Friday, November 08, 2013

"Bloomberg Businessweek", a surprisingly good magazine

Clearly there are enough magazine subscriptions here.  They have been cut back in the last year or two but there is still more coming in that can receive a full review.  That leads to skimming tables of contents and looking for the highlights, the must-read articles, and likely missing something that may be of interest.  What it also leads to is a constantly filling box of magazines that needs to be culled regularly.

Subscribing to any other magazines was not in my game plan, but having paid full prices for a "Bloomberg Businessweek" at an LIRR station to have reading on the train, I found something totally different from the "Business Week" of old.  This one has for the most part excellent writing, reporting, and features that are not found elsewhere, at least here.  So using one of those discount cards that fall out of the magazine, a subscription was ordered.

It's looked forward to here now.  In the latest issue there is an article, "The Surprising Sophistication of Twitter" that gives me information about Twitter that had never been seen here, and both impresses and alarms me.  I am not a Twitter user but want to know as much as possible about it.

 There are numerous graphs and charts that accompany articles and are informative.  One on page 24 of this issue one looks at the global wage growth over the last 20 years, dividing the population into twenty groups, from poorest to wealthiest.  While the poorest to the center of middle class have had significant gains percentage wise they are clearly coming off a low base.  What is stunning but is observable intuitively is that the proportion of people in top of middle class and lower end of the high income class, 15% of the total, have had almost no income growth over that time period.  Of course, those in the top 5% did well off of a high base, and as we all know if they had a slice that represented the top 1% were included the rate would be radically higher.

You can see in an October 29th blog here the suggestion that the tax cost of the Affordable Health Care Act would fall most directly on that 15% that can be called upper middle class.

Those are just examples.  My surprise at the quality and varied content of "Bloomberg Businessweek" is genuine and was unexpected.


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