Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Daily Wisdom:Time for the Six Hour Work Day?

According to The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman, Gothenburg, Sweden wants to find out what six hour work days will do for health and the economy:

In 1930, in the throes of the Great Depression, cereal magnate W.K. Kellogg decided to conduct an experiment. He replaced the three daily eight-hour shifts at his plant in Battle Creek, Michigan with four six-hour shifts. The results? The company hired hundreds of new people, production costs plummeted, and employees operated more efficiently, learning to prioritize leisure over work. Vestiges of the system remained in place until 1985.

Now the Swedish city of Gothenburg is considering a similar experiment. The governing coalition has proposed a year-long trial that would divide some municipal workers into a test and control group at the same pay rate, with the test group working six-hour days and the control group working the traditional eight. (It’s unclear how, or if, a lunch break will factor into the scheme.)

/by

Daily Wisdom: Paolo Freire

From Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom:

“This is the road I have tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing and sensitive to the experience of teaching as an art; being pushed forward by the challenges that prevent me from bureaucratizing my practice; accepting my limitations, yet always conscious of the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them because to do so would be a failure to respect both my students and myself as a teacher.”

/by

Daily Wisdom: The Power of the Word

From Joseph Conrad:

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

/by

Daily Wisdom: 8 Facts the Media Won’t Tell You

Our discussion about Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman made it clear that the US media doesn’t fully inform the American public. Paul Buchheit, writing at Alternet, gives eight examples of things the media just isn’t telling us, including the fact that many American companies generate most of their revenue in the U.S. and pay more taxes outside it.

Citigroup had 42% of its 2011-13 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.) and made $32 billion in profits, but received a U.S. current income tax benefit all three years.

Pfizer had 40% of its 2011-13 revenues and nearly half of its physical assets in the U.S., but declared almost $10 billion in U.S. losses to go along with nearly $50 billion in foreign profits.

In 2013 Exxon had about 43% of management, 36% of sales, 40% of long-lived assets, and 70-90% of its productive oil and gas wells in the U.S., yet only paid about 2 percent of its total income in U.S. income taxes, and most of that was something called a “theoretical” tax.

/by

Daily Wisdom: Growing US Inequality

The debate about the growth in income inequality in the United States was framed by Occupy Wall Street as the gap between the top 1% and the 99% of Americans in the majority. New research shows that the share at of the wealth has increasingly been concentrated in the hands of a much small group, “the plutocrats.”

Slate’s Jordan Weissman explains:

But they are basically in keeping with what has already been shown about income inequality. Occupy Wall Street trained Americans to frame the economic gap in terms of the 99 percent and 1 percent. But writers and economists have been pointing out for years that the biggest winners in today’s globalized, finance-heavy economy have been an even smaller band of super-rich. Tim Noah dubbed them “the stinking rich.”Chrystia Freeland went with “plutocrats.” No matter what you choose to name them, the largest economic gains have accrued to Americans at the very, very tiniest tip of the earnings pyramid. Here’s one dramatic illustration I’ve drawn from the World Top Incomes Database. The top 0.5 percent, with minimum household income of $551,000, have roughly tripled their share of the nation’s paycheck since 1978, to about 18 percent. The bottom half of the 1 percent, the work-a-day rich, have upped theirs only to around 4 percent.

/by