An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this field there are many sub-fields, ranging from the broad philosophical theories to the focused study of minutiae within specific markets, macroeconomic analysis, microeconomic analysis or financial statement analysis, involving analytical methods and tools such as econometrics, statistics, economics computational models, financial economics, mathematical finance and mathematical economics.
Most major universities have an economics faculty, school or department, where academic degrees are awarded in economics. However, many prominent economists come from a background in mathematics, engineering, business, law, sociology, or history. Getting a PhD in economics takes six years, on average, with a median of 5.3 years.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, established by Sveriges Riksbank in 1968, is a prize awarded to economists each year for outstanding intellectual contributions in the field of economics. The prize winners are announced in October every year. They receive their awards (a prize amount, a gold medal and a diploma) on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
In contrast to regulated professions such as engineering, law or medicine, there is not a legally-required educational requirement or license for economists. In some job settings, the possession of a Bachelor's or Master's degree in economics is considered the minimum credential for being an economist. However, in some parts of the US government, a person can be considered an economist as long as they have four or more university courses in economics. Also, a person can gain the skills required to become a professional economist in other related disciplines, such as statistics or some types of applied mathematics, such as mathematical finance or game theory.
A professional working inside of one of many fields of economics or having an academic degree in this subject is widely considered to be an economist, and any person within any of these fields can claim to be one. Economists are also employed in banking, finance, accountancy, commerce, marketing, business administration, lobbying and non- or not-for profit organizations.
Politicians often consult economists before enacting policy, and many statesmen have academic degrees in economics (see List of politicians with economics training).
Policy advising and analyzing of economic current trends are among the main responsibilities of economists in the United States. A recent study of U.S. economists by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern found that the responses show that most economists are supporters of safety regulations, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. They are evenly mixed on personal choice issues, military action, and the minimum wage. Most economists oppose government ownership of enterprise and tariffs.
Analysis of destination surveys for economics graduates from a number of selected top schools of economics in the United Kingdom (ranging from Newcastle University to the London School of Economics), shows nearly 80 per cent in employment six months after graduation – with a wide range of roles and employers, including regional, national and international organisations, across many sectors. This figure compares very favourably with the national picture, with 64 per cent of economics graduates in employment.
Probably the earliest economist, Fan Li, served as an advisor to King Goujian of Yue (r. 496 BC—465 BC) in the ancient Chinese Spring and Autumn Period. Fan Li prospered in business, applying the concepts of 'buy low sell high' in the feudal agrarian society of ancient China, and wrote a book of sage advice on business management. Early economists were also found in the Ancient Greek world, with Aristotle (382—322 BC) expounding in his work Topics on the topic of human production and further examining the topic in Politics. Xenophon (431—355) also wrote extensively on the Athenian economy in his work Economics. According to Lakshmi Kant Jha and K. N. Jha and "the pioneer economist of the world" was Chanakya (c. 350-283 BC) an adviser and prime minister to the first Maurya Emperor Chandragupta from 340—293 BC.
In the 18th century, one of the first economic writers was Richard Cantillon (1680—1734), who wrote the treatise Essai Sur la Nature du Commerce en Général. Early founders of economic concepts included the Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, David Hume (1711–1776), and the so-called "classical economists": English demographer and political economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), political economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), and the Scottish moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723–1790). Other early developers of economic concepts include the British philosopher, political economist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873); French economist and free trade advocate Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832); Prussian philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary Karl Marx (1818–1883); French classical liberal theorist and political economist, Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850); and English economist and logician William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882).
Founders of important economic concepts who were alive during the 20th century include the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851–1914); the founder of the Austrian School of economics, Carl Menger (1840–1921); British economist, developer of Keynesian economics, and influential founder of modern theoretical macroeconomics John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946); American economist, health campaigner, and eugenicist Irving Fisher (1867–1947); German economist and proponent of the social market economy, Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966); Canadian-American economist, popularizer of economics John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006); American economist, Nobel Prize Laureate and proponent of the Tobit model, James Tobin (1918–2002); Austrian-British member of the Austrian School of economics Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992); and American economist, public intellectual, and laissez-faire capitalism advocate Milton Friedman (1912–2006).
Current well-known economists include 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner Paul Krugman, a public intellectual, advocate of modern liberal policies, known for his descriptions of rising inequality; Jeffrey Sachs, former United Nations economic adviser to the Secretary-General, author of The End of Poverty and architect of shock therapy throughout poor countries; Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve; Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Joseph Stiglitz, an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics winner, critic of the governance of globalization, Chief Economist of the World Bank; and Fengbo Zhang, a leading Chinese economist who introduced Western Economics to China.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Sir Richard Branson |
| Title | Sir |
| Caption | Branson at the Time 100 Gala, 4 May 2010. |
| Birth name | Richard Charles Nicholas Branson |
| Birth date | July 18, 1950 |
| Birth place | Blackheath, London,England, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Residence | London, England |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Years active | 1966–Present |
| Known | Chairman of Virgin Group |
| Networth | $4 billion (2010) |
| Spouse | (divorced) |
| Children | 3 |
Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is a British industrialist, best known for his Virgin Group of over 400 companies.
His first successful business venture was a magazine called Student when aged 16. In 1970, he set up an audio record mail-order business. In 1972, he opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records, later known as Virgin Megastores. Branson's Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980s—as he set up Virgin Atlantic Airways and expanded the Virgin Records music label.
Richard Branson is the 212th richest person in the world according to Forbes' 2010 list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of approximately £2.97 billion (US$4.0billion).
With Lady Joan Templeman he has two children, Holly (b. 1981) and Sam (b. 1985). He revealed in an interview with Piers Morgan that he and wife Joan had a daughter named Clare Sarah who died when she was just four days old in 1979. The couple wed—at their daughter Holly's suggestion when she was eight years old—in 1989 at Necker Island, a island in the British Virgin Islands that Branson owns. He also owns land on the Caribbean Islands of Antigua and Barbuda. Holly Branson is now a doctor. Branson is a supporter of Oxford United.
In 1998, Branson released his autobiography, titled Losing My Virginity, an international bestseller.
Branson was deeply saddened by the disappearance of fellow adventurer Steve Fossett in September 2007; and, the following month, he wrote an article for Time magazine, titled "My Friend, Steve Fossett".
Branson eventually started a record shop in Oxford Street in London and, shortly after, launched the record label Virgin Records with Nik Powell. Branson earned enough money from his record store to buy a country estate, in which he installed a recording studio. He leased out studio time to fledgling artists, including multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield.
In 1971, Branson was arrested and charged for selling records in Virgin stores that had been declared export stock. He settled out-of-court with UK Customs and Excise with an agreement to repay the unpaid tax and a fine. Branson's mother Eve re-mortgaged the family home to help pay the settlement. Branson says that he wept when the sale was completed since the record business had been the birth of the Virgin Empire. He later formed V2 Records to re-enter the music business.
In 1993, Branson took what many saw as being one of his riskier business exploits by entering into the railway business. Virgin Trains won the franchises for the former Intercity West Coast and Cross-Country sectors of British Rail. Launched with the usual Branson fanfare with promises of new high-tech tilting trains and enhanced levels of service, Virgin Trains soon ran into problems with the rolling stock and infrastructure it had inherited from British Rail. The company's reputation was almost irreversibly damaged in the late 1990s as it struggled to make trains reliably run on time while it awaited the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line and the arrival of new rolling stock.
Virgin acquired European short-haul airline Euro Belgian Airlines in 1996 and renamed it Virgin Express. In 2006, the airline was merged with SN Brussels Airlines forming Brussels Airlines. It also started a national airline based in Nigeria, called Virgin Nigeria. Another airline, Virgin America, began flying out of the San Francisco International Airport in August 2007. Branson has also developed a Virgin Cola brand and even a Virgin Vodka brand, which has not been a very successful enterprise. As a consequence of these lacklustre performers, the satirical British fortnightly magazine Private Eye has been critical of Branson and his companies (see Private Eye image caption).
After the so-called campaign of "dirty tricks", British Airways settled the case, giving £500,000 to Branson and a further £110,000 to his airline and had to pay legal fees of up to £3 million. Branson divided his compensation (the so-called "BA bonus") among his staff.
On 25 September 2004, Branson announced the signing of a deal under which a new space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, will license the technology behind Spaceship One—funded by Microsoft co-Founder Paul Allen and designed by legendary American aeronautical engineer and visionary Burt Rutan—to take paying passengers into suborbital space. Virgin Galactic (wholly owned by Virgin Group) plans to make flights available to the public with tickets priced at US$200,000 using Scaled Composites White Knight Two.
Branson's next venture with the Virgin group is Virgin Fuels, which is set to respond to global warming and exploit the recent spike in fuel costs by offering a revolutionary, cheaper fuel for automobiles and, in the near future, aircraft. Branson has stated that he was formerly a global warming sceptic and was influenced in his decision by a breakfast meeting with Al Gore.
Branson has been tagged as a "transformational leader" in the management lexicon, with his maverick strategies and his stress on the Virgin Group as an organisation driven on informality and information, one that is bottom-heavy rather than strangled by top-level management.
On 21 September 2006, Branson pledged to invest the profits of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains in research for environmentally friendly fuels. The investment is estimated to be worth $3 billion.
On 4 July 2006, Branson sold his Virgin Mobile company to UK cable TV, broadband, and telephone company NTL/ for almost £1 billion. As part of the sale, the company pays a minimum of £8.5 million per year to use the Virgin name and Branson became the company's largest shareholder. The new company was launched with much fanfare and publicity on 8 February 2007, under the name Virgin Media. The decision to merge his Virgin Media Company with NTL was in order to integrate both of the companies' compatible parts of commerce. Branson used to own three quarters of Virgin Mobile, whereas now he owns 15 percent of the new Virgin Media company.
In 2006, Branson formed Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, an entertainment company focussed on creating new stories and characters for a global audience. The company was founded with author Deepak Chopra, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, and entrepreneurs Sharad Devarajan and Gotham Chopra.
Branson also launched the Virgin Health Bank on 1 February 2007, offering parents-to-be the opportunity to store their baby's umbilical cord blood stem cells in private and public stem cell banks.
In June 2006, a tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led US and UK competition authorities to investigate price-fixing attempts between Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. In August 2007, British Airways was fined £271 million over the allegations. Virgin Atlantic was given immunity for tipping off the authorities and received no fine—a controversial decision the Office of Fair Trading defended as being in the public interest.
On 9 February 2007, Branson announced the setting up of a new Global science and technology prize—The Virgin Earth Challenge—in the belief that history has shown that prizes of this nature encourage technological advancements for the good of mankind. The Virgin Earth Challenge will award $25 million to the individual or group who are able to demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects. This removal must have long-term effects and contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate.
Branson also announced that he would be joined in the adjudication of the Prize by a panel of five judges, all world authorities in their respective fields: Al Gore, Sir Crispin Tickell, Tim Flannery, James E. Hansen, and James Lovelock. The panel of judges will be assisted in their deliberations by The Climate Group and Special Advisor to The Virgin Earth Prize Judges, Steve Howard.
Richard Branson got involved with football when he sponsored Nuneaton Borough for their January 2006 FA Cup 3rd round game against Middlesbrough. The game ended 1-1, and the Virgin brand was also on Nuneaton Borough's shirts for the replay which they eventually lost 2-5.
In August 2007, Branson announced that he bought a 20 percent stake in Malaysia's AirAsia X.
On 13 October 2007, Branson's Virgin Group sought to add Northern Rock to its empire after submitting an offer that would result in Branson personally owning 30% of the company, changing the company's name from Northern Rock to Virgin Money. The Daily Mail ran a campaign against his bid and Liberal Democrats' financial spokesperson Vince Cable suggested in the House of Commons that Branson's criminal conviction for tax evasion might be felt by some as a good enough reason not to trust him with public money .
On 10 January 2008, Branson's Virgin Healthcare announced that it would open a chain of health care clinics that would offer conventional medical care alongside homoeopathic and complementary therapies. The Financial Times reported that Ben Bradshaw, UK's health minister, welcomed the launch. "I am pleased that Virgin Healthcare is proposing to work with GPs to help develop more integrated services for patients."
Plans where GPs could be paid for referring National Health Service (NHS) patients to private Virgin services were abandoned in June 2008. The BMA warned the plan would "damage clinical objectivity", there would be a financial incentive for GPs to push patients towards the Virgin services at the centre. Plans to take over an NHS Practice in Swindon were subsequently abandoned in late September 2008.
In February 2009, Branson's Virgin organisation were reported as bidding to buy the former Honda Formula One team. Branson later stated an interest in Formula One but claimed that, before the Virgin brand became involved with Honda or any other team, Formula One would have to develop a more economically efficient and environmentally responsible image. At the start of the 2009 formula one season on 28 March, it was announced that Virgin would be sponsoring the new Brawn GP team., with discussions also under way about introducing a less "dirty" fuel in the medium term. After the end of the season and the subsequent purchase of Brawn GP by Mercedes, Branson invested in an 80% buyout of Manor Grand Prix with the team being renamed to Virgin Racing.
Branson and Tony Fernandes, owner of Air Asia and Lotus F1 Racing, had a bet for the 2010 F1 season where the team's boss should work on the winner's airline for a day dressed as a stewardess. Fernandes escaped as the winner of the bet, as Lotus Racing ended 10th in the championship, while Virgin Racing ended 12th and last.
Branson's Ninety Acres Culinary Center in New Jersey will open in December 2009 with a restaurant run by chef David Felton, cooking school, wine school and working farm. The culinary center is the first phase to turn Natirar, the King of Morocco’s former estate, into a luxury resort, spa and culinary center.
On 18 July 2007, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nelson Mandela announced the formation of a new group, The Elders, in a speech he delivered on the occasion of his 89th birthday. The founding members of this group are Desmond Tutu, Graça Machel, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson, and Muhammad Yunus. Fundraising activity to support the school is notably achieved by the Sunday Times Fast Track 100, sponsored by Virgin Group, at its yearly event, where places to join Richard Branson on trips to South Africa to provide coaching and mentoring to students are auctioned to attendees. In 2009, Jason Luckhurst and Boyd Kershaw of Practicus, Martin Ainscough of the Ainscough Group and Matthew Riley of Daisy Communications helped raise £150,000 through the auction.
In September 2007, Richard Branson chaired the jury of the first Picnic Green Challenge, a €500,000 award for best new green initiative, set up by the Dutch "Postcode Loterij" (ZIP code Lottery) and the PICNIC Network of creative professionals. The first Green Challenge was won by Qurrent with the Qbox.
Branson was the first celebrity guest for the popular charity fund raisers, Reserve Dinners, raising over $75,000 in one evening towards his Virgin Unite charity.
In March 2008, Richard Branson hosted an environmental gathering at his private island, Necker Island, in the Caribbean with several prominent entrepreneurs, celebrities, and world leaders. They discussed global warming-related problems facing the world, hoping that this meeting will be a precursor to many more future discussions regarding similar problems. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Larry Page of Google were in attendance.
On 8 May 2009, Branson took over Mia Farrow's hunger strike in protest of the Sudanese government expulsion of aid groups from the Darfur region. He concluded his scheduled 3-day fast on 11 May. Later that year, he joined the project Soldiers of Peace, a movie against all wars and for a global peace.
In January 1991, Branson crossed the Pacific from Japan to Arctic Canada, , in a balloon of . This broke the record, with a speed of .
Between 1995 and 1998 Branson, Per Lindstrand and Steve Fossett made attempts to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. In late 1998 they made a record-breaking flight from Morocco to Hawaii but were unable to complete a global flight before Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones in Breitling Orbiter 3 in March 1999.
In March 2004, Branson set a record by travelling from Dover to Calais in a Gibbs Aquada, in 1 hour, 40 minutes, and 6 seconds, the fastest crossing of the English Channel in an amphibious vehicle. The previous record of six hours was set by two Frenchmen. The cast of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond, attempted to break this record in an amphibious vehicle which they had constructed, and, while successfully crossing the channel, did not break the record of Branson.
In September 2008 Branson and his children made an unsuccessful attempt at an Eastbound record crossing of the Atlantic ocean under sail in the sloop Virgin Money. The boat, also known as Speedboat, is owned by NYYC member Alex Jackson, who was a co-skipper on this passage, with Branson and Mike Sanderson. After 2 days, 4 hours, winds of force 7 to 9 (strong gale), and seas of , a 'monster wave' destroyed the spinnaker, washed a ten-man life raft overboard and severely ripped the mainsail. She eventually continued to St. George's, Bermuda. In March 2010 Richard tried for the world record of putting a round of golf in the dark at the Black Light Mini Golf in The Docklands, Melbourne, Australia. He succeeded in getting 41 on the par 45 course.
He was also the star of a reality television show on Fox called (2004), in which sixteen contestants were tested for their entrepreneurship and sense of adventure. It did not succeed as a rival show to Donald Trump's The Apprentice and only lasted one season.
His high public profile often leaves him open as a figure of satire—the 2000 AD series Zenith features a parody of Branson as a super villain, as the comic's publisher and favoured distributor and the Virgin group were in competition at the time. He is also caricatured in The Simpsons episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love" as the tycoon Arthur Fortune, and as the ballooning megalomaniac Richard Chutney (a pun on Branson, as in Branston Pickle) in Believe Nothing. The character Grandson Richard 39 in Terry Pratchett's Wings is modelled on Branson.
He has a cameo appearance in several films: Around the World in 80 Days (2004), where he played a hot-air balloon operator; Superman Returns, where he was credited as a 'Shuttle Engineer' and appeared alongside his son, Sam, with a Virgin Galactic-style commercial suborbital shuttle at the centre of his storyline. He also has a cameo in the James Bond film Casino Royale. Here, he is seen as a passenger going through Miami Airport security check-in and being frisked – several Virgin Atlantic planes appear soon after. British Airways edited out Branson's cameo in their in-flight screening of the movie.
He makes a number of brief and disjointed appearances in the cult classic documentary Derek and Clive Get the Horn which follows the exploits of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore recording their last comedy album. Branson and his mother were also featured in the documentary film, Lemonade Stories. In early 2006 on Rove Live, Rove McManus and Sir Richard pushed each other into a swimming pool fully clothed live on TV during a "Live at your house" episode.
Branson is a Star Trek fan and named his new spaceship VSS Enterprise in honour of the famous Star Trek ships, and in 2006, offered actor William Shatner a free ride on the inaugural space launch of Virgin Galactic. In an interview in Time magazine, 10 August 2009, Shatner claims that Branson approached him asking how much he would pay for a ride on the spaceship. In response, Shatner asked "how much would you pay me to do it?"
In August 2007, Branson announced on The Colbert Report that he had named a new aircraft Air Colbert. He later doused political satirist and talk show host Stephen Colbert with water from his mug. Branson subsequently took a retaliatory splash from Colbert. The interview quickly ended, with both laughing as shown on the episode aired on Comedy Central on 22 August 2007. The interview was promoted on The Report as the Colbert-Branson Interview Trainwreck. Branson then made a cameo appearance on The Soup playing an intern working under Joel McHale who had been warned against getting into water fights with Stephen Colbert, and being subsequently fired.
In March 2008 he made a small appearance in a budget Bollywood action film alongside Neha Dhupia. Branson caused a stir in the Indian media as he turned Dhupia upside down on a stage.
In July 2010, Branson narrated Australian sailor Jessica Watson's documentary about her solo sailing trip around the world. It premiered on ONEHD on 16 August 2010.
When Virgin Mobile launched its service in Canada on 1 March 2005, the use of "naughty nurses" in its advertising triggered The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario to demand an apology from Branson and an immediate stop to the campaign, and called on members to boycott Virgin Mobile. Virgin Mobile spokeswoman Paula Lash said the company never intended to offend anyone, but was not about to pull the advertising.
When Virgin Mobile included "super hot holiday" wrapping paper with the December 2005 issue of youth magazine Vice, as part of the Hot Box promotion, the wrapping paper contained illustrated Christmas angels, where the male angel is touching the female's breast, while the female angel has her hand on the male's genitals. Famous Players stopped its partnership deals with Virgin Mobile after a complaint.
In the New Years Honours list dated 30 December 1999, HM The Queen signified her intention to confer the honour of Knight bachelor on him for his "services to entrepreneurship". He was knighted by HRH The Prince of Wales on 30 March 2000 at an investiture in Buckingham Palace.
Also, in 2000, Branson received the 'Tony Jannus Award' for his accomplishments in commercial air transportation.
Branson is the patron of several charities, including the International Rescue Corps and Prisoners Abroad, a registered charity which supports Britons who are detained outside of the UK.
Branson appears at No. 85 on the 2002 list of "100 Greatest Britons" (sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public). Sir Richard also ranks No. 86 on Channel 4's 2003 list of "100 Worst Britons". Sir Richard was also ranked in 2007's Time Magazine "Top 100 Most Influential People in the World". In 2009, Branson was voted the UK's "Celebrity Dream Boss" in an opinion poll by Cancer Research UK.
On 7 December 2007, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon presented Branson with the United Nations Correspondents Association Citizen of the World Award for his support for environmental and humanitarian causes.
Category:1944 births Category:British billionaires Category:British music industry executives Category:Britannia Trophy winners Category:English aviators Category:English balloonists Category:English businesspeople Category:Formula One people Category:Knights Bachelor Category:Living people Category:Old Stoics Category:People from Blackheath, London Category:Segrave Trophy recipients Category:Virgin Group
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| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Nouriel Roubini |
| School tradition | New Keynesian economics |
| Color | darkorange |
| Image name | Nouriel Roubini 05.jpg |
| Birth date | March 29, 1959Istanbul, Turkey |
| Nationality | American |
| Institution | New York University |
| Field | International economics |
| Alma mater | Bocconi University (B.A. 1982)Harvard University (Ph.D. 1988) |
| Influences | John Maynard KeynesHyman MinskyLarry SummersJeffrey Sachs |
| Signature | |
| Repec prefix | e | repec_id = pro145 |
After receiving a BA in political economics at Bocconi University, Milan, Italy and a doctorate in international economics at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, he began academic research and policy making by teaching at Yale while also spending time at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. Much of his early studies focused on emerging markets. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, later moving to the United States Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who is now Treasury Secretary.
In 2008, Fortune magazine wrote, "In 2005 Roubini said home prices were riding a speculative wave that would soon sink the economy. Back then the professor was called a Cassandra. Now he's a sage". The New York Times notes that he foresaw "homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt". In September 2006, he warned a skeptical IMF that "the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence, and, ultimately, a deep recession". Nobel laureate Paul Krugman adds that his once "seemingly outlandish" predictions have been matched "or even exceeded by reality."
As Roubini's descriptions of the current economic crisis have proven to be accurate, he is today a major figure in the U.S. and international debate about the economy, and spends much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. he was #4 on Foreign Policy magazine's list of the "top 100 global thinkers." He has appeared before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Roubini spent one year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before moving to Milan, Italy, where he received his B.A., summa cum laude, in economics from the Bocconi University in 1982. He received his Ph.D. in international economics from Harvard University in 1988. According to his academic adviser, Jeffrey Sachs, he was unusual in his talent with both mathematics and intuitive understanding of economic institutions.
By 1998, he joined the Clinton administration first as a senior economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers and then moved to the Treasury department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, then the undersecretary for international affairs and now Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
In September 2006, he saw the end of the real estate bubble: "When supply increases, prices fall: That’s been the trend for 110 years, since 1890. But since 1997, real home prices have increased by about 90 percent. There is no economic fundamental—real income, migration, interest rates, demographics—that can explain this. It means there was a speculative bubble. And now that bubble is bursting." In the Spring 2006 issue of International Finance, he wrote an article titled "Why Central Banks Should Burst Bubbles" in which he argued that central banks should take action against asset bubbles. When asked whether the real estate ride was over, he said, "Not only is it over, it’s going to be a nasty fall."
By May 2009, he felt that analysts expecting the U.S. economy to rebound in the third and fourth quarter were "too optimistic." He stated, "Certainly the rate of economic contraction is slowing down from the freefall of the last two quarters." He expects negative growth to the end of 2009, and feels that during 2010 the recovery is still going to be weak," with the full recession lasting 24 or 36 months, and a possibility of an "L-shaped" slow recovery that Japan went through in The Lost Decade. But in fact, the US economy started to grow in mid 2009 just like the optimistic analysts forecasted.
In his opinion, much of the current recession's cause is due to "boom-and-bust cycles," and feels the U.S. economy needs to find a different growth path in the future. "We’ve been growing through a period of time of repeated big bubbles," he said. "We’ve had a model of 'growth' based on overconsumption and lack of savings. And now that model has broken down because we borrowed too much." He feels that too much human capital went into financing the "most unproductive form of capital, meaning housing" and would like to see America create a model of growth in more-productive activities. He feels that "sustainable growth may mean investing slowly in infrastructures for the future, and rebuilding our human capital," by investing in renewable resources. "We don’t know what it’s going to be," he says, "but it’s going to be a challenge to find a new growth model. It’s not going to be simple."
His pessimism is focused on the short-run rather than the medium or long-run.
At a conference in Dubai in January, 2009, he said, the U.S. banking system was "effectively insolvent." He added that the "systemic banking crisis.... The problems of Citi, Bank of America and others suggest the system is bankrupt. In Europe, it’s the same thing." To deal with this problem, he recommends that the U.S. government "do triage between banks that are illiquid and undercapitalized but solvent, and those that are insolvent. The insolvent ones you have to shut down." He adds, "We're in a war economy. You need command-economy allocation of credit to the real economy. Not enough is being done," he felt at the time.
:We are just at the next stage. This is where we move from a private to a public debt problem . . . We socialised part of the private losses by bailing out financial institutions and providing fiscal stimulus to avoid the great recession from turning into a depression. But rising public debt is never a free lunch, eventually you have to pay for it.
In late May 2010, markets around the world began dropping due partly to problems in Greece and the Eurozone. "Roubini believes Greece will prove to be just the first of a series of countries standing on the brink," writes the Telegraph. Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy, and New International Financial Architecture.
Category:People from Istanbul Category:1959 births Category:Living people Category:Persian Jews Category:Turkish Jews Category:American economists Category:New Keynesian economists Category:International finance economists Category:Macroeconomists Category:Jewish American social scientists Category:Jewish American writers Category:American economics writers Category:United States Department of the Treasury officials Category:United States Council of Economic Advisors Category:Clinton Administration personnel Category:New York University faculty Category:Yale University faculty Category:Alumni of Bocconi University Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Hebrew University of Jerusalem alumni Category:American art collectors
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| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Julian Assange |
| Caption | Assange in 2010 |
| Birth date | July 03, 1971 |
| Birth place | Townsville, Queensland, Australia |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
| Occupation | Editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks |
| Awards | Economist Freedom of Expression Award (2008)Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009)Sam Adams Award (2010) |
| Death date | |
| Nationality | Australian |
For his work with WikiLeaks Assange has received glowing praise and accolades, along with public condemnation and calls for his execution. He received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed that they are politically motivated.
When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people." and other organisations, via modem. After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle, and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999. The entire process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group centered on creating a "central databank" for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia. Starting in 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. He helped to write the book (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives. On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005. In his blog he wrote, "the more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.... Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."
Assange sits on Wikileaks's nine-member advisory board, and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site. In 2006, CounterPunch called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker." The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter."
WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video, and material involving large banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer among other documents.
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange "is serving our [American] democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the US, Ellsberg added that "He's obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn’t. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody's national security". Assange told London reporters that the leaked cables showed US ambassadors around the world were ordered "to engage in espionage behavior" which he said seemed to be "representative of a gradual shift to a lack of rule of law in US institutions that needs to be exposed and that we have been exposing."
On 29 November 2010, in the aftermath of WikiLeaks release of more classified American documents Sarah Palin wrote of Assange on her Facebook page, "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?" she added, "Assange is not a 'journalist', any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist'."
A number of political and media commentators, as well as current and former US government officials, have accused Assange of terrorism. US Vice President Joe Biden argued that Assange was "closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers." In May 2010 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had used the phrase, calling Assange "a high-tech terrorist", and saying "he has done enormous damage to our country. I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law".
Also in May 2010, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said: "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant." In December 2010 former Nixon aide and talk radio host G. Gordon Liddy told WorldNetDaily, "Julian Assange is a severe national security threat to the U.S., and that then leads to what to do about it. This fellow Anwar al-Awlaki – a joint U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen – is on a 'kill list' [for inciting terrorism against the U.S.]. Mr. Assange should be put on the same list."
Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin condemned Assange’s detention as "undemocratic". A source within the office of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that Assange be nominated for a Nobel Prize, and said that "Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him."
In December 2010, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank LaRue, said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."
Daniel Ellsberg, who was working in the U.S. Department of Defense when he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was a signatory to a statement by an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials in support of Assange’s work, which was released in late December 2010. Other signatories included David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, and five recipients of annual Sam Adams Award: Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson. Ellsberg has said, "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me ... I would be called not only a traitor — which I was [called] then, which was false and slanderous — but I would be called a terrorist... Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has come under widespread condemnation and a backlash within her own party for failing to support Assange after calling the leaks "an illegal act" and suggesting that his Australian passport should be cancelled. Hundreds of lawyers, academics and journalists came forward in his support with Attorney-General Robert McClelland, unable to explain how Assange had broken Australian law. Opposition Legal Affairs spokesman, Senator George Brandis, a Queen's Counsel, accused Gillard of being "clumsy" with her language, stating, "As far as I can see, he (Assange) hasn't broken any Australian law, nor does it appear he has broken any American laws." Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who supports Assange, stated that any decision to cancel the passport would be his, not Gillard's. Queen's Counsel Peter Faris, who acted for Assange in a hacking case 15 years ago, said that the motives of Swedish authorities in seeking Assange's extradition for alleged sex offences are suspect: "You have to say: why are they [Sweden] pursuing it? It's pretty obvious that if it was Bill Bloggs, they wouldn't be going to the trouble." Following the Swedish Embassy issuing of a "prepared and unconvincing reply" in response to letters of protest, Gillard was called on to send a message to Sweden "querying the way charges were laid, investigated and dropped, only to be picked up again by a different prosecutor."
On 10 December 2010 over five hundred people rallied outside Sydney Town Hall and about three hundred and fifty people gathered in Brisbane where Assange's lawyer, Rob Stary, criticised Julia Gillard's position, telling the rally that the Australian government was a "sycophant" of the US. A petition circulated by GetUp!, who have placed full page ads in support of Assange in The New York Times and The Washington Times, received more than signatures. Accepting the award, Assange said, "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented." Readers' Choice in Time magazine's Person of the Year poll, and runner-up for Person of the Year., and an informal poll of editors at Postmedia Network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered".
Le Monde named him person of the year with fifty six percent of the votes in their online poll. Le Monde is one of the five publications to cooperate with Wikileaks' publication of the recent document leaking.
Claes Borgström, who represents the two women, appealed against the decision to drop the rape investigation. The Swedish Director of Public Prosecution then reopened and expanded the investigation on 1 September. Swedish investigators reinterviewed the two women, wanting to clarify their allegations before talking to Assange but he left Sweden on 27 September, according to statements in UK court, and refused to return to Stockholm for questioning in October, according to Borgström. According to Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, Assange made repeated attempts to contact the prosecution, spending over a month in Stockholm before obtaining permission to leave the country, with the Swedish prosecution stating an interview would not be required.
On 18 November 2010 the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny asked the local district court for a warrant for Assange in order for him to be heard by the prosecutor. The court ordered detention as a suspect with probable cause for rape, sexual assault, and coercion. An appeal from the legal representatives of Assange was turned down by the Svea Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Sweden declined to hear the case. On 6 December 2010, Scotland Yard notified Assange that a valid European arrest warrant had been received. He presented himself to the Metropolitan Police the next morning and was remanded to London's Wandsworth Prison. On 16 December he was granted bail and placed under house arrest at Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, the High Court Judge rejected the prosecution's argument that he was a flight risk. Bail was set at £240,000 surety with £200,000 ($312,700) required to be actually deposited in the courts account.
On release Assange said "I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter," Assange claimed that the extradition proceedings to Sweden were "actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US." Swedish prosecutors have denied the case has anything to do with WikiLeaks. His defence team outlined seven strands of their argument, including a challenge for abuse of process as well as the potential risks to Assange's person were he "rendered" to the US.
In late November 2010, Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas of Ecuador spoke about giving Assange residency with "no conditions... so he can freely present the information he possesses and all the documentation, not just over the Internet but in a variety of public forums". Lucas believed that Ecuador may benefit from initiating a dialogue with Assange. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino stated on 30 November that the residency application would "have to be studied from the legal and diplomatic perspective". A few hours later, President Rafael Correa stated that WikiLeaks "committed an error by breaking the laws of the United States and leaking this type of information... no official offer was [ever] made." Correa noted that Lucas was speaking "on his own behalf"; additionally, he will launch an investigation into possible ramifications Ecuador would suffer from the release of the cables. He was ultimately released, in part because journalist Vaughan Smith offered to provide Assange with an address for bail during the extradition proceedings, Smith's Norfolk mansion, Ellingham Hall.
Category:1971 births Category:Australian Internet personalities Category:Australian activists Category:Australian computer programmers Category:Australian journalists Category:Australian whistleblowers Category:Internet activists Category:Living people Category:People from Townsville, Queensland Category:University of Melbourne alumni Category:WikiLeaks
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| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Honorific-prefix | The Honorable |
| Name | Joseph Stiglitz |
| Honorific-suffix | ForMemRS FBA |
| Order | 17th Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors |
| Term start | 1995 |
| Term end | 1997 |
| President | Bill Clinton |
| Predecessor | Laura Tyson |
| Successor | Janet Yellen |
| Office2 | World Bank Chief Economist |
| Term start2 | 1997 |
| Term end2 | 2000 |
| Preceded2 | Michael Bruno |
| Succeeded2 | Nicholas Stern |
| Birth date | February 09, 1943 |
| Birth place | Gary, Indiana |
| Party | Democratic |
| Spouse | Anya Schiffrin |
| Alma mater | Amherst CollegeMassachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Profession | Economist |
| Religion | Judaism |
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has held the rank of University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Professor Stiglitz is also an honorary professor at Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management. Stiglitz is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world.
In addition to making numerous influential contributions to microeconomics, Stiglitz has played a number of policy roles. He served in the Clinton Administration as the chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (1995 – 1997). At the World Bank, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist (1997 – 2000), in the time when unprecedented protest against international economic organizations started, most prominently with the Seattle WTO meeting of 1999. He was fired by the World Bank for expressing dissent with its policies. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He is a member of Collegium International, an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world.
Stiglitz has advised American President Barack Obama, but has also been sharply critical of the Obama Administration's financial-industry rescue plan. Stiglitz said that whoever designed the Obama administration's bank rescue plan is "either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent."
Before the advent of models of imperfect and asymmetric information, the traditional neoclassical economics literature had assumed that markets are efficient except for some limited and well defined market failures. More recent work by Stiglitz and others reversed that presumption, to assert that it is only under exceptional circumstances that markets are efficient. Stiglitz has shown (together with Bruce Greenwald) that "whenever markets are incomplete and/or information is imperfect (which are true in virtually all economies), even competitive market allocation is not constrained Pareto efficient". In other words, they addressed "the problem of determining when tax interventions are Pareto-improving. The approach indicates that such tax interventions almost always exist and that equilibria in situations of imperfect information are rarely constrained Pareto optima." Although these conclusions and the pervasiveness of market failures do not necessarily warrant the state intervening broadly in the economy, it makes clear that the "optimal" range of government recommendable interventions is definitely much larger than the traditional "market failure" school recognizes. For Stiglitz there is no such thing as an "invisible hand". According to Stiglitz:
In the opening remarks for his prize acceptance "Aula Magna", Stiglitz said:
In an interview in 2007, Stiglitz explained further:
# Unlike other forms of capital, humans can choose their level of effort. # It is costly for firms to determine how much effort workers are exerting.
A full description of this model can be found at the links provided. Some key implications of this model are:
# Wages do not fall enough during recessions to prevent unemployment from rising. If the demand for labour falls, this lowers wages. But because wages have fallen, the probability of 'shirking' (workers not exerting effort) has risen. If employment levels are to be maintained, through a sufficient lowering of wages, workers will be less productive than before through the shirking effect. As a consequence, in the model wages do not fall enough to maintain employment levels at the previous state, because firms want to avoid excessive shirking by their workers. So, unemployment must rise during recessions, because wages are kept 'too high'.
# Possible corollary: Wage sluggishness. Moving from one private cost of hiring
The outcome is never Pareto efficient.
# Each firm employs too few workers because it faces private cost of hiring rather than the social cost — which is equal to and in all cases. This means that firms do not "internalize" the "external" cost of unemployment - they do not factor how large-scale unemployment harms society when assessing their own costs. This leads to a negative externality as marginal social cost exceeds the firm's marginal cost (MSC = Firm's Private Marginal Cost + Marginal External Cost of increased social unemployment)
# There are also negative externalities. Each firm increases the asset value of unemployment
::Once incomplete and imperfect information are introduced, Chicago-school defenders of the market system cannot sustain descriptive claims of the Pareto efficiency of the real world. Thus, Stiglitz's use of rational-expectations equilibrium assumptions to achieve a more realistic understanding of capitalism than is usual among rational-expectations theorists leads, paradoxically, to the conclusion that capitalism deviates from the model in a way that justifies state action—socialism—as a remedy. (Stiglitz 1994, 179).
The objections to the wide adoption of these positions suggested by Stiglitz's discoveries do not come from economics itself but mostly from political scientists and are in the fields of sociology. As David L. Prychitko discusses in his "critique" to Whither Socialism? (see below), although Stiglitz's main economic insight seems generally correct, it still leaves open great constitutional questions such as how the coercive institutions of the government should be constrained and what the relation is between the government and civil society.
Stiglitz's most important contribution in this period was helping define a new economic philosophy, a "third way", which postulated the important, but limited, role of government, that unfettered markets often did not work well, but that government was not always able to correct the limitations of markets. The academic research that he had been conducting over the preceding 25 years provided the intellectual foundations for this "third way".
When President Bill Clinton was re-elected, he asked Stiglitz to continue to serve as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for another term. But he had already been approached by the World Bank, to be its senior vice president for development policy and its chief economist.
As the World Bank began its ten-year review of the transition of the former Communist countries to the market economy it unveiled failures of the countries that had followed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shock therapy policies - both in terms of the declines in GDP and increases in poverty - that were even worse than the worst that most of its critics had envisioned at the onset of the transition. Clear links existed between the dismal performances and the policies that the IMF had advocated, such as the voucher privatization schemes and excessive monetary stringency. Meanwhile, the success of a few countries that had followed quite different strategies suggested that there were alternatives that could have been followed. The U.S. Treasury had put enormous pressure on the World Bank to silence his criticisms of the policies which they and the IMF had pursued.
Stiglitz always had a poor relationship with Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. In 2000, Summers successfully petitioned for Stiglitz's removal, supposedly in exchange for World Bank President James Wolfensohn's re-appointment – an exchange that Wolfensohn denies took place. Whether Summers ever made such a blunt demand is questionable – Wolfensohn claims he would "have told him to fuck himself".
Stiglitz resigned from the World Bank in January 2000, a month before his term expired. The Bank's president, James Wolfensohn, announced Stiglitz's resignation in November 1999 and also announced that Stiglitz would stay on as "special advisor to the president", and would chair the search committee for a successor.
:"Joseph E. Stiglitz said today [Nov. 24, 1999] that he would resign as the World Bank's chief economist after using the position for nearly three years to raise pointed questions about the effectiveness of conventional approaches to helping poor countries."
In this role, he continued criticism of the IMF, and, by implication, the US Treasury Department. In April 2000, in an article for The New Republic, he wrote:
:"They’ll say the IMF is arrogant. They’ll say the IMF doesn’t really listen to the developing countries it is supposed to help. They’ll say the IMF is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability. They’ll say the IMF’s economic ‘remedies’ often make things worse – turning slowdowns into recessions and recessions into depressions. And they’ll have a point. I was chief economist at the World Bank from 1996 until last November, during the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century. I saw how the IMF, in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department, responded. And I was appalled."
The article was published a week before the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF and provoked a strong response. It proved too strong for Summers and, yet more lethally, Stiglitz's protector-of-sorts at the World Bank, Wolfensohn. Wolfensohn had privately empathised with Stiglitz's views, but this time was worried for his second term, which Summers had threatened to veto. Stanley Fisher, deputy managing director of the IMF, called a special staff meeting and informed at that gathering that Wolfensohn had agreed to fire Stiglitz. Meanwhile, the Bank's External Affairs department told the press that Stiglitz had not been fired, his post had merely been abolished.
In a September 19, 2008 radio interview with Aimee Allison and Philip Maldari on Pacifica Radio's KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley, California, Stiglitz implied that President Clinton and his economic advisors would not have backed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had they been aware of stealth provisions, inserted by lobbyists, that they overlooked.
Stiglitz is an exception to the general pro-globalization view of professional economists, according to economist Martin Wolf. Stiglitz argues that economic opportunities are not widely enough available, that financial crises are too costly and too frequent, and that the rich countries have done too little to address these problems. Making Globalization Work had sold more than two million copies.
Stiglitz bases his argument on the themes that his decades of theoretical work have emphasized: namely, what happens when people lack the key information that bears on the decisions they have to make, or when markets for important kinds of transactions are inadequate or don't exist, or when other institutions that standard economic thinking takes for granted are absent or flawed. Stiglitz stresses the point: "Recent advances in economic theory" (in part referring to his own work) "have shown that whenever information is imperfect and markets incomplete, which is to say always, and especially in developing countries, then the invisible hand works most imperfectly." As a result, Stiglitz continues, governments can improve the outcome by well-chosen interventions. Stiglitz argues that when families and firms seek to buy too little compared to what the economy can produce, governments can fight recessions and depressions by using expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to spur the demand for goods and services. At the microeconomic level, governments can regulate banks and other financial institutions to keep them sound. They can also use tax policy to steer investment into more productive industries and trade policies to allow new industries to mature to the point at which they can survive foreign competition. And governments can use a variety of devices, ranging from job creation to manpower training to welfare assistance, to put unemployed labor back to work and cushion human hardship.
Stiglitz complains bitterly that the IMF has done great damage through the economic policies it has prescribed that countries must follow in order to qualify for IMF loans, or for loans from banks and other private-sector lenders that look to the IMF to indicate whether a borrower is creditworthy. The organization and its officials, he argues, have ignored the implications of incomplete information, inadequate markets, and unworkable institutions—all of which are especially characteristic of newly developing countries. As a result, Stiglitz argues, the IMF has often called for policies that conform to textbook economics but do not make sense for the countries to which the IMF is recommending them. Stiglitz seeks to show that these policies have been disastrous for the countries that have followed them.
One of the reasons Stiglitz sees for the critical failing in the standard neoclassical model, on which market socialism was built, is its failure to consider the problems that arise from lack of perfect information and from the costs of acquiring information. He also identifies problems arising from its assumptions concerning completeness.
"Finally, if Stiglitz's main insight is generally correct– that the state cannot be ruled out or that it should be ruled in– but leaves open the grand constitutional questions: How will the coercive institutions of the state be constrained? What is the relation between the state and civil society? His book fails on these political aspects because it has not addressed the broader constitutional concerns that James M. Buchanan (1975) and other economists have raised."
This book does not require an economics background in order to be of value to the reader. Rather it explains Mr. Stiglitz's views on the recent economic crisis in terms which make it relevant to the average homeowner, retirement investor, and voter in the United States. He explains how without fundamental changes in economic policy and regulation the position of the US in the world political and economic arena may deteriorate significantly.
; Book chapters:
; Selected scholarly articles
; Articles in popular press:
; Video and online sources:
Category:Academics of the University of Oxford Category:American anti-globalization writers Category:American economists Category:American Nobel laureates Category:Amherst College alumni Category:Ashkenazi Jews Category:Clinton Administration personnel Category:Columbia University faculty Category:Development economists Category:Development specialists Category:New Keynesian economists Category:Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford Category:Fellows of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Category:Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Category:Fellows of the British Academy Category:Fellows of the Econometric Society Category:Information economists Category:International development Category:International Panel on Climate Change lead authors Category:Jewish American writers Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Category:Members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences Category:Nobel laureates in Economics Category:People from Gary, Indiana Category:Princeton University faculty Category:People associated with the University of Manchester Category:Public economists Category:Stanford University faculty Category:United States Council of Economic Advisors Category:World Bank Chief Economists Category:Yale University faculty Category:Keio University faculty Category:1943 births Category:Living people Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:Faculty of Sciences Po
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| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Hillary Rodham Clinton |
| Office | 67th United States Secretary of State |
| President | Barack Obama |
| Deputy | Jim Steinberg |
| Term start | January 21, 2009 |
| Predecessor | Condoleezza Rice |
| Jr/sr2 | United States Senator |
| State2 | New York |
| Term start2 | January 3, 2001 |
| Term end2 | January 21, 2009 |
| Preceded2 | Daniel Patrick Moynihan |
| Succeeded2 | Kirsten Gillibrand |
| Office3 | First Lady of the United States |
| Term start3 | January 20, 1993 |
| Term end3 | January 20, 2001 |
| Preceded3 | Barbara Bush |
| Succeeded3 | Laura Bush |
| Office4 | First Lady of Arkansas |
| Term start4 | January 11, 1983 |
| Term end4 | December 12, 1992 |
| Predecessor4 | Gay Daniels White |
| Successor4 | Betty Tucker |
| Term start5 | January 9, 1979 |
| Term end5 | January 19, 1981 |
| Predecessor5 | Barbara Pryor |
| Successor5 | Gay Daniels White |
| Birth date | October 26, 1947 |
| Birth place | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Party | Democratic Party |
| Spouse | Bill Clinton |
| Children | Chelsea |
| Residence | Chappaqua, United States |
| Alma mater | Wellesley CollegeYale Law School |
| Profession | Lawyer |
| Religion | Methodist |
| Signature | Hillary Rodham Clinton Signature.svg |
| Website | Official website |
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham first attracted national attention in 1969 for her remarks as the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College. She embarked on a career in law after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973. Following a stint as a Congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas in 1974 and married Bill Clinton in 1975. Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977 and became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. Named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979, she was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America. First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with husband Bill as Governor, she successfully led a task force to reform Arkansas's education system. She sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart and several other corporations.
In 1994 as First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. However, in 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a role in advocating the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her years as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public. The only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, she testified before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband's administration. The state of her marriage was the subject of considerable speculation following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
After moving to the state of New York, Clinton was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2000. That election marked the first time an American First Lady had run for public office; Clinton was also the first female senator to represent the state. In the Senate, she initially supported the Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, including a vote for the Iraq War Resolution. She subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the war in Iraq and on most domestic issues. Senator Clinton was reelected by a wide margin in 2006. In the 2008 presidential nomination race, Hillary Clinton won more primaries and delegates than any other female candidate in American history, but narrowly lost to Senator Barack Obama. As Secretary of State, Clinton became the first former First Lady to serve in a president's cabinet.
Raised in a politically conservative household, at age thirteen Rodham helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater's classic The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in Chicago in 1962.
In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, also a law student at Yale. That summer, she interned at the Oakland, California, law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. The firm was well-known for its support of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members); Clinton canceled his original summer plans, in order to live with her in California; the couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school. The following summer, Rodham and Clinton campaigned in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. She received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973, having stayed on an extra year to be with Clinton. Clinton first proposed marriage to her following graduation, but she declined. Discussing the new children's rights movement, it stated that "child citizens" were "powerless individuals" and argued that children should not be considered equally incompetent from birth to attaining legal age, but that instead courts should presume competence except when there is evidence otherwise, on a case-by-case basis. The article became frequently cited in the field.
Rodham maintained her interest in children's law and family policy, publishing the scholarly articles "Children's Policies: Abandonment and Neglect" in 1977 and "Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective" in 1979. The latter continued her argument that children's legal competence depended upon their age and other circumstances and that in serious medical rights cases, judicial intervention was sometimes warranted. while conservatives said her theories would usurp traditional parental authority,
In 1977, Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children's Defense Fund. Later that year, President Jimmy Carter (for whom Rodham had been the 1976 campaign director of field operations in Indiana) appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, and she served in that capacity from 1978 until the end of 1981. From mid-1978 to mid-1980, she served as the chair of that board, the first woman to do so. During her time as chair, funding for the Corporation was expanded from $90 million to $300 million; subsequently she successfully fought President Ronald Reagan's attempts to reduce the funding and change the nature of the organization.
Following her husband's November 1978 election as Governor of Arkansas, Rodham became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for twelve years (1979–1981, 1983–1992). Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year, where she successfully secured federal funds to expand medical facilities in Arkansas's poorest areas without affecting doctors' fees.
In 1979, Rodham became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm. From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than her husband. During 1978 and 1979, while looking to supplement their income, Rodham made a spectacular profit from trading cattle futures contracts; an initial $1,000 investment generated nearly $100,000 when she stopped trading after ten months. The couple also began their ill-fated investment in the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate venture with Jim and Susan McDougal at this time. she also took a leave of absence from Rose Law to campaign for him full-time. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was named chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee in 1983, where she sought to reform the state's court-sanctioned public education system. In one of the Clinton governorship's most important initiatives, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association, to establish mandatory teacher testing and state standards for curriculum and classroom size. She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984.
Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than the other partners, as she billed fewer hours, but still made more than $200,000 in her final year there. She seldom did trial work,
From 1982 to 1988, Clinton was on board of directors, sometimes as chair, of the New World Foundation, which funded a variety of New Left interest groups. From 1987 to 1991, she chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the association to adopt measures to combat it. When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary considered running, but private polls were unfavorable and, in the end, he ran and was reelected for the final time.
Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services (1988–1992) and the Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992). In addition to her positions with nonprofit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992) and Lafarge (1990–1992). TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law. Once there, she pushed successfully for Wal-Mart to adopt more environmentally friendly practices, was largely unsuccessful in a campaign for more women to be added to the company's management, and was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.
on Marine One, 1993. ]] Some critics called it inappropriate for the First Lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters were well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency. Bill Clinton's campaign promise of "two for the price of one" led opponents to refer derisively to the Clintons as "co-presidents", or sometimes the Arkansas label "Billary". The pressures of conflicting ideas about the role of a First Lady were enough to send Clinton into "imaginary discussions" with the also-politically-active Eleanor Roosevelt. from the time she came to Washington, she also found refuge in a prayer group of The Fellowship that featured many wives of conservative Washington figures. Triggered in part by the death of her father in April 1993, she publicly sought to find a synthesis of Methodist teachings, liberal religious political philosophy, and Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" to overcome what she saw as America's "sleeping sickness of the soul" and that would lead to a willingness "to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium." Other segments of the public focused on her appearance, which had evolved over time from inattention to fashion during her days in Arkansas, to a popular site in the early days of the World Wide Web devoted to showing her many different, and frequently analyzed, hairstyles as First Lady, to an appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1998.
favorable and unfavorable ratings, 1992–1996 ]] In January 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Hillary Clinton to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, hoping to replicate the success she had in leading the effort for Arkansas education reform. She privately urged that passage of health care reform be given higher priority than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (which she was also unenthusiastic about the merits of). The recommendation of the task force became known as the Clinton health care plan, a comprehensive proposal that would require employers to provide health coverage to their employees through individual health maintenance organizations. Its opponents quickly derided the plan as "Hillarycare"; some protesters against it became vitriolic, and during a July 1994 bus tour to rally support for the plan, she was forced to wear a bulletproof vest at times. The plan did not receive enough support for a floor vote in either the House or the Senate, although Democrats controlled both chambers, and the proposal was abandoned in September 1994. Republicans made the Clinton health care plan a major campaign issue of the 1994 midterm elections, which saw a net Republican gain of fifty-three seats in the House election and seven in the Senate election, winning control of both; many analysts and pollsters found the plan to be a major factor in the Democrats' defeat, especially among independent voters. The White House subsequently sought to downplay Hillary Clinton's role in shaping policy. Opponents of universal health care would continue to use "Hillarycare" as a pejorative label for similar plans by others.
Along with Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, she was a force behind the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, a federal effort that provided state support for children whose parents could not provide them with health coverage, and conducted outreach efforts on behalf of enrolling children in the program once it became law. She promoted nationwide immunization against childhood illnesses and encouraged older women to seek a mammogram to detect breast cancer, with coverage provided by Medicare. She successfully sought to increase research funding for prostate cancer and childhood asthma at the National Institutes of Health. The First Lady worked to investigate reports of an illness that affected veterans of the Gulf War, which became known as the Gulf War syndrome. As First Lady, Clinton hosted numerous White House conferences, including ones on Child Care (1997), on Early Childhood Development and Learning (1997), and on Children and Adolescents (2000). She also hosted the first-ever White House Conference on Teenagers (2000) and the first-ever White House Conference on Philanthropy (1999).
Clinton traveled to 79 countries during this time, breaking the mark for most-traveled First Lady held by Pat Nixon. She did not hold a security clearance or attend National Security Council meetings, but played a soft power role in U.S. diplomacy. A March 1995 five-nation trip to South Asia, on behest of the U.S. State Department and without her husband, sought to improve relations with India and Pakistan. Clinton was troubled by the plight of women she encountered, but found a warm response from the people of the countries she visited and a gained better relationship with the American press corps. The trip was a transformative experience for her and presaged her eventual career in diplomacy. declaring "that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights" She helped create Vital Voices, an international initiative sponsored by the United States to promote the participation of women in the political processes of their countries. It and Clinton's own visits encouraged women to make themselves heard in the Northern Ireland peace process.
There was a variety of public reactions to Hillary Clinton after this: some women admired her strength and poise in private matters made public, some sympathized with her as a victim of her husband's insensitive behavior, others criticized her as being an enabler to her husband's indiscretions, while still others accused her of cynically staying in a failed marriage as a way of keeping or even fostering her own political influence. In her 2003 memoir, she would attribute her decision to stay married to "a love that has persisted for decades" and add: "No one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met."
In the White House, Clinton placed donated handicrafts of contemporary American artisans, such as pottery and glassware, on rotating display in the state rooms. the redecoration of the Treaty Room into the presidential study along 19th century lines, and the redecoration of the Map Room to how it looked during World War II. Once she decided to run, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, north of New York City, in September 1999. She became the first First Lady of the United States to be a candidate for elected office. Initially, Clinton expected to face Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York City, as her Republican opponent in the election. However, Giuliani withdrew from the race in May 2000 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and having developments in his personal life become very public, and Clinton instead faced Rick Lazio, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives representing New York's 2nd congressional district. Throughout the campaign, opponents accused Clinton of carpetbagging, as she had never resided in New York nor participated in the state's politics before this race. Clinton began her campaign by visiting every county in the state, in a "listening tour" of small-group settings. During the campaign, she devoted considerable time in traditionally Republican Upstate New York regions. Clinton vowed to improve the economic situation in those areas, promising to deliver 200,000 jobs to the state over her term. Her plan included tax credits to reward job creation and encourage business investment, especially in the high-tech sector. She called for personal tax cuts for college tuition and long-term care. Clinton won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio's 43 percent. She was sworn in as United States Senator on January 3, 2001.
Clinton has served on five Senate committees: Committee on Budget (2001–2002), Committee on Armed Services (since 2003), Committee on Environment and Public Works (since 2001), She is also a Commissioner of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (since 2001).
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Clinton sought to obtain funding for the recovery efforts in New York City and security improvements in her state. Working with New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, she was instrumental in quickly securing $21 billion in funding for the World Trade Center site's redevelopment. She subsequently took a leading role in investigating the health issues faced by 9/11 first responders. Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. In 2005, when the act was up for renewal, she worked to address some of the civil liberties concerns with it, before voting in favor of a compromise renewed act in March 2006 that gained large majority support.
Clinton strongly supported the 2001 U.S. military action in Afghanistan, saying it was a chance to combat terrorism while improving the lives of Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban government. Clinton voted in favor of the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution, which authorized United States President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq, should such action be required to enforce a United Nations Security Council Resolution after pursuing with diplomatic efforts.
After the Iraq War began, Clinton made trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit American troops stationed there. On a visit to Iraq in February 2005, Clinton noted that the insurgency had failed to disrupt the democratic elections held earlier, and that parts of the country were functioning well. Noting that war deployments were draining regular and reserve forces, she cointroduced legislation to increase the size of the regular United States Army by 80,000 soldiers to ease the strain. In late 2005, Clinton said that while immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake, Bush's pledge to stay "until the job is done" was also misguided, as it gave Iraqis "an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves." Her stance caused frustration among those in the Democratic Party who favored immediate withdrawal. Clinton supported retaining and improving health benefits for veterans, and lobbied against the closure of several military bases. favorable and unfavorable ratings, 2001–2009
In 2005, Clinton called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how hidden sex scenes showed up in the controversial video game . Along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, she introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, intended to protect children from inappropriate content found in video games. In 2004 and 2006, Clinton voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment that sought to prohibit same-sex marriage.
Looking to establish a "progressive infrastructure" to rival that of American conservatism, Clinton played a formative role in conversations that led to the 2003 founding of former Clinton administration chief of staff John Podesta's Center for American Progress, shared aides with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, founded in 2003, and advised the Clintons' former antagonist David Brock's Media Matters for America, created in 2004. Following the 2004 Senate elections, she successfully pushed new Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid to create a Senate war room to handle daily political messaging.
Clinton opposed the Iraq War troop surge of 2007. In March 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by a deadline; it passed almost completely along party lines but was subsequently vetoed by President Bush. In May 2007, a compromise war funding bill that removed withdrawal deadlines but tied funding to progress benchmarks for the Iraqi government passed the Senate by a vote of 80-14 and would be signed by Bush; Clinton was one of those who voted against it. Clinton responded to General David Petraeus's September 2007 Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq by saying, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief."
In March 2007, in response to the dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy, Clinton called on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. In May and June 2007, regarding the high-profile, hotly debated comprehensive immigration reform bill known as the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, Clinton cast several votes in support of the bill, which eventually failed to gain cloture.
As the financial crisis of 2007–2008 reached a peak with the liquidity crisis of September 2008, Clinton supported the proposed bailout of United States financial system, voting in favor of the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, saying that it represented the interests of the American people. It passed the Senate 74–25.
Clinton had been preparing for a potential candidacy for United States President since at least early 2003. On January 20, 2007, Clinton announced via her web site the formation of a presidential exploratory committee for the United States presidential election of 2008; she stated, "I'm in, and I'm in to win." No woman had ever been nominated by a major party for President of the United States. In April 2007, the Clintons liquidated a blind trust, that had been established when Bill Clinton became president in 1993, to avoid the possibility of ethical conflicts or political embarrassments in the trust as Hillary Clinton undertook her presidential race. Later disclosure statements revealed that the couple's worth was now upwards of $50 million,
Clinton led candidates competing for the Democratic nomination in opinion polls for the election throughout the first half of 2007. Most polls placed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina as Clinton's closest competitors. Clinton and Obama both set records for early fundraising, swapping the money lead each quarter. By September 2007, polling in the first six states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses showed that Clinton was leading in all of them, with the races being closest in Iowa and South Carolina. By the following month, national polls showed Clinton far ahead of Democratic competitors. At the end of October, Clinton suffered a rare poor debate performance against Obama, Edwards, and her other opponents. Obama's message of "change" began to resonate with the Democratic electorate better than Clinton's message of "experience".
in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two days before Super Tuesday 2008.]] In the first vote of 2008, she placed third in the January 3 Iowa Democratic caucus to Obama and Edwards. Obama gained ground in national polling in the next few days, with all polls predicting a victory for him in the New Hampshire primary. However, Clinton gained a surprise win there on January 8, defeating Obama narrowly. Explanations for her New Hampshire comeback varied but often centered on her being seen more sympathetically, especially by women, after her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke while responding to a voter's question the day before the election. The nature of the contest fractured in the next few days. Several remarks by Bill Clinton and other surrogates, and a remark by Hillary Clinton concerning Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon B. Johnson, were perceived by many as, accidentally or intentionally, limiting Obama as a racially oriented candidate or otherwise denying the post-racial significance and accomplishments of his campaign. Despite attempts by both Hillary Clinton and Obama to downplay the issue, Democratic voting became more polarized as a result, with Clinton losing much of her support among African Americans. She lost by a two-to-one margin to Obama in the January 26 South Carolina primary, setting up, with Edwards soon dropping out, an intense two-person contest for the twenty-two February 5 Super Tuesday states. Bill Clinton had made more statements attracting criticism for their perceived racial implications late in the South Carolina campaign, and his role was seen as damaging enough to her that a wave of supporters within and outside of the campaign said the former President "needs to stop." On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the largest states, such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, while Obama won more states; they almost evenly split the total popular vote. But Obama was gaining more pledged delegates for his share of the popular vote due to better exploitation of the Democratic proportional allocation rules.
rally in support of her former rival, Barack Obama; October 2008.]] The Clinton campaign had counted on winning the nomination by Super Tuesday, and was unprepared financially and logistically for a prolonged effort; lagging in Internet fundraising, Clinton began loaning her campaign money. Obama won the next eleven February caucuses and primaries across the country, often by large margins, and took a significant pledged delegate lead over Clinton. On March 4, Clinton broke the string of losses by winning in Ohio among other places, Throughout the campaign, Obama dominated caucuses, which the Clinton campaign largely ignored organizing for. Obama did well in primaries where African Americans or younger, college-educated, or more affluent voters were heavily represented; Clinton did well in primaries where Hispanics or older, non-college-educated, or working-class white voters predominated. Some Democratic party leaders expressed concern that the drawn-out campaign between the two could damage the winner in the general election contest against Republican presumptive nominee John McCain, especially if an eventual triumph for Clinton was won via party-appointed superdelegates. On April 22, she won the Pennsylvania primary, and kept her campaign alive. She won some of the remaining contests, and indeed, over the last three months of the campaign she won more delegates, states, and votes than Obama, but it was not enough to overcome Obama's lead. In a speech before her supporters on June 7, Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama, declaring, "The way to continue our fight now to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama." By campaign's end, Clinton had won 1,640 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,763; at the time of the clinching, Clinton had 286 superdelegates to Obama's 395, with those numbers widening to 256 versus 438 once Obama was acknowledged the winner. with both breaking the previous record. Clinton also eclipsed, by a very large margin, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's 1972 mark for most primaries and delegates won by a woman. Clinton gave a passionate speech supporting Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and campaigned frequently for him in Fall 2008, which concluded with his victory over McCain in the general election on November 4. Clinton's campaign ended up severely in debt; she owed millions of dollars to outside vendors and wrote off the $13 million that she lent it herself.
The appointment required a Saxbe fix, passed and signed into law in December 2008. Confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration; two days later, the Committee voted 16–1 to approve Clinton. By this time, Clinton's public approval rating had reached 65 percent, the highest point since the Lewinsky scandal. On January 21, 2009, Clinton was confirmed in the full Senate by a vote of 94–2. Clinton took the oath of office of Secretary of State and resigned from the Senate that same day. She became the first former First Lady to serve in the United States Cabinet.
In a major speech in January 2010, Clinton drew analogies between the Iron Curtain and the free and unfree Internet. Chinese officials reacted negatively towards it, and it garnered attention as the first time a senior American official had clearly defined the Internet as a key element of American foreign policy. By mid-2010, Clinton and Obama had forged a good working relationship; she was a team player within the administration and a defender of it to the outside, and was careful that neither she nor her husband would upstage him. She met with him weekly, but did not have the close, daily relationship that some of her predecessors had had with their presidents. Clinton assumed a prominent role in the September 2010 resumption of direct talks in the stalled peace process in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, after having cajoled the reluctant parties to the table. In late November 2010, Clinton led the U.S. damage control effort after WikiLeaks released confidential State Department cables containing blunt statements and assessments by U.S. and foreign diplomats. A few of the cables released by WikiLeaks concerned Clinton directly: they revealed that directions to members of the foreign service, written by the CIA, had gone out in 2009 under her (systematically attached) name to gather biometric and other personal details on foreign diplomats, including officials of the United Nations and U.S. allies.
Several organizations attempted to measure Clinton's place on the political spectrum scientifically using her Senate votes.
National Journal's 2004 study of roll-call votes assigned Clinton a rating of 30 in the political spectrum, relative to the then-current Senate, with a rating of 1 being most liberal and 100 being most conservative. National Journal
Interest groups also gave Clinton scores based on how well her Senate votes aligned with the positions of the group. Through 2008, she had an average lifetime 90 percent "Liberal Quotient" from Americans for Democratic Action and a lifetime 8 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.
Other books released by Clinton when she was First Lady include Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets (1998) and (2000). In 2001, she wrote an afterword to the children's book Beatrice's Goat.
In 2003, Clinton released a 562-page autobiography, Living History. In anticipation of high sales, publisher Simon & Schuster paid Clinton a near-record advance of $8 million. The book set a first-week sales record for a nonfiction work, went on to sell more than one million copies in the first month following publication, and was translated into twelve foreign languages. Clinton's audio recording of the book earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
for fifteen years. Her professional career and political involvement set the stage for public reaction to her as First Lady.]] Burrell's study found women consistently rating Clinton more favorably than men by about ten percentage points during her First Lady years. In particular, Anderson states there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found political cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.
Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different perspectives. A 2006 survey by The New York Observer found "a virtual cottage industry" of "anti-Clinton literature", put out by Regnery Publishing and other conservative imprints, Van Natta, Jr., found that Republican and conservative groups viewed her as a reliable "bogeyman" to mention in fundraising letters,
Going into the early stages of her presidential campaign for 2008, a Time magazine cover showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate". By December 2007, communications professor Jamieson observed that there was a large amount of misogyny present about Clinton on the Internet, up to and including Facebook and other sites devoted to depictions reducing Clinton to sexual humiliation. that "We know that there's language to condemn female speech that doesn't exist for male speech. We call women's speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton's laugh was being described as a cackle." Newsweek editor Jon Meacham summed the relationship between Clinton and the American public by saying that the New Hampshire events, "brought an odd truth to light: though Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on the periphery or in the middle of national life for decades ... she is one of the most recognizable but least understood figures in American politics." She gained consistently high approval ratings, and her favorable-unfavorable ratings during 2010 were easily the highest of any active, nationally prominent American political figure. She continued to do well in Gallup's most admired man and woman poll; in 2010 she was named the most admired woman by Americans for the ninth straight time and the fifteenth overall.
Clinton has received many awards and honors during her career from American and international organizations for her activities concerning health, women, and children.
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| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Dean Baker |
| Image name | Dean Baker.PNG |
| Birth date | July 13, 1958 |
| Field | Economics, Macroeconomics, Urban & Real Estate Economics |
| Institution | Center for Economic and Policy Research |
| Alma mater | Swarthmore College (B.A., 1981)University of Denver (M.A., 1983)University of Michigan (Ph.D.) |
| Signature | |
| Repec prefix | f | repec_id = pba441 |
Since 1996 Baker has been the author of a weekly online commentary on economic reporting. The Economic Reporting Review was published from 1996 to 2006; subsequently he has continued this commentary on his weblog Beat The Press, which was formerly published at The American Prospect, but is now located at the CEPR website.
Baker wrote his thesis on consumption theory. He argues that analyzing consumption requires categorizing objects, which cannot be done using only physical characteristics. The words for objects must be used, e.g., chair. These words imply socially understood uses, which define the object, e.g., a chair is used to sit on. Individuals have preferences over these uses of objects. This is at odds with consumption theory, which makes no assumptions about how individuals derive utility from objects. Baker also argues that objects' use values change with their social context, rejecting consumption theory's claim that consumption is private, and not influenced by society.
From 1996 to 2006 Baker was the author of a weekly online commentary on the New York Times
Baker opposed the US government bailout of Wall Street banks on the basis that the only people who stood to lose from their collapse were their shareholders and well-paid CEOs. As regards any hypothetical, negative effects of not doing the bailout, he has explained that, "We know how to keep the financial system operating even as banks go into bankruptcy and receivership," citing US government action taken during the S&L; crisis of the 1980s. He has ridiculed the US elite for favoring it, asking, "How do you make a DC intellectual look less articulate than Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric? That's easy. You ask them how failure to pass the bailout will give us a Great Depression."
;Media
Category:Swarthmore College alumni Category:University of Denver alumni Category:University of Michigan alumni Category:Bucknell University faculty Category:1958 births Category:Living people Category:Macroeconomists Category:American economists Category:American economics writers
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| Coordinates | 37°12′5″N112°9′16″N |
|---|---|
| Name | Bjørn Lomborg |
| Caption | Bjørn Lomborg |
| Birthdate | January 06, 1965 |
| Birthplace | Denmark |
| Occupation | Author, Researcher, Analyst |
| Subject | Environmental Economics |
| Influences | Julian Simon |
In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, which seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics.
Until 2010 Lomborg campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argued for adaptation to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and for spending money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition.
In 2010, in conjunction with an announcement of a forth-coming book, Lomborg revised his position regarding mitigation of anthropogenic global warming. He has consistently supported the position that global warming exists, but cost benefit analyses, as calculated by the Copenhagen Consensus ranked climate mitigation initiatives low on a list of international development initiatives when first done in 2004. In 2008, the issue of global warming saw an increase in its priority ranking, culminating with examination of a broader list of possible solutions. He announced his agreement with "tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change" and declared global warming to be "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront". In a 2010 interview with the New Statesman, Lomborg summarized his position on climate change: "Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world."
He lectured in statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus as an assistant professor (1994–1996) and associate professor (1997–2005). He left the university in February 2005 and in May of that year became an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School.
Early in his career his professional areas of interest lay in the simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas, simulation of party behavior in proportional voting systems, and the use of surveys in public administration. In 1996, Lomborg's paper, "Nucleus and Shield: Evolution of Social Structure in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma", was published in the academic journal, American Sociological Review.
Later Lomborg's interests shifted to the use of statistics in the environmental arena. His most famous book in this area is The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose English translation was published as a work in environmental economics by Cambridge University Press in 2001. He later edited Global Crises, Global Solutions, which presented the first conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press. In 2007, he authored a book entitled Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.
In 1998, Lomborg published four essays about the state of the environment in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, which according to him "resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers."
In 2001, he attained significant attention by publishing The Skeptical Environmentalist, a controversial book whose main thesis is that many of the most-publicized claims and predictions on environmental issues are wrong.
:Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. ...In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.
The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:
#Fabrication of data; #Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation); #Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods; #Distorted interpretation of conclusions; #Plagiarism; #Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.
The Ministry remitted the case to the DCSD. In doing so the Ministry indicated that it regarded the DCSD's previous findings of scientific dishonesty in regard to the book as invalid. The Ministry also instructed the DCSD to decide whether to reinvestigate.
The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel claims to offer a "careful analysis" of the ways in which Lomborg has "selectively used (and sometimes distorted) the available evidence". Lomborg has denied the claims.
A Dutch think tank, HAN, Heidelberg Appeal the Netherlands, published a report in which they claimed 25 out of 27 accusations against Lomborg to be unsubstantiated or not to the point. A group of scientists with relation to this think tank also published an article in 2005 in the Journal of Information Ethics, in which they concluded that most criticism against Lomborg was unjustified, and that the scientific community misused their authority to suppress Lomborg.
Kåre Fog has established a catalogue of criticisms against Lomborg on the Lomborg-errors website. Fog maintains the catalogue, which includes a section for each page in each chapter in The Skeptical Environmentalist. In each section, Fog lists and details what he believes to be flaws and errors in Lomborg's work. Fog explicitly indicates if there are any details which he believes support the interpretation that the particular error may have been made deliberately by Lomborg, in order to mislead. Lomborg has on numerous occasions commented and defended himself against Kåre Fog's critique, especially in the web-book "Godhedens Pris".
In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, which seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. A panel of prominent economists was assembled to evaluate and rank a series of problems every four years. The project was funded largely by the Danish government, and co-sponsored by The Economist. A book summarizing the conclusions of the economists' first assessment, Global Crises, Global Solutions, edited by Lomborg, was published in October 2004 by Cambridge University Press.
, also published in 2007, argues against taking immediate and "drastic" action to curb greenhouse gases while simultaneously stating that "Global warming is happening. It's a serious and important problem ...". He argues that "... the cost and benefits of the proposed measures against global warming. ... is the worst way to spend our money. Climate change is a 100-year problem — we should not try to fix it in 10 years." Howard Friel wrote a book entitled The Lomborg Deception, which criticizes Lomborg, claiming that the sources Lomborg provides in the footnotes do not support—and in some cases are in direct contradiction to—Lomborg's assertions in the text of the book; Lomborg has denied these claims in a public rebuttal.
In August 2010, Lomborg appeared to reverse his position on global warming in an interview with the Guardian. He revealed that he endorses the use of a carbon tax to fight climate change in his latest book. As a public figure he has been a participant in information campaigns in Denmark about homosexuality, and states that "Being a public gay is to my view a civic responsibility. It's important to show that the width of the gay world cannot be described by a tired stereotype, but goes from leather gays on parade-wagons to suit-and-tie yuppies on the direction floor, as well as everything in between"
The Bloggers' Briefing with Bjorn Lomborg and his movie COOL IT. Accuracy In Media
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