Singapore job satisfaction one of the highest in Asia.

According to Gallup, workers in Singapore have the highest job satisfaction compared to their peers in industrial Asian economies. The Chinese have the lowest.

 

tags: demographics, economy, growth

LunchTalk: (@Berkeley) Demystifying the Chinese Economy.

Speaker: Justin Yifu Lin, Senior Economist and Senior Vice President, World Bank.

Building on a distinguished career as one of China’s leading economists, Mr. Lin is undertaking an ambitious research program that examines the industrialization of rapidly developing countries and sheds new light on the causes of lagging growth in poor regions.

link

tags: lunchtalk, economy, 4q diagram, mousetrap

Recessions are great for entertainment companies because people have a lot of free time on their hands. Moreover, playing social games is much cheaper than even going to the movies, so we can expect a strong new industry emerge from this economic downturn.

TechCrunch: Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone.
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Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be a stunning $350 million, half of which is operating profit. Zynga is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011.

Another quiet milestone along a similar path was reported by Bloomberg about a week ago:

Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox Live online video-game service probably broke the $1 billion revenue mark for the first time in the year that just ended, helped by sales of movies, avatar accessories and extra game levels.

tags: games, internet, business, industry, entertainment, economy, microsoft

$400K per green job

Last week, Business Week published an article by former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, where he, among other things, pointed out that now it takes tons and tons of money to create jobs in America. The chart below shows that in 2010 dollars high-tech job creation costs went from about $2K in the 1950s to $100K in the 2000s.

Andy Grove thought it was a gruesome trend that spelled doom for American workers. He said that unless we learned how to create jobs more efficiently, the gap between the haves and have-nots is going to grow. Pretty bad, isn't it.

But just three days later, real life events exceeded his gloomy forecast:

"President Barack Obama, under pressure to spur job growth, said on Saturday two solar energy companies will get nearly $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to create as many as 5,000 green jobs."

It's $400K per job! Four times greater than the current already absurdly high level. This looks like the disruption pattern described in The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen. That is, we keep "producing" more and more expensive jobs (products/services), while our growth model is being disrupted by China and other formerly 3rd world countries.

tags: innovation, problem, trend, energy, infrastructure, disruption, economy, growth

Hong Kong's air polution: 500 on a 0 to 500 scale.

An update to my yesterday's post about China's need for new energy infrastructure:

NYT: Air pollution in Hong Kong, one of the perpetual banes of living and working in this Asian financial hub, reached record levels on Monday, setting off an official government warning to avoid outdoor activities and physical exertion.

Pollution levels are now 12 to 14 times the amount recommended by the World Health Organization, according to the Clean Air Network

Some of it is due to a major sandstorm in northern China. But sandstorms are a regular event in this part of the world; they are not going away any time soon. All this makes deployment of clean energy technologies even more desirable.

tags: problem, energy, effect, economy, system

invention vs innovation: a 10X difference

The difference between invention (discovery) and innovation (commercial application) was highlighted last week when Charles K. Kao was awarded the 2009 Nobel prize in physics ""for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication". Kao's work lies at the foundations of today's telecommunications technology. His share of the Nobel Prize money is about $700K. For comparison, John T. Chambers, the Chairman and CEO of Cisco, a networking and communications gear company, gets about $10M a year in salary, stock, and bonuses. Both of them are at the top of their profession, and the contrast between the rewards the society affords these two brilliant men indicates the relative value created at different stages of the innovation process.

tags: 10x, invention, innovation, greatest, economy, process, scale, niche construction

An important emerging technology market:

Financial analyst Piper Jaffray estimates that US citizens will spend $621 million in 2009 in virtual worlds; estimates of the Asian market are even larger. Research firm Plus Eight Star puts spending at $5 billion in the last year.

Over in Second Life, trade remains robust. The value of transactions between residents in the second quarter of this year was $144 million, a year-on-year increase of 94 per cent. With its users swapping virtual goods and services worth around $600 million per year, Second Life has the largest economy of any virtual world

and a new problem:

Just as the digital revolution has facilitated piracy and copyright theft in other spheres, those who make a living running businesses in Second Life have seen their profits eroded by users who have found ways to copy their intellectual property (IP).

The easier it is to implement and replicate somebody-else's idea, the important IP protection becomes. Also, production processes for virtual goods in Second Life are still primitive, therefore it is difficult to have trade secrets.

tags: niche construction, 4q diagram, problem, greatest, virtual, economy, market, growth,

A new powerful manufacturing and distribution infrastructure has emerged in Asia.

Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- India, whose auto market is 19 percent of China’s, has the edge in exports.

Suzuki Motor Corp., Hyundai Motor Co., and Nissan Motor Co. are making India a hub for overseas sales of minicars as incentives lift demand for smaller, fuel-efficient autos. Helped by cheaper labor and a surging local market, India this year overtook China in auto exports and is challenging Thailand and South Korea as an alternative production center in Asia.

The current economic crisis will help China and India to become dominant trading powers. The American century had began after the WWI when mass manufacturing shifted to the US. The 21st century will be the Asian century, starting with the market crash of 2008.

David Brooks in NYT about the communications aspect of the current economic crisis:

To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousandsof ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.

From a system perspective, communications work to synchronize various elements of the system. Under general information overload, people tend to synchronize on what attracts immediate attention, which nowadays is infotainment rather than information. Therefore, the latest financial bubble can be considered as one of the consequences of rapid media/internet growth. I would argue that in a similar pattern another major economic downturn, the Great Depression, followed a major communications breakthrough, radio, and the emergence of mass media.

12/28/07 By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics writes:

New-home sales tumbled 9 percent in November from October to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 647,000, the Commerce Department reported Friday. That was the worst sales pace since April 1995.

"It was ugly," declared Richard Yamarone, economist at Argus Research. "It is the one sector of the economy that doesn't show any signs of life. It doesn't look like there is any resuscitation in store for housing over the next year," he said.

The housing picture turned out to be more grim than most anticipated. Many economists were predicting sales to decline by 1.8 percent to a pace of 715,000.

By region, sales fell in all parts of the country, except for the West.

In the Midwest, new-home sales plunged 27.6 percent in November from October. Sales dropped 19.3 percent in the Northeast and fell 6.4 percent in the South. In the West, however, sales rose 4 percent.

Over the last 12 months, new-home sales nationwide have tumbled by 34.4 percent, the biggest annual slide since early 1991, and stark evidence of the painful collapse in the once high-flying housing market.

"I think you can classify what we are seeing in the housing market as a crash," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "Sales and home prices are in a free fall. The downturn is intensifying."

A very interesting trend. People will be spending less money on housing and loan servicing, and probably more on staples, entertainment, and communications.