Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

< 7:18:31 PM        >

Here is an interesting stat from the article:

U.S. productivity zoomed by 2.75% a year in the quarter-century after World War II, creating the modern American middle class. Around 1973, productivity growth slowed mysteriously to 1.5%, and showed no signs of revival despite the spread of computers until 1995. Since then, productivity has grown by more than 2.5% a year. This is big. Adding just two-tenths of a percentage point to productivity growth over a decade works out to an extra $1,000 in income for each man, woman and child.

Obviously, we didn't see anything close to this growth in incomes since 1995.  Where did it go?  Into the pockets of CEOs like Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and others is one answer.  It has also been siphoned off by corporations and Wall Street.  Imagine the improvement in personal incomes if American families got the full benefit of productivity improvements.

This chart shows the increasing gap between productivity and income (note, this chart depicts median income which factors out the incomes of super-rich families):

comments < 7:15:46 PM        >

William Safire: You are a suspect. [Scripting News]
comments < 7:14:27 PM        >

Here's the Markoff article Safire referenced. "The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe -- including the United States." [Scripting News]
comments < 7:13:45 PM        >

Intel Releases "Fastest Chip Ever" [Slashdot]
comments < 7:12:57 PM        >

3-XServe Cluster Achieves 217 GigaFlops [The Macintosh News Network]
comments < 7:10:37 PM        >

Xbase helps publish, create online magazine [The Macintosh News Network]
comments < 7:08:57 PM        >

Apple offers training materials to teachers [The Macintosh News Network]
comments < 7:08:03 PM        >

New telescope provides sharpest view of Sun. A new Swedish telescope has taken the sharpest images to date of the Sun, astronomers... [spacetoday.net]
comments < 7:04:48 PM        >