Pacific Standard Debut Cover

Time for a More Sensible, Permanent Calendar?

December 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar

This year, the federal government has created a public holiday for New Year’s Day on, oddly, January 2. The scheduling quirk is a byproduct of our roaming Gregorian calendar. Every year, New Year’s Day — or any other notable fixed date, from your birthday to Christmas to the Fourth of July — moves forward in the week one day (and two in leap years). Last year, New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday. This year, it’s a Sunday. And no Sunday holiday can come between the American people and a three-day weekend. There is a kind of democratic virtue in this calendar tic: no one gets a ... Read More

Why Mexican Immigrants Can’t Get Ahead

December 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

An annual Christmas pilgrimage used to see perhaps millions of Mexican immigrants, documented or not, return to Mexico from the U.S. for the holidays. But that flow has slowed as the U.S. militarizes its southern border and violence back home reduces the motherland's charms. But the economic charms of working in the U.S. are paling, too. Among the so-called 99 percent of people in the United States who have not shared in the rising prosperity of recent decades, Mexican immigrants have fared worse than most. While the real wages of other groups have remained fairly stagnant since 1970, ... Read More

The Growth of Degrowth Economics

December 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

What if we promoted policies to shrink our economy, rather than grow it? What if government officials called for a recession, perhaps a depression, as the answer to humanity’s most intractable challenges? As heretical as they sound, such questions frame very real policy proposals debated by a growing legion of economists, activists, and government officials representing the so-called Degrowth movement. Degrowthists argue that only a contraction of the world’s developed economies can help reduce dependence on fossil fuel and other environmental resources, slow climate change, and ... Read More

Simon Johnson Critiques Democracy vs. Financialization

December 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

For many on the right side of the U.S. political spectrum, the financial meltdown that began in 2008 resulted from a government push to bring the American Dream of home ownership to the masses. And while President Clinton made home ownership a central tenet of his economic plan — a goal George W. Bush also embraced — there were greater forces at work, according to Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT and the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In his 2010 bestseller, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial ... Read More

Detroit’s Tech Town: An Incubator of Creativity

November 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

According to the latest census figures, Detroit’s population continues to plummet while its public school system remains largely dysfunctional and FBI statistics report an increase in violent crime after several years of decline. But Detroit, the buckle of the “Rust Belt,” is also a city of paradoxes. In the city’s midtown, an innovative project, Tech Town, stands out as living up to its motto, “Reigniting Detroit’s Entrepreneurial Culture.” The city has been counted out before — “Decline in Detroit” was Time magazine’s headline in 1961 – so talk of a comeback has ... Read More