What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:

1.  Unemployment Edges Down as People Continue to Leave the Workforce in September: One plus of having the federal government starting back up is that we get to see all of those statistics we were missing. Case in point: the latest report on the employment situation. Dean Baker of the Center For Economic and Policy Research takes a look at the numbers and notes that the past three months have seen an average increase of 143,000 jobs, which unfortunately leaves the employment-to-population rate unchanged. “On the whole, this is not a very encouraging report,” Baker writes. “It reinforces the notion that the economy had slowed in the third quarter. This is before any negative effects of the shutdown” by the feds for more than two weeks.

2.  Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?: Japan’s population continues to shrink. One reason is that, for young people, marriage and children and even amorous relationships look more and more unappealing. This is especially true for women who wish to have fulfilling careers. “Romantic commitment seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and in-laws,” writes Abigail Haworth in The Guardian. “Japan’s Institute of Population and Social Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that staying single is ‘preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like.’”

3.  Rediscovering the Price of Money When Things Can’t Get Worse: One good thing about hitting bottom is that it gives your feet something to stand on. With that in mind, Steen Jakobsen, chief economist of Denmark’s Saxo Bank, writes that aggressive central-bank interventions are delaying Europe’s bottoming out and endangering its long-term recovery. “It’s time to realise that the reason capitalism won the war against Communism in the 1980s was its strong market-based economy—itself based on price discovery,” Jakobsen writes at TradingFloor.com. “Now the policymakers ‘in their wisdom’ are copying everything a planned economy entails: central planning and control, no price discovery, one supplier of credit, money and the corollary effect of suppressing SMEs and even individuals.”

4.  Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we asked readers what they thought of the “flipped” classroom, which transforms a teacher from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” Judie Forbes had this to say:

An even better tweak is the way the old executive management PhD courses used to be run. The professor set the topic and moderated the discussion, recognizing that the expertise in the room exceeded his own. It was a great way to hear about the nuances of application of the topic management theory in various industries.