the Fed’s policy-making committee said Wednesday after a two-day meeting, adding that inflation would remain “subdued for some time.”
The central bank cautioned that the recovery would be slow and that unemployment was likely to remain high for the next year. It reiterated that it would keep its benchmark short-term interest rate at virtually zero for an extended period.
But it also announced that it would wrap up its program to buy $300 billion worth of Treasury bonds by the end of October. The program was one of several tools invoked to drive down long-term interest rates and indirectly reduce the cost of home mortgages and corporate borrowing.
The move signaled that policy makers were confident enough to remove one of their emergency props for the financial markets.
“In a way, it’s more of a thumbs-up than if they had said they were continuing the Treasury-buying,” said Edward McKelvey, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “They’re saying that things are going according to plan, and that the policy is O.K.”
Stock prices, which were already up from Tuesday, ticked up again after the Fed announcement. The Dow Jones industrial average ended the day up 120.16 points, or 1.30 percent, at 9,361.61.
Fed officials made it clear they were still more worried about unemployment than a resurgence of inflation. As they have said for months, they will use “all available tools” to support the economy and will keep the benchmark federal funds rate at “exceptionally low levels” for the foreseeable future. Many analysts predict that the Fed will not raise the federal funds rate, which is the overnight rate at which banks lend reserves to each other, until late next year.
The latest assessment comes two years after the Fed, in August 2007, began the first of its emergency lending programs to banks when credit markets seized up in response to the crisis in the subprime lending market.
The central bank is not yet throttling back its biggest emergency credit programs. The Fed is barely halfway through its plan to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, a program that directly affects home mortgage rates and has had a much more noticeable effect than the Treasury bond program.
Analysts said the Federal Reserve had entered a wait-and-see period, continuing to supply the economy with cheap money but not expanding or extending the emergency programs beyond what policy makers have already announced.
The government’s preliminary estimates show that the economy’s downturn slowed markedly in recent months, shrinking only 1 percent in the second quarter compared with 6.4 percent in the first. The rate of job losses has slowed sharply as well, though the nation still lost 247,000 jobs in July.
The most recent forecasts by Fed policy makers say that the economy will begin an unusually slow recovery in the second half of this year and pick up speed only gradually in 2010. Even if all goes according to plan, the Fed envisions that unemployment will climb from its already high level of 9.4 percent and average as much as 9.8 percent through the end of 2010.
Rising productivity rates in the United States are giving the Fed more maneuvering room to keep borrowing costs low without aggravating inflation. The productivity of workers, the amount produced per hour of work, shot up at an annual rate of more than 6 percent in the second quarter and has been climbing throughout the recession.
That is unusual for an economic downturn, but it means that wages have more room to climb before employers start to raise prices for their goods and services.
The Fed’s decision to end its program of buying Treasury bonds appears to have reflected both practical and philosophical concerns among some policy makers.
According to minutes of the Fed’s previous policy meeting in June, some policy makers worried that the central bank’s heavy purchases of new Treasury debt would be seen by investors as simply financing the federal government’s huge deficits. That, they feared, would erode the Fed’s credibility and heighten inflation expectations.
“Some of those who are less disposed to additional Treasury purchases worry about the perception in the markets that they are motivated by a desire to help the Treasury finance a mountain of debt,” wrote Laurence H. Meyer, chief economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, and a former Fed governor, in a note to clients last week.
By contrast, Mr. Meyer said, most policy makers seem to agree that the mortgage-security program strikes at the heart of the economy’s biggest problem — the housing market.
On a practical level, analysts said, the Treasury-buying program never packed as much punch in the markets.
At $300 billion, the Treasury purchases are only one-quarter as big as the mortgage program, and they have equaled only about one-third of the new issuance of Treasury securities, according to Ira Jersey, an interest-rate analyst at Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets. By contrast, the Fed purchases of government-guaranteed mortgage securities equaled more than 100 percent of new issuance in that market.
Though mortgage rates have edged up in recent weeks, along with other long-term interest rates, the spread between mortgage rates and risk-free Treasury rates has narrowed by almost half since last November.
“The program to buy Treasuries wasn’t as effective as some of the other programs, like the mortgage-security program, so ending it made sense,” Mr. Jersey said.
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — Almost exactly two years after it embarked on what was the biggest financial rescue in American history, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that the recession is ending and that it would take a step back toward normal policy.
Though the central bank stopped well short of declaring victory, policy makers issued their most upbeat assessment in more than a year by saying that the downturn appears to have hit bottom and that consumer spending, financial markets and inventory-building by corporations all continued to stabilize.
“Economic activity is leveling out,” the Fed’s policy-making committee said Wednesday after a two-day meeting, adding that inflation would remain “subdued for some time.”
The central bank cautioned that the recovery would be slow and that unemployment was likely to remain high for the next year. It reiterated that it would keep its benchmark short-term interest rate at virtually zero for an extended period.
But it also announced that it would wrap up its program to buy $300 billion worth of Treasury bonds by the end of October. The program was one of several tools invoked to drive down long-term interest rates and indirectly reduce the cost of home mortgages and corporate borrowing.
The move signaled that policy makers were confident enough to remove one of their emergency props for the financial markets.
“In a way, it’s more of a thumbs-up than if they had said they were continuing the Treasury-buying,” said Edward McKelvey, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “They’re saying that things are going according to plan, and that the policy is O.K.”
Stock prices, which were already up from Tuesday, ticked up again after the Fed announcement. The Dow Jones industrial average ended the day up 120.16 points, or 1.30 percent, at 9,361.61.
Fed officials made it clear they were still more worried about unemployment than a resurgence of inflation. As they have said for months, they will use “all available tools” to support the economy and will keep the benchmark federal funds rate at “exceptionally low levels” for the foreseeable future. Many analysts predict that the Fed will not raise the federal funds rate, which is the overnight rate at which banks lend reserves to each other, until late next year.
The latest assessment comes two years after the Fed, in August 2007, began the first of its emergency lending programs to banks when credit markets seized up in response to the crisis in the subprime lending market.
The central bank is not yet throttling back its biggest emergency credit programs. The Fed is barely halfway through its plan to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, a program that directly affects home mortgage rates and has had a much more noticeable effect than the Treasury bond program.
Analysts said the Federal Reserve had entered a wait-and-see period, continuing to supply the economy with cheap money but not expanding or extending the emergency programs beyond what policy makers have already announced.
The government’s preliminary estimates show that the economy’s downturn slowed markedly in recent months, shrinking only 1 percent in the second quarter compared with 6.4 percent in the first. The rate of job losses has slowed sharply as well, though the nation still lost 247,000 jobs in July.
The most recent forecasts by Fed policy makers say that the economy will begin an unusually slow recovery in the second half of this year and pick up speed only gradually in 2010. Even if all goes according to plan, the Fed envisions that unemployment will climb from its already high level of 9.4 percent and average as much as 9.8 percent through the end of 2010.
Rising productivity rates in the United States are giving the Fed more maneuvering room to keep borrowing costs low without aggravating inflation. The productivity of workers, the amount produced per hour of work, shot up at an annual rate of more than 6 percent in the second quarter and has been climbing throughout the recession.
That is unusual for an economic downturn, but it means that wages have more room to climb before employers start to raise prices for their goods and services.
The Fed’s decision to end its program of buying Treasury bonds appears to have reflected both practical and philosophical concerns among some policy makers.
According to minutes of the Fed’s previous policy meeting in June, some policy makers worried that the central bank’s heavy purchases of new Treasury debt would be seen by investors as simply financing the federal government’s huge deficits. That, they feared, would erode the Fed’s credibility and heighten inflation expectations.
“Some of those who are less disposed to additional Treasury purchases worry about the perception in the markets that they are motivated by a desire to help the Treasury finance a mountain of debt,” wrote Laurence H. Meyer, chief economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, and a former Fed governor, in a note to clients last week.
By contrast, Mr. Meyer said, most policy makers seem to agree that the mortgage-security program strikes at the heart of the economy’s biggest problem — the housing market.
On a practical level, analysts said, the Treasury-buying program never packed as much punch in the markets.
At $300 billion, the Treasury purchases are only one-quarter as big as the mortgage program, and they have equaled only about one-third of the new issuance of Treasury securities, according to Ira Jersey, an interest-rate analyst at Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets. By contrast, the Fed purchases of government-guaranteed mortgage securities equaled more than 100 percent of new issuance in that market.
Though mortgage rates have edged up in recent weeks, along with other long-term interest rates, the spread between mortgage rates and risk-free Treasury rates has narrowed by almost half since last November.
“The program to buy Treasuries wasn’t as effective as some of the other programs, like the mortgage-security program, so ending it made sense,” Mr. Jersey said.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
In Study, Most Graduates’ Debt Load Is Manageable
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
By TAMAR LEWIN
NYT, August 12, 2009
About a third of all students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2007-8 graduated with no debt at all, about the same share as in the 2003-4 academic year, according to a policy brief released Tuesday by the College Board.
“People think students are drowning in debt, and there is a small proportion of students that borrow an exorbitant amount, but most students graduate with a manageable debt load,” said Sandy Baum, an author of the brief.
For bachelor’s degree recipients who did borrow, the median loan debt was $19,999, up 5 percent from $18,973 four years earlier. The data, the latest available, come from the federal Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is conducted every four years.
About 6 percent of those who completed a degree or certificate — and 10 percent of those who received a bachelor’s degree — borrowed more than $40,000, the brief said.
Over all, for all kinds of degrees and settings, the median student loan debt of borrowers in 2007-8 was $15,123, up 11 percent from $13,663 in 2003-4. But debt levels rose far more sharply for students in for-profit colleges, and for students earning certificates and two-year degrees.
For example, students who received certificates in a for-profit program carried a median debt load of $9,744 in 2007-8, compared with 2003-4, a 30 percent increase. And bachelor’s degree recipients in for-profit institutions had a median debt load of $32,653, up 23 percent from $26,562 four years earlier.
For-profit colleges, which have grown rapidly over the last decade, acquire much of their revenue from federal aid. According to the authors of the policy brief, the for-profit colleges had about 7 percent of the nation’s undergraduates in 2006, but received about 19 percent of the federal Pell grants.
For those earning bachelor’s degrees in public or private colleges, borrowing did not increase much. At private four-year colleges, the median loan debt for bachelor’s degree recipients was $22,375 in 2007-8, up 5 percent from $21,238 four years earlier.
Typically, the report said, those earning certificates or associate degrees accumulate about half as much debt as those earning four-year degrees.
With the recession, the authors said, student borrowing may be quite different in the next study.
“Of course, everybody is struggling much more,” Ms. Baum said. “And private student loans are less available, now that a number of banks that were making those loans are no longer making them, or no longer in business.”
Over all, 41 percent of the students who completed a degree or certificate in the 2007-8 academic year — and 34 percent of those who received bachelor’s degrees — graduated with no debt.
According to the brief, 50 percent of all full-time students took out a federal loan in 2007-8, and 19 percent took out private loans, with many of them borrowing through both routes. Full-time students who borrowed received an average $7,809 from private sources and $5,432 in federal student loans.
“It’s important for students to remember the difference between federal and private borrowing,” said Patricia Steele, the other author of the brief. “Private borrowing gives you no protection, no forbearance, no income-based repayment.”
By TAMAR LEWIN
NYT, August 12, 2009
About a third of all students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2007-8 graduated with no debt at all, about the same share as in the 2003-4 academic year, according to a policy brief released Tuesday by the College Board.
“People think students are drowning in debt, and there is a small proportion of students that borrow an exorbitant amount, but most students graduate with a manageable debt load,” said Sandy Baum, an author of the brief.
For bachelor’s degree recipients who did borrow, the median loan debt was $19,999, up 5 percent from $18,973 four years earlier. The data, the latest available, come from the federal Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is conducted every four years.
About 6 percent of those who completed a degree or certificate — and 10 percent of those who received a bachelor’s degree — borrowed more than $40,000, the brief said.
Over all, for all kinds of degrees and settings, the median student loan debt of borrowers in 2007-8 was $15,123, up 11 percent from $13,663 in 2003-4. But debt levels rose far more sharply for students in for-profit colleges, and for students earning certificates and two-year degrees.
For example, students who received certificates in a for-profit program carried a median debt load of $9,744 in 2007-8, compared with 2003-4, a 30 percent increase. And bachelor’s degree recipients in for-profit institutions had a median debt load of $32,653, up 23 percent from $26,562 four years earlier.
For-profit colleges, which have grown rapidly over the last decade, acquire much of their revenue from federal aid. According to the authors of the policy brief, the for-profit colleges had about 7 percent of the nation’s undergraduates in 2006, but received about 19 percent of the federal Pell grants.
For those earning bachelor’s degrees in public or private colleges, borrowing did not increase much. At private four-year colleges, the median loan debt for bachelor’s degree recipients was $22,375 in 2007-8, up 5 percent from $21,238 four years earlier.
Typically, the report said, those earning certificates or associate degrees accumulate about half as much debt as those earning four-year degrees.
With the recession, the authors said, student borrowing may be quite different in the next study.
“Of course, everybody is struggling much more,” Ms. Baum said. “And private student loans are less available, now that a number of banks that were making those loans are no longer making them, or no longer in business.”
Over all, 41 percent of the students who completed a degree or certificate in the 2007-8 academic year — and 34 percent of those who received bachelor’s degrees — graduated with no debt.
According to the brief, 50 percent of all full-time students took out a federal loan in 2007-8, and 19 percent took out private loans, with many of them borrowing through both routes. Full-time students who borrowed received an average $7,809 from private sources and $5,432 in federal student loans.
“It’s important for students to remember the difference between federal and private borrowing,” said Patricia Steele, the other author of the brief. “Private borrowing gives you no protection, no forbearance, no income-based repayment.”
American Graduates Finding Jobs in China
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
American Graduates Finding Jobs in China
BEIJING — Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.
Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.
“I’ve seen a surge of young people coming to work in China over the last few years,” said Jack Perkowski, founder of Asimco Technologies, one of the largest automotive parts companies in China.
“When I came over to China in 1994, that was the first wave of Americans coming to China,” he said. “These young people are part of this big second wave.”
One of those in the latest wave is Joshua Arjuna Stephens, who graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies. Two years ago, he decided to take a temporary summer position in Shanghai with China Prep, an educational travel company.
“I didn’t know anything about China,” said Mr. Stephens, who worked on market research and program development. “People thought I was nuts to go not speaking the language, but I wanted to do something off the beaten track.”
Two years later, after stints in the nonprofit sector and at a large public relations firm in Beijing, he is highly proficient in Mandarin and works as a manager for XPD Media, a social media company based in Beijing that makes online games.
Jonathan Woetzel, a partner with McKinsey & Company in Shanghai who has lived in China since the mid-1980s, says that compared with just a few years ago, he was seeing more young Americans arriving in China to be part of an entrepreneurial boom. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on in China right now, particularly in the energy sphere, and when people are young they are willing to come and try something new,” he said.
And the Chinese economy is more hospitable for both entrepreneurs and job seekers, with a gross domestic product that rose 7.9 percent in the most recent quarter compared with the period a year earlier. Unemployment in urban areas is 4.3 percent, according to government data.
Grace Hsieh, president of the Yale Club in Beijing and a 2007 graduate, says she has seen a rise in the number of Yale graduates who have come to work in Beijing since she arrived in China two years ago. She is working as an account executive in Beijing for Hill & Knowlton, the public relations company.
Sarabeth Berman, a 2006 graduate of Barnard College with a major in urban studies, initially arrived in Beijing at the age of 23 to take a job that would have been difficult for a person her age to land in the United States: program director at BeijingDance/LDTX, the first modern dance company in China to be founded independently of the government.
Ms. Berman said she was hired for her familiarity with Western modern dance rather than a knowledge of China. “Despite my lack of language skills and the fact that I had no experience working in China, I was given the opportunity to manage the touring, international projects, and produce and program our annual Beijing Dance Festival.”
After two years of living and working in China, Ms. Berman is proficient in Mandarin. She travels throughout China, Europe and the United States with the dance company.
Willy Tsao, the artistic director of BeijingDance/LDTX, said he had hired Ms. Berman because of her ability to make connections beyond China. “I needed someone who was capable of communicating with the Western world.”
Another dynamic in the hiring process, Mr. Tsao says, is that Westerners can often bring skills that are harder to find among the Chinese.
“Sarabeth is always taking initiative and thinking what we can do,” he said, “while I think the more standard Chinese approach is to take orders.” He says the difference is rooted in the educational system. “In Chinese schools students are encouraged to be quiet and less outspoken; it fosters a culture of listening more than initiating.”
Mr. Perkowski, who spent almost 20 years on Wall Street before heading to China, says many Chinese companies are looking to hire native English speakers to help them navigate the American market.
“I’m working with a company right now that wants me to help them find young American professionals who can be their liaisons to the U.S.,” he said. “They want people who understand the social and cultural nuances of the West.”
Mr. Perkowski’s latest venture, JFP Holdings, a merchant bank based in Beijing, has not posted any job openings, but has received more than 60 résumés; a third are from young people in the United States who want to come work in China, he said.
Mick Zomnir, 20, a soon-to-be junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working as a summer intern for JFP. “As things have gotten more difficult in the U.S., I started to think about opportunities elsewhere,” he said. He does not speak Chinese but says he will begin studying Mandarin when he returns to M.I.T. in the fall.
A big draw of working in China, many young people say, is that they feel it allows them to skip a rung or two on the career ladder.
Ms. Berman said: “There is no doubt that China is an awesome place to jump-start your career. Back in the U.S., I would be intern No. 3 at some company or selling tickets at Lincoln Center.”
For others, like Jason Misium, 23, China has solved the cash flow problem of starting a business. After graduating with a degree in biology from Harvard in 2008, Mr. Misium came to China to study the language. Then he started Sophos Academic Group, an academic consulting firm that works with Chinese students who want to study in the United States.
“It’s China’s fault that I’m still here,” he said. “It’s just so cheap to start a business.” It cost him the equivalent of $12,000, which he had in savings, he said.
Among many young Americans, the China exit strategy is a common topic of conversation. Mr. Stephens, Ms. Berman and Mr. Misium all said they were planning to return to the United States eventually.
Mr. Woetzel of McKinsey said work experience in China was not an automatic ticket to a great job back home. He said it was not a marker in the same way an Ivy League education: “The mere fact of just showing up and working in China and speaking Chinese is not enough.”
That said, Mr. Woetzel added, someone who has been able to make a mark in China is a valuable hire.
“At McKinsey, we are looking for people who have demonstrated leadership,” he said, “and working in a context like China builds character, requires you to be a lot more entrepreneurial and forces you to innovate.”
Monday, August 10, 2009
Coffee Can Wait. Day’s First Stop Is Online.
Thank you for your time with my blogs and welcome back in the near future.
Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich., can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.
That was so last century. Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.
The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms. Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.
“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”
Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.
This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.
“It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,” said Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. “But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.”
The Gudes’ sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr. Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up.
“We use texting as an in-house intercom,” he said. “I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts.” The Gudes recently began shutting their devices down on weekends to account for the decrease in family time.
In other households, the impulse to go online before getting out the door adds an extra layer of chaos to the already discombobulating morning scramble.
Weekday mornings have long been frenetic, disjointed affairs. Now families that used to fight over the shower or the newspaper tussle over access to the lone household computer — or about whether they should be using gadgets at all, instead of communicating with one another.
“They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”
The surge of early risers is reflected in online and wireless traffic patterns. Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.
Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.
Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 a.m. on the East Coast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 a.m. jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.
Both adults and children have good reasons to wake up and log on. Mom and Dad might need to catch up on e-mail from colleagues in different time zones. Children check text messages and Facebook posts from friends with different bedtimes — and sometime forget their chores in the process.
In May, Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, N.J., bought her 14-year-old daughter, Moriah, an Apple laptop for her birthday. In the weeks after, Moriah missed the school bus three times and went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside.
Moriah concedes that she neglected the bus and dog, and blames Facebook, where the possibility that crucial updates from friends might be waiting draws her online as soon as she wakes. “I have some friends that are up early and chatting,” she said. “There is definitely a pull to check it.”
Some families have tried to set limits on Internet use in the mornings. James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that deals with children and entertainment, wakes every morning at 6 and spends the next hour on his BlackBerry, managing e-mail from contacts in different parts of the world.
But when he meets his wife, Liz, and their four children, ages 5 to 16, at the breakfast table, no laptops or phones are allowed.
Mr. Steyer says he and his sons feel the temptation of technology early. Kirk, 14, often runs through much of his daily one-hour allotment of video-game time in the morning.
Even Jesse, 5, has started asking each morning if he can play games on his father’s iPhone. And Mr. Steyer said he constantly feels the tug of waiting messages on his BlackBerry, even during morning hours that are reserved for family time.
“You have to resist the impulse. You have to switch from work mode to parenting mode,” Mr. Steyer said. “But meeting my own standard is tough.”Friday, August 7, 2009
How To Find Cheaper Flying Dates
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By Michelle Higgins
Most travel booking sites assume you know where and when you want to fly. But what if you’re building an entire trip around a cheap flight? Now, a growing number of Web sites are offering tools to make that search easier.
ITA Software, which provides the technological backbone for many airfare shopping sites, allows anyone to scan an entire month’s fares for the cheapest rate. Log in as a “guest” and click on “month long search” in the right hand corner. Travelers can also narrow searches by the number of stops and length of trip. To book the actual ticket, users must go to another site.
Bing Travel the new Microsoft search engine that uses the prediction tools of Farecast, offers a similar option, found under “plan trips,” about half way down the page. To compare prices for different routes — say, New York to Paris versus New York to Frankfurt — click “select a city.”
Bing.com A month-long comparison of flights from New York’s JFK to Paris or Frankfurt.
FareCompare, another airfare shopping site, introduced a Deal Finder tool in late June that filters deals by month. The tool also prompts users to specify a departure airport, budget and destination (e.g., North America, Summer in Europe, Beaches and other choices from a drop-down menu).
Kayak has a “flexible dates” option and a calendar that shows the best fares found by other Kayak users in the last 48 hours. (Registration required.)
Travelocity has a flexible search that looks for fares up to 330 days out. (One flaw: it doesn’t allow users to narrow choices to nonstop flights.)
Expedia has a Trend Tracker tool that shows the least expensive time to visit a place based on past prices. Specify a point of origin and destination, and the tracker generates a chart that plots historical air fares over a two-year period.
Most sites, including Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Kayak, also offer fare alerts that tells users when the price for a particular route drops.Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Bill Clinton and Journalists in Emotional Return to U.S.
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WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton arrived in Los Angeles Wednesday morning after a dramatic 20-hour visit to North Korea, in which he won the freedom of two American journalists, opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea’s reclusive government and dined with the North’s ailing leader, Kim Jong-il.
The private plane, carrying Mr. Clinton and the journalists, Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, landed at 5:50 a.m. Pacific Standard Time at Burbank Airport outside of Los Angeles.
The two women stepped off the plane in jeans and sweaters, rushing down the stairs to be reunited with their families, who clustered around them. Ms. Lee, in tears, picked up and embraced her four-year-old daughter, Hannah. Mr. Clinton stepped off the plane a few moments later, embracing Al Gore, the founder of the media company that employs the journalists.
“Thirty hours ago, Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea,” Ms. Ling said in brief remarks to reporters, blinking back tears. “We feared that at any moment we could be prisoners in a hard labor camp. Then suddenly we were told that we were going to a meeting.”
“We were taken to a location and when we walked through the doors, we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton,” she said, recounting the final moments of her ordeal. “We were shocked, but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end. And now we stand here home and free.”
Mr. Gore then spoke. “President Obama and countless members of his administration have been deeply involved,” in the effort to bring the women home, he said. “To everybody who’s played a part in this,” he said, “we are so grateful.”
The North Korean government, which in June sentenced the women to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korean territory, announced hours before the jet’s departure from North Korea that it had pardoned the women after Mr. Clinton apologized to Mr. Kim for their actions, according to the North Korean state media.
Mr. Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Wednesday that the administration was “extremely excited” that the women would be reunited with their families. But she denied that her husband had apologized.
President Obama, who contacted the families of the women on Tuesday evening, said that he, too, was “extraordinarily relieved” at the journalists’ return.
“I want to thank President Bill Clinton — I had a chance to talk to him — for the extraordinary humanitarian effort that resulted in the release of the two journalists," Mr. Obama said outside the White House Wednesday morning..
Mr. Clinton’s mission to Pyongyang was the most visible by an American in nearly a decade. It came at a time when the United States’ relationship with North Korea had become especially chilled, after North Korea’s test of its second nuclear device in May and a series of missile launchings.
It ended a harrowing ordeal for the two women, who were stopped on March 17 by soldiers near North Korea’s border with China while researching a report about women and human trafficking. They faced years of imprisonment in the gulag-like confines of a North Korean prison camp.
And it catapulted Mr. Clinton back on to the global stage, on behalf of a president who defeated Mrs. Clinton in a bitter primary campaign last year, and who later asked her to be his secretary of state.
Mrs. Clinton was deeply involved in the case, too. She proposed sending various people to Pyongyang — including Mr. Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore — to lobby for the release of the women, before Mr. Clinton emerged as the preferred choice of the North Koreans, people briefed on the talks said.
About 10 days ago, these people said, Mr. Gore called Mr. Clinton to ask him to undertake the trip. Mr. Clinton agreed, as long as the Obama administration did not object.
In an interview Wednesday with NBC News in Nairobi, Kenya, Mrs. Clinton said the final request to Mr. Clinton had come from the White House.
“When the message came to us from the young women themselves, to their families, to former vice president Gore, and then to the administration that sending my husband would be the best way to ensure their release, of course we took that very seriously, discussed it,” she said, according to a transcript. “The White House reached out, as they said, to my husband, to ask him if he would be willing to do that.”
The riveting tableau, of a former president jetting into a diplomatic crisis while his wife was embarking on a tour of Africa in her role as the nation’s chief diplomat, underscored the unique and enduring role of the Clintons, even in the Obama era.
At an news conference in Nairobi on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton said the case of the captured Americans had been handled separately from America’s dispute with North Korea over its nuclear program.
“We have been working hard on the release of the two journalists, and we have always considered that a separate issue,” she said. The future of the United States’ relationship with Pyongyang, she continued, was “really up to them.”
Mr. Clinton’s trip to Pyongyang came just two weeks after North Korea issued a harsh personal attack on Mrs. Clinton, in response to comments she made comparing its nuclear test and missile launchings to the behavior of an attention-seeking teenager.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry objected to her “vulgar remarks” and called her “a funny lady” who was neither intelligent nor diplomatic. “Sometimes she looks like a primary-school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping,” a spokesman said.
The episode evidently did not stop consideration of sending her husband as an envoy. But the initiative was cloaked in secrecy and came after weeks of back-channel talks between the United States and North Korea through its United Nations mission. In addition to Mr. Gore, the White House’s list of potential candidates included Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
North Korea signaled its desire to have Mr. Clinton act as a special envoy in conversations with Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee, who relayed that message to their families in the middle of July, according to a senior administration official. The message was passed to Mr. Gore, who contacted the White House, which then explored whether such a mission would be successful.
Mr. Obama did not speak directly with Mr. Clinton before the mission. But his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, contacted the former president to sound him out. The senior official said the administration did “due diligence” with the North Koreans to ensure that if Mr. Clinton went, he would return with the journalists.
As president, Mr. Clinton had sent Mr. Kim a letter of condolence on the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, according to a former official. For Mr. Kim, the former official said, freeing the women was a “reciprocal humanitarian gesture.”
Mr. Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke last year. American officials said they thought his declining health had set off a succession struggle, complicating the Obama administration’s dealings with the North.
The families of the American journalists issued a statement saying they were “overjoyed” by news of the pardon and thanked Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. “We especially want to thank President Bill Clinton for taking on such an arduous mission and Vice President Al Gore for his tireless efforts to bring Laura and Euna home,” the statement said.
Current TV said in a statement that it was also “overjoyed” and that the hearts of its employees went out to Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee for “persevering through this horrible experience.”
Mr. Clinton and the journalists traveled on a private jet owned by Stephen Bing, a real estate heir and a major Democratic Party contributor, who donated the use of the jet as a favor, said Andy Meyers, the chief executive officer of Shangri-la Industries, which was founded by Mr. Bing.
Administration officials said Mr. Clinton went to North Korea as a private citizen, did not carry a message from Mr. Obama for Mr. Kim and had the authority to negotiate only for the women’s release.
“This was 100 percent about the journalists,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. “We knew Kim Jong-il would probably seek a meeting with Clinton. But that’s not what this visit was about.”
Still, North Korea, clearly seeing a propaganda opportunity at home and a rare chance for a measure of favorable publicity abroad, welcomed Mr. Clinton with the fanfare of a state visit. It broadcast a group portrait, as well as photos of Mr. Kim gesturing and talking to Mr. Clinton; of the former president accepting flowers from a North Korean girl; and of Mr. Clinton, seated across a negotiating table from Mr. Kim, each flanked by aides. Among those greeting Mr. Clinton at the airport was Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator.
Among those accompanying Mr. Clinton was David Straub, a former director of the Korea desk at the State Department, who had held talks with the North Koreans through what is known as the “New York connection.”
Also on hand was John Podesta, an informal adviser to the Obama administration who served as Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff in the final years of his presidency, when the former president yearned to travel to North Korea to clinch a deal that would have curbed its nuclear program.
That visit never happened — partly because the White House concluded that a deal was not assured — and former President George W. Bush put the brakes on direct talks with North Korea, setting the stage for eight years of largely fruitless efforts to stop the North’s nuclear ambitions.
Given Mr. Clinton’s stature and his long interest in the North Korean nuclear issue, experts said it was likely that his discussions in North Korea ranged well beyond obtaining the release of Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee.
“It would be someplace between surprising and shocking if there wasn’t some substantive discussion between the former president, who is deeply knowledgeable about the nuclear issue, and Kim Jong-il,” said Robert L. Gallucci, who negotiated with North Korea in the Clinton administration.
Mr. Clinton has sought to find the right place in the Obama era, eager to play a role without stepping on the toes of the new president or, certainly, the secretary of state.
The last time the two had spoken, said the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was in March, when Mr. Obama invited Mr. Clinton to a ceremony in Washington for signing legislation expanding the AmeriCorps program created by Mr. Clinton.
In interviews last spring, Mr. Clinton said that he would be happy to do anything Mr. Obama asked him to do, but that “I try to stay out of their way.”
Mr. Clinton’s mission may be less of an issue for Mr. Obama than for Mrs. Clinton. The same day he landed in North Korea, she arrived in Kenya, beginning an 11-day journey through Africa — a visit now largely eclipsed by her husband’s travels.
Brian Stelter contributed reporting from New York, Rebecca Cathcart from Burbank, Calif. and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi, Kenya.
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