Science Fiction Reflects Our Anxieties

1 http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate

Trials Tempered by Compassion and Humility

Steven Goodman Nancy Kass

Nancy Kass is a professor of bioethics and public health at Johns Hopkins University.

Steven Goodman, an associate dean of clinical research, is the co-director of the Meta-

Research Innovation Center at Stanford University, which aims to improve the

reproducibility of scientific research.

UPDATED DECEMBER 1, 2014, 7:21 PM

Designing an ethically acceptable trial to test new Ebola treatments is challenging. It

sounds inhumane to give sick and dying people placebos when testing experimental

treatments, but it is tragic on a different scale to conduct a study that doesn’t tell us clearly

whether, or how well, a new treatment works. When high-dose chemotherapy was

developed for advanced breast cancer, desperate patients were diverted from trials by

treatment advocates whose hope in a cure overrode the lack of scientific evidence of its

efficacy – all in the name of ethics. As a result, thousands of women endured highly toxic,

ineffective therapy until controlled trials were conducted.

Adaptive approaches allow researchers to modify their study, in almost real time, as they

learn more about a drug.

Ethics is not just figuring out which side poses better arguments; often it’s best to find a

third way. Given the breadth and deadly nature of the current Ebola outbreak, and

unknowns about treatments, an "adaptive approach" seems most appropriate. Adaptive

approaches allow researchers to plan a sequence of studies, or modify a single study in

almost real time, as they learn more about a drug. In West Africa, for example, the first 40

Ebola patients in a trial could all get an experimental treatment, and nobody would take a

placebo. If nearly all patients survived, in settings where most others were dying with the

same supportive care, then it is possible that placebo testing could be avoided, and

subsequent trials could randomize to different doses or treatments.

But if the results of the first trial, without placebos, revealed anything less than an almost

certain cure, a design with proper controls would have to be initiated, and explained to

those participating in the trial. Patients must be told that the drug is not a guaranteed life-

saver, so they can see the point of the control group. (And given the multiple beliefs about

Ebola among West Africans, creative approaches to promoting understanding and consent

are important as well.) These placebo-controlled trials could themselves be adaptive in


design, randomizing more patients to whichever therapy appears most effective, until the

verdict is clear. If we are to design trials to minimize suffering and death in a whole

population, we must temper our compassion with humility about what we think we know.


Science Fiction Reflects Our Anxieties

J. P. Telotte

J. P. Telotte is a professor of film and media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology

and the author, most recently, of "Science Fiction TV."

UPDATED JULY 30, 2014, 12:47 PM

The 1930s saw numerous science fiction films centered around apocalyptic, sometimes

climatic, destruction: “La Fin du Monde” (France, 1931) predicted a comet’s collision with

the Earth; “Deluge” (United States, 1933) was the story of a giant tsunami resulting in a

worldwide flood; “Things to Come” (England, 1936) predicted world war and a

civilization-destroying plague; “S.O.S. Tidal Wave” (United States, 1939) showed the

destruction of America’s East Coast by massive tidal wave.

All these films were not as much forward-looking predictions of real apocalypse as they

were metaphorical responses to the widespread economic and political crises of the day.

Floods and plagues became stand-ins for contemporary upheaval, in this case a way to

address the anxieties that attended the Great Depression and post-World War I shock.

Science fiction does not detail the realities of specific problems so that we might avoid

them, but rather represent our most pressing cultural fears.

This is what our genre films tend to do best — not detail the realities of specific problems

so that we might avoid them, but rather represent our most pressing cultural anxieties. If a

solution is presented by a science fiction film, it is seldom workable, immediately possible,

or even logical in real-world application.

And as elements of narrative entertainment, that really isn’t their function. While science

fiction films and novels often, and quite naturally, raise awareness of — or stimulate

discussion about — scientific and technological issues including climate change, they

seldom function as primers for the solutions we need for these very knotty problems. More

often, they make us feel better about our ability to survive them.

As some of the more recent apocalyptic climate films filter into college curriculums —

works like “Waterworld” (1995), “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) or the more recent

“Snowpiercer” (2014) — they are not typically included in the conventional study of film

or science fiction.


More commonly, they are being appropriated by scientists or climatologists as lures —

attractive, non-textbook ways of introducing students to issues that can be terribly resistant

to narrativization. These professors are prodding students to see the films as more than just

exciting stories in order to start hopefully profitable discussions of what sort of responses

might or might not be appropriate for addressing global warming.

And such an outcome, a start of discussion rather than a solution to the problem, is probably

the best we can expect.


Use Hollywood Plots and Characters to Teach STEM

Mayim Bialik

Mayim Bialik is a neuroscientist, Emmy-nominated actress and STEM education brand

ambassador for Texas Instruments.

DECEMBER 10, 2013

Hollywood and science rarely come together as vividly as they have in my life. I not only

have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, but I also play a neurobiologist on the television show “The

Big Bang Theory.”

Zombies can teach mathematical concepts like exponential growth curves, while studying

superheroes can answer physics questions, like what it means to travel faster than the speed

of light.

It is a wonderful convergence of academic pursuit and artistic creativity. I grew up cursorily

interested in science but never thought I would actually pursue an advanced degree, since

it didn’t come naturally to me. I was fortunate enough to have a young woman tutor me

during middle school who gave me the confidence to realize that a career in science was a

worthy and attainable pursuit that would transform my life in unimaginably wonderful

ways.

We have seen the statistics on how the U.S. is lagging behind much of the world in science,

technology, engineering and math. We also know that the world would be a better place if

there were more skilled and enthusiastic scientists, mathematicians and engineers. After

all, who is going to design the next great social media platform or build the next generation

of smartphone?

The confines of a classroom, combined with teaching methods that are not engaging or

inspiring, will not get today’s students excited enough about STEM to want to make a

career in these fields. We need to use content that is relevant to their sensibilities -- stuff

that is cool -- and to let them experience what it’s like to be a scientist using technology

and tools that real-life scientists use.

Programs like STEM Behind Hollywood from Texas Instruments and the National

Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange are already giving educators

new, free tools to immerse students in these critical fields using Hollywood as the

backdrop.


Who doesn’t know something about zombies or superheroes? These cultural archetypes

can do more than just entertain. Zombies, it turns out, can teach real science and

mathematical concepts like exponential growth curves and the intricacies of human

anatomy and anatomical degradation. Superheroes can prompt a variety of questions that

draw on physics, such as: How does one actually travel faster than the speed of light?

Countless entertainment topics are ripe for scientific inquiry, which STEM Behind

Hollywood explores using real-world simulations developed for Texas Instruments

graphing calculators, computer software and iPad apps.

Movies and television are the foundations of modern storytelling and the vernacular of

today’s students, but they can be so much more. Exploring the science behind today’s hot

topics in entertainment can ignite our children’s imaginations and their passion. Maybe

they will one day even inspire a shy middle school girl to embrace her inner nerd and get

a Ph.D. in neuroscience.


Countering Security Breaches Is a National Priority and a Business

Priority

Lauren Gelman

Lauren Gelman, the former executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at

Stanford Law School, is the founder of BlurryEdge Strategies, a legal and strategy firm in

San Francisco. She is on Twitter.

UPDATED FEBRUARY 21, 2013, 6:36 PM

As the public well knows after the headlines of the past few weeks, security breaches are a

regular part of American business. Now we must make countering those breaches a

national priority, and a priority for American businesses. An important part of that

commitment is to require companies to disclose when their security is compromised, so

that everyone can learn from the incident.

Because attackers sometimes exploit vulnerabilities in widely used software, it’s important

for victims to share the details of the intrusion.

The public needs to know about network intrusions to judge the right amount of investment

in government funded cyber security research and response. Sharing the technical details

of breaches helps other companies and organizations learn from the incident, and perhaps

even thwart an attack. And because attackers sometimes exploit vulnerabilities in widely

used software that’s known only to the hackers, it’s important for victims to share the

details of the intrusion.

An effective disclosure framework might oblige companies to report the fact of every

substantial security breach at their business to a designated federal agency, and upon

request to share technical details and forensic data from the breach. That agency would

compile information anonymously for the public and other businesses.

Regulation is appropriate because security breaches pose a collective action problem.

There is no incentive for any individual company to report that they were attacked. Despite

the rash of disclosures over the past few weeks, the fact remains that most companies are

more concerned about the impact of disclosure on their image and market value than on

the benefit such information would provide to the security community as a whole. Like

pollution, an insecure infrastructure is bad for everyone. Forcing companies to disclose

breaches reintroduces the public’s collective interest -- whether in not having U.S.


corporate assets electronically stolen, not being a victim of identity theft or not suffering

the externalities of cyber espionage -- as a variable in the equation.

Additionally, it is in the companies’ interest to stop fighting mandatory disclosure

requirements. As the past weeks have demonstrated, there is comfort in the herd. If the

scope of the security problem is as far-reaching as experts believe, individual businesses

who think they are alone in facing security problems are likely to find they are just one

among their peers facing the same problem. Standardized processes and programs will

develop to assist companies who suffer a security breach, similar to those that have

developed in the wake of the passage of California’s breach notification law. Smaller

companies without large in-house security teams will have more incentives to invest in

discovering and disclosing breaches if they are not terrified by the potential downside.

Opponents argue that a mandatory disclosure program will give the hackers an advantage

by widely disclosing bugs and other vulnerabilities. However right now it seems clear that

it is the hackers – sharing, selling and purchasing bugs, techniques and access – who are

the ones benefiting from information sharing. Businesses must learn from their example so

the public can benefit from the increased awareness and improved security that will follow.


Pique My Interest, Don’t Belittle My Intelligence

Jazmine Hughes

Jazmine Hughes is the contributing editor of The Hairpin. She is on Twitter.

UPDATED NOVEMBER 25, 2014, 1:27 PM

I wear my Millennial badge proudly: Like many of my peers, I get most of my news from

mobile devices, culled from Twitter accounts or RSS feeds, or links swapped from friend

to friend. There are a handful of sites that I visit regularly, but even as an avid consumer, I

don’t find myself getting my news directly from a homepage too often.

There's a lot to wade through. So how am I deciding what's worth a click? I take several

factors into account, including the veracity of the source, the breadth of the conversation

and the promise of puppy photos. But as those variables can fluctuate, I must rely on the

one thing that is certain: the headline.

The majority of backlash against click bait headlines is a response to the forced push of

emotion that click bait content foists onto a consumer.

In an industry riddled with plagiarism, civil insensitivities and “hot takes,” “click bait” is

still the worst insult you can hurl at a publication. Minimalistic, pared down headlines —

the anti-headline headlines — have become more prevalent in reaction to the vague,

bombastic, pandering headlines that the Internet-at-Large has come to despise.

But the majority of backlash against click bait headlines is a response to the forced push of

emotion that click bait content foists onto a consumer. The promise that "you won't believe

what comes next" or "you'll never feel the same" deprives readers of their analytic agency

and imposes an uncontextualized reaction on them. It's aggressive, empty and intellectually

reductive — or, simply, super annoying.

There's nothing wrong with an enticing headline, but pique my interest, don't belittle my

intelligence. Publications want readers to trust them, so they should trust their readers back.


Student Data Collection Is Out of Control

Khaliah Barnes

Khaliah Barnes is the director of the student privacy project at the Electronic Privacy

Information Center.


The collection of student data is out of control. No longer do schools simply record

attendance and grades. Now every test score and every interaction with a digital learning

tool is recorded. Data gathering includes health, fitness and sleeping habits, sexual activity,

prescription drug use, alcohol use and disciplinary matters. Students’ attitudes, sociability

and even "enthusiasm" are quantified, analyzed, recorded and dropped into giant data

systems.

Rampant data collection is not only destroying student privacy, it also threatens students’

intellectual freedom.

Some schools use radio frequency identification tags to track student location throughout

the school day. Other schools use “human monitoring services” that read student email and

then contact local law enforcement if something is amiss. Students and parents will never

see the vast majority of information collected.

The push for big data in education has also contributed to data breaches and has made

student information susceptible to being sold for purposes unrelated to the collection. My

organization sued the Education Department for weakening a forty-year-old student

privacy law and allowing private companies increased access to student data.

Rampant data collection is not only destroying student privacy, it also threatens students’

intellectual freedom. When schools record and analyze students’ every move and recorded

thought, they chill expression and speech, stifling innovation and creativity.

Students should have a right to a privacy framework that limits data collection, gives rights

to them and their families, and places responsibility on schools and companies that gather

data. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and others are working to update student

privacy protections in Congress. Enacting a Student Privacy Bill of Rights is a top priority.


Government Should Invest in Fiber Optics

Susan Crawford

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive

Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age." She is on

Twitter.


Because we treat high-speed Internet access as a luxury rather than basic infrastructure —

akin to electricity and clean water — we're leaving most economically disadvantaged

people in New York behind. Although access is "available" to 97 percent of people living

in the five boroughs, just 37 percent of people in New York State with annual incomes of

$20,000 or less have a high-speed Internet access connection at home, compared with 85

percent of those with incomes over $60,000. Having a wire in your home is too expensive

for people of modest means.

Programs that have worked in Sweden could work here, installing lines and leasing them

to Internet providers.

Earlier this year, I met a young man named Daniel who wants to design virtual

environments. Daniel knows he'll get a job and he's already midway through his training

in virtual reality design. That's because Daniel lives in Stockholm, where 100 percent of

people have a wire in their home. Even in a low-income section of Stockholm called Husby

– where 86 percent of residents are immigrants, unemployment hovers at about 8 percent

and monthly incomes average $2,250 – gigabit fiber access (1,000 Mbps download and

upload, 100 times as fast as standard access in America) costs only $28 per month.

Stockholm, unlike New York City, decided 20 years ago that it didn't want to be under the

thumb of any existing communications company. It also wanted to avoid competing in the

private market or regulating the existing players. So the city built neutral fiber lines and

leased them out to private operators so they could light the lines with electronic equipment

and serve customers. Result: intense competition, low prices and universal coverage. The

project paid for itself in short order and now brings millions of dollars of revenue annually

into city coffers.

A similar program in New York City would require the city to expand the work of an entity

called Empire City Subways that maintains and operates the conduits for communications

lines in Manhattan and the Bronx. Landlords of apartment buildings and offices would


need to install boxes so that neutral fiber would get all the way into the building. Then

young residents wouldn't have to hang around the local library after closing time in order

to get online.

The problem is that entity is now a subsidiary of Verizon. Verizon has enormous power in

New York City; it is a very large employer and taxpayer; pays millions in video franchise

fees to the city; and runs the national security infrastructure.

But unless the city acts to control its destiny, Verizon and Time Warner Cable will always

call the shots.

Services, like Airbnb, Mean We Need to Adapt to a New Economy

Arun Sundararajan

Arun Sundararajan is a professor of information, operations and management sciences at

the Stern School of Business at New York University. He is on Twitter.

MAY 6, 2014

Online services like Airbnb, Lyft, SideCar and Getaround are disrupting old economic

systems rooted in firm-to-consumer interactions and individual ownership, and opening

new ways to stimulate economic and social activity. This is blurring the boundaries

between personal activities and the commercial provision of services. We need to rethink

our local governance and regulatory framework to accommodate this new economy while

ensuring that a few bad actors don’t bring down the entire system.

We need to create a new regulatory framework for online service providers, balancing their

lower risks with appropriately designed safeguards.

We are free to lend our apartments to acquaintances, pick up relatives from the airport, or

loan money to friends starting new businesses. These are considered "personal"

undertakings, unlike running a hotel, driving a taxicab, or being a professional investor,

and have none of the additional oversight, licensing, screening, taxation or training

expected of providers who conduct these activities as a full-time occupation.

This balance seemed reasonable when peer-to-peer exchange remained personal, and even

when it was commercial but on the fringes, mediated by personal networks and sites like

Craigslist. But as new sharing platforms bring these informal exchanges into the

mainstream economy, they create service providers who are “in between” personal and


professional – like Airbnb hosts who rent out their apartments when they travel, or Lyft

drivers who transport people commercially for a few hours a week.

We need to create a regulatory framework for these new providers, balancing their lower

risks with appropriately designed safeguards. Delegating some of the responsibility to the

platforms with suitable government oversight is part of the solution. Since there always

will be businesses (like the landlords trying to run illegal hotels via Airbnb) that misuse

new platforms to bypass regulations or taxes meant for them, guidelines developed

explicitly to formalize the informal providers will ensure that a handful of law-breakers

don’t hold back the millions who are creating legitimate new economic value.

Laws Can Ensure Privacy in the Internet of Things

Aleecia M. McDonald

Aleecia M. McDonald is the director of privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at

Stanford Law School.

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 8, 2013, 7:01 PM

It’s a noisy, nosy world. For example, our cellphones are nonstop tracking devices that

occasionally make calls – and yet we would be lost without their maps. Our shoes can tell

hundreds of our closest Facebook friends about our latest jog. Tiny RFID tags, embedded

in many objects and devices, have unique IDs that they blurt out to any radio signal that

asks. New cars not only phone information back to car makers, but also to other cars.

Vehicular communication improves safety but adds new risks that a database of

everywhere you drive could become available to hackers, police or insurance companies.

We are at the cusp of big changes – good and bad.

We have learned the hard way that we cannot trust companies or governments to show

restraint in collecting our data.

The idea of devices chatting away to one another is both radically cool and rightly

concerning. Most people want what a data-driven future can provide, but we have learned

the hard way that we cannot trust companies or governments to exercise basic decency and

restraint in collecting our data. Lack of trust hampers adoption of potentially useful

technologies, including California’s decision last week to halt plans for RFID in drivers’

licenses.

How can we have smart devices while preserving our core rights to privacy? First, the key

is to include privacy and security from the very start while designing products and


components. This way we can use technology without technology using us. Second, we

already use firewalls and other approaches to limit who can reach our desktop computers.

We could engineer similar technical intermediaries for our new devices. Third, privacy

tools should be as simple to use as products themselves. Finally, it is rare for technology

to entirely solve the challenges technology creates, so we need new privacy laws that are

savvy and wise. There is much work to do, but we can build an awesome future without

trading away our human need for privacy.

Noncompete Agreements Don’t Have to Be All or Nothing

Michael D. Weil

Michael D. Weil is a partner at the law firm Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe. He blogs at

Trade Secrets Watch.

UPDATED JUNE 11, 2014, 12:25 PM

Employers who overuse or misuse noncompete agreements have given them a bad

reputation.

American companies are losing billions of dollars to foreign and domestic hackers who

steal trade secrets. We should be cautious about further weakening employers’ ability to

protect their intellectual property.

Noncompetes protect the legitimate business interests of employers — usually in the form

of trade secrets, confidential information or client relationships — but their enforcement

must be balanced against the rights of former employees and the public.

Reasonable enforcement depends entirely on context. For example, it might be reasonable

to restrain a well-compensated chief technology officer from immediately taking a similar

position with a direct competitor.

Likewise, it may be reasonable for a company to want to prevent former sales employees

from poaching certain customers, especially in cases where the employees fostered those

relationships at the employer’s expense.

But it can be unfair when overzealous employers attempt to impose overly broad

noncompetes, beyond their legitimate purpose, on employees who pose no actual threat.

To prevent these kinds of situations, and to advance employee mobility, a few states like

California have taken the extreme approach of enacting laws that ban noncompetes. (The

exception is that the buyer of a business may still impose a noncompete on the seller.)


California adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which authorizes courts to keep

employees from working with a competitor for a reasonable period of time in response to

an actual or threatened misappropriation of protected information. The law, which has been

adopted in some form by 48 of the 50 states, also permits monetary recovery.

But that only remedies a problem after it has occurred. As a practical matter, these problems

are often difficult to detect. California’s laws, for example, do not prevent individuals from

accepting employment where, by virtue of their new job duties, they will inevitably

disclose trade secrets.

At a time when Congress is concerned that American companies are losing billions of

dollars in trade secret theft to foreign and domestic hackers, we should be cautious about

weakening employers’ ability to protect their intellectual property. The broad solution is

not an all-or-nothing approach, but thoughtful legislation that creates appropriate

disincentives to employers who might overuse or misuse noncompetes, while allowing for

enforcement to protect employers’ legitimate interests.


Tips Supplement Paltry Paychecks

Ty Batirbek-Wenzel

Ty Batirbek-Wenzel, a Web and graphic designer, is the author of “Behind Bars: The

Straight-Up Tales of a Big City Bartender” and a new novel, “The Orchid Revolution.”

She is on Twitter.


“Tip or Die.”

That was written in black permanent marker on a can that lived next to the cash register at

the bar where I mixed drinks for over a decade.

The cash I earned tending bar, which involved 10-hour shifts on my feet and drunks

vomiting on me, bought groceries, health care and peace of mind.

I've had to defend tipping more than a handful of times. I actually had to deal with an anti-

tipping heckler while on book tour for my bartending memoir. I've had born-again

Christians leave me pamphlets on finding God -- in lieu of a tip -- after drinking themselves

into heaven.

Sure, I made decent money from tips; there was rarely a night that I didn't clear two or

three hundred dollars. “You're making money hand-over-fist!” some would declare, as if I

didn't deserve it. Care to look at my $30 weekly paycheck? Care to subsidize my health

insurance? I didn't get any. Care to work over 10 hours a night on your feet and shuffle

home at 5 in the morning? McDonald's workers had bigger paychecks, and I doubt they

had to deal with people vomiting on them on a fairly regular basis.

Getting rid of tipping would be bad business. Prices at restaurants would rise if the burden

of paying servers were turned over to the house. And then there is the question of

motivation. Think it's hard to find your waitress now? Think your waiter was a little surly?

Wait until their income is no longer linked to their performance at your table.

Of course, if all restaurants offered a living wage -- say, at least $25 per hour with health

care and other benefits -- then this could be a game-changer. Until then, though, those five-

and 10-dollar bills left on tables and bars across the country are paying for rent, doctor

visits and child care. Without tipping in this current environment, I fear that we would be

just a stone's throw away from inflicting the same kind of poverty on servers that is endured

by the employees at Wal-Mart, to give just one example.


Tipping counters the actions of powerful restaurant lobbies that spare no expense in driving

down wages to near poverty levels.

So until salaries are generous, tip or die.


Food Industry Deals Hurt Consumers and the Environment

Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter is the executive director of Food & Water Watch and the author of

"Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America."


The U.S. government needs to do more to stop consolidation in the food supply, and

transnational business deals — like the proposed purchase of Smithfield by China’s largest

meat company, Shuanghui International — illustrate why mergers and acquisitions need

more regulation and scrutiny, not less.

This deal facilitates the export not just of pork but also America’s industrialized factory

farming system — a disaster for the environment. This approach is already spreading;

Shuanghui International became China’s monolithic meat company by adopting the U.S.

factory farm model pioneered by companies like Smithfield. The merger is likely to

increase the size, intensity and pollution of hog production in China. Furthermore,

Smithfield’s anticipated increased exports to China would effectively convert U.S. factory

farms into export platforms; Smithfield would ship out the pork, and we’d keep the hog

manure.

Deals like this serve no one but the executives and bankers who stand to profit; everyone

else is left with the manure.

In addition to the environmental consequences of the deal, it’s bad for consumers.

Transnational deals in the food industry usually add to American imports, and a rising flood

of imported food swamps U.S. import inspectors. In the long term, Shuanghui may offshore

hog operations to China, and the U.S. could be importing pork. In 2011, Shuanghui recalled

thousands of tons of meat after reports that it was laced with the banned veterinary drug

clenbuterol, which is linked to serious human health risks.

Despite these risks, the United States is pursuing new trade deals with Europe and Pacific

Rim partners, which China has expressed interest in joining. These commercial pacts

promote such transnational megamergers as much as they promote exports. And the secret

negotiations behind them are used to weaken food safety and environmental standards.

Deals like this serve no one but the executives and bankers who stand to profit; everyone

else is left with the manure.


Workers Know Whether to Telecommute

Cali Ressler Jody Thompson

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson are the co-founders of CultureRx and co-authors of a

book about management.


Organizations trying to decide whether and when to allow people to work remotely are

stuck in the last century. In the 1950s, requiring employees to work in the same location

made a lot of sense. But we’ve evolved, as civilizations tend to. Today we have numerous

tools that allow us to work from literally anywhere on the planet. We are moving forward,

and society is aligned in favor of a 24/7 economy that rewards personal responsibility and

freedom. It’s not about who’s in the office vs. who’s gotten a special pass to work outside

the building.

Responsibility and freedom. Responsibility for the work, and the freedom to do it in a way

that makes common sense. Managers are playing hall monitor instead of getting crystal

clear with each employee about delivering measurable results. Managed flexibility is

seriously outdated – just paternalistic behavior of granting permission for people to work

outside of the 1952 constraints of time and place.

Get clear on what needs to get done and how it's being measured, and stop managing how

and where people do it.

Organizations can trust their employees to own their work and manage their time without

vintage H.R. policies about office hours or remote working. Managing someone’s time is

a way of saying, “I don’t know how to effectively manage the work, so now I’m going to

try to manage you.”

Treat people like the adults that they are, and they will act like adults. Treat them like

children, and you’ll find yourself with a workplace full of people who are watching the

clock tick waiting for the bell so they can make a mass exodus.

Our advice: Focus on managing the work, not the people. People can manage themselves.

Get clear on what needs to get done and how it's being measured, and stop managing how

and where people do it. If they don't deliver, they're out. No results? No job.


Obama Should Invite an Obamacare Critic to the State of the Union

Grace-Marie Turner

Grace-Marie Turner is the president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit research

organization focusing on free-market ideas for health reform. She served on the Medicaid

Commission from 2005 to 2006.

UPDATED MARCH 5, 2014, 1:20 PM

President Obama can be expected to invite Affordable Care Act enthusiasts to sit with the

first lady, especially young people who have newly purchased health insurance in the

exchanges. But this gesture could backfire with the millions of people whose health

insurance has been cancelled because of the law and who cannot afford to replace it with

expensive policies that meet its extensive rules and benefit mandates.

If I were advising the president, I would recommend he try to calm the growing animosity

toward the law by apologizing to those who have lost their coverage and inviting a former

critic, especially someone with a chronic medical condition who now is able to get health

insurance through the exchange. The disruption the law is creating to our health sector and

economy is extensive, but the president could single out a few people representative of

those who may even reluctantly have been helped by the law.


Our Society Discourages Innovation

Cecilia A. Conrad

Cecilia Conrad is the vice president for the MacArthur Fellows program at the John D. and

Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.


Reports of the death of American creativity are an exaggeration. The hyperloop, Google

Glass, nano-pharmaceuticals and mind-controlled robotic legs are all examples of its

continued vitality.

That said, people with innovative and cutting-edge ideas have likely spent much of their

lives swimming against the tide.

It starts with the tests in K-12, and extends to investors' focus on short-term returns. What

if, instead, we encouraged autonomy and flexibility?

Creativity flourishes at the intersections of traditional disciplines, but traditional means of

assessment often marginalize individuals working to define new and unique fields of

endeavor. From the high-stakes tests in K-12, to the academic tenure clock, to the

economy’s focus on short-term return on investments, American society’s reward

structures tend to discourage unconventional thinking and limit risk-taking.

And yet, creativity thrives in an environment where individuals have the freedom to devote

time and effort to ideas and projects that may not have an immediate payoff – projects like

John Dabiri’s analysis of the aerodynamics of schools of fish, to inform the optimal

placement of wind turbines. Creativity requires giving self-directed original thinkers space

for the missteps and dead ends that are often prerequisites for groundbreaking work. That’s

the philosophy behind the MacArthur Fellows program and its “no strings attached” grants.

For over 30 years, the MacArthur Foundation has recognized and inspired creativity among

the Dabiris of the world through its fellowship program. Each year the program awards 20

to 25 exceptionally talented individuals five-year, unrestricted fellowships, which the news

media have dubbed “genius grants.”

The widespread adoption of a “no strings attached” rewards structure is neither practical

nor advisable. However, the basic insight — that the best incubator for creativity is an

environment that gives the individual autonomy and flexibility — should inform the design

of incentives in both the schoolhouse and the workplace. A healthy society requires that


we cultivate the next generation of innovators to maintain economic competitiveness, to

solve deep-rooted social problems and to create objects of beauty that inspire.


Cooking for the Family Is a Promise Kept

Blaine Sergew

Blaine Sergew is a program director for the Nature Conservancy.


When my husband and I got married, we made two promises to each other: We would

never watch reality shows and we would always eat at least one meal a day together.

Let’s just say we fared better with the second promise.

My husband and I have worked out arguments over meal preparations, laughed through

botched recipes. And when we sit down for a meal we stay connected.

We both grew up in Ethiopia and are from large families. Mealtimes were often beautifully

choreographed chaos. But there was never any question about everyone eating together,

primarily because we Ethiopians live under the vague threat that “he who eats alone, dies

alone.”

That adage was so ingrained in me from an early age that I still remember the first dinner

I had by myself when I came to the United States. In my aunt’s apartment in the Bronx, I

ate a plate of re-heated doro wet – chicken stew –as the exhausted rumbling of the No. 1

train kept me distracted from the possibility of dying before I saw the Empire State

Building.

Culturally, food has never been just about nutrition. It’s been about community and

connection. Some of my fondest childhood memories center around family feasts prepared

by a small army of bustling women who would work out hazy passive-aggressive impulses

in the confines of a sweltering kitchen. It was where a delicate hierarchy of women had

total control of their environment.

When my mother moved to her own house in Charlotte, N.C. – the first time she had ever

lived by herself – what appalled her most was the prospect of cooking for one. I would call

her at mealtimes and we would talk on the phone while she prepared her meals. Her sadness

was palpable even through the orchestrated casualness of voice.

Several years and varying degrees of success at assimilation later, family meals still give

me a sense of presence and belonging in a country that taught me about loneliness. My

husband and I have worked out arguments over meal preparations; we have laughed


through botched recipes of burnt leg of lamb. And when we sit down for a meal, whether

in silence or merriment, we stay connected.

Now we have a 7-year-old son for whom we have tried to construct a miniature version of

our childhoods. When he was an infant, I would hoist him on sling or a baby chair and talk

to him while I cooked and we listened to Amharic love songs. We would have him sit with

us for entire meals, especially dinners. So far away from family, when the three of us felt

like we were the only ones in the world, we would linger over dinner and talk about

Ethiopia, the grandfathers our son never knew, and the hope we have of one day taking

him back to a place that both broke and mended our hearts.

Until then, we will linger over the dinner.

Join Room for Debate on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

Topics: cooking, food, parenting

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If a Gluten-Free Diet Helps People, Then Leave Them Be

Elissa Altman

Elissa Altman, the author of the memoir "Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort,

Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking," blogs at Poor Man's Feast.


As a food writer, cookbook editor, caterer, personal chef, and a staff member at the original

Dean & DeLuca in Manhattan, I have watched culinary trends ebb and flow, from bran

muffins to cupcakes. I’ve seen the same tidal shift with diets.

Why is there such vitriol and snarky mistrust aimed at people who eat this way because it

makes them feel better?

One customer at Dean & DeLuca was on the infamous grapefruit diet, and another ate only

quinoa. The latter lost 126 pounds in six months. One customer came in each day to buy a

small filet mignon, because she was on a diet that discouraged bread or pasta. Another

sprinkled oat bran flakes on her imported goat yogurt every morning, and ate it with the

shot of wheat grass juice she would buy next door at the health food shop.

None of them thought they were hopping on the bandwagon of the latest trend, but

naysayers thought otherwise. People have a right to their opinions.

But gluten-free eating is more than a trend.

I grew up in a home where bread and pasta were everywhere. In the late 1950s, one of my

teenage cousins died of what my father obliquely called “intestinal disease.” From the time

I was born, in 1963, until the time he died, in 2002, my father also suffered daily from a

similar and agonizing intestinal affliction. The ileostomy he had in 1988 did little to ease

his pain. It was only 12 years later, when he removed his beloved bread and pasta from his

diet, that he became healthy for the first time in his life. I watched him live stoically with

the sort of discomfort that nobody should ever have to endure. I watched him heal after

eliminating gluten from his diet. And I watched him pass on the challah at Rosh Hashana,

and weep.

So why are people who must avoid gluten for their health being ridiculed as trend-setters?

There is a palpable level of indignation among those who think the gluten-free diet is a

sham. People blame the gluten-free population for threatening the very fiber of human

culture — bread and grains, for goodness' sake.


But can you blame these same people for wanting to heal? Many gluten-free eaters who

don't have celiac disease feel they can also avoid discomfort by avoiding wheat. Leave

them be.

The growing number of people going gluten-free won’t prevent anyone else from

continuing to eat their glorious ancient breads, gorgeous heirloom grains, and delicious

pastas any more than my wife and I getting married will imperil heterosexual marriage.


Topics: diet, food, lifestyle, nutrition labels

PREVIOUS

Mark Lang

A Consumer-Driven Trend

MARK LANG


The French-American Similarity Is Only Superficial

Debra Ollivier

Debra Ollivier is the author of "What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other

Matters of the Heart and Mind."


The French folk hero and Catholic saint Joan of Arc has been iconic on both sides of the

Atlantic for centuries.Eugène Delacroix’s Marianne represents the "true French woman:

accessorized, political, passionate and topless," writes Debra Ollivier.

France and the United States have been feeding off of one another since the French

Revolution, and the French woman has been an icon ever since Joan of Arc marched into

battle in chic, form-fitting armor (or so popular renditions would have us believe). Even

Eugène Delacroix’s famous Marianne leading a revolution is both the nation’s calling card

and a paragon of the true French woman: accessorized, political, passionate and topless.

If you push past the cream puffery about French fashion, food and flair, you touch on an

essential element here that’s hard-wired into the French cultural DNA. The writer Michèle

Fitoussi hit the nail on the head when she said that her compatriots “have a keen sense of

the brevity of time and the immediacy of pleasure.” In other words, the French still exalt

the senses and prefer having a life over making a living – and lucky for them, their

infrastructure of social benefits lets everyone do just that. Any threat to this infrastructure

(which includes affordable health care and up to six weeks of paid vacation for everyone,

irrespective of rank) sends millions to the streets with the same fury as Marianne, because

these social benefits that support quality of life (and a sexy one, at that) are considered

basic human rights, not luxuries.

DESCRIPTIONThe French folk hero and Catholic saint Joan of Arc has been iconic on

both sides of the Atlantic for centuries.Eugène Delacroix’s Marianne represents the "true

French woman: accessorized, political, passionate and topless," writes Debra

Ollivier.Photo by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

Unlike the French, we Americans have a keen sense of the immediacy of the future and the

brevity of pleasure, with a dollop of guilt and a Puritan undertow in the mix. If we read

countless books about the French and flock to France, it's often in the hope of shedding

that cultural baggage and living out the sensual attributes evoked in that proverbial “Je ne

sais quoi.” But short of a revolution in this country (and who’s got time for that?) the


differences between us and the French run deep. They're woven into the socio-cultural

fabric of both countries that shapes us from birth.

Thus, no matter how distasteful it might be to see a “MacDo” under the Louvre or Jenny

Craig in Paris, France will always maintain its distinct character.


Topics: Culture, Europe, France, food, international relations


The Chef Knows Best About When to Salt

Kevin Sbraga

Kevin Sbraga, the winner of the seventh season of “Top Chef” on Bravo, is the chef and

owner of Sbraga in Philadelphia.


My restaurant does not have salt on the tables.

The obvious reason is because my food is seasoned properly ... or at least I would like to

think so. We try our best to season our food through each step of the cooking process as

needed. Some food items just require a little more salt than others.

Salt added at the table doesn't season the food the same as when salt is added during the

cooking process. It can just make food taste salty.

Ultimately, it might be a control thing. I want to have as much say in our guest experience

as possible, even when it comes down to the salt.

A more scientific reason is that when salt is added at the table it doesn't season the food the

same as when salt is added during the cooking process. It can easily make food taste salty.

It doesn't really mix into the food properly and can sit on top, making it the first thing the

palate senses.

Our guests should expect their food to be properly seasoned, and really shouldn't need to

ask for salt. To be quite honest if one of our guests needs salt, we didn't do our job.


Buying Organic Fruits and Vegetables Is a Personal Choice

Marion Nestle

Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food

Studies and Public Health at New York University, is the author of "Why Calories Count:

From Science to Politics." She blogs at FoodPolitics.com and is on Twitter.

UPDATED FEBRUARY 6, 2014, 9:54 AM

Questions about organic food raise three issues: productivity, benefits and costs.

Productivity is easy. Since the early 1980s, careful productivity studies conclude that

organic yields are only slightly lower than conventional yields, and organic production

leaves soils in much better shape — boding well for future productivity. The yield

difference is too small to have much of an effect on world food supplies.

I choose not to be a guinea pig in a long-term pesticide experiment. We should do all we

can to give everyone that choice.

Next, benefits. If crops are grown without pesticides, they won’t contaminate soil and

water, foods will contain fewer pesticides, and people who eat organic foods will have

lower levels in their bodies. The Stanford study and others confirm all this. Critics of

organics say: “So what. Pesticides are safe.” They point out that nobody has ever died from

eating industrially produced broccoli. Although science does not presently demonstrate

long-term harm from eating pesticide-treated vegetables, pesticides are demonstrably

harmful to farm workers and to “nontarget” wildlife, and they accumulate in soils for ages.

If pesticides were all that benign, the government wouldn’t need to regulate them, but it

does.

The Stanford study made a big deal about nutrients, but nutrients are not the point. The

point of organic production is its effects on the health of people and the planet. The

investigators did not examine the overall health impact of organics, no doubt because such

studies are difficult to conduct and interpret. For one thing, people who buy organics tend

to be better educated and wealthier — characteristics that track with good health anyway.

That leaves the cost question. Organics cost more because they require greater amounts of

hand labor. Are they worth it? Personally, I prefer not to be a guinea pig in a long-term

pesticide experiment. I’m also fortunate to have the choice.

We should be doing all we can to give everyone else the same choice.


A Choice With Definite Risks

Nina Planck

Nina Planck is the author of the Real Food series and The Farmer's Market Cookbook.

APRIL 17, 2012

They say everything can be replaced.

—Bob Dylan

The modern American is fierce about his or her right to choose a particular “lifestyle.”

So it is with vegan diets for children. In 2007, when I argued in The New York Times that

a diet consisting exclusively of plants was inadequate for babies and children, the response

was dramatic, and at times, even vicious.

I believe that babies and children require a better diet. The American Dietetic Association

asserts that a “well-planned” vegan diet — by which the experts mean one with many

synthetic supplements — can be adequate for babies; I disagree.

The breast milk of vegan mothers is dramatically lower in a critical brain fat, DHA, than

the milk of an omnivorous mother.

Nature created humans as omnivores. We have the physical equipment for omnivory, from

teeth to guts. We have extraordinary needs for nutrients not found in plants. They include

fully-formed vitamins A and D, vitamin B12, and the long-chain fatty acids found in fish.

The quantity, quality and bio-availability of other nutrients, such as calcium and protein,

are superior when consumed from animal rather than plant sources. It’s quite possible to

thrive on a diet including high-quality dairy and eggs — many populations do — but a diet

of plants alone is fit only for herbivores.

For babies and children, whose nutritional needs are extraordinary, the risks are definite

and scary. The breast milk of vegetarian and vegan mothers is dramatically lower in a

critical brain fat, DHA, than the milk of an omnivorous mother and contains less usable

vitamin B6. Carnitine, a vital amino acid found in meat and breast milk, is nicknamed

“vitamin Bb” because babies need so much of it. Vegans, vegetarians and people with poor

thyroid function are often deficient in carnitine and its precursors.


The most risky period for vegan children is weaning. Growing babies who are leaving the

breast need complete protein, omega-3 fats, iron, calcium and zinc. Compared with meat,

fish, eggs and dairy, plants are inferior sources of every one.

Soy protein is not good for a baby’s first food for the same reason that soy formula is not

good for newborns. It’s a poor source of calcium, iron and zinc — and much too high in

estrogen. It also lacks adequate methionine, which babies and children need to grow

properly. Lastly, soy damages the thyroid, which compromises immunity and stunts

growth.

Vegans may believe it’s possible to get B12 from plant sources like seaweed, fermented

soy, spirulina and brewer’s yeast. Alas, these foods contain mostly B12 analogs, which,

according to the health writer Chris Kresser, “block intake of and increase the need for true

B12,” a vital nutrient for mental health.

Mr. Kresser argues that this is one reason studies consistently show that up to 50 percent

of long-term vegetarians and 80 perent of vegans are deficient in B12. “The effects of B12

deficiency on kids are especially alarming,” he writes. “Studies have shown that kids raised

until age 6 on a vegan diet are still B12 deficient even years after they start eating at least

some animal products.” In one study, the researchers found “a significant association”

between low B12 levels and “fluid intelligence, spatial ability and short-term memory.”

The formerly vegan kids scored lower than omnivorous kids every time.

The greatest error of modern industrial life, which celebrates the lab and technology, is our

love affair with the facsimile. It is time to face the music. Some things cannot be replaced.

Real food is one.

You may choose to be a vegan. Your baby doesn’t have that luxury. Let her grow up

omnivorous and healthy. Then watch her exercise her own freedom of choice with

justifiable pride.

Changing Habits, Not Just Diets

Jane Black

Jane Black, a food writer based in Brooklyn, writes the "Smarter Food" column for The

Washington Post and is at work on a book about the efforts of Huntington, W.Va., to build

a healthier food culture (due out in 2013 from Simon & Schuster).

UPDATED APRIL 16, 2012, 12:55 PM


With rates of obesity and diabetes at epidemic levels, you’d think it would be enough to

simply tell people what they need to do. But the messages about how to eat healthfully —

buy local, eat seasonally, shun industrial meat — can be overwhelming and unrealistic for

both low-income and time-stressed, middle-class families. Moreover, much of today’s

dietary advice ignores a fundamental truth: Most Americans seek out fast and processed

foods, not for the price, but for the convenience and the taste. A recent study in the journal

Population Health Management revealed that households earning $60,000 a year ate the

most fast food. Households bringing in $80,000 were actually more likely to “have it their

way” than those with $30,000.

Many Americans know what to eat, and they have access to it, and they can afford it. So

why do they still hit the drive-through?

Until now, mainstream "solutions" to the obesity crisis, and to the broader problem of how

to forge a healthier American diet, have focused on making fresh food more affordable and

accessible. But as I saw last year while reporting a book on what people eat, and why they

eat it, in Huntington, W.Va., many Americans do have access to, and can afford, better

food. They just choose not to eat it. Or rather, they choose not to take the time to shop for

it, to plan and cook their meals, when they can hit the drive-through or have a pizza

delivered or pop a Stouffer’s entrée into the microwave.

Does this mean the battle is lost? On the contrary. A new and growing group of studies

point to a third way to persuade Americans to make small but essential changes to their

diets and lifestyles. Based on behavior-change theories — a kind of grassroots behavioral

economics for public health — these strategies address a range of personal, cultural and

environmental factors that affect what people eat. America on the Move, a Denver-based

nonprofit, has shown that if overweight and obese people add 2,000 extra steps to their

daily routine or cut out 100 calories a day, they can effectively prevent weight gain. In

Kentucky, a program called Healthy, Well-Thee and Wise is tracking its multiyear effort

to help Appalachian women make realistic changes, such as baking their pork chops instead

of frying them, that lead to healthier lifestyles.

Sadly, this approach doesn’t appeal to our culture’s love of quick fixes, the kind of dramatic

overhauls that make hits of reality TV shows such as “The Biggest Loser.” But they are

simpler and less expensive than plans to pass new regulations or plunk Wal-Marts in the

inner cities. Plus, they are about what’s realistic, given the nature of the problem we face.

They help Americans to understand not only how to eat well but also how to incorporate a

healthy diet into their own lives.


Albany Must Take the M.T.A. Seriously

John Petro

John Petro is a consultant on New York City public policy.

UPDATED OCTOBER 8, 2013, 12:52 PM

The first step toward solving a problem is admitting there is a problem. Governor Andrew

M. Cuomo and the state legislature, who are responsible for the M.T.A.'s finances, need to

admit that there’s a problem with the M.T.A. The most obvious symptom: It is drowning

in debt. The M.T.A.'s future is in their hands, and any solution to the authority's debt

problem must begin in Albany.

Cuomo tends to ignore the M.T.A. and mass transit in general. With the exception of the

few weeks after Hurricane Sandy, the governor hardly ever mentions the M.T.A. He has

excluded transit projects from one of his key infrastructure programs, the New York Works

Fund, and has refused to include a transit connection in plans for a new Tappan Zee bridge.

If he has any plans for the M.T.A. and its future, the public has yet to hear them.

When they mention it at all, state lawmakers tend to treat the M.T.A. as a punching bag or

as a piggy bank.

But maybe being ignored is preferable to being noticed. Albany tends to treat the M.T.A.

as a punching bag or as a piggy bank. In 2010, Albany lawmakers raided $120 million from

“dedicated” M.T.A. funds to plug holes in the state budget. Elected officials feign outrage

at fare hikes, but are the ones ultimately responsible for them.

Even worse, state and local officials tend to obstruct the M.T.A.’s plans to improve service,

like rolling out “select bus service” to more city neighborhoods. In Harlem, State Senator

Bill Perkins and the City Council member Robert Jackson stymied plans for a new rapid

bus line, which would have benefitted 32,000 riders a day. And a balanced plan to reduce

tolls for drivers outside Manhattan (in exchange for East River tolls) has received no

attention from the governor or the legislature. The plan would raise money for transit while

lowering tolls on river crossings.

State leaders need to realize that the M.T.A. is one of the state’s greatest assets and drivers

of economic development, right up there with the state university system. With the right

kind of attention from Albany, workable solutions can be found. The cost of capital projects

must come down; projects here tend to cost several times more than overseas. A new


contract with the transit union must be negotiated. And Albany must get a handle on the

M.T.A.’s debt. All this is possible, but not until Albany admits there is a problem.

The Next Mayor of New York Needs to Create More Bike Lanes

Nicole Gelinas

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. She is on

Twitter.

UPDATED AUGUST 29, 2013, 4:00 PM

New York City is coming off a mega-project construction spree. The next mayor will help

cut ribbons on the No. 7 subway to Manhattan's far West Side, the Fulton Center transit

hub downtown and the first phase of the Second Avenue subway.

The next mayor will have to expand bikeshare beyond Midtown to Upper Manhattan, the

Bronx and Queens and further into Brooklyn.

But the next mayor will also watch as the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority

has to confront the debt that financed all that blasting and tunneling. As the M.T.A. focuses

on paying for its beneath-the-streets projects, the city can make up some slack by doing

what Bloomberg has been doing for half a decade: rethinking the streets themselves.

The streets are finite space. The goal is to get as many people as possible using them

efficiently and safely. The common-sense way to use the streets is not to clog them with

passenger cars that go nowhere fast. Instead, it's to make more room for safe, gridlock-free

walking and bicycling to ease growing demand for mass transit.

The demand is there. Since the city started Citibike in May, more than 66,000 people have

bought annual passes. Daily ridership has topped over 41,000.

If 10,000 of these people are using bikes instead of subways, the M.T.A. no longer has to

worry about 10 subway trains each day, which is important when parts of the subway

system, like the No. 4, No. 5 and No. 6 trains on the East Side, are over capacity.

The next mayor will have to expand bikeshare beyond Midtown to Upper Manhattan and

the Bronx, as well as to Queens and further into Brooklyn. He or she will also have to carve

out more bike lanes. This involves angering a powerful minority — New Yorkers who are

driven around. The next mayor must be willing to confront these special interests as the

current mayor has.


Fall in Fortunes for Pennsylvania Attorney General

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The question before Pennsylvanians is this: Is Kathleen G. Kane,

the first woman to be elected as the state’s attorney general, the victim of angry men who

targeted her after she exposed their pornography habits?

Or are Ms. Kane’s problems — she standsaccused by a grand jury of a bevy of crimes —

the self-imposed travails of a political comet who rose from obscurity to eminence, only to

be undone by her own temperament and inexperience?

Last year, a special prosecutor charged that Ms. Kane, a Democrat, had violated secrecy

rules by leaking information to a newspaper concerning an investigation by her Republican

predecessor into the finances of a Philadelphia civil rights leader. Late last month, a grand

jury recommended that Ms. Kane be charged with perjury, false swearing, official

oppression and obstruction concerning that case.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a county prosecutor from filing

charges, pending a hearing in March in that court. Ms. Kane’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, noted

that there is no charge of illegally leaking grand jury information, which he said cast doubts

on the strength of the case against her.

Ms. Kane, 48, places blame for her legal troubles on former prosecutors in the attorney

general’s office whose work on the child sexual abuse case at Pennsylvania State

University she impugned during her campaign and whose explicit emails she found and

exposed once in office. Further, she refused to prosecute a public corruption case that one

of them had helped build before she arrived.

“This all started because of retaliation against me for doing my job,” Ms. Kane said in an

interview. “There is no doubt they are angry with me.”

Regardless of fault, Ms. Kane’s descent is the swiftest and steepest in memory, even in a

state where corruption in politics is as common as the housefly. Former Kane staff

members, elected officials and even her supporters say her problems stem largely from her

inexperience in management and missteps in judgment.

Ms. Kane’s troubles are a deep disappointment to Democrats, who saw her as a rising star

and potential challenger next year to the Republican senator, Patrick J. Toomey, and to

female politicians, who see their ranks as too thin here. They have also enraged many

prosecutors who believe that she has tainted the profession.


“Pennsylvania on the statewide level has for the most part been a white male game, and

there was some hope that a Democrat and woman was what the state needed,” said Alan

C. Kessler, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser who helped get Ms. Kane elected. “But

sometimes when you don’t cultivate people you can find yourself alone.”

Unlike the majority of elected Democrats here, long embedded in the party infrastructure,

Ms. Kane was a relatively unknown assistant district attorney in Lackawanna County when

she decided to run for attorney general in 2012.

Bolstered by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton — Ms. Kane had volunteered for Mrs.

Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and her husband, Chris Kane, was a big donor —

she centered her campaign largely on her predecessor’s handling of the Jerry Sandusky

sexual abuse case at Penn State.

Ms. Kane beat the favored establishment candidate in the primary and crushed her

Republican opponent, getting more votes in the commonwealth than President Obama and

Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat.

She quickly drew national attention when she refused to defend the state’s same-sex

marriage ban in federal court. Here in the capital, she wooed members of both parties,

getting budget increases at a time of financial distress for programs like mobile crime units.

But even as she was wowing, Ms. Kane campaigned relentlessly against political enemies,

a drive that began during the elections and seemed to consume her office after victory.

The day she was sworn in, Ms. Kane authorized a team to go into the office of Frank Fina,

a prosecutor in the attorney general’s office who had led the Sandusky investigation, to

seize his hard drive, even though he had already resigned. The investigation into what she

said was the slowness of Mr. Sandusky’s prosecution proved to be dicey for Ms. Kane —

at one point she suggested that new victims would materialize, but none did.

In the process, Ms. Kane exposed pornography found in the emails of other employees of

the office, many with connections to Mr. Fina, who declined to be interviewed for this

article.

At one point, Ms. Kane went on national television to say that some of the emails contained

pornographic images of children, a felony crime, a charge for which her office later

admitted it had no evidence. In the end, four employees were fired, and a State Supreme

Court justice linked to the emails resigned.


Saying that it was improper and racist, Ms. Kane also scrapped an investigation that began

under Mr. Fina in which Democratic state lawmakers, all black, were caught on audio and

video accepting cash and gifts in exchange for votes. The case was then taken up by Mr.

Fina’s new boss — Seth Williams, the district attorney of Philadelphia — after she publicly

taunted him about his interest.

“I grew up in Philadelphia,” Mr. Williams said. “I am the first African-American district

attorney in the history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and I know too well that the

criminal justice system has been replete with injustice and racism. To have this person

throw gasoline on a fire for no reason was just astonishing.”

Ms. Kane says she does not regret the choice. “Mr. Williams has every right to his own

opinion,” she said. “I exercised my prosecutorial discretion.” When The Philadelphia

Inquirer wrote articles about her unusual decision on the corruption case, she went to its

editorial office with a libel lawyer, without notifying her communications staff.

Ms. Kane, who during a telephone interview quoted Mother Teresa, Winston Churchill and

Bruce Springsteen, is short on supporters these days, and the new Democratic governor,

Tom Wolf, has been carefully neutral.

Former Gov. Edward G. Rendell said that the grand jury recommendation was itself leaked,

underscoring what he believes to be the absurdity of the case against Ms. Kane.

“To think we may be indicting the attorney general of this state for a grand jury leak that

became public knowledge because The Philadelphia Inquirer got a leak of a sealed

presentment is just a joke,” added Mr. Rendell, a former Philadelphia district attorney, who

said Ms. Kane’s good work had been overshadowed. “Would it probably have been better

if she’d had some administrative experience before this job? Yes. But so could have

President Obama.”

Ms. Kane said that she would not resign, and that the truth about the campaign against her

would soon be revealed, though she declined to discuss specifics, citing legal concerns.

“The people I care about the most, the people of Pennsylvania, support me,” she said.

“Everywhere I go, even in the restroom on the turnpike, people recognize me, and every

person says the same thing: ‘We see this for what it is worth. It’s sickening. Hang in there.’

”


Still, political operatives wonder which Democrat might be waiting in the wings to replace

her. “I have a great job in Philadelphia,” said Mr. Williams, among those often mentioned.

“If the governor called me, I’d have to think about it.”


Train Crash Kills 7 in Worst Accident in History of Metro-North

A crowded Metro-North Railroad train passing through Westchester County at the height

of the evening rush on Tuesday slammed into a sport-utility vehicle on the tracks at a

crossing, creating a fiery crash and explosion that killed seven people, injured a dozen and

forced the evacuation of hundreds. It was the deadliest crash in the railroad’s history.

Passengers were temporarily stranded after evacuating the train, as its front car continued

to release billowing smoke into the cold night air. Service was suspended on the Harlem

line on Tuesday night as firefighters responded to the smoking car and officials said they

were investigating what had led to the crash.

The train hit the S.U.V., a black Jeep Cherokee, in the crossing at Commerce Street in

Valhalla, N.Y., around 6:30 p.m., officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority

said. The driver of the vehicle and six people on the train were killed, Gov. Andrew M.

Cuomo said after touring the scene late Tuesday.

“This is a truly ugly and brutal sight,” he said. Mr. Cuomo said the car was stopped on the

tracks and the crossing gates were down when it was hit by the train, resulting in a fire that

consumed the vehicle and the first car of the train. The train pushed the S.U.V. about 400

feet, and the explosion caused the third rail of the track to go through the front train car,

Mr. Cuomo said.

Passengers were evacuated through the back of the train. About 400 of them were taken to

a local rock-climbing gym for shelter, where buses were to take them to the next working

station, said Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for the authority.

Ten people were seriously injured and two others had injuries that were not life threatening,

Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, said. They were taken to local hospitals.

The locomotive engineer on the train was among the injured. One passenger, Scott Miller,

45, said he was riding in the second car of the train when he heard a bang.

“The train screeched to a halt, and you immediately started smelling smoke,” he said.

“People started screaming, ‘Run to the back of the train.’ ”

He grabbed his coat and bag and started walking down the aisle toward the back of the

train with other worried passengers, he said.

“It was kind of crazy,” he said. “You had firemen trying to bang open the doors. People

were jumping out of the windows.”


A worker at a nearby gym, Michael McGuinn, 22, said he saw sparks flying from the front

of the train and heard a huge crash. He said he saw the train braking and the car catching

fire.

“I knew immediately that it was a car and that it was going to be really bad,” Mr. McGuinn

said.

A short time later, he heard passengers moaning and trying to leave the train.

“I just saw a lot of dazed and confused people,” he said. “They all looked shellshocked.”

Metro-North has been under intense scrutiny after a series of crashes that killed six people

in less than a year, including a derailment in 2013 on the Hudson line that left four

commuters dead in the Bronx. A federal report released last year was highly critical of

Metro-North.

On Tuesday night, the National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to

investigate the crash.

According to preliminary information, the gates at the crossing came down on top of the

S.U.V., which had stopped on the tracks, Mr. Donovan said. The driver got out of the

vehicle to look at the rear of the car, then got back in and drove forward. Then the vehicle

was struck, he said.

Mr. Astorino said that the crash appeared to be the S.U.V. driver’s fault, not the

conductor’s.

Service on the Harlem line, which runs from Grand Central Terminal to Wassaic, N.Y., in

Dutchess County, was suspended between North White Plains and Pleasantville on

Tuesday night. The train in the crash had left Grand Central around 5:45 p.m. and was

running express, Mr. Donovan said.

The transportation authority’s chairman, Thomas F. Prendergast, said the express train

usually carried around 655 people, and can reach speeds up to 60 miles per hour.

Late on Tuesday at the snowy scene, railroad gates were lowered at the site of the crash.

Helicopters hovered above. Early on Wednesday the M.T.A. said it had set up a family

assistance center at the Mount Pleasant Town Hall in Valhalla for those affected by the

crash.

The M.T.A. said there would be major service changes to the railroad’s Harlem Line on

Wednesday morning and riders should expect delays and crowded trains. The Valhalla and


Hawthorne stations will be closed, and service north of the North White Plains station will

not operate normally.

In a statement, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said, “Our hearts go out to those

lost, we pray for those injured and our hats are tipped to the brave first responders who

came to the scene of this tragic crash so quickly.”

Mr. Schumer, who has been critical of safety measures at the railroad, added,

“At this early stage, it is premature to point any fingers of blame, but there are many

important questions that must be answered in the coming days.”

Representative Sean Patrick Maloney issued a statement: “As M.T.A. and N.T.S.B. look

into this horrific incident in the days to follow, we need to know how and why this

happened and then take real steps to prevent another tragic collision from ever recurring.”

James E. Hall, a former chairman of the safety board, said he expected investigators to

consider whether gasoline escaping from the Jeep had set the train car on fire. He said it

was unusual for a passenger train to burst into flames in a crash, but he added that “anytime

you have friction in an accident there’s a possibility of flammability.”

Mr. Hall said he would expect investigators to look into the rail cars and the difficulty

passengers might have had evacuating. He said the safety board had investigated several

train accidents in the 1990s “where evacuation was a problem.”


House G.O.P. Again Votes to Repeal Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — The House passed a bill on Tuesday to repeal the Affordable Care Act

for the first time in the new Congress, but Democrats appeared to show more zeal in

defending the law than Republicans did in trying to get rid of it.

The measure goes now to the Senate, where the majority leader, Mitch McConnell,

Republican of Kentucky, has said that the chamber will vote on legislation repealing the

health law but has not announced a schedule.

Republicans in both chambers are divided over how to replace the law and how to respond

if the Supreme Court upholds a challenge to insurance subsidies now being provided to

millions of people under the law.

The House vote, 239 to 186, generally followed party lines. No Democrats voted for repeal.

Three Republicans — Representatives Robert Dold of Illinois, John Katko of upstate New

York and Bruce Poliquin of Maine — voted against the bill.

Despite an explicit veto threat from President Obama, Republicans said the vote on

Tuesday was necessary to give new House members a chance to take a stand on the health

law, which most Republicans had campaigned against. Freshman Republicans like

Representatives Jody Hice of Georgia and Mia Love of Utah were among the most

outspoken critics of the law on Tuesday.

Democrats said it was the 56th time since 2011 that the House had voted to repeal or

undermine some or all of the law, which was adopted in 2010 without any Republican

votes.

This time the repeal vote was different because millions of Americans have gained

coverage through provisions of the law that expanded eligibility forMedicaid and

subsidized private insurance for low- and middle-income people.

The chief sponsor of the repeal bill, Representative Bradley Byrne, Republican of

Alabama, said opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans had unfavorable views

of the law.

“I don’t believe Obamacare can be fixed through piecemeal reforms,” Mr. Byrne said. “The

only way to get rid of this harmful law is to repeal Obamacare in its entirety.”


Republicans said the law was driving up insurance premiums, burdening consumers with

high out-of-pocket costs and leading some employers to cut back workers’ hours so that

employers would not have to pay for their coverage.

Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said the vote was “a complete

waste of time” because Mr. Obama would reject the bill and Congress could not override

his veto.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, called the bill

frivolous.

“Republicans,” she said, “are baying at the moon. Instead of proposing any good

suggestions they may have to improve the Affordable Care Act, they are baying at the

moon.”

Just moments before the House began its debate, Mr. Obama met at the White House with

10 people who he said had benefited from the health care law.

“This is working not just as intended, but better than intended,” Mr. Obama said. Why, he

asked, was it such a priority for Republicans in Congress to take insurance away from

cancer patients and others who were benefiting from the law?

Continue reading the main story


Representative Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania, angrily disputed the suggestion

that “somehow we are taking something from somebody.”

“It’s not the Republican Party that disapproves of the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Kelly said.

“It’s the American people.”

Democrats relished the fight, citing tangible evidence that the law was working.

“Today we’ve gone back to the Republicans’ old songbook — yet another vote to repeal

Obamacare,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois. “But let me warn

them. They do this at their peril. Tens of millions of Americans, many insured for the first

time, and others who can finally afford insurance will not give it up without a fight. The

war against Obamacare is over, and Obamacare has won.”

The bill directs four House committees to report legislation to replace the Affordable Care

Act.


Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, acknowledged that “there has not

been a unified Republican position” on how to replace the health care law or respond if the

Supreme Court upholds the challenge to subsidies in states using the federal insurance

exchange.

Until now, Mr. Cole said, House Republicans did not have to specify an alternative to the

2010 health law because “we knew it would not get through the Senate” when Democrats

controlled that chamber.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of plaintiffs challenging the subsidies — a decision is

expected this year — “it will destroy health insurance exchanges in 30-odd states in the

blink of an eye,” Mr. Cole said, adding that Republicans needed to be prepared for that

possibility.

Republicans have dozens of proposals to change the health law, but in describing their

plans on Tuesday, they stuck mostly to general principles.

“House Republicans are developing patient-centered solutions, which preserve personal

freedom, expand choice and allow people to keep the doctor and health insurance plan they

like and trust,” said Representative Tom Graves, Republican of Georgia.


Lawsuit Seeks to Legalize Doctor-Assisted Suicide for Terminally Ill

Patients in New York

A group of doctors and terminally ill patients are asking New York courts to declare that

doctor-assisted suicide is legal and not covered by the state’s prohibition on helping people

take their own lives.

Under longtime interpretations of state law, a doctor who helps a terminally ill patient die

by providing a fatal dose of medication can be prosecuted under the manslaughter statute,

which covers anyone who “intentionally causes or aids another person to commit suicide.”

The lawsuit, to be filed Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, contends that

the law was intended to prevent someone from, for instance, helping a lovesick teenager

commit suicide, but not to stop a doctor from helping a mentally competent, terminally ill

patient die.

The plaintiffs also argue that because doctors are already allowed to help terminally ill

patients die in some circumstances, such as when they remove life support, the fact that

they cannot hasten death for other terminally ill patients violates the equal protection clause

of the State Constitution.

“What we will be helping the court to see is there are many instances where patients under

existing law in medicine can invite medical conduct which precipitates death,” Kathryn L.

Tucker, lead counsel in the case and executive director for the Disability Rights Legal

Center, said this week. “Yet it is somewhat random whether any given patient will fall into

that category.”

Assisted suicide — advocates prefer the term “aid in dying” — is legal in only a few states,

including Montana, Washington, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont.

Kathleen M. Gallagher, director of pro-life activities for the New York State Catholic

Conference, said that while she had not seen the court papers, the conference was generally

opposed to assisted suicide. “We would make the distinction — and there are longstanding

distinctions which are moral and medical and legal — between letting someone die a

natural death and deliberately hastening someone’s death by giving them a lethal dose of

drugs,” Ms. Gallagher said.

Ms. Gallagher said that permitting assisted suicide would undermine the physician’s role

as a healer, and could eventually be used as the most financially expedient option. “It

forever changes the patient-physician relationship,” she said.


Samuel Gorovitz, a professor of philosophy at Syracuse University who has written

extensively about biomedical ethics, said the lawsuit struck him as an effort to circumvent

the law by people who thought “that is easier than changing it.”

Dr. Gorovitz was part of a 1994 report on assisted suicide by the state’s Task Force on Life

and the Law, which decided that the law should not be changed. Still, he said that, without

expressing his own opinion on the topic, it might be ripe for review because of experience

with assisted suicide in other states and countries and because of advances in medicine.

The plaintiffs — three patients, four doctors, a nurse and End of Life Choices New York

— are suing the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the district attorneys

who are charged with upholding the law in Westchester, Monroe, Saratoga, Bronx and

New York Counties, where the plaintiffs live and practice.



Sara Myers, one of the patients, has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s

disease. She uses a wheelchair. Her arms are paralyzed, her breathing and talking are

compromised, and though she can still swallow, she has to be fed.

Ms. Myers, 60, did not know precisely when she might want help dying. “The line in the

sand is constantly moving,” she said in an interview. But she added, “Knowing you have a

choice means you don’t have to use it.”

One of the physician plaintiffs, Timothy E. Quill, became a pioneer in the movement when

he published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1991, describing how

he prescribed a lethal dose of sleeping pills for a leukemia patient. A grand jury declined

to indict him.

He challenged the New York law on constitutional grounds, and the case went to the United

States Supreme Court, which rejected the challenge in 1997. The lawsuit to be filed

Wednesday does not raise any federal issues.

Dr. Quill, who is head of palliative care at the University of Rochester Medical Center,

said he recently had a patient whose bones were breaking from advanced cancer, and

consciously stopped eating and drinking. “It took him about 10 days to die,” Dr. Quill said.

“You have to be incredibly disciplined to do it.”


On the legislative front, State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, has proposed

a law that would permit doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients and is

seeking co-sponsors. Mr. Hoylman has said he was inspired by Brittany Maynard, 29, a

California woman with terminal brain cancer who moved to Oregon so she could die under

that state’s law. Through videos posted on YouTube, she became a public face of the “death

with dignity” movement, and died in November of an overdose of barbiturates at her home

in Portland.

Correction: February 3, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Kathleen M. Gallagher of the New

York State Catholic Conference. She is director of pro-life activities, not anti-abortion

activities.


Senate Democrats Block Republicans’ Homeland Security Bill

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a Republican bill that would

finance the Department of Homeland Security, objecting to a measure that would have

gutted President Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration. The vote set up an

urgent confrontation over the department, which will see its funding run out at the end of

the month.

The bill, passed by the House recently, would have revoked the president’s action that

provides legal protection for as many as five million undocumented immigrants, including

children. Democrats said that was unacceptable, and Mr. Obama has promised to veto any

legislation that reversed his directives on immigration.

The showdown over the $40 billion measure is most likely the first of many, as Democrats

turned to procedural moves to stop votes much as Republicans did when they were in the

minority. On Tuesday, Republicans blamed Democrats for the vote, which was 51 to 48,

to block the bill from coming to the Senate floor.

“If they’re going to dig their heels in and say, ‘We’re going to refuse to fund the

Department of Homeland Security,’ I think they’re going to be held accountable for that,”

said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, warned, “Democracy

doesn’t work if you don’t debate.”

But congressional Republicans now find themselves scrambling to fund the agency before

it runs out of money on Feb. 27 while also placating their most conservative members, who

believe that the president has overstepped his constitutional authority and that the

Homeland Security bill is their best leverage to fight back.

“Nobody really has a strategy yet, I’m sorry to say,” said Senator John McCain, Republican

of Arizona. He said he had been involved in at least 20 discussions over the last 72 hours

about funding the agency. But he added, “We cannot shut down the Department of

Homeland Security.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, is expected to try to bring the

bill back for another vote, complete with amendments that Democrats will oppose. But

lawmakers in both parties acknowledge privately that they will have to produce at least a

Plan B to ensure the security agency does not run out of money.


Republicans have yet to coalesce around an alternative, but several lawmakers emerged

from a closed-door lunch on Tuesday talking about a spending bill that would repeal Mr.

Obama’s 2014 executive immigration order, but leave untouched his 2012 order providing

legal protections to the undocumented immigrants brought here as children and known as

Dreamers. Many Senate Republicans were increasingly opposed to the amendment to roll

back the protections for Dreamers, which they thought made them look too harsh.

The plan, proposed by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, had broad support

from Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of his conference’s most

outspoken immigration opponents. Mr. Cruz’s office stressed that the senator’s first

preference is simply to pass the House legislation.



“The 2014 order is an extraordinary broad executive order that flies in the face of

congressional action,” Ms. Collins said.

Senate Democrats have signaled that they do not expect to support anything other than a

bill that only deals with funding the agency, and will continue to block any attempts to

bring up the current legislation.

“That’s like haggling over the price of the ransom with hostage takers,” said Senator

Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. “We’re not going to do it.”

Speaker John A. Boehner also told his conference in the House last week that he was taking

the first step toward possible litigation against Mr. Obama over the president’s unilateral

immigration actions — a move that could help provide the necessary cover to pass a clean

funding bill.

Another possible move includes passing a short-term funding extension for the agency, as

Congress did last year, and postponing the fight for another few months.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations

Committee, took to the Senate floor Tuesday to express her “shock” that she was

supporting a procedural maneuver to prevent a spending bill from coming to a vote. But

she called on her Republican colleagues to support a “clean” bill to fund the agency.

“The program is to protect America, not to protect a political party and its partisan points

on immigration,” she said, citing cybercriminals, terrorists, drones and even White House


fence jumpers as reasons the agency needs to be funded immediately. “Our job is to protect

the homeland of the United States of America.”

For the second day in a row, the president also called on Republicans to fund the

department, arguing that they were imperiling the nation’s security because of a partisan

dispute.

“The notion that we would risk the effectiveness of the department that is charged with

preventing terrorism, controlling our borders, making sure that the American people are

safe, makes absolutely no sense,” Mr. Obama said at the White House, where he was

meeting with his cabinet.

House Republicans, who already passed their own legislation to fund the department last

month, seemed to relish passing the responsibility to the other chamber.

“It’s time for Senator Cruz and Senator Sessions and Senate Republicans and Senate

Democrats to stand with the American people and to block the president’s action,” Mr.

Boehner said, referring, in addition to Mr. Cruz, to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of

Alabama.

Walker’s Wisconsin Budget Has a National Message

Gov. Scott Walker, a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination, on

Tuesday proposed a new spending plan for Wisconsin that relies on borrowing and

spending cuts, including deep reductions to state universities, and steers clear of tax

increases.

Mr. Walker called for drug testing for people applying for some public assistance; the

merging of several state agencies and the elimination of 400 state jobs, some of which are

vacant; and an end to a cap on students’ attending private schools with taxpayer-funded

vouchers.

His proposal came as an answer to recent revenue estimates that suggested Wisconsin could

fall $928 million short by mid-2017, but also as a mission statement for Republican voters

beyond Wisconsin.

“Our plan will use common-sense reforms to create a government that is limited in scope

and ultimately more effective, more efficient and more accountable to the public,” Mr.

Walker told lawmakers and other officials in a speech in Madison, the capital.


Mr. Walker came to national prominence in 2011 largely because of his first statewide

budget proposal, which relied on cuts to collective bargaining rights and increased health

and pension costs for most public workers to help solve an expected budget gap. His latest

proposal, which contemplates spending about $68 billion over two years starting this

summer, quickly drew its share of critics, especially among those with ties to the state’s

university system. But the address seemed muted compared with four years ago, when

demonstrators could be heard screaming and pounding drums outside the legislative

chamber as Mr. Walker spoke.

Mr. Walker’s proposal calls for cutting about $300 million, or 13 percent, in state funds

from the University of Wisconsin System, which includes 13 four-year universities and

enrolls some 180,000 students. Mr. Walker’s plan would also take the unusual step of

removing the university system from direct state control to a “quasi-governmental”

authority that could act autonomously on issues of personnel, procurement, capital projects

and tuition.

As word spread in recent days that proposed cuts were coming, some in the university

system expressed deep concern, likening the focus on the universities to Mr. Walker’s

earlier clashes with public-sector labor unions. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

the Faculty Senate this week condemned the proposal. Students said they intended to

organize opposition.

Mr. Walker’s proposal needs approval from the State Legislature, which is controlled in

both chambers by his fellow Republicans. Some of them voiced uncertainty about Mr.

Walker’s suggestion that repairs for the state’s roads be paid for, in part, by borrowing $1.3

billion over the coming years. Mr. Walker rejected suggestions that he instead call for a

higher gas tax. His office said the level of new bonding would actually be the lowest for

the state in a decade.

Mr. Walker, who has often cited his record of lowering income taxes during his first four

years in office, proposed no significant tax increases, and said the state’s funding should

allow a typical homeowner to pay less in property taxes two years from now.


Economics Makes Strange Bedfellows

Ali Wyne

Ali Wyne is an associate of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and

International Affairs and a contributing analyst at Wikistrat. He is also a coauthor of "Lee

Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World."


The U.S. is in relative decline, not absolute decline. Indeed, its demographic outlook, its

progress on major trade initiatives like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and its breakthroughs

in fields like natural gas and big data — among other factors — suggest that it may be

poised for a renaissance.

The collective footprint of the U.S. and China requires them to cooperate. Together, they

are home to nearly a quarter of humanity and account for a third of gross world product.

U.S. revitalization and Chinese ascendance are not mutually exclusive; nor must they

become so. Beyond absorbing a fifth of Chinese exports, the U.S. largely underpins the

maritime commons through which vital commodities flow to China; China holds almost 8

percent of total U.S. debt and is America’s third-largest export market. Even if the U.S.

and China were not so interdependent, the size of their collective footprint would require

them to cooperate on the world’s most pressing challenges. Together, they are home to

nearly a quarter of humanity and account for a third of gross world product.

Despite such realities, their strategic preferences render them competitors: while the U.S.

and China appreciate the imperative of avoiding conflict, each is accustomed to

preeminence, not cohabitation and coevolution with a near equal. The U.S. has had the

largest economy for well over a century and the largest defense budget for roughly 70

years. China, meanwhile, was once the “Middle Kingdom” in the Asia-Pacific, long the

focal region of geopolitics. It regards the past 250 years or so of Western predominance as

a deviation from historical patterns.

U.S.-China competition is most apparent in the Asia-Pacific, where China is drawing its

neighbors into its economic orbit and constraining the U.S. Navy’s ability to operate within

the second “island chain” (connecting the Aleutian Islands, Guam and Papua New Guinea).

It is also increasing in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, two regions that appear to

have calculated that they can better sustain their rapid growth by playing the two giants off

of one another rather than “picking” one.


As it approaches strategic parity with the U.S., China will likely become more assertive in

shaping the norms, rules and institutions of the international system, with important

consequences for humanitarian intervention and conflict resolution.


Disney and Other Big Brands Need to Address the Real Challenges to

Outsourcing

Michael H. Posner

Michael H. Posner, the former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor

at the U.S. State Department, is a professor of business and society at New York

University's Stern School of Business.

MAY 2, 2013

Some have praised Disney’s decision to pull out of Bangladesh as a step forward for

workers’ rights. It's not.

Disney’s departure does nothing to address the real challenges, which require a

commitment by big global brands to stay in places like Bangladesh and be part of a

collective effort to protect the well-being of factory workers.

A senior Disney executive justifies the company’s action by asserting that pulling up stakes

in Bangladesh is “the most responsible way to manage the challenges associated with our

supply chain.” But Disney’s departure does nothing to address the real challenges, which

require a commitment by big global brands to stay in places like Bangladesh and be part

of a collective effort to protect the well-being of factory workers.

Ask the workers in those factories, mostly young women, what they want. They will tell

you two things. First, they want to keep their jobs, desperately. Bangladesh is one of the

poorest countries in the world, and the rapid expansion of the garment sector in recent years

has put food on the table for many, lifting families out of extreme poverty. Second, they

want to be treated with dignity, which begins with going to work in a safe and secure

environment.

To address these reasonable aspirations, global brands like Disney need to do three things:

• Make a long-term commitment to provide jobs in places like Bangladesh and accept

responsibility for addressing workplace issues in factories producing their products;

• Commit to working with other global brands to develop shared strategies and accepted

best practices. This is not the place to compete, it’s the place where companies need to

work together;

• Disney, in cooperation with other megabrands, needs to work with governments

(including our own), civil society groups, academics and others to explore alternatives to


the current outsourcing model. Driven by the hunt for the cheapest production costs, this

model creates intense downward pressures on local factory owners and governments, and

limits rather than encourages needed reforms.


China, Japan and South Korea Need to Stand Up to North Korea

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State

University and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author, most recently, of

“American Umpire.”

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 4, 2013, 10:22 AM

America has an interest in countering North Korea’s nuclear threat — especially since Kim

Jong-un pinned a target on our back — but its immediate neighbors have a greater stake.

China, Japan and South Korea should be encouraged to rank this problem No.1.

China, Japan and South Korea should be encouraged to rank North Korea problem No.1.

The best news is that China co-authored last week’s Security Council resolution. Li

Baodong, China's envoy to the U.N., told reporters, “We are formally committed to

safeguarding peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.” If North Korea continues on its

present path, Japan and South Korea may feel compelled to develop nuclear weapons. The

last thing in China’s interest as the regional power is to have three nuclear states on its

borders. Of all nations involved in this problem, China has the greatest capacity to bring

resolution. Washington should encourage Beijing to play bad cop, for once, rather than

volunteer for police duty itself. If China follows through on sanctions and cuts off oil to

Pyongyang, it’s "case closed."

Japan has interests at stake, too. It is the world’s fourth-largest trading nation and can ill

afford a regional conflict. What can it do? The Chinese people don't believe Japan has ever

made an unequivocal, written apology for its wartime aggression. Japan needs its own

Willy Brandt: the brave chancellor who worked overtime to mend fences with Germany’s

former victims and thereby helped end the cold war in Europe. Japan tries to be a good

neighbor, but needs to think harder about how to close this chapter. An explicit ban on

ministerial visits to the offensive Yasukuni Shrine honoring war criminals would be a place

to start. It might allow Japan and China to work together as a nutcracker on North Korea,

and bring the cold war to an end in that region, too. Japan’s alternative is to do nothing,

and continue its relative decline as an Asian leader.

What can South Korea do? It has become rich during the years that the United States

guaranteed its existence. As a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. spends twice

as much on defense as its ally does. What this has bought the United States is the animosity


of both Koreas. A survey of South Korean military cadets in 2004 found that a greater

percentage ranked the United States as the “country’s main enemy” than they did North

Korea. Young Americans who teach English in South Korea find signs on some restaurants

saying “no foreigners allowed.” If South Korea took over more of its own defense,

Americans might be better appreciated, and North Korea would find it harder to justify its

nuclear arsenal against the “imperialistic” West.

The U.S. has provided stalwart leadership in Asia since World War II, but good leaders

develop new ones. Here is an opportunity.


Dual Citizenship: As It Should Be

Peter Spiro

Peter Spiro is a law professor at Temple University and a contributor to the international

law blog Opinio Juris. He is writing a book about dual citizenship.


There was a delicious irony in having a conservative like Michele Bachmann point the way

on a post-modern phenomenon like dual citizenship. Dual citizenship is an irreversible

incident of globalization. Its acceptance appropriately recognizes multiple national

identities in a more mobile world.

Dual citizenship has never been illegal under U.S. law. The U.S. historically relied on the

laws of other countries to police the status. But the rest of the world has moved to embrace

dual citizenship to the end of cementing ties to prosperous emigrant populations. Nineteen

out of the top 20 source countries for immigrants now allow their citizens to maintain the

status even as they naturalize in the United States.

The overwhelming majority of new Americans are 'ampersand Americans.'

The overwhelming majority of new Americans are “ampersand Americans,” retaining not

just the sentimental but also the formal tie to their homelands.

Native-born Americans who move to other countries, meanwhile, will often acquire

citizenship in their new country of residence while retaining their U.S. passports. An

increasing number of Americans are reestablishing ties to ancestral homelands while they

remain in place here. That was the case with Bachmann’s husband, whose parents

emigrated from Switzerland. Thousands are acquiring Irish and Italian citizenship on the

basis of a grandparent birth. The descendants of Jews who fled the Nazi regime are

reacquiring German citizenship. And those born today to “mixed status” parents are no

longer forced to choose between them.

As a political matter, efforts to outlaw dual citizenship have gone nowhere. The issue does

not map out onto putatively parallel debates about immigration. Although many Americans

now have dual citizenship on both sides of the southern border, Mexico does not cast a

long shadow on the question. Powerful constituencies across the political board accept the

quiet transformation of the status from anomaly to commonplace.


That’s as it should be. Dual citizenship poses few concrete problems as the world moves

away from zero-sum competition among states. Acceptance of the status allows the many

individuals with multiple national attachments to actuate those identities. In this respect,

dual citizenship represents a kind of freedom of association, a form of voluntary affiliation

to be protected, not condemned.


Scientists discover organism that hasn't evolved in more than 2 billion

years An international team of scientists has discovered the greatest absence of evolution ever

reported -- a type of deep-sea microorganism that appears not to have evolved over more

than 2 billion years. But the researchers say that the organisms' lack of evolution actually

supports Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The findings are published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists examined sulfur bacteria, microorganisms that are too small to see with the

unaided eye, that are 1.8 billion years old and were preserved in rocks from Western

Australia's coastal waters. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the bacteria look

the same as bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago -- and that both sets of

ancient bacteria are indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found in mud off of the

coast of Chile.

"It seems astounding that life has not evolved for more than 2 billion years -- nearly half

the history of Earth," said J. William Schopf, a UCLA professor of earth, planetary and

space sciences in the UCLA College who was the study's lead author. "Given that evolution

is a fact, this lack of evolution needs to be explained."

Charles Darwin's writings on evolution focused much more on species that had changed

over time than on those that hadn't. So how do scientists explain a species living for so long

without evolving?

"The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes,

which is consistent with Darwin," said Schopf, who also is director of UCLA's Center for

the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. The environment in which these

microorganisms live has remained essentially unchanged for 3 billion years, he said.

"These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and

biological environment," he said. "If they were in an environment that did not change but

they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian

evolution was seriously flawed."

Schopf said the findings therefore provide further scientific proof for Darwin's work. "It

fits perfectly with his ideas," he said.

The fossils Schopf analyzed date back to a substantial rise in Earth's oxygen levels known

as the Great Oxidation Event, which scientists believe occurred between 2.2 billion and 2.4


billion years ago. The event also produced a dramatic increase in sulfate and nitrate -- the

only nutrients the microorganisms would have needed to survive in their seawater mud

environment -- which the scientists say enabled the bacteria to thrive and multiply.

Schopf used several techniques to analyze the fossils, including Raman spectroscopy --

which enables scientists to look inside rocks to determine their composition and chemistry

-- and confocal laser scanning microscopy -- which renders fossils in 3-D. He pioneered

the use of both techniques for analyzing microscopic fossils preserved inside ancient rocks.


Our thoughts are susceptible to external influence, even against our will For a recent San Francisco State University study, participants were asked to look at a

commonplace image but avoid thinking of the word that corresponds with the image or

how many letters are in that word. The task may seem simple, but the study found that

when presented with ?, for example, nearly 80 percent of people will automatically conjure

up the word "sun" and about half will quietly count to three.

This nifty little cognitive trick is not only amusing -- the study also reveals that the stream

of consciousness is more susceptible to external stimuli than had previously been proven.

This research is the first demonstration of two thoughts in the stream of consciousness

being controlled externally and against participants' will.

"Our conscious thoughts seem protected from our surroundings, but we found that they are

much more tightly linked to the external environment than we might realize, and that we

have less control of what we will think of next," said Ezequiel Morsella, associate professor

of psychology and co-author of the study.

Morsella and his team showed the study's participants 52 black-and-white images

corresponding to familiar words of varying lengths -- basic drawings including a fox, heart

and bicycle. Participants were instructed not to subvocalize (speak in the mind) each word

or how many letters the word had. On average, 73 percent subvocalized a word, and 33

percent counted its letters.

"We triggered with our experiment not one but two different kinds of unintentional

thoughts, and each thought required a substantial amount of processing," Morsella said.

"We think that this effect reflects the machinery of the brain that gives rise to conscious

thoughts. When you activate the machinery -- and it can be activated even by being told

not to do something -- the machinery cannot help but deliver a certain output into

consciousness."

The study found that people were much more likely to experience counting

subvocalizations of shorter words. For words with three letters, 50 percent of participants

reported counting. At six or more letters, the rate dropped to just over 10 percent. "It shows

you the limits of the unconscious machinery that generates conscious thoughts -- it seems

that it can't count above four or five," Morsella said. He added that the limits to the

automatic triggers are not clear, nor is it understood why they exist.

Morsella said that this research has important implications for the study of

psychopathological disorders that afflict people with uncontrollable repetitive thoughts or,


more commonly, the inability to stifle an obsession. "When people have a thought they

can't control, this machinery may be at work," Morsella said. "We're learning not only that

the brain does work this way, but that unfortunately, under most circumstances, the brain

should work like this."

While it may seem counterintuitive, Morsella argues that the mind's inability to shut out

unwanted thoughts is a good thing in most cases. "A lot of things that seem bad about the

brain reflect part of its overall architecture, which was selected through evolution because,

in most cases, it is adaptive," Morsella said.

Take guilt, for example. Just like most people can't stop themselves from subvocalizing the

word "sun" in response to an image of one, it can also be difficult to repress negative

feelings after doing something wrong. "If you could override these kinds of thoughts, it

would not be adaptive," Morsella explained. "There is a reason why we feel guilt: to change

future behavior. If you could snap your fingers and not feel guilty about something, guilt

would cease to have a functional role."


Splash down: High-speed images capture patterns by which raindrops

spread pathogens among plants Farmers have long noted a correlation between rainstorms and disease outbreaks among

plants. Fungal parasites known as "rust" can grow particularly rampant following rain

events, eating away at the leaves of wheat and potentially depleting crop harvests.

While historical weather records suggest that rainfall may scatter rust and other pathogens

throughout a plant population, the mechanism by which this occurs has not been explored,

until now.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a team from MIT and

the University of Liege, in Belgium, presents high-speed images of raindrops splashing

down on a variety of leaves coated with contaminated fluid. As seen in high resolution,

these raindrops can act as a dispersing agent, in some instances catapulting contaminated

droplets far from their leaf source.

The researchers observed characteristic patterns of dispersal, and found that the range of

dispersal depends on a plant's mechanical properties -- particularly its compliance, or

flexibility.

Lydia Bourouiba, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, says understanding the

relationship between a plant's mechanical properties and the spread of disease may help

farmers plant more disease-resistant fields.

"We can start thinking of how to smartly reinvent polyculture, where you have alternating

species of plants with complementary mechanical properties at various stages of their

growth," says Bourouiba, who is a senior author of the paper. "Polyculture is an old concept

if you look at native cultures, but this is one way to scientifically show that by alternating

plants in one field, you can mechanically and naturally reduce the range of transmission of

a pathogen during rainfall."

Tracking the fluid dynamics of outbreak

In their paper, Bourouiba and Tristan Gilet, of the University of Liege, first addressed a

widely held assumption: that pathogens coat leaves in a thin film.

The team ran experiments with dozens of types of common foliage, including ivy, bamboo,

peppermint, and banana leaves. They conducted hundreds of experiments for each type of

foliage, using 30 examples of real plant foliage and 12 artificially engineered materials. In


initial trials, the researchers simulated rainfall by running water through a container pricked

with tiny holes. The container was suspended several meters in the air, high enough for

drops to reach terminal velocity -- the speed of an actual raindrop upon impact.

The researchers captured the sequence of events as raindrops hit each leaf, using high-

speed videography at 1,000 frames per second. From these images, Bourouiba and Gilet

noted that as water fell, leaves were unable to support a thin film, instead forming drops on

their surface. The team concluded that pathogens, in turn, must rest as droplets -- not film

-- on a leaf's surface.

"That can initially seem like a small difference, but when you look at the fluid dynamics

of the fragmentation and resulting range of contamination around an infected leaf, it

actually changes a lot of the dynamics in terms of the mechanism by which [pathogens]

are emitted," Bourouiba says.

To observe such dynamic differences, the team first simulated rainfall over a flat surface

coated with a thin film. When a droplet hit this surface, it launched a crown-like spray of

the filmy substance, though most of the spray stayed within the general vicinity. In contrast,

the team found that raindrops that splashed onto leaves covered with droplets, rather than

a film, launched these drops far and wide.

From crescent moons to catapults

To examine the effect of raindrops on surface drops in more detail, the researchers

performed a separate round of experiments, in which they dotted leaves with dyed water -

- a stand-in for pathogens. They then created a setup to mimic one single drop of rain, using

lasers to delicately calibrate where on the leaf a drop would fall.

From these experiments, Bourouiba and Gilet observed two main patterns of dispersal: a

crescent-moon configuration, in which a raindrop flattens upon impact, sliding underneath

the dyed droplet and launching it up in an arc, similar to the shape of a crescent moon; and

inertial detachment, where a raindrop never actually touches a dyed droplet, but instead

pushes the leaf down, causing the dyed droplet to slide downwards, then catapult out -- a

consequence of the inertia of the leaf as it bounces back up.

After capturing hundreds of raindrop impacts on a range of leaf types, Bourouiba and Gilet

realized that whether a droplet assumes a crescent-moon or inertial detachment

configuration depends mainly on one property: a leaf's compliance, or flexibility. They

found that in general, the floppier a leaf, the less effective it was at launching a wide arc,


or crescent-moon of fluid. However, at a certain flexibility, the crescent-moon pattern

morphed into one of inertial detachment, in which fluid, in the form of larger drops than

what the crescent moon can produce, was flung further from the leaf.

From their observations, the researchers developed a theoretical model that quantitatively

captures the relationship between a leaf's flexibility, the fragmentation of the fluid, and its

resulting pattern of raindrop-induced dispersal. The model, Bourouiba says, may

eventually help farmers design fields of alternating crops. While the practice of polyculture

has traditionally relied on reducing the spread of disease by alternating plants with varying

resistance to pathogens, Bourouiba says the intrinsic mechanical properties -- not

biological immunology -- of plants could themselves help contain the spread of disease.

"If this were done optimally, ideally you could completely cut the spread to just one

neighboring plant, and it would die there," Bourouiba says. "One plant could play the role

of a shield, and get contaminated, but its mechanical properties would not be sufficient to

project the pathogen to the next plant. So you could start reducing the efficacy of spread in

one species, while still using agricultural space effectively."

Don Aylor, an emeritus scientist of plant pathology and ecology at the Connecticut

Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, Conn., says Bourouiba's results may be

particularly useful in tamping down disease in small plant populations.

"This could help set separation distances for crops of small plants, such as strawberries,

that are usually planted in close proximity," says Aylor, who did not contribute to the study.

"The farmer would also have to consider the effect of splashing on plastic mulch often used

in such crops. In summary, this is a nice study and introduces some findings that are

certainly worth following up on."


Communication Pros Are Teaching Their Secrets to Small Business It used to be that you were left to figure things out for yourself if your business didn't have

the budget for a $25,000 consultant or a couple grand per month to keep a PR firm on

retainer. Maybe you read blogs and books focused on communications, maybe you handed

the reigns over to your social media-savvy intern and hoped for the best.

But now, a handful of marketing, PR and copywriting professionals are throwing the old

model out and creating do-it-yourself online classes designed for small businesses and

entrepreneurs. Prices range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars at prices, so even

the newest businesses can afford to learn.

"We pretty quickly priced ourselves out of where we can keep doing business with the

people we started our business [for], like the mom and pop shops and the small businesses

who don't have huge budgets," said Nathan Havey, CEO of Thrive Consulting Group,

which caters to non-profits and small businesses. "We wanted to invent something that

would let us keep doing business with those folks and focus on training and developing

[their] teams."

Some of these programs are broad, like Marie Forleo's B-School, which covers nearly all

aspects of marketing your business, or Thrive Consulting Group's UThrive, which guides

clients through developing a communications plan and creating a 90-day implementation

strategy. Others hone in on specific aspects of communications, like Emily Florence's Do-

It-Yourself PR course, Braid Creative's Personal Branding course or Nikki Elledge Brown's

copywriting courses.

While nearly all of the courses offered have seasoned professionals behind them, UThrive

is also throwing a bit of science into the mix.

"UThrive is steeped in our findings from a lot of brain science research that's out there, and

… the way that purpose, higher purpose in particular, has a way of communicating directly

to the limbic brain, which is a behavior change center of the brain," Havey said. "It's an

intuitive and emotional center of the brain, so if you can tap into that and attract people that

way, they'll make up their own reasons why they want to do business with you."

UThrive walks clients through this research in their program, and helps brands find the

higher purpose within their business and figure out how to convey that "why" story to their

customers.


This core idea, teaching entrepreneurs to share their story with the world, is a common

thread in many of these classes.

"No one cares as much about your business as you do, so why not be the one to get your

name out there and share your story?" Florence said.

It's a method of teaching that seems to be paying off for some small businesses.

"We have recently had our story featured on major media outlets across the country," said

UThrive member Seth Kelley, founder of Red Tail Coffee in Fort Collins, Co. "UThrive

has allowed us to understand our mission, but more importantly all of our staff can

articulate our purpose and our story. Really knowing who we are and what we are meant

to do has given us [the] foundation to be able to take risks, grow areas and share our concept

with others."

In addition to giving clients the tools to create their own communications programs, what

many of these DIY programs offer is a community for entrepreneurs and small businesses

to share ideas and collaborate. Many classes, like B-school or the Do-It-Yourself PR

Course offer private Facebook groups for members, while UThrive has a community set

up within its course website with discussion boards, weekly advice and quarterly webinars

from the Thrive team.

"We're looking forward to the community of other users," said UThrive member Tom

McDougall, founder of 4P Foods in Washington, D.C. "We're just getting started but it'll

be cool to engage with companies across the world."

This on-going engagement seems to be what makes this new DIY trend especially

effective. These aren't just one-time classes, but the beginnings of long-term relationships

between the communications experts and their DIY clients. In UThrive's case, clients are

required to submit monthly metrics and goals to the group so everyone can be held

accountable. And in nearly all cases for these DIY products, it opens the door to further

collaborations.

"We developed our e-courses to serve creatives who would be ideal one-on-one consulting

clients but can't quite afford our rates," said Braid Creative Co-Founder Kathleen Shannon.

"And we're always thrilled when an e-course student hires us because they're already that

much more familiar with our philosophy – there's kind of a shorthand there that allows us

to dig in a little deeper and faster than if they had hired us cold."


7 Rules of Brilliant Marketing If you think marketing is all about B2B email, lead generation, social media, and

advertising campaigns, then I seriously doubt if you'll make it in the business world. Savvy

executives and business leaders get marketing. They know it's the key to business success.

Steve Jobs certainly did.

Sure, he was Apple's CEO, but more than anything, he was a consummate marketer. He

understood that, more than anything, his job was to come up with products that people

really wanted to use--even if they didn't know it themselves. He also knew that product

developers live for that sort of thing.

Indeed, Bill Davidow, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former Intel

executive said, "Marketing must invent complete products and drive them to commanding

positions in defensible market segments." He should know. He wrote the seminal book on

high-tech marketing.

David Packard, the iconic co-founder of Hewlett Packard, took an even broader view of

the significance of marketing when he famously said, "Marketing is too important to be

left to the marketing department."

Marketing and business are synonymous. Some of the most powerful business strategies

and concepts come from marketing. And they can be applied to any individual, product, or

company. Here are seven from my experience in the high-tech industry.

You only need a focus group of one. If it's the right one. Crowd sourcing and collectivism

may be popular these days, but business success is almost always the result of a simple

idea by an individual or relatively small team. Apple's executives never used focus groups.

They had themselves.

The power of positioning. In a competitive market, you either differentiate or die. Of the

relatively few things you can actually control, positioning strategy comes second only to

the product itself. How you position yourself, your products, your company, is perhaps the

most powerful and underutilized tool for differentiating anything.

Control the message. In a world of information and communication overload, controlling

the message--what you say and how you say it--is a lost art. If you can boil complex

concepts down to simple messages and stories people can connect with, that makes all the

difference. Not only does every word count, but so does how and when you say it.


The customer is and has always been king. That doesn't mean you just do what they want.

It means that you need to understand your audience, your customer base, and focus on

giving them an experience with your company, its products and services, and its people,

that will delight them and keep them coming back for more. In a world where just about

everyone is focused on themselves, that's how you stand apart.

You can't win without a defensible value proposition. If you can't articulate what you bring

to the market that nobody else has or does better than you, you won't beat the competition.

And that doesn't mean you can just BS. If it doesn't pass the smell test, if you can't say it

with a straight face, if customers don't wholeheartedly agree that it's true, forget it.

Brands still win. Bob Pittman has run everything from MTV and Nickelodeon to Century

21 and Six Flags. While he was president and COO of AOL--back when that meant

something--he said this: "Coca Cola does not win the taste test. Microsoft does not have

the best operating system. Brands win." Microsoft may not have the cache it did back then,

but you know what he meant. Some say branding is dead. Don't believe it. Nothing's

changed.

Competitive markets are a zero sum game. It's a competitive world. It takes a lot to win.

The equation that determines the success of your product, your company, even your career,

has many variables. Business is all about how effectively you use and control those

variables, many of which are described above. I guess there are other ways to win, but then,

you're just making already tough odds a whole lot tougher.


To Boost Investment, End S.E.C. Rule That Spurs Stock Buybacks

William Lazonick

William Lazonick is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell,

where he directs the Center for Industrial Competitiveness.

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 15, 2014, 10:40 AM

U.S. corporate profits abound, but for most Americans, prosperity can’t be found. Open-

market repurchases — stock buybacks — are central to the problem.

From 2004 to 2013, 454 companies in the S&P 500 Index expended 51 percent of their

profits, or $3.4 trillion, on repurchases, on top of 35 percent of profits on dividends. Of

profits not distributed to shareholders, a big chunk was parked overseas, under a tax

loophole that encourages U.S. companies not to invest at home.

More than three-quarters of compensation for the 500 highest-paid executives came from

stock options and stock awards.

The real bottom line: corporate profits are high, but corporate reinvestment is low. Yet

business investment in productive capabilities is the foundation of sustainable prosperity.

Innovative enterprises train and retain employees who work together to generate

competitive products. Profits from product sales permit higher earnings that can be

sustained over time. That’s how living standards rise, creating a broad-based middle class

like the one America used to have.

So who gains from open-market repurchases? Their sole purpose is to give a company’s

stock price a manipulative boost, and prime beneficiaries are the corporate executives who

decide to do them. In 2012, 83 percent of the $30.3 million in mean total compensation of

the 500 highest-paid executives came from realized gains from exercising stock options

and vesting of stock awards. For corporate executives, stock-based pay is a ticket to

membership in the 0.1 percent top-income club.

So why do we let executives manipulate the stock market? Back in 1981 John Shad, a Wall

Street banker and Ronald Reagan backer, became head of the Securities and Exchange

Commission. Shad, like the Chicago economists who influenced him, believed that a

deregulated stock market was good for the economy. In November 1982 the very

government agency that is supposed to regulate the stock market adopted Rule 10b-18,


which instead encourages corporations to manipulate stock prices through open-market

repurchases.

Rule 10b-18 gives corporations a “safe harbor” against charges of stock-market

manipulation if, among other things, its buybacks on any single day are no more than 25

percent of the previous four weeks’ average daily trading volume, which for many

companies can be $200 million or more in buybacks per day. Only top executives know

when buybacks are actually done, so if the corporation’s buybacks exceed the 25 percent

limit it is not likely that there will be repercussions.

My research shows that this regulatory failure is an important part of the puzzle of profits

without prosperity. Perhaps you had never heard of SEC Rule 10b-18? Well now that you

have, you might want to demand a national debate on why it exists. Along with most

economists, the S.E.C. needs to rethink the role of the stock market in the economy so that

it can distinguish rules that encourage value extraction from those that encourage value

creation. If we want to transform profits into prosperity, that’s the bigger economic debate

that needs to begin.


Keep Christmas, and Add Other Faiths’ Holy Days Khyati Y. Joshi

Khyati Y. Joshi, an associate professor of education at Fairleigh Dickinson University, is

the author of “New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race and Ethnicity in

Indian America.” She trains teachers and administrators on topics related to immigrants in

schools, race in education, and religion and schools.


As the United States’ population reaches unprecedented levels of religious diversity, it is

time for federal, state and local governments to officially recognize other religions’

holidays. For too long, the narrative on religion in the public square is that more diversity

should mean less religion – that schools must have “winter concerts” instead of Christmas

concerts, and that we should all say “Happy Holidays” at Christmastime.

The fact of the matter is that those changes are a thin veneer over the privileges that

Christians alone enjoy in the United States. Lawmakers and society should not focus on

taking Christianity out, but on bringing everyone else in.

The most important part of this dialogue is starting it, by recognizing that Christianity

already permeates all facets of society and the law. The federally recognized Christmas

holiday is just the tip of the iceberg. The advantages that Christians enjoy are broader, and

run so deep that they are virtually invisible to Christians. Christians get to live in a society

that is familiar to them and with them. They are raised with Christian ideas and images –

for whom “scripture” means one agreed-upon text, “God” is obviously singular and male,

and the Sabbath never falls on a work day.

Americans shouldn't hesitate to say 'Merry Christmas,' as long as they know when to say

'Happy Diwali,' 'Eid Mubarak' and 'Joyous Passover.'

Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Bahais and others live on the flip side of that

equation: By comparison these religions are often considered deviant, cultish and exotic.

They are spoken of in caricature, preached of as false paths, or co-opted to sell candles and

perfume. The conveniences of a Christian’s life are lost to the Hindu who must leave work

to observe a holiday or the Muslim student fainting in gym class because he’s fasting for

Ramadan. Hanukkah is elevated in status because it happens in December, near Christmas,

while more theologically significant Jewish holidays remain unfamiliar.


The solution isn’t pushing Christianity to the side, where the other religions have been

relegated. Working toward religious pluralism means adding to the religious holidays,

rituals, practices that are recognized in law and society. Christianity isn’t going anywhere.

It’s time to bring other religions into parity with it. Other religiously diverse countries, like

India, Guyana and many others, formally recognize both majority and minority religions’

holidays.

These changes probably won’t begin at the federal level. Across the U.S., school districts

are becoming the first to grapple with the issue. Many already break for the Jewish high

holy days. More recently, cities like Passaic, N.J., and Dearborn, Mich., have responded to

local residents’ needs for observing Hindu and Muslim holidays. Change will rise up from

there. Practical responses to growing religious populations will lead to dialogue and new

connections between “us” and “them.”

As that happens, we can again become a society that says “Merry Christmas” instead of

“Happy Holidays.” For that to happen, we will also need to know when it’s time to wish

our neighbors a “Happy Diwali,” “Eid Mubarak” or “Joyous Passover” – and to extend

others’ greetings as genuinely as we do our own. That’s the sound of a more perfect union.


Making a ‘Fashion Statement’ Is a Big Mistake for Men Over 40

Dan Peres

Dan Peres is the editor in chief of Details magazine.

UPDATED OCTOBER 11, 2013, 6:26 PM

Let me start by saying that I am decidedly pro fashion. I believe that men of every age

should embrace fashion. But I believe that the idea of making a “fashion statement” is a

mistake — a big mistake — particularly for men 40 and over (myself included).

Making a 'fashion statement' is a mistake — a big mistake — particularly for men 40 and

over (myself included).

Fashion should be about subtlety. It should be about fit over flair. It should be about

bespoke over bedazzling. These are rules for every man to take into consideration, but they

should take on a more non-negotiable tone for anyone who starts his day with a fiber-based

breakfast cereal.

Am I being ageist? No, just honest. Think about it: nothing stands out more than a Man of

a Certain Age taking style cues from One Direction. Jumping on every trend, and wearing

them all at once, is a recipe for disaster. At a certain age, a man should have his own fairly

well developed sense of personal style. He should know what works for him and what

doesn’t. He should know when to avoid concert tees and hyper-cropped suits and anything

with skulls.

This doesn’t mean we should be avoiding the right fashionable flourish. George H. W.

Bush seems to have the right idea. Take, for example, a recent photo I saw of the former

president (at a gay wedding, I might add) wearing a navy suit, button-down shirt and his

signature colorful socks. Now that’s how to work the proverbial “pop-of-color” into your

life.

Don’t take what I’m saying as a mandate for 40-plus men to be boring. That’s not the point.

It is, however, a gentle reminder that a whisper is always louder than a shout. Unless you

have cultivated a certain look over the years, like my friend Simon Doonan and his many

floral patterned shirts, embrace flash at your own risk. Just bear in mind that people can

tell when you’re wearing your midlife crisis on your cap sleeve.


The Brad Paisley and LL Cool J Duet Is How We ‘Do’ Race in the Age

of Obama Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American

Studies in the department of religion at Princeton University and the chairman of the Center

for African-American Studies.


This Brad Paisley and LL Cool J duet is so indicative of our times. One could even go as

far as to say that they have produced a soundtrack for how we “do” race in the Age of

Obama.

The lyrics reflect individual anxieties over personal identity and a tortuous navigation of

remembering and forgetting our nation’s racial past.

The lyrics reflect individual anxieties over personal identity and a tortuous navigation of

remembering and forgetting our nation’s racial past. Of course, collective memory is bound

up with questions of justice. What we choose to forget leaves in the shadows all those who

bear the wounds of past and present evils. So how and what we remember matters.

The uproar has been fascinating. LL Cool J has drawn particularly harsh criticism from

segments of the black community. His eagerness to forgive and to forget; his invocation of

Robert E. Lee and his view that somehow gold and iron chains are related suggest, at least

for some, a willingness to cast aside African-American history.

I wonder about this selective outrage. Robert E. Lee and gold chains aside, the basic frame

of LL Cool J’s verse has been the frame of President Obama’s racial politics. For Paisley

and LL, stereotypes by black and white Americans do equal harm. The president made a

similar move in his Philadelphia speech. LL even refers to the president’s beer summit:

“I’d love to buy you a beer, conversate and clear the air. But I see that red flag and I think

you wish I wasn’t here.” The point here is that the frame informing the song has been and

remains the frame for how we do race today.

What can get lost in all of this is Paisley’s view of Southern identity as white and his

complex negotiation of pride and shame. In some ways, remembering or forgetting gives

the South its ghostly quality: that the burdens of past deeds and present failings weigh down

the region, shadowing every facet of Southern life with anxiety masked as charm and ease.

And I say this as a child of the South.


This anxiety is heightened by the fact that the region has to bear the burden of what is, in

fact, a national sin: that the story of a racist South protects, for all Americans, the illusion

of an inherently progressive nation. Southern anxiety is a common terror experienced as

one’s own helplessness – the state of a region, and by extension a nation, haunted by its

own bloody hands and its inability to come to terms with that very fact.

Paisley’s hand wringing reminds me of this and, to that extent, he and even LL have done

us a favor.


Interracial Couples Are Still Seen as Rare

Kevin Noble Maillard

Kevin Noble Maillard is a law professor at Syracuse University and the co-editor of

"Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex and Marriage." He is on

Twitter.

UPDATED JUNE 27, 2013, 10:42 AM

Interracial relationships are scandalous because people still believe them to be rare, even

when we are all surrounded by them. These entirely normal couplings forever face a

presumption of illegitimacy or sexualization that harks back to an era where miscegenation

was illegal. In all reality, mixed race is an entirely American story, but we still see it as a

mission impossible.

Every interracial couple in the history of interracial couples knows this scenario: At a party,

they strike up a conversation with another guest. Introductions made, commonalities

identified, drinks refilled. It’s just a matter of time before the inevitable question: “How

did you two meet?”

These entirely normal couplings forever face a presumption of illegitimacy or

sexualization. Couples get used to hearing, 'How did you meet?'

No sinister subtext here. No protest. Just curiosity, because a boring story (“mutual friends”

or “same dorm”) is not enough. Surely, there must be adversity in the tale of an interracial

couple.

It’s quite different from asking a married white couple about their meet cute. Unless one

person is much older, richer or better looking than the other, there is no hidden meaning. It

is what it is. But when the people are different races, the subtext is, “it’s so fascinating that

you are together.”

People want to know because it seems improbable. The deep assumptions of racial

difference add a layer of unspoken complex questions: Do your parents approve? What do

your friends think? What will your children look like? Sure, this cloud of questions could

be entirely exploratory and innocuous, but it underscores the point that people believe

mixed race to be an anomaly rather than a norm.

Mixed relationships are sexualized, where everything mundane and normal is forgotten in

the wake of the erotic. They are scandalous because we don’t think about what the couple


does during the day. We think about what they do at night. White men can jump, if they

date a black woman. Everyone is happy in the world of Suzie Wong. Once someone has

jungle fever, they’re never going back.

Of course, race mixing is an abomination (at least in public) to the usual suspects: nostalgic

Dixiecrats, Internet trolls and extras from “Deliverance.” It’s a long, grossly unyielding

battle. But it’s harder to assess the opinions of the “normal” mainstream, where overt

discrimination is shunned. This is the majority that swears by colorblindness and equality

but can’t stop staring at mixed couples. The individuals are eclipsed by the assumptions

about them.

So perhaps the inevitable party question deserves a gratifying and expected answer. The

next time a mixed couple is asked “how did you meet,” they should respond: “Craigslist.”


Time Cards Are Passé Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah is co-founder and chief technology officer at HubSpot, an inbound

marketing software company in Cambridge, Mass.


Vacation policies are predicated on the notions that your work happens in the office, your

life happens at home and vacation is an escape from the daily stresses in both of those

places. Our company has employees who do their best work after midnight -- I happen to

be one of them -- and others who spend much of their time at the office coordinating

customers’ schedules or their own child care arrangements. We favor innovative results

over inflexible rules, and we believe doing so gives the employees the autonomy to be

awesome.

We optimize for innovative results instead of inflexible rules, and we believe doing so

gives the employees the autonomy to be awesome.

Managing, monitoring and enforcing a vacation policy takes time, energy and money.

Right now, a talented engineer somewhere is trying to figure out how she’s going to

squeeze her children’s doctor’s appointments into one afternoon or produce an entire day's

work in one morning so that she can leave work early to attend a friend’s wedding. I’d

rather have my most talented employees working on innovations that improve my

company’s core business than spending valuable time and energy micromanaging their

vacation time to fit an archaic policy.

When I tell people that our company, HubSpot, has an unlimited vacation policy, the

inevitable first question is: “Gosh, there must be so many people that abuse that policy. Do

your employees ever get any work done?" The reality is: No, people don’t abuse the policy

-- and yes, they do get work done. If we ever end up with an employee who abuses his or

her privileges, I'll know that we made a hiring mistake. I would rather fix that one mistake

than put the burden on everyone else.

Our unlimited vacation policy is part of a broader focus on trust in our culture. We call this

our Culture Code. You don’t have to ask permission to solve a problem for a customer,

pursue a brilliant idea or improve on a process that isn’t working, just do it. The same goes

for vacation -- just take it. Hire employees who expect and deserve your trust, and they’ll

prove you right.


The way in which people work has fundamentally changed, and the relationship between

the employee and employer should change too. Your employees work anytime and

anywhere, using their smartphones and managing feedback and work with cloud-based

applications. And yet, as the world rapidly changes around us, too many companies and

managers are holding on to time cards and vacation logs by saying that they maintain

productivity, encourage honesty or ensure results. The exact opposite is true. An unlimited

vacation policy benefits employees, managers and companies.


Immigration Reform: Legalized Workers Earn More and Spend More

Marshall Fitz is the director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress.

APRIL 16, 2013

Granting legal status and eventually citizenship to undocumented immigrants already

living and working in the United States would give a powerful economic and fiscal boost

to this country.

The economic logic is straightforward: legalized workers end up earning higher wages by,

among other things, pursuing jobs that best match their skills and investing in training and

education. Those opportunities translate into an average wage increase after legalization of

around 15 percent.

Legalization would increase the earnings of all Americans, provide more jobs and generate

federal, state and local tax revenues.

And this boost in wages translates into big returns. Those workers invest that earnings

surplus back into the economy by purchasing things like homes, cars and computers, and

pay a significant amount in new tax revenue. That consumption creates more demand for

goods and services, which leads to economic growth and job creation.

In fact, a recent study by my colleagues found that legalization would increase the earnings

of all Americans by $470 billion and generate on average 121,000 jobs annually, over 10

years. On top of those benefits and the additional $832 billion in cumulative gross domestic

product, legalization would generate $109 billion in federal, state and local tax revenues.

Allowing legalized workers to earn citizenship will only turbocharge these gains, as their

report demonstrated that naturalized workers earn an additional 10 percent on top of the

original 15 percent. The sooner we can put these workers on the road to citizenship, the

greater the economic returns.

To be sure, legalization and citizenship come with costs as well as benefits. But immigrants

use less in services than they contribute in taxes, and less on average than native born

Americans. That conclusion is consistent with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget

Office’s cost estimate of the last attempted immigration overhaul bill in 2007, which found

that the ratio of increases in revenues to costs was 2 to 1.


From an economic and fiscal perspective, the question we should be asking is not whether

to legalize this workforce, but how quickly we can put them on a path to citizenship.

Deals Now Make Sense, Not Just Money

Steven M. Davidoff, the "Deal Professor" for DealBook in The New York Times, is an

associate professor of law and finance at the Ohio State University.


Some eye-poppingly big transactions have been announced in the past few months,

including Michael Dell’s acquisition of Dell, the combination of Office Depot and Office

Max, and Berkshire Hathaway and 3G’s acquisition of Heinz. But while these catch our

attention, we are nowhere near a return to the go-go years before the financial crisis.

Back then, private equity firms rushed to acquire companies to take advantage of the credit

bubble and chief executives seemed to want nothing more than to take their companies

private on the cheap. Today's deal are more about building up than cashing in.

Today's mergers and acquisitions are more about building up than cashing in.

Not only the attitude but also the numbers are different. According to Dealogic, the dollar

value of U.S. mergers and acquisitions so far this year is $233 billion, more than double

last year. But there were almost 10 percent fewer deals than last year.

So, what is really going on is that we’ve had a few large transactions that have skewed the

numbers and driven bubble talk. And these big deals show how M&A has changed and that

this time may be different. Back in the Internet bubble, C.E.O.'s rushed to acquire

companies and overpaid, Time Warner’s acquisition of AOL being the most prominent of

these deals from hell. But now mergers and acquisitions are more cautious and done on a

must-need basis. C.E.O.'s and boards just do not want to take on a risky deal in this choppy

economic environment. In the case of Dell and Office Depot and Office Max, this is more

survival M&A. These companies are looking to M&A to fix their businesses. Dell, for

example, needs to restructure and wants to do so in the private sphere. Office Depot and

Office Max need to get bigger to compete with Amazon and Costco. And in Heinz’s case,

Warren Buffett and 3G are making a careful acquisition, paying a conservative price in an

area where they have previously been able to add significant value. In other words, these

transactions while disruptive are being done to create value and deal with a changing world,

good reasons why companies have historically acquired one another.


The Dell case also shows another heartening development in mergers and acquisitions:

shareholders are fighting back against what they perceive as underpriced deals. While still

rare, the rebellion going on at Dell will keep executives on their toes when they try to do

deals.

It’s likely that both of the trends highlighted will continue. This means that companies that

do deals will be forced by the economy to soberly assess the risk and not get in over the

heads. And sure, there will always be deals that don't make sense, either because they are

anticompetitive or because they are examples where chief executives are taking advantage

of their positions to take over the company. Private equity firms in particular will be

tempted to speculatively bid, since there is cheap credit still and they have lots of left over

money from the crisis. But over all, the recent uptick in large M&A deals has promise for

helping companies ride out the economic turbulence. And that’s where we’ll continue to

see the large M&A deals appear. Call it the era of cautious M&A.

Do Wall Street Ties Impede a Treasury Secretary?

Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of "After the Fall:

Saving Capitalism From Wall Street -- and Washington." She is on Twitter.

UPDATED AUGUST 2, 2013, 1:27 PM

Mr. Lew, you held a top position at Citigroup from 2006 through 2008, the years when

nation’s financial industry was careening toward crisis. In his recent book, "Bailout," Neil

Barofsky, the former special inspector general of the government’s bank bailout program,

writes that the “allure” of a high-paying private-sector job “is a powerful and pernicious

force in government service, especially … in agencies that deal with Wall Street.” You

surely remember that the former Clinton-era Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, also landed

at Citigroup. Is the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street a serious problem,

and if so, what would you do about it in your agency?

Is the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street a serious problem, and if so,

what would you do about it at Treasury?

If Citigroup were to fail tomorrow, can you say with confidence that you could counsel the

Obama administration to allow Citigroup’s bondholders and other creditors, including

derivatives counterparties, to take its losses in the marketplace, without a bailout? If not,

in what circumstances wouldn’t this course be the best route?


More than two years after President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill

into law, critics on the left and right have said it falls far short of fixing problems with the

financial system. Derivatives rules, for example, are still not finalized, and there is no

certainty on what would happen if a large insurance company like AIG failed, or is there?

Do you think Dodd-Frank needs to be strengthened?

In the past few months, Spain and Italy have taken extraordinary steps to use taxpayer

money to bail out investors in private banks. Does the U.S. government encourage such

bailout policy or discourage it? If the former, is there a danger that Europe and the rest of

the West would expect the U.S. to bail out its banks and other large financial institutions

in a future crisis, just as Europe is doing now?

The Obama White House has done little to pressure mortgage servicers to reduce the

amount that “underwater” homeowners owe on their home loans. Do you think it was fair

for the U.S. government to bail out mortgage lenders and investors but not borrowers?

We Need to Find Creative Job Options for Young and Old

Pamela Mitchell, founder of The Reinvention Institute, is the author of "The 10 Laws of

Career Reinvention: Essential Survival Skills for Any Economy."


Between 2011 and 2029, 79 million Americans will reach the traditional retirement age of

65. And with improving health trends, many people in their 50s and 60s have the capacity,

not to mention the desire, to deliver another 20 plus years of productive work — the

equivalent of a full career.

With their nest eggs decimated by the financial crisis, many boomers cannot afford to

retire. And those who can afford to stop working often don’t want to. Their challenge will

be to reinvent their careers so they can continue to earn while achieving a sense of purpose

and contribution.

We must cease viewing the labor market as a zero-sum proposition where keeping 50- and

60-year-olds means locking 20-somethings out.

Given the number of boomers who will likely remain in the workplace, we must cease

viewing the labor market as a zero-sum proposition where keeping 50- and 60-year-olds

means locking 20-somethings out. The challenge for both cohorts is to be skilled, not stuck.


By focusing on how we transfer skills, we can build solutions to create much-needed

options for both generations.

When a workforce’s most seasoned members leave, their expertise and institutional

knowledge are gone forever. People in their 20s need those departing workers’ greatest

assets — practical, job-tested skills and hard-won wisdom from weathering booms and

busts. Conversely, older workers often need to develop the enhanced technology and

communications skills necessary in today’s marketplace.

But the most important skill an older worker can learn from someone younger is that of

continuous, conscious reinvention. Rather than fruitlessly searching for a “safe” job in a

“safe” industry (neither of which exist), older workers must embrace the younger

generation’s flexible perspective. This means structuring their remaining working years as

a latticework of skill-development opportunities with multiple employers, along with

occasional side trips into entrepreneurship.

It is time to explode the myth that it doesn't make sense to offer retraining to people 55 and

older. We need to get creative about designing work to support the transfer of skills

between boomers and millennials. We should expand internships to include both older and

younger workers and incorporate specific mechanisms that facilitate the sharing of

competencies. We should also develop “executive internships” expressly tailored for

boomers. This will allow companies to reap continued dividends from the know-how of

older workers while ensuring a strong pipeline of future talent. And by doing so, both

groups will increase their marketability to employers and opportunities for landing

fulfilling work.


An Independent German Currency Will Spur Growth Charles Dumas

Charles Dumas is the chairman of Lombard Street Research in London. He is the co-author,

most recently, of "The American Phoenix: And Why China and Europe Will Struggle After

the Coming Slump."

UPDATED JANUARY 23, 2013, 5:46 PM

European Union membership has slowed the German economy and left Germans worse

off. If Italy and Spain retain the euro, this will require Germany and other “core” euro zone

countries to pay them huge subsidies. Worse, Mediterranean depression can be avoided

only if Germany generates major inflation for at least a decade.

But if Germany abandons the euro, its rising regional currency (assuming that it would

rise) will be just what Germany needs. Prolonged undervaluation of Germany’s relative

labor costs has weakened growth, and a rising exchange rate would remove imbalances.

Prolonged undervaluation of Germany’s relative labor costs has weakened growth, and a

rising exchange rate would remove imbalances.

German growth has decelerated sharply over the past decade, despite financial and export

strengths and labor market reforms. Productivity growth has been cut in half, from 2

percent in the 1990s for output per worker-hour to 1 percent over the past decade.

Meanwhile, German citizens have accepted severe wage restraints without the former

benefit of a strengthening currency, leading to negligible gains in consumer welfare. And

yet wage restraints have served German businesses well. For them, cutting waste is less

urgent, which is why worker productivity growth has slowed.

Austerity alone is not enough. To avoid a Mediterranean depression, and hugely increased

subsidy payments beyond those already committed, Germany would have to accept a

wage/price inflation spiral to rebalance its relative costs upward. But Germans hate

inflation, and the subdued world economy means there is almost no chance of them

experiencing it.

Would leaving the euro make Germany seriously uncompetitive and unable to grow? Are

Germany’s businesses so weak they need artificially low costs? On the contrary, similar to

drug abuse, keeping businesses on an artificially cheap exchange rate causes damage in the

case of an overdose. German businesses need the discipline of a higher exchange rate to

enforce cost control and productivity gains. German consumers need the lower import costs


that a rising currency would bring to raise their spending power without wage inflation.

Any excessive rise in the exchange rate could be curbed without inflation by German

monetary expansion, which the whole of Europe needs, not just Germany.

Without a euro exit, Germany would soon be in big trouble. With it, growth could return.

Science Fiction Reflects Our Anxieties

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