by Art Woolf
My weekly look at interesting sites, economic and otherwise, on the web.
1. Where do immigrants go, worldwide? Not surprisingly, the Pew Research Center finds that they go to the U.S.
The U.S. is the top destination for Christian and Buddhist immigrants, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, reflecting a decadeslong surge in migration from Latin America and a quest by Chinese to improve their economic lot.
But here's what I found most interesting:
a quarter of all Jews are living in a country other than the one in which they were born, making them by far the most migratory religious group in the world [emphasis added].
UPDATE: Walter Russell Meade has more.
2. What would it have looked like if Rita Haywoth could have danced disco with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and others I couldn't identify? Great editing in this video.
3. A 14 year old girl buys a house in Florida. Where does she get the cash? She tags along with investors who are buying foreclosed homes and selling them. She takes the furniture off their hands and starts selling
the furniture and appliances from the house on Craigslist. She did the same thing with a bunch more houses. After a while, she was clearing about $500 a month, and saving a lot of it.
The she takes her savings and buys
a two-bedroom, concrete-block home on auction for $12,000 — down from $100,000 at the peak of the bubble
I think this girl has a future.
5. How hydraulic fracturing works. A great short video. Now I understand how you can make a drill go from vertical to horizontal.
6. Tim Taylor summarizes a nice paper from the St. Louis Fed on what banks should do, and explains why the deregulation of banking that Senator Sanders rails against couldn't be stopped.
[the paper is]a reminder of why bank deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s wasn't some clever ploy by the financial-sector lobbyists, but was absolutely necessary given the evolution of the industry at that time....
In short, both the savers and the borrowers were migrating outside the banking industry. Instead, the process of financial intermediation between savers and borrowers was happening outside the banking industry, in what came to be called the "shadow banking" sector. If the banks had not been deregulated and allowed to compete in this new financial sector--at least in some ways--the banks themselves would have shrunk dramatically and a very large part of the U.S. saving and borrowing would have passed completely outside the purview of the bank regulators.
7. High tech and very poor: A recent government census survey in India
found that 63.2 per cent of households said they had a telephone connection – that’s up from 9.1 per cent a decade ago, and the increase is due almost entirely to the rise in cellphone ownership...However only 53.1 per cent of Indian households have access to a toilet – either one in their own home or in a shared toilet block. Less than one in three rural Indians has access to a toilet. UNICEF says that 640 million Indians are still “open defecators” – people who relieve themselves in fields or next to railway tracks.
Next time you hear someone complain about China or India "stealing" U.S. jobs, remember what conditions are like in those countries for hundreds of millions of people. And they're not "stealing" our jobs any more than a supermarket scanning machine has "stolen" the job of someone who used to put a price tag on every can in a grocery store.
