Category: Current Affairs

Wal-Mart is the largest company in the world, measured by sales, $245 billion last year.

McKinsey estimates that one-eighth of the productivity gains of the late 1990s came from Wal-Mart.

Its $12 billion of imports from China account for a tenth of total U.S. imports from China.

It is estimated that Wal-Mart saved U.S. customers $20 billion last year.

82% percent of American households made a purchase at a Wal-Mart last year.

On the darker side, it pays lower wages and “censors” music and magazines.

And do you worry about monopoly or monopsony power? In this context I don’t, frankly, except for the cultural/censoring issue, but still it is worth noting that Wal-Mart’s U.S. market share of consumer staples could hit 50% by the end of the decade.

From Business Week , which has a long cover article, “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?”

Here are two more facts:

1. It is the biggest employer in 21 states, with more people in uniform than the U.S. Army

2. Every year the company loses $2 billion in theft, this “enterprise” alone would rank #694 on the Fortune 1000.

From Straybulletins.com.

What is the greatest danger associated with nuclear proliferation? Misunderstandings. Read my article in today’s TechCentralStation.com.

1. They devote more space to news, about twice as much.

2. Hard news gets lower priority for space. Business coverage, sports, and special features have all risen in relative prominence, business coverage doubling in percentage terms.

3. Front pages are much more local in their orientation. Foreign stories are down from 20 percent to 5 percent.

4. Female bylines have increased from 7 to 29 percent.

5. Stories are longer.

6. Papers print more letters to the editor.

And what about overall feel?

Papers of the 1960s seem naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey, and obliging. There was apparently no bottom to the threshold for local news and photos. Writing was matter of fact, and stories were surprisingly often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things. The worldview seemed white, male, middle-aged, and middle-class, a comfortable and confident Optimist Club bonhomie. With it came a noblesse oblige sense of purpose. A paper was inextricably woven into its community, a self-anointed major player almost preening with pride and duty.

From a 1999 study by Carl Sessions Stepp, recently republished in Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Newspapering.

Addendum: Bruce Bartlett adds: “You neglected to note that over the same period, newspaper circulation fell like a rock. Perhaps people would read more papers if they were more like those in the ’60s.”

“A smuggling ring operated for several months in Ohio’s largest Amish community, transporting hundreds of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, investigators said.” So notes Cnn.com. It says something about the power of good institutions that it still makes economic sense to smuggle workers into a community that limits its use of modern technology.

Garrett Hardin and his wife recently passed away, it is rumored to have been a double suicide. Hardin was a well-known environmentalist, most prominently he coined the phrase “tragedy of the commons”. He spent the latter part of his career opposing immigration and favoring population control, he was even embraced by some eugenecists.

Addendum: The Hardins were survived by their four children, thanks to Nicky Tynan for the pointer.

Perhaps you have put your name on the “do not call” list. Don’t think that your troubles are over. One estimate suggests that unsolicited calls will go down by no more than 25 percent. The wording is ambiguous but from the context the figure seems to be for people who have put their name on the list, obviously it will be worse for the population as a whole. One loophole is that anyone with a “previously existing commercial relationship” can call you, so can non-profits, pollers, and radio and TV providers, not to mention politicians. The group Private Citizen is leading the fight against such cold calls, and is the original source of the estimate. Thanks to TechiePundit for the original pointers to the links.

Check out this map, which is dominated by the Muslim world.

Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution has argued that such intermarriage patterns make liberal democracy harder:

In the modern Middle East, networks of kin are still the foundation of wealth, security, and personal happiness. That, in a sense, is the problem. As we’ve seen in Afghanistan, loyalty to kin and tribe cuts against the authority of the state. And the corrupt dictatorships that rule much of the Muslim Middle East often function themselves more like self-interested kin groups than as rulers who take the interests of the nation as a whole as their own. That, in turn, gives the populace little reason to turn from the proven support of kin and tribe, and trust instead in the state.

An intriguing idea, but I find it very hard to establish the appropriate causal connections. Still, better that we ponder the question than stick our heads in the sand. Parapundit offers a very useful overview of the debate, sympathetic to Kurtz’s point of view. Please note, as always, that use of a link does not constitute endorsement of all of that link’s contents or subsequent links.

Why not just give gifts of money? Prudence of Slate tells us that norms are changing, and that more people are finding cash gifts for weddings acceptable. The couple that posed the initial question put it as follows:

So they think it’s “tacky” to ask for money? Well, we think it’s worse to make people spend precious time getting gifts we don’t need or want.

Amen, says this economist, whose best wedding presents from this last May often were the gift certificates. I might add that co-blogger Alex and his wife gave us a very useful gift certificate for a framing shop.

One economic estimate suggested that Christmas gifts alone involve a “deadweight loss” of $4 billion. I’ve never been convinced by this number, gifts help people sort out how well their friends and loved ones understand them, and create new lines of communication, surely this is an offsetting benefit. And sometimes a surprise or show of affection, as embodied in a gift, is simply more fun. Nonetheless gifts are a form of signalling, and very often people invest too much effort in the signal, just to be higher in the pecking order. I hope Prudence is right about the change in norms.

Addendum: I read the following in the Weekend Financial Times: “In 1979, Karen Davis started a hickory-baked ham company in Marieta, Georgia, and on opening day her parents gave her a porcelain pig for good luck. Over the next two decades, she estimates that she got 400-500 pig gifts. “Pigs aren’t my thing,” she says, though she did warm to the piggy banks.” See the article for other examples of dubious gifts.