sketchy subways

Article. Illustrations. (U-bahns, too.)

I liked this:

Frost also rides the F train and is buddies with Velandria on Flickr’s subway sketchers group. But the two have never met face to face.

Meanwhile, the New York Times tried to draw a quick portrait of riders on the Q train one morning. Kind of disappointing, although I guess they didn’t have much time. (Incidentally, both articles came out around the July 4th weekend, probably because those were expected to be slow news days.)

the other side of outsourcing

Following up on my recent immigration/emigration post: it appears that the U.S. economic slowdown is leading American jobs lost overseas to be lost – overseas:

That does not mean the emerging world is buffered completely, particularly if both the United States and Europe slip into recession or if the financial crisis in the United States claims more and bigger financial institutions. And without question, sectors of emerging economies are already being stung.

There is growing fear especially in the fastest-growing Indian technology markets, which include outsourcing, back-office operations and call centers. Those sectors are 70 percent dependent on the United States. Several Indian technology companies have slowed their hiring because of the U.S. economy’s slowdown. In May, industrial output was up 3.3 percent, half the 6 percent increase in May 2007.

“I will have to lay off more if things don’t pick up,” said Rajiv Prem, a clothing manufacturer for U.S. retailers, including Anthropologie and Motherworks, who said the drop in orders has meant he had to close two of his three factories outside New Delhi.

Exports in China — the darling of the 21st-century economy — are also being hammered by slackening demand caused by the global slowdown and rising labor and material costs. Chen Gong, who runs a factory that makes plastic cleaning devices in Ningbo, a manufacturing city near Shanghai in the Yangtze River delta, has seen profits slip partly from the yuan’s controlled but steady rise against the dollar. It has slashed profit margins for many mid-size manufacturers from 15 to 3 percent. Many factories in nearby Guangdong province have closed their doors, and thousands of workers have lost their jobs.

“We’ll just see who can survive this,” Chen said. Experts predict as many as one-third of export manufacturers will close in the next three years.

Ultimately, that might not turn out so bad for China

Chinese exports to the United States have been flat this year and will likely experience a rare, overall decline by year-end, said Arthur Kroeber, managing director at Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing. Yet experts said that might be exactly what China needs. A global slowdown — if tempered — could help China stage a soft landing for its breakneck economic growth.

“In some ways, this is not only welcome but desired by the Chinese,” said Vikram Nehru, the World Bank‘s chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.

However,

Yet in Europe and Japan, the situation is decidedly more gloomy. In Japan, a new government forecast shows slowing economic growth and rising inflation in the coming year….

In Europe, which analysts once hoped would be a pillar of economic strength in the event of a U.S. recession, analysts are now warning of possible recession. The weakening dollar has made German chemicals and cars exceedingly expensive overseas — particularly in the United States — stinging the manufacturing industry in the euro zone’s largest economy. Spain, Ireland and Britain are mired in painful housing slumps with their financial institutions squeezed by the U.S.-sparked global credit crunch.

So to reiterate, chances of American emigration for better employment: still not likely.

coincidence

July 18th, in the Washington Post (via):

If the movement to confront climate change is perceived as partisan, anti-capitalist and hostile to human life, it is likely to fail, causing suffering for many, including the ice bears. And so the question arises: Will the environment survive the environmentalists?

July 18th, in the New York Sun (via):

Today, we need sophisticated policies that weigh costs and benefits, not more warnings. Ironically, the very success of environmental alarmism has convinced many of us that the environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists.

queue is for quiescent

The discussion of attempted line-jumping reminds me of a discussion of queuing behavior in Russia – focused mostly on the Soviet era, but with reference to more recent times – that I read on the h-russia e-mail list years ago. You can find the whole archived discussion in the fall 2001 h-russia logs.* This is probably the most similar anecdote (though with a different outcome), followed by this. And for a more in-depth analysis, see here.

But my favorite story is this one:

Sorry I don’t have any citations to research but in a basic guide book
to Moscow I have here there is mention of something worth including in your efforts.

Namely – when McDonald’s opened their first place in Moscow there were of course huge lines. The Russians then automatically lined up in the longest of the multiple queues on the standard presumption that the longest queue went to the sales place with the highest quality goods. McDonald’s had to pass out printed notes explaining that all queue’s went to the same products.

Guidebooks are not the most reliable of sources so it might well be an urban legend, but lots of urban legends read like jokes and sometimes they’re just as amusing.

*It looks like it started with a query in October, the bulk of the discussion was in November, and there were some follow-ups in December. The subject lines use either the words “queue” or “line.”

where were they then? (Alton Brooks Parker)

William Jennings Bryan is famously an electoral loser, but he wasn’t always a loser. In 1904, Alton B. Parker was. Don’t know much about Alton B. Parker? Neither do I, but he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904 after having been (scroll down for the correct Parker) chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals. I don’t know anything about his merits as a candidate, but Wikipedia notes:

In author Irving Stone’s 1943 book, They Also Ran, about defeated presidential candidates, a chapter about Judge Parker mentioned that he is the only defeated presidential candidate in history never to have a biography written about him. Stone theorized that Parker would have been an effective president and the 1904 election was one of a few in American history in which voters had two first-rate candidates to choose from. Stone professed that Americans liked Roosevelt more because of his colorful style.

After the election Parker went back to being a lawyer, though it appears he was still referred to as “judge” – as was the style at the time. And in today’s 1908 New-York Tribune, he (or someone with the exact same name) makes a surprise appearance at the bottom of the front page:

JUDGE PARKER EXECUTES DEFENDANT

Toston, Mont., July 16.–Judge Alton B. Parker, while visiting here yesterday, took part in a tragedy. The dead: One large and vociferous rattlesnake. The judge was riding a horse in the wake of a band of sheep at Riverside Ranch, when he took judicial cognizance of the reptile. The rattler waved its tail. His honor, not to be outdone, waived all technicalities, and by virtue of his authority and a large stone executed the defendant on the spot.

Tribune Thursday: fleet arrives at Honolulu harbor

Top stories:

  1. An express train on the New York, New Hampshire, & Hartford Railroad derailed just past Greenwich station, leaving 1 dead and a dozen people injured.
  2. (a) Columbia University professor Darius Eatman, who did not know how to swim, drowned in a North Carolina pond after the boat he was on capsized. Eatman’s companions on the boat, who were able to swim, were unable to save him.
    (b) Unusually high pressure from firefighters’ hoses let the water used to put out a fire at Nos. 1, 3, and 5 Bond St. to cause more damage than the fire itself.
  3. A report from the Olympics in London
  4. Bad news for the Democratic presidential nominee:

    The Nebraska State Railway Employes Association, started in Nebraska as a movement against William J. Bryan and the principles for which he stands, has spread into other Western states, and already organizations are being formed in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas and Colorado. Other states will be organized as fast as possible until all railroad employes in the Middle West have joined the organization.

  5. Taft has completed the first draft of his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination. He plans to cut if from 10,000 to 3500 words by the time he delivers it in Cincinnati on July 28th.
  6. The Atlantic battleship fleet arrived in Honolulu yesterday.

Photo: Honolulu harbor

a nation of immigrants

I’ve been wondering for some time if there’s a chance that if there’s a prolonged economic downturn, a significant number of Americans won’t just see their jobs moved overseas, they’ll begin to follow them. I’m sure it’s extremely unlikely: a significant depression in the US would almost certainly be accompanied by a more or less worldwide one. Anyway, it’s not like Americans left the country in huge numbers in the 1930s, and even if a depression were a push factor, there still would have to be some pull factors drawing people elsewhere.

That said, I found myself wondering about American emigration again when I read this:

Why does Germany have an engineering shortage while U.S. engineers are forced into “sales”? If our engineers didn’t go into sales, they’d be unemployed. It also puzzles me how, in 2008, German industry, with an ever higher euro, keeps outcompeting the U.S. in sales abroad. The Germans are actually looking for more than half a million skilled workers, including 100,000 engineers.

Of course unemployment in the US is still fairly low, sales can pay well enough, there are restrictions on Americans working in the EU, and Germany is attracting workers from other parts of the world who likely earn less than an American would ask for. So there are some pretty easy answers to the question: why aren’t American engineers trying for those jobs? And that’s before you get to the question of whether Americans are not inclined to emigrate, not even temporarily, with the intention of sending money back and eventually returning.**

*Though the article itself is actually on an entirely different topic from this post, by the way, namely: what effect will growing numbers of wealthy young wealth-managing liberals have on Democratic (and by extension, American,) politics?

**I know very little about American emigration history. I think quite a few Americans actually left for Canada in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the American economy was growing rapidly (outside of panics/depressions). A chart in Eric‘s book indicates that the United States was second only to the British Isles as a source region for immigrants to Canada between 1891-1910 (figure 3.2, page 68). I wonder if that number includes immigrants to the United States who later went to Canada.

“Listen, I–I’m sorry to tell you this, but, uh, you’ve been fired. Management had to replace you with a Mac II and a part-timer with a Masters degree.”

I know there are people – I count myself as one – who are reluctant to watch even medium length videos online, especially if they’re of something that could easily be covered in a transcript. But this is an actual short film with actors and everything, and it’s darkly comedic too: “The Debt.” I saw it on Bravo sometime in the 1990s and I’ve been looking for it online for a few years now, ever since I started paying attention (more or less) to debt in the news. It fits in with the mood of the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s (the debt counter shows the 1992 interest); aside from the technology the characters use, it doesn’t seem all that out of date.

Note: it’s on youtube in two parts of 5 and 7 minutes (not counting credits it’s just over 10 minutes), but if you play it at the link above you should be taken directly from part 1 to part 2. For more on the film go here and click on “shorts” in the top menu.

indy mac, when are you coming back?

Earlier tonight I caught people on CNN talking about the possibility of a bank run on Monday when IndyMac re-opens after what I guess was already a bank run. (Want to see an old-style bank run? Check out 51:45 on this video.) Apparently it would not be a good idea for people to rush out and try to withdraw their money; the commentators agreed that this needs to be made clear to the public. I suppose political leaders could use their platform to address this, but it hardly seems like the kind of thing a President, for instance, would want to get involved in.

Update: Reading about another Mac and a Mae, their relations with Congress don’t look very healthy (via):

The political battle lines were drawn by 2000, when a senior Clinton administration official called on Congress to take steps that might have diminished the companies’ special status. Treasury Undersecretary Gary Gensler also urged that regulators be given more power to set capital requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The companies fought back.

“We think that the statements evidence a contempt for the nation’s housing and mortgage markets,” Freddie Mac spokeswoman Sharon J. McHale said at the time.

Even after Freddie Mac was shown to have manipulated earnings, Congress remained deadlocked over legislation to create a stronger regulator. Opposing one such bill in 2004, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) argued that a hostile regulator could use the proposed powers to choke the companies.

When a federal regulator accused Fannie Mae of cooking its books to increase bonuses, lawmakers lined up to denounce the regulator. Rep. William L. Clay Jr. (D-Mo.) said a House panel had no business holding a hearing on the matter — “unless this is truly a witch hunt.” Fannie Mae was later found to have overstated profits by $6.3 billion.

Former representative Richard H. Baker (R-La.), who chaired a subcommittee that oversaw the companies, struggled for years to rein them in and tried to show they were being managed for the enrichment of their executives. When Baker obtained data on Fannie Mae pay, a lawyer for the company threatened him with personal liability if he made it public, Baker recounted last week.

Critics of the two firms included former Reagan administration official Peter Wallison, who crusaded against them at the American Enterprise Institute, and a coalition of financial companies whose interests often conflicted with those of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Bush administration pushed a similar agenda.

“The simple truth is that there is no need for our financial markets to be exposed to this risk,” Emil W. Henry, Jr., an assistant Treasury secretary, said in 2006.

On the other side, a top lobbyist for Freddie Mac held more than 75 fundraisers for members of the House Financial Services Committee in an 18-month period several years ago, raising nearly $3 million, according to records brought to light in a federal investigation. The lobbyist’s fundraising dinners typically featured the committee’s Republican chairman at the time, Michael G. Oxley of Ohio.

Those and other activities led to a record $3.8 million fine against Freddie Mac in 2006 for allegedly[*] violating federal election law.

In an internal memo in 2004, Fannie Mae executive Daniel H. Mudd affirmed what the company’s critics had long contended: In the political arena, “we always won” and “we took no prisoners.”

“We used to, by virtue of our peculiarity, be able to write, or have written, rules that worked for us,” wrote Mudd, now the company’s chief executive.

*This appears to be one of those mysterious usages of “alleged.” Quick searches suggest that this was a settlement in which it was agreed that the allegations will continue to be called allegations.

conspicuous by their absence

Reading this, it occurred to me that the rich really are different from you* and me: they can afford to stay out of sight.

Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff describe a similar pattern in their book, The Middle-Class Millionaire, which analyzes the spending habits of the 8.4million American households whose wealth is self-made and whose net worth, including their home equity, is between $1 million and $10 million. Aside from a penchant for fancy cars, these millionaires devote their luxury dollars mostly to goods and services outsiders can’t see: concierge health care, home renovations, all sorts of personal coaches, and expensive family vacations. They focus less on impressing strangers and more on family- and self-improvement. Even when they invest in traditional luxuries like second homes, jets, or yachts, they prefer fractional ownership. “They’re looking for ownership to be converted into a relationship rather than an asset they have to take care of,” says Schiff. Their primary luxuries are time and attention.

*Unless you are rich, but you wouldn’t tell me that, would you? Unless you’re only recently rich.