Weren't OLEDs supposed to deliver a lot of that same stuff a few years ago? What ever happened with that?

You can purchase the Samsung KN55S9C â' 55" OLED Smart TV today, and they are expecting 65" and 75" later this year.

If you assault people, you might get shot.

I generally operate under this belief where I live.

"Finland has no private schools."

There are some private schools in Finland (for example, The International School of Helsinki). They are granted the same government funds as public schools, and are required to use the same admissions standards and provide the same services as public schools. The majority of the private schools in Finland are religious.

I think a key element of Finnish schools is that they are managed by the teachers and staff. The local municipal authority in any given region appoints principals for 6/7 year terms, but apart from this appointment, they largely leave the running of the school to the principal and his or her teachers.

Also school choice is big in Finland, especially in cities. In Helsinki, half of the age group transferring to the 7th grade in the basic school had applied for a student place in other catchment area school.

Starting at age 7 points out an important issue - there is ZERO evidence that early education helps students by the time they graduate. Yes, they may start reading earlier, but over time that advantage goes away.

Also Finland does have merit pay for teachers, and also most Finnish 15-year olds go into vocational (rather than general) education.

"For example, I learned most of my core trigonometry well before I ran into it in school, because I wanted to write space combat games"

I remember asking my dad about slope/intercept equations because I wanted to draw line segments on the screen for computer graphics (on my Commodore PET). Then it turned out to be a really useful concept when I learned again it in algebra!

"Here in New Yorkâ¦they...Aren't required to take ALL students."

In California, when enrollment requests exceed the number of seats, charter schools are required by law to hold a public lottery to determine who will attend.

Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.

Which is why more people are going to college, people are living in larger houses, home ownership is up, more people eat out more, households have more cars, people fly more, etc. In general, people at all income levels now have access to many more material possessions than they did in the 1980s. Moreover, there has been a narrowing of the gap between high and low-income classes in terms of ownership of these items.

Health costs do cost more, but you have access to much better health care today than one did 30 years ago. Also health care is more highly regulated today (HIPPA, ACA, etc.)

College education prices are high as well, but perhaps they are inflated by the wide availability of government provided loans?

When you buy a pair of pants, of, say $100, what do you think the person (presumably in China or India) who manufactured it receives? Right, less than $1.

However before the pants factory (and others) were allowed by the PRC government, hundreds of millions of Chinese were making under $1 per DAY who now are making more than that. So even making a few dollars per day is a big step up for them.

By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%. There is a lot that goes into selling a pair of pants for $100: marketing, transport & distribution, planning, research, etc.

Your jeans may be made from cotton grown in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, or Turkey, woven and dyed in Italy, cut in India, then go to one of 35 countries for assembly. Not just China, but also Bangladesh, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, and Sri Lanka.

You may want to compare your article's data with FRED's Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Compensation Per Hour (COMPRNFB) which shows a 35% increase over 40 years.

The article says it is using data from only production/nonsupervisory workers in the private sector and comparing it to productivity is for the total economy. If it could compare productivity just for production/nonsupervisory workers then there might be a case, but how could you even do that without firing all non-production and supervisory workers? I've had some great bosses that really improved my productivity by guiding my work. This is the same mistake as trying to compare a MINIMUM wage with AVERAGE productivity.

FRED only puts out a nominal Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees: Total Private (AHETPI), not an inflation adjusted series, but suffice it to say that over 40 years, AHETPI has gone from $3/hr to $20/hr. Based on the BLS CPI calculator, $3/hr in 1973 is $15.75/hr today, so there has been real gains. Also it is not clear to me that the productivity data mentioned has been inflation adjusted.

You may want to look at BLS Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share (PRS85006173) which is labor compensation divided by value added. It certainly has been going down, but very slowly.

It should also be kept in mind that a 52% of americans hold equity capital positions, so most people are benefiting from the return to capital.

Also over 40 years, the US has acquired 30 million foreign born people from immigration, most of them lower skilled, but almost all of them making more for their labor in the US than they would in their home country.

It would be an awesome first step if we could all just agree that the middle class (at least in America) is in decline from what it was one generation or two generations ago, and that that has several bad consequences, and that we should try to think of ways to reverse this trend.

What is your definition of the middle class, and what are your precise metrics on "in decline"?

For example, of the 3.2 million youth age 16 to 24 who graduated from high school between January and October 2012, about 2.1 million (66.2%) were enrolled in college in October. That doesn't sound like much of a decline to me.

If the "big flippers" didn't convince Safeway to shutter Dominick's, Safeway's clearly feeble management would have just thrown away more shareholder value in trying to keep them going.

Sometimes you have to know when to stop, and activist shareholders are often the only answer to managerial hubris.

If you "dismember" a corporation to achieve a >15% ROI, then obviously the people buying the assets must have been convinced that there is a way to use those assets to generate higher profits.

Sometimes corporations are just stupid, and are more productive with someone else owning their parts than with the current management owning all of them.

My view of corporate management is that management rarely learns from mistakes. Great companies are largely lucky ones. It is more of a process of evolution where companies that luck into high profitability survive and those that don't flounder. Economist Joseph Schumpetet called this "creative destruction."

Complex systems are challenging to centrally control, and systems made up of tens of thousands of human beings are very, very complex.

A great natural experiment on this is the North Dakota shale boom.

In Williston, ND, one of the highest grossing McDonalds in the US does pay $15/hour, but the Big Mac costs $1 more than the US average.

Regarding the 91% top marginal tax rate, it is now generally recognized that most income in that bracket was "tax avoided" through various legal and illegal means.

Good evidence for this was that after the "Kennedy Tax Cut" that reduced the top marginal rate from 91% to 70% passed in early 1964, total income tax revenues rose in 1964 and 1965.

We should keep in mind that the IBM S/360 was only announced in 1964. The Federal Government had little power to analyze tax avoidance schemes, and likely there was little political will to actually prosecute powerful rich people for tax cheating.

Sugar Cane

Unfortunately, the US maintains tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) for imports of raw cane sugar, refined sugar, specialty sugar, and sugar-containing products.

If imported sugar products did not have the trade restrictions, they would be cheaper for use in confectionary, foodstuffs, and for biofuel.