20 Gorgeous Posters From a Time When Travel Was Glamorous

Travel was once the epitome of luxury. People dressed in their finest clothes to go to the airport. Ships and planes were things of glamor. In that era, the posters that advertised luxe journeys were just as lovely as the journeys themselves.

The Boston Public Library's Print Department has an extensive collection of these travel posters. Here's what the library's archivists have to say about them:

Railways opened up America and Europe, luxe ocean liners introduced elegance into overseas voyages, and drivers took to the road in record numbers in their new automobiles. By the mid-1940s, new airlines crisscrossed the globe, winging adventure-seekers to far-flung destinations.

Travel agents and ticket offices during this period were festooned with vivid, eye-catching posters, all designed to capture the beauty, excitement and adventure of travel and to promote a world of enticing destinations and new modes of transportation. Individual artists gained fame for their distinctive graphic styles and iconic imagery, and many posters from this era still remain important works of art long after their original advertising purposes have faded.

Fast forward to 2013, and travel is expensive, crowded, and invasive (we're looking at you, handsy TSA pat down). But forget for a minute where things are now and remember what things once were, through the lens of these beautiful, artful travel posters of yore.

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Cruises in the early 1900s were the epitome of luxury. Now they're just floating Lord of the Flies barges.

Image credit: Flickr

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This 1935 print made Palestine look utterly divine.

Image credit: Flickr

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Artist Robert Falcucci created this 1932 advert for a French vacation. It looks like a piece of pop art.

Image credit: Flickr

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This early 1900s poster is a reminder that France has an unfair advantage in the beauty, culture, and scenery department.

Image credit: Flickr

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This poster depicts jet travel as a heavenly experience—with none of the crappy peanuts and bad service that await you today.

Image credit: LA Public Library

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Yes, this poster would have enticed us to go to the 1936 Olympics. If only the whole Nazi thing hadn't been a factor.

Image credit: LA Public Library

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This Japanese Public Railways ad still works today.

Image credit: LA Public Library

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This captures exactly what you'd imagine the French Riviera to be like in person.

Image credit: LA Public Library

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The Switzerland of the South? Artist Harry Kelly's rendering of Tasmania's Lake St. Clair has our attention.

Image credit: Flickr

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We don't need much more convincing on the winter in Austria idea.

Image credit: Flickr

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You can go fast as hell on the Autobahn—as illustrated in this tourism poster by German artist Ludwig Hohlwein.

Image credit: Flickr

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Artist Dorothy Waugh touts what Ken Burns famously called "America's best idea."

Image credit: Flickr

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Artist Edward Vincent Brewer's rendering of Yellowstone.

Image credit: Flickr

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Edward Eggleston captures the glamor of Atlantic City.

Image credit: Flickr

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Ignore the Markets (and the Fed), the Economy Is Doing Fine

You could be forgiven for missing the latest installment of market panic over the past ten days. It came and went like a summer thunderstorm -- passing over the global financial landscape quickly and violently. But unlike meteorological events that inflict actual harm, the sharp gyrations of financial markets have increasingly less relationship to real-world economies and exist in their own never-never land of self-fulfilling prophecies and conventional wisdom.

The proximate cause of the swoon was June's monthly statement from the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke's comments that the Fed might taper its purchases of bonds sooner than many market players had anticipated. The exact quote wasn't exactly dramatic (so few Fed quotes are!):

"The Committee currently anticipates that it would be appropriate to moderate the monthly pace of purchases later this year. And if the subsequent data remain broadly aligned with our current expectations for the economy, we would continue to reduce the pace of purchases in measured steps through the first half of next year, ending purchases around midyear."

The hint that the Fed would slow or even halt its monthly purchases of $85 billion of government and mortgage bonds was enough to send bond yields substantially higher and stocks substantially lower. It also made market bears substantially cockier. The most notable example was the ever-opinionated Rick Santelli on CNBC whose weekly rant took Bernanke to task not just for how he communicates, but for soft-pedaling the weak and tenuous U.S. and global financial system.

The bond market response was particularly dramatic. Yields on U.S. 10-year Treasuries went from just over 2 percent to 2.6 percent, still historically low but a substantial move in a short time. Emerging market bonds were even more eviscerated, and the ripple effects for pension funds and retirement accounts will be felt for some time as the value of supposedly safe bond holdings declined as much or more than supposedly riskier stocks.

There were other factors, including renewed concerns about China's credit situation, but in essence the gyrations in the markets reflect nothing other than the gyrations in the markets. An undue amount of the volatility stemmed from high-frequency traders (whose algorithms execute trades by the millisecond) and assorted speculators, as well as professional investors who have watched from the sidelines as stocks have gone up and have been waiting to make money from them going down.

In fact, many professionals in both the bond and stock markets have been convinced that the only reason that stocks and bonds and a host of financial instruments have been strong is because of easy money provided by both the Federal Reserve and by other central banks around the world. Former Fed chairman William McChesney Martin famously said in the mid-20th century that the role of the Fed and central banks was to provide enough money when times were tough and then "to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going." That phrase has become the cliché of choice for investors. Throw a dart at any set of commentary from fund managers and traders over the past year, and that phrase or a variant occurs time and again. Type the words "Bernanke Fed punch bowl" into Google and you get tens of thousands of results.

So when Bernanke elliptically suggested that the punch bowl might be, if not taken away, at least rationed, investors did what they were primed to do: sell and panic. It was the perfect self-fulfilling script: things aren't really good in the real world; they have only been decent in the financial world because central banks are artificially propping up assets; when central banks change those policies, the truth will be revealed and we will see sharp declines, perhaps even back to the dark days of 2008-2009.

Thankfully, we are not in those days. The sentiment of what we call Wall Street -- of global financial markets -- remains fragile. You wouldn't guess that given how watered down all of the post-2009 reforms have been, or from the relative placidity of real-world economies outside of Southern Europe. But there is a certain wide-eyed fear that hovers in market land, a sense that it all almost fell apart, that it could do so again, that calm and stability are mirages, and that we are all in some July of 1914 moment: the world is fraught, seemingly not in immediate peril, but actually is about to implode in the carnage of a world war.

Thankfully, the insular logic of many market players has not stopped real-world economies from chugging along. No, the U.S. economy is not thriving, but nor is it sinking. And yes, Europe is stuck in what appears to be a decade of despair and lack of vision about the future. Yet stocks in the U.S. have been relatively strong simply because companies have been doing relatively well, and companies have been doing relatively well because consumers have been doing relatively well throughout the world.

One of the complexities of the modern world is that core aspects of our lives that used to run in sync -- financial markets, corporate earnings, employment, income and national economic growth -- now drift their separate ways. You can have strong corporate earnings and weak national economies; decent national income but wide inequality; high unemployment and companies unable to fill open slots with skilled workers. Financial markets are still related to national economies and corporate earnings, but only the way overlapping circles are. They connect, but they have wide areas of separation and divergence.

That is why companies and markets have been doing appreciably better than real-world economies. It is also why markets can then panic and do considerably worse than either companies or real-world economies.

The maelstrom of the past week was a market issue, following its own internal narrative and the self-fulfilling expectations of its main participants. As quickly as markets sank, they then began to recover. That should be a reminder that markets are not a canary, and there is no coal mine. And that is all for the best.

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44% of Young College Grads Are Underemployed (and That's Good News)

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that a full 44 percent of recent college graduates were underemployed as of 2012, meaning that they were working in jobs that did not require their degrees. 

Yes, it sounds terrible. But in a subtle way, this is actually good news. 

Reports like the Fed's have helped fuel a good deal of post-recession soul searching about the value of a college degree, with lots of writers asking some version of the question former White House budget director Peter Orszag posed in a Bloomberg column this week: "Why are so many college graduates driving taxis?" Sub in bartender, barista, or whatever other low-paid service job you like, and you've captured the concern that's on a lot of people's minds.  

Unfortunately, these conversations lack historical context. The lot of young college graduates has obviously deteriorated in the past few years. But it's less clear whether that's because the value proposition of college has fundamentally changed, or if it's because the economy got fed through a wood chipper during the recession and we still haven't picked up all the pieces. 

The Fed report gives us a little insight on that front. First, as it shows in the graph below, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates tends to move more or less in step with unemployment among all working age adults. Their suffering is not particularly unique. They're having trouble finding work because everybody is.  

Something similar seems to be going on with underemployment, which has also risen and fallen with the health of the economy. As New York Fed President William Dudley noted yesterday, college graduates during the 80s and early 90s were just as likely to be overqualified for their jobs as the young BA's of today. And then, as now, most grads eventually made it into jobs appropriate for their skills. Our memory of the tech boom makes the problems facing contemporary college grads seem particularly painful. But they're not entirely without precedent. And it's not clear they're a product of anything other than a bad jobs cycle. That's a double relief.

As it turns out, this is all pretty much in keeping with the study that inspired Orszag's column. In March, Canadian economists Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand released a working paper arguing that demand for high-tech skills, which fueled the college graduate hiring spree of the 90s, had tailed off. As a result, they argued, underemployment had grown...back to where it was 30 years ago. As Beaudry put it to me in an interview: "This isn't saying all of a sudden it isn't worth going to college. It's saying it's, at worst, as good as it was in the eighties." 

From a jobs perspective, at least. I've spent this post focusing on the good news about the Fed's report, but I'd be remiss not to mention the bad. The obvious difference between higher education today and in 1990 is the cost of a degree, and the amount of debt students take on to finance it. So while failing to land a college-level job straight out of school might have been tolerable in the past, today it might mean severe financial hardship, especially if students aren't savvy about how to handle their student debt (three words: Income. Based. Repayment).

So here's the upshot: A college diploma is still plenty valuable on the job market by historical standards, but it's gotten expensive. Let's focus on the latter problem, instead of panicking about English majors driving town cars. 

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How Silicon Valley's Tech Reign Will End

Reuters

Why is Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley?

"You've got Stanford, you've got federal expenditures, and you've got an ecosystem" of start-up mentors and established institutions, said Bruce Katz, the founding director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. But Silicon Valley's stranglehold on West Coast innovation is in danger, he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Friday. The main problem?

It's no fun to live in Silicon Valley.

"What's happening now is workers want to be in Oakland and San Francisco," he told Walter Isaacson. Young workers want to live in a city -- somewhere they can ride bikes, shop locally, walk to their favorite restaurants and bars, and live in a dense urban or urban-lite environment with nearby amenities. But Silicon Valley isn't like a city. It's like a suburb. "Silicon Valley is going to have to urbanize," Katz said. "[There is a] migration out of Silicon Valley to places where people really want to live."

The housing market might be on the march this summer, but Silicon Valley is still about as flat as a silicon chip. Mountain View, Palo Alto, and its kin aren't having a construction "boom," and that's precisely the problem.

Katz' new book, The Metropolitan Revolution, argues that there is no "national economy," realistically speaking, but rather a network of leading city economies whose density of talent and productivity drive the entire country's GDP. But in many of our richest and most productive metros -- not just around San Jose and San Francisco, but also New York and Washington -- housing costs and limited housing supply prevent some of the most smartest people from moving into the most productive cities.

In response to a question, Katz argued that untangling the web of NIMBYs and state and city zoning laws was intractable and won't be solved by outsider technocrats walking into City Hall with a memo saying: Build Higher. Silicon Valley's location isn't destiny. It's the result of a long and complicated series of decisions by various government agencies, companies and individuals over many decades. But new technology comes from people. And if people would rather live and work in dense and walkable cities, Silicon Valley's stranglehold on innovation in America isn't as strong as we might have thought.

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CEOs Now Earn 273 Times the Average Worker's Pay—Should You Be Mad

CEOs: They used to be just like us. Well, at least a lot more like us. Thirty years ago, the average chief executive of a large public company earned less than 30-times more than the typical worker. But today they rake in between 202 and 273-times the pay, as shown in the graph below from a new Economic Policy Institute paper. (The precise number depends on whether you count the stock options they're awarded during a year towards pay, as in the light blue line, or the stock options they cash in, shown via the dark blue line.) 

It's not hard to figure out why CEO pay has bounced back as of late. The job market certainly hasn't fully recovered from the recession, but corporate profits have been on a tear along with share prices. And since the 1980s, executive compensation has been pretty tightly correlated with the stock market's performance. When investors do well, management does well.

The bigger question, the one you could spend many thousands of words investigating, is why CEO pay packages have become so handsome in the first place. I'm not about to offer a definitive answer to that question, but the EPI report does add an interesting wrinkle to the debate.
There are two large camps on this issue. On the one hand, you have those who believe that in a world of competing multinational corporations, CEO's have simply become more valuable than ever. Companies are larger and generate more wealth. When executives fail -- as Derek Thompson has noted -- their incompetence affects more lives than perhaps ever before. Proponents of this view  often note that while CEO compensation has jumped, so too have earnings for other highly talented professionals who have large sums of money riding on their abilities. In a globalized economy, skills are simply worth more than ever.
The other side, which includes more liberal organizations like EPI and the Center for American Progress, tend to subscribe to a theory known as "management power." CEO's, they say, essentially have so much sway over their corporate boards that they can set their own pay packages, often with assistance from compliant compensation consultants. I'm simplifying a lot, but that's the gist.
Now back to the EPI's report. It turns out, CEOs aren't just pulling away from average workers; they're pulling away from the rest of the elite as well. Chief execs at large companies are now making 4.7 times what other workers in the top 0.1 percent of wage earners bring in, up from an average ratio of about 3-to-1 that prevailed through 1979. Now, I wouldn't say this makes a slam dunk case that executives are inflating their own pay beyond reason. It might just be that, these days, CEOs are truly becoming more valuable compared to even other highly educated, highly accomplished professionals with high stakes jobs. But it does re-enforce the idea that something different is going on in the c-suite than in the rest of the economy. And whatever it is might be reason for outrage.

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Why the Recovery Has Been So Miserable in 2 Charts

Four years since it officially began, and three years since Tim Geithner welcomed us to it, the recovery still feels like a recession to most. Even now, there are three unemployed people for every job opening -- worse than it ever was after the tech bubble burst -- and growth is too slow to push that dismal ratio back to normalcy anytime soon.

So why hasn't this recovery felt like one? Well, for one, households have had a helluva debt hangover from the housing bust that's left them struggling to pay back what they already owe, rather than borrowing more; for another, the financial system's near-cardiac arrest has made banks wary of lending, and businesses wary of investing. Or, as Keynes might put it, Lehmangeddon has robbed us of our risk-taking animal spirits -- and aggregate demand.

Still, as the Wall Street Journal points out, this recovery hasn't been all doom and gloom. Compared to every other recovery since 1970, stocks are doing better now, industrial production is doing better than average, and so is business investment in software and equipment. But, aside from weak consumer spending, there are two culprits for our remarkably consistent and consistently unremarkable recovery: housing and austerity. As you can see below, construction of single-family homes the past four years has lagged every other post-1970 recovery. Now, multifamily building has made up for this a bit the past few years, but not nearly enough to power quicker GDP growth.

It's hardly surprising that we've built so few homes in the aftermath of the housing bubble, but, believe it or not, we've overdone it: there's now a housingshortage. Indeed, that's why there's been a surge of building in the past year, and it's why, as my colleague Derek Thompson points out, there's finally a chance the recovery will accelerate past stall speed. Housing and cars super-charge recoveries, and we haven't had much spending on either (though car sales have rebounded a bit from their lows) -- until now.

That's assuming, of course, that Congress stops screwing up. Now, House Republicans like to talk about TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICITS, and how Obama is sending us down the road to fiscla ruin, if not serfdom, but the reality is government spending has increased less since the beginning of this recovery than in any other recent one. Between the stimulus fading out, state and local cuts, the debt ceiling deal, and sequestration, overall government spending has fallen 6.3 percent since June 2009. It rose 21.6 percent during the mythologized Reagan recovery of 1982.

If not for this ill-timed austerity, Phil Izzo of the Wall Street Journal calculates unemployment would be 7.1 percent today instead of the 7.6 percent it really is. And that's just assuming the government hadn't laid off the 750,000 workers it has since June 2009; it doesn't project the kind of public-sector job growth has otherwise been typical.

Recoveries from financial crises tend to be long, slow slogs, but it didn't have to be this long or slow this time. With a little more building and a little more socialism it wouldn't have been.

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What's the Matter With TV News?

Reuters

Forty to 50 million people -- more than the combined populations of New York State and Texas -- are desperate for in-depth and original television journalism, said Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of international operations for Al Jazeera America. And that's why Al Jazeera America, the new channel he's launching, is going to be a hit in the United States, he claimed at the Aspen Ideas Festival Thursday afternoon.

The rest of the panel wasn't so confident. In fact, some were downright hostile to the idea that serious news has a big and untapped audience.

Lawrence O'Donnell, a primetime host on MSNBC, which has moved away from original reporting toward an op-ed-TV model, objected strongly to the idea that there was a 50-million-person audience for a serious news channel that didn't already exist.

"I think if you did a survey of the 300 million Americans, I think something like 50 million would tell you they want to read the complete works of William Shakespeare. They won't," he said, even if he personally placed the Bard's complete works on 50 million living room tables.

"[Serious television] is being offered to them every night on PBS," he added. "NewsHour is doing it every night. [Every discussion about serious television] always forgets that PBS exists. We're running the market test every single night."

Hari Sreenivasan, a PBS NewsHour correspondent, acknowledged that NewsHour only gets about one million viewers a night. But while he was self-deprecating about PBS' diminutive role in the television ecosystem, he said the network had the advantage of not having to respond to the brutal challenges of corralling massive audiences with snappy opinion-based infotainment. "For a noncommercial audience we have the luxury of time," he said.

TV news has a business problem, but it also has a distinct civic problem. The business problem is how to concentrate audiences in front of ad-supported news. The civic problem is how to inform the general American public, which has, admittedly, never been spectacularly informed, the panel agreed.

Great ratings don't come from eight-month special reports on Haiti, O'Donnell said. They come from the television equivalent of must-read newspaper columnists.  People tune in to see what their favorite personalities think. "When you get to 9pm in America ... what they're doing with their remote is 'I want to know what O'Reilly thinks about this. I want to know what Rachel thinks about this.'"

Building a profitable serious news channel suffers from the somewhat intractable fact that serious news has never been profitable, moderator James Fallows said. Instead, it's always attached itself to a "host body," like the Travel Section of theLos Angeles Times, or the car and real estate sections of other big papers. Perhaps the problem with TV news isn't that the networks aren't giving audiences what they want. It's that TV news is giving audiences exactly what they want, and some people don't like the outcome. The most profitable networks aren't "serious," and the most "serious" networks aren't profitable.

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