Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots

Machines won't bring about the economic robot apocalypse -- but greedy humans will, according to physicist Stephen Hawking.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Thursday, the scientist predicted that economic inequality will skyrocket as more jobs become automated and the rich owners of machines refuse to share their fast-proliferating wealth.

 

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Essentially, machine owners will become the bourgeoisie of a new era, in which the corporations they own won't provide jobs to actual human workers.

As it is, the chasm between the super rich and the rest is growing. For starters, capital -- such as stocks or property -- accrues value at a much faster rate than the actual economy grows, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty. The wealth of the rich multiplies faster than wages increase, and the working class can never even catch up.

But if Hawking is right, the problem won't be about catching up. It'll be a struggle to even inch past the starting line.  

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Why Another Big Bank Is Jumping On The Anti-Coal Bandwagon

Citigroup on Monday became the third banking giant this year to slash its lending to coal-mining companies.

The move, which follows similar pledges this year from Bank of America and Crédit Agricole, will make it more difficult for companies producing coal, a major source of pollution and contributor to climate change, to finance future projects.

Now, credit lines extended to any coal companies by Citi must first gain "senior approval" and pass more rigorous ethics guidelines that factor in human rights.

"Citi's credit exposure to coal mining companies has declined materially since 2011," Citi said in a 10-page memo on its environmental practices. "Going forward, we commit to continue this trend of reducing our global credit exposure to coal mining companies." 

The U.S. coal industry has been a financial disaster this year. There have been a string of high-profile bankruptcies, and borrowing costs for U.S. coal companies soared from 8 percent at the start of the year to 65 percent in July.

These are all important indicators that the financing activity Citi has pledged to cut down on is getting riskier -- which means there are very good reasons for Citi to decrease its exposure to coal companies that have nothing to do with the environment. It's just what a smart banker should do.

But that still represents a shift for Citi, which, it's worth remembering, shoveled billions of dollars at bad mortgages in the period leading up to the financial crisis.

Citi did not immediately respond to questions about whether its new commitment goes beyond the decline in lending that would already be expected as the coal industry struggles. 

To be sure, there are signs that the banking industry is waking up to the economic and existential threats that climate change poses.

In a joint statement last week, a group of six colossal U.S. banks called for a "strong global climate agreement" during the United Nations' upcoming conference in Paris. Citi was among them.

But though progress has already been significant, the industry has a long way to go to take really meaningful steps to reduce climate change.

"Reducing credit exposure is only a partial step forward," Lindsey Allen, executive director of the nonprofit Rainforest Action Network, said in a statement. "We urge Citigroup and Wall Street laggards such as Morgan Stanley to cut all financing ties to both coal mining and coal-fired power."

How Jack Dorsey Can Keep His Chill While Running Two Companies

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Jack Dorsey has his plate full -- doubly full.

Twitter on Monday named him its permanent CEO, nearly four months after he took over as the interim chief executive following Dick Costolo's sudden departure.

The company he co-founded nine years ago is in flux, struggling to attract new users and make money. Shareholders clamored for Dorsey to stay in the position in large part because few other business leaders seemed qualified to meaningfully correct Twitter's course. 

But Dorsey is also the full-time chief executive of mobile-payments firm Square, a position he will keep in addition to heading up Twitter. Square is quietly preparing for an initial public offering -- a process that, judging from Twitter's own IPO, can become quite volatile.

That's a lot for anyone to take on. As much as he's going to need the people around him, Dorsey -- who's known to meditate and jog early in the morning and take long, meandering walks during the day -- will also need to turn inward for the tools to help him succeed in both roles.

Twitter is a social media company. Square processes credit card transactions. The two firms have little in common, which helps in a certain way -- perhaps there are few conflicts of interest. But the arrangement will require Dorsey's mind to be nimble. He'll navigate very different realities at the helm of each company.

"It's unusual and really challenging," Sydney Finkelstein, management professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck Center for Leadership, told The Huffington Post.

Finkelstein said the people in Dorsey's professional inner circle will be crucial to him, perhaps more than they've ever been. 

"To make something like this work, you have to have a world-class team around you," Finkelstein explained. "Effective leaders delegate. In this case, you probably have to delegate more than normal. … You have to be able to process in your brain two different worlds."

Dorsey must also remain mindful of his own emotions to prevent himself from succumbing to stress and becoming reactionary.

“Oftentimes what we do is we withdraw and we tighten and we become reactive,” Janice Marturano, executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Mindful Leadership, told HuffPost. “That’s exactly the opposite of what we need to do during stressful times in our lives.”

Simple activities like napping, taking a walk and finding a quiet room to meditate for 10 minutes can be helpful. Some of this is undoubtedly part of Dorsey's routine already, but not everyone has time for that. Training the brain to take what Marturano calls “purposeful pauses” -- receding into the mind during a brief moment of free time -- can help keep a leader grounded, even when she or he is stretched thin.

“In times of real craziness, you have to be able to find your training that allows you to meditate with a cup of coffee, or with the two minutes you walk from this office to this meeting,” said Marturano, whose book Finding The Space To Lead was released recently in paperback. “Rather than texting along the way, you say, ‘I’m going to use that time for meditation.’”

To be sure, not everyone enjoys the perks of a chief executive whose net worth Forbes estimates at $2.2 billion. Many workers struggle as wages remain low. Nearly two million people in the United States work multiple part-time jobs, and nearly 1.6 million of those do not have a primary full-time job. That means many are likely disqualified from receiving health insurance coverage or other benefits as part of their compensation. The perks and privileges enjoyed by Dorsey and others in the executive set certainly make their struggle a bit less difficult.

Still, Marturano said the principles of mindfulness apply as much to workers stocking shelves for minimum wage as they do to someone running two large technology companies.

"We influence the people around us every day, so we're all leaders," she said. "It's about making the time to reflect." 

 

ATM Fees Have Never Been Higher

Ever been a little bit lazy or drunk and out too late and used a random ATM on a sidewalk, in a bar, at some strange bank? This is your annual reminder to stop.

The average out-of-network ATM fee is now $4.52, up 4 percent from last year and 21 percent since 2010, according to a report released Monday from Bankrate.com, a personal finance site that tracks banking costs. That includes both the fee charged by your bank and the out-of-network fee charged by the ATM operator.

“In all likelihood these fees are going to continue to go up,” Greg McBride, Bankrate’s chief financial analyst, told The Huffington Post.

Cities With Highest Average ATM Fees

Atlanta $5.15

New York $5.03

Phoenix $4.88

Miami $4.84

 Milwaukee $4.78

Cities Lowest Average ATM Fees

San Francisco $3.85

Cincinnati $3.86

Kansas City $4.01

Dallas $4.11

Seattle $4.21

Bankrate surveyed a total of 243 banks in 25 large U.S. markets in July and August, looking at ATM and overdraft fees of interest and noninterest accounts.

McBride said this is the ninth straight year ATM fees have gone up. And it’s happening for a bunch of reasons. First, people have gotten smarter about not using random ATMs, McBride said. Second, banks feel comfortable raising out-of-network fees because they don’t have to worry about alienating non-customers.

But mostly this is the result of regulations passed after the financial crisis that make it slightly more difficult for banks to levy more hidden and sneaky fees elsewhere. For example, a 2009 law requires that bank customers opt-in if they want the bank to lend them money when they overdraw their accounts.

Another law, part of the goliath Dodd-Frank Act, restricts the amount of money banks can charge retailers when you pay with a debit card, so-called swipe fees. 

So banks are making up the lost revenue at the ATM and by charging more for checking accounts. “If you own a restaurant and hamburger prices are restricted, you’d raise the price of soda and fries,” McBride explains.

Bankrate’s survey also found that just 37 percent of non-interest checking accounts are completely free, down from 76 percent in 2009.

If the fee picture seems bleak to you, the good news is: These ATM fees are much easier to avoid. You just need to stick with in-network ATMs and plan out your month of cash consumption a little more carefully. If you’re in a pinch, you can also choose to get cash back when you’re shopping at your local supermarket, McBride said.

Less hopeful: This is a strategy that won't be as easy for those typically lower-income people who live in underbanked areas.

Be careful out there, everyone.

Via: NerdWallet

 

Want To Make America Great Again? Support Working Women.

If Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and their fellow Republican presidential candidates truly want to make the United States “great again," there’s actually a reasonably simple way to do it: support working women.

The U.S. once had the world's highest percentage of women in the workforce, but over the past quarter-century, we’ve fallen behind. Policies that make it easier for women to work could vault us to the top again -- and stimulate economic growth, too.   

If American women were to enter the job market at the same rate as men, work the same hours as men and take jobs in sectors with higher productivity (think more women in tech, fewer at Walmart), gross domestic product would grow 4.2 percent over the next 10 years, according to a report released last week from researchers at McKinsey & Company. (A report from the International Monetary Fund estimates even higher growth, 5 percent, if women participated equally in the workforce.) That’s about $4.3 trillion more than what our GDP growth would be if it chugs along at an expected rate of 2.6 percent, the researchers said.

“This is one of the biggest levers they could pull, and one of the easiest ways to get a significant jump in GDP growth,” Kweilin Ellingrud, a managing partner at McKinsey who worked on the report, told The Huffington Post.

The full report considered how greater gender equality would affect GDP -- a measure of all the economic activity in the country -- globally and by region. The researchers broke out the U.S. numbers for HuffPost.

The last time the U.S. economy approached 4.2 percent GDP growth was during the Clinton administration -- when GDP grew at 3.8 percent. It’s about the same growth rate Bush is promising, and a bit less than what Trump said he’d deliver if elected president.

Bush and Trump both seem to believe they’ll increase GDP growth by cutting taxes on the rich, but economists have widely debunked the idea that such a proposal would actually be effective.

The stampede of women into the workforce that began in the late 1960s was one of the key drivers of U.S. economic growth in the second half of the 20th century, along with the invention of the Internet. 

But in recent decades, American women's ascendance in the workplace has flatlined. Since 1990, the percentage of U.S. women of working age (15-64) in the labor market has ticked up only one percentage point, to 75 percent. Meanwhile, European countries have surged ahead of us, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published in the Economic Report of the President.

Those countries were able to push the needle by enacting policies that support dual-income families: paid parental and sick leave, free universal preschool, subsidized child care and more pressure on businesses to enact policies that support parents. The U.S. doesn’t do any of that.

No Republican presidential candidate has voiced support for federally mandated paid parental leave of the sort you see in all other major industrialized countries -- and they don't even talk about that other stuff. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton does support a modest amount of paid leave and free preschool -- but she's hardly proposing the kinds of policies you'd find overseas, which are considered pretty far off the mainstream in the U.S.

Nearly one-third of the gap between the U.S. and these other countries can be traced back to the lack of work-family policies in the United States, according to a widely cited study from two researchers at Cornell University.

The McKinsey report comes to a similar conclusion. The researchers outline four things that keep women out of the workforce around the world:

1. A lack of education
2. Restrictions on women’s financial and digital freedom
3. An absence of legal protections against discrimination and abuse
4. Time spent on “free labor,” uncompensated work at home and child care.  

The good news is that the U.S. is pretty great at addressing those first three problems -- well ahead of much of the developing world. It’s on the “free labor” front that we fall down. Women are still doing the bulk of housework and child care, even though about 70 percent of women with children under the age of 18 have jobs. 

Are we, as a society, supporting these women so they can make the money that helps them care for their families? Are we making it relatively simple for a woman to have children and a career? We are not.

Many women, without access to paid parental leave, are back on the job just two weeks after giving birth. Others choose lower-paying, part-time work and juggle an intense and exhausting schedule of child care to scrape by. Some women who want to work must instead rely on government assistance because they cannot afford child care. Their lives, and the lives of their children, are measurably worse as a result.

Even at the highest levels of the workforce, women -- and, increasingly, men -- are finding it too difficult to manage home and work duties, as Anne-Marie Slaughter argues in her new book, Unfinished Business.

The McKinsey researchers are not suggesting that women simply abandon home and enter the workforce, but that there are all kinds of ways to help men and women better balance the time they spend on unpaid and paid work, Mekala Krishnan, another researcher, told HuffPost in an email. They include better on-site child care facilities at businesses, flexible work policies and a more equitable distribution of work between men and women.

Still, there’s a conservative argument that goes something like this: Well, if women work, then no one will have the babies!

In turns out the opposite is true. Indeed, in countries where it’s too hard to juggle motherhood and work, women choose work. Aiming to increase Japan's low birthrate and boost its economic growth, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently announced the country would make preschool free of charge and give more support to mothers and fathers. 

“Work-family policies are always framed as some nice thing to do,” Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of a gender balance consulting firm that works with Fortune 100 companies, told HuffPost. But it’s so much more than that. This is an economic issue that affects everyone.

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Massive Data Breach At Experian Exposes Personal Data For 15 Million T-Mobile Customers

Experian, the world's biggest consumer credit monitoring firm, on Thursday disclosed a massive data breach that exposed sensitive personal data of some 15 million people who applied for service with T-Mobile US Inc.

Connecticut's attorney general said he will launch an investigation into the breach.

Experian said it discovered the theft of the T-Mobile customer data from one of its servers on Sept. 15. The computer stored information about some 15 million people who had applied for service with telecoms carrier T-Mobile during the prior two years, Experian said.

T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere said the data included names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, drivers license numbers and passport numbers. Such information is coveted by criminals for use in identity theft and other types of fraud.

"Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian," T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere said in a note to customers posted on the company's website. "But right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected."

The Experian breach is the latest in a string of massive hacks that have each claimed millions - and sometimes tens of millions - of customer records, including the theft of personnel records from the U.S. government this year, a 2014 breach on JPMorgan Chase and a 2013 attack on Target Corp's cash register systems.

It is also the second massive breach linked to Experian. An attack on an Experian subsidiary that began before Experian purchased it in 2012 exposed the Social Security numbers of 200 million Americans and prompted an investigation by at least four states, including Connecticut.

Experian on Thursday said it had launched an investigation into the new breach and consulted with law enforcement.

The company offered two years of credit monitoring to all affected individuals. People, however, said that they did not want credit protection from a company that had been breached.

Legere responded by promising to seek alternatives.

"I hear you," he said on Twitter. "I am moving as fast as possible to get an alternate option in place by tomorrow."

Experian said the breach did not affect its vast consumer credit database.

Legere said no payment card or banking information was taken.

T-Mobile had nearly 59 million customers as of June 30. A representative for the carrier said that not all 15 million of the affected applicants had opened accounts with T-Mobile.

The telecom carrier's shares were down 1.3 percent in extended trading after closing little changed at $40.13 on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the earlier data breach affecting Experian, a Vietnamese national confessed in U.S. court last year to using a false identity to opening an account with the unit, known as Court Ventures, sometime before Experian purchased it in 2012.

A spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said on Thursday that it would investigate the latest attack.

The spokeswoman, Jaclyn Falkowski, declined to elaborate on the T-Mobile incident, but said the investigations of the Court Ventures matter "is active and ongoing."

(Additional reporting by Karen Friefeld and Arathy Nair; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Gender Equality Won't Just Change Women's Lives -- It'll Change Everyone's

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What would the world be like if we achieved true equality for women?  

The global economy might be stronger, for one thing. But such a shift would need to come with trade-offs -- adjusting traditional gender roles and modifying public policies to support a balanced family life.

A recent report from McKinsey & Company estimated that if women were to achieve economic parity with men across the world -- meaning they worked the same hours and made the same amount of money in total -- the resulting economic output would add $28 trillion in global gross domestic product per year.

What the report doesn't mention, however, is who would take over the vast amount of unpaid labor that women around the world do for their households and families on a daily basis. 

True, women aren't the only ones who raise children, care for aging parents and sick relatives or do the cooking and cleaning; but globally, women are still the default caregivers in many places. If more women choose to pursue careers and professional leadership roles, more men also need to step into the role of caregiver. On top of that, governments and employers must recognize the importance of caregiving and provide benefits that encourage it. 

This is the point of foreign policy expert Anne Marie Slaughter's new book, Unfinished Business, a follow-up to her seminal 2012 Atlantic piece, "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All." 

At a book launch event Monday night hosted by the New America Foundation, where Slaughter serves as CEO, the author spoke to former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn about what Slaughter calls the "infrastructure of care." In the U.S., this infrastructure barely exists. It used to be maintained largely by the women who stayed home. As women have gone into the workforce, families have had to patch together a way to take care of young children and ageing parents -- with less and less time to spare.

"We need an equal infrastructure of care: a set of arrangements and institutions that allows citizens to flourish not only in the pursuit of their individual goals but also in their relationships to one another," Slaughter wrote in her book.

We build and maintain roads as a society because we recognize that most people will need to use them. Why, she asked, do we not provide "high-quality paid care" for those who need it: the young, the sick and the elderly? 

Both women and men, she argued on Monday, must manage to balance their work and their families in a world where the workday is never really over, paid family leave is not a guarantee and childcare often costs more than rent. "We should think of this not as a women's problem, but as a care problem," Slaughter said at the event.

She added that while men need to step into larger family roles if there is going to be more equality at work, reworking society is a policy problem that goes far beyond the struggles of ambition in wealthy families. People across the class spectrum need more support than they currently get for caregiving.

Slaughter mentions in her book that one of the most progressive organizations when it comes to subsidizing care is, ironically, the Pentagon. The Department of Defense provides on-site day care for children of the men and women who work there. They also pay the day care employees just as well as other employes. 

"[T]he part of the U.S. government most directly responsible for upholding national security recognizes the need to pay wages that can attract and retain college- and graduate-school-educated workers to provide care and early learning to the children of all employees from birth onward," she wrote.

Indeed, Slaughter said in both the book and at Monday's talk that she believes the care of young children is important enough to rise to the level of a national security issue.

"Children's brains are shaped most in the first five years of their lives, so it's not an exaggeration to say that the care and education of our children from birth to age five is a national security issue," she wrote in her book.