Dollars & Sense articles from November 2001

Dollars & Sense archives from November 2001

Most (Economically) Valuable Player. .(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... At the age of 38, basketball superstar Michael Jordan has his share of skeptics, who doubt he can make a successful return to the National Basketball Association (NBA) after three years of retirement. There is less doubt, however, about the...

What, Me Worry?(International Monetary Fund)(Brief Article)(Column)
November 1, 2001... Ask most economists if the world economy is headed into recession, and they'll tell you it is. The Japanese economy, still in the depths of a decade-long crisis, is expected to continue its contraction at least through spring 2002. The U.S. and...

What Do the Pros Know? (Stocks I).(journal readers choose better stocks in contest)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 2001... Who knows more about picking stocks? Wall Street professionals, Wall Street Journal readers, or dart-throwing high-school students? The answer is not so clear, judging from a recent stock-picking contest sponsored by the Journal. For the...

Adopt a Logo.(brand logos and consumer behavior)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... Next time you meet a corporate logo, you might want to lend the poor dear a blanket or feed it some hearty soup. According to the September 8-14 issue of The Economist, logos are vulnerable, fragile, and prone to sudden death at the merciless...

Ornamental Truck.(Brief Article)(Column)
November 1, 2001... With its decade-long sport utility binge, the automotive industry seemed to have reached the apex of four-wheeled gluttony. Now, however, comes the latest in status vehicles: the luxury pickup truck. The concept of the Sport Utility Truck...

Dying Clientele No Problem for Big Tobacco.(Brief Article)(Column)
November 1, 2001... Tobacco companies are at it again. After a huge settlement that imposed new "guidelines" for tobacco advertising, three of the United States' four biggest cigarette companies are still marketing to children, according to the August 15 New York...

Dying of Thirst.(Brief Article)(Column)
November 1, 2001... When did it become so hard to get a free drink of water in this country? When people realized that instead of giving away the precious liquid, they could charge $2.50 a bottle. "Seen a water fountain at a gasoline station lately?" asks the...

Letters.
November 1, 2001... To the Editor: I read with interest the article by Ellen Mutari on self-sufficiency ("Self-Sufficiency: An Elusive goal") in the July/August issue of Dollars & Sense. The research quoted on self-sufficiency notes the huge gap between what...

Smoke and Mirrors.(teenager Jonathan Ledbed in SEC case)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... You don't have to be a professional market analyst--or even be old enough to vote--to make a killing on the stock market. Jonathan Lebed, a fourteen-year-old New Jersey high school student, made about $800,000 manipulating the stock market in...

Meatpackers Fight for Health and Safety.(Column)
November 1, 2001... When Wilmer Sosa experienced hearing loss on the job, he was worried. When he saw his co-workers laboring under unhealthy and unsafe conditions, he knew he had to point out the problem to management. But Sosa says his bosses dismissed his...

From New Economy to War Economy: Now that the economy needs stimulus, why not insist that government spending shape economic development in socially beneficial ways?(Column)
November 1, 2001... Now that the "New Economy" appears to have gone the way of the hula hoop, it looks like the "War Economy" will be the latest craze. But before we get carried away with the idea that the September 11 attacks threw us into recession, a bit...

September 11: A Discussion.
November 1, 2001... All of us at Dollars & Sense were shaken by the attacks of September 11. In discussing our response, we found that we agreed on many issues, and differed on some. So we are listing our main points of agreement, followed by individual statements...

United States Government.(a progressive view of the Taliban)(Brief Article)(Editorial)
November 1, 2001... I reject the view of history as a closed circle that starts and ends in Washington, in which the U.S. government is the sole protagonist. The present struggles within the Islamic world, the conflict over the future of the global economy, even...

World Trade Center. (Comment).(national security threatened)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... I've grown so used to the habitual American government posture of false righteousness against false demons that it has been a struggle to acknowledge what is different here. But the World Trade Center attacks are the first genuine threat to...

United States Embassy.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
November 1, 2001... Outside the United States embassy in Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, Muslim women march holding signs that read, "No to war, No to terrorism." You would hope we could do as well. And as long as we are saying no, why not say no to...

United States Policy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... I am a woman who believes in herself, believes in you, in the strength of what we have in common, in the richness of our differences, that no one should die of starvation or diarrhea, from bullets, bombs, or heartbreak. I believe in laughter. I...

Chile's Air Force.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
November 1, 2001... I can't count the number of times I've seen the film of Chile's Air Force bombing the country's presidential palace during the CIA-sponsored military coup of September 11, 1973. The parallels with last September 11--not only the date, but also...

United States Bombs.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... Grieving for the "other" is a political act. We can resist becoming desensitized to the violence inflicted in our names by grieving each Afghan life taken by U.S. bombs as a loss equal to each life lost so horribly on September 11. Hope is also...

United States Military and Economic Domination.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... I've been thinking about patriotism. I cringe when I see U.S. flags everywhere, because the flag has become a symbol of U.S. military and economic domination worldwide. People suffering from that domination must feel like we would feel if...

Middle East Reflects the Moral and Political.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... The meaning of the September 11 attacks and the desirable response to them are tangled with moral complexity. On the one hand, the present situation in the Middle East reflects the moral and political failure of U.S. policy, from the 1953...

Braceros or Amnesty?: The choice is not over what policy will not stop people from coming across the border, but over what happens to people when they're here in the United States. It is the age-old American dilemma--bondage or freedom.(workers from Mexico)
November 1, 2001... At the end of Mexican President Vicente Fox's first state visit to Washington, D.C., in September, he left frustrated and empty-handed. It wasn't supposed to work out that way. Months before, the occasion had been planned for Fox and U.S....

Haiti in 2001: Political Deadlock, Economic Crisis: Though factional strife, economic hardship, and discouragement have driven away members, Haiti's popular organizations doggedly continue with hundreds of initiatives large and small.(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 2001... Much has changed in Haiti since Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first elected president more than a decade ago. As an insurgent priest in the 1980s, Aristide narrowly escaped assassination several times by agents of the Duvalier dictatorship. After...

Q & A. (SOCIAL SECURITY).(United States)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 2001... "Social Security Q &A" was inspired by a plea from Larry Siegel, a D&S reader from Monroe Township, New Jersey, for clarification of the Social Security debate. "It's driving me nuts!!" he declared. We hope this helps. Readers interested...

The Hidden Costs of Private Accounts.(social security, United States)(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 2001... As Bush's handpicked commission on Social Security grapples with the details of diverting Social Security revenue into private accounts, it will almost certainly confront a knotty little logistical problem--an issue that so stumped...

The Surplus Vanishes: A New Budget Battle.(Congressional Budget Office, United States)(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 2001... Surplus, we hardly knew ye. Just last January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was projecting $5.6 trillion in budget surpluses over the next decade. A cool $3.1 trillion were on-budget (outside of the Social Security system) and...

Lines in the Sand: A Tourism Debacle in Southern Mexico.(farm land expropriation in Santa Maria Huatulco)(Statistical Data Included)
November 1, 2001... Laurentino Cormona doesn't remember exactly what he was doing the morning of May 28,1984. He was probably somewhere on the five acres of land that he has farmed his entire life. Around mid-day, someone came by and showed Cormona a newspaper. An...

Reversal of Fortune on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast: The Nicaragua of today is much like the country was before the Somoza dynasty was overthrown.(Arnoldo Aleman, Liberal Constitutionalist Party)
November 1, 2001... BLUEFIELDS, NICARAGUA--Bruce Hodgson is known as the Mayor of Cotton Tree, a predominantly Creole neighborhood of single-story wood and cinderblock homes here. Clutching a mahogany cane in one hand and adjusting his straw hat with the other,...

Millions Mull Social Utopia--But Within Limits: Games like Sim City, Tropico, and Civilization give players a chance to remake the world. Or do they? (In Review).(Evaluation)
November 1, 2001... Nothing stretches the imagination like the chance to reinvent history--or remake society. While the conventional "wisdom" often assumes that we've reached the "end of history," the popularity of computer games such as the Sim City series,...

Ask Dr. Dollar.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2001... Dear Dr. Dollar, I'm a new subscriber and wondering if you had any reading-list recommendations. Could you suggest five to ten must-read books, primers through advanced, that put forth a critique of reigning macro-economic conditions, and...

Unlevel Playing Fields: Understanding Wage Inequality and Discrimination. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Randy Albelda, Robert W. Drago, and Steven Shulman, Unlevel Playing Fields: Understanding Wage Inequality and Discrimination (Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2001) Largely free of jargon (technical terms are clearly defined), this book...

Political Economy and Contemporary Capitalism: Radical Perspectives on Economy Theory and Policy. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Ron Baiman, Heather Boushey, and Dawn Saunders, eds., Political Economy and Contemporary Capitalism: Radical Perspectives on Economy Theory and Policy (M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001) Since the 1970s, the Union of Radical Political Economists...

For the Common Good. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Herman Daly and John Cobb, For the Common Good (Beacon Press, 1994) Daly and Cobb offer a vision of community-rooted economics, taking the ecological limitations on Earth-bound human activity very seriously. Along the way, the authors...

Readings in Urban Theory. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell, eds., Readings in Urban Theory (Blackwell Publishers, 1996) How to think about the local and the global together--this vexing problem was the foundation of a school of urban sociology emerging in the...

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (The New Press, 2001) In this masterpiece of feminist political economy, Nancy Folbre pulls together her conclusions from 20 years' work on the economics of families--all in a...

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (Penguin USA, 2001) A sweeping synthesis of the different ways the British and Spanish empires shaped race and economy in the "New World." It is a lively and penetrating...

Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Arthur MacEwan, Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century (Zed Books, Ltd., 2000) Margaret Thatcher famously declared that "there alternative" to bare-knuckle capitalism. In this book,...

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1999) If you didn't read Marable's classic when it first came out in 1983, read it now. If you read it then, maybe it's time to read it again. Marable's...

Wage-Labor and Capital and Value, Price and Profit. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Karl Marx, Wage-Labor and Capital and Value, Price and Profit (International Publishers, 1997) Two of the best short expositions of Marx's economics, written by Marx himself. Wage-Labor and Capital (1849) was one of Marx's first attempts...

The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century. (Ten Must-Read Economics Books).(Review)
November 1, 2001... William K. Tabb, The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2001) Bill Tabb, a Queens College professor associated with Monthly Review magazine, is an old hand...

Honorable Mentions.
November 1, 2001... Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000) Serious lessons from both the victories and defeats of U.S. workers' movements. Jean Dreze...

Safety in Numbers: Airlines have been hiring security companies that offer the service at rock-bottom prices. (Economy is Numbers).(Brief Article)
November 1, 2001... The events of September 11 have made many question the integrity of the United States' airport security system. Even before the attacks, however government agencies had warned repeatedly of inadequate security. Between 1991 and 2000, undercover...