Dan Kennedy draws attention to the state of US cable news in the Guardian. UK television news is certainly much better than in the US, but when it comes to newspapers and magazines, in my view the best publications in the US are far better than their British counterparts.
These days UK newspapers - yes, even the "broadsheets" (for non-UK readers, these are the four "serious" newspapers, namely the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent) - contain little more than re-worded press releases plugging some product or another ("10 best stir-fry pans" etc.), or paraphrased versions of the Reuters wire. There is nothing remotely equivalent to the serious journalism you see in the New York Times. By this I mean pieces where the journalist makes the effort (and has the background) to understand the issues for herself, and then puts the evidence together into a coherent story.
The opinion pages are even worse. In the UK papers, opinion pieces are droll enough, but very rarely have the depth of the best of the New York Times or Washington Post's op-ed pages. I really can't imagine a serious economist like Paul Krugman having a regular column in the Times of London. Instead we get the likes of Boris Johnson: a funny enough writer, but a literate generalist with absolutely no expert knowledge of anything.
Finally, where are Britain's magazines? America has the superb New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the more mainstream Newsweek and Time (light, but readable enough). Germany has Der Spiegel and Stern. Leaving aside the Economist, which is a much more specialist outlet than any of the above, we have nothing comparable.
Thank heaven for BBC news...
Showing posts with label us. Show all posts
Showing posts with label us. Show all posts
Friday, July 27, 2007
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Youth unemployment
I've written previously on how difficult it is to compare rates of joblessness between countries. One of the trickiest areas is the youth labour market. Suppose countries A and B each have 1 million 16-20 year olds. Out of this population, each country also has the same number - let's say 50,000 - of youths who are neither at work nor in education. Now, country A is less generous with funding for education, so 450,000 of the the 950,000 kids at school there work part-time. Country B offers more support for education, so only 50,000 of the kids at school there work. Now, the unemployment rate is, by definition
Thus, the formal youth unemployment rate in country A is just 10% but in country B a whopping 50%. Both countries have exactly the same number of kids who are not usefully occupied, but A's situation looks better simply because it has more of its students at work. (You could even argue that B's position is better, since the long-term pay-off of good education is high, and it may well be the case that it's preferable if students don't have to work.)
There's a good argument to be made that the US currently resembles country A, and France country B. As economists John Schmitt and David Howell report:
Yet:
And there are of course differences in the rate at which young people work:
Be wary of unemployment rates: they really are the most heavily politicised of economic indicators...!
number unemployed / (number unemployed + number employed)
Thus, the formal youth unemployment rate in country A is just 10% but in country B a whopping 50%. Both countries have exactly the same number of kids who are not usefully occupied, but A's situation looks better simply because it has more of its students at work. (You could even argue that B's position is better, since the long-term pay-off of good education is high, and it may well be the case that it's preferable if students don't have to work.)
There's a good argument to be made that the US currently resembles country A, and France country B. As economists John Schmitt and David Howell report:
At 22 percent, the nominal youth unemployment rate in France is double the U.S. rate of 11 percent, and even further above the U.K. rate of 9.9 percent...
Yet:
...for male youth the unemployment-to-population rate is 8.3 percent in the United States and 8.6 percent in France...
And there are of course differences in the rate at which young people work:
In the United States, 23.1 percent of 16- to 19-year-old students were also working, compared to only 1.8 percent of French teenagers. This disparity creates most of the higher statistical unemployment rate.
Be wary of unemployment rates: they really are the most heavily politicised of economic indicators...!
Starving the NIH
Very rarely do I find myself agreeing with anything in the Washington post, but this piece is spot-on:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/23/AR2007072301364.html
NIH-funded research, and associated spin-offs, have been for many years arguably the most potent source of biomedical innovation in the US, if not the world. Yet the Bush administration - which when it comes to tax cuts seems swayed by far more tenuous arguments about innovation and technology - sees fit to reduce its support. The effects are substantive. From my own small circle, I can think of several top young scientists - all very smart and enormously hard-working - who have, largely as a consequence of these changes, now reluctantly left the academic sector.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/23/AR2007072301364.html
NIH-funded research, and associated spin-offs, have been for many years arguably the most potent source of biomedical innovation in the US, if not the world. Yet the Bush administration - which when it comes to tax cuts seems swayed by far more tenuous arguments about innovation and technology - sees fit to reduce its support. The effects are substantive. From my own small circle, I can think of several top young scientists - all very smart and enormously hard-working - who have, largely as a consequence of these changes, now reluctantly left the academic sector.
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