Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Migration Economies and Portland

May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Migrants moving into a region stimulate economic growth. Newcomers demand more housing and local services, to name a few ways the inbound impact the economy. Over the course of the 20th century, the relationship between metros and migration transformed: At the time of the Great Migration in the 1920s—when more than two million African Americans abandoned the South for industrial centers in other regions—less-educated individuals were more likely to migrate in search of better lives. Today, the opposite is true: The more education a person has, the more mobile he or she is. College ... Read More

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Geography of Isolation

May 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Some places are less connected across space than others. North Korea is an extreme example. Robert Guest, author of Borderless Economics, explains: Because North Korea shuts out people, it shuts out ideas. That's one big reason why it is a starving backwater. Its more open cousin, South Korea, which welcomes foreigners and sends hordes of students and businesspeople abroad each year, is 17 times richer. People connect places. Migration is how ideas move. Another cost of isolation: Two recent papers by Filipe Campante of Harvard's Kennedy School and Quoc-Anh Do of the Singapore Management ... Read More

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Captive Labor Markets and Migration

May 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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I cultivated an interest in talent migration via human rights advocacy. How could I get American voters to support the ratification of United Nations conventions? I settled on matters of citizenship. Non-citizens didn't enjoy the same constitutional protections as citizens. In fact, I learned that where you are located determines the force of international treaties. Geography and sovereignty impact international human rights law. Places, not people, have rights. Not all migrants fall into legal spatial loopholes such as Guantanamo. Cosmopolities above the fray hop from global city to global ... Read More

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Why Focusing on Exports Doesn’t Make Economic Sense

May 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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In January 2010, a year after taking office, President Barack Obama unveiled a singularly ambitious idea for boosting the economy. “Tonight, we set a new goal,” he said in his State of the Union address. “We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America.” Under the banner of a National Export Initiative, the president pledged to support new trade missions overseas, offer export assistance to small and medium-size businesses, and step up enforcement of trade agreements. “Because the more products we make and sell to other ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2013
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Niall Ferguson Apologizes for Remarks on Economist Keynes

May 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Harvard historian Niall Ferguson posted an "unqualified apology" on his personal blog on Saturday after saying that British economist John Maynard Keynes did not care about the future because he was gay and had no children. The comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive," Ferguson wrote. "I should not have suggested that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children." While speaking at a conference of investors in California on Thursday, Ferguson was asked to comment on Keynes' observation that "in the long run, we are all dead." He described his response as ... Read More

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Would You Give Up 9 Months of Your Life for Professional Prestige?

April 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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What would you give for a tangible achievement that carries enormous professional prestige? If you’re an economist, and the achievement is a paper published in the American Economic Review, the answer seems to be three-quarters of a year of your life. Or, looking at it a different way, about three-quarters of a thumb. That’s the tentative conclusion of three economists from Erasmus University in the Netherlands. They took an offhand comment by a colleague—“I would give my right arm for a publication in the American Economic Review”—and decided to test whether, for the average ... Read More

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How the Fate of a Spanish Cold Cut Explains Global Finance

April 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Dry-cured ham is one of the lesser known pillars of Spanish identity. Every year the average Spaniard eats 11 pounds of the stuff, and there are 47 million Spaniards. That comes out to more than half a billion pounds each year. Food historians suggest that Spain’s love affair with jamón dates back to Roman times and was cemented under the Caliphate of Córdoba, when eating pork was a way of declaring one’s Christian-ness. The cured hams also traveled well, which came in handy in the days when Spain ruled the seas; whole pig legs were stacked like firewood on Spanish ships bound for the ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2013
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Hot Investing Tip: Get Your Money Out of Cupcakes Immediately

April 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Sometimes, things just make sense. Like when a handheld cake that masquerades around like it's actually some kind of viable breakfast option for any person with even a remote notion of "personal health" finally gets found out. That's what appears to be happening with the gourmet cupcake company Crumbs, according to the Wall Street Journal: After trading at more than $13 a share in mid-2011, Crumbs has sunk to $1.70. It dropped 34 percent last Friday, in the wake of Crumbs saying that sales for the full year would be down by 22 percent from earlier projections, and the stock slipped further ... Read More

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Lose All Your Weight, Fly for Free

April 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Samoa Air—which is sadly not an airplane made out of Girl Scout cookies and which is an airline with mini planes that appear to come pre-packaged in a box that you can order on Amazon—is beginning to charge its customers based on how much they weigh. As in, however many kilograms you bring on the plane—on your body and in your bags—you'll multiply that by whatever set per-kilogram rate the airline is charging at the time. From news.com.au: "People have always traveled on the basis of their seat but as many airline operators know airlines don't run on seats they run on weight and ... Read More

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Can Australia Keep Beating the Economic Odds?

March 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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LAST JUNE, AUSTRALIA completed its twenty-first consecutive year of economic growth. That’s a record, Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan pointed out, no other advanced economy can come close to matching. It’s even more impressive given that this performance has spanned the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, the dot-com boom and bust, and the international financial cataclysm triggered by Lehman Brothers’ fall in 2008. During each of these economic calamities, local and international doomsayers were quick to predict that, this time, Australia’s good run would come to an ... Read More

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