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Chairman Sen. Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat, says he has invited Dimon to testify about the loss at the nation’s largest bank. Since Dimon acknowledged the misstep, Democratic lawmakers have stepped up calls for stricter oversight of major financial firms.

A spokeswoman for the bank says Dimon will accept the invitation.

Johnson says the committee will hold hearings on Tuesday and June 6 at which federal regulators will provide information on the trading loss. Dimon would testify at a third hearing sometime later, Johnson said.

Dimon this week apologized to the bank’s shareholders for the loss.

Associated Press

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These days? Not so much. It’s the celebrity judges who are raking in the cash and using TV contests not only as a way to re-launch a fading career, but to further boost a thriving one.

For music stars in an era of weak record sales, the trend spells victory for their bank account, but for fans and the music industry always hungering for a new star, it’s a loss. And for TV networks, the once cheap-to-produce shows are ever more expensive, yet they don’t always pay off in bigger audiences.

As recent winners of “The Voice” and “American Idol” fade into obscurity, pop princess Britney Spears and ex-Disney Channel teen star Demi Lovato have signed up to judge “The X Factor,” while controversial radio DJ Howard Stern is the biggest star on the new season of “America’s Got Talent”.

Spears and Stern are among the most highly-paid TV judges, each earning a reported $15-$20 million annual salary – a bigger figure than many A-list Hollywood actors command for a movie.

“The whole playing field has shifted from when ‘American Idol‘ started (2002) and the judges were people whose biggest hits were behind them. Now it is seen as a really viable option for current artists,” said Melinda Newman, a music blogger for entertainment website Hitfix.com.

Spears and Stern join a roster of celebrity TV judges that includes Christina Aguilera, Steven Tyler, Sharon Osbourne, Cee Lo Green and Blake Shelton who have seen their fame, record sales and endorsement deals skyrocket since they began sitting in front of the stage rather than on it.

Kelly Clarkson, the first “American Idol” champion and now a Grammy-winning singer with worldwide celebrity, joins the judge club next week on “Duets,” which pairs would-be singers with established stars.

Lyndsey Parker, managing editor of Yahoo! Music, said a lot of people were surprised at Clarkson’s decision, but “no-one is looking at that as a step back.”

With the focus on the judges, what happens to the wannabe pop stars these shows were supposed to discover and promote?

“The unfortunate thing is that as there becomes more emphasis on hiring famous names, it goes off the contestants,” Parker said.

IT PAYS TO JUDGE

Back in 2002, record producer Simon Fuller – the man behind Britain’s “Spice Girls” – created “American Idol” as a way to discover and sign new singers to his 19 Entertainment group.

Few people had ever heard of judge Simon Cowell, an acerbic British record producer. Host Ryan Seacrest was an ambitious Los Angeles radio DJ, Randy Jackson was a backroom record producer and Paula Abdul was an almost forgotten 1980s pop star.

Fuller’s format worked for several years, turning Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Clay Aiken, Jennifer Hudson, Chris Daughtry and Adam Lambert into bonafide recording artists bringing in millions of dollars for record companies.

But by 2011, given the success of the show as the most-watched program on U.S. airwaves averaging well over 20 million viewers a week, the dynamic of making a celebrity had shifted.

That year, “Idol” champion Scotty McCreery saw his debut album sell more than one million copies, but his success was dwarfed by that of incoming judges Jennifer Lopez and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Lopez, who had been dropped by her record company before joining “American Idol,” scored her biggest single ever with “On the Floor”, launched a fashion line, got her own Latin music talent show, multiple endorsement deals and a world tour. This week Lopez topped the annual Forbes list of the world’s 100 most powerful celebrities.

Tyler, 64, has won new fans, written a book and pulled Aerosmith back from the verge of an acrimonious break-up and into the recording studio for the band’s first album of original material since 2001.

“Tyler probably opened the door in a huge way because he is a rock legend. I think a lot of people were surprised that someone of his stature would do it,” said Parker.

Also in 2011 came “The Voice,” which has proven to be one of the few ratings winners for NBC. Yet, last year’s champion Javier Colon and runner-up Dia Frampton didn’t even crack the Billboard top 100 with their debut albums.

Moreover, while the show has been an NBC bright spot, it failed to challenge “American Idol” for overall viewers this year as strongly as some industry experts had predicted. About 15 million viewers tuned in for “The Voice” on average this year, compared to more than 19 million for “Idol”.

The stars of “The Voice,” however, fared better. Judges Aguilera and Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine had one of the world’s biggest selling singles of 2011 with “Moves Like Jagger” which they first performed on the show. Country artist Shelton has seen his mainstream star soar since he joined “The Voice.”

Jermaine Paul, last week’s winner of the second season of “The Voice” has yet to produce an album. His cover version of “I Believe I Can Fly” fared well on iTunes the day after his win, but it was a blip compared to Maroon 5′s “Payphone” single with rapper Wiz Khalifa, which debuted on “The Voice” in April.

KING OF ALL MEDIA?

Now entering the fray are Spears and Stern, who were hired by Cowell in a bid to produce bigger ratings for their respective shows: “X Factor” which returns in Fall 2012 and “America’s Got Talent” which debuted this week.

Stern, the self-described “King of All Media” whose satellite radio show on SiriusXM is reported to earn him some $80 million a year, insists his reason for doing “America’s Got Talent” is simply that he is a big fan of talent shows.

“I didn’t need the money. I didn’t need more fame. I certainly feel famous enough. I certainly feel I am comfortable in my life and I am happy about that. I just love the show. And I thought, ‘wow, how much fun to do it,’” he told reporters in a news conference last week.

Yet for all the fanfare around his hiring, Stern’s first outing this week on “America’s Got Talent” was watched by about five million fewer people than last year’s season kickoff.

Then there is Spears. After almost 15 years as a global pop icon, the former Disney star now 30 and a mother of two kids, may have a different motive than Stern for joining “X Factor”.

“That is a steady paycheck without having to go on the road. That is how she makes her money now, not by record sales, but by touring and endorsement deals,” said Parker.

But will she bring more viewers? That is, after all, what producer Cowell and broadcast network Fox hope she will do. And if so, will those viewers create the world’s next big thing in music like “American Idol” once did?

Last season’s “X Factor” winner, Melanie Amaro, had little impact on the U.S. music scene with her first single and five months on, she is still working on her debut album.

Times have changed, and Andy Dehnart, editor of RealityBlurred.com, expressed concern for Spears. “I think ‘X Factor’ is a gigantic ego trip for Simon Cowell and I worry that Britney is another piece of that,” he said.

That’s not to say TV talent shows don’t occasionally still find stars who eclipse their mentors, such as British boy band One Direction.

But “now it seems like all the shows are trying to one up each other by stocking their judging panel with people who are already famous, and that does make it harder for the contestants to stand out,” said Parker.

(Additional reporting by Christine Kearney; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Patricia Reaney)

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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Despite an unprecedented rate of economic growth, Chinese people are less happy overall than they were two decades ago, reveals timely new research from economist Richard Easterlin, one of the founders of the field of “happiness economics” and namesake of the Easterlin Paradox.

In 1990, at the beginning of China’s economic transformation, a large majority of Chinese people across age, education, income levels, and regions reported high levels of life satisfaction. Sixty-eight percent of those in the wealthiest income bracket and 65 percent of those in the poorest income bracket reported high levels of satisfaction in 1990.

But life satisfaction has fallen dramatically among the poorest Chinese in the last two decades, according to the study, reflecting a growing unease about emplyment prospects and the dissolution of the social safety net.

Despite happiness parity just twenty years ago, the percentage of the poorest Chinese who say they are satisfied with their lives has fallen more than 23 percentage points. Only 42 percent of Chinese people in the lowest income bracket reported high levels of life satisfaction in 2010, while, at the same time, the percentage of the wealthiest Chinese who said they were satisfied with their lives grew about 3 percentage points, to 71 percent.

The paper, appearing the week of May 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes on the heels of the revelation that the Chinese government has not released an official report about wealth distribution in the country in more than a decade.

“There are many who believe that well-being is increased by economic growth, and that the faster the growth, the happier people are. There could hardly be a better country than China to test these expectations,” said Easterlin, University Professor and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California.

“But there is no evidence of a marked increase in life satisfaction in China of the magnitude that might have been expected due to the enormous multiplication in per capita consumption,” Easterlin said. “Indeed people are slightly less happy overall, and China has gone from being one of the most egalitarian countries in the world in terms of life satisfaction to one of the least.”

Overall, life satisfaction among Chinese fell sharply in the early 1990s, bottomed out in the 2000s and has since recovered to about the same or slightly lower levels of individual happiness ? despite the largest period of economic growth in history and a quadrupling of China’s GDP per capita. The analysis uses a wide range of data sets on self-reported life satisfaction and is the first to track happiness trends in China over a long period (from 1990 to 2010) rather than using simple comparisons of points in time.

The overall downward trajectory in life satisfaction among low-income people in China, the most populous country in the world, is similar to observed trends in the transition countries of central and eastern Europe, and in both areas reflects the emergence of substantial unemployment and the dissolution of the social safety net, correlating to declining satisfaction in particular areas of life such as household finances and health.

On one of the surveys included in the latest PNAS analysis, people in China were asked a general question about how they viewed their own health. In 1990, a majority of Chinese people in both the wealthiest bracket and the poorest bracket rated their health as “good” or “very good” ? with only a four percentage point divide across income levels. By 2007, the divide in perception about personal health had grown to 28 points, driven by a decline in self-reported health among the poorest Chinese and an increase among the wealthiest.

“One may reasonably ask how it is possible for life satisfaction not to improve in the face of such dramatic per capita economic growth,” said Easterlin, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “There is more to life satisfaction than material goods, and there is an important policy lesson here for the Chinese government and policymakers generally: among ordinary Chinese people, especially the less educated and lower-income, jobs and income security, reliable and affordable health care, and provision for children and the elderly, are of critical importance to life satisfaction.”

###

University of Southern California: http://www.usc.edu

Thanks to University of Southern California for this article.

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Skechers USA Inc. will pay $40 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that the footwear company made unfounded claims that its Shape-ups shoes would help people lose weight and strengthen their butt, leg and stomach muscles. Kardashian, Burke and other celebrities endorsed the shoes in Skechers ads.

The settlement, announced Wednesday, also involves the company’s Resistance Runner, Toners, and Tone-ups shoes. Skechers made deceptive claims about those shoes, too, says the agency.

Consumers who bought the shoes will be eligible for refunds.

The commission settled similar charges with Reebok last year over its EasyTone walking shoes and RunTone running shoes. That $25 million agreement also provided customer refunds.

Skechers billed its Shape-ups as a fitness tool designed to promote weight loss and tone muscles with the shoe’s curved “rocker” or rolling bottom ? saying it provides natural instability and causes the consumer to “use more energy with every step.” Shape-ups cost about $100.

Ads for the Resistance Runner shoes claimed people who wear them could increase “muscle activation” by up to 85 percent for posture-related muscles and 71 percent for one of the muscles in the buttocks, said the FTC.

The commission says Skechers falsely represented that clinical studies backed up the company’s claims about its toning shoes. The settlement bars Skechers from misrepresenting any tests, studies or research on its shoes in the future.

In Wednesday’s court filing, Skechers says it disputes the charges and is pursuing additional studies.

The settlement is part of a broader agreement also being announced Wednesday ? a settlement resolving a multi-state investigation led by the attorneys general from Tennessee and Ohio and involving more than 40 states.

The company, based in Manhattan Beach, Calif., will provide $40 million for customer refunds in the federal case and $5 million to the states.

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Total People in Discussion: 18

?? I was shocked to see that 91 percent of the 11,484 respondents to a Morning Call Question of the Day last week said they did not favor President Obama?s stance supporting gay marriage.

?? I know we shouldn?t put much stock in any response to one of those Morning Call questions. For whatever reason, I?ve found they tend to skew more conservative than the Lehigh Valley as a whole, based on election results and real polls. Because they?re not scientific, you can?t reliably draw any conclusions from a poll in which everyone is invited to click on an? answer,. You have no way of knowing if it the respondents are representative of the area?s larger population.

?? For example, I think you?ll find that among many young people, gay marriage is a nonissue. Since newspaper readership tends to skew older, those younger people probably were underrepresented.

?? Still, that margin was so wide that it far exceeds whatever that demographic difference would suggest.? Polls show that that the population as a whole increasingly is OK with gay marriage and is pretty evenly divided on the issue. Are people voting differently when they get to do it anonymously?

??? Obama himself described his view as something that has evolved over the years, a process I think many of us have undergone. I like to believe that he?s sincere about that, rather than this was some kind of political calculation, but I have no doubt that politics at least were discussed before he went public.

? ? Either way, I think it was the right decision. If we agree that people don?t really get to choose their sexual orientation ? and I think the science and plain common sense have made that clear ? it?s hard to argue that they shouldn?t be able to formalize their relationships in the same way straight people do.

?? I have no problem with particular religions choosing not to perform or sanction gay marriages. That?s their right. ?But our government needs to get out of the way of people?s pursuit of commitment and happiness ? and out of everyone?s? bedrooms in general.

? What do you think? Are you part of that 91 percent? Do you think that number really reflects the Lehigh Valley?s viewpoint?

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