Professor Elizabeth Wood

Committed to Polyamory Means Several Sex Partners and a Lot of Talking - NYTimes.com
This weekend, a group called Polyamorous NYC, with more than 2,000 members, planned to have a three-day Poly Pride Weekend, featuring a picnic and rally in Central Park. All this does not mean that polyamory has risen above underground status. Edward O. Laumann, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago and a prominent sex researcher, said many sex studies don’t treat the practice as a category of its own. Dr. Laumann said polyamorists are probably “just talking like that because they haven’t found somebody special.”

Economic Scene - Lesson From a Crisis - When Trust Vanishes, Worry - NYTimes.com
As a young academic economist in the 1980s, Mr. Bernanke largely developed the theory that the loan officers’ lost knowledge was a crucial cause of the Depression. He referred to this lost knowledge as “informational capital.” In plain English, it means that trust vanished from the banking sector. The same thing is happening now. Financial markets are global, not local, today, so the problem isn’t that the failure of any single bank locks individuals or businesses out of the credit markets. Instead, the nasty surprises of the last 13 months — the sort of turmoil that once would have been unthinkable — have caused an effective breakdown in informational capital. Bankers now look at longtime customers and think of that old refrain from a failed marriage: I feel like I don’t even know you.

Gay Families Find the Bronx Is a Place to Call Home - NYTimes.com
There may be as many reasons for same-sex couples to settle in the Bronx as there are same-sex couples there — almost 3,000, according to a demographic snapshot by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Forty-nine percent of those couples have children. Many said they chose the Bronx for similar reasons as their straight neighbors: affordability, space, racial affinity, familiarity. The Bronx, home to 11 percent of New York City’s 26,000 same-sex couples — a fraction of the borough’s 1.3 million people spread across 54 square miles — is hardly a gay mecca (Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise line has yet to make Hunts Point a port of call). Gay and lesbian couples generally do not gravitate there, as they might to neighborhoods perceived to be more gay-friendly, like Park Slope, Brooklyn, or Chelsea in Manhattan. In fact, many say there are fewer support services, and more harassment, in the Bronx than elsewhere.

New Law Shields Children From Prostitution Charges - NYTimes.com
Ending years of debate and delay, Gov. David A. Paterson on Friday signed into law a bill shielding sexually exploited girls and boys from being charged with prostitution. The law, known as the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, will divert children under the age of 18 who have been arrested for prostitution into counseling and treatment programs, provided they agree to aid in the prosecution of their pimps. It has been the subject of intense debate in the State Legislature and beyond, and was opposed by some law enforcement officials and by the Bloomberg administration, which argued that the bill would make it harder to crack down on prostitution. But the bill’s backers said it was wrong to treat under-age prostitutes — many forced into the sex trade and kept there with physical threats and abuse — as criminals rather than victims.

Economic Scene - The Issue Is Payback, Not Bailout - NYTimes.com
The most obvious solution is to pay more than 25 cents on the dollar and then demand something in return for the premium — namely, a stake in any firm that participates in the bailout. Congressional Democrats have been pushing for such a provision this week, and it’s one of the most important things they have done...The government would then be accomplishing three things at once. First, it would take possession of the bad assets now causing a panic on Wall Street. Second, it would inject cash into the financial system and help shore up firms’ balance sheets (which some economists think is actually a bigger problem than the bad assets). And, third, it would go a long way toward minimizing the ultimate cost to taxpayers....Why? The more that the government overpays for the assets, the larger the subsidy it’s providing to Wall Street — and the more it is pushing up the share prices of Wall Street firms...the equity stakes allow the government to recapture some of the subsidy down the road

Paulson Gives Way on C.E.O. Pay; Bush to Speak Tonight - NYTimes.com
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had agreed to demands from lawmakers in both parties to limit the pay of executives whose companies benefit from the bailout. ...“The American people are angry about executive compensation, and rightfully so,” Mr. Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee. “Many of you cite this as a serious problem, and I agree. We must find a way to address this in legislation without undermining the effectiveness of the program.”...Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, announced that he was temporarily suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to deal with the crisis. He also asked Senator Barack Obama...to agree to postpone their first debate...But Mr. Obama said...that this time of financial crisis is “exactly the time” to have a debate.

In Bailout Furor, Wall Street Pay Becomes a Target - NYTimes.com
The proposals in Washington are still tentative, and often vague. A Senate draft document calls for a ban on incentive payments that the Treasury deems “inappropriate or excessive” and a “claw-back” provision, requiring executives to give up pay or severance benefits if the firm’s financial results are later shown to be overstated. Other proposals call for a ban on severance payments and allowing large shareholders, with a stake of 3 percent or more, to propose alternative slates of directors. This would be an effort to tackle excessive pay practices by opening up and strengthening corporate governance. Some corporate governance experts say hastily devised compensation curbs in the bailout package would be a mistake and perhaps open the door to unintended consequences.

White Flight' Has Reversed, Census Finds - NYTimes.com
“The fact that it is not going down is the news,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division at the Department of City Planning. “The increase is small, but the relative stability of the number and percent is meaningful.” ... He described the turnaround as a testament to the city’s “diversity and ethnic heterogeneity” and said it “sets New York apart from many other older cities where this is not the case.” ... Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, called the apparent trend a potential “harbinger of racial equilibrium.”

Retirees Filling the Front Line in Market Fears - NYTimes.com
As companies have switched from fixed pensions to 401(k) accounts, retirees risk losing big chunks of their wealth and income in a single day’s trading, as many have in the last month....Today’s retirees have less money in savings, longer life expectancies and greater exposure to market risk than any retirees since World War II. Even before the last week of turmoil, 39 percent of retirees said they expected to outlive their savings, up from 29 percent in 2007, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, an industry-sponsored group in Washington....After three decades of decline, a higher percentage of Americans older than 55 are now working than at any time since 1970, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Some are working because they want to, but many because they need to....The McKinsey Global Institute reported in June that the typical worker would have to work to age 70 to maintain his or her standard of living in retirement.

Ping - Technology Doesn't Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. - NYTimes.com
THE pessimistic assumption that new technologies will somehow make our lives worse may be a function of occupation or training. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death. Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

Conservatives Try New Tack on Campuses - NYTimes.com
Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history. “These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general,” he said. ... Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to “traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization.”

Mayor's Report Shows New York by the Numbers - NYTimes.com
It offers an uneven mix of good and bad news, with more good than bad. In the realm of public health, for example, there were 3,305 new AIDS cases diagnosed among adults in the 2008 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. That is 410 fewer than in the previous fiscal year and 2,020 fewer than in the 2004 fiscal year. But new syphilis cases increased by 20 percent, which the report attributes largely to risky sexual behavior among men. This happened even though the city more than doubled the number of condoms it distributed during the same period. The Buildings Department, which experienced a rash of fatal construction accidents in the past year that heightened concerns about the public’s safety and the quality of its inspectors, registered 25 fatalities in the 2008 fiscal year and 167 injuries, which is more than it had in either the 2006 or 2007 fiscal years, the only other years for which statistics were available.

Mayor's Office of Operations - "Mayors Management Report"
According to the NYT article on this report there were "There were more condoms handed out (39,070), more complaints about rats, roaches and other critters (23,000) and more potholes repaired (210,032). There were fewer homicides (516), fewer cars stolen (12,723) and fewer adults smoking (16.9 percent of the population)."

City Reaches Deal on Shelter for Homeless - NYTimes.com
The deal came as the number of homeless families seeking shelter hovered near its high, and while the city and advocates for the homeless remained in a serious battle about who is entitled to free shelter. Those advocates have argued that the city is sending many families back to crowded or unsafe living situations. Steven Banks, Legal Aid’s attorney in chief, praised the deal for enshrining a right to shelter, which he said had been the main point of the original suit. In addition, he said that because the city had agreed to standards for reviewing the validity of homeless families’ petitions for shelter at least until 2010, they were safer than before.

Economic Scene - Perhaps, It's Time to Play Offense - NYTimes.com
...But if you take a moment to think through the full Chrysler story, you start to realize that it’s setting a really low bar. The Chrysler bailout may have saved the company, but it did nothing, after all, to stop Detroit’s long, sad decline. ... If Chrysler had collapsed, he argues, vulture investors might have swooped in and reconstituted the company as a smaller automaker less tied to the failed strategies of Detroit’s Big Three and their unions. “If Chrysler goes belly up,” he says, “it also might have forced some deep introspection at Ford and G.M. and might have changed their attitude toward fuel efficiency and manufacturing quality.” Some of the bailout’s opponents — from free-market conservatives to Senator Gary Hart, then a rising Democrat — were making similar arguments three decades ago....