Quartz: Germany has set up a website to debunk the lies traffickers tell refugees

The Federal Foreign Office today (Oct. 23) launched the RumoursAboutGermany.info website in French, English, and Arabic. It’s part of the government’s ongoing #RumoursAboutGermany public awareness campaign that’s been running in places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2015.

The site lists the seven biggest lies told by smugglers, based on what refugees told European media. The top lie: “The ship for the crossing is very big, it even has a pool and a cinema.” The site explains that human traffickers use old, unseaworthy boats so they can make as much money as possible, adding that more than 5,000 people died crossing the Mediterranean in such boats last year. [...]

The Federal Foreign Office says the website’s goal is to inform, not deter refugees, as “many irregular migrants make the decision to set out for Europe based on inaccurate information and rumours spread by people smugglers who are interested in profit, not the benefit and safety of the migrants.”

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Foreign Affairs: How Should Governments Address Inequality?

In 2014, an unusual book topped bestseller lists around the world: Capital in the Twenty-first Century, an 816-page scholarly tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty that examined the massive increase in the proportion of income and wealth accruing to the world’s richest people. Drawing on an unprecedented amount of historical economic data from 20 countries, Piketty showed that wealth concentration had returned to a peak not seen since the early twentieth century. Today in the United States, the top one percent of households earn around 20 percent of the nation’s income, a dramatic change from the middle of the twentieth century, when income was spread more evenly and the top one percent’s share hovered at around ten percent. Piketty predicted that without corrective action, the trend toward ever more concentrated income and wealth would continue, and so he called for a global tax on wealth. 

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Quartz: Eastern Europe’s major economies are having an underappreciated “Goldilocks moment”

The IMF now forecasts that “emerging and developing Europe” economies to grow 4.5% this year, upping their prediction by 1.5 percentage points from six months ago. This increased optimism is based, in part, on bumper growth in the second quarter of 2017, when Romania’s economy increased 5.7% versus a year earlier, the Czech Republic’s by 4.7%, and Poland’s by 4.4%. By comparison, the EU average was 2.4% growth over the same period.

All of these economies are still heavily reliant on manufacturing, exporting much of their production to the rest of the EU. For example, the Czech Republic—er, Czechia—has the lowest unemployment rate in the EU and about 35% of the Czech labor force is employed in manufacturing, the highest proportion of any EU country. When Europe is growing, demand for the things made in these economies grows. Often this means cars: automakers including Toyota, Volkswagen, and Peugeot have factories in the Czech Republic. Romania’s largest exporter is Dacia, a subsidiary of French car company Renault. [...]

Poland is also benefiting from a surge in workers from Ukraine. It’s estimated that as many as 1 million Ukrainians are working in Poland at any one time, who come for higher wages and more opportunities, especially since the recession that hit after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia. Ukrainian workers have helped address Poland’s demographic issues—an aging population and low fertility rate—in addition to counterbalancing the emigration of millions of Poles after the nation joined the EU in 2004. [...]

For now, the benefits of their economic models seem to outweigh the risks, so the EU’s eastern economies are likely to keep growing, according to JPMorgan’s Amoa. EU funds are there to be invested, central banks have supportive monetary policies, and political tensions aren’t yet at a breaking point. JPMorgan Asset Management is buying these countries’ currencies and government bonds in Poland, Amoa said.

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Wendover Productions: Elon Musk's Basic Economics

Vintage Everyday: Amazing Photographs of 1980s New York City Subway Through the Lens of a Teenager

Most of these photographs below were shot in 1982 and 83 by native New Yorker Ken Stein when he was 17 and 18 year old, and was the staff photographer for a weekly community newspaper in The Bronx. Through his work he managed to capture the spirit of a New York quite different than the one we currently know, one with an undertone of danger and edge that has transformed over the past few decades. "The city was different back then," he told Gothamist. "I think it was quieter, the street lights were darker, there was more room to walk and more places to wander—often everything seemed new and the different areas of the city were just that; different."

Ken Stein recently shared some of his old photos of New York City from the 1980s on his Flickr page. "I pulled my slides from 20 years ago out of storage and began scanning them. It's like a portal back to my teenage years when i dreamed of going to art school to become a photojournalist."

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