OVER the past two years Moira McKamey has had to adjust to a very different way of life. She lost her job in November 2008, one of 8,000 workers fired from an air-freight hub in Wilmington, Ohio. The departure of DHL, a delivery company, was quick and devastating; as if a tornado had ripped through Main Street. A few weeks after Mrs McKamey was sacked she and her husband, Randy, spoke to The Econo
Why do firms exist?Ronald Coase, the author of “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), turns 100 on December 29th FOR philosophers the great existential question is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” For management theorists the more mundane equivalent is: “Why do firms exist? Why isn't everything done by the market?” Today most people live in a market economy, and central planning is remembe
The redistribution of hopeOptimism is on the move—with important consequences for both the hopeful and the hopeless “HOPE” is one of the most overused words in public life, up there with “change”. Yet it matters enormously. Politicians pay close attention to right-track/wrong-track indicators. Confidence determines whether consumers spend, and so whether companies invest. The “power of positive th
No longer bottom of the classWeak and wasteful schools hold Brazil back. But at least they are getting less bad IN 2000 the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries, decided to find out how much children were learning at school. At the time, only half of Brazilian children finished primary education. Three out of four adults were functionally illiterate and more than one in ten totally so. And yet f
China and the Nobel peace prize The empty chair CHINESE leaders probably failed to anticipate the battering that China's image abroad would suffer as a result of the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. They would have expected that their boycott of the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10th would invite comparisons in the West between China and the So
The dangers of a rising ChinaChina and America are bound to be rivals, but they do not have to be antagonists TOWARDS the end of 2003 and early in 2004 China's most senior leaders put aside the routine of governing 1.3 billion people to spend a couple of afternoons studying the rise of great powers. You can imagine history's grim inventory of war and destruction being laid out before them as they
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WikiLeaks degenerates into gossipThe fine line between truth-telling and tattling SO WE have another WikiLeaks release, and this time it's secret diplomatic cables. So far the interesting material is on Arab states' and America's relationships with Iran. It seems all those fervid background-only reports of Arab states urging America to bomb Iran, which I mistrusted at the time, were true. Call me
Conflict on the Korean peninsula Ignore us at your peril IF THE world sniggered to see Kim Jong Un, with his fat-faced boyishness, thrust forward as the dictator-to-be of North Korea, it is not laughing now. A 65-minute-long artillery barrage on November 23rd rained down upon the tiny South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, marking the first time since the war of 1950-53 that the North has fired shells
The Andy Warhol Foundation $100m-worth of Elvises “EIGHT ELVISES” is a 12-foot painting that has all the virtues of a great Andy Warhol: fame, repetition and the threat of death. The canvas is also awash with the artist's favourite colour, silver, and dates from a vintage Warhol year, 1963. It did not leave the home of Annibale Berlingieri, a Roman collector, for 40 years, but in autumn 2008 it so
A passion that knows no boundsPhilippe Ségalot's “Carte Blanche”, the auction as self-portrait THIS month saw the launch in New York of a new kind of contemporary-art auction, one in which a single major player in the art market is invited to create “the sale of his dreams”. Set up by Phillips de Pury & Company and held in the firm's new premises on the corner of Park Avenue and East 57th Street,
Leave well aloneCapping microfinance interest rates will hurt the poor. There are better ways to regulate the industry MICROFINANCE is an example of something that is sadly all too rare: an anti-poverty tool that usually at least breaks even. If you make small, uncollateralised business loans to groups of poor women, they almost always repay them on time. It has grown rapidly in many countries, no
Japanese resignations The joke that fell flat IS THERE no justice in Japan? Apparently not. Minoru Yanagida, the justice minister, was forced to step down on November 22nd for offence of having told a joke—a rare thing in governing circles, it would seem—that made a sensible point. What his resignation has to say about Japanese politics is anything but funny. Mr Yanagida's downfall was caused by a
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