Federal Reserve Board: Polarization, Immigration, Education: What’s Behind The Dramatic Decline in Youth Employment?

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Federal Reserve Board: Polarization, Immigration, Education: What’s Behind The Dramatic Decline in Youth Employment?

From the abstract: “This paper presents updated trends in teen employment and participation across multiple demographic characteristics, and argues that, in addition to immigration, occupational polarization in the U.S. adult labor market has resulted in increased competition for jobs that teens traditionally hold. Testing various supply and demand explanations for the decline since the mid-1980s, I find that demand factors can explain at least half of the decline unexplained by the business cycle, and that supply factors can explain much of the remaining decline.”

British Foreign Secretary On E-Commerce and Blurred Geographies

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From British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s 10/18/2011 guest editorial in Spiegel :

Web-based industry has already become a critical part of our economies. The UK’s industry is already worth £100 billion, accounting for 8% of our total GDP, and is forecast to grow at 10 percent over the next four years. Globally, e-commerce sees $8 trillion change hands each year …

Our reliance on cyber blurs geographical boundaries, breaks down traditional cultural and religious divides, brings families and friends closer together and enables contact between those who share common interests or concerns.

PewResearch: Old Prosper Relative to Young With 47:1 Age-Based Wealth Gap

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PewResearch: Old Prosper Relative to Young With 47:1 Age-Based Wealth Gap

According to the report: “As a result of these divergent trends, in 2009 the typical household headed by the older adult had $170,494 in net worth, compared with just $3,662 for the typical household headed by the younger adult. People generally accumulate wealth as they age, so it is not unusual to find large age-based gaps on this measure. However, the current gap is unprecedented. In 1984, the age-based wealth gap had been 10:1. By 2009, it had ballooned to 47:1.”

TPMIdeaLab: FTC To Monitor Google’s Privacy Practices For Next 20 Years

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TPMIdeaLab: FTC To Monitor Google’s Privacy Practices For Next 20 Years

From the article: “The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday finalized a landmark settlement with Google in which the company has agreed to be audited for its privacy practices for the next 20 years … The commission charged that Google engaged in unfair and deceptive practices in 2010 when it launched Google Buzz by leading users of its Gmail system to believe that they could easily opt-out of the social network. The controls that would enable them to do that were ineffective, the FTC charged at the time. Also the tools that Google created to enable users to limit the sharing of users’ personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.”

education | identity | quotes | youth

From Turkle to Sesame: What’s a Computer?

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From Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self,” p21:

… the computer is a metaphysical machine. Children too are provoked. The computer creates new occasions for thinking through the fundamental questions to which childhood must give a response, among them the question “what is life?”

From Sesame Street (h/t jgieseking, Aga Skorupka):

AP: Census Data Shows Recession Takes Big Toll on Young Adults

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AP: Census Data Shows Recession Takes Big Toll on Young Adults

From the article: “Young adults are the recession’s lost generation. In record numbers, they’re struggling to find work, shunning long-distance moves to live with mom and dad, delaying marriage and raising kids out of wedlock, if they’re becoming parents at all. The unemployment rate for them is the highest since World War II, and they risk living in poverty more than others – nearly 1 in 5.”

NY Times: Pirate Party Wins 8.9 Percent of Vote in Berlin

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NY Times: Pirate Party Wins 8.9 Percent of Vote in Berlin

From the article: “By winning 8.9 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election in [Berlin], these political pirates surpassed — blew away, really — every expectation for what was supposed to be a fringe, one-issue party promoting Internet freedom. The Pirates so outstripped expectations that all 15 candidates on their list won seats … The question that members of Germany’s political establishment are now asking after the insurgent party stormed the statehouse is this: Are the Pirates merely the punch line to a joke, a focus of protest, a reflection of electoral disgust with all established political parties — or an exciting experiment in a new form of online democracy?”

NY Times: FTC Urges Update to Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act

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NY Times: FTC Urges Update to Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act

From the article: “the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday proposed long-awaited changes to regulations covering online privacy for children … The proposed revisions expand the definition of “personal information” to include a child’s location, along with any personal data collected through the use of cookies for the purposes of targeted advertising. It also covers facial recognition technology.”

governance | property | surveillance

Government Hypocrisy: Protect Intellectual Property, Collect Personal Data

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Mike German, ACLU policy counsel and former FBI agent, was recently on Reason.tv discussing domestic surveillance in post-9/11 America. German covers the U.S. government’s growing interest in collecting personal data, the development of data fusion centers, and the erosion of existing privacy protections.

Speaking specifically about the 4th Amendment, Brown explains:

The way the 4th Amendment protections work with your personal papers, requires probable cause and a warrant before the government can search your desk to look through your papers. Unfortunately, now most of our personal papers are kept on 3rd party servers. It’s our email that’s stored remotely. Every thought that we have we hit the search engines to find out more about the subject we’re thinking bout. All that gets recorded by 3rd parties, and that information doesn’t have the same 4th Amendment protections.

The hypocrisy is extraordinary. For decades the U.S. government has extended and enhanced intellectual property protections. The rationale has been that the laws governing property ownership in the physical environment must also apply in the digital environment. Downloading a Beatles album from Pirate Bay is treated the same as shoplifting a Beatles album from Walmart. But, when it comes to personal property in the digital environment (i.e. your data) we see an erosion of what little protections existed in the physical environment. In short: protect intellectual property, collect personal data.