US middle class shrinks as incomes fall; I made the robot do it; The clock ticks for men, too; Hindi films have given up on us; More Chinese opt for home schooling

1US middle class shrinks as incomes fall (San Francisco Chronicle) All those things our two political parties swear they'll do for the middle class? They'd better hurry up because the middle class is fast approaching the endangered species list. Not only has the middle class "endured a lost decade for economic well-being," it has shrunk significantly, from 61% of the adult population in 1971 to 51% in 2011, and continues to "fall backward in income and wealth, and shed some - by no means all - of its characteristic faith in the future."

This according to a Pew Research Center survey of self-described middle-class adults in July, and data from the US Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve. Median wealth for the middle class - assets minus debts - has taken a particularly heavy hit in the past decade, falling by 28% from $130,000 to $93,000, while median income for a family of four fell 5%, to $68,000. According to those describing themselves as middle class, a household income of $70,000 is about what it takes to enjoy that way of life.

And, yes, the better off got better off, though not by much (to $575,000 in median wealth, up from $570,000), while the poor got a lot poorer: a 45% plunge in median wealth from $18,000 to $10,000.

2 I made the robot do it (Thomas L Friedman in The New York Times) While visiting the design workshop of Rethink Robotics, near Boston’s airport, I did something I’ve never done before: I programmed a robot to perform the simple task of moving widgets from one place to another. And therein lie the seeds of a potential revolution. Rethink’s goal is simple: that its cheap, easy-to-use, safe robot will be to industrial robots what the personal computer was to the mainframe computer, or the iPhone was to the traditional phone. That is, it will bring robots to the small business and even home and enable people to write apps for them the way they do with PCs and iPhones — thus speeding innovation and enabling more manufacturing in America. 

The Rethink robot will be unveiled in weeks. Actually, the robots will eliminate jobs, just as the PC did, but they be will lower-skilled ones. And the robots will also create new jobs or enlarge existing ones, but they will be jobs that require more skills. I watched a Rethink robot being tested at the Nypro plastics factory in Clinton, Mass. A single worker was operating a big molding machine that occasionally spewed out too many widgets, which forced the system to overload. The robot was brought in to handle overflow, while the same single worker still operated the machine.

This is the march of progress. It eliminates bad jobs, empowers good jobs, but always demands more skill and creativity and always enables fewer people to do more things. We went through the same megashift when our agricultural economy was replaced by the industrial economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, what this election should be about is how we spawn thousands of Rethinks that create new industries, new jobs and productivity tools.

3 No crime, no punishment (The New York Times editorial) When the Justice Department recently closed its criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs, it became all but certain that no major American banks or their top executives would ever face criminal charges for their role in the financial crisis. Justice officials and even President Obama have defended the lack of prosecutions, saying that even though greed and other moral lapses were evident in the run-up to the crisis, the conduct was not necessarily illegal.

As far back as 2009, when the Justice Department lost a financial fraud case against a pair of hedge fund managers at Bear Stearns, it seems to have made an institutional determination that it could not win against big banks and top bankers. The result is a public perception that the big banks and their leaders will never have to answer fully for the crisis. After all these years, what is still needed are cases with convictions and settlements severe enough to deter future bad behavior. If institutions operating at the heart of the economy really cannot be held to account, the solution should be to break them up, not give them and their leaders a pass.

4 The clock ticks for men, too (The New York Times) On Wednesday, various news organizations reported findings of a study in the journal Nature. There was convincing evidence, the study concluded, that — in a fraction of cases — increased mutations found in the sperm of older men meant that they were more likely than their younger counterparts to father children with autism or schizophrenia.  

Traditionally, the question of a man’s age has largely been absent from discussions of complications from pregnancy, while a woman’s age has been connected with an increased risk of Down syndrome, genetic disorders and even autism.

But if men start worrying about their biological clocks even 10% as much as women do, commentators seemed to suggest, that would signal a notable social shift — one that’s in line with a broader gender shift we’re seeing. Far more men are feeling anxious about worries (work-life balance, pressure to look attractive, even whether they’re good cooks) that used to weigh more heavily on women. We used to think the gender revolution meant that women would become more like men. Has it turned out the real shift is that men are becoming more like women?

5 Hindi films have given up on us (Gautam Chintamani in Dawn) Forget the quality of present day popular Hindi cinema. The real debate should be ‘is there any sense of morality left in our films?’ The moral code of our cinema, or the apparent lack of it, could be blamed on the successful filmmakers and their rather apathetic sense of attachment towards things around them and, maybe, even their viewers. But that would just be half the story. Looking at films, the characters, the successes and the super hits, one could give up on any hope that things would change but that’s not as tragic as the realisation that perhaps our films have given up on us.

Present day commercial Hindi cinema is all about being cool. The kids are cool and the dads are cooler, the villains might cease to be dispassionate but the heroes are more aloof than ever before. It’s not enough for a character to simply kill the other; today they have to mouth some inane profanity and then hear something worse before pulling the trigger or parking the fatal blow.

Sadly it seems like the failure of the smaller or different films has ensured that big, bad Bollywood extracts its pound of flesh on its viewers. The slow but sure exit of people like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Saeed Mirza from the spotlight along with the new dictum of box-office-success-by-any-means-necessary has defined a new sense of hollow morality.

The acceptance of films like Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Dabangg, Ghajini or Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), Rowdy Rathore is a result of this new thought process and we as audiences seem to be guilty of showering it with our blessings. If you thought that was bad enough try coping with the reality that perhaps it was we, the viewer, who might have killed Hindi cinema’s morality in the first place.

6 More Chinese opt for home schooling (Dawn) China has made impressive progress in rolling out universal education across the country, with urban areas such as Shanghai claiming a perfect school enrolment rate. The United Nations says China has a youth literacy rate of 99%. But many parents complain about the focus on rote learning and passing exams, which means that children spend long hours in class.

Chinese children spend an average of 8.6 hours a day in school, with some spending 12 hours in the classroom, according to a 2007 survey conducted by China’s Youth and Children Research Center. Lao Kaisheng, an education policy researcher at Beijing Normal University, said growing numbers of Chinese parents were demanding more of a say in how their children were educated. “There’s been a rapid rise in home schooling, especially in the past few years,” he said. “Parents who home school tend to have more strict requirements for their children’s education, and feel that schools won’t meet their children’s individual needs.”

7 Manmohan Singh and our 'descendants' (Rupa Subramanya in The Wall Street Journal) In the recent Oscar winning film, “The Descendants,” George Clooney plays a character who has to make a decision that will affect the lives of many others. Mr. Clooney’s character is the executive trustee of an old family trust that owns a huge swath of priceless beachfront property in Hawaii which is saddled with debts. He must figure out what to do to benefit all the other trustees who are the “descendants” of the original property owners referred to in the title.

In real life, Manmohan Singh, playing his role as India’s prime minister, faces such difficult situations all the time. As prime minister, he heads a government which is charged with, among other things, managing the country’s natural resources for the best interests of its citizens. In a sense, every Indian citizen is a descendant whom Mr. Singh or anyone else who might be prime minister has to look out for.

Spoiler alert: In the movie, Mr. Clooney’s character decides not to sell the land to a local property developer, in part because of a plot twist related to his comatose wife. But more importantly, from his point of view, because selling the land for a quick buck would imperil future generations, both his own family and the other residents of Hawaii.

If a recent report by India’s Comptroller and Auditor General is accurate, Mr. Singh’s government has done something very like what Mr. Clooney’s character decided not to do, which is to give away valuable coal deposits (which all Indians own collectively but the government manages for them) to a few private sector players at what the CAG asserts are bargain-basement prices. And the beneficiaries in this case weren’t sleazy real estate agents but include some of India’s biggest and most respected private sector companies. According to the report, the potential losses amount to a sum worth the equivalent of $34 billion.

8 Zapiro cartoon in Johannesburg Times

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2011/06/13/zapiro-cartoons