Nouriel Roubini..Guru …Who advises

If you read any newspaper or blog today you would find thousand analysis about why things went wrong. A year ago you could have seem most talking about why things are great now (inspite of the sub-prime issues). 2 years ago…things were even rosier.. At one point even Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley stopped talking negative…(may be his new assignment did not allow him too). But Nouriel Roubini maintained his stance that the path that USA was following monetary and economic policy wise was not the right way and that they will pay for it. Well now his prediction (and that of Stephen Roach before he moved to Asia) has come true. But atleast Fortune magazine recognized him and selected him as one of the new gurus of modern thinking.  Hope that in the future people show more eagerness in diagnostics rather than in postmortems. But then greed never promoted rationality.

Hillary Clinton – Beaten by the Media or by her friends??

Well , now that Hillary Clinton has finally given, one wonders what went wrong. That she was not accessible was well known fact. The liability of an aging Bill and his shadow on Hillary was also expected. Means it did not change since the last 16 months. She won all the key democratic states. She won all the swing voters states which the democrates need to beat a republic man. Whereas most of Obama wins are in republican states. He will really need to work on to get the backing of the key states he did not win. He was protrayed as elite more than Hillary. So why did Hillary loose?  Some say it is gender and some say it is all the mistakes she made.  The first one I would dismiss right away. The next one…her mistakes can easily been explained as just one in a many statements she made each day. These can be easily excused. 

Clue to this mystery is that Hillary almost always did better than what the polls said. She always defied the odds when she won. The main reason was that her support was more outside the media world. The world not accessible to the media or not interested in the media. Well this came up many times during the campaign there was an unfair treatment . Obama always was the media´s darling.  It appears to be a mutual love affair.

The other reason was that entire democratic establishment was against her. No idea why.Kennedy, Kerry and host of others more or less threw their weight behind her. I still remember when in one of the debates Hillary looked up at John Edwards while attacking Obama expecting his support. But then John Edwards came up attacking her along with Obama.

Even though I think that it is a gross failure of someone aspiring to be a president in not being able to maintain and control his or her own establishment, I feel the establishment itself was biased against her and never gave her a chance from day one. Well let us see what she does in the coming days.

 

MBA by mail!!! Who is better??

The regular ranking of MBAs take a lot of additional items into account  like salary benefit, connections, reputation of institution which are not really relevant to the course content offered.  But this year Economist did a ranking on the distance learning MBAs. Ranking in this group of MBA actually is very special. Here all the fringe elements don´t matter. Such MBAs hardly assist in job switch or salary rise . So the rating brings out the pure academic content. A person who is working and spends a part of free time , not expecting any gain in salary or position is going to be more truthful. He would be a better judge on the relevancy of the training he receives. Well, the ranking of these distance education MBAs  can be seen here http://mba.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=view_article&eiu_article_id=1782965163 .(I am not sure everybodycan see as the site requires registration). 5 British universities are on the top while US has 2 including the top one . France, Spain and Australia have one each.

Why would British Universities crowd this group while the US ones could only manage 2.  I guess the British universities cater to a lot of European managers who are working and don´t find enough in incentive to take a break from the job to do such courses.

Poor English – One Reasons for lack-lustre performance in Academic Research in Non-English Europe

In an article in VOX, Luc Bauwens,Giordano Mion, Jacques-Francois Thisse show that apart from low research budget and poor governance of academic institutions, lack of  proficiency in English is also important factor for the poor performance of European academic research. http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/834. They explain this citing example of the better performance in the European countries where English proficiency is high like Sweden, Netherland and Denmark compared to countries where it is low like Germany, France and Italy. It even goes on to point out that the former English countries like Australia,Canada,New Zealand, Singapore,Israel Ireland etc. performed much higher when measured in terms of Highly Cited Research (HCR) counts per million. Of course this study is based more on the Thomson Database only. But seems the researchers are quite right in their assumptions.

As usual there is no mention about Indian  or Chinese research capabilities. But a look at the site based on which the data is derived shows India has only 9 HCRs while Chinese have around 19 HCRs of which most of them are from Hong Kong (another former English Colony).

For the Education Departments in European countries this should be another wakeup call to be proactive. They are already under pressure to increase the emphasis on English because of the dilution of the other languages after the expansion of EU.

Overwork-Japanese Culture of Hardwork

Registered users of  The Economist can read this article about overworking in Japan http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10329261.  This highlights the issues of KAROSHI (the Japanese have a way of glorifying everything with terms) where somebody dies out of overwork. The article picks up an example of a third generation employee of Toyota who worked 80 hrs more unpaid overtime for the last six months apart from the normal working hours. Japanese are slightly less than Americans on their working hours. (1780 hrs compared to 1800 hrs per year). In Germany this is 1440 hrs.   Family members affected by Karoshi are payed compensations by the company.  In fact the widow of this person mentioned commented that Toyota´s dominance is more due to such flexible manpower rather than often quoted efficiency of working. Given the cultural loyalty and the hardworking habits of Japanese I tend to agree with her. The issue of of Karoshi is so pressing that there is even a website for it http://karoshi.jp/english/index.html.

Comparing this with the living conditions in Europe where total working hours are so low and then people are forced to take vacations just to get rid of the accumulated extra hours and days of holidays. Many of them argue that the efficiency of work is not good enough when higher hours are spent. Comparing it with countries like India and China it might be so. But Japan and South Korea have been consistently doing better than the Europeans in all aspects like education, health care etc. This shows that Europe cannot just keep watching. Either they have to work hard or increase efficiency to stay alive with their current conditions. But when I see that we will have public transport strikes in the next few weeks., it appears that the urgency for such changes is not yet being felt by the Europeans

No of working hours for US and Europe.

About general discussion on how the numbers of hours put in by workeres influences the overall GDP, here is a policy paper published by cepr http://www.cepr.org/pubs/PolicyInsights/PolicyInsight12.pdf.  The general conclusion  is  that ” GDP per capita is today 30% higher in the US than in France or Germany, while GDP per hour worked is roughly equal. This means that Americans are today richer than Europeans simply because they work more, not because they are more productive “.  But then as mentioned in earlier posts the hours spent by Europeans at other activities like building and fixing their own houses (however inefficient) does not reflect in the GDP as this does not get accounted. This isvery much identical to the black economy which also does not reflect in GDP.