Stimulus

I have become a major podcast fiend. If you have any favorites, please comment so that I can subscribe. What a great way to multitask while commuting to work, especially when it’s overcast in San Francisco and you can’t read without an itty bitty light. Aside from educating my mind by listening, I’ve done a ton of reading lately because I can’t access Facebook at home. I don’t know what the problem is. I tried to troubleshoot it myself by reading a bunch of apple support pages and help feeds. I even brought my laptop to the Genius Bar and that didn’t work. So night time is all about reading my book club books which are both fab.

There are always people who don’t read the book which, in my mind, is flabbergasting because we always assign a substantial cushion of time for reading. I know people will throw out the baby excuse, but so what? I have a full-time job. I also work for Burning Man. I’m a blogger, a landlord, a vacationer, active on Airbnb for additional rental income. On top of all that, I’m trying to get pregnant. That means constant blood work, trips to the pharmacy, phone calls, appointments, ultrasounds, sonograms, a multitude of tests, and injections. And I read two books a month! People in the book club who don’t have kids and don’t read the book are essentially pathetic.

Back to podcasts. I listened to an economic podcast with Professor Raghu Rajan. Incidentally he happens to hail from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I wasn’t listening to it for that reason. He was just so insightful (and from my alma mater, duh). I’m going to start stalking this guy and his research. He wrote a book called Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy which was the Financial Times 2010 Best Business Book of the Year.

One of the issues he discusses in detail is income inequality. Because of technical innovation, jobs such as manufacturing are disappearing. What remains are very low-end jobs and very high-end technical and professional jobs. As the wages of the upper middle class continue to grow, the middle class is starting to merge with the lower class. As a result, there’s a lot of anger towards the so-called “1%.” Anger at the Bush tax cuts, anger that the top is getting a free ride, anger that the rich are in their position because of corporate malfeasance, when in reality, the single biggest group in the top 1% are doctors. Not bankers! The solution is to fix longer-term problems such as education which is a lot more challenging than fixing tax codes! Raghu, you the man. Buy this guy’s book. http://blogs.chicagobooth.edu/faultlines