Gentle readers,
we have moved the complete afoe installation to another host over the weekend. As updating nameservers can take up to 72 hours, some readers might experience accessibility problems until Wednesday morning.
As you’re reading this, you’re lucky and not among them.
Gentle readers,
due to ongoing heavy server engineering there is an increased possibilty that afoe will not be accessible for a limited amount of time on Sunday, September 4, 2005.
While the more important part of Germany’s electorate seems to be treating the ongoing campaign as some kind of diversion from a rather rainy summer, there is also, according to a poll published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine today, a common understanding that the upcoming federal election – the one that will take place on September 18 if the constitutional court confirms President Koehler’s decision to dissolve the Bundestag – is a particularly important one.
Given this sentiment and the most unusual way the elections were called, it is not entirely surprising that, in addition to the usual pollsters, political scientists concerned with electoral research are having a busy summer. One of them is my friend Thorsten Faas at the University Duisburg-Essen, who is currently asking Germans to spend a couple of minutes filling out an online survey at www.wahlumfrage2005.de (in German).
So if you’re entitled to vote in Germany, are interested in the kind of questions political scientists might ask to make you reveal all your self-contradicting political opinions, and have a couple of minutes to spare for the progress of science, why not take the survey. I already did, and it didn’t hurt…
Opening my McKinseyQuarterly Newsletter today, I find an interesting link to the McKinsey Global Institute’s latest contribution (free, but registration required) to the question whether Globalization is actually civilizing, destructive, or feeble – as Wharton’s Mauro Guillen put it in this paper with reference to Albert Hirschman’s analysis of the shifting social value attributed to markets.
Actually, the analysis is not so much concerned with moral evaluations but – as one of the study’s authors, Diana Farrell, put it in the preface, with providing
“… a fact base to the public debate on offshoring and
the emerging global labor market to enable policy makers and business leaders
to make more informed and better decisions.”
Even if the study only projects trends up to 2008, it is still apparent that any conclusions drawn from an attempt to analyse something as vast and complicated as the global labour market will always depend on far too many assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true. After all, McKinsey also managed to present a model for rationlising stock market valuations for non-cash-flow-generating companies before and after the crash in 2000 – the variable that changed was… expectations.
Still, I think it is a valuable contribution to raise the quality of the public debate by actually attempting to quantify some variables determining demand and supply. While the study – as far as I can tell from looking at the executive summary – does not support the “feeble” view of globalization, when reading the results it is probably still helpful not to forget that McKinsey is unlikely to be interested in increasing their clients’ employees fear of being outsourced any further (the study deals only with white collar offshoring) –
- Offshoring will probably continue to create a relatively small global labor market?one that threatens no sudden discontinuities in
overall levels of employment and wages in developed countries.- Demand for offshore labor by companies in the developed world will increasingly push up wage rates for some occupations in low wage countries, but not as high as current wage levels for those occupations in developed ones.
- Potential global supply and likely demand for offshore talent are matched inefficiently, with demand outstripping supply in some locations and supply outstripping demand in others.
I suppose it is only a matter of time until Google Earth will be banned both for its addictive potential and its contribution to a sharp decline in desktop productivity. But given that much of Europe – and afoe – is on holiday these days, I thought I present you, our gentle readers, with the opportunity of a Google Earth powered, lunchbreak-compatible flight over quite a lot of European capitals, most of which are already available in high resolution.
Actually, I did not programme the European Capitals Tour – it was created by a certain Ben at googletouring.com, where you can find and download the tour. Enjoy.
Alright, that’s not a particularly clever headline. I know you have probably read it a couple of hundred times in the course of the last years if you at all opened the sports section of your newspaper of choice in the month of July. But with only days left to the official retirement of Lance Armstrong from professional cycling, this year – despite the terror in London – the Tour, its most successful rider in history, as well as all alleged challengers are getting the additional amount of public attention only available in years without Olympics or a major international football competition.
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While the entire world is admiring Londoners for their ability to not let the terror destroy their way of life, while London mayor Ken Livingston is taking the Tube each morning, because not doing so would prove the terrorists strategy right, the British government is reinforcing its ongoing quest to get hold of as much information about citizens as possible. I’d call it “opportunistic”, they’d call it “concerned”.
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Flickr.com’s hugely popular photo-sharing servers appear to have a hard time today. But if you’re patient you may get a glimpse at the the most recent shared images tagged with “London”.
Actually, I’m not entirely sure there is a European blogosphere yet, as most blogospheres seem to develop in their respective linguistic markets, complemented by a couple of English language (non UK) blogs operating in the same markets. Thus, the European blogosphere, narrowly defined, is still a rather tiny community.
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Today, the IHT reprinted post referendum reflections about Europe by former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt that were first published last Thursday in the German weekly Die Zeit.
I’m sure some will call it elitism in light of the recent constitutional referanda, but Schmidt still believes that real political leadership is now more important than ever in Europe, for
[b]ecause Europeans can look back on more than a millennium of national development, the Union cannot be brought to completion in just a few decades by ministers and diplomats: The EU needs the consent and will of its citizens. The coming experience of increasing helplessness of smaller and medium-sized nations acting alone will increasingly convince their citizens of the need for the Union, but that will take time and perseverance.
Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Delors, many of the old guard knew: We can repress the historically created egocentric nationalism of Europeans only gradually. Today’s statesmen and the overzealous Brussels commissioners should follow this example.