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Many economists contend that technology is the primary driver of the increase in wage inequality since the late 1970s, as technology-induced job skill requirements have outpaced the growing education levels of the workforce.
The 10 points “represent a broad list of macro themes from our economic outlook that we think will dominate markets in 2014.”
Goldman’s 2014 Market Themes – Business Insider
We need protein and fat in our diets. We also need to consume enough calories to reassure our bodies we aren’t starving, or we risk all kinds of metabolic and electrical freak-outs. Plus, liquefying fruits and vegetables means getting rid of fiber, which aids digestion by sustaining the microflora in our gut.
We collect around 2 percent of GDP in revenues from the corporate income tax each year. That’s not nothing ($320 billion), but it’s not much given that after-tax corporate profits were almost $2 trillion in 2012.
6 Reasons To Get Rid Of The Corporate Income Tax – Business Insider
China’s rapid growth from 1980 to 2010 was built on a convergence of several factors: a big increase in the working-age population fuelled by pro-birth policies in the Mao years; a rapid increase in productivity through foreign investment and farmers moving to urban and factory work; cheap raw materials and labour; and a booming market for exports from the world’s rich economies. All of these factors are now going or gone.
RealClearWorld – Timid Reforms Won’t Spare China from Major Growth Crunch
First outfit your iPad with this smooth and appropriately futuristic-looking appendage. Then point your tablet in any direction and you can get a meticulous 3D model of your surroundings. The device, called the Structure Sensor, from Occipital, can map an entrance foyer or a motorcycle’s cylinder head with full measurements for every edge, all to a slim 1 percent of error
The 3D Scanner for Your iPad Will Digitize Reality – Popular Mechanics
That is, until he took an idea from the garden, combined it with some basic procedures borrowed from the aeronautical industry and came up with a “beautifully simple” solution to treat his own heart condition.
BBC News – The engineer who fixed his own heart and others too
Manchester United and Chelsea are interested in an eight-year-old Argentine. Left-footed Claudio Gabriel Nancufil is said to possess impressive dribbling and control and has already drawn comparisons with Barcelona superstar Lionel Messi, with his nickname “Snow Messi”. Full story: Daily Mirror
BBC Sport – Thursday’s gossip column – transfers and rumours
Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays – Bloomberg
Color-rich, energy-efficient, and flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays could soon be churned out more economically on giant inkjet printers.
Inkjet Printing Could Be the Key to Next-Generation OLED Displays | MIT Technology Review
FCVs are powered by fuel cells, which generate electricity from hydrogen, which is not only environmentally friendly and highly energy-efficient, but can also be produced using a variety of readily available raw materials. Thanks to these characteristics, fuel cell vehicles are ideal for achieving sustainable mobility. Therefore, Toyota is striving to make this vehicle technology widely available as soon as possible.
Toyota Challenges Tesla With Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Car – Yahoo Finance
“Poland, Hungary, Czech, they’ve done phenomenally well down when emerging markets have got burnt,” he told CNBC Thursday.
Emerging market currencies the Fed can’t touch
Crucial to Summer’s argument is that our problems did not all start with the recession. However it may be worth just noting some arguments that the ZLB may be around for some time that do begin with the recession.
mainly macro: Is zero the new normal?
What was pretty amazing about the event was the calibre and quality of the attendants (including the audience), as well as the open mindedness of the participants towards the idea that a paradigm shift may be taking place. A consensus was generally formed around the following points:
The bubble is us | FT Alphaville
On a per person basis, private insurance spending rose by just a little more than 1 percent between 2010 and 2013, while Medicare spending remained flat and Medicaid spending actually declined a bit. The growth rates for all three were substantially lower than the rates for previous years.
Terrible Polls for Obamacare But Good News On Policy | New Republic
Prof Hardy has previously called for boxing to be banned, after the repeated blows to the head were linked with dementia later in life.
BBC News – Concussion damage ‘lasts months’
The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggested the greatest benefit was in those munching on a daily portion.
BBC News – Eating nuts ‘may prolong life’
Tor, a privacy tool used by activists, criminals, and U.S. intelligence to obscure traces of their online activities, is being repackaged for the mass market. A $49 device launched today and targeted at consumers makes it relatively easy to route a home Internet connection through the Tor network. The Safeplug, as the device is called, can also block most online ads.
A Cheap Box Brings Hacker Anonymity Tool Tor to the Mass Market | MIT Technology Review
European shares are “significantly underpriced” and could double within five years, with a 27 percent total return likely by the end of 2014, bringing stocks back to their 2007 highs, Barclays said.
European shares to double within five years: Barclays
The euro zone’s largest economy Germany might be powering ahead in terms of growth but the euro zone as a whole is heading towards a “catastrophe,” one economist warned on Friday.
‘Europe heading for catastrophe’ despite German growth
We’d all like to know what will happen in 2014, and the thoughtful journalists at the Economist magazine have published an intriguing set of predictions that give us some clues, as they do every year. Some of them are quite a stretch, however. So in the spirit of respectful debate (which the Economist basically encourages with every issue) here are five things the magazine thinks will happen next year that probably won’t:
4 Predictions About 2014 That Are Wrong | The Exchange – Yahoo Finance
The point is that a lot of people who are healthier have benefited from existing discrimination in the market….
But that is not the only baseline available for purposes of comparison. There is also the Eurozone, which has avoided QE and until recently kept interest rates higher than in the US, though to be sure not as high as US opponents of QE (and defenders of the natural rights of savers) would have liked. Compared to the Eurozone, where nominal GDP has barely risen since 2010, and real GDP and employment have shrunk, QE, which has been associated with nearly 4% annual growth in US nominal GDP and slightly more than 2% annual growth in US real GDP, has clearly outperformed the eurozone.
The Internal Contradiction of Quantitative Easing | Uneasy Money
