What does this mean?

There really are two faces to financialization. The most familiar face is the dominance of the finance sector over the rest of us: the giant profits and bonuses at the big banks and investment houses and the instability generated by too big to fail but rapaciously imprudent financial services firms. The other face is the financialization of the rest of the economy. Greta Krippner figured this out first. Greta discovered that since the 1980s firms in the non-finance sector have increasingly invested, not in the production of goods and services, but in financial instruments. The productive economy, Main Street in some formulations, has increasingly abandoned production in favor of financial shenanigans. Finance related income, including interest, foreign exchange profits, and stock market investments have risen from about 1/8^th of corporate profits to around 30%. In the manufacturing sector the move from production to financial strategies has been even more dramatic, rising to a ratio of finance revenue/profit as high as .60 after 2000.

icancstructures:

Financialization and Income Inequality

other-stuff:

ryking:

CHART: States That Cut The Most [Government] Spending Have Lost The Most Jobs

More proof, as if we needed any, that the only way to stimulate an economy out of a recession is through increased government spending. You cannot tax-cut your way out of a recession.

I tend to think of it like reducing food shopping so you won’t be starving anymore — there is only so much cutting you can do.

(Source: diadoumenos)

manicchill:

Don’t forget guys, our current president is terrible at aiding job creation. Especially in the private sector. The GOP said it, so it has to be true right? Just like everything I read on the internet?

motherjones:

What Planned Parenthood actually does. Hint: Not a lot of abortions. Via Washington Post

Update:

This is the most reblogged, most “noted” post I’ve ever made to Tumblr. Consider two things: the wage gap is higher in higher wage professions, and the workplace is already stratified by gender, such that there are few women in those lower wage occupations where this is a smaller gap. This portrays a very unequal workplace indeed.

icancstructures:

The Gender Gap in Wages

Not a pretty picture, these are social facts.

icancstructures:

% of Jobs Lost in Recessions since 1948

From the Thickculture blog on The Society Pages (affiliated with the American Sociological Association and Contexts Magazine).

icancstructures:

All you really need to know:

Older voters came out… younger ones didn’t. The underlying fundamentals were pretty much the same as they were in 2008 Whites turned out at slightly greater…

noosphere:

mitochondrion:

jonathan-cunningham:

danielholter:

datavis:

Trembling Giants (via Michæl Paukner)

Pando has a good 70 millennia on every other tree out there.  That is one old organism.