The warrant for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been withdrawn, the Swedish Prosecution Authority has confirmed.
"I do not consider there to be any reason to suspect that he has committed rape," chief prosecutor Eva Finné said in a statement explaining her decision.

Maz Jobrani - did you hear the one about the Iranian - American

Jamil Abu-Wardeh: The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour

However, the energy industry is very efficient with respect to use of labor. According to Fortune, the top 4 industries out of 51 in terms of revenue per employee are all in the energy business.

Industry                               2006 $
Rank         Industry              (millions)
1            Pipelines                    4.3 
2            Petroleum Refining           3.2 
3            Mining, Crude-Oil Production 2.1 
4            Energy                       2.0 

One of the primary functions of government is to manage the economy. Governments do this directly through their expenditures, which are often more than 1/3 of GDP, and they do this indirectly by establishing the commercial law, promulgating financial and industrial regulations, and through tax policies which advantage certain sectors and encourage certain behaviors. Given the size, complexity and detailed involvement of the government in the economy, it is not tenable to regard the economy and the government as separate systems. They must be regarded as a whole, with the government playing a leading role.

As democracies have evolved, sufferage has become broader and the linkage between the voters' opinions and the politicians' actions has become tighter. With the broadening of the electorate from just males with property to most people over 18, the electorate has come to include a lot more people who are looking for various types of economic aid and assistance from the government. Government expenditures have changed from capital projects, such as building canals, railroads, and highways, to more consumption oriented projects, such as public employment, public housing, unemployment insurance, welfare programs, pensions, environmental cleanup, space exploration, the military, athletic stadiums/facilities, and the like. Less and less is spent on projects which will return a steady flow of future tax dollars to pay back the expenditure. Politicians are incented to provide consumption programs because the electorate wants to see benefits now and is not interested in delayed gratification. The media, polling, lobbyists, political organizations, and the growth of communications and information systems ensure that the politicians know what they must do in order to be reelected.

The result is Greece, where the politicians have been pandering to their wealthy supporters; buying off the populace with public service jobs, pensions, and benefits; borrowing to pay for the excess expenditures; and hiding the truth until it is too late.

But considering that Greece is the "cradle of democracy", it may be that they are just ahead of us all.

The central theme is how technical and scientific know-how specifically, and knowledge generally, were treated by early theories as "exogenous" factors and not included in models of the economy. The watershed moment is given as the 1990 paper by Paul Romer (son of former Colorado Governor Roy Romer, not related to Christina Romer) titled "Endogenous Technological Change". This solidified the '80s work on models of economic growth that took account of more realistic mechanisms of economic progress and led to further work in the area of "new growth" economics.

For someone not familiar with the history of economics, the first part is particularly interesting in its discussion of the key figures in economic thought and their interactions with their supporters and detractors. Warsh describes how there was a transition between the early economists, who used text and logical arguments as their medium, and the later macroeconomists, who used mathematical models, and how the adoption of formal mathematical models left out the broader, possibly erroneous descriptions of many econmic phenomena while creating more precise and logical models of a more limited and narrow set of economic phenomena. This is likened to the early maps of Africa. As cartographers began to understand the outlines of the coast with greater scientific precision, they omitted illustrations of the interior which had been based on story and myth. Maps of Africa became emptier for a time until the interior was visited by explorers equipped with modern instruments.

Besides the limitations and voids in early macroeconomic theory, the first part is also interesting as a treatise on the processes of academic research, publication, rivalries, advancement and honors. It would be a good read for anyone entering graduate school intending on a career in academic research. Dozens of the key contributors to the field are sketched, along with the part they play in the rivalries between the classicists and the Keynesians, the freshwater and the saltwater schools, and among the academic deparments of the great universities.

Having spent my careeer in engineering, it was astonishing to read that technical and scientific progress was not included in the structure of economic models until the '80s. Economists had not ignored techology, but they had treated it as an "exogenous" externality. In their models it would appear as sort of a cosmological constant that would expand the economy. This changed with the introduction of modern growth economics. Now, technological progress and the additions to the store of knowledge could be treated formally as part of the macroeconomic model. Companies as well as governments invest in research and development, part of the benefits are captured by the investor while other parts become available to all, and firms, nations, and the global economy benefit from the enhanced productivity that results.

This is capsulized by the following passage:

"So what is economics all about? Land, labor, and capital, with technology considered as a force apart? Or people, ideas, and things, with the production and distribution of knowledge as a matter of central concern? Scarcity? Or the countervailing forces of scarcity and abundance?"

Writing in 2005, Warsh is perhaps a little too optimistic about modern growth economics.

But I think that his description of the prevailing macroeconomic theories of the past is only too charitable, and that the prior models, which made too many generalizations and which ignored concerns that were too difficult to measure and model, are best discarded in favor of more realistic and detailed models.

First, to be a policy which can be sustained over multiple business cycles, the debts accumulated during downturns must be paid down by government surpluses during upturns. Our experience through several periods of relative prosperity is that neither Democrat nor Republican adminstrations are able to run surpluses except on the rarest of occasions. Therefore, the debt has accumulated progressively through multiple business cycles until we are approching a government debt crisis.

Second, the regulator or controller of a system must be able to respond more quickly than the system being controlled. In simplistic terms, the controller must measure some outputs of the controlled system, make decisions based on the data, provide some input signals to the system, observe changes in the outputs, and repeat. If the system being controlled changes more rapidly than the controller can make measurments, decide, and provide inputs, then the outputs become decorrelated from the control inputs and the system becomes unstable.  For example, if a car is being driven down the highway at 60, and it wanders due to unevenness in the roadway, the driver can steer it back to the center of the lane.  If you introduce a delay between the driver's turning the steering wheel and the turning of the front wheels, the driver will have a harder and harder time keeping the car in the lane. When the delay becomes long enough, the driver will be turning the steering wheel the wrong way too much of the time, the car will skid back and forth, and it will go in the ditch.

In recent decades the economy has become more "adaptable" and able to change rapidly, partly because of lack of regulation, partly because of the application of IT to production systems, and partly because more of the economy is financial and deals with abstract goods and services, rather than being involved with material things. For example, with a largely non-union, employee-at-will, workforce, businesses can fire employees more quickly than they used to, and more quickly than in other countries, e.g. in Europe. Just-in-time delivery in supply chains is managed by Enterprise Resource Planning systems, which can throttle back deliveries and control inventories rapidly. In finance, the "hot money" can move in and out of various financial instruments in very short times.

On the other hand, the political process has slowed down, degenerating into a series of theatrical episodes punctuated by procedural roadblocks. Agreements on the type of fiscal policy to be applied, how much, who should benefit, and what should be spent in each congressional district are reached only after difficult and time consuming negotiations. By the time the process has been completed it is rarely clear whether the inputs to the economy will have the desired effect on economic output so as to actually promote stable growth of the economy.

The economic indicators over the last couple decades appear to show a pattern of increasing cycle amplitude with decreasing cycle duration. This is typical behavior for a system where a control system is providing inputs too late and the system is becoming unstable.

Below this layer are Web Services, Enterprise Service Buses, and various software plumbing that connects clients, services and databases.

Using BPM, businesses can implement "straight-through processing", where a customer transaction is processed to completion without invoking any humans in the process.  A good example of a straight-through process is filling your car at a self-service gas pump using your credit card. From the time that the credit card magnetic stripe data, the customer's various button presses, and the grade, quantity and price of the gasoline purchased are collected from the the pump, until the transaction appears on the customer's statement, there is no human intervention.

Since the mid-'70s, there has been a debate about how software applications should be designed. Some have thought that software applications should support people in work centers, while others have thought that applications should support end-to-end processes. For a long time, the work center automation concept won out, and client-server software converted paper-based processes to digital, one job task and work station at a time. This was inefficient, since often jobs would involve accessing, cutting and pasting between applications, making printouts of partial transactions, or entering data from paper references.

BPM and the lower layers of software plumbing now allow software developers to create interface to these applications so that they become services which communicate directly to each other. BP also implements the necessary data transformations, data lookups, routine logical functions, and routing of results, which was previously done at workstations. When transactions require human intervention, it routes and queues work for workstations, and then resumes the automated process flow.

 As a result, businesses can eliminate permanently many clerical and administrative jobs.

Besides contributing to permanent unemployment, the elmination of these jobs will also diminish the demand for office space and exacerbate the downturn in commecial real estate.

At present, we may have just passed the bottom of the "V" and started up the right side. However, it will be a few quarters until we get up to a level even with the left side.

It is specious to declare a recession over until the GDP exceeds its previous maximum, adjusted for inflation, for two sucessive quarters.

This program appears to be adminstered by TrailBlazer Health Enterprises LLC under contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

See http://www.trailblazerhealth.com/Section_1011/Default.aspx

and http://www.acep.org/practres.aspx?id=37636

Presumably these programs would continue under the "if you've got it now, you won't lose it" principle.

People simply cannot read the legislation and understand what Congress is proposing in the bill, nor can they understand how the law will affect the country or their lives. 

Having seen examples like HR.3200, people also think that their Representatives and Senators have not read the bills, and that their Congresspeople do not understand what they are voting on.

It is time for legislation to be written in plain English that everyone can understand.

It can be done.  See the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America for examples.

On further thought, it seems that there is a general economic and trade policy problem with holders of de jure (patents, copyrights, etc) and de facto (e.g. 3 companies or fewer with more than 70% of the market?) monopolies or oligopolies. These companies do not use cost-based pricing but instead use profit-maximizing pricing.  In other words, they increase their prices to the point where the next cent in price increase will cause demand to fall enough that their net profits will fall.

In the case of drugs, a global pharma company can implement this profit maximizing strategy independently in each country since non-tariff barriers to trade can be used to prevent the flow of drugs between countries.  This allows global profit maximization, since the willingness to pay may be different between countries based on their economic status and a host of policy and sociological factors. 

Other manufacturers employ the same strategy. The regionalization of DVDs is intended to allow copyright holders to differentially price DVDs in different parts of the world.  Software distributors do the same thing. Even products like cameras are sold at different prices in different countries, although there is a "gray market" of products imported from low-price to high-price areas. The manufactures attempt to dissuade customers from gray market purchases by voiding warranties.

Since many of these companies are American, the general tendency is to rip off the home market and then maximize volume and profit by selling incremental volume above incremental costs in the global market.  This should be stopped by regulation along the following lines:

No company benefiting from de jure or de facto monopoly position may price its product or service to Americans at a price more than 10% above the lowest price charged in any other country, adjusted for the ratio in per capita GDP at the prevailing exchange rates.

Note that this would still let American drug companies charge less for drugs in poor countries, due to the per capita GDP ratio.  However, it would require a rough equalization of prices for drugs sold in the developed countries.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Like other Technology, Entertainment, Design talks, this is both entertaining and informative. 

However, over the last few decades major auto makers have become final assemblers and marketers, who are dependent on deep supply chains. In many cases they have spun out divisions into free-standing companies. These in turn have spun out some of their divisions, each spin out lengthening the supply chain.

Theoretically this increases efficiency in a number of way.  First, the creaky, inefficient division is no longer sheltered within the cost accounting structure of the parent company.  It is now exposed to market competition and it must get efficient or die. Second, the spun out entity can win business from other customers, increasing its volumes and realizing efficiencies of scale.

However, a "spin out" represents a symbolic analyst bonanza.

Since the suppliers are separate from the parent, there must be real business processes between them to replace the informal coordination between divisions of a single company. This requires the parent to draw up detailed design and quality specifications, write requests for proposals, evaluate proposals and bids, formulate contracts, get the contracts approved by legal and funded by management, receive the parts, monitor inventories and reorders, analyse invoices, and send out payments with remittance advices showing bonuses and penalties. The supplier now has to have a marketing and sales division, create proposals, negotiate contracts, evaluate proposed designs, prepare shipping documents with test results, invoice and bill the parent company, and negotiate collections, including negotiating any design changes/replacement parts/penalties due to issues with quality. All this is coordinated by extensive software systems for intercompany ERP and accounting, which must also be operated and maintained.

Furthermore, the parent can no longer depend on a single supplier, who may have a business interruption, so the parent has to do all this with at least a second source for each part. This increases the adminstrative, maintenance, warranty, and long term stocking complexity for the parent. And the supplier, no longer assured of the parent's volume, has to sell to as many other customers as possible, setting up a multiplicity of relationships with differing processes as demanded by the customers.

Each of these suppliers in the supply chain needs a set of general and adminstrative functions, such as a board of directors, upper management, legal, regulatory, marketing, human resources, real estate, accounting, etc., which were not needed by the integrated division.

Lastly, the process for spinning out the supplier also involves a lot of symbolic analyst work to prepare the legal documents, get approvals, get new debt to leverage up the balance sheet, choose a name and logo, implement the new identity ad campaign, etc.

The end result is an industry with a greatly increased number of symbolic analyst jobs.

A study was referenced in U.S. Study Says Job Retraining Is Not Effective, but that was in 1993, and it would be out of date.

Possibly retraining programs are more of a subsidy to the training industry than an effective means to assist workers coping with job losses due to outsourcing or technological change.

Are there any recent and reliable studies on the effectiveness of worker retraining programs?

"At the end of the first quarter, 12.63 per cent of the WaMu credit card loans were deemed uncollectable by JPMorgan. The bank estimates that figure could reach 18 to 24 per cent by the end of 2009, depending on economic conditions."

The Chase credit card loan portfolio isn't doing so hot either -- especially in Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada and Virginia

This is why credit card interest rates are so high -- to compensate for all the deadbeats.