O’Connell: Could you start by telling us why you think the suburbs are in decline?

Gallagher: The suburbs were a great idea that worked really well for a long time, but they overshot their mandate. We supersized everything in a way that led many people to live far away from where they needed to be and far away from their neighbors, and that has far-reaching implications, no pun intended. People have turned away from that kind of living. Add in the demographic forces that are reshaping our whole population, and the result is a significant shift. Census data shows that outward growth is slowing and inward growth is speeding up.

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We might like to think more jobs are being created because factories are producing more car parts, cockpit mechanisms and furniture, but Robert Johnson says it’s just not that simple. He’s the director of economic analysis at Morningstar.

“I mean I can’t tell you how many times I sit down and talk with our analysts and they say, ‘I mean I can’t believe it. I just went out this factory and there were like ten guys sitting around computers,’ ” he says.

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[General Ray] Odierno called the moves “one of the largest organizational changes probably since World War II” for the service.

“If we go though full sequestration there’s going to be another reduction in brigades, there’s no way around it,” Odierno warned, adding that there will likely be more cuts coming in the heavy armor brigades, sequestration or not.

Fewer brigades, fewer soldiers, less money, and an uncertain modernization profile. With all of this in flux, what missions will the Army prioritize in the future?

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Canadians are increasingly working while on vacation, according to a recent study by Regus PLC, a global provider of flexible workplaces. The study found that 53 per cent of the Canadian professionals who responded would work one to three hours a day while on holiday. While entrepreneurs and freelancers have been taking so-called “workations” for years, now more Canadian nine-to-fivers are using the increased flexibility that technology offers to travel while continuing to work at their full-time jobs from the road. Workations allow people to travel the world without sacrificing their careers, explains Wes Lenci, a vice-president at Regus Canada, who cites significant benefits such as boosted creativity from the exposure to different cultures as well as stress reduction for employees.

But while Mr. [Tony ] Vlismas confirms technology is “absolutely important” to a workation, he found he wasn’t as reliant on technology as he expected. When in Toronto, where he also keeps a flexible schedule, he’s constantly available on his devices, but when he travels to places such as that remote Greek island, he’s in a different time zone and has limited Wi-Fi and spotty cellphone coverage. He simply makes do by setting up his calls in advance or letting people know the best times to reach him.

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A credit unions expert has praised the Church of England for its plan to out-compete payday lending company Wonga.

Dr Peter Davis, of the University of Leicester’s School of Management, has worked as a consultant on credit unions and other forms of co-operative around the world – including for the United Nations Anti-Poverty Unit.

He welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury Rev Justin Welby’s plan to build up credit unions as an alternative to payday loans that charge astronomical interest rates.

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So far, [the narrative is] so heartwarming; or so it might seem. After all, if scientists can understand the architecture of cancers, this should help them find better cures. No surprise, then, that investor interest in biomedicine is rising after several years of neglect. Indeed, the money raised through biomedical companies’ initial public offerings has jumped to $1.7bn this year, the highest level since 2000.

Sadly there is a catch; at least two challenges threaten to stop this new genomic revolution in its tracks. The first is an obvious one: as a fiscal squeeze bites in the western world, research budgets are being slashed for biomedicine and much else. This matters because even though the cost of sequencing the genome has plunged, the costs of other types of medical research remain high.

The second issue is more subtle: one consequence of the wave of recent cyber surveillance scandals is that voters are becoming more nervous about privacy. That is affecting not just online communication; it could also undermine scientists’ efforts to collect a big enough pool of genomic data to do their research.

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It was not the ideal start to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s grand initiative to bring a new morality to Britain’s banking sector….

But despite the stumble out of the gate, Welby appears committed to taking on payday loans ”“ small, high-interest, short-term loans to those who can’t get credit elsewhere ”“ as a means of “speaking for the poor.” And his plan raises questions about just how much clout the Church of England wields through its portfolio of investments and through the influence the church has over its flock ”“ how it ought to wield it.

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even as unemployed workers in Germany lose income, energy, and vitality — not to mention social connections, emotional support, and hope — they’re actually better off than employed Germans who have bad managers. That’s right: In Germany, where 71% would keep working even if they didn’t have to, disengagement at work is worse than unemployment.

Only about 30% of actively disengaged employees and unemployed workers are thriving

In 2012, Gallup administered its Q12 employee engagement survey to employed workers in Germany and its wellbeing assessment to employed and unemployed workers. Gallup asked both groups to rate their current lives and predict their lives five years in the future, then categorized them as “thriving,” “struggling,” or “suffering” based on their responses.

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It was once the curse of the working classes, but these days it seems it’s their bourgeois cousins who are developing an unhealthy relationship with drink.

To some it may come as a surprise, given that a better education, for example, could be said to aid informed decisions.

But Lucy Roca, who struggled for years with a alcohol problem, knows the truth: clever people don’t always make clever choices, they’re just good at coming up with clever excuses.

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As the scriptures tell it, Jesus expelled the money changers from the temple to cleanse it of a “den of thieves.” With some discernible echoes, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury has initiated a comparable crusade against newer financiers charging enormous interest on what are called payday loans.

Unlike the biblical showdown, though, the outcome of this newest confrontation seems freighted with moral ambiguity, risk and potential ridicule.

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Even as the U.S. stock market continues to rise, Americans’ confidence in the economy has dropped to its lowest level since late April. Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index registered -13 for the week ending July 28. This is essentially unchanged from -12 during the prior two weeks, but is 10 points lower than it was in early June. Still, consumers’ confidence remains higher than it was in early March, after automatic federal budget cuts took effect.

While Americans’ confidence has generally retreated since early June, from a longer-term perspective, the current index score is still one of the best Gallup has measured since January 2008.

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…in this process of liberalisation over the centuries, it seems we have forgotten a couple of key principles. If I lend money, the borrower makes a promise to repay. If I lend money to borrowers I believe will probably default, I am inducing people to make promises they will break. Inducing promise-breaking is straightforwardly unethical.

Again, although short-term high-interest loans may (as Eck and Melanchthon claimed) help people through temporary difficulties without their being forced to liquidate assets (e.g. sell the family car) unnecessarily, if I lend money very short term and at high interest to someone that is already insolvent and that person defaults on other creditors shortly after repaying me, I have profited at the expense of those other creditors. That could be seen as akin to theft ”” capturing assets that should rightly be used to repay other loans.

It could be difficult to regulate lending that induces promise-breaking or that extorts the assets of other creditors without preventing more innocent lending that helps with liquidity or business launching.

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Once again, the Church of England was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, below, its relatively new leader, denounced the demons of payday lending, vowing to defeat them with the church’s own credit unions. Yet almost instantly it emerged that his own organisation had played a role in their creation through its huge investment funds.
For those of us who take little interest in this declining institution beyond wondering how it remains an established church in our multi-cultural age, it is just the latest farce involving bungling bishops and clerical contortions.

Yet this weekend, even Catholic-born atheists such as me are forced to concede that the current resident of Lambeth Palace is emerging as one of the most distinctive voices in the country. His deft political touch, sharp media abilities and displays of decent humanity could even help restore his church to the role expected by its followers after decades during which it failed to capitalise on its centrality to national life.

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The morality of payday loan firms is under the spotlight. But what do faiths say about money lending and interest?

In general, usury defined as the lending of money at high interest rates, is frowned upon by religion. The three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – take a very firm stance against it.

Several passages in the Old Testament condemn usury, in particular when lending to the poor and destitute. This led to lending money at interest being forbidden in the Jewish community, explains Dr Alastair McIntosh from the Centre for Human Ecology: “In Jewish tradition charging interest was forbidden within the community, but it was permitted to outsiders.”

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For those over 50 and unemployed, the statistics are grim. While unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are lower than for young people who are recently out of school, once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding work. Over the last year, according to the Labor Department, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers.

There are numerous reasons ”” older workers have been hit both by the recession and globalization. They’re more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, and since their salaries tend to be higher than those of younger workers, they’re attractive targets if layoffs are needed.

Even as they do all the things they’re told to do ”” network, improve those computer skills, find a new passion and turn it into a job ”” many struggle with the question of whether their working life as they once knew it is essentially over.

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The Church of England’s ethical finance chief has defended its investment policy despite its stakes in businesses blamed for pollution, tax dodging, animal cruelty and child labour.

“Life is not perfectly good or perfectly bad,” Edward Mason said after it was revealed that the Church had been unwittingly bankrolling the payday lender Wonga. “Everything is a mess.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has ordered a review of the Church’s multibillion-pound investments to identify inconsistencies with its moral teachings.

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Nicola, a young woman with a daughter aged 3, was homeless, unemployed and “sofa surfing” when she sought the help of the community bank at Trinity Centre in Louth, Lincolnshire.

The centre is part of the local Church of England parish and for two hours every Wednesday morning, the bank ”” a credit union run entirely by volunteers ”” opens for business.

Nicola did not even have a bank account. The credit union waived its administrative costs to help her open an account. This meant that she was able to secure an affordable loan through the union that served as a deposit.

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…for many people in Britain the brutal question of money is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly if you have run clean out of it. Yet only someone who is truly confident around cash flows and interest rates would dare to pledge, as the Archbishop did last week, that the Church of England will back a chain of non-profit credit unions that would one day “compete” payday lenders such as Wonga out of business.

No good intention goes unpunished: just a day after that splendidly hopeful promise came the revelation that the Church of England’s pension fund itself had invested in Accel Partners, one of Wonga’s key financial backers. This was, I think, supposed to be the point at which the Archbishop was caught pitching a large stone from the door of a glass cathedral, but it somehow didn’t turn out that way. On Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday morning he openly admitted that the revelation was “very embarrassing”, and indicated that he would re-examine the Church’s decisions about its investments.

At the same time, he explained how morally complicated such choices could sometimes be: should an investment in a hotel chain, for example, be wholly disallowed simply because, like most hotels, they offered pay-per-view pornography? By the end of the interview, there was the sense that the unruffled Archbishop had treated his audience like adults.

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…before we laugh at the foolishness of the Church, we should reflect on how we are all implicated in this hypocrisy. Many of our pensions schemes and banks are invested in this billion industry built on the backs of the poor.

Welby’s courageous leadership on the issue of usurious lending practices is in stark contrast to the supine political leaders of all parties who have consistently failed to address the problem of legalized loan sharks. And Lord Maurice Glasman is exactly right to point out the challenge Welby’s action poses to the Labour Party and the left more generally. Through the leadership of Compass, Stella Creasy MP, London Citizens and the indefatigable Damon Gibbons – who since 1999 has worked on this issue through the Debt on your Doorstep campaign – some are starting to wake up to the nightmare that the kind of exploitative financial practices Wonga represents.

The silence of many on the left should be a source of deep shame, as usury is a profound challenge to all those committed to strengthening democracy and challenging oppression. Read it all.

The head of the Church of England said on Friday he was embarrassed to find out that his organisation had invested indirectly in a short-term loan company which he had vowed only days earlier to drive out of business.

The discovery of the relatively small investment was a major setback for Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, after he launched a scathing attack on “payday” lenders who charge high interest rates on short-term loans that are typically repaid when borrowers receive their wages.

But the former oil executive and a member of Britain’s Banking Standards Commission said he would push ahead with his campaign to compete with, and eventually render obsolete, a business he labels “morally wrong”.

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Tourism officials in both Carolinas are working to get visitors down roads less traveled this summer.

A $2.5 million spring advertising campaign touting “Undiscovered South Carolina,” is already showing positive results, and Duane Parrish, director of the state’s tourism department.

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The Church of England has admitted it invests in one of Wonga’s key financial backers, a day after the Archbishop of Canterbury revealed his plans to take on the payday lender he describes as “morally wrong”.

The church, which claims to have a strong ethical investment policy that explicitly bans companies involved in payday lending, invests in Accel Partners, the US venture capital firm that led Wonga’s 2009 fundraising, the Financial Times has learnt.

A Lambeth Palace spokesperson said: “We are grateful to the Financial Times for pointing out this serious inconsistency of which we were unaware. We will be asking the Assets Committee of the Church Commissioners to investigate how this has occurred and to review the holding in this pooled investment vehicle.”

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When Greece ran into financial trouble three years ago, the problem soon spread. Many observers were mystified. How could such a little country set off a continental crisis? The Greeks were stereotyped as a nation of tax-dodgers who had been living high on borrowed money for years. The Portuguese, Italians and Spanish insisted that their finances were fundamentally sound. The Germans wondered what it had to do with them at all. But the contagion was powerful, and Europe’s economy has yet to recover.

America seems in a similar state of denial about Detroit filing for bankruptcy…. Many people think Motown is such an exceptional case that it holds few lessons for other places. What was once the country’s fourth-most-populous city grew rich thanks largely to a single industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler once made nearly all the cars sold in America; now, thanks to competition from foreign brands built in non-union states, they sell less than half. Detroit’s population has fallen by 60% since 1950. The murder rate is 11 times the national average. The previous mayor is in prison. Shrubs, weeds and raccoons have reclaimed empty neighbourhoods. The debts racked up when Detroit was big and rich are unpayable now that it is smaller and poor.

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The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its International Energy Outlook today, and it’s chock-full of excellent data. It points to a number of global energy trends, and the overarching narrative that emerges is the economic ascendence of the developing world (especially China and India) and the sharp rise in energy usage expected to accompany that growth.

The EIA forecasts that OECD countries’ energy usage will grow by a surprisingly small 17 percent by 2040. But non-OECD countries will more than make up for this sluggish growth, as they are projected to nearly double their energy consumption over the next 27 years.

Sure, this is a familiar trend by now, but stifle the yawn. The actual numbers that the EIA is projecting are startling, and as you can see in the graph below, the energy sources many of these countries will be relying on in the future are worth noting….

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One of America’s chief fiscal burdens is the mounting cost of entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) ”“ an obligation that will only grow larger as baby boomers age. In tackling this problem, the United States should look to what many might see as an unlikely model ”“ the European welfare state, Sweden.

“Usually, U.S. policymakers look to Europe to determine what not to do when it comes to social-welfare policy,” James C. Capretta, former associate director of the US Office of Management and Budget, wrote a few years ago.

But, he continued: “When you are in a hole, the prudent first step is to stop digging, and the United States can indeed gain insight into how to ”˜stop digging’ the entitlement hole” by studying the reforms that some European countries have implemented. Most notably, he suggested, we should study what Sweden and Germany did to cut their long-term government pension commitments.

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The archbishop of Canterbury has told Wonga that the Church of England wants to “compete” it out of existence as part of its plans to expand credit unions as an alternative to payday lenders.

The Most Rev Justin Welby said he had delivered the message to Errol Damelin, chief executive of Wonga, one of Britain’s best-known payday lenders, during a “very good conversation”.

“I’ve met the head of Wonga and we had a very good conversation and I said to him quite bluntly ‘we’re not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence, we’re trying to compete you out of existence’,” he told Total Politics magazine.

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According to GMO, the asset manager, profits and overall net investment in the US tracked each other closely until the late 1980s, with both about 9 per cent of gross domestic product. Then the relationship began to break down. After the recession, from 2009, it went haywire. Pre-tax corporate profits are now at record highs ”“ more than 12 per cent of GDP ”“ while net investment is barely 4 per cent of output. The pattern is similar, although less stark, when looking at corporate investment specifically.

This change is profoundly odd. Economic theory says investment is driven by profitable opportunities on one side and the cost of capital on the other. High profits suggest there are decent opportunities to make money; historic lows in interest rates and highs in the stock market mean that capital is dirt cheap. Yet investment does not follow.

“We have this strange thing that the return on capital really does seem to be high, the cost of equity capital is low, and yet we’re getting a lot of share buybacks and not much investment,” says Ben Inker, co-head of asset allocation at GMO. “It just feels a bit weird.”

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In some ways, however, what is happening with our urban swim team is more the exception than the rule in our city. Some well-meaning Christians have a theology of mission that seeks to alleviate the spiritual and physical suffering of people far away, but pays little attention to needs here at home.

I know because I was one of them. I spent many years taking mission trips to Tulcea, Romania. We shared the gospel, cared for orphans, and started a medical clinic. It seemed that God moved in powerful ways. Then my friends Jon and Toni moved into one of Knoxville’s marginalized neighborhoods. Jon invited me to go on prayer walks with him on Wednesday mornings. I saw syringes on playgrounds, prostitutes turning tricks, hustlers selling drugs. Our walks led me to volunteer at the elementary school in Jon’s neighborhood. I’d assumed all the schools in our city were pretty much the same. They aren’t. Kids with B averages in Jon’s school score in the 30th percentile on standardized tests. Kids with B averages in my neighborhood score in the 90th percentile.

Along the way, a pastor named Johnny began showing me what the city looked like from the front lawn of his cash-strapped inner-city church. As I spent more time in Knoxville’s at-risk neighborhoods, I realized that I knew more about poverty in Tulcea than I knew about poverty in Knoxville. I was pursuing the common good of a city across the world while neglecting the common good of the place where I lived.Read it all.

The economy may be sputtering along. But it hasn’t been in recession for more than four years. More than half of Americans think it still is.

A majority of people ”” 54% ”” in a new McClatchy-Marist poll think the country is in an economic downturn, according to the survey conducted last week and released Tuesday.

One bright spot: July’s figure marks the lowest proportion of Americans who have held that view since 2008. About a third of those surveyed don’t think the economy is in a slump, while 8% are unsure, according to the poll. In March, 63% thought the economy was in recession.

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One of the best new books out there ”“ “something close to a non-fiction masterpiece,” according to a New York Times reviewer ”“ is The Unwinding by George Packer….The book’s author is not an American declinist. There have been other unravellings; rebuilds inevitably follow. But the context is different now. America’s greatest century is behind it. Its degree of dominance will likely never be the same.

In response to all this, how does Canada, the big neighbour to the north, position itself?

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