Archive for October, 2009
Measuring and Fighting Poverty
October 30th, 2009 | 2 comments
This week on Business Matters, we’re exploring exactly how many Americans are living below the poverty line and how to change it. Find out how our system for measuring poverty was developed more than four decades ago and how we compare to other developed countries in poverty levels. Also, we’ll learn about a new strategy to eliminate poverty in Illinois.
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Steven Pressman, Professor of Economics and Finance, Monmouth University
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Steven Pressman also serves as co-editor of the Review of Political Economy, as Associate Editor and Book Review Editor of the Eastern Economic Journal, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Basic Income Studies. He has published around 120 articles in refereed journals and as book chapters, and has authored or edited 13 books, including “Women in the Age of Economic Transformation”, “Economics and Its Discontents”, “A New Guide to Post Keynesian Economics”, “Alternative Theories of the State”, “50 Major Economists”, and “Leading Contemporary Economists”. His main areas of research are poverty and income distribution, and government tax and spending policies.
Related Links:
Poverty: Numbers alone don’t tell the real story
Maria Cancian, Co-editor, “Changing Poverty, Changing Policy“; Professor of Public Affairs and Social Work; Affiliate, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Maria Cancian is Professor of Public Affairs and Social Work, and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. Her research is in the area of domestic social policy, with recent focus on the impact of married women’s growing employment and earnings on marriage patterns and the inter- and intra-household distribution of income, the work and income of women who have received welfare, and the implications of child support and custody for the well-being of divorced and never-married families. She and Sheldon Danziger edited the 2009 book “Changing Poverty, Changing Policies” published by Russell Sage. Her articles have appeared in journals including Demography, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Review of Economics and Statistics and Social Service Review.
Doug Schenkelberg, Associate Director of Policy & Advocacy at Heartland Alliance; Campaign Coordinator, From Poverty to Opportunity
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The “From Poverty to Opportunity Campaign: Realizing Human Rights in Illinois” is a grassroots, human rights campaign to develop the political will and substantive plans to end poverty in our state. The Campaign was established to create a comprehensive vision and a workable plan grounded in human rights standards that will halve extreme poverty in Illinois by the year 2015. The Campaign contextualizes poverty within the human rights framework, facilitates conversations across parties and interests in order to build shared understanding and urgency, uses our collective knowledge to identify solutions, and leverages our collective commitment to human rights to press for real change.
Related Links:
From Poverty to Opportunity Blog
Money and the Recent Graduate
October 23rd, 2009 | 1 comment
This week, we’re discussing how young people are handling the recession.
If you, or someone close to you has just graduated college and is having trouble finding work, or maybe heading into college and not sure how it would be possible to pay for it you will definitely want to listen to this weeks show. In the first half we’ll be talking to two people who are working to improve the financial literacy of young people about how to handle their money, then in the second half of the show we’ll find out about an organization that’s teaching entrepreneurship to low-income students around the country.
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Bill Pratt, Author, The Graduate’s Guide to Life and Money
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Bill Pratt is a former credit card executive turned student-advocate. Bill is a former economist for the U.S. federal government and a former Vice President for one of the largest financial institutions in the world. He holds an MBA in finance. He left the financial industry to focus his efforts on helping others understand money. He is the author of “Extra Credit: The 7 Things Every College Student Needs to Know About Credit Debt & Ca$h” and “The Graduate’s Guide to Life and Money”. Bill speaks at colleges to educate and entertain students about real-life issues in money, leadership and success.
Farnoosh Torabi, Author, “You’re So Money- Live Rich Even When You’re Not”; Bank of America’s ambassador for financial literacy
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Farnoosh Torabi is an accomplished television, print and web journalist focusing on a spectrum of money matters, from personal finance and small business to investing and the financial markets. She is best known for her business reports that air on TheStreet.com TV, where she hosts Wall Street Confidential featuring the site’s founder Jim Cramer. She’s also a business contributor to AM New York, and she writes a monthly investing column in Entrepreneur Magazine. Farnoosh began her broadcasting career as a business reporter and producer for NY1 News, Time Warner’s 24-hour news channel in New York City.
Christine Poorman, Executive Director, NFTE Chicago
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The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE or “nifty”) provides an entrepreneurship education program to youth in low-income communities. Starting in 2003, NFTE opened the Chicago office and successfully launched a partnership with the Chicago Public Schools, currently in 39 schools. Looking ahead, NFTE Chicago has developed an aggressive growth plan, and aims to reach 10,000 in the coming year.
Zoe Damacela, Founder, Zoe Damacela Apparel; 2nd Place Winner, 
2009 OppenheimerFunds/NFTE National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge
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Zoe Damacela is a 17-year-old senior at Whitney Young High School, she’s an entrepreneur and a fashion designer, She’s made everything from wedding dresses to handbags and the business she founded, Zoe Damacela Apparel, has sold more than 300 dresses over the past four years.
Is the Recession (really) Over
October 16th, 2009 | post a comment
So the Dow is back above 10,000, 3rd Quarter GDP growth may be looking good, and Goldman Sachs is making splendid profits, but with rising double-digit unemployment, can this really be the end of the recession? We went searching for the answer to that question this week on Business Matters, and although each of our guests has a different take on where we’re headed, there’s agreement that this recession is unlike any we’ve seen before and it’s not nearly over.
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Tim Duy, Director of Oregon Economic Forum, University of Oregon
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Following graduate school, Tim worked in Washington, D.C. for the United States Department of Treasury as an economist in the International Affairs division and later with the G7 Group, a political and economic consultancy for clients in the financial industry. In the latter position, he was responsible for monitoring the activities of the Federal Reserve and currency markets. Tim returned to the University of Oregon in 2002. He is the Director of the Oregon Economic Forum and the author of the University of Oregon Index of Economic Indicators and the Central Oregon Business Index.
Ken Goldstein, Economist, The Conference Board
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Ken Goldstein has been an economist at The Conference Board since 1971. His principal responsibilities include analyzing current trends in labor market activity and forecasting near-term economic development. Specifically, he has maintained The Conference Boards Help-Wanted Index—a proxy measure for changes in labor demand. Since 1989, Goldstein has managed the monthly update of the The Conference Board economic forecasting process and has frequently been quoted in both print and electronic media as to where employment, inflation, interest rates, and the economy are headed.
Michael Mandel, Chief Economist, BusinessWeek
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Michael Mandel is chief economist at BusinessWeek, responsible for formulating BusinessWeek’s coverage of economic policy. Prior to this, Mandel was economics editor. In 1998, Mandel won the Gerald R. Loeb Award for his coverage of the New Economy. Mandel is the author of several books, including Rational Exuberance, The Coming Internet Depression, and The High Risk Society. Prior to joining BusinessWeek in 1989, Mandel was an assistant economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Mandel holds a PhD in economics from Harvard. He writes the World Economy Blog for BusinessWeek.
The Business of Fakery
October 9th, 2009 | 1 comment
This week we’re exploring the business of fakery, when people pretend to be one thing, and advocate some position based on that pretense, and then turn out to be something else. It’s not just businesses that get into this fakery, setting up fake grassroots groups (also called astroturfing) or using marketing to mislead consumers about environmental issues. (so-called greenwashing) This is the business that all of us get into sometime of posturing because we want people to think one thing about us and we really are something different. So this week we look at ways that fakery has impacted our public policy debates over the past summer.
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Mark Bowden, an Atlantic Monthly national correspondent; Writer, The Story Behind the Story, October 2009 Atlantic
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Mark Bowden, is an author, journalist, screenwriter, and teacher. He spent 25 years as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. His book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999)—an international bestseller that spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list—was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bowden also worked on the screenplay for Black Hawk Down, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Ridley Scott. Bowden is also the author of the international bestseller Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (2001), which tells the story of the hunt for Colombian cocaine billionaire Pablo Escobar. Killing Pablo is currently being adapted for film, with Bowden again writing the screenplay. Bowden contributes regularly to major American magazines, and he’s an adjunct professor at Loyola College of Maryland, where he teaches creative writing and journalism.
Timothy Karr, Campaign Director, FreePress
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Timothy Karr manages all online initiatives for Free Press — including SavetheInternet.com, StopBigMedia.com and InternetforEveryone.org. Tim speaks and writes about the state of journalism and the future of the Internet. Before joining Free Press, Tim was executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of the Globalvision News Network. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time Inc., the New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim has been quoted in publications across the country and has been featured as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR and ABC News Radio, among other places. He blogs for The Huffington Post and at MediaCitizen.
Valarie Davis, CEO Enviromedia
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Valerie Davis is cofounder of EnviroMedia Social Marketing — America’s first full-service advertising and public relations firm dedicated solely to improving the environment and public health. Davis, along with business partner Kevin Tuerff, launched www.greenwashingindex.com to fight the forces of misleading advertising. They also provided observations and perspective for Environmental Leader from the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia. Among Davis’ key client and project accomplishments: leading the Don’t Mess with Texas campaign to victory in the America’s Favorite Slogan Competition, beating Nike’s “Just Do It” and “Got Milk?”; spearheading research and brand creation for the Governor’s Water Conservation Implementation Task Force and Texas Water Development Board; and overseeing a water-saving education campaign which cut daily peak water-use within one region by 200 million gallons a day.
The Business of Youth Sports
October 2nd, 2009 | post a comment
This week, we explore the marketplace and culture of youth sports. How are adults and our broader national culture of competition impacting childhood development? How can youth sports help kids grow up to be successful? We’ll lay out some of the challenges facing youth sports today and then talk to some innovators in the field to find out new ways for parents, coaches and kids to build healthy emotional and physical skills.
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Mark Hyman
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Mark Hyman is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek and the author of the new book Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession With Youth Sports. Prior to joining BusinessWeek, he spent nearly 20 years as a reporter for newspapers including the Baltimore Sun where he was an enterprise and investigative reporter in the sports department. During his time at the Sun, earned his law degree from the University of Maryland. He blogs at youthsportsparents.blogspot.com and also contributes to BusinessWeek’s Working Parents blog.
Jim Thompson
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Jim Thompson is the founder and director of Positive Coaching Alliance, a national nonprofit organization of parents, coaches and youth sports organizations dedicated to improving youth sports by developing a positive character building approach. Jim has more than 20 years of teaching, coaching and management experience working with a variety of individuals and groups. He was formerly Director of Stanford Business School’s Public Management Program and his experiences as a youth coach led him to write two books on the subject: “Positive Coaching: Building Character and Self-Esteem Through Sports” and “Shooting in the Dark: Tales of Coaching and Leadership“.
Frank Fiume
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Frank Fiume is founder and CEO of i9 Sports Corporation. Noticing from his own experience that the amateur sports industry was poorly organized on the local level, Frank applied the marketing and business skills he acquired with medical device companies to create ABA Sports in 1995. Over time, it grew at an astonishing rate, becoming i9 Sports corporation, the nation‘s first complete amateur sports franchise business allowing individuals to organize leagues, tournaments, camps, clinics, train officials, and sell sporting goods and custom uniforms while working with the local amateur organizations and parks and recreation departments.
(this program was originally broadcast on July 3rd, 2009)
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