Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

Interesting article about why the tech industry prefers younger workers.  It has a lot of threads and quickly gets into current heated political debates.  The gist of it is is outlined in an article on Vivek Wadhwa's blog:

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

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Stuffing Their Pockets

Newsweek
For CEOs, a lucrative recession.
by Rana Foroohar
September 04, 2010

CEOs Behaving Badly
One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage over their Croesus-like pay packages. The award for complete obliviousness would have to go to Blackstone cofounder Stephen Schwarzman, who earlier this summer compared government attempts to raise taxes on financiers such as himself to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Silver medals should certainly be handed out to the many executives and corporate lawyers who were grousing last week about the new Dodd-Frank bill, which includes a rule requiring companies to disclose the difference in pay between their chief executive and their lowest-level workers. It would be a “logistical nightmare,” these titans of industry wailed, for firms to compile this information.

Well, maybe, but if you issue pay stubs, surely you can tally them up (and perhaps keep a few more workers on board to do just that). The real nightmare will be when the public sees the numbers, which will illuminate just how egregious the U.S. pay gap has become. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank based in Washington, the average S&P 500 CEO takes home 263 times what his cheapest laborer does. While CEO pay is indeed down from its pre-crisis highs in 2007, it’s still double what it was in the 1990s, and eight times the level in the 1950s.
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What America Has Lost

Newsweek
It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11
by Fareed Zakaria
September 04, 2010

Life Returns to Ground Zero
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
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In Praise of Start-ups

Newsweek

The Capital Gets a Lesson In Job Growth

by Tony Dokoupil

September 05, 2010

President Obama recently scarfed a “super sub” to show his support for mom-and-pop businesses, crediting the little guy with the majority of U.S. job growth. Every modern president has done the same. There’s just one problem: it isn’t true, according to a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The work—the first to track employment by age and size of the hiring company—found that small, mature firms (those with fewer than 500 employees and at least 10 years in operation) are actually net drags on job growth.

On average, between 1992 and 2005, they destroyed more salaries than they created. In 2005, for example, small businesses lost about a million jobs, even as the overall economy expanded by about 2.5 million. Startups accounted for nearly all the growth.

New businesses are often tiny, of course, at least at first. But the distinction between them and small, mature firms is hardly semantic, says economist John Haltiwanger, who coauthored the study. His research suggests that the policy focus should skew young, nurturing the next big firms—which actually employ the most people—rather than tending an old crop of small ones.

Here is a larger more expansive article from the NYTimes on the same study:

Forgetting Ourselves

NYTimes
September 11, 2010
My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern-American
By Porochista Khakpour

IN the late ’90s and early ’00s, I used to frequent a boutique in the East Village called Michael and Hushi. Hushi Mortezaie, an impish club kid born in Iran and raised in the Bay Area, made outlandish, psychedelic, robot-chic clothing and was getting the coolest of the East Village cool kids to wear his strategically slashed and torn Farsi-graffitied shirts, though none of them had any idea that in some cases they were bearing post-Iranian Revolution political slogans.

I — born in Iran, raised in the Los Angeles area — used to go to downtown parties in a skimpy halter top that featured newsprint-emblazoned mujahideen women brandishing machine guns, their bullets bedazzled in gold next to the words “Long Live Iran.” It was the first time I had worn anything having to do with my homeland; I loved that feeling of for once being able to both be Iranian and a play on it.
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Decision Time

NYTimes

September 11, 2010
Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back
By Frank Rich

NO, he can’t. President Obama can’t reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can’t get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.

And so the odds that Obama’s party will survive the midterms seem less than Indiana Jones’s in the Temple of Doom — as we are reminded hourly by the Beltway herd flogging the latest polls. The Democrats are facing a “historic” rout, an earthquake, a tidal wave — well, you know the drill. End of story.

Unless it’s not. On Labor Day, the fighting Obama abruptly re-emerged, a far cry from the man whose Oval Office address on Iraq days earlier was about as persuasive as a hostage video. Speaking to workers in Milwaukee, the president finally started giving voice to the anger of America’s battered middle class. And he even let loose with a little anger of his own. The unspecified “powerful interests” aligned against him, he said, “talk about me like a dog.”
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Presidency in the Age of Regression

NYTimes
September 11, 2010
The Presidency, Chained to the World
By Matt Bai


President Obama tried to seize the moment last week, at the traditional start of the midterm election season, by laying out a series of new economic proposals. And yet, at least politically, there was something almost tangential about Mr. Obama’s latest initiatives, which included $50 billion for infrastructure projects and an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans. The country’s economic trajectory heading into November is probably unchangeable at this point, which means that nothing the president does now is likely to alter the grim data confronting the electorate.

Such powerlessness in the face of economic free fall has emerged as a hallmark of the modern presidency. While Mr. Obama is facing a more acute economic crisis moment than his predecessors, characterized by a near depression, the truth is that every president going back to Jimmy Carter, at one point or another, has had to campaign or govern in an environment dominated by the same cyclical and stubborn factors — recession, unemployment, rising energy costs. And so perhaps Mr. Obama’s presidency, as it reaches its midway point, is best understood not in isolation, but rather as part of a longer and still undefined political moment.
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$1,000,000,000,000 and Counting

Sept 13, 2010
The New Yorker
Iraq's cost

by Hendrik Hertzberg

Speaking from the Oval Office last Tuesday evening to mark what he called, with more hope than precision, “the end of our combat mission in Iraq,” President Obama had occasion to mention the previous occupant. “This afternoon,” he said,

I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.

That was kind—and not untrue, as far as it went: there is no reason to doubt that the personal motivations of the second President Bush in launching the invasion and occupation of Iraq included the fine sentiments that his successor now attributes to him, even if these were mixed with others less fine, such as a desire to avenge his father and outdo him in a single bold stroke of Oedipal filial piety. But it was also a reminder, gentle but pointed, that the war was a war of Bush’s choice—a choice that has left Obama with no good choices, only the responsibility of withdrawing in a way that mitigates, or at least does not needlessly extend, the harm this war has done to Iraq and its people and to American interests, American honor, and American power.
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Newsweek's "Best Countries in the World"

Newsweek, using various measures of success and well-being, ranked 100 countries to compile their list of best places to live.  Here are some graphs of ranking from the various continents and grouping.
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Also read Tom Freidman's excellent NY Times article where he uses this Newsweek report as the topic of another of his often insightful columns.

All Countries

East Asia & Pacific

EU Countries

Europe & Central Asia

Latin America & Caribbean

Middle Est & N Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

G20

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America in the Caboose While the World Barrels Ahead on High Speed Rail

This article points out the inherent lameness of the notion that Obama's recent $50B infrastructure announcement will be spent primarily on more roads, while the rest of the world zooms by us on their highspeed rail investment.  See orig article from Huffington Post for more detail.
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[excepts]

"But a $50 billion program to deal with all these objectives? Assuming as much as half, or $25 is being set aside for rail, how does that compare to other nations who are already far ahead of us in providing modern up to date mass transportation for their citizenry, or at least far more farseeing in planning ahead.

France for one, with perhaps the most comprehensive national high speed rail network in the world, will be adding another 2,000 additional kilometers of track to accommodate high-speed rail by 2020 at a cost of 98 billion dollars. In comparison, proportionate to size and population, that would the equivalent of the U.S. committing at least $490 billion to a similar project."

"China, in the time frame of one generation has built an infrastructure of high speed trains that leaves us in the dust. Major hubs are interconnected by trains speeding at some 300 miles per hour, while the rail travel time between many of our major cities is now slower than it was in the 1930's and '40s. According to Arianna Huffington's "Third World America" it now takes eighteen hours to travel by rail between Chicago and Denver, while back then the travel time was thirteen hours. According to an article in the China Daily in August of last year, China was planning to invest at least 700 billion yuan ($102 billion) annually from 2010 through 2012 on railway construction alone."

"By comparison we are way behind and falling further behind every year. From the very outset our reticence, or perhaps lack of vision, of how a national program to rebuild our railways might impact our society was missing. The stimulus program initiated last year set aside but $8 billion for important rail service improvement, a sum perhaps more appropriate to Andorra or Grenada than the United States."
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Partisan Voting Index for 111th Congress

Courtesy of Polidata (www.polidata.us)

Religiosity = Poverty?

Sept 6 2010
NYTimes
Religious Outlier
By Charles Blow

With all of the consternation about religion in this country, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our religiosity is in the world.

A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are. Gallup surveyed people in more than 100 countries in 2009 and found that religiosity was highly correlated to poverty. Richer countries in general are less religious.

But that doesn’t hold true for the United States.

Sixty-five percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their daily lives. That is compared with just 30 percent of the French, 27 percent of the British and 24 percent of the Japanese.

I used Gallup’s data to chart religiosity against gross domestic product per capita, and to group countries by their size and dominant religions.

The cliché goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Assuming that this holds true for charts, here is mine.

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