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The Georgetwon University Center on Education and the Workforce 2015 report shows the different college majors, annual wages and lifetime earnings based on Census Bureau data. Engineering comes first, followed by computers. Advanced graduate degrees make a large difference in earnings in health sciences. A lot depends on the standing in the class with top 25% of the class in finance having much higher earnings. A lot also depends on the individual. Employment opportunities may be lacking even if annual wages are high, as in architecture.

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The SEC requirement that companies disclose the ratio between median worker pay and the pay of senior executives. The SEC says it is putting out the rule as part of implementing Dodd-Frank legislation to control excessive executive pay. Companies will be allowed to survey a fraction of their workforce as appropriate for companies with global operations. Executive pay will include pension benefits and stock options under the new rule. A WSJ chart using information from the University of Southern California and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows the ratio between what CEO's on average make and rank and file workers make remained at about 30 times in the post war period till about 1970, a period of rapid growth in the U.S. economy. By 1980 this climbed to about 60 times and exceeded 100 times by 1990. The period of stratospheric growth for CEO pay and extreme widening of the gap then occurs between 1990 and 2000. By 2000 the dot com boom- telecom boom and the internet- creates a surge in executive pay reaching over 500 times. This drops to about 280 times in 2008 and picks up again to reach about 320 times in 2011. Many of the poor business practices, the excessive leveraging and risktaking in the financial industry, take place against this background of excessive pay for senior executives. Some of that risk was passed on to others through such methods as securitization in the period leading to the 2008 financial crisis, so that executives were compensated with higher pay for taking excessive risk that they personally or their companies did not assume. Dodd-Frank legislation following the 2008 financial crisis sought to correct this imbalance by having pay information disclosed. The excessive pay has also coincided with an increase in the frequency of boom-bust cycles in the economy. The busts prompted the needs for intervention by the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, to drop interest rates more than would otherwise have happened during this decade, culminating in the huge bond purchases and monetary easing by the Bernanke Fed. The SEC under Mary Jo White is mindful of these distortions in the economy as a result of misallocation of resources based on excessive executive pay, and the need to take action before the next crisis. ...

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Toyota is reducing senior management positions to 60 from 77. The board of directors will also be smaller, with 11 members instead of the current 27 members. It was felt that the large board did not enable discussion of important issues and slowed down decisionmaking. This is part of the new Business Plan and the new global vision for Toyota. The thrust is on sales in emerging markets which Toyota will target for increasing sales to 50% of the total sales by 2015, up from 40% currently. Sales in developed markets are set to decline to 50% of the total sales by 2015, down from 60% currently. The other push is in the hybrid sales area. Toyota will roll out 10 more hybrid vehicles by 2015, in addition to all electric cars, plug-in hybrids. Toyota will continue to have an all-Japanese board, and will use a committee of outside advisors to stay abreast of opinion in other countries. Akio Toyoda announced these plans recently and did this by himself, as he puts his own ideas to work for setting Toyota's direction....

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Krugman points to financial deregulation, cross border financial flows, private debt in dollars and depreciating currencies, and the U.S. Federal Reserve's low interest rate policies, as the main culprits for bubbles and the emerging market crises in the 1990's and 2013.

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The Bernanke Fed's decision on Sept. 16, 2013 to continue the pace of bond purchases is seen with relief in emerging markets and taken positively by equity markets worldwide. The Fed's decision is based on evidence of sluggishness in the economy and in the pace of job growth, as well as the likelihood of more political uncertainty about the budget because of sharp differences between Democrats and Republicans.

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As Dr Harsh Vardhan, India's representative and Health Minister, takes on responsibilities as the Chairman of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization this can be said about this critical juncture.The WHO is going through soul searching and a reevaluation of how it has implemented the vision of its founders during the closing years of a world torn apart  by war in 1945, and actual founding in 1946.  At the UN conference in San Francisco in 1945, Dr. Szeming Sze of China, Dr. Geraldo da Paula Souza of Brazil and Karl Ewang of Norway, were keen to set up an international organization for cooperation on health. The Indian representative was Arcot Ramaswamy Mudaliar, a member of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet, who chaired the committee on economic and social problems. He was the president of the Economic and Social Council which called for an international health conference in Feb. 1946. It was at that conference on 19 June 1946 that the World Health Conference came into being. A native of Madras he then returned to Mysore as chief minister. The vision at the time for international cooperation on problems such as smallpox which killed 2 million people each year were quite different from the fast moving epidemics with international travel in 2020. Today 4.4 billion passengers traveled by air in 2018, according to International Travel Association, 100 times compared to less than 40 million in 1950, and about 10 times the 400 million when Nixon's visit opened up China in 1972. The world we live in is different and the World Health Organization needs to be redesigned for the 21st century. The entire process of how the WHO operates has to be rethought. Immediate steps include- 1. The appointment by Executive Board should be reinstated as this is more representative of the world population and the major centres of advanced public health, including the major countries. Throughout its life the WHO made appointments through the Executive Board not by election. The election in 2019 by 200 countries was actually not representative of the world population as it gave India, Brazil and other early founders at the 1945-46 conferences only 1 vote each with population of 1.2 billion and 210 million, the same as tiny countries Barbados population 385,000 and Laos 7 million. 2. Reassessment of the entire process in which nations are requested to give permission of teams from major countries in Europe, North America and Asia, major population centres, so that the 6-7 week delay between the U.S. request to China for a special team to go to Wuhan on January 6, 2020 and the permission granted Feb 16, a costly delay of 7 weeks which added millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths. In a super fast moving pandemic with international sports stadiums and 4 billion air passengers spreading it like wild fire around the world, there is little room for error, every day counts. Never should this happen again, as Dr. Sze Szeming China's representative said once in 1945 we must learn from mistakes, as mistakes were made in the years before World War II that were costly for China, India, North and South America, Other Asia, Africa, large population centres. 3. As was the effort then in 1946 and the early years, the effort to keep the staffing positions of leadership in the World Health Organization should be kept far from politics. Very experienced and capable people are needed from major countries with long records of public health experience and committed to the huge task, as was the vision of the founders.     ...

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The BJP Party wins 25 seats in the Kasmir legislative assembly, and the Kashmir People's Democratic Party led by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed wins 28 seats. Mr. Sayeed becomes the new chief minister in a coalition government formed with the BJP. Sayeed says about the election and the future- "History has given us a big opportunity, and we want to make this alliance the turning point for Kashmir." After years of conflict a new election provides an opportunity to turn the page for Kashmir and South Asia, and shift the focus to the economy and infrastructure.

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Eric Bellman's intervew with Rajiv Lall, chief executive officer of Infrastructure Development Finance, India's largest infrastructure financing company. Lall says the conditions are right for power development to be the next telecom of India's growth story, with some of the same impact that telecom has had bringing mobile phones to hundreds of millions of people in India. IDFC expects 20% growth in net profit in 2010 and 30% in 2011.

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President Obama ordered the surge in 2010 for 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan. There are now 150,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan. Of these two thirds are Americans. The goal of the surge was set by President Obama as " disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Quaeda and its extremist allies" in Afghanistan. Yet the fact remains that official estimates on the coallition side are for only about 100 or so al Quaeda militants operating in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan is being fought with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan who also live in the mountainous region that comprises Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has some form of clandestine support from sections of the Pakistani military and intelligence services- the Pakistani military having played a critical role in the formation of the Taliban from its inception to act as Pakistan's proxy in that region. With the democracy protests in the Arab world in 2011, al Quaeda does not fit into the existing mood in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Considering these facts- and the mood favoring American disengagement on the part of America's allies in the Afghan government and Pakistan's military, and the American public mood favoring disengagement, the Taliban seeing their conflict as purely domestic and little to do with al Quaeda- the situation is likely to move in the direction of phased American withdrawal. ...

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Different estimates on how quickly and how much additional oil would come into world oil markets if sanctions are lifted. The time estimates range from quickly to 6 months for additional new supplies into world oil markets. Estimates of how much production can be added range from 500,000-800,000 barrels a day from private estimates to 1 million additional barrels a day from Iran's oil company, if sanctions are lifted. UK foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, says "there is still a long way to go if we are going to get there." He told a parliamentary committee that the nonnegotiable part is a window of one year advance notice if Iran were to break out and go for a nuclear weapon, which would be based on technical expert opinion of how long it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon using its knowhow and materials at that Mr Zanganeh took over as oil minister after the election of Rouhani as president 18 months ago. Zanganeh calls the effect of sanctions and the mismanagement of the previous government as "a catastrophe," and he has tried to instill anew discipline in the oil sector. Iran currently produces about 1-1.2 million barrels a day under sanctions, half of earlier levels before sanctions were tightened in 2012 because of the nuclear weapons development issues....

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China's National Bureau of Statistics made an announcement in Beiijing that 51.27% of the Chinese people now live in urban areas. In 1949 the figure was 10.6%, in 1979 it was 19%. In the space of three decades China has urbanized rapidly. This has brought with it economic growth, infrastructure development and increased employment in the manufacturing sector as new workers moved from rural areas to the cities. With it also come major problems for the country and the leaders of the Communist party led government. Of the 691 million urban residents, 253 million are migrant workers- 37% of urban residents and 19% of the population are in this grey zone described as the "hukou" or household registration system. Under "hukou" these migrants from rural areas cannot access public services in the cities, and have rights to access them in their own villages where they are registered. Integrating these migrant workers who are different than their more affluent and better educated neigbors in the cities so that they become truly a part of the urban areas will remain a huge challenge for China. One of the ways China is addressing this is with the plan to build 36 million units of affordable housing for these migrant workers by 2016. Ever so gradually Chinese officials are relaxing the restrictions on migrant workers- such as Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng's announcement for allowing all migrant workers to rent subsidized housing in the outer parts of Shanghai and committing to "increase the migrant population's involvement in the community affairs, cultural life and show genuine care for them." Food security is another issue as more development on prime agricultural land means less land available for agriculture. Appropriation of agricultural land for industrial use is bringing the country down to the limit of 120 million hectares of agricultural land needed for self sufficiency in food, according to the Land Ministry. At the same time China's leaders want to avoid what the World Bank calls "the middle income trap," where a country reaches a level of modernization and urbanization, and then stalls at that level- the level being around $3000 per capital GDP, which is China's GDP per capita today, according to the National Bureau of Statistics in China. Li Keqiang, who takes over from premier Wen Biao, sees the building of affordable housing for migrant workers as a critical way to continue the urbanization process, and shift the country from its export focus by increasing consumption and the development of industries that support this. A slowing economy dominated by state owned companies focussed on a decelerating export model and an aging but still growing population- NBS says China's overall population was up by 4.8% in 2011 over 2010 and has reached 1.35 billion- presents a tougher set of challenges to the new leadership in China than was faced by the current leadership....

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This WSJ editorial calls the ISI and Pakistan army's playing both sides of the game- acting as an ally of the U.S. and supporting the Taliban- unacceptable. The editorial points to the Taliban and its leader Mullah Omar running the operations out of Quetta, in Baluchistan. And the Taliban faction loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani having sanctuaries in North Waziristan and the tribal regions of Pakistan. Al Quaeda's No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, it says, could very well be in Pakistan in some compound in the manner of bin Laden.

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Kaushik Basu, economist at Cornell University, and Chief Economist at the World Bank, says the U.S. Federal Reserve should consider the current low labor participation rate and low inflation in its rate policy setting decisions in 2015. Basu points out that in the recent past unemployment has gone below the current 5.5% without increasing the risks of inflation. He cites the period from July 1997 to August 2001 when inflation was below 5%, and at some points below 4%, yet inflation in 2002 was close to 2%. The large number of discouraged workers in this economic cycle has placed the unemployment rate below what it really is, says Basu.

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Friedman compares the anti-corruption movements in India and the U.S., the world's two largest democracies. The Occupy Wall Street anti-corruption movement in the U.S. focusses on the excessive influence of banks on lawmakers, regulators, and the government, through the use of campaign money, revolving door for government officials and regulators to join banks, and intense lobbying. The anti-corruption movement focusses on corruption in government at higher levels, such as the handling of government licenses, and at the basic levels of needing to bribe officials for something as simple as getting a birth certificate or other government document. Both have pernicious effects, in the U.S. excesssive bank influence leads to taking excessive risk for higher bonuses, putting the entire financial system at risk and creating a crisis in housing that delays the economic recovery. And in India the corruption leads to retarded progress, as funds to invest in infrastructure and development are siphoned off, business and entrepreneurs are required to pay bribes at each step, and ordinary people face the need to pay bribes for the most routine interactions with government officials. In the process this creates more unequal societies by skewing the distribution of benefits from wealth created to groups that are better equipped to game the system. The economic system once distorted in these ways has tendencies to take talent away from productive activity and innovation which create wealth, and direct it towards speculative activities....

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Efforts to boost the share of national income that goes to rural households and workers in China. The share of income taken by state owned enteprises and taxes paid by the enterprises would have to change for reducing the gap in incomes and reducing inequality in China.

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Jerry Muller, professor of history at the Catholic University of America, offers some useful insights into the nature of inequality in advanced capitalist societies and other parts of the world, and a clear eyed way to tackle the problem of inequality. Tackling the problem should be done in a way that preserves the economic protections for the middle class and the poor which are needed for capitalism to work- unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Earned Income Credit, and the Affordable Care Act. Much of this system is already in place in advanced capitalist societies. Incremental gains in this area will be much smaller and it is important to recognize the need for strengthening the economic engine that supports these benefits, says Muller. Economic dynamism has to be preserved and nurtured with human capital deployed in the best possible way, and competitiveness of countries increased. Each country and society has to find its own way of achieving this. The family matters, and matters a lot in taking advantage of educational opportunity, says Muller. The culture of different ethnic, immigrant groups, also matter. These differences were present in earlier periods in the nineteenth and twentieth century and are likely to remain. Strengthening the pool of human capital and deploying it is essential to progress. In an earlier book "Adam Smith In His Time and Ours- Designing a Decent Society," Muller emphasized the importance Smith placed on the civic duty of citizens to promote the welfare of the whole society, and the importance of education, family and moral character, with no substitute for the "general prevalence of wisdom and virtue." ...

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Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. and Britain, has edited a collection of essays in a new book titled- Pakistan: Beyond the "Crisis State." It tries to form a new construct to move the debate on Pakistan into a future in which Pakistan can exist as a "normal country" free of a paranoia about India that affects its outlook, and free from the military connections that have shifted the focus from development that a friendly neighborly coexistence with India would provide. Intriguing essays include one by Saadat Hasa Manto who goes back to 1951, when the Cold War was at its peak and the U.S. formed a relationship with Pakistan based on military assistance, with only small fraction of aid going into development programs. Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad puts it directly: Pakistan needs to become a normal state and the only way to to do this is for the rivalry and obsession with India to be resolved and put behind it. As it now stands the U.S., India and Pakistan all stand to gain tremendously in such an outcome- the U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan and the Taliban because at its core the Taliban issue goes back to the Pakistan rivalry with India, Pakistan and India because it puts the focus on development, infrastructure building, and economic gains....