TIME April 25, 2011

TIME sketches the China effect: as the economy matures, multinationals look elsewhere in Asia for low-cost manufacturing. As China progresses from a low-cost manufacturer dependent on exports to a service-oriented economy driven more by domestic demand, wages there are rising. As salaries and spending power in China rise, the Chinese are importing more goods from the rest of Asia. At the same time, those rising salaries are forcing China to outsource more of its low-end manufacturing. As a result, the lowest-end factory work once done in the China, is now being done in neighboring countries, from Malaysia and Thailand to Vietnam and Bangladesh. But still, we are only talking about fractions of European or US wages. The average hourly wages for manufacturing workers in 2010 was 2.00 dollars in China compared to 1.40 dollars in Thailand and 1.10 dollars in Vietnam.

The US focus in the magazine is on savings. As described in earlier issues, next year’s election could well be about the national deficit and how to get it under control. The US spends nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on defense policy. It is obvious that there is a world to win here. But which candidate will have the guts to save on national security. Regarding the US election campaign for 2012 TIME analyses the chances of Mitt Romney, a rather controversial figure. In a weak field of Republican candidates, Romney is currently the frontrunner. This is in spite of how TIME brilliantly describes him as being “the sum of its negative parts”.

But this is only a fraction of the variety of interesting items this week. Take your time for the extensive reports on the Nigerian elections, the Euro monetary crisis, people that never grow old and an interview with comedian-actor Robin Williams (who is now a Broadway actor and wineyard owner, despite being in alcohol rehab during 2006).

TIME April 18, 2011

A very insightful TIME magazine this week. It is clear to see that TIME is preparing for next year’s election campaign by fully covering the Budget fights between the Democrats and the Republicans (in the person of U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan).

Time’s cover story (Egypt’s unfinished revolution) covers the difficult situation Egypt is currently in. Two months after the Tahrir square revolution democrats and Islamists compete over the future of the country. Time quotes Kamal Habib, founder of the Egyptian, Islamic Jihad, who was jailed for years (some years alongside Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaida’s number two).

Habib, 53, and his followers are Salafists, adherents of a particularly fundamentalist strain of Islam, and until recently they regarded democracy as un-Islamic. That changed, he says, when the Tahrir Square demonstrations brought down President Hosni Mubarak. Despite this, Habib’s democratic credentials are low. The Islamists who make up the Muslim Brotherhood, moderate in comparison with the Salafists, are already in full campaign mode and are widely expected to be the largest group in parliament. Unable to master comparable organizing skills, many liberals have taken to complaining that the Islamists are hijacking their revolution. Many believe that Egypt's military, running the country until the election, will not cede all its power and privileges afterward.

Besides politics the cultural section this week is extensive. TIME uses the example of the making of the movie Dredd (a Sci-fi movie which will be in theaters later this year), which was shot in South Africa to show that the movie making business is shifting away from Hollywood. Versatility and convenience of location — all those landscapes are within a few hours' drive of Cape Town — are keys to South Africa's moviemaking appeal. So is the cost factor. By making Dredd in South Africa, where a non-union cast and crew is cheaper than it would be in Europe and the U.S. and the government rebates up to 25% of production costs. “South Africa is in the business of making movies that cost half as much as they look"

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TIME April 11, 2011

This week’s TIME Magazine is focused on business issues. To pick out a couple of them:

To tweet or not to tweet? While the economy may be troubled, one area of business is thriving; social media websites. Most known at the moment is Facebook, but a dazzling number of other social media have enormous amounts of users (Linkedin, Foursquare, Twitter, Flickr, Groupon). There can be little doubt that these companies enrich their founders as well as some investors. But do they add value to the economy? Time Magazine tries to answer that question in the weekly column “the curious capitalist”.

TIME’s cover story is about the energy crisis. Until recently, natural gas was the forgotten stepsister of fuels. It provides about a quarter of U.S. electricity and heats over 60 million American homes, but it's always been limited — more expensive than dirty coal, dirtier than nuclear or renewable energy. Natural gas is up in popularity now — way up — and it's changing how we think about energy throughout the world. If its boosters are to be believed, gas will change geopolitics, trimming the power of states in the troubled Middle East by reducing the demand for their oil, thanks to vast new onshore deposits of what is called shale gas. Using new drilling methods pioneered by a Texas wildcatter, companies have been able to tap enormous quantities of gas from shale, leading to rock-bottom prices for natural gas even as the oil price rises sky high. President Obama praised natural gas in a speech on March 30, when he named it part of the solution to reducing America's oil addiction.

Don’t forget to check out the article where an adaption of Anne Kraemer’s book “It’s always personal” shows us that 69% of people feel that when someone gets emotional in the workplace, it makes the person seem more human. So go ahead and cry at work…

TIME April 4, 2011

What if he doesn’t go?

I began subscribing to Time Magazine as a way of getting more insights on world politics but with a focus on the American viewpoint. This week for example, TIME writer Fareed Zakaria describes the dilemma that American president Barack Obama is in.

Zakaria uses the brilliant metaphor “Goldilocks military plan”: Not too much, not too little, not too unilateral, not too American. The operation against Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya mirrors the moderate temperament of its architect, Barack Obama.

So far, Obama seems to have pleased almost no one. For those who had been urging military action from the start, Obama dithered and remains too cautious. For those wary of another open-ended U.S. commitment in the Muslim world, Obama suddenly turned from restraint and became reckless.

In his book How Wars End, Gideon Rose points out that American policymakers have often entered war with little thought given to the endgame — the political order they wish to see at its close — hoping that military action would create some kind of positive momentum and things would work out. Maybe that happens, but often things only get more messy.

The most significant challenge for Barack Obama is to keep America's military involvement limited. If Gaddafi does not fall immediately, it will take just a few days for people in Washington to start claiming that Obama lost, Gaddafi won, and America has been humiliated.

Another issue covered this week is the state of the American economy. The debate is now about how to address the US government’s enormous deficits and debt while growing the economy. If you think that European countries have high debts, guess again. The USA deficit has doubled in the last five years to more than 10 trillion dollars. In this pace, the size of the debt will be bigger than the size of the entire countries economy. Recent opinion polls have showed that both the President and the countering Republicans run great electoral risks with their strategies to confront the deficit. The question is what the American public will decide to be the best strategy. The next presidential election could be well about whom reads the minds of the American people best.