How long are American commutes?

Oct 16th 2011, 18:33 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

LAST week, the OECD released a report attempting to assess different characteristics of well-being across member countries. Rather than focus just on statistics like income and employment, its authors tried to build a more meaningful portrait of quality of life, which included information on things like health and work-life balance. The New York Times' Catherine Rampell focused on one particular piece of the report—differences in commuting time across countries. Here's the table she produced:



As you can see, America performs quite well on this score. This surprised me, since it was sharply at odds from work I'd found on the subject in reporting a piece on infrastructure from earlier this year. You can see the data I found at right. These figures have been cited in economic research assessing the cost of commuting. America's commuting times, according to these sources, stack up very poorly against those of other countries.

How should we explain the divergence? Some of the gap may be due to methodology. The OECD's figures are derived from its time-use surveys, for instance. Here is how the OECD explains its data-collection method:

Data on time use are collected through the use of diaries, where respondents record their activities during short (around 10 minute) intervals for a continuous period of 24 hours (or 1440 minutes). Respondents use their own words to describe their activities, either by writing their own diaries, or by verbally reporting their activities by telephone, which are then re-coded according to the country’s classification system.
The European figures in the chart at right, by contrast, are from the European working-conditions survey. This survey uses a questionaire, and during each assessment period face-to-face field interviews are conducted with a random sample of firms and workers in each country. That methodology—questionaire plus field interviews—is similar to that used by the American Census Bureau, from which the American number in the chart at right is taken. The figure has actually been updated through 2010 at this point. According to the Census Bureau, the average American spends over 50 minutes a day commuting—almost twice the OECD's figure.

The actual figure may be somewhere between the two estimates, but I'm inclined to put more stock in the official Census number. And using that number, American commute times stack up poorly against those elsewhere as measured by both the OECD and the European survey.

One final point concerning commuting times. In commenting on the OECD study, Brad Plumer writes:

A lot also depends on whether a person drives or takes public transportation. The Department of Transportation found that, in 2009, commutes by private car took, on average, 23 minutes. Public transportation, by contrast, took an average of 53 minutes. You could read that as an argument that more people should drive so that their commutes are shorter or as an argument that we need to bolster public transportation.
I see this disparity reported quite often, but rarely is it given the proper context. The vast majority of transit journeys take place in just a few very large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Within these large cities, average commute time by car is well above the national average, and transit commutes are competitive with driving. Transit journeys will tend to take longer than automobile commutes, but the difference between the two times for a given commute is much smaller than the nationwide average times for driving versus transit suggests.

JOBS LEFT INDIA TWICE

Having returned disillusioned with Indian spiritualism in the 1970s, he later abruptly closed his centre in India.

It wasn't “all romantic,” as Steve Jobs said at the inspiring commencement address that he delivered at Stanford in 2005. Talking about that phase in his iconic life when he chose to drop out of college and spend time simply dropping in on interesting lectures — including one on calligraphy, which gave him ideas he would later incorporate into the first Macintosh 10 years later — he recalled his weekly excursion across town for one good vegetarian meal a week at the Hare Krishna Temple. His “curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless” later on in life, he said.


This popular quote, often invoked in order to establish the elusive “India connection” to this great success story, went viral on the web soon after Jobs' sudden demise was announced on Thursday morning.


Jobs' real Indian connection, however, dates back to the 1970s, when he made a trip to India while working at the video game developing firm Atari, along with college-mate Dan Kottke, who later became one of the earliest employees at Apple Computers. Like many of their generation, the duo travelled to India in search of ‘enlightenment', and to meet Neem Kairoli Baba, a Hindu spiritual guru and Hanuman devotee obviously better known in the West than in India.


According to one story, when they arrived at the ashram, the Guru had already passed on. Another version has it that Jobs was disappointed with the “spiritualism” he encountered, and was quoted in one of his biographies as having said: “We weren't going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times that I started to realise that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together.” Yet another biography, by Micheal Moritz, says he found Indians “far poorer than he had imagined, and was struck by the incongruity between the country's condition and its airs of holiness.” His friend Steve Wozniak, is quoted as recalling Jobs returning from his India travels a Buddhist, shaven-head and all.


If India disappointed the young Jobs, three decades later it was his turn to let down the Indian technological industry when he decided to close down his month-old India operations in May 2006. The 30 employees Apple had hired were retrenched, and the grand plans to ramp up operations by hiring 3,000 workers for a technical support centre were shelved.


At a time when companies overseas were turning to India — most notably his contemporary and rival Bill Gates — he chose to stay away. A report in BusinessWeek attributed this to the “tough-minded executive” in Jobs, who knew “when to cut and run.”


However, its sales and marketing team in India continues to be headquartered in Bangalore.

WORLD TODAY

The Prestiege

WORLD TODAY
The Prestige is a 2006 mystery thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan, with a screenplay adapted from Christopher Priest's 1995 novel of the same name. But i was sensible enough to watch it only yesterday. Wow! it is movie which you can call one of it's kind. It starts by confusing you. But as the plot unveils it makes you say Wow.
It is a must watch for every management student. Gives you a feel of need for ethics in business and also tells you that rather than competing with rivals by doing what they do , it is better to think and innovate what they have not thought of. In the movie there is a right mix of emotions, ethics, business, competition, responsibility and what not.
For people who watched it, please go around telling others to watch it. Those who dint please get your own copy and watch it.
And for the Bookies get a copy here at flipkart http://www.flipkart.com/books/0312858868

Echoes of 2008 - european banking system and global economy

there is enough sign that 2008 episode is going to repeat again even if not with the same intensity. the major indicator is the confident statements of the european banks that they are fine and their balance sheets are stronger than 2008.

even US does not seem safe out of it as it is accusing china for manipulating currency. so read this article from economic times to get a complete overview of the situation.