For more than a decade, NewWork News has surveyed the world's news having to do with life and work in the revolutionary new world economy. Over all these years, we have not made a significant effort to distinguish between straight reporting and editorial comment.

Written by Gary Johnson, NewWork News each day is more like a newspaper or magazine column than a newspaper's front page. However, nearly every item is linked to at least one original story from somebody else's "front page" so as to enable our readers easily to examine the original story without deliberate interpretation or commentary.

Some NewWork News items are highly analytical. Several of these have been gathered together for presentation below. All have been written by Gary Johnson.

Economic eye of the beholder? (Thursday, 8/3/06)
Is it any wonder that many politicians prefer to speak directly to the public, rather than be interpreted through the eyes of reporters and editors? Jeannine Aversa in Washington reports that the latest government reports reflect a thriving economy, while Zubin Jelveh only a few miles away in New York says that services and factory data are below expectations. On the other hand, Jeannine Aversa says that factory orders picked up in June, and Anne D'Innocenzio in New York says that retailers "report solid sales in July."

It's reminiscent of newspaper columnist and TV commentator George Will who, in response to current reports of global warming, likes to haul out his newspaper clipping from some years ago which trumpeted that scientists expected that the world could be heading into a new ice age. That was what some reporter and editor said at the time, but we have no idea which scientists were saying what or why.

It all suggests that there really is no substitute for people--particularly journalists, lawyers, and politicians, as well as other opinion leaders--coming to learn something about statistics and substantive disciplines such as economics and environmental science so that they can interpret data themselves.

We've said for sometime that statistics should be considered a part of basic education now, given that we are surrounded by important phenomena which are inherently statistical. Trying to think about them or talk about them without this terribly important branch of applied mathematics is like trying to talk about pharmacy while leaving out all that hard stuff about chemistry.

President Bush may share in common with some of his noisiest critics a lack of understanding of WHAT IT TAKES to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds. At the very least, one must begin with honest questions, as if one really doesn't know, because unless or until one does what it takes to know, one really DOESN'T know. Moreover, this fundamental reality is not altered, no matter how rich or how powerful a person is.

Okay, here's more about money and happiness (Wednesday, 8/2/06)
Many persons, often those who don't have much and are seeking ways to adjust to the fact that others have more, frequently point out how unimportant money really is, and may even repeat the familiar aphorism, "Money can't buy happiness." There's even been a good deal of research on the subject of whether wealthy people are really happier, on average, than persons who are not wealthy.

However, maybe we typically don't ask the right questions. Hypothetically, at least, it might seem that money often influences those things to which we attribute happiness, and that it might be more reasonable to ask about the conditions under which money, wealth, possessions, or consumption correlate with happiness. As a man said at a recent YMCA banquet in St. Paul, Minnesota, "It isn't what you HAVE, but what you DO that's important," and we might add that this includes what you do with what you have, particularly if you have a lot.

One of the founders of Yahoo! was asked how it felt suddenly to possess wealth of $10 billion. He said that he has learned that having $10 billion isn't any different from having $1 billion, and that the new money was most important to him the day he first realized that he would no longer have to scramble to find a way to meet his car payment. His work schedule didn't seem to be influenced by his new wealth, incidentally, because he seems to be one of those persons who doesn't work for money in the first place. He suggested that we was quite happy, but that his work had far more to do with it than his money.

Famed financial advisor Suze Orman offers some opinions on the money-happiness issue.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (Tuesday, 8/1/06)
Given America's long, sordid history with the primitive institution of slavery, it may be difficult to believe that the United States is not the exclusive world center of bigotry and racism. In fact, racism and xenophobia continue to be common throughout the world, and, given the vast migrations of people throughout the world now and the extent to which ancient ideas and attitudes are coming into daily collision in the modern world, these conditions seem to be central to many of the world's most bloody conflicts. The European Union focuses on conditions that can lead to greater tolerance through its European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.

Finally, a Hilton story that isn't about Paris (Sunday, 7/30/06)
Deena Beasley reports that Hilton Hotels has reached agreement with its union on a new labor contract.

Incidentally, when Conrad Hilton appeared on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show many years ago, Johnny asked him if there was anything he wanted to say to an audience of millions. Mr. Hilton replied, "Yes, please remember to put the shower curtain INSIDE the tub."

From ON a pedestal to UNDER a pedestal? (Thursday, 7/27/06)
Not long ago, every executive seemed to be trying to become the next Jack Welch. Recently, though, there has been evidence that Jack's approach to management may be going out of style, although, if you would like a contrary opinion, just ask Jack. Here's more for CNN's Betsy Morris in New York.

Incidentally, one of the things that business and public education may have in common is that fads often sweep through the business and education cultures with blinding speed. New policies and procedures often are instituted, not because they have been shown to be superior to the old, but because people who don't really know what to do often feel better if they do SOMETHING.

Not many years ago, American corporations were sending their executives to Japan to see "how the Japanese do it." That was when the Japanese economy was still regarded by many as "miraculous." However, it has been anything but miraculous during most of the time since the early 1990s.

What journalists are doing on the side (Thursday, 7/27/06)
Many companies have been shedding workers at fairly furious rates, and the big news organizations have not been exceptions. The New York Times reports on what some journalists are doing to prepare in case they receive the dreaded "pink slip" themselves. What kind of business is the author of this article starting? We don't know either.

Incidentally, small businesses on the side are nothing new for people in media. For instance, visit Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and you will see many small electrical shops, and so on. Many of these businesses are owned and operated by people who work in the movie industry whenever they can, including crew members on big-budget films.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The American Language (Saturday, 7/22/06)
Contrary to popular assumptions, Latin isn't a "dead language," it is said, because Romance languages such as Spanish, French, and Italian are really the modern versions of the Latin spoken by the common people of the Roman Empire. In fact, even during the time of Cicero, there wasn't a single dialect of Latin.

Languages evolve over time, and dialects eventually become identified as separate languages. Moreover, whether different "tongues" are regarded as different dialects or different languages can depend greatly on local circumstances. For instance, some Chinese dialects differ from one another more than English and German, both of which are Germanic languages, but because of England's special history, English also includes a fairly messy Latin "overlay." The result is a language that is hard to learn for persons whose native language is something else.

In 1921, Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken wrote an influential book an influential book called The American Language, which is now available on the Web in its entirety.

If you see Superman walking down San Diego's streets, don't be alarmed (Friday, 7/21/06)
However, if you see him flying, perhaps you should be alarmed. The big Comic-Con convention is being held in San Diego at the moment, and it has drawn (no pun intended, but not really regretted either) cartoonists and animators who are used to a lot of Wham! and Bam! in the workplace. The convention has drawn fans by the multitude as well.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science (Thursday, 7/20/06)
We've suggested a number of times that the word "science," which has been in common use only since the latter half of the 19th century, could safely be retired, if we had a suitable substitute.

As psycholinguists often say, "Words don't have meanings; instead, people have meanings for words." Unfortunately, the meanings that many people have learned for "science" are misleading and counterproductive, suggesting, among other things, that there are alternatives to science that can be equally reliable. By definition, this isn't the way scientists understand the term "science."

So many people seem to think that "science" is defined in terms of its subject matter, when, actually, it is defined by its methods. In fact, "science" is simply another name for the most effective methods presently available for arriving at trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds, whether these be referred to as "science," historical research, the gathering of evidence in court cases, journalism, or some other field.

We now know a good deal about "what it takes" legitimately to say that we "know" or to be sure about anything having to do with observable things and events in the natural world, past or present. Of course, some areas of activity require greater compromises short of "what it takes" than others; e.g., historical research vs. controlled experimentation, say, in chemistry or experimental social psychology. As a consequence, conclusions must be qualified appropriate to the compromises that are necessary. Magical thinking in any human endeavor doesn't help, though.

By whatever means, the public needs to learn far more about the nature of science in modern life. If case studies can contribute to greater public understanding, then case studies should be used. The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science is based at New York's University of Buffalo.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: PreserveNet (Wednesday, 7/19/06)
Any member of one of the growing number of families that have contained an Alzheimer's patient know how devastating memory loss can be for an individual. Similarly, whole societies and cultures can become "demented" if they lose touch with their histories. Tangible remains from the past can act as important "reality testers" and make it less likely that truly goofy ideas will be generated by a culture and persist over long periods, even over generations. PreserveNet at Cornell University organizes people over great distances in the service of historic preservation.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Society for Historical Archaeology (Monday, 7/17/06)
History isn't dead. We act according to how we perceive things, and historical context has a lot do with determining our perceptions.

The kind of perspective provided by historians is important, but so is that provided by other scholars, such as geologists and astronomers. For instance, there is overwhelming evidence that the Earth was here long before humans of any kind, let alone modern humans such as ourselves, arrived. Moreover, there is a good chance that our home planet will be here long after there is any trace that humans were ever here, with the possible exception of a few fossils.

The Society for Historical Archaeology is made up of scholars and other persons interested in societies gone by that have left both physical remains and other kinds of historical evidence.

More "old media" job cuts (Saturday, 7/15/06)
A single appearance on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show" was a career-maker for many performers who were catapulted into stardom soon after, including David Letterman and Roseanne Barr, among many others. Now, young performers are likely to have to make many appearances on both Letterman's and Leno's shows, as well as others, in order to have the same impact on public consciousness.

With hundreds of cable TV channels, iPods, video games, and movie rentals all competing for home information and entertainment audiences, the number of people watching prime-time programming on over-the-air networks has eroded steadily, as has the audience for the evening television network news programs.

Then, after a slow start as an advertising medium, the Internet suddenly has slammed both traditional electronic and print media as well. Among the latest media job cuts are 120 at the Chicago Tribune and 115 at CBS Radio, including the CBS radio division's head of programming.

Meanwhile, in an effort to put a tourniquet on the hemorrhaging, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that a number of publishers are trying to make special deals with Yahoo.

It all brings to mind all of the talk about a possible alliance between General Motors and another car company that is in better financial condition, as Time magazine reports. James Healey and Chris Woodyard of USA Today report that GM CEO Rick Wagoner doesn't feel the alliance talk is very helpful. If it were to happen, his job might very well be threatened, incidentally.

Lebanon's economy may be hurt by bombing (Friday, 7/14/06)
Well, no kidding. Having things smashed all to hell may impair an economy's ability to carry on business as usual. Here's more from Jim Krane in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, the Council on Foreign Relations fears that "the big one" may be brewing in the Mideast, and they're not the only ones. Can $100 crude be far behind. How about $150 crude? The only good thing that one might say about a regional war in that area of the world now is that if it had occurred 25 years ago, it could have led to a nuclear exchange between the United States and the old Soviet Union, and that could have ended life on Earth as humans have known it for tens of thousands of years.

Finally, as one might expect, it's "testing time" for the American economy. James Miller writes in the Chicago Tribune about how high oil prices are putting pressure on the entire American economy and low-income families in particular. Lucia Mutikani and Alister Bull report from New York and Washington, respectively, on new University of Michigan data showing that American consumers have been losing some of their optimism as they fill their gas tanks and think about winter fuel bills in northern climates.

Incidentally, "global warming" doesn't necessarily mean mild winters from now on. The climate changes that seem to be occurring mean, among other things, more moisture in the atmosphere and greater weather extremes.

Guess who's going to be altering the political and economic landscape in the United States (Thursday, 7/13/06)
When Spain conquered or colonized large portions of the Americas, bringing Roman Catholicism and the Spanish language, as well as other aspects of its culture to the indiginous peoples of the region, its influence was greatest in Central and South America. Now, though, centuries later, Spain's influence is being felt indirectly throughout much of North America as well. Census Bureau data show that Hispanics make up the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States, something which politicians have noticed, and, as Stacy Perman reports, marketers have noticed as well.

Soldiers with "personality disorders" discharged (Saturday, 7/8/06)
A former Army private who had been diagnosed with "antisocial personality disorder" has been charged with the murder and rape of a young woman in Iraq. Lolita Baldor has more from Washington on the 1,000 soldiers with "personality disorders" who were discharged last year by the U.S. Army.

Incidentally, "personality disorder" is an official category in psychiatric diagnostic systems, such as DSM-IV, the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual from the American Psychiatric Association. The label can be misleading because it may sound like a general term for all kinds of psychiatric disturbances. However, it's defined by specific diagnostic criteria and contains a number of different kinds of "personality disorders," of which "antisocial personality disorder" is only one. The various types differ significantly from one another, but many seem to have in common that they are examples of arrested or distorted psychological development and its consequences during adulthood.

The "personality disorders" differ dramatically from other types of psychiatric problems, such as schizophrenia or mood disorders. Overall, the research shows that, at any particular time, about 20 percent--or 1 in 5--of adult Americans would meet diagnostic criteria for one or more psychiatric disorders. Critics see the high incidence of psychiatric disorders overall as reflecting a tendency to over-"medicalize" deviant behavior, often remarking "Heck, everybody's a little abnormal."

Not so, if an attribute becomes more widely distributed in a population, that doesn't make it "more normal." The incidence of diabetes has increased in the United States during recent years, but this doesn't mean that diabetes has become more normal. It is just as much a disease as it has always been, and medical specialists will have no difficulty distinguishing a diabetic person from an individual with normal health.

Incidentally, the increase in the incidence of diabetes has been attributed to a variety of environmental, societal, and lifestyle influences. Similarly, many cases of "personality disorder" can be traced to factors impacting on the person's early development.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: When Do Rural Roads Benefit The Poor and How? (Saturday, 7/8/06)
This is the 50th anniversary year of the American Interstate highway system, a 47-thousand-mile marvel of civil engineering, rivaled in human history by few other building projects, with the possible exception of the Great Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Moreover, the Interstate system transformed American work and life.

Throughout history, roads have had a tremendous effect on societies and individuals. For instance, it's hard to believe that, during ancient times, the vast Roman Empire could have held together without its tremendous system of roads.

When Do Rural Roads Benefit The Poor and How? is a report written by Mermamala Hettige and sponsored by the Asian Development Bank.

China attempts to restrict Internet access again (Thursday, 7/6/06)
Recently, China has been in the news most frequently because of its blazing economic growth, but there are many sides to the contemporary Chinese picture. While large numbers of Chinese are benefitting from the economic boom, it still amounts to a small proportion of its enormous population. As a few become better off and even get rich, hundreds of millions of Chinese people are getting poorer.

The Chinese Communist Party, based in Beijing, continues efforts to maintain highly centralized control in this vast country of at least 1.3 billion persons, but that's getting harder. The rich areas, such as Shanghai, have been exerting increased political autonomy, and the poor multitudes in other regions of the country have been making their dissatisfaction known. The tens of thousands of social protests each year typically do not work their way into the international press as easily as stories about economic successes, and typically don't get into the government-controlled Chinese press at all. Nonetheless, they have been rattling whatever residual security governmental authorities in Beijing may have been experiencing.

The free flow of information is a threat to any autocratic government, and the Internet may be the greatest threat of all. When people can communicate more easily, they can also organize. Some years ago, BraveNewWorkWorld & NewWork News was among the sites that the Chinese government specifically attempted to block.

The Chinese government's latest effort to control Internet access ostensibly is an attempt to "protect" children. Here's more on the curfews that have established for "Internet cafes," of which there are thousands in major metropolitan areas.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Mathematics Across the College Curriculum (Thursday, 7/6/06)
First, there was "writing across the curriculum," which may have sounded like some sort of vandalism, but, instead, reflected the persistent need for writing skills in work and life, even though the culture seems to be moving away from language-based activities in the the direction of tech-based audio and video images. Now, colleges are attempting to emphasize the widespread role of mathematics in modern life and work and to prepare students by showing the importance of math in many academic and work fields. People who remain illiterate of mathematics will remain illiterate of many others things in modern life as well. Here's Mathematics Across the College Curriculum.

Have you felt it getting more crowded lately? (Monday, 7/3/06)
Not only is the U.S. on schedule for reaching a population of 300 million in October, the world now contains more than 6 1/2 billion persons, with billions more to come soon.

During the Lincoln administration and the Civil War, U.S. population was approximately 30 million, and global population reached one billion for the first time only about two decades earlier. To put things into perspective, there are still a few people living who have talked to people who knew the Lincolns before they moved from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D. C.

Needless to say, the population explosion continues at a furious pace, and many of the world's most pressing problems, including climate change, can be traced to the fact that Earth is supporting far more persons now than during any other time in its history. David Francis has been thinking about ways that population growth might be slowed a bit.

Work vacations (Saturday, 7/1/06)
Jeffrey Gangemi tells about people who use their vacations for doing volunteer work.

It is said that Bill Frist, who is Senate Majority Leader, but also a major heart surgeon, often goes to Africa to work as a doctor when the Senate isn't in session. Former Governor and current Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is a physician as well, although we don't know if he keeps his license current.

Frist and Dean occupy largely opposite political positions, but how would they act toward each other if they found themselves in the middle of an emergency requiring medical assistance? Even though the American political climate has gotten highly rancorous, we expect that they would cordially address each other as "Doctor" and work together closely and efficiently.

Speaking of medicine, there has been a growing shortage of nurses in the United States, and Rodrique Ngowi reports from Nairobi, Kenya that African nurses are moving to the United States in search of work. Large portions of Africa remain tortured by poverty, war, and, of course, disease, which probably means that they can't afford a "medical brain drain."

Meanwhile, Heidi Vogt and Marta Falconi write from Kebemer, Senegal about migrant workers who spend long periods of time in Europe, while leaving their families behind.

Reality testing (Thursday, 6/29/06)
In a democracy with stable and firm institutions, politicians occasionally lead, but usually spend more of their time following public opinion. It means that large numbers of individuals as well as most institutions can easily be left far behind during a period of rapid change. This is particularly the case now, given the synergistic interaction of the related but nonetheless distinct knowledge and high-technology revolutions.

Not so long ago, many major politicians were speaking and working in support of the slavery institution, at least in part because they had to satisfy their constituencies in order to remain in office. Now, though, both major political parties and virtually all major politicians are reflecting changed popular realities in the United States in their respective ways. According to polls, only a few years after it was rare for black Americans to appear in the popular mass media at all, TV star and self-made billionaire Oprah Winfrey is the most admired woman in America. Moreover, both current and immediate past Secretaries of State are African Americans, and they're also Republicans. Times are changing.

Race-based politics haven't disappeared entirely, of course, and many Americans continue to hold beliefs about race that are not supported by the best available scientific evidence. The knowledge revolution has left most Americans behind in other areas as well. For instance, Americans commonly believe that the U.S. makes more generous foreign aid contributions than any other country; but, as USA Today reports, the facts don't support this widely-held belief.

Who's going to be leaving a lot of money to their kids? (Tuesday, 6/27/06)
Not the world's richest people, and not most baby boomers either, but for different reasons. Actually, this requires some clarification.

Omaha's Warren Buffett, who, except for Bill Gates, is the richest person in the world, has indicated that he wants his three children to have enough so that they can do anything they like, but not so they and their descendants can do nothing. Similarly, Bill and Melinda Gates, who are a generation younger than Buffett, but who also have three children, have indicated that they don't believe in simply dumping great wealth on their kids, thinking that it's likely to be destructive, not only for society but for their children as well.

While it's unlikely that either the Buffett or Gates children will ever have to apply for food stamps, Mr. Buffett and the Gates have been making both news and history by essentially doubling the size of what was already the world's largest Foundation.

In his book, All the Presidents' Children, Doug Wead documents how poorly so many of the children of presidents have made out in life. Similarly, many people who have been born into great wealth have had major difficulties too. Poverty certainly isn't good for people, but there are also "diseases of affluence," as well, and wealth also can be hazardous to personal well-being.

Not all children of wealth have led disastrous or unproductive lives. For instance, Minnesota's Senator Mark Dayton financed his own campaign for the Senate and has deflected his Senate salary for other than personal use.

Similarly, a half-century ago, the Kennedy family controlled one of America's biggest fortunes, so the younger generation was taught that it would be a waste of their time and talents either to dedicate their lives to making money or to spending their father's. Old Joe Kennedy aspired to putting a son in the White House, and, even though it wasn't the one he planned on helping to make president, his aspirations were fulfilled. Over the years, the fairly reckless but also very unlucky family produced many people who had never known not being rich and who dedicated their lives to public service rather than money.

Bill Gates, who was born in 1955, is a member of the baby-boom generation, and, unlike most of his fellows in the huge boomer cohort, has plenty to give. Most boomers, on the other hand, aren't likely to have anything of consequence left to leave either to their children or to charity. Here's more from USA Today on how longer lives and larger health care costs are reducing inheritances.

Meanwhile, Mindy Fetterman tells about how retirement has gotten more complicated as life beyond work has been extended from a few years to decades. In fact, many people will go through five stages, she says.

What corn and gold may have in common, in addition to color (Monday, 6/26/06)
The New York Times reports on the ethanol boom that is changing the economy of the American plains. Factories that "spin" corn into fuel that can be used by specially-configured gasoline engines are sprouting up all over.

The long-term consequences for the animal and human food supply of diverting large amounts of corn and farmland to energy production are still in question. Also, the consequences for energy independence and national security, as well as for the environment, may be more limited than enthusiasts currently expect, unless increased efficiencies can be brought to the ethanol production process. Presently, it appears that it requires about 1 unit of energy from other sources, such as oil, to produce no more than 1.4 units of ethanol. The net gain remains fairly small; some analysts say that there is even a net loss of energy. We'll see.

Nonetheless, those increased efficiencies may be coming soon, given the enormous productivity increases in agriculture itself over the past several decades because of mechanization and the recent application of high-technology. In fact, American farmers have become victims of their own success to some extent, given that they have made such effective use of technology and did so earlier than people in many other economic sectors.

Doctors' helpers (Monday, 6/26/06)
For many years, the medical profession has been trying to cope with rising health care costs by moving as many medical services as low in the skills/cost hierarchy as possible. That is, you wouldn't want to have to pay for a specialized surgeon's time in order to have him/her measure your blood pressure. Better to have a less costly person who is perfectly competent for the job do that. Some services require more costly levels of training than others. Medicine now operates on some version of a "need to know" basis.

As a consequence, many patients now to go clinics to consult with professionals who can legally write prescriptions and who wear stethoscopes around their shoulders, but who are not physicians. Some of these are nurse practitioners, and others are physician assistants.

Are Gates and Buffett going to accomplish things that the world's governments have been unable to do? (Monday, 6/26/06)
Before long, it may very well be that Warren Buffett will no longer be the second-richest person in the world, but it will be for all the right reasons. He has committed the bulk of his multibillion dollar fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Buffett billions will be used to seek cures for the world's top diseases and to further education.

Buffett is a generation older than Bill Gates, but he and Gates have become very good friends. It's clear that Omaha's richest man is impressed with how the Gates are running their foundation and the fact that they are sufficiently young that they will be able to direct it for many years to come. Buffett has stipulated that his yearly contributions be distributed during the years in which they are given to the Gates Foundation, which means that the Foundation will be distributing about twice as much money as it has been doing each year so far.

It remains to be seen whether other wealthy entrepreneurs will follow the Gates/Buffett lead. However, it's clear that this is a way for brilliantly gifted and highly successful people to contribute in multiple ways--first, by benefitting the economy with their work and creating large numbers of jobs; then, by using their resources and brilliance to become effective philanthropists on a scale that really can make a difference to the entire world.

Meanwhile, the UK's Tony Blair says that the G8 hasn't been sufficiently forthcoming in following through on its commitments to fight global poverty. The Prime Minister would like to see more action.

Big year for the U.S. population (Sunday, 6/25/06)
Demographers are forecasting that this will be the year when America's population will reach 300 million. Could our forebears ever have anticipated such a thing?

Well, yes, it's clear that many of America's founding folks expected their democratic experiment to result in something that would eventually dwarf England, which, at that time, had not yet become a global imperial power. In fact, many 19th century American politicians expected the U.S. eventually to cover all of North America. Of course, some of these were interested in expanding the number of slave states and, thus, permanently cementing the slavery institution in the United States.

Lincoln was not one of these, incidentally--he opposed the so-called Mexican War of the late 1840s--and even expected the American population to grow to 300 million by several decades ago. It was about one-tenth that size during his administration, smaller than the population of California now.

Efficiency hits doctors offices (Sunday, 6/25/06)
An increasing number of American physicians are feeling competition from walk-in clinics and other such organizations, and, as a consequence, are making fuller use of technology and other resources in order to increase their efficiencies and better meet the needs of patients who don't want to get a lot older while waiting to see their doctors. Here's more from Milt Freudenheim of the New York Times.

Is your CEO worth more than 260 times as much as you? (Friday, 6/23/06)
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that American Chief Executive Officers earn 262 times as much as the average worker.

That may not seem fair, and, in fact, it may not be, depending on whether the people paying out the money are making fully free and informed decisions. In a market economy, fairness has nothing to do with it, because something is "worth" what somebody is willing to pay for it. If corporate stockholders really want to pay CEOs this much, and feel that they have to do so for the good of their companies, that's really up to them. It's their money.

Problem is, as we've said before, these things often do occur without the fully informed consent of the company's owners, and, when this is the case, there is a serious problem. However, it has nothing to do with how MUCH chief executives are paid, because only those persons directly involved in a transaction are in a position to agree on a price.

Pay discrepancies are even greater in other lines of work. For instance, according to Forbes magazine, Tom Cruise's income was approximately $67 million during 2005. How does this compare to the members of crews, say, who have worked with him on film projects? We don't know either, but we would be surprised if he has earned "only" 262 times as much as the majority of people on film production teams.

A-list stars of Cruise's caliber are guaranteed tens of millions of dollars to do a film, and production typically lasts only about four months. Of course, Tom Cruise has a reputation as an extremely committed and conscientious actor who may spend many months preparing for a role--e.g., learning to become expert in Japanese sword fighting for his recent Samurai picture. Still, most actors are involved on a daily basis only during a film's shooting, not during the long periods of preproduction or post-production. Major stars, then, can earn tens of millions of dollars for only a few months work.

Why is Tom Cruise paid far more than any of the world's heads of state, while a grip, say, may earn about as much as s/he would on any ordinary job outside the film industry? Because the film is sold as a "Tom Cruise picture," and few people would pay to see it if he were not leading its cast. The people who negotiate with big stars can decide that it is perfectly rational and in their best interest to pay people like Cruise far more than they themselves or top studio executives earn. Major entertainment and big-time commercial sports are two industries in which some of the workers are paid far more than their bosses, but, of course, most of the workers aren't.

It's also said that David Letterman earned about $40 million last year. It's quite likely that this is many dozens of times more than any of the 150 or so people that it takes to get his television show on the air several times per week. Is that fair? Well, considering that the other people probably would have no jobs at all if he were not headlining the show, it probably is. A truly good business of any kind is one in which everyone who is touched by it benefits, but it will never be to the same extent. Supply-demand relationships determine the price of anything in a truly open market economy in which something as nearly as possible resembling "perfect competition" ensues.

If there is fraud or collusion or price fixing, that's another matter entirely, and these are the things that should concern us, not the prices of products or services themselves. It may or may not be the case that there is open competition for the services of some American corporate CEOs. However, even when there is, CEOs are likely to make a lot of money. The CEO seems to be a critical factor in determining the success or failure of a company. People who can perform at high levels in this sort of role continue to be scarce, and scarcity drives up prices.

Still dominant, but how much longer? (Wednesday, 6/21/06)
Fareed Zakaria appears on American television a lot. He's a perfectly legal immigrant with a Harvard Ph. D. who was so impressive when he was young, that he was made editor of the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal when he was only 28 years old. He's still not very old and he's still very impressive.

In addition to his own television program on PBS, as well as a regular panel slot on ABC News' "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," he's editor of the international edition of Newsweek magazine. We don't know how many languages he speaks, but it has to be at least two, because English, in which he is fully expert at the post-doctoral level, is not his native language.

All of this is to say that, unlike most Americans, Dr. Zakaria has had broad experience outside the United States and has a global perspective that makes him very much worth listening to. For instance, also unlike most Americans, he recognizes that America's dominant economic, scientific, and military preeminence are not birthrights and won't necessarily last. He recognizes that much of the rest of the world is rapidly catching up to the U. S. in many areas, and several societies already have pulled out ahead in some.

Fewer American workers are using illegal drugs (Wednesday, 6/21/06)
The number of workers testing positive for illegal drug use has fallen to its lowest level in nearly 20 years. We'd like to think that it's because more workers have realized that using substances like methamphetamine is like sticking blowtorches in their ears, but that may not be the reason. Stephanie Armour and Del Jones write in USA Today report that experts are saying that it's more likely because of a combination of several other things, including more vigorous drug testing.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: NOAA Ocean Explorer (Tuesday, 6/20/06)
Climate change isn't simply affecting that thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth, but also the upper layers of the world's oceans. For instance, as the oceans get warmer, tropical storms become more numerous and more severe. For this reason and others, you may want to get into closer touch with your world's oceans, and the NOAA Ocean Explorer can help. Incidentally, NOAA is the government agency that is responsible for those weather radios that can alert you in the middle of the night if tornados or other deadly storms are brewing in your area.

iSweatshop? (Monday, 6/19/06)
Life is not at all comfortable for the multitudes of Chinese people who don't have the money to pay off corrupt government officials in order to get things done. The Chinese government does its best to make life easy for foreign tourists and investors, as well as its new entrepreneurial class that is driving China's big economic boom. But, for the hundreds of millions of people who have no alternative but to seek out low pay jobs under sweatshop conditions or even conditions of near slavery, life can be very grim indeed, particularly when their government provides no protection.

Walaika Haskins reports that Apple Computer Corporation is looking into allegations in a London newspaper that its phenomenally successful iPod is being manufactured under sweatshop conditions in the world's most populous country.

Is Bill Gates leaving an unsettling wake? (Saturday, 6/17/06)
Stephen Foley writes from New York for The Independent about what could turn out to be upheaval at Microsoft set off by Billionaire Bill's decision to concentrate more each day on giving money away than on making it.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune's Michael Baron reports that there hasn't been much reaction from Wall Street to Bill's career-change plans. It suggests that Microsoft has grown successfully beyond being simply an extension of Bill Gates. Years ago, it's unlikely that he could have left the company or sold a large block of stock without setting off a stock-selling frenzy that could have made him instantly something less than the wealthiest individual in the world. Now, though, Microsoft is more than Bill Gates and probably could continue without any involvement from him at all.

On the other hand, Apple Computer Corporation probably hasn't reached that point yet. When longtime Gates adversary Steve Jobs developed cancer awhile back, it is said to have sent shock waves through the company and the investment community, at least among those persons who knew about it. Apparently, Mr. Jobs is cancer-free now, though.

At any rate, it's much easier to imagine a Microsoft without Gates than an Apple without Jobs.

Guess what's about the same age as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (Saturday, 6/17/06)
If you said "the Interstate Highway System," you're entitled to the coveted NewWork News handshake award. It's pretty much agreed that the national highway system for which President Eisenhower is given much credit changed America and certainly changed American business. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, it's just turning 50 years old.

When career soldier Dwight Eisenhower was suspecting that he would spend his entire military career in an office and probably never advance beyond, say, Lt. Colonel, if that, he volunteered in 1919 to be part of an experiment to see if it was possible--POSSIBLE--to drive military vehicles across the United States. The whole effort was given enormous publicity, including the many photographs of Army trucks being pulled out of the mud by horses.

In addition to getting Eisenhower out of the office for a while, the experience seemed to have had quite a lot to do with convincing the future president that the United States needed a national highway system. Seeing Germany's autobahnen once he got to Europe seemed to solidify the idea, and the memories galvanized him once he became president.

Incidentally, Dwight Eisenhower needn't have worried about his own career. In record time, he was promoted from Lt. Colonel to Five-Star General once the Allies needed the organizational and diplomatic genius that he had exhibited over so many years in Army offices.

Bill and the biggest (Friday, 6/16/06)
Bill Gates has been the richest individual in the world for at least a dozen years after building the largest software company in the world. He also established the largest charitable foundation in world history.

He announced yesterday that, within two years, he will be giving his fullest attention to giving away his great wealth through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some people believe that Bill's impact on the nature of philanthropy itself may be as great as his impact on the high-technology revolution. Finally, Todd Bishop writes in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Mr. Gates' much reduced role in the company he founded might be good for Microsoft Corporation as well.

Interestingly, we chose to focus on the Gates Foundation and its founder yesterday as our NewWork News Web Tip many hours before the Gates announcement. We posted our piece, then, once the announcement was made, we added a few words to one paragraph to reflect that news that we were sure would be on the next day's front pages throughout the country.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Thursday, 6/15/06)
Bill Gates finally turned 50 last year, even though it seems as though he's been around forever. Actually, he WAS helping to change the world when he was still in his teens, and he's been the wealthiest person in the world since at least his thirties, maybe his twenties, which may give hope to college dropouts everywhere.

For a brief period several years ago before the bursting of the dot-com-all-ye-faithful bubble and before courts ordered the breakup of Microsoft Corporation into several "Baby Bills," Billionaire Bill's net worth was estimated at $100 billion, which, for readers in parts of the world that use the word "billion" differently, means one-hundred-thousand-million dollars. To put things into perspective, that number of $1 dollar bills, laid end-to-end, would extend about 380 times around the Earth, or, about 20 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon and back again.

The breakup of Microsoft never happened, but protracted court battles and attendant publicity helped to drive Microsoft stock values down. More recently, Forbes magazine estimates Mr. Gates' wealth at about $50 billion in 2006 dollars, which still puts him several billion ahead of Number 2, Omaha's Warren Buffett.

During the late 1990s, when Ted Turner announced that he would donate a billion dollars to the United Nations, criticism of Bill Gates arose because he hadn't given away much of his money yet, even though he had announced that he would eventually give away nearly all of it, because he doesn't believe in simply dumping it on his kids. As Senator Mark Dayton's father often told him when he was growing up, "There's nothing worse than a rich bum." However, Bill's response at the time was, "Look, I'm still only about 40 years old."

Nonetheless, Mr. Gates apparently was sufficiently embarrassed by all the publicity, that he quickly established a foundation in his wife's and his own name, which now gives away about as much money each year as fellow-billionaire Oprah Winfrey has altogether. At the beginning, Bill's father, William Gates, Sr., a noted and recently retired Seattle lawyer, was put in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with emphasis on the supporting of worldwide health and learning initiatives.

The richest individual in the world is now one of several co-chairs of Earth's largest foundation, which gives away enough money each year to make a really significant difference in the condition of peoples throughout the world. In fact, Bill Gates has announced that he is giving up his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft in order to concentrate his attentions on the foundation.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Apollo Alliance (Tuesday, 6/13/06)
During the hot old days of the Vietnam War, the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing a concert pianist in tails standing beside his grand piano saying, "Before we begin, I have a few remarks about American foreign policy."

Such bait-and-switch techniques have been used by many entertainers over the years who have the power to attract attention for reasons having nothing to do with their ideas or lack of them. Recent examples may be Tom Cruise and the "Dixie Chicks," but there have been lots of others. Many people--not just entertainers--can easily come to "believe their own press releases," in a sense, and assume that, because they have been successful in a particular line of work, they necessarily know something about unrelated issues, or that "everybody else has a right to their opinions," whether or not they ask for them, and whether or not they're told ahead of time that this is what they will get for the price of a ticket.

After all, publicity, self-promotion, and hype are the lifeblood of commercial entertainment. Without a lot of noise, nothing happens, and it has become an increasingly noisy environment in which the ability to stand out and get noticed has resulted in noisy escalations.

Of course, entertainers are citizens too, and they have a right to be politically active and a right to speak, but not a RIGHT to be heard. That is, they don't have a RIGHT to our time or a RIGHT to be taken seriously. Those things must be earned. It all has to do with WHAT IT TAKES to be right about anything, and many of the noisiest individuals who have the ability to attract public attention to their political or religious opinions typically don't have a clue.

However, those who do their homework may very well become expert so as to earn our time and attention. Becoming a successful artist doesn't preclude the possibility of excelling in other areas as well. For instance, Goethe was one of history's greatest writers and also one of its greatest scientists. The current Secretary of State is a very good pianist who once aspired to making her living on the concert stage. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once was a Julliard student and played in traveling orchestras.

Robert Redford has the ability to become the center of attention by simply walking into a room or in front of a camera, and he has used his celebrity to attract attention to various causes in which he has been active for many years. However, he doesn't live in Beverly Hills and has done his best to disconnect himself from the Hollywood culture in many ways. Even though he was born in Santa Monica, he hasn't lived in California for decades.

Redford is not simply a movie star, or even "simply" a noted actor, director, and film producer. He's also been a businessman and environmental activist, among other things. In the long-run, he may be most influential as an educator because of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival that he established, all of which may very well live on long after he's gone. Even though he has succeeded grandly in Hollywood's industry, he has great depth and sophistication, and he has given no indication of being self-obsessed or of having been romanced by his own publicity.

Recently, he's been calling a good deal of attention to the Apollo Alliance, an organization dedicated to reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy for both economic and national security reasons, as well as to the creation of the next generation of quality American jobs.

Along similar lines, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been pushing the need for a reorganization of the American economy based on clean, renewable sources of energy. His latest book, The World is Flat, has sold two-million copies in hardback, and he is featured in a new film called "Addicted to Oil," which will run on the Discovery Channel. At the same time, former Vice President Al Gore is featured in a new feature film called, An Inconvenient Truth. Even the Bush administration, which contains a number of major figures who seem to have close ties to the oil industry, now has a Secretary of the Treasury who is a committed environmentalist.

After many years of accumulating scientific evidence of climate change, something important finally may be happening in the political culture, which, typically follows and reflects changes in society at large. Former professional politician Al Gore is right in attempting to influence public attitudes, not simply attitudes among people on Capitol Hill or in the White House. It's a mistake to spend too much time agonizing over individuals, even the President of the United States. Attitudes held by millions of people WILL be represented in our political culture, if not by George W. Bush, then by somebody else.

Moreover, a change of public attitude and, thus, of public policy may not come a moment too soon. Gore indicates in his movie that climate changes may be occurring much more rapidly than previously believed. Yes, this does appear to be the case, and it's what Ray Kurzweil has been saying all along. Dr. Kurzweil has demonstrated that major changes often are perceived as linear when, with sufficient perspective, we can see that they are really geometric or "ogival."

An example is the number of humans on Earth, which remained fairly small for tens of thousands of years, increasing only very slightly over most of that period. Then, for the first time in human history, total world population reached one billion somewhere around 1840. Now, fewer than 170 years later, there are approximately 6 1/2 billion persons on the Earth.

In only 170 years, Earth has accumulated 5 1/2 times as many people as it took during all of Earth's history to accumulate up until about the time that the grandparents of some people still living were born. And, yes, it does appear that the same kinds of mathematical functions can be used to represent climate change.

Ray Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity is Near, should be bought and read by each of the two million persons who have purchased Tom Friedman's latest book. They make good companion reads, and both are among the most important books of the past half-century.

It all comes down to what philosophers for centuries have been referring to as "epistemology." WHAT we know depends entirely on HOW we know it. There has been a lot of magical thinking in the Bush administration on many topics by people who don't yet understand WHAT IT TAKES to be right about anything. Problem is, the majority of the Administration's noisiest and most outspoken critics don't either, and the interacting knowledge and tech revolutions are leaving whole societies and their institutions far behind.

"What better time to pay taxes than after you're dead?" (Monday, 6/12/06)
Now that repeal of the estate tax has failed in the Senate, owners of small businesses have varied ideas about what to do. The quotation in our headline is from a Proctor, Minnesota businessman who expects his heirs to pay up.

In the psycholinguistics department, Republican pollster and strategist Dr. Frank Luntz recommended sometime ago that Republicans stop referring to the "estate tax" and start calling it the "death tax." This seemed to be related to a major turnaround in public opinion. When nearly everybody was calling it the "estate tax," the public seemed overwhelmingly against repealing it. After Republicans had been calling it the "death tax" for awhile, polls suggested an almost complete turnaround in public opinion. Suddenly, the majority of Americans seemed to favor the idea of repeal, even though only the very rich would be affected.

David Francis worries about what a repeal of the estate tax could mean for American democracy.

China's energy appetites are shaking the world (Sunday, 6/11/06)
For several years, China's economy has been booming at a rate that makes it double every seven or eight years. Its voracious appetite for energy has been increasing at a similar pace. As a consequence, China seems to have altered the global oil market permanently, perhaps even hastening the day when many of its competitors, including Europe and the United States, will no longer have economies based on fossil fuels. Peter Enav and Elaine Kurtenback report from Zhenhai, China on shifting oil consumption patterns throughout the world as a consequence of China's "thirst for oil."

Meanwhile, China's coal mines are under increasing pressure to produce as well. This has meant that mine disasters are reported almost daily, and most don't seem to be reported at all. Mine safety still isn't much of a priority in China, at this point, but as James Carroll reports from Washington for the Louisville Courier-Journal, recent disasters have moved it to the front burner in the United States.

Finally, China's increasing energy consumption is also producing a world-class environmental problem within the country itself, and, as Keith Bradsher and David Barboza report from Hanjing, for the rest of the rest of the world as well.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Office of Vocational and Adult Education (Sunday, 6/11/06)
Why do professional researchers go to all that trouble and spend all that time on their projects? Because THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES, and if we don't do what it takes, we can't expect to be right about anything any more consistently than by flipping a coin. Of course, it's fairly easy to hold the same beliefs as most of the people who surround you, and, thus, be told you're right repeatedly, but that's not the same thing as being right.

The most fundamental purpose of educational institutions is to produce educated persons, not prepare people for jobs or careers. Education for living and education for citizenship are particularly important now that the tech and knowledge revolutions have resulted in a situation in which most people's beliefs about most things are, at least to some extent, simply wrong.

Still, people need to make a living in the revolutionary new world economy, and, the required skill sets for most jobs that pay well have been escalating significantly. Moreover, with the rapid rate of change in the economy, retraining seems necessary at an ever-increasing rate. Here's the U. S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education.

A setback for farm subsidies (Thursday, 6/8/06)
Congress has turned back efforts to beef up farm subsidies by $4 billion to cover increased fuel costs as well as the consequences of droughts and floods. Richard Wolf reports that it may mean a change of direction for American farmers.

Why subsidize farmers in the first place? Many economists believe that farming as a business--as opposed to subsistence farming, which seems to operate according to different principles--is inherently unprofitable in the long-run. But, if becoming too dependent on foreign sources of energy can be a threat to national security, think of what might happen if the United States were entirely dependent on foreign sources of food. The U.S. cannot afford to allow all of its farmers to go out of business.

Corruption and politics in China (Wednesday, 6/7/06)
China has the world's largest population as well as the fastest growing economy. Also, the Chinese recognize that their country once was the most advanced on Earth and many probably intend for it to achieve that distinction again sometime later this century.

However, it isn't at all clear what's going to happen or what's happening now. For one thing, corruption in China is legendary. For another, it appears that there were as many as 80,000 protests last year by people throughout the country who have not been benefitting from the current economic boom in some regions, to say the very least. Are social upheaval and disintegration on the Chinese horizon?

Also, how much effect does the central government in Beijing really have at this point on other booming regions such as Shanghai? For instance, the government has announced that most land acquisitions across the country have been illegal and intends to do something about it. So far, many of the people making the acquisitions seem unimpressed, suggesting that the distribution of power may be undergoing reorganization across the country.

Is the world undergoing "smithereening?" (Monday, 6/5/06)
Fred Weir is in Moscow where he reports on very small regions and collections of people that want to be regarded as independent states. The ultimate result of this "atomization" process might be the increasing isolation of individuals. However, it's not necessarily a new phenomenon. Long before several U.S. states broke away to form the Confederacy in the mid-19th century, there were people in early American who favored the secession of New York City.

On the other hand, we've been speculating about the future of the "nation-state," as we know it, which is one of world history's fairly recent geopolitical inventions. For instance, we've been wondering what may really be going on at the border which for many years now has separated Mexico from the United States, and what its future may be. Also, how about one of the longest international boundaries in the world--the one between the United States and Canada? It probably won't be possible to "lock it down" somehow, so, now what?

Overall, it simply seems that the world is reorganizing, and one of the principal sources of stress is that no one knows what the outcome will be, or, for that matter, if the process will stabilize, resulting in some new equilibrium, or if the churning will simply continue.

For those who don't know how to live (Monday, 6/5/06)
People in other parts of the world who think the United States is just one big hospital of some sort may suspect that many Americans really have more need for getting in touch with basic realities than for "life coaches" to help them with their get-even-more-privileged skills. Nonetheless, Patrik Jonsson reports from Atlanta that even many of America's young are interpreting their own inability to delay gratification to mean that their life skills are deficient and that they are in need of coaching.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary (Saturday, 6/3/06)
In his autobiography, which puts his personal spin on his life's story only up to about age 50 or so, Benjamin Franklin tells about a very early trip to England where he got a glimpse across the room in a London coffee shop of a very old Isaac Newton, but didn't have sufficient nerve to go over and talk to him. Franklin doesn't say whether it was simply a matter of being "star struck," or if the great physicist's reputation for tearing people's heads off and handing them to them was behind Franklin's youthful reticence.

At any rate, among many other things, Benjamin Franklin often is identified as America's first entrepreneur. He was rich enough by the time he wrote his autobiography that he was free to concentrate full time on being remembered as a great physicist himself, and, of course, on the reasons that most Americans remember him three centuries after his birth: his key diplomatic activities as an old man which enlisted French assistance in winning a war against the strongest military power on earth. Here's an excellent site to help you celebrate Franklin's 300th birthday this year: The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary.

"Whoops" doesn't seem to be quite enough (Friday, 6/2/06)
With hi-tech, fewer people can make more and bigger mistakes in less time than ever before, which means that world-class foul-ups like the loss of personal data on tens of millions of veterans probably should be included in the productivity statistics. Along similar lines, the University of Kentucky accidentally posted Social Security numbers for 1,300 employes on the Internet for several weeks.

We've been claiming for sometime that the synergistic interaction of the technology revolution and the knowledge revolution is leaving many individuals and most institutions hopelessly behind. During the past several years, we've seen the spectacular failure of many American institutions in a variety of ways. Other institutions are following suit, but many consequences of these failures won't become visible to the general population and many of their leaders for months or years.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Faces of the Fallen (Thursday, 6/1/06)
The Bush administration's policy is to do all it can to prevent the press from photographing caskets containing war dead, and high government officials, including the President, do not attend military funerals. Under these conditions, it may be easier to forget that each of the 2,416 American deaths in Iraq and the 292 American deaths in Afghanistan, as of May 31, 2006, represents a real person, most with grieving families who aren't likely to get over these deaths during their lifetimes.

Sometimes war is necessary--few Americans would claim that it was a mistake to bring down Germany's Nazi regime through the use of military force--but war is always a messy and very costly business that certainly shouldn't be forgotten. The Washington Post, in its online Faces of the Fallen section, enables readers to learn at least a little about each of the the persons whose lives have been sacrificed in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to see most of their photographs.

On the other hand, it's useful to put America's current wars into historical context. For instance, it's been approximately 39 months since the U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, with more than 2,400 American deaths. By comparison, it was approximately 45 months from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor until Japan's surrender ended World War II in early September, 1945. During World War II, there were more than 400,000 American deaths. At the same time, during that great mid-20th century war, more than 450,000 people died in the United Kingdom, while more than 23,000,000 (sic) persons died in the Soviet Union.

Some of the numbers are likely to be disputed for years, just as Americans are likely to be arguing about the current War in Iraq a century from now. Clearly, there have been far more unknown soldiers than those buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but nobody is sure how many.

In this case, we're relying, in large part, on data from George Mason University's History News Network. In fact, for further perspective, here are the approximate numbers of American war dead so far, according to George Mason University historians:

American Revolution: 25,324
War of 1812: 2,260
Mexican War: 13,283
Civil War: 863,153
Spanish-American War: 2,446
World War I: 116,516
World War II: 405,399
Korean War: 54,246
Vietnam War: 56,244
Panama Invasion: 23
Gulf War (1991): 148

Incidentally, while more Americans died as a consequence of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 than at Pearl Harbor, several times as many Americans died in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

What's really happening to the U.S.-Mexican border? (Monday, 5/29/06)
Ioan Grillo reports from Mexico City that the big debate over illegal immigration in the United States is even affecting Mexican politics at the highest level.

Yesterday, we pointed to Andres Oppenheimer's suggestion for helping the tens of millions of Americans who will be retiring soon, while also helping to create jobs in Mexico, which should encourage large numbers of Mexicans to stay home or even go back home. However, we're aware that if millions of American retirees were living in Mexico, it might remind lots of people about how Texas became part of the U.S. rather than part of Mexico.

Actually, there were people in the American government during the 19th century who wanted to see the United States cover all of North America--e.g., Secretary of State Seward made the deal to buy Alaska from Russia--and some had specific plans for annexing Mexico, although such actions were seen by many at the time as a way of securing and extending slavery.

At any rate, will the border more-or-less separating the United States from Mexico largely dissolve over the years ahead? Of course, not so long ago, some political scientists and historians were predicting that English-speaking Canada would become part of the United States during the 21st century, and, at the moment, we seem to be further from that, rather than closer.

Meanwhile, Venezuela's President Chavez is using a lot of his country's oil money in an effort to promote the formation of socialist movements in Latin America, but with mixed success. Given the fact that Venezuela is one of the world's leading oil exporters, and given America's huge appetite for energy, it probably can be said that the U.S., in addition to financing both sides of the so-called "war on terror," is helping to finance Mr. Chavez's anti-American activities too. Kelly Hearn is in Buenos Aires and reports that a "backlash" appears to be forming in a number of regions.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Archive of European Integration (Friday, 5/26/06)
Does commerce lead to peace? Former British Prime Minister John Major has pointed out that, after centuries of wars between Britain and France, the idea of armed conflict between the two countries now seems inconceivable, if for no other reason than the enormous number of ongoing business relationships between the two countries.

Similarly, now that there is such vigorous daily commerce going on between individuals and companies on Taiwan and those on the Chinese mainland, war seems far less likely. If this is true, many in the United States have reason to celebrate, because the U.S. is still obligated by treaty to defend Taiwan. An invasion of the island from the People's Republic of China could lead to war between the largest country on Earth with the world's fastest-growing economy, on the one hand, and the richest, most militarily powerful country, at least in terms of conventional armaments, on the other.

European leaders have expressed frustration with many young Europeans who have known nothing but European peace and don't seem to understand what all the fuss is about, as European countries inch toward a "United States of Europe" level of integration. Considering that more than 60 years of peace has followed centuries of European wars, including the two most devastating wars in all human history, both occurring within the 20th century, many people who have been working so hard on the development of a viable European community feel they've been doing a pretty good job.

Economic relationships do seem have an importance that extends beyond economics itself. Here's the interesting and instructive Archive of European Integration site.

Distance is about to shrink to essentially nothing, functionally speaking (Thursday, 5/25/06)
The interacting knowledge and tech revolutions are causing the world and its global economy to "morph" into something very new. As we have suggested, this may even include the dissolving of nation-states as we have known them during recent history, as the social-cultural-political world reorganizes into something highly unfamiliar. If you think that the Internet has had something to do with these historic changes--and it has--how do you expect the world to be changed by the 800 Gbps of bandwidth that appear to be coming? Here's more about Internet2 from Barry Levine.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: National Institutes of Health: Office of Science Education (Sunday, 5/21/06)
Americans love hi-tech gadgets as much as any people in the world, but most don't have a clue as to how they work or what a knowledge of natural processes can mean, not only for understanding technology, but also most of life.

Contrary to common assumptions, "science" is defined, not in terms of its subject matter, and certainly not in terms of any conclusions at a particular time, but, instead, by its METHODS. Moreover, these methods apply to empirical questions of all types, whether we call the activity "science," historical research, journalism, court procedure, or something else.

In fact, "science" is just another name for the best available methods at a particular time for providing trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds. If you develop or discover better methods, they don't become an alternative to science, but, instead, PART of science.

There's a lot more to science than what the National Institutes of Health deal with or, for that matter, what the Institutes present to the public through their excellent Office of Science Education.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Book TV (Wednesday, 5/17/06)
Many academics like to brag about how little television they watch, which may simply provide evidence, possibly redundant, that universities are not necessarily centers of rationality to the extent that they like to claim. Some of the same people seem to favor books over computers because words are printed on paper rather than appearing on electronic screens, even when they're the same words. The academic culture can be irrational, fraudulent, or corrupt in its own very special ways, and occasionally even a little humorous.

Newton Minnow famously remarked in 1961 in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that television was a "vast wasteland," but he seemed to be referring to commercial prime-time programming. He certainly hadn't had an opportunity to watch the Charlie Rose program or anything else on PBS at that point, because PBS started in the late 1960s, or, for that matter, any of C-SPAN's three television networks, because C-SPAN started in the late '70s. Nonetheless, many academics don't seem to have moved beyond 1961.

If Charlie Rose were to interview, say, the Secretary General of the United Nations on a campus, most of the school's professors probably would want to attend. However, when Rose interviews Kofi Annan on his program, many of the same academics will miss it because they "haven't watched television for years" and seem proud of it.

While PBS has changed American society, there's nothing else quite like C-SPAN either, and it comes from the commercial cable TV industry. Members of the academic culture who like to talk about the books they read but refuse to watch television will miss the three-hour sessions with major authors on C-SPAN's "In Depth" program, and they'll miss Book TV as well. Pity.

What does it take to learn about nature, including human nature? (Tuesday, 5/16/06)
The current Administration seems to contain quite a number of people, including its Chief, who don't appear to understand what it takes to answer questions about their world or themselves.

It isn't that President Bush is conspicuously lacking in intelligence, as many of his political enemies have claimed; in fact, he's probably smarter than most of the people who spend so much time talking about how "dumb" they think he is. However, much has been made, even by some Republicans, of his overall lack of curiosity or about how little he reads, and so on. His personal information base does not seem to be very impressive.

Mr. Bush has acknowledged that he underwent some sort of personal transformation when he was about forty years old, which he attributes, in part, to his wife Laura's influence as well as a to a fundamentalist religious conversion. He went from being an over-privileged, irresponsible, alcoholic young man who was at serious risk--See Doug Wead's book, All the Presidents' Children, a grim history of the sons of presidents--to a highly-disciplined middle-age man who seems driven by central values. However, again, his personal information base does not seem to be very impressive. Even though he will turn 60 this year, he continues to remind many professors of so many of their beginning college students.

However, while he really does appear to be a different kind of man now than when he was in college, there is no strong indication that he has attempted to catch up on what he missed at Yale where he seemed to spend so much of his time "hung-over" and disengaged.

He certainly isn't alone. In fact, in a representative democracy, the President does appear to represent millions of other Americans who also don't have a clue about what it takes to be right about anything. It isn't good enough simply to make up something or to accept traditional ideas which have their roots in a time when even the smartest humans on the planet didn't even know that the blood circulates or what the heart is for.

One of the most intriguing psychological issues has to do with how so many people can feel so strongly that they're right about things, even when they have so little to go on. It's not a mystery anymore, of course, particularly for persons who are acquainted with the past 70 years or so of research in experimental social psychology or cultural anthropology.

Informed individuals, at least, now know quite a lot about what it takes to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all types, as well as how most people TYPICALLY develop and maintain their attitudes and beliefs about their world and themselves. Current knowledge about these processes helps explain why there are more Lutherans in Minnesota than in India, for instance, or why there are "red states" and "blue states" in the first place.

Along these lines, a new investigative study concludes that the Administration, under great pressure to find a sufficient number of "bodies" to send into combat zones, seems to be ignoring mental health issues when dispatching military people to Iraq. One of the consequences seems to be a significant increase in suicides among American military personnel.

Presidents tend to surround themselves with like-minded people, and this administration seems to contain quite a number of people who really don't believe in psychiatric illness, or, for that matter, in most other natural processes as we can now best understand them. Here's more from Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor on the Hartford Courant's important investigative report.

Zeitgeist and women leaders (Saturday, 5/13/06)
The Washington Times' David Sands says that women seem to be playing a greater role in world affairs.

Are Americans ready for a woman President of the United States? Neither major American political party has pushed female candidates since the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984 won only one state. However, Mondale also announced on national television that he would raise taxes, something that candidates typically feel they cannot say, if they want to have any hope of winning elections.

Also, Ronald Reagan deftly defused the age issue during the second presidential debate that year by remarking that he wouldn't hold Mondale's age and inexperience against him. The remark got a big laugh from the audience, including Mondale, who later said that he knew at that moment that he and Ferraro had lost the election. So, the 1984 debacle can't necessarily be attributed to the fact that a woman was on the ticket.

Hillary Clinton certainly appears to be assuming that she will win reelection to the U.S. Senate this fall and will run for president in 2008. However, while most experts regard her as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at this point, her election certainly isn't assured, and her nomination doesn't appear to be a sure thing either.

A prime-time TV program about a female president started the season as a big hit, but its audience quickly faded to the point where it almost surely won't have a spot on the schedule next fall, and ABC has even been withholding the final episodes for this season, hoping to air them when they won't do damage to the network's "sweeps" chances. Still, it's possible that the program has been failing, not because it's about a woman president, but because it's just not a very high-quality program. Fans of NBC's "The West Wing" feel that there's been no comparison in terms of the quality of the scripts, the characters, or the casting.

So, is it time for a woman President of the United States? We don't know either. Stay tuned.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: What is Your Mom Worth? (Friday, 5/5/06)
Salary.com offers a "wizard" for calculating what your mother's in-home work is worth. They tell how they arrived at their conclusions that "stay-at-home moms" would earn $134,121 if paid at current market rates for each of the things they do. Of course, anyone who really is prepared to pay that much for the job surely would have no difficulty finding takers.

Moreover, if a mother who works inside the home is worth that much, think of what Michelangelo's famous fresco in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel would be worth. On the other hand, who's going to buy it?

In a market economy, something is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, and that's the problem. In fact, the owner of the Sistine Chapel, the Roman Catholic Church, is often said to be fabulously wealthy because of the treasures it owns. On the other hand, there is no way the Church could turn many of these things into cash, even if it wanted to. Is St. Peter's Basilica really a fabulously valuable asset, or a priceless treasure that is very expensive to maintain?

Despite everything, the Catholic Church frequently has cash flow problems, in part, because most of the world's Catholics now are located in Latin America, which, on average, is poor, and most of the money that is collected to maintain the international Church comes from North America, where it has incurred tremendous costs and has suffered diminished contributions because of the recent wave of child molestation cases.

At any rate, we think it's silly to try to estimate what mothers are worth in the home. Instead, what they do is more like the Sistine Chapel. Their value exceeds any financial calculation. Mothers are priceless, so they certainly shouldn't be treated as if they were sweatshop labor.

Another economic advantage accorded American churches (Wednesday, 5/3/06)
Some early Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the possibility that government and religion could become intertwined in the U.S. as it had been in Europe during the 18th century and before, believed in a strict separation of church and state, even though, in Europe as well as North America, "religion" was regarded as a synonym for "Christianity." Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, even Muslims, might as well have been located on Mars at that point.

However, not all Americans have agreed with the Sage of Monticello; in fact, some still long for some sort of theocracy on the North American continent, apparently inspired by how well that sort of thing worked in John Calvin's Geneva or in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. As has been the case with most of American legal and political life, the relation of government to religion has been a sometimes-contradictory mishmash born of political compromise.

Relationships are likely to become even more complicated during the years ahead, given America's increasing cultural diversity. Will some Americans of the future insist that Buddhist or Hindu aphorisms appear on U.S. currency, or will a Muslim President-Elect take the Oath of Office while holding his hand (probably not "her hand," given the nature of Islamic ideology) on the Koran?

President Bush doesn't appear to mind mixing his own version of Christianity with government. With his, er, well, faith in faith-based initiatives of various kinds, he probably has his own religion in mind, not necessarily those that don't even include a concept of "God" in their ideologies, even though an increasing number of Americans identify with most of the world's major religions as well as quite a few smaller and lesser-known ones.

Churches are exempt from paying taxes in the United States, but, as Mary Williams Walsh writes, it goes beyond that. Churches and affiliated organizations can opt out of the law that provides at least some degree of pension protection for employees of secular organizations. Instead, an increasing number of employees of church organizations are finding that they are being left high and dry during old age.

How many immigrants rallied yesterday and what were the effects? (Tuesday, 5/2/06)
It's hard to say in both cases. Gillian Flaccus reports from Los Angeles that "more than 1 million illegal immigrants" took to the streets across the country, leaving their jobs and schools, in order to demonstrate their economic importance to the United States. However, Doug Palmer reports that many economists seem to expect that the impact of the one-day strike and boycott on the U.S. economy is likely to be fairly small.

If the reported numbers are accurate, one might expect that meager effects might be the result of a fairly small percentage of those persons contributing to the American economy were participating in yesterday's street demonstrations.

But are any of the reported numbers accurate, and how can we know? The American press has been reporting various numbers of illegal immigrants in the United States--generally ranging from 10 to 12 million--but who's counted them? It appears that at least some of these numbers have come from the Pew Foundation's research, but it's difficult to say. With respect to answering most empirical questions, the majority of Americans seem to believe that it's good enough simply to make up something.

Were there really a million illegal immigrants in American streets yesterday? Who counted them? "More than a million?" Well, how many more, and how can we tell? A million persons plus one more person? Two million, three million? Also, it's frequently said that about 7 or 8 million illegal immigrants are employed in the United States. How could anyone possibly know that, given that, by definition, many are "off the books."

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, said on television that the Congress will try again to pass new immigrant-related legislation, but it may not be exactly what many of the demonstrators yesterday want.

What can be done about the flow of people from the south into the United States? How about a 700-mile wall to bring back memories of the "good old days" of the Berlin Wall? Of course, the latter was intended to keep people in, while a wall across the U.S.-Mexican border would be intended to keep people out. Nonetheless, policing it with personnel carrying machine guns might make it into as much a propaganda disaster for the United States as the old Berlin Wall was for the former Soviet Union.

Are there people entering the United States illegally now? Yes, but the ancestors of millions of Americans entered the United States perfectly legally, at least according to somebody's law, even though they were kidnapped in Africa and brought to North America against their will.

Similarly, what was once about half of Mexico is now part of the United States. Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the so-called "Mexican War" of the late 1840s, but, because his views were so unpopular, he chose not to run for reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives, and, instead, returned to Springfield, Illinois. Former General and President Ulysses S. Grant considered the War as a "land grab" and an effort by proponents to extend slavery.

In fact, some American politicians favored annexing all of Mexico, and, if McClellan had won the 1864 presidential election, it's fairly likely that the Confederate States of America would have moved quickly to do just that, and that slavery would have been legal throughout the greatly expanded Confederacy.

At any rate, when a large part of Mexico's territory became part of the United States, Mexican people came with it, and they certainly didn't enter the United States against the wishes of the American government.

While not much has been said about it in the press, is it possible that the highly permeable boundary which more-or-less separates the United States from Mexico is symbolic of a growing erosion of the concept of "nation state," which, historically, is not very old to begin with? Nearly everything is "morphing" into something that is greatly unfamiliar, and nobody really knows what to do about it.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: 100 most influential people (Tuesday, 5/2/06)
Here's Time magazine's idea of the 100 most influential people in today's world, which is no doubt dedicated to the proposition that lists help sell magazines and ads. The magazine's editors don't provide much insight into their views about the nature of the processes by which these people are actually causing things to happen in the world, as opposed to simply being present and well-known. The basic issue seems to be one usually dealt with in the first few pages of college textbooks in most of the social sciences; i.e., the distinction between correlation and causation and what it takes to tell the difference.

Will mining be made safer in the United States? (Monday, 5/1/06)
Randal McCloy says that some of the air masks failed following the Sago mine explosion in January. However, Tim Huber writes from Charleston, West Virginia for the Grand Forks Herald, saying that insufficient profit potential because of the small market hampers the production of the safety equipment that miners really need. However, like military personnel and their families, miners and their families seem to accept far more than their share of the costs and risks of producing energy that everybody needs. This seems to be one of those situations in which society as a whole should shoulder the burden of protecting miners, whether or not it is profitable for private-sector companies.

Incidentally, while China has coal mine disasters so frequently that it's really not even "news" anymore, there are other mine problems throughout the world, and not all of them relate to the production of energy. Two Tasmanian gold miners have been found alive but are still trapped. They have been provided with food and water, but, despite being able to talk to them, rescuers are still crossing their fingers as they work to free the miners.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Monticello Explorer (Monday, 5/1/06)
Was Thomas Jefferson America's prototypical Renaissance Man or its most outrageous dilettante who shaped his historical image by entertaining the right people lavishly while spending himself deeply into debt? At this point, it's now widely recognized that, rather than being the author of the Declaration of Independence when he was only thirty-three, it's probably more accurate to say that he was the author of the Declaration's first drafts. Others, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, had quite a lot to do with creating its final form.

In fact, while Jefferson has lost some stature among historians during recent years, Adams has gained, and it's at least interesting to ask the hypothetical question of whether there would be a Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C. or an Adams Memorial if it were being done today.

At any rate, there are at least two trees at Monticello that Jefferson himself planted, so visitors can still have a living physical connection to America's third president. Jefferson's greatly restored home is still a great place to visit, and curators there insist that he would likely recognize it and feel at home if he were to walk in now. In fact, if you are unable to visit in person, or even if you've been there multiple times, the Monticello Explorer is likely to be of great interest.

While perhaps not all that admirable in his personal life, Jefferson contributed greatly because of his ability to think very large thoughts, attributes he shares in common with contemporary political figures such as John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Newt Gingrich. Both of America's major political parties like to trace themselves back to Thomas Jefferson.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Best of the Humanities on the Web (Wednesday, 4/26/06)
Some goofy things have been going on in American education recently, in part, as a response to its overall condition in relation to 21st century needs. However, some solutions can be worse than original problems, particularly if they come from people who know nothing about education or the development of effective individuals.

There's little doubt that some of U.S. education needs fixing, but we're hoping that efforts to repair what needs repairing will not damage or destroy the best of K-12 education in the United States, or, for that matter, the idea of public schools with their goal of educating everybody. Some school districts are truly lamentable, but others provide excellent service and even are attracting students from affluent families away from high-priced private schools.

"Home schooling" might be a viable alternative to the worst of American schools, if nothing else, simply in order to protect children from toxic influences. But, unless parents are professional educators, there's little chance that simply keeping kids at home for instruction will result in their being better prepared than sending them to the best of American public schools. Parents who have convinced themselves that they are better at teaching than top professional educators may think they can conduct family surgery themselves too. Also, kids learn a great deal at school that is not included in their classes--like how to interact with people outside their families, for instance.

The "No Child Left Behind" program has resulted in a tremendous emphasis on testing, which means that somebody with political power either has a lot of confidence in standardized tests, or, more likely, knows nothing whatever about the underlying statistical issues. In addition, the testing has narrowed the focus of educators, not only to reading and math, for the most part, but also to the task of preparing students to do well on the tests, rather than creating competent, educated persons who are well-prepared for life and work in the new world of knowledge, technology, and economics.

A major neuroscience expert on the Charlie Rose TV program the other night said that recent data suggest that, in addition to the role of the arts in humanizing society, de-emphasizing them in favor of so-called "core curricula" may be counterproductive, because excellence in the arts does seem to depend on some of the same aptitudes as excellence in science and math. It's not uncommon to find musicians who have a very strong technical streak, in large part, because music theory is a subset of physics theory, and knowing what you're doing and why in music requires an understanding of mathematical relationships. All of the arts have strong technical components. It shouldn't be a surprise, for instance, that Albert Einstein was a fairly competent cellist, or that he was interested in the first place.

We even worry a bit about the influence of three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, now that 2 million copies of his hugely successful and increasingly influential book, The World is Flat, are in print.

He's right in asserting that "outsourcing" is not simply a matter of a "race to the bottom." In fact, the shipping of low skill jobs overseas has become very old news, and, for the most part, already has happened. Nearly everybody is aware that China and India, with their exploding economies, want a hegemonic relationship to the high-value jobs too, and they're already producing far more engineers and other technical people than the United States.

We worry because, even though we believe that the brilliant Mr. Friedman is correct in calling for a dramatic increase in technical interest and technical preparation for American young people, if the U.S. is to retain its creative edge, we're afraid that, if he is successful in influencing public attitudes and policy, it might result in our emphasizing education for work even more at the expense of education for living and education for citizenship.

This is important in a society in which large numbers of people already believe that education is "practical," only if it provides preparation for one's first job, or, at most, for a career and earnings, not if it provides preparation for an entire life or contributes to the quality of life in an entire society.

It's also important because most of the beliefs that most Americans have about themselves and their world are simply unsupported by the the sum of current knowledge. That is, many Americans and their leaders have a mostly goofy and distorted view of reality, and, according to Emeritus Professor Carl Frost of Michigan State University, effectiveness depends on the 1) quality of our contact with reality as well as 2) appropriate responses to that reality. Individually and collectively, it will be very difficult to respond appropriately to a reality that we misperceive or misinterpret in the first place.

"Education" is something very different from "training." The latter prepares people for specific kinds of work tasks, and it's certainly true that there has been a tremendous escalation of the kinds of skill sets required by good jobs in the new global economy.

However, modern societies need highly-developed persons as well as quality personnel. The current age has been defined largely in terms of science and technology, but the humanities also play a critically important role in determining the quality of individual, family, and societal life. As John Kennedy once remarked, the humanities seem to have more to do with our ends than our means. Here is the Best of the Humanities on the Web.

From Washington to Washington to Riyadh (Saturday, 4/22/06)
China's President Hu Jintao first stopped in Washington state to visit with Bill Gates, Boeing officials, and others, then went on to Washington, D. C. for lunch with President Bush, and, finally, on to Saudi Arabia, where he may have expected the most fruitful discussions of all.

If crude oil goes to a hundred dollars a barrel, as some worry may be about to happen, the Saudis will be able to finance even more terrorism directed toward the West and Iran will be able to cause even more trouble in Iraq and elsewhere.

Also, if, as Tom Friedman suggested on the Charlie Rose TV program the other night, $100-per-barrel crude would bring about a massive change of behavior on the part of Americans, thus diminishing the American market for oil, the Chinese market might be particularly important to the Saudis and Iranians, and they may be willing to pay nearly anything for it.

Could it be that the Chinese might eventually end up indirectly financing international terrorism carried out by radical Muslims toward the West? It's one thing to be fairly gleeful that people in the Middle East, Western Europe, and the United States are managing to distract themselves from 21st century issues by resurrecting the conflicts of the Middle Ages, but quite another to spur them along by paying for them.

Incidentally, China's President Hu seems to be getting most of what he seems to want from the rest of the world, a sign of China's growing economic as well as geopolitical power.

As he and President Bush were meeting in Washington, the U.S. government announced that Chinese citizens received the greatest number of U.S. visas last year. The timing may have been coincidental, but, maybe not.

Also, the sequence of "amateur hour" events in Washington may not have impressed the Chinese President that he's dealing with a very formidable adversary. It was reminiscent of the poor impression that John Kennedy made on Khrushchev in Vienna only about six months into his administration, which may have helped the Soviet dictator decide to move missiles into Cuba.

Neither the announcer's introduction of the "national anthem of the Republic of China" nor the New York physician's three-minute heckling of the Chinese President made the TV news back home--not to worry--but these events did put the President of the United States in a position of having to apologize to the leader of one of the most brutal and dehumanizing regimes in the world.

On the other hand, several of Silicon Valley's leading hi-tech firms already are assisting the Chinese government in its censorship efforts, so President Hu may have felt that he was in friendly territory in both Washingtons. Powerful people can find sycophants in the oddest places.

It all brings to mind Lincoln's concerns--still very relevant--about whether "government of the people, by the people, for the people" may perish from the earth after all.

G7 meets about oil prices, and includes guests (Friday, 4/21/06)
As the price of crude oil hits another record high, worried finance ministers from the G7 are meeting today, but are including China and oil-exporting nations in their talks.

Until recently, at least, the G7 has been one of the world's most exclusive clubs made up of the richest industrial nations. However, with its tremendous economic growth rates recently, there is talk that China's economy already has become the fourth largest in the world, which may justify its having a permanent seat at the table during G7 meetings. Is it fair to call a country "industrial" that includes hundreds of millions of people who, instead of working in industry, are still trying to scrape a meager living out of rice paddies with water buffalo?

China is nearly everything. It has the world's largest national population, probably the greatest number of people living in poverty, maybe the greatest contrast between rich and poor, the world's fastest-growing, energy-hungry and raw materials-hungry economy, a large proportion of the world's new rich, and already is one of the world's largest markets for consumer products.

Actually, the G7 frequently is referred to as the "G8" anyway, which is intended to include the seven richest industrial nations, plus Russia. Russia certainly isn't rich, but the world has learned from painful 20th century experience that it is probably in its enlightened self-interest not to isolate or exclude the big Russian bear.

Still, there is good reason to expect that China will have a greater influence on the world during the remainder of this century and beyond than Russia. In fact, if Americans, including their governmental leaders, spend ALL of their time worrying about terrorism or the Middle East, they may miss something VERY important.

Hu's on first (Thursday, 4/20/06)
Then, Bill Gates is on, followed by the President. Actually, it may or may not be significant that China's President met with Billionaire Bill in the Seattle area before meeting with the President of the United in Washington. Nonetheless, it appears that Chairman Gates made slightly more progress on his intellectual property rights concerns than President Bush did on his trade concerns. Basically, though, it appears that the Chinese President reflects his country's growing confidence in having things their way as China becomes more and more powerful and increasingly influential in most of the world's affairs.

Will it make Katie Couric seem less like a next-door friend if you know that CBS intends to pay her more for anchoring each 22-minute newscast than your family earns in a year? (Thursday, 4/13/06)
For whatever reason, Marcy Gordon reports for ABC News that many big-time media organizations would like to conceal how much they're paying their stars.

It's been widely reported that CBS intends to pay Katie Couric about $15 million per year to leave NBC's Today Show in order to anchor the CBS Evening News. No one other than those directly involved in contract negotiations knows for sure, and that includes us. However, if she will be paid that much, it's probably important to remember that NBC pays Jay Leno far more and that CBS apparently pays David Letterman even more than Leno, even though Leno's ratings typically are greater than Letterman's.

Meanwhile, Hollywood's A-list stars are often guaranteed as much for one movie as television's biggest stars make in a year, and, for movie stars, it may amount to working only three to four months during filming.

These things have nothing to do with virtue or who "deserves" to make what. They have only to do with the supply-demand relationships that determine the price of anything in a free economy.

Commercial television, for instance, makes money by "renting" audiences to advertisers, so, if an individual performer, for whatever reason, can attract and hold the attention of large numbers of viewers in the desirable demographic categories long enough so that they will see the commercials, that performer can demand big pay days.

In fact, a television news anchor, for example, doesn't necessarily even have to be important to viewers in order to make a difference in ratings. For instance, research into factors determining the commercial success of local television news programs finds that competing news shows can be so evenly matched that the smallest thing can make the difference in determining which one a viewer typically watches. The anchor may be like the slightest force that tips a pencil balancing on its tip in one direction or another. Even so, s/he can make a big difference, because, once the "pencil" falls, it's not easy to reposition it.

Incidentally, the millions apparently paid to major television personalities such as Katie Couric, Jay Leno, or David Letterman pale in comparison to what satellite radio organization Serius apparently is paying Howard Stern to do his X-rated program, which apparently attracts mostly young males with "testosterone poisoning" by offering vulgarity in heavy doses. People who walk through his studio may feel like boiling their shoes afterwards.

According to news reports, Serius is paying Stern $500 million for five years. A few weeks ago, it appeared that as much as 70 percent of his old audience had not followed him to the satellite service, which requires a monthly fee. Now, though, it appears that the decision to throw an unprecedented amount of money in Mr. Stern's direction may have been been a good business decision on the part of Serius after all. For the first time, Serius has attracted more listeners than XM, its principal competitor.

We've always felt that the tendency to refer to X-rated media material as "adult" involves a misuse of language. It seems far more adolescent than adult. People who are attracted to this sort of material seem to have leveled off in their development at around age thirteen or so, although this probably unjustifiably slanders genuine thirteen-year-olds. Anyone who has overhead the conversations of some middle-school students will know what we mean, though.

The fact is that it is not possible for any of the body's parts or functions to diminish the specialness or dignity of a human being. It isn't possible because none of the body's parts or functions are "dirty" or obscene in any way. Efforts to make them appear this way, however misguided or vicious, may themselves be obscene. They emphasize people's parts rather than whole persons and assault a person's humanity by threatening the wholeness that is the essence of a human being. Howard Stern, as well as much advertising in the so-called "mainstream media," relies on the kind of "psychological dismemberment" that can easily bring to mind people like Jeffrey Dahmer.

Howard Stern is a very wealthy man, but this alone doesn't make him interesting. His radio act isn't shocking and it isn't funny. It's only immature and, well, stupid.

What to do about CEO pay? (Tuesday, 4/11/06)
Nothing, if stockholders--the owners of the company--freely choose to use their own money to pay a person to lead them, no matter how much it is. In a free market economy, something is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, and buyer and seller are free to agree on a price. Nobody else, including the government--maybe PARTICULARLY the government--is in a better position to determine the value of either products or services than the buyer and seller who are directly involved in the transaction.

Ironically, it was the Republican Nixon administration that attempted wage and price controls only a few years ago, and they didn't work, to put it mildly. Moreover, the failure of the old Soviet Union, Maoist China, and catastrophic economies such as that of North Korea should have settled once and for all the question of how well centralized economies work in which somebody with political power determines the "value" of products and services.

Moreover, research demonstrates that the CEO is a critical factor in determining a corporation's success or failure, and this helps to explain the huge incomes enjoyed by many heads of corporations. It appears that the supply of people who are really good at this type of work doesn't nearly equal demand, and, in a free economy, this kind of situation drives prices up.

However, problems arise when stockholders are not freely choosing how much to pay their CEOs. One type of difficulty can arise when mutual back-scratching occurs among people who serve on multiple corporate boards and help determine each other's pay. That is, suppose the executive who heads Corporation A is on the board of Corporation B, while the executive that heads Corporation B is on the board of Corporation A. Both can influence each other's level of remuneration. Opportunities for corruption seem to be magnified in this sort of situation.

Another kind of problem can arise when "independent consultants" really aren't all that independent, as Gretchen Morgenson reports.

The solution in each case seems to be greater activism on the part of the company's owners. Stockholders DO own the company and have a right to exercise ultimate control over its board as well as policies and key personnel. In recent years, many problems with corporations have arisen because of "sleepy" boards supported by equally sleepy stockholders.

Protests and strikes pay off in France (Monday, 4/10/06)
French President Jacques Chirac has announced that he intends to "replace" the law that has been the cause of massive marches and demonstrations. Here's more from Christine Ollivier in Paris. Richard Fisher and Michael Cox say that the public reaction to the law that would have made it easier to fire workers under 26 reflects the depth of public misunderstanding of the new global economy.

Meanwhile, Anabelle Garay writes about the massive demonstrations in the United States on behalf of immigrants, legal and illegal, which may have had something to do with persuading Members of Congress to get out of town after only two weeks of work in the Capitol following their St. Patrick's Day break.

It all brings to mind speculations about the conditions under which massive numbers of people in the streets can threaten lawfulness and subvert due process.

However, it appears that nearly all institutions are experiencing great pressures and fumbling to some extent in response to historically novel conditions. During the past several years, the news media have been filled with stories about corruption and failures in the Administration, the Congress, the major political parties, the healthcare system, religious institutions, the military, corporations, the news media, and big-time commercial sports. Virtually all American institutions have been foundering and failing in a variety of ways.

Our NewWorld Trends project will examine the extent to which institutions throughout the world are being left far behind by the synergistic interaction of the knowledge and technology revolutions.

Despite the huge numbers, if you live in China, you're probably being watched (Sunday, 4/9/06)
Hi-tech and its ability to quicken and broaden the flow of information are threats to highly centralized political systems. In fact, along with Pope John Paul, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ronald Reagan, the lowly old low-tech copy machine probably deserves at least a little of the credit for setting in motion processes that led to the disintegration of the old Soviet Union.

However, high-technology makes it easier to turn a government into Big Brother too. In fact, during the past three years, China's government has managed to gather information on all but about 500 million of the country's 1.3 billion people. Moreover, 30,000 Web police are watching the behavior of 110 million Chinese who are on the Internet.

There have been many recent news stories in the United States about how American hi-tech companies have been assisting the Chinese government in its censorship efforts. It brings to mind the role of Krupp in Germany during the Nazi period, which, incidentally, did business before the Nazis and has continued to do business since.

In fact, it isn't necessary for the leaders of a corporation to have a political agenda in order to assist those who do. All that is required is that corporate leaders sufficiently feel the pressure to produce profits that they don't allow politics, however unsavory, to interfere with business.

For example, even though there is evidence that media mogul Rupert Murdock personally prefers libertarian politics, it isn't necessary to assume that he is trying to influence politics in the United States by developing a largely right-wing cable news network that selectively interprets events as a matter of corporate policy.

Murdock built much of his early fortune with tabloid newspapers that frequently ran outrageous stories with outrageous headlines. It wasn't necessary to assume that he had to believe the headlines in order to run them.

He is a very sophisticated Oxford-educated Australian who seems to be most interested in exploiting market opportunities, whatever the political consequences. He saw the success of right-wing talk radio in the United States and accurately concluded that there are more people in the general population committed to traditional and familiar than to novel and unfamiliar ideas and attitudes, and saw a major potential market for a cable television news channel that would tell millions of people what they like to hear. There's no good reason to believe, if, instead, the majority of Americans were politically "liberal," that Fox News would not be a left-wing cable news operation as a consequence.

In this sense, Murdock, Jerry Springer, and Howard Stern may be kindred spirits. It appears that they're all educated, sophisticated but cynical people who are willing to put nearly anything into the mass media in order to make money.

Will a fancy, expensive college teach you how to cope with your accumulated student debt? (Thursday, 4/6/06)
Dante Chinni writes that it isn't necessarily clear anymore that attending one of America's most famous colleges will pay off as you might expect. Of course, it might help your career if you are able to share a dorm room with a Kennedy at Harvard or a Bush at Yale, but for reasons having little to do with what you might learn in your classes.

If you you think of "higher education" as referring mostly to which school you have attended, whose approval you have obtained, and what certificates you can display, whether or not you really know anything and whether or not you really can do anything, it's probably important to choose carefully so that you can brag to others about how much money college has cost you. Problem is, that seems a bit like those people who buy books to display on their shelves without caring what, if anything, is contained on their pages.

On the other hand, if you consider "higher education" to refer to learning and the actual acquisition of knowledge and competence, it's important to remember that, with sufficient commitment and diligence, you can still obtain an excellent education for nothing at the public library. In fact, learning resources are more accessible now than ever before. While it used to be necessary to go to a college or university campus in order to learn about most important topics, we're approaching a time when really serious learners will be able to learn about nearly anything nearly anywhere.

China's Great Firewall (Tuesday, 4/4/06)
The half-hour network TV news programs are really less than a half-hour long, because several minutes have to be set aside for the commercials. Moreover, those who expect to get all their news from these programs may be disappointed to learn that the entire editorial content on one of these shows would fit into only a part of one column of the New York Times. Nonetheless, the length of these programs is fixed, so there always has to be the same amount of news each day, no matter what, if anything, has happened.

You might also be annoyed to learn that there are similar limitations on the political comedy or satire programs, such as John Stewart's "The Daily Show" or "Real Time with Bill Maher." They also have a fixed amount of time to fill each time. As a consequence, they always have to spend the same amount of time making fun of politicians or political events, no matter what has been going on. It's not quite the same as having to wait until something happens that genuinely deserves ridicule.

Some of us have spent long periods of time writing and doing comedy on radio or in live performance and know how easy it is to do cheap shots. For instance, it would be easy to say that Republicans have been claiming for decades that anything done by the government is done inefficiently, ineffectively, and clumsily, and the Bush administration has been trying to demonstrate the truth of this assertion once and for all. Similarly, we could emphasize the facility that Democrats seem to have for forming circular firing squads, or that, while Republicans are governmentally incompetent, Democrats are politically incompetent, and, then, provide selected examples in support of either assertion.

The problem is that wisecracks, while often amusing to people whose attitudes already are in line with them, typically rely on stereotypes or caricatures, which, by definition, are distortions of reality. Political reality, like other aspects of reality, is greatly complicated. Anyone who believes that the answers to political questions are obvious and simple are likely to be experiencing the simplicity within their own minds. They're telling us much more about themselves than the objects of their attitudes.

Still, the incessant self-serving political jokes, the strident radio talk and TV shout shows, the highly polarized, selective partisan rhetoric, the reprehensibly dishonest political ads during heated campaigns, while annoying and disappointing, particularly in relation to easily imagined life in Shangri-la, are really part of the sweet music of a free society.

If you doubt this, consider how great the stakes are and what life would be like in a society without something resembling the American Constitution with its First Amendment. Consider how similar most American "liberals" and "conservatives" really are, compared to ideologues in societies with very different political histories and institutions.

For instance, consider that, in China, the government is recording every keystroke generated by people who are online in Internet cafes, and it isn't doing this simply in order to pass the time.

In Singapore, where foreign tourists constantly are told how "clean and green" and well-behaved this society is, it might be easier to forget that this prosperous city-state, unlike the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and many Western European countries, has no resemblance to a liberal democracy. Until you recall that this is a society in which individuals are held in check by the threat of draconian punishments for what most people in the West regard as minor offenses, that is. Moreover, Singapore's government is now warning people who post political commentary on the Internet that they may be liable to prosecution.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Sacred Destinations (Saturday, 4/1/06)
The world's cultures have been filled with different religions throughout human history, and there is evidence that people invented a multiplicity of religions during the much longer period of prehistory as well. During the tens of thousands of years that modern humans have been on the planet, religious cultures have existed largely in isolation from one another; but, now, increasingly, geographical distance is becoming irrelevant.

We've remarked previously about how millions of people throughout the world are responding to the fundamentally new conditions of life on Earth as well as to breathtaking changes of many kinds by more vigorously asserting ancient ideas and traditions. We can see examples of this phenomenon in each days news throughout the Muslim world as well as within Christian communities within the United States. This effort to cope may work psychologically for individuals for a while, but it also seems to exacerbate some of the major conflicts of our times, and, sooner or later, people will have to face the new realities, assuming that we don't destroy each other before that happens.

While waiting to see how it all shakes out, you may be interested in examining a few of the thousands of places on Earth which have been regarded as sacred by people within a variety of religious cultures over recent centuries or millennia. Holly Hayes's Sacred Destinations site contains information on about 1,500 of them.

Despite progress, the long-term racial gap persists (Thursday, 3/30/06)
Anyone who still believes that nothing has changed for African Americans in the U.S. either isn't very old or knows nothing about contemporary American history. Americans over sixty easily can remember when there were separate drinking fountains and restrooms for whites and blacks in the South and NO positive black models in the popular media. During the 1960s, there were still African-American males who felt that it was necessary to carry signs that said "I am a man" in civil rights marches.

To feel it necessary to point out something so obvious reflects the extend to which America's morbid racist history has been so monumentally stupid. Let's continue the search for intelligent life on earth. If it were not so deadly serious in its effects on the lives of tens of millions of people over such a long period of time, it would be simply hilarious because it has been so stupid.

The idea that brilliant people such as PBS' Gwen Ifill, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey--who, according to polls, is now the most admired woman in America--Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or former Secretary of State Colin Powell could have been considered somebody's "property" only a few decades ago, or that millions of Americans whose ancestors were victims of the most heinous crime ever perpetrated in the Americas could still have it held against them is, well, amazingly STUPID.

Well, so far, how are we doing as a society? For one thing, the old black-white dichotomy doesn't seem very appropriate anymore for describing America, given the great increase in our national diversity. For those who still believe that skin tone is more important than the color of a person's socks, there aren't just "whites" and "blacks" in America, but every imaginable shade in between, as well as a multiplicity of ethnicities, and, or course, an increasing number of people who have mixed ancestry, and not just from different parts of Western Europe.

For instance, Tiger Woods, who may very well be the greatest golfer in history, has an African-American father and Thai mother. Former wrestler and movie star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, has African-American and Hawaiian parents. Former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has said that it's not quite accurate to call him an "African-American." He says that his ancestry is African, Caribbean, Native American, and Irish. It seems easier simply to call him "Colin Powell."

At present, at least, different skin tones can be pretty obvious, just as the difference between a tall person and a short person is obvious, but nobody cares. We may be approaching a time when trivial biological differences will be commonly perceived as trivial. For the time-being, however, we're still attempting to live with the legacy of a very long, racist history. The majority of African-Americans now are middle-class, as are the majority of European-Americans. Nonetheless, there are still dramatic economic contrasts. Erin Texeira tells about the latest Urban League annual State of Black America report which offers details about the persistent economic gap.

How to please everybody on the immigration issue (Monday, 3/27/06)
Well, come to think of it, there isn't a way to do that. Forget about pleasing everybody, or even a large proportion of Americans who care about immigration.

Some people are saying that they would like to see all of the illegal immigrants deported. However, there is a problem or two with that. Assuming that one could identify and locate all of the nearly 12 million people who are in the United States illegally, if one were to load them all on busses for transport to Mexico, say, the busses would line up for about 1,700 miles, as one television commentator recently pointed out. That means that you would have to have a sufficient number of busses to extend along Interstate 35 from Austin, Texas to Duluth Minnesota, and back to Des Moines, Iowa or so. It appears that this solution is, well, somewhat impractical.

Another problem is that the American economy probably depends on the availability of at least a large proportion of the people from very poor countries. As Mitra Kalita and Krissah Williams report in the Washington Post, many American employers are paying very close attention to what Congress might do and how they may fill many of the jobs that American citizens apparently don't want.

Suzanne Gamboa reports from Washington that President Bush is among those Americans who would like to see the legalization of many illegal immigrants already here if they have jobs. That is, he would like to see a "guest worker" category established that would enable many people presently working in the U.S. while attempting to remain invisible, particularly to authorities, to come out of the shadows. However, many Americans, including many Congressional Republicans see this as a type of amnesty and want no part of it. It appears that the whole mess is interesting in the sense of what is supposed to have been an old curse: "May you live in interesting times." Stay tuned.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Institute for Global Ethics (Monday, 3/27/06)
Now that cultures which had been separated either by thousands of years or thousands of miles are coming into daily collision, it's important to search for common ground. The Institute for Global Ethics examines the question of whether there really are any universal core values.

Our NewWorld Trends project is based, in part, on the assertion that one of the most important values now involves a commitment to using the most powerful and trustworthy methods available for developing answers to empirical questions of all kinds. This is something that most of the world's religions and political ideologies, rooted in the ancient past, tend not to do.

The persistence of war, Germany's Nazi period, as well as other examples of genocide, the recent transAtlantic slave trade, the present resurgence of slavery throughout much of the world, as well as attitudes toward indigenous peoples nearly everywhere, all emphasize that it's very important what our ideas are and where they come from. Both depend on how we have obtained them. WHAT we know depends entirely on HOW we know it.

The knowledge revolution of recent history has affected greatly those members of humanity who are aware of it and understand its implications. However, most people in American society and the rest of the world still are not aware of WHAT IT TAKES to develop genuine knowledge, something about which scholars have learned a great deal during recent years.

We've also learned a great deal about the processes by which most people TYPICALLY develop and maintain their attitudes, including attitudinal belief components. Current knowledge of these processes helps explain how people can be so sure of things even when they have so little to go on, for example.

For those who still don't know any better, it's time to learn. For "consequentialists," at least, who DO understand the great modern knowledge revolution, but insist on not allowing it to influence them, it seems fundamentally immoral. It amounts to one of the most basic and important value issues, eclipsing many others that we hear more about.

It's not easy selling the idea of an American gastarbeiter program (Saturday, 3/25/06)
America's southern border has been a sieve in recent years, and millions of people are living and working in the United States illegally. The President favors a "guest worker" policy with which many of his fellow Americans disagree. The whole question of immigration is likely to become a major political issue during the years ahead, and threatens major impact, not only on the Republican Party, but also on American political life. In fact, among professional national politicians, like the war in Iraq, the issue doesn't break along strictly party lines. It's easy to find both Democrats and Republicans who are willing to argue all sides of the question.

While there seems to be growing popular resistance to illegal immigration, a case can be made for how the American economy depends on immigrants, including the millions who are in the U.S. illegally. Moreover, it is immigration that seems to be moderating for America what seems to be developing into a destabilizing demographic trend for other industrial countries, such as Japan and Russia, with populations which not only are aging rapidly, but also shrinking. Meanwhile, some would point out that many Mexicans simply have been repopulating a region of the United States that, before the Mexican War of the late 1840s, was part of Mexico--before the United States simply took it. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant both regarded the war as simply a "land-grab" also intended to extend slavery.

Guess who's the richest person in the world for the 12th consecutive year (Friday, 3/10/06)
If you said "Bill Gates," you're entitled to the coveted NewWork News handshake award. Billionaire Bill has net worth of about $50 billion now, and he's still the richest billionaire of them all. However, for a brief period before a court ordered the breakup of Microsoft, which, along with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, drove the world's largest software company's stock values down, Bill's net worth was about $100 billion. But, who's counting? There are far more billionaires in the world than there used to be, though, so you might want to check to see if you're on the latest Forbes list.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The World's Billionaires (Friday, 3/10/06)
There are more billionaires in the world than a year ago and far more than there were a few years ago. It's one of the things that Donald Trump and Oprah have in common, in addition to their both being moguls who appear on TV regularly. Martha Stewart is still on TV too, but she's no longer a billionaire, at least for the moment. Being an ex-con doesn't seem to help bolster one's finances, although Michael Milken did prison time too, and considerably more than Martha, but he's solidly on Fortune magazine's list of billionaires this year at the $2 billion level.

Overall, Forbes magazine identifies 793 billionaires this year. It's a far cry from that time during the 1960s when Howard Hughes and J. Paul Getty shared the cover of a major American news magazine. At the time, they were identified as probably the only two billionaires in the world. But, of course, a billion isn't what it used to be.

Do or die (Tuesday, 3/7/06)
Volkswagen executives are saying that Europe's largest automotive manufacturer is doomed unless it can cut costs and jobs, and do it sharply. Like the American automakers, Volkswagen is feeling the effects of heightened international competition, not only from Japan, but also South Korea, as well as the likelihood of a flood of cars from Chinese auto companies soon.

Europe's highly-privileged workers and its expensive social welfare system are products of an earlier period when national economies were much more isolated than presently. In the new global economy, capital moves around the world at the speed of light, and modern communications technology make it possible for workers throughout much of the world to compete with those in North America and Europe. Moreover, products easily move around the world as well. For instance, one of the major security concerns in the United States has to do with the 26,000 large shipping containers (sic) that come into the country each day, only a tiny proportion of which are inspected as they enter the United States.

When the unthinkable becomes thinkable (Tuesday, 3/7/06)
The late President John Kennedy said repeatedly that civilization hangs by a thread. Nothing should be taken for granted. In fact, nothing is ever settled once and for all. Is infanticide entirely gone from the Earth? No, it's still practiced in various places, and we can't rule out the possibility of a cultural change that could bring it about in familiar regions, such as the United States. In fact, the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that late-term abortion seems to be very near to infanticide.

Is it possible that disposing of society's aged and unproductive citizens could seem like a good idea sometime in the future? Stay tuned, because many so-called "advanced" industrial nations will soon become nearly overwhelmed with the cost of caring for increasingly large populations of elderly persons.

Did slavery disappear from the Earth with its abolition in the United States when the grandparents of many Americans who are just now approaching their late years were born? Hardly. In fact, given that the world's population is about six times as large now as it was in 1865, it appears that more people in the world are living under conditions of slavery now than during the dark days of the transatlantic slave trade.

How about forced sterilization? Lori Valigra examines Harry Bruinius' new book that traces the modern history of the sordid practice, and why it could be in Earth's future as much as in its past.

Eating its children (Monday, 3/6/06)
AT&T used to be called "Ma Bell," but, twenty-two years ago, it was ordered to divest itself of its local telephone service. The once-dominant telephone colossus became much reduced, spinning off a number of "Baby Bells" in the process. Among these was BellSouth, which is now being absorbed back into AT&T.

In most major mergers, some employees are considered redundant and jobs are cut. The big merger of AT&T with BellSouth is no exception. It is expected that 10,000 jobs will be sliced, as part of the old "Ma Bell" is reincarnated in a totally altered communication universe in which companies relying on the use of wires and fiber optics--telephone companies, cable TV companies, and Internet companies--begin to look much alike as they all compete for telephone, television, and Internet customers.

The American economy so far this year (Wednesday, 3/1/06)
Martin Crutsinger reports from Washington that consumers spent more in January, but construction slowed, largely because of a general slowing of the housing sector. Existing home sales have slowed, as well as new construction--even though home prices increased at a near-breathtaking rate for the entire 2005 year--so if you bought a house for speculative reasons, it may be time to begin moving your stuff into it and making plans to move in yourself, of all things. On the other hand, if you're young and would like to move from a rental to a house with your very own mortgage for most of the remainder of your active life, Business Week's Peter Coy has some suggestions.

Meanwhile, factories have been revving up because of an increase in orders. Ron Scherer reports that there are multiple signs that the American economy may roar through the spring.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Small World Project (Thursday, 2/23/06)
Psychologist Stanley Milgram probably is best-known in academic circles because of his famous "obedience experiments" from the early 1960s. In these experiments, subjects drawn from the general population were led to believe that they were giving highly painful, potentially lethal electric shocks to complete strangers who had never done the subjects any harm. In reality, no one was getting shocked, but Dr. Milgram was interested in how many subjects would obey the experimenter's instructions under minimally threatening conditions and deliver what they thought were excruciating electric shocks to innocent strangers.

The results astonished everybody, including psychiatrists who had been asked to predict them ahead of time and had wildly underestimated the outcomes. To nearly everybody's surprise, approximately two-thirds of the subjects, despite agitation and apparent discomfort, were willing to administer what they were led to believe was maximum shock. When those few who refused to continue simply said "No," the experiment was terminated immediately, and a full explanation was provided.

The findings attracted a lot of attention, particularly because it had been only about 15 years after the end of the Nazi era in Germany. They also contradicted common cultural assumptions that an individual's behavior is mostly a result of attributes of the person, and, instead, called great attention to the powerful role played by situational variables. Scientific findings such as these have been essentially ignored by American institutions, however, because they are inconsistent with cultural attitudes that have been handed down through many generations.

Milgram died in 1984, but, before his departure, he also conducted his "small world" studies, which gave rise to "six degrees of separation" ideas in the popular culture, which became the name for a play and a Hollywood feature film. Among other things, these studies showed the extraordinary extent to which society is closely networked. For instance, the odds are fairly great that you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows any randomly selected celebrity, or, for that matter, someone chosen at random from the general population. If you know any single big-time political or show-biz figure, or know somebody who does, it's likely that only a few links connect you to most big-time political or show-biz figures, because many of them know each other.

Because of relatively inexpensive international telephone service and air travel now, as well as the Internet, it's likely that the entire world is becoming much more closely networked as well. How many "degrees" now separate you from a randomly-selected person on the other side of the world? At any rate, it's time for additional research that addresses more specific questions, and this is being conducted by Professor Duncan Watts in his Small World Project at Columbia University.

A new aristocracy? (Tuesday, 2/21/06)
History has demonstrated over and over from Homeric Greece through the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution and beyond, that, even if you don't care about people, the risk of destructive social upheaval increases as the gap between the increasingly ostentatious rich and the far greater number of poor increases. During recent years, the world's rich have been getting richer, as vast multitudes of poor have been getting poorer across regions of the world as well as within many countries.

The world's well-to-do tend to use their money to leverage their time by having others do things for them that they might otherwise have to do for themselves. They do this by taking greater advantage of the division of labor that a market economy provides, but, also, in a more visible or conspicuous way, by hiring others to do things for them.

For instance, it is no longer necessary to be royal or a member of Britain's landed aristocracy in order to have personal assistants. Julie Bick of the New York Times tells about people in New York City and elsewhere who employ people to help take care of their personal responsibilities. Along similar lines, Roger Yu tells about travelers who employ others to handle their bags.

Currently, with its booming economy, China may hold the record for ther greatest gap between rich and poor, with its fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and its hundreds of millions of impoverished people attempting to live on the equivalent of a U.S. dollar or two per day, on the other. However, Tan Ee Lyn reports that the gap also is widening between Hong Kong's rich and its middle-class.

Perspective on an apparently grim U.S. jobs picture (Friday, 2/17/06)
Paul Craig Roberts has been examining data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and doesn't like what he sees. He says that job growth in the United States over the past five years has been the weakest since records began. The American economy would have had to produce more than an additional 7 million jobs during this period just to keep up with population growth, he says, and this is one good reason for controlling immigration.

But, wait a minute--isn't it immigration that is mostly responsible for U.S. population growth in the first place? For years, American whites and blacks have not been reproducing sufficiently to replace themselves. Nonetheless, U.S. population growth contrasts greatly with demographic trends in Japan, Russia, and many Western European countries where populations are expected to shrink substantially over the decades ahead. A major consequence is that these populations are aging even more rapidly than the U.S. population and their aging workforces make up a diminishing proportion of their total populations. The U.S. is expected to have problems during the remainder of this century as fewer workers attempt to support themselves and an increasing number of older people. However, many other countries would greatly prefer to have America's problems along these lines rather than their own.

Meanwhile, Mary Dalrymple reports from Washington that investigators are calling for greater coordinated action on the part of government agencies to remove incentives for people who are hiring illegal immigrants.

More on China's growing presence on the world stage and what it all may mean (Friday, 2/17/06)
Barry Peterson of CBS News reports that companies have to be willing to "play by China's rules" if they want to do business in a country that expects to become increasingly dominant in the new world of the 21st century. Jim Puzzanghera writes from Washington for the San Jose Mercury News about the "Great Firewall of China" and the Chinese government's efforts to block its citizens' access to taboo topics on the Internet. Tom Zeller reports that representatives of four major U.S.-based hi-tech companies have been called to explain to a Congressional committee why they are assisting the Chinese government in its great censorship effort. Here's more about that from Elizabeth Millard in the U.S. capital.

We should point out once again that BraveNewWorkWorld was one of the sites that the Chinese government specifically blocked within the country several years ago. After a time, Chinese censors apparently gave up and allowed our site to be freely accessible once again. We have not heard recently whether this accessibility has continued.

On the CBS Evening News recently, reporter Barry Peterson demonstrated the very different results when doing a Google search on the "Tiananmen Square protests of 1989" in Tokyo as opposed to doing the same search in Beijing. In Tokyo, everything on the topic is freely available; in Beijing, it's as though those protests never occurred.

Does our site come up on a Google search within China at this point? We don't know. If there were a Mandarin version of BNWW, we're almost certain that it would not, and Google's American executives have played a key role in making this sort of selectivity possible.

Why should Americans care about all of this? It appears that free inquiry and free expression are under siege from a variety of directions, only a few of which we will mention here. It's important for many reasons, not the least of which is that humanity's ability accurately to assess reality depends on free inquiry.

There is a very real question as to whether democracy as we understand it will survive the century on Earth. Keep in mind that the U.S. population now amounts to about 4.5 percent of the global population, and that the populations of other major industrial democratic countries, such as Japan and those in Western Europe, are shrinking. Also, keep in mind that China contains about 1.3 billion persons--about a billion more than the U.S.--and that it has the world's fastest-growing economy.

Remember, too, that there are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam has not had any strong liberal democratic traditions. Like many Christians throughout the world, many Muslims believe they already have the truth, so there's no reason to maintain conditions which can enable scientists, historians, or journalists to search for it. The knowledge revolution of recent years has not yet produced general populations that understand WHAT IT TAKES to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds. It would not be a good time for free inquiry or expression to disappear from the Earth. In fact, there is no good time for that.

Current public opinion polls clearly indicate that a majority of Americans care more about their security than about freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Among other things, this means that a nuclear attack on the United States by radical Islamic terrorists, for instance, could, in effect, destroy the American Constitution, not by incinerating parchment copies in the National Archives building, but by permanently altering American minds, which, in turn, could permanently alter the country's political culture.

Keep in mind, too, that the people who win wars or otherwise come to dominate write the history books. What will histories during the 22nd century have to say about the principal events of the preceding three or four centuries? Will there be reference to the American Bill of Rights, or will it disappear as Nikita Khrushchev did from Soviet history textbooks and as the Tiananmen Square massacre has from Google searches?

If you think this is highly unlikely, given the ubiquity of increasingly dominant electronic records, have you tried to play any of those old 8-track tapes lately? Or, how about those old reel-to-reel audio tapes in your closet or the Betamax video cassette of the "miracle on ice" game between the U.S. and Soviet hockey teams only about a quarter century ago? Incidentally, that was the same year that the large 5.25 inch floppy disks were introduced. Do you still have any copies of encyclopedias on those disks? When's the last time you were able to find a machine that would play them? In fact, how readily can you play the smaller "floppies" that have been disappearing more recently?

Incidentally, when the new Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified in Congress a few days ago, lawmakers had many questions about whether China now holds enough U.S. dollars to threaten the American economy. The Chairman attempted to reassure them, but the fact that well-informed American politicians were asking the questions is instructive in itself. And, if China is not a threat to the U.S. economy now, how about a week from Thursday or soon after?

The Earth can be expected to warm at about the same rate it has for a long time. Well, no, maybe not (Thursday, 1/26/06)
In fact, there are growing signs that our home planet may be warming up much faster than most people have been expecting. Here's more from Robert Cowen of the Christian Science Monitor on some of the recent studies.

It's possible that climate change may offer yet another example of a phenomenon that Ray Kurzweil, whom we've recently discussed at length, discusses in his latest book, The Singularity is Near: that many changes which are widely perceived to be linear really are geometric.

For example, global population remained relatively small and increased only slightly for tens of thousands of years, then suddenly hit the "knee" of the ogival curve, reaching 1 billion for the first time around 1840. In the lifetime of someone born in 1910 who died last year, world population went from 1.5 billion to more than 6 billion. That's in a single lifetime.

Population geneticist, Spencer Welles, has been remarking recently, based on his DNA studies, on how relatively quickly humanity spread throughout the world, becoming highly diverse in the process, after spending hundreds of thousands of years confined to Africa. Once again, things change slowly for a long time, then suddenly explode.

Will Earth become an unfamiliar planet within our lifetimes or those of our children? We don't know either, but it's a question that flows from more than idle curiosity.

Disney buys Pixar: Bob Iger, ask Gil Amelio why you had better watch out (Tuesday, 1/24/06)
It's final: The Walt Disney Company will acquire Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in a stock deal that will make Pixar CEO Steve Jobs one of Disney's largest stockholders and probably put him on the Disney Board of Directors.

Robert Iger is the new head of the Walt Disney Company, succeeding long-time CEO Michael Eisner, who was a veteran entertainment executive before he came to Disney, but with whom various people have had trouble relating, including Walt's nephew, Roy, and, of course, Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs.

Things began to fall apart for Eisner shortly after he published his triumphant autobiography, which brings to mind Dick Cavett, who published his memoirs while still in his 30s. It seemed premature at the time, but, as it turned out, maybe not.

At any rate, Mr. Eisner was forced into retirement after a controversial but nonetheless important tenure as Disney's chief executive. He wasn't able to reach a new agreement with Pixar's Steve Jobs, though, and it appeared for a time that Pixar really was going to find another distributor for its feature films after producing nothing but major hits for Disney.

However, now, Robert Iger is head of The Walt Disney Company, and he and Steve Jobs seem to get along just fine. In fact, the Disney board met yesterday and approved Iger's plan to buy Pixar, although not necessarily agreeing unanimously that Steve Jobs' animation company would be worth so much money.

The Disney-Pixar merger has been watched throughout the world because of its potential implications, not only for the entertainment business, but for other aspects of the global economy as well. For instance, James Doran of The Australian says that Steve Jobs is about to become an even stronger force in Hollywood than he's been since he drove Pixar to make the first animated feature film produced entirely by computer for Disney a decade ago.

Mr. jobs also is co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer Corporation, which, among other things, is responsible for the enormously successful iPod. Moreover, Jay Wrolstad reports that a full 14 percent of Americans who spend time on the Internet have visited Apple's ITunes site during the past year where music and major television series, such as big hits from ABC, which is owned by Disney, are available for sale. Moreover, higher education has been making increasing use of the iPod, and thousands of recorded books are also available for downloading to iPods. Expect corporate training programs to use the iPod as well. Even the video game industry is likely to be significantly affected by the Disney-Pixar merger.

Dawn Chmielewski of the Los Angeles Times reports that, in Steve Jobs, Disney may now have the "larger than life" character that it has needed to succeed Walt Disney and give the company a much needed boost of creativity.

For those who have followed the career of 50-year-old Stephen Jobs over the past three decades, it's hard not to remember that, in 1997, Steve Jobs managed to persuade Gil Amelio, who was then Apple Computer Corporation's CEO, that Apple should buy Jobs' NeXT operating system, which had been the core of the company Jobs formed after he was ousted from Apple by John Scully. Amelio later acknowledged that Apple probably paid too much for NeXT, but, then, they "also got Steve Jobs." Soon after, Amelio was a former Apple CEO, and Jobs was running the company again. A Disney executive has been heard to exclaim that the price paid for Pixar probably was pretty high, but, then, they "also got Steve Jobs." A principal difference this time seems to be that, unlike NeXT, Pixar is anything but a failure.

Around 1990 or so, five years before the Disney release of Pixar's "Toy Story," a prescient writer speculated that Steve Jobs might eventually come to dominate Hollywood as, well, say, as head of Disney.

Enough is enough (Monday, 1/23/06)
What do American coal miners and their families have in common with American combat soldiers and their families? All seem to be taking far more than their share of the risks and making far more than their share of the sacrifices, while the rest of America benefits. Vicki Smith says that political leaders at state and federal levels are beginning to push for mine safety legislation following two mine tragedies and the deaths of 14 miners within less than a month.

Here are some people who can't tolerate an interruption of their medications for ANY reason (Sunday, 1/22/06)
They're still commonly referred to as "mental illnesses," but conditions such as schizophrenia are really physical diseases just like so many others, except that, in this case, the part of the body that is not functioning properly is the brain, rather than heart, the lungs, the pancreas, or some other commonly dysfunctional organ. Some societies have come quite a long way since the days when the victims of these illnesses were simply persecuted, while most people lacked the slightest understanding of the reasons for the unusual behavior or experiences. Robert Pear writes from Hilliard, Florida about some of the people who are particularly vulnerable to interruptions due to the prescription drug fiasco from Medicare.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Google Earth (Saturday, 1/21/06)
When you step outside next time, you might want to wave skyward, in case your friends--or Uncle Sam--are watching. Google, which started out as a garage-based search engine about eight years ago, is still a search engine, but the enormously successful company seems to be getting into nearly everything else at this point as well.

For instance, Google Earth is an impressive feature that enables you to look at either large or extremely small parts of the earth from your personal computer with the help of some of the hundreds of man-made Earth satellites--if your computer is sufficiently powerful and suitably equipped, that is. At the moment, you'll need a fairly high horse power Macintosh or Windows machine to take advantage of Google Earth's capabilities. However, given that computers become largely obsolete in about three years, it won't be long before virtually everybody will have what they need. Apparently, the company would like to make it possible for you to view the earth--or the license plate number on a car parked down the street--from space in real time, as soon as that capability becomes available.

Google's corporate slogan is "Do no evil," which may or may not represent its real intentions and may or may not be consistent with its objective of making the world's information available to anybody who is interested.

During recent months, copyright holders have resisted Google's efforts to make other people's books available to everybody online, and Google's apparent policy of keeping a record of every Google search that has ever been performed seems to amount to an engraved invitation to government or anyone else with potentially malevolent motives to do evil of their own.

As this is written, the news is filled with stories about Google's resistance to government demands that it be given access to Google's records of what Americans have been searching for. So, it appears that the people running Google haven't been interested in making ALL information available to everybody. They seem to want to keep quite a bit of it for their own use, which is?

One might wonder why on earth they have been keeping those records in the first place. While it might be convenient to read the world's books online, if we forget, for the moment, that many of those books are the property of people who may not want to give them away, what possible good can come from keeping a record of people's searches? Intentionally, or not, Google's providing the means for anyone to keep track of what you're doing as well as keep an eye on you from space seem to strike at the heart of Constitutional privacy guarantees. There are signs that Google also wants to put your genome on the Internet as soon as it's possible to do so. Why? Before long, we should easily be able to tell how often you change your underwear. Just ask anybody.

Their intention to make the world's information widely available seems to be accelerating a fundamental process that's already going on over much of the world, the result of which is that nearly everything is connected to nearly everything else. One important consequence of this, of course, is that it erodes traditional structure and possibly prevents the development of new structure as well. It's probably important for us to think very seriously about whether an "atomization" of society and culture will really be in our best interest.

Incidentally, where did the two thirty-something grad students--sons of University of Maryland and Michigan State University professors, respectively--who started Google get its odd name? Not from the long-running post-World War I comic strip, "Barney Google," apparently. Instead, it seems that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were trying to make reference to "googol," the mathematical concept, while accepting the idea that most people are likely to feel like spelling it "google."

A "googol" is 1 followed by 100 zeros. It is a VERY large number, so large that it doesn't appear to have any identifiable use at this point, at least when counting. Possibly the only thing on Earth of which there may someday be a googol is the number of Google searches that have been performed through which people who are interested in what you've been doing can conduct "fishing expeditions" with high-speed, hi-tech equipment. In the meantime, be careful what you search for and consider wearing a large hat and dark glasses when you go outside.

Bad news for those who recognize that America's future depends on its willingness to commit more heavily to education (Friday, 1/20/06)
On average, the United States has been getting older while the gap between rich and poor has been widening. An indicator of these trends is that states are now spending more on Medicaid than on K-12 education. At what point will the big story of the day be that the once-wealthiest and most advanced country in the world has become the 21st century prototype of a third-world country?

Will Steve and Mickey together change the world? (Friday, 1/20/06)
Among the hot business stories of recent days is one which could have very broad and profound implications. It is the story about a possible merger between Pixar and Disney. If it happens as rumored, it would make Steve Jobs the largest individual stockholder at Disney and could earn him a seat on Disney's Board of Directors. Suddenly, the man who launched the iconographic computer interface, which became standard throughout the world, the man who was largely responsible for producing animated feature films with computers, and the creator of the fabulously successful iPod, could be helping to direct the company that owns Disney films, the Disney theme parks, the ABC television network, and ESPN.

Long-time Jobs watcher, Adam Engst, says that Steve Jobs, who heads both Apple Computer Corporation and Pixar Animation Studios and who is sometimes called the best CEO in the world, isn't propelled by money at this point--he's already a multi-billionaire--but, instead, wants to change the world. Moreover, he thinks the way to do it is to work though the popular culture. In addition, it's not unreasonable to expect that all this might also have something to do with Jobs' sometimes friendly, sometimes not so friendly rivalry with Bill Gates that goes back to their teens.

Gina Keating in Los Angeles examines the implications of a Disney-Pixar merger. Steven Levingston and Mike Musgrove look at implications too, while also examining the likelihood that it will happen.

Incidentally, both Stephen Jobs and Bill Gates finally turned 50 last year. It seems as though they should be about 150, because it seems that they've been around forever, already changing the world by the time they were 20.

As co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates purchased an operating system from little Seattle Computer Corporation which he made into MS-DOS--essentially a version of the then-dominant CP/M operating system that would run on Intel microprocessors--which he then sold to IBM on a non-exclusive basis. This enabled him to sell it to other computer makers too, and, before long, the great IBM was a minor player in the personal computer industry and Microsoft Corporation was the most powerful and important company in the world.

However, command-line interfaces such as CP/M or MS-DOS made computer users feel like the drivers of early automobiles, who not only had to carry a lot of tools with them, but also had to be amateur mechanics if they expected to go anyplace.

Nearly everybody wanted computers to be easier to use, and when young Steve Jobs took a tour of Xerox PARC and saw what Xerox was doing with the development of an iconographic interface, he thought that it was obvious that this would be the future of personal computing.

The Apple Lisa was his company's first effort along these lines, and it was not successful, in part, because it seemed to cost about as much as a house. However, in 1984, Apple released the first Macintosh, which seemed to many business users to be no more than an interesting toy. At the beginning, there were exactly two applications which would run on it, and neither was very useful in its original form: MacWrite and MacPaint. Steve got together with Bill Gates, and, before long, Microsoft released Multiplan, a spreadsheet program for the Mac, followed by Microsoft Word, a word processor for the Macintosh. Both were buggy at the beginning, leading many observers to suspect that this had not been accidental.

Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in 1992, its first operating system with an iconographic interface. It basically "sat on top" of MS-DOS, and was not very impressive, even though more than a million copies were sold within two months. Later, though, the company released Windows 95 on August 24, the anniversary of the explosion of Mount Vesuvius and the burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We thought at the time that this was amusing and significant.

Along the way, Apple sued Microsoft, claiming that Windows was simply a knockoff of the Mac, but Microsoft won. Microsoft certainly had not invented the iconographic interface, but Apple hadn't either. The original ideas came from Xerox, which, even though it was marketing CP/M-based personal computers of its own at the time, never brought the concepts to market itself.

Over the years, Apple produced a lot of interesting and elegant products, but, for a long time, it was a pitiable and very ineffective company--particularly during the years that Jobs was not running it. Meanwhile, Microsoft became the most influential corporation in the world, and, while Steve Jobs worked his way toward becoming a "poor billionaire," Bill Gates became the richest billionaire of all. For years now, he's been the wealthiest individual in the world.

For a brief period, before the Justice Department brought suit to break Microsoft up into a group of "baby Bills," and before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Gates' net worth was about $100 billion. It's considerably less at this point, but, at least for the moment, Billionaire Bill remains the richest individual on the planet, with Warren Buffett following fairly close behind and Steve Jobs trailing somewhere nearer Oprah as a "poor billionaire" in the Fortune magazine rankings.

Things have been going Steve's way lately. Not only has an entire industry grown up around Apple's phenomenally successful iPod, but, also, the Macintosh computer has been gaining some market share again, in part, because of the iPod, but also, in part, because of its elegant "Tiger" operating system. Meanwhile, Microsoft has delayed the introduction of the latest version of Windows while continually trying to plug holes in the current versions that hackers have been exploiting mercilessly.

Is it possible that Steve Jobs could still displace Bill Gates after all these years as the wealthiest, and more importantly, the most influential force in the hi-tech revolution that is transforming work and life throughout the world? Stay tuned.

Why it's important to continue the search for intelligent life on earth (Friday, 1/20/06)
Curt Anderson in Fort Lauderdale, Florida presents evidence of mankind's capacity for being a predator who preys upon the weak. Throughout the United States, homeless persons are being attacked by people who apparently do it just because they can.

Does the federal government seem like some sort of hospital? (Wednesday, 1/18/06)
Business Week's Howard Gleckman discusses what he regards as a very small step in the direction of "tax sanity." He says that Pease and PEP are good examples of how goofy the American tax code has gotten.

Incidentally, historians seem to agree that very few American presidents have had good second terms. Moreover, it may be possible to build a pretty strong case for how, of the forty-two men who have occupied the presidency, the majority have been fairly limited, unremarkable, mediocre, or outright awful. In fact, it might appear that the likelihood of a president's being uninspiring has increased as the franchise has broadened.

During the country's early days, the U.S. was not so much a democracy as an oligarchy, with only white, male landowners able to vote. Many of the founders were remarkable individuals, and early presidents were chosen by and from a select group of American aristocrats, even though some, like Franklin, Hamilton, and even Washington, had undistinguished social origins. Demagoguery might not have played such a large role as when the "masses" of the population became able to vote. Nonetheless--and this seems very important--as the United States became increasingly democratic, it became an increasingly successful society. Public opinion isn't always right, but participation and a widespread sense of ownership are very important.

At the moment, according to polls, President Bush's approval rating among potential voters is quite low. However, the public seems to have even less regard for the Congress, and, when asked about the Republican or Democratic parties, approval falls into single digits.

Still, despite common public attitudes, overall, the American Congress seems absolutely righteous, compared to the Congress of decades ago. In politics, for many purposes, perceptions ARE reality, but, overall, in fact, perceptions are one thing, while realities can be quite different, and, of course, this is a REPRESENTATIVE democracy, so the greater number of voters tend to get the elected representatives that they want and deserve.

Do the Republicans' current problems mean that the Democrats will regain control of Congress in this fall's election and win the presidency in 2008? Maybe, but not necessarily. The whole thing might remind you of an old joke: Two campers wake up in the middle of the night because they hear a bear outside their tent. One of the campers hurriedly puts on his running shoes. The other says, "What are you doing? You know you can't outrun a bear." The other replies, that's right, but I can outrun YOU."

Incidentally, if you noticed that we said that forty-two men have occupied the American presidency, and wonder what all the "41" and "43" stuff is all about that the two Presidents Bush keep talking about, there is an answer. We're correct, but so are they. George W. Bush is the 43rd president, in a sense, but only 42 men have held the office, because Grover Cleveland had two NON-consecutive terms.

Is Medicare's prescription drug program turning into a Katrina-style debacle? (Monday, 1/16/06)
So far, it's taken only two weeks for the new drug program to turn into a mess for millions of individuals and lots of states. In fact, with health emergencies suddenly appearing all over the country, the Bush administration has stepped in to try to alleviate at least some of people's problems getting the medications they need. Here's more from Robert Pear.

Many older people who were bewildered by the range of choices when they were trying to sign up for the program are now finding that it probably didn't make much difference what they signed up for--the medications that they need probably aren't covered anyway. Nonetheless, the tremendous range of choices in America is complicating the lives, not only of older Americans, but people in general. Here's more from Sandra Block of USA Today.

Incidentally, if you've been hoping that Congress will fix the Alternative Minimum Tax problem before it hits you, there may be less chance of that now, given that Congress may have to scramble to fix Medicare's new prescription drug mess.

Penny wise and pound foolish; well, penny foolish too (Monday, 1/16/06)
Americans have an international reputation for saving too little, spending too much, and building up too much debt. Michael Liedtke writes from San Francisco that, with their their profligate use of credit cards, young adult Americans aren't giving nervous economists much reason to relax. Along related lines, Marilyn Gardner writes about how debt is limiting the futures of so many of the young.

However, it isn't only the young who seem to suffer from this malady, and there is good evidence that Americans of all ages could benefit from a bit more financial literacy. For instance, a new survey conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation finds that the majority of Americans feel that they wouldn't have much chance of accumulating net wealth of $200,000, while a fifth of those surveyed indicated that their best chance of becoming well-off financially will come from buying lottery tickets, according to a report by Andrea Coombes of Marketwatch.

Precisely the opposite is true, of course. Anyone with only a passing familiarity with multiplier effects and the magic of compounding will know that, by beginning fairly early and sticking with even a modest savings plan, the building of genuine wealth is nearly inevitable. Winning the lottery, on the other hand, is about as likely as being struck by a meteor.

We've pointed out for years that the world would be a different place if the majority of the population were simply to learn about descriptive statistics and its implications, even though it typically takes up no more than about 15 percent of most college introductory statistics textbooks. The great majority of texts covers inferential statistics. Moroever, while we hear most about the hi-tech revolution--because it's "sexy," and it IS changing the world, of course--the knowledge revolution in virtually all fields is leaving most individuals and most institutions further and further behind as well.

Finally, what is true of the part also seems to be true of the whole, in this case. It isn't only individual Americans who are spending more than they're bringing in. The federal government has been doing the same. Jeannine Aversa reports that a growing number of analysts are worrying about the impact of the federal budget deficit on the American economy. The greater the deficit, the more the federal government will have to borrow, meaning that it will be competing more with individuals and businesses for available capital. It also means that it will be borrowing more from foreign sources.

David Lague writes in the International Herald Tribune about increasing international concerns over China's burgeoning financial power, in part, due to its great accumulation of foreign exchange. China's reserves now are nearly as great as those of Japan.

How much are you willing to pay to be a stage actor? (Monday, 1/16/06)
Even if you're greatly talented, betting your future on success in show business can make Las Vegas seem like a benevolent place or it can make selling your house to buy lottery tickets seem like a rational thing to do.

The talent market routinely grinds up even gifted people, and it is not unusual for the very few who make it big in Hollywood first to spend fifteen years trying. That is, by the time many people decide that they don't have what it takes or that they're not going to make it, for whatever reason, it has become pretty late to be a beginner at something else.

Only a small percentage of Hollywood's feature films make money, and even well-known actors still struggle with a life of financial insecurity. Work doesn't become less competitive as one climbs the ladder of success, even for stars, but, instead, even more so. It's only the A-list stars who can make so much money on a single film that they'll never need any more who probably won't have to worry about long-term financial security. However, these people have to "build a moat around their lives" because of their tremendous visibility, and that's also very expensive.

If films, television, recording, or live touring are tough, these lines of work often pale by comparison to life in the theater, even for successes on Broadway.Here's more from Charles Isherwood of the New York Times.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The King Center (Monday, 1/16/06)
Even the smartest, most motivated, most conscientious person on earth isn't going to get everything right. People are complicated, and, paradoxically, imperfection may be part of the definition of a "perfect" human being. The idea has shown up in many cultures throughout the world throughout history. It's probably most familiar to many Westerners in the form of Christianity's concept of "original sin."

For instance, Thomas Jefferson was a flawed human being in many ways, and not just because he apparently carried on an affair and produced children with his slave, Sally Hemmings, who was also the half-sister of his dead wife. In addition, he was a hypocrite with respect to slavery, and he was a world-class spendthrift who managed to work his way from wealth to huge debt by the time he died in 1826. Despite his long and carefully-crafted reputation, it's likely that he was as much dilettante as "Renaissance man." He was a devious politician who, like so most other American presidents who have served two terms, might have had a better presidential record if he had left office after four years. Nonetheless, there is a large monument to him in Washington, D. C., and that probably isn't a mistake.

Winston Churchill was an unabashed colonialist, one of Ghandi's principal opponents, had attitudes toward women which today would make most persons in either the UK or the U.S. cringe, mindlessly put information in one of his books that helped the Nazis later, left most of his political contemporaries with the impression that he was a "loose cannon," and he certainly drank too much. Nonetheless, he was a great man, maybe the greatest in a thousand years.

John Kennedy is another example. Disclosures following his death in 1963 have taken a good deal of the shine off the "Camelot" myth. Nonetheless, he performed brilliantly in the Cuban Missile Crisis, helping the world to avert annihilation. However, judging from what he told New York Times columnist James Reston immediately following his first meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Europe after becoming president, Kennedy seemed to recognize that he may have had a lot to do with creating the Cuban missile crisis in the first place. He felt that he left the Soviet dictator with the impression that he was not only young, but also naive and weak. If it had not been for that impression, Khrushchev might not have sent missiles to Cuba in the first place.

For several years during the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich not only were opponents, but also each others' "protection," in a sense. For a time, the Republicans were unable to push ahead too vigorously over Clinton's personal flaws because they had Gingrich. Similarly, the Democrats were unable to call too much attention to Gingrich's personal flaws because they had Clinton. Many normal Americans might not want either of these men as next-door neighbors, or want them to hold high public office, once they've gotten to know something about their personal lives. Nonetheless, both are brilliant analysts, and we would be very foolish not to pay close attention to what either has to say about American or geopolitical issues. They have two of the most powerful political minds of the past century.

So, the fact that Martin Luther King apparently carried on extramarital affairs and that rumors about plagiarism relating to his doctoral dissertation at Boston University have been in the wind for decades do not diminish the fact that he was one of the most important figures in modern American history who could end up having a profound influence on world history during the remainder of this century and beyond.

He never saw his 40th birthday, but he would be approaching 80 now, if he had lived. Unfortunately, his family has been carrying on a major feud which, in part, has to do with whether the King Center should be turned over to the National Park Service.

Quick tax guide: 1) Add up all you've made, 2) Send it in to the IRS (Sunday, 1/15/06)
Well, okay, it isn't quite that bad yet, but it may feel like it, if this is the year you get snared by the Alternative Minimum Tax. The ATM was instituted more than 35 years ago to insure that rich people could not avoid paying any tax whatever, so, if you end up paying it, it may be the closest you'll ever be to feeling rich.

Also, don't feel left out if you avoid the AMT this time; if it doesn't get you this year, there's always next, or the year after that. For reasons which may mystify but not surprise you, Congress neglected to index the ATM to inflation, which is why non-rich Americans are suddenly having to think about the AMT at all. All it knows is that your income may seem to be five times what it would have been when men first walked on the moon. Never mind that, in terms of buying power, $5.00 isn't quite enough to buy what $1.00 could buy in 1969 when the AMT was passed into law. Five dollars isn't five times as much as a 1969 dollar; a five-dollar bill simply has become the new dollar bill.

How could the Congress be so neglectful as to pass a law that seems so monumentally stupid, you might ask, particularly when we seem to have many of the best representatives that money can buy?

No, it's unlikely that you will ask a question like that during a time when many older Americans are seeing the new Medicare subscription medication benefit simply as some sort of cruel trick to bewilder aging brains. Also, we're living in a time when FEMA has done it all over again following the devastation from the fires in Oklahoma, even though Michael Brown apparently is off running his consulting firm which intends to advise people on responding to disasters.

And, oh yes, there are those in Congress whose votes apparently have been swayed by whether or not super-crook, er, super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff bought them a meal or a plane ticket. Is it possible that there are people in Washington who are so amazingly petty? Isn't being a member of the great American Congress ENOUGH, for heaven's sake? Apparently, not. For some, it's worth doing only if the job comes with lunch. Isn't it only a very pathetic crook who would be willing to sell a vote for such a low price?

Many Americans are still falling behind on their credit card payments (Tuesday, 1/10/06)
A principal difference between borrowing money from your neighborhood loan shark and borrowing it from a credit card company is that the latter isn't likely to break your knees if you don't pay up on time. It's important to read the fine print before paying with plastic, though, because you may be committing yourself to interest rates that can be hard to believe.

Many Americans carry a lot of credit card debt, and may not realize that, if they make only minimum payments, they're essentially just paying the interest, and it could take most of the remainder of their lives to pay off the debt itself. Credit cards can be very helpful if you are trying to wreck your life. Most experts in personal finance suggest biting the bullet and paying them off as quickly as possible. Then, you should use a little of the money you will save on interest, buy a good scissors, and cut up all those pieces of plastic so that you'll never be tempted to use them again.

Too many Americans live on the edge most of the time, and, credit cards can help them fall off if any of their regular expenses increase only slightly. Martin Crutsingter reports that data from the American Bankers Associated indicates that the proportion of credit card accounts in arrears during the third quarter remained near the record high of the quarter before.

How can the U.S. hold its position with respect to innovation? (Tuesday, 1/10/06)
Americans have a tendency to assume that everything is better in the U.S., even though that hasn't been the case in many areas of life for many years. For instance, the gap between rich and poor has been wider in the United States than in many other countries for a long time, and, despite overall average prosperity, there continues to be seemingly intractable institutionalized poverty. Also, the U.S. isn't anywhere near the best on infant mortality.

In the tech area, the U.S. is about 16th in the world on Internet broadband access, and, in fact, what is called "broadband' in the United States really is "medium band." Internet access in places like South Korea or Singapore is so fast that it will make most U.S. so-called "broadband users" feel as though they've returned to 9600 baud dial-up.

Most American would not want to live in an America that is no longer in charge of "inventing the future." Nonetheless, competition for hi-tech leadership is heating up, and many U.S. trends are pointing in the wrong direction. For instance, Americans in general have exactly the wrong attitude toward science and technology, as well as their own need for at least minimal mathematical and technical competence. Moreover, the U.S. isn't producing nearly enough engineers, and public attitudes translate into political policies that seem wrong-headed and perverse in the extreme. Vivek Wadhwa has been thinking about what can be done to prevent Americans from turning the U.S. into some sort of third-world country.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Millennium Seed Bank Project (Sunday, 1/8/06)
If Ray Kurzweil is right about the disconnect between perceptions and reality--i.e., people tend to perceive historical changes as linear, when, in fact, they have been and continue to be geometric--the world as we know it and as previous generations have known it will be left behind very rapidly. The Millennium Seed Bank Project has this in mind as it attempts to preserve the current diversity of plant life for future generations of humans. Incidentally, it's possible for seeds and other plant life to survive for a very long time, as research at Pompeii and Herculaneum has shown.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: What You Should Know About the AMT (Wednesday, 1/4/06)
You could be forgiven for confusing the AMT with your ATM, because you may have to open up the latter to pay the former. AMT stands for Alternative Minimum Tax, and it wasn't intended for you, unless you're among the very rich.

Nonetheless, because Congress, in all its wisdom, didn't index the AMT to inflation, it could soon snare you anyway, unless Congress steps in to head it off. You can count on that, if you want, but, in the meantime, it's probably a good idea to get up to speed on what could soon turn out to be a very bad surprise for millions of Americans who never have felt rich. Here's what you should know about the alternative minimum tax from Kathy Krisof of the Los Angeles Times.

More on China's tremendous economic growth (Tuesday, 1/3/06)
The Chinese government-controlled Xinhua News Agency reports that the country's economic growth during 2005 was higher than initially thought, and that the Chinese economy is even larger than first reported. The Washington Post reports from Shanghai that China's economy grew by 9.8 percent last year.

The implications aren't all rosy, however. China's booming economy means that the Chinese government has been giving little priority to its growing environmental disaster. Moreover, China's voracious appetite for energy means, not only an alteration of geopolitical relationships, but also increased pressure on China's coal mines to produce. One consequence of the latter is that mine disasters have become so commonplace in China that it takes something really spectacular to attract international press attention and be regarded as genuine news.

Meanwhile, in the "how the world is changing" department, France's economy expanded by 0.7 percent during the third-quarter of last year, and that is taken as very good news. It wasn't long ago that France was a major colonial power and French was regarded as the must-learn language of international business and diplomacy. French is still being taught in large numbers of American high schools and colleges, but mostly because the schools still have people who can teach it. Of far greater use for life and work during the remainder of the 21st century, though, might be Mandarin or Arabic.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: International Association of Nanotechnology (Tuesday, 1/3/06)
We called attention to Ray Kurzweil yesterday, as well as Bill Joy. Both are among the people on Earth who know more about nanotechnology than most of the rest of us.

Both seem to agree that it will be "the next big thing," in fact, probably the biggest thing so far, altering, not only how the world conducts its economic affairs, but changing the nature of human life on the planet, and SOON. With respect to nanotechnology, they differ mostly in their attitudes toward what Dr. Joy calls the "balance of promise and peril." Dr. Kurzweil tends to be more optimistic; Dr. Joy tends to be more worried.

If you do research on nanotechnology, you might be interested in presenting a paper or speaking at one of the upcoming conferences sponsored by the International Association of Nanotechnology. On the other hand, if you're still wondering what all the fuss is about, you might want to visit the Association's site as well.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: A Brief Career Summary of Ray Kurzweil (Monday, 1/2/06)
Several of the most important minds in the world are carried around inside the heads of visionaries who have spent most of their time since graduate school in the private sector.

One is the great Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel Corporation. Another is Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, perhaps best-known because of "Moore's Law." Another is Sun Microsystems co-founder, Bill Joy, and, of course, there is Ray Kurzweil, whom Fortune magazine and others have called the successor to Thomas Edison and one of the most influential thinkers of modern history. Here's a Brief Career Summary of Ray Kurzweil.

His latest book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, should be read by all government and corporate officials, as well as anyone else who is interested in the dramatically changed contexts within which all human activities will be carried on during the years immediately ahead.

Of course, two of the most influential minds of modern times were not listed above--Bill Gates and Stephen Jobs--because the term "since graduate school" doesn't apply to them. Bill Gates didn't finish college, and Steve Jobs earned no college credits at all.

You might be tempted to say that Mr. Jobs, who is CEO of both Apple Computer Corporation and Pixar in Hollywood, has done all this with "nothing but a high school education." However, the truth about him is the same as what noted organizational psychologist Carl Frost used to say about Victor Krause, who was responsible for redirecting Wolverine World Wide and inventing the "Hush Puppy" shoe: that he has everything, INCLUDING a high school education.

Gates and Jobs have been largely "self-created," both are thinkers AND doers, and both continue to have a tremendous effect on life in the modern world, including the rapidly evolving global economy.

Boom, boomer, bust, or buster? (Sunday, 1/1/06)
If you watch ABC's "Good Morning America," you may know that Mellody Hobson is the program's financial expert. Here are some of her predictions for the American economy of 2006.

Incidentally, this is the year that the huge American baby-boom cohort begins to turn 60, and many are wondering if they will be able to finance a "forever young" lifestyle once they stop working. That is, while Ms. Hobson is wondering if it will be boom or bust for the economy, many of America's "near-elderly" are wondering if retirement will be a boomer buster.

And, oh, yes, today not only is the first day of the rest of your life, it's also when the biggest expansion of Medicare in its history begins its roll-out. Kevin Freking has more from Washington on the new Medicare prescription medication benefit.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: China's Business Schools (Sunday, 1/1/06)
China contains nearly as many people now as the entire world contained in 1910 at the beginning of what has come to be known as the American Century, when U.S. population was only 92 million.

The world's most populous country has had the world's fastest-growing economy for several years now, and it suddenly appears that China's economy is the world's fourth-largest, behind only the U.S., Japan, and Germany. China will soon have more people on the Internet than any other country, and it is rapidly becoming one of the largest markets in the world for personal computers, television sets, and automobiles. It also appears that China now has as many cellular telephone users as the United States has total population.

All these may be among the reasons for expecting that the 21st and 22nd centuries could turn out to be like the many centuries before the Italian Renaissance started Europe and people of European ancestry on their way to global dominance.

Incidentally, China wasn't a democracy during those centuries either. China was the most advanced society on Earth, while most Europeans were living in mud huts, and no one in Europe knew about the existence of the Americas.

You might gather from all this that China also has an increasing need for people who know how to run businesses. They've thought of that. Business Week magazine has been compiling a great deal of information about China's business school explosion and why it is not only Chinese companies that will need the new generation of Chinese-trained managers.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: RIETI (Tuesday, 12/27/05)
RIETI stands for Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry. Since 2001, RIETI has been examining and advising on ways Japan can break with convention in order to reinvigorate governmental policy and the Japanese economy following a decade of economic struggle.

Over the years ahead, it's likely that Tokyo's subways will become far less crowded, but the bad news is that Japan's population will be shrinking overall, with an increasing proportion of it made up of people who are beyond their working years. Fewer younger people will be supporting more older people, and there will be an overall labor shortage that will inhibit economic growth.

Russia and several Western European countries are facing the same prospects. In fact, the rich industrial nations as a group are no longer part of the population explosion, even though global population is expected to increase from about 6 billion to about 9 billion during the 21st century. The world is likely to be a very different an unfamiliar place by the end of this century for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that it is becoming increasingly polarized with poor nations with high fertility rates, on the one hand, and rich nations with low fertility rates, on the other.

Native-born American whites and blacks haven't been replacing themselves either, but the U.S. population is still growing, in large part because of a high degree of immigration.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Ripples of Genocide: Journey Through Eastern Congo (Sunday, 12/18/05)
It may be hard to believe, but, even though the instruments of violence have become far more potent--e.g., dropping an atomic bomb can require no more exertion than pressing a button, but can destroy far more lives than rocks or swords--it does appear that humanity has become somewhat less violent over the past tens of thousands of years.

For instance, there is evidence that genocide was common during prehistoric times. But, once cities began to appear, violent impulses became less functional as people had to live together in close proximity within fairly large groups. Wars between geographically separated groups have remained popular, though, because the separation has helped people within "in-groups" to develop perceptions of those in "out-groups" as being very different from themselves, maybe even hardly worth bothering about, even to the point of perceiving people in other cultures as equivalent to different species, as Lorenz and Tinbergen have asserted with their concept of "pseudospeciation."

In a world in which geographical distance has become increasingly irrelevant and nearly everything is connected to nearly everything else--meaning that people, even if separated by thousands of miles, are interacting daily as if they were interacting face-to-face--there is reason to hope that the overall incidence of violent impulses will subside to an even greater extent over time.

We've hypothesized that traditional structure tends to dissolve in a world in which nearly everything is connected to nearly everything else, and there appear to be examples of this all around us. Of course, the collapse of space also amounts to a collapse of time, given the greatly different rates of change in the world. When cultures, which, previously, had been separated by thousands of miles of thousands of years, come into daily collision, it can be like bringing matter and anti-matter together. We're seeing examples of this all around us as well. We still don't know enough about the conditions under which the one thing happens as opposed to the other.

Even though there have been multiple examples of genocide during recent decades, there continue to be people who deny that these things have happened. For instance, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been in the news a lot during recent days for saying that the Holocaust is a "myth." Incidentally, several of the American hostages held in Iran a quarter century ago still insist that Mr. Ahmadinejad was one of the ring-leaders, but the American Department of State has chosen not to accept the idea, at least in public.

At any rate, similarly, despite overwhelming evidence, there are people who still deny that humans have ever visited the Moon. In fact, a poll a few years ago found that more Americans believed that we had been visited by extraterrestrial beings than believed men had ever set foot on the Moon. How much evidence is there for the one type of event, as opposed to the other?

It all simply illustrates that the great majority of people still do not understand WHAT IT TAKES to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all types, including those having to do with the origin and development of ancient documents. The modern era has been characterized by an enormous explosion of knowledge which some members of humanity understand, but most still do not.

If you believe that the attitude of the majority of Americans about the foundations of modern biology are exceptional, do you really believe that most people who believe that biological evolution doesn't happen really have greater understanding of organic chemistry, or archeology, or astrophysics, or calculus, or statistics, or any of the dozens of other fields in which the knowledge explosion of recent history has been so conspicuous? Overall, the knowledge explosion has left many aspects of culture and most human institutions far behind, creating a novel and highly dangerous global situation in the process.

If you're interested in recent examples of genocide, you will want to examine Ripples of Genocide: Journey Through Eastern Congo from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Business Plan Archive (Friday, 12/16/05)
During the late 1990s, the "dot-com bubble" wasn't the only thing filled with hot air. In retrospect, lots of heads seemed to be filled with the same stuff. You may remember the competition for who had the greatest "burn rates" and why earnings weren't important. For a brief period, there were dot-com startups which hadn't made a single dollar profit yet but nonetheless had greater market capitalizations than General Motors, General Electric, and several other major companies put together. All this should have alerted nearly everybody that something goofy was going on. In fact, you may recall that, when AOL and Time-Warner merged, many people were astonished to hear that it was AOL that bought Time-Warner, rather than the other way around. That "bloody merger" resulted in the loss of $200 billion in shareholder value in only three years.

If business students don't continue to study the great debacles of only a few years ago for decades, if not centuries, they will be damned fools, although it appears that the majority of people in American society already are forgetting about World War II, so maybe anything can happen. The Library of Congress, the Center for History and New Media, and the University of Maryland Libraries have joined forces in documenting that heady and irrational "dot-comedy" with their Business Plan Archive.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Center for Immigration Studies (Thursday, 12/15/05)
The Center for Immigration Studies says that it is pro-immigrant and favors fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those who are admitted to the United States. It claims to be the only "think-tank" in the United States exclusively committed to research on the "economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States."

It should be said that the flood of immigrants into the United States recently is not unique in American history, nor is the present migration unique to the United States. We've reported recently that, while all of the numbers have gotten larger as global population has expanded enormously during recent decades, a larger proportion of the U.S. population was foreign born in 1910 than presently. Also, many other wealthy countries have had large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants during the past several years. Resentments and conflicts have been widespread in a variety of locations including places such as Western Europe and Australia.

Current global migrations appear to be exacerbated by the widening gap between rich and poor, combined with the continuing population explosions in poorer countries, as well as the growing irrelevance of geographic distance when it comes to communication and even transportation.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: France in America (Monday, 12/12/05)
If you believe that all that American stuff about "freedom fries" a while back and all the jokes about France's presumed ineptness militarily, and so on, were simply stupid, you must know something about history.

True, the United States and its allies saved France during the 20th century. On the other hand, without French assistance during the late 18th century, there clearly would not have been any United States of America. The principal reason that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown was that he looked out and saw the French fleet poised in Chesapeake Bay.

Also, Napoleon's willingness to sell Louisiana to the U.S. during the Jefferson administration doubled the size of the Untied States at that time and probably prevented North America from becoming a patchwork of countries, much like Europe, with the continuing series of wars on North American soil over the past two centuries that this is likely to have generated.

France has played a long and important role in the history of the Americas. Here's France in America, which is a product of a partnership between the America Library of Contress and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Library of Economics and Liberty (Friday, 12/9/05)
The Liberty Fund foundation has provided much of the financial support for the Library of Economics and Liberty, an information- and idea-rich site from smart people whose orientation seems more libertarian than "conservative."

Incidentally, both major American political parties are complex coalitions made up of people with varying interests, including persons with ideas which are intellectually incompatible or even contradictory. Nonetheless, as columnist Dr. George Will has pointed out, despite this, both Democratic and Republican parties are relatively stable, although both have evolved greatly over the course of American history, even during the past several decades.

Currently, the Republican coalition is heavily influenced by social conservatives, which include many religious conservatives, as well as by secular conservatives or libertarians. The two groups have an uneasy relationship with one another, which helps explain the current schisms and conflicts within the party, but, for the moment, at least, members of neither feel they have anyplace else to go once they're in the voting booth other than to vote Republican.

A sign of growing regional autonomy in China? (Monday, 12/5/05)
Many of the people who live in Hong Kong had long experience with one of the world's great democracies, even though the 19th century events that led to its becoming a British colony in the first place were a bit unsavory. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have turned out to demonstrate that the democracy movement in Hong Kong is still very much alive.

In addition to Hong Kong, China's economic boom has been centered in regions around Guangzhou (Canton), Chongqing, Shanghai, and Beijing. During the past year or two, with the exception of Beijing itself, there have been growing signs that rich regions of the country have been going their own way a bit more, less under the centralized control of the Beijing government. And, oh yes, there is also Taiwan, which has become an industrial giant in recent years as well as increasingly democratic, even though it is still regarded as part of China by mainland Chinese leaders.

Sony attempts to get smaller (Monday, 12/5/05)
Hiroko Tabuchi writes from Tokyo about Sony's plans to cut 10,000 jobs around the world. Workers are being encouraged to take early retirement, for instance.

Over the nearly 10 years that NewWork News has been summarizing and analyzing economic events, we've commented now and than about Steve Jobs and Apple Computer's likely role in the new world economy.

For instance, some years ago, some observers of major business were saying that they thought that Stephen Jobs might end up dominating Hollywood by becoming head of Disney. What has happened, though, is that Jobs' Pixar Corporation, which produced "Toy Story" for Disney, the first full-length animated feature film done entirely with computers, as well as a series of additional film hits, has been riding high, while Disney has been struggling. Jobs has become a major force in Hollywood, but not in the way that many had expected.

Also, over the years, some observers have speculated that Apple Computer Corporation, which Steve Jobs also heads, would eventually come to dominate the consumer electronics sector as some sort of digital version of old analog Sony.

That may be happening. The iPod has become a huge international success with its own industry growing up around it. In addition, Apple is quickly establishing itself as a major consumer electronics and entertainment company in other ways, and seems to have taken some of the glow away from Sony as well as Disney. Moreover, Apple has become a major distributor of music online, and, with the latest video version of its iPod, seems poised to do the same for the distribution of video or "television" programming. Moreover, given that Steve Jobs is CEO of both Pixar and Apple, what synergies lie ahead?

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Russia and the Information Revolution (Sunday, 12/4/05)
When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the old Soviet Union into fifteen separate countries, instead of fifteen Soviet republics, there was great optimism among some in the West that Russia would become a capitalist democracy following many centuries of authoritarian political and economic centralization. Over the years since, though, the results have been mixed, to say the very least.

Nonetheless, the world has learned through long, painful experiences, that it is a very bad idea to ignore, exclude, or try to isolate Russia. As a consequence, the G7 often become the G8 at meetings by giving Russia a place at the table.

Even though Russia became poorer following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, at least for a while, there have been some recent signs that its open market economic experiment might succeed in the long-run, even while President Putin has consolidated and centralized power, making himself appear more like simply the latest Czar, rather than a freely-elected president in a vital democracy.

Digital technology is reorganizing the world and is likely to be a key determinant of economic success in the future. The famed RAND Corporation has been studying Russia and the information revolution.