Last month, General Motors announced that it would not be advertising in this year's Super Bowl, because of the high prices charged by network CBS. But as the Detroit Free Press reports, the company isn't pulling out of sports advertising, it's just looking further afield: 

General Motors, which said earlier this month it would not advertise in next year's Super Bowl, plans to announce today a broad marketing and sponsorship plan with the Manchester United soccer team, a person familiar with GM's plans confirmed.

The deal would give GM major visibility alongside a soccer team that has a worldwide following -- and it would fit with the automaker's strategy of making Chevrolet and Cadillac strong global brands.[...]

Manchester United, one of the most successful clubs in English soccer, released a survey Tuesday conducted by Kantar Media Compete that showed it has 659 million followers throughout the world. But about 89.2% of its fans are located outside the Americas, the survey found. The team is particularly popular in Asia, where it has 325 million followers. It also boasts 173 million in the Middle East and Africa.

As Yiping Yang notes, Chevy will be sponsoring two Man U games in China this summer as part of the deal. 

It seems like a good idea on paper, but has anyone told them how few commercial breaks there are in a soccer game?

The "town" -- which is really more of a "gas station" -- of Buford, Wyoming, has a new owner:

The population of the least populous town in the United States appeared to at least double Thursday when two mysterious businessmen from Vietnam won the tiny hamlet with a bid of $900,000 at auction.

About a dozen bidders gathered around the town's one business to bid on Buford, Wyoming, which consists of a gas station, a three-bedroom house and a few small outbuildings on 10 acres along Interstate 80.

The bidding began at $100,000 and quickly escalated. The winning bidders were immediately whisked away by auction officials, who would not let them speak to the media.

The town's only resident, Don Sammons, said he'll miss the town but not the billboard of his face that currently adorns the highway. "I can always rent one somewhere if I need to see my face," he told CNN.

The intentions of the town's new owners have not yet been revealed. 

I was in Vancouver over the weekend for a conference that I will likely blog about in more detail shortly, but while I was there, my attention was struck by this story in Saturday's Globe and Mail, which suggests there's some interest in Iceland around the idea of dropping the struggling krona for the Canadian dollar:

There’s a compelling economic case why Iceland would want to adopt the Canadian dollar. It offers the tantalizing prospect of a stable, liquid currency that roughly tracks global commodity prices, nicely matching Iceland’s own economy, which is dependent on fish and aluminum exports, and in the future, energy.

There’s also a more sentimental reason. They’re both cold, Arctic countries.

“The average person looks at it this way: Canada is a younger version of the U.S. Canada has more natural resources than the U.S., it’s less developed, has more land, lots of water,” explained Heidar Gudjonsson, an economist and chairman of the Research Centre for Social and Economic Studies, Iceland’s largest think tank.

“And Canada thinks about the Arctic.”

Officially, the Icelandic government is targeting membership in the 27-member euro zone. But support among Icelanders is slipping.

In a recent Gallup poll, seven out of 10 Icelanders said they would happily dump their volatile and fragile krona for another currency. Their favoured alternative is the Canadian dollar, easily outscoring the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Norwegian krone.

The Icelandic government's official plan is still to adopt the euro, and the Canadian ambassdor to Iceland was upbraided by his bosses back in Ottawa for plans to give a speech promoting the Canadian dollar as a new currency for Iceland. There a number of countries where U.S. dollars are in circulation, either as an alternative to the local currency or as the sole legal tender, but none, so far, using the loonie -- currently trading at US$ 1.00497.

The fact that there's even this much enthusiasm for the idea could be evidence in support of Laurence Smith's notion of power shifting to the NORCs -- Northern Rim countries -- in the century ahead. 

Global Human Resources firm Mercer has released its 2011 Quality of Living worldwide city rankings. The index ranks cities based on political stability, economic environment, cultural environment, sanitation, education, public services, recreation and other factors. In theory, the list is used by firms to allot appropriate compensation for employees relocated to these cities. 

As it turns out, Europe's economies may be imploding, but its cities are still pretty nice places to live, comprising more than half the cities in the top 25, including first ranked, Vienna. (At least it's not those smug Norwegians again! Oslo's down at 33rd.)

Decline-o-meter: How did America's shining cities on hills fare? There are eight U.S. cities in the top 50, more than any other country, with the highest ranked being President Obama's hometown, Honolulu, at 29. That's the same number as last year, although Portland fell out of the top 50 and Pittsburgh squeaked in. (Congrats yinz!)

That's not too shabby. Although it's slightly less impressive when you consider that Canada, with about 1/10th of the population and a slightly lower urban population by percentage, has five, nearly all of them higher than 29th place. Germany has seven. No BRIC cities made the cut. 

Of course, compare the U.S. to the EU as a whole and it's not even close. But still, for all the talk of Americans' distrust of urbanization, over 80 percent of them live in cities and many of them are quite nice. 

See also: Global Thinkers Edward Glaeser and Saskia Sassen's list of 16 cities to watch from the new print issue. 

The New York Times has a very strange op-ed today from Paul V. Kane, a former international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. The piece makes the case that the U.S. should trade Taiwan to China for a deal on debt. Here's the argument:

There are dozens of initiatives President Obama could undertake to strengthen our economic security. Here is one: He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015. 

This would be a most precious prize to the cautious men in Beijing, one they would give dearly to achieve. After all, our relationship with Taiwan, as revised in 1979, is a vestige of the cold war. 

Kane argues that with this one bold stroke, Obama can "correct the country’s course, help assure his re-election, and preserve our children’s future." It could also "pressure Beijing to end its political and economic support for pariah states like Iran, North Korea and Syria and to exert a moderating influence over an unstable Pakistan."

Decline-o-meter: Giving this a two for the fact that we've gotten to the point where a suggestion like this is being featured on a prominent op-ed page. I'm all for counter-intuitive thinking, and intelligent people can disagree on the wisdom of the current U.S. Taiwan policy, but like most magic bullet solutions to major international crises, this makes absolutely no sense.

1. Why would China take this deal? According to the figures Kane himself cites, Beijing will spend around $500 billion over the next decade on Taiwan-related defense spending. So a $1.14 trillion debt write-off isn't really a bargain. Obviously Taiwan is a major priority for Beijing. But its trade relationship and relative economic position with the U.S. is a much, much bigger one. 

2. U.S. debt is approaching $15 trillion. Lowering that to $14 trillion isn't going to "save our economy". And I can't imagine a write-off on the scale doing wonders for the U.S. credit rating.

3. How exactly will this help Obama's reelection chances? I've always thought the argument that Obama is "selling out" U.S. allies was overblown, but it would be a bit hard to refute if he literally sold a U.S. ally. 

4. Even if this deal magically resolved the Taiwan situation, what does that have to do with Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Pakistan -- countries where China has completely different interests at stake?  If anything, it takes a bargaining chip off the table. 

Flawed as it is, the idea got me thinking. Canada holds about $90 billion in U.S. debt. Maybe they'd take a Dakota or two for it. 

Update: Via James Fallows, I see that the good folks at Taiwan's Next Media Animation have weighed in: 

The FEC and FEMA carried out an unprecedented nationwide test of the U.S. emergency alert system today, which was supposed to interrupt television and radio coverage at around 2 p.m. eastern time. Results of the test were mixed, as the New York Times's Media Decoder blog reports:

Many of the reported failures affected cable and satellite television subscribers, and some were quite head-scratching: Some DirecTV subscribers said their TV sets played the Lady Gaga song "Paparazzi" when the test was underway. Some Time Warner Cable subscribers in New York said the test never appeared on screen. Some Comcast subscribers in northern Virginia said their TV sets were switched over to QVC before the alert was shown.

In some cases the test messages were delayed, perhaps because the messages are designed to trickle down from one place to many. A viewer in Minneapolis said he saw the message about three minutes late. A viewer in Chattanooga, Tenn., said she saw it about 10 minutes late.

In Greensboro, N.C., a local reporter saw the alert on all the cable news channels but on none of the local broadcast networks. In Los Angeles, some cable customers said the alert lasted for almost half an hour.

Many other viewers and listeners reported that the alert arrived right on time at 2 p.m. Eastern. It halted digital video recorder playback in some households and surprised radio listeners in their cars.

The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were the two federal agencies in charge of the test. "We always knew that there would probably be some things that didn't work, and some things that did," a FEMA official said an hour after the test, acknowledging that some glitches had occurred. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agencies had not publicly acknowledged the glitches yet.

Perhaps this was all according to plan, and the government thinks Americans would prefer to spend their last moments before nuclear annihilation shopping for costume jewelry and fishing equipment while listening to Lady Gaga. But assuming this wasn't a coded message from the Illuminati and the glitches were accidental, it's not that encouraging. 

Decline-o-meter: As a side note, as someone who almost never turns on the radio and does a good portion of my "TV" watching online, it occurs to me that I would likely be blissfully unaware of the impending catastrophe my government was trying to warn me about. On the other hand, the idea of FEMA commandeering Gmail, Twitter, YouTube, Pandora, Netflix, etc. feels pretty icky from a privacy point of view. 

I suppose we'll have to count on someone to be watching TV at the time to tweet at the rest of us so we tune in. 

In its seamless blending of globalization, "rise of the rest,"  and the gnawing anxieties of upper middle-class American parents, the New York Times piece which arrives just in time for college admissions season comes pretty close to hitting the NYT trend story sweet spot. (All it needs is an animal and a health trend to achieve ultimate most-emailed status.):

NEW DELHI — Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia. 

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools.

“Daughter now enrolled at Dartmouth!” her mother, Madhavi Chandra, wrote, updating her Facebook page. “Strange swings this admission season has shown us. Can’t get into DU, can make it to the Ivies.”

Ms. Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.

This summer, Delhi University issued cutoff scores at its top colleges that reached a near-impossible 100 percent in some cases. The Indian Institutes of Technology, which are spread across the country, have an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent — and that is only from a pool of roughly 500,000 who qualify to take the entrance exam, a feat that requires two years of specialized coaching after school.

Decline watch: Like I said, this one's going viral because, like Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, it feeds into the fears of American parents that they're not doing enough to prepare their kids to compete with a massive influx of smart kids of India and China. But the real story here is that India doesn't have enough elite educational institutions to meet the demand of its qualified students. The fact that students like Moulshri are willing to pay$41,736 per year for Dartmouth instead of $500 for an Indian school says a lot. 

See Ben Wildavsky's Think Again: Education for more on this topic. 

There are few signs of the Amerislump in Stockholm. U.S. economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims were awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Economics. This is the 11th straight year that at least one of the recipients of the economics prize has been American. All three of the physics winners this year and one of the medicine winners were also American. 

In terms of total, all-time Nobel wins, the United States has more than twice as many as any other country and as this chart from Flowing Data shows, that dominance has only increased in recent years. The glaring exception is the literature category, which no American has won since Toni Morrison in 1993. 

China is something of a Nobel underperformer. While there have been dozens of Nobel winners of Chinese descent, and Chinese birth, the only one who actually made his career in China was last year's Peace Prize winnder Liu Xiaobo, one that Beijing is not exactly proud of. 

Decline-o-meter: The U.S. has a formidable lead on this one. But keep in mind that this is something of a lagging indicator since, in the science categories, as opposed to the Peace Prize, awards are typically given for work done several years in the past rather than in the previous year.  

Also, the large number of immigrants and dual citizens who have won awards in the sciences suggests that the U.S. edge may be its ability to attract talent as much as its ability to produce it. The U.S. will need to continue to be a desirable destination for the best and the brightest if the streak is to continue. 

Today's Amerislump data point comes from Ylan Q. Mui of the Washington Post: 

For the first time, lawmakers, businesses and even White House officials are courting consumers from cash-rich countries such as China, India and Brazil to fill the nation’s shopping malls and pick up the slack for penny-pinching Americans. They are wooing travelers with enticements such as coupons, beauty pageants and promises of visa reform. The payoff, they say, could be significant: 1.3 million new jobs and an $859 billion shot in the arm for the economy over the next decade.

“They’re their own little stimulus program,” said David French, senior vice president for government relations at the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

The trend underscores the depth of the United States’ reliance on countries once considered to be at the bottom of the global totem pole. The nation already counts on China and other countries to manufacture its goods, creating a $45 billion trade imbalance that is paid for with money borrowed from their coffers. Now officials are encouraging foreign travelers to buy some of those products back — and a growing number are happy to oblige.

Guo Hui, 37, who lives in Beijing, recently returned home from a two-week tour of Yellowstone National Park, Houston and Los Angeles. He estimated he spent $2,000 to rent a car and pay for gas and lodging for himself and his wife. Then there was the Ed Hardy T-shirt, the Apple laptop, the HP laptop, even baby food and formula for his child, totaling an additional $6,000.

Still, Guo said prices are significantly cheaper than in China — a pair of Adidas sneakers costs only $25 at a U.S. outlet mall.

“For that price in China, you can’t even buy counterfeits,” he said.

Decline-o-meter:

Increasing tourism is a great goal, but the idea of kick-starting an economic recovery by attracting Asian shoppers to the United States to buy goods that are, for the most part, made in Asia doesn't sound all that sustainable. The fact that Guo flew back over the Pacific with a pair of shoes that probably were shipped over the Pacific from Indonesia a few months earlier and that he saved money in the process sounds frankly ridiculous. 

On top of that, draconian security regulations mean the U.S. isn't even taking full advantage of its new status as the world's outlet mall: 

Last week, Rep. Joseph J. Heck (R-Nev.) introduced a bill aimed at cutting the time it takes to get a tourist visa to 12 days, citing waits at consulates in key markets that can stretch to more than 100 days.

The State Department has pledged to reduce wait times for appointments to 30 days, and a spokesman said it is adding a “significant” number of staffers in Brazil and China to keep up with demand. The bill is awaiting a committee hearing.

Guo, of Beijing, said he waited nearly two months for an interview for his visa. He said he is also frustrated that the pass is only good for one year, which means he could have to reapply before his next trip. New York, Miami and Orlando are on his list.

“I guess too many people want to go to the U.S.,” Hui said.

Well that's something, I guess. 

It's not all doom and gloom here at decline watch. We keep our eyes out for signs of recovery as well. Via Marginal Revolution, here a new paper from Princeton University's Angus Deaton, showing that Americans' contentment levels have returned to where they were before the crash. From the abstract:

In the fall of 2008, around the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and lasting into the spring of 2009, at the bottom of the stock market, Americans reported sharp declines in their life evaluation, sharp increases in worry and stress, and declines in positive affect. By the end of 2010, in spite of continuing high unemployment, these measures had largely recovered,
though worry remained higher and life evaluation lower than in January 2008. 

Decline-o-meter score:

This sounds great until you read into Deaton's conclusions, which substantially undercut the usefulness of this data. First of all, this may just show that Americans are adapting to their circumstances:

If people become accustomed to economic misery, so that the response of SWB to such pain is only temporary, the continuing harm is no less real nor demanding of policy attention just because people say that they are used to it. Sen (1985, 14) notes that “a person who is ill-fed, undernourished, unsheltered, and ill can still be high up in the scale of happiness or desire fulfillment if he or she has learned to have `realistic’ desires and to take pleasures in small mercies.” 

Taking a look at the world's top 20 happiest countries, according to Gallup's data, you get a sense of what this means. Yes, the top five consist of the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands -- the teacher's pets of international development statistics -- but the U.S. is also outranked by several much poorer countries, such as Panama, Costa Rica, and Brazil, as well as one with a much higher level of political strife: Israel. Turkmenistan, one of the world's most repressive states, cracks the top 20, though I have my doubts about the reliability of polling there.

Deaton concludes:

In a world of bread and circuses, measures like happiness that are sensitive to short-term ephemera, and that are affected more by the arrival of St. Valentine’s Day than to a doubling of unemployment, are measures that pick up the circuses but miss the bread.  

Perhaps it's time to get the good folks at Hallmark working on some new holidays?

Frankly, the idea that Americans are becoming so accustomed to the idea of economic distress that they're not even that unhappy about it anymore is actually more depressing.

Thanks to a sluggish economy and slightly less astronomical Wall Street bonuses, New Yorkers apparently no longer move snowflakes by the OZ. The New York Post reports:

Cocaine-related emergency-room admissions, overdoses and requests for rehab have declined since the economy started its 2008 decline, according to data obtained by The Post.

“It is sort of on a slight but steady downward trend,” said Dr. Stephen Ross, director of NYU’s Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction. “I treat patients in private practice. Many cocaine addicts tell me stories they don’t have enough money to buy it anymore.”

There were 478 “accidental” deaths in which cocaine was a factor, typically overdoses, in New York City in 2006, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

That number plunged to just 274 in 2010.

Powder-cocaine addicts typically shell out $60 to $80 a gram, so perhaps the high cost of blow is why also a smaller number of people -- 7,693 -- sought treatment for cocaine addiction in New York City last year, according to the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. That number is a drop from 9,654 in 2008.

Decline-o-meter score: 3

This might be an indicator of a slower economy, but it also might not be the worst thing -- for their own health and the global economy -- for aspiring masters-of-the-universe to lay off the nose candy. 

Mexican President Felipe Calderón said at the U.N. last week that the United States and other consumer countries are "morally obliged" to reduce the demand for narcotics. Perhaps the recession may help accomplish that. On the other hand, as White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske told FP in an interview this year, "We've become much better at producing drugs in the United States." American jobs!

Hat tip: Mike Nizza

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Proctor and Gamble has, "for the first time in 38 years... launched a new dish soap in the U.S. at a bargain price." The implication here is that the company is now marketing to an American middle class under severe distress.

It's a very interesting article. And columnist Richard Cohen, likely after watching Mad Men clean up at Sunday's Emmy awards, weaves it into a textbook example of the American Decline column genre: 

Aside from his multiple infidelities, prodigious drinking and having the personality of a mud wall, what finally caused Betty Draper to separate from Don Draper, her husband and the protagonist of the wildly popular series "Mad Men," was a clutch of Heineken beer. As Don Draper knew she would, Betty purchased the beer for their home because he had her infuriatingly pigeonholed as the typical upwardly mobile housewife of the early 1960s. The American Dream, it turns out, is about 5% alcohol.

The Heineken affront was the last straw, a bizarre crisis even for the "Mad Men" series. In a trenchant essay in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn explains the show's appeal by saying it "represents fantasies, or memories, of significant potency." For me, the memory - now, alas, a fantasy - is the assumption that Americans would get richer and richer and that, if you were an adman or a client, it made sense to market products to the affluent. Heineken, imported and thus hardly prole in origin, oddly represents an America that used to be and we may never see again.

I direct you to a recent Wall Street Journal article about Procter & Gamble. This iconic American company - Ivory, Tide, Bounty, Gillette - has introduced a dish soap at a bargain price. It's called Gain, and it represents P&G's attempt to attract less affluent customers, not out of the goodness of its corporate heart but because the middle class is shrinking.

He concludes: 

Ah, you want me to say it will soon be morning again in America. Maybe not. We are crippled by a political system and culture that resists excellence and falls back on bromides. Our problems are national, and yet a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination says he wants Washington to shrink in importance. Ditto say his fellow candidates. And at the top of this heap is a President who hasn't a clue as to how to be President.

"Mad Men" - with yet another Emmy the other night - is not about the nostalgic past and such lost pleasures as smoking. It's about the unattainable future. Betty Draper is old now. She shops at Costco, buys the cheap beer and passes up Ivory for - what's this? - Gain. A Mad Man would put it this way: Her Gain is our loss.

Decline-o-meter score: 1

Cohen's overwrought prose aside, the numbers cited in the original Journal article are alarming. As the article reports, "the middle fifth of American households grew by 2.4% a year between 2001 and 2007 and plunged by 26.2% in the following two years." The income of a median family is now lower than in 1998.

Charles Kenny may be right that the Middle Class isn't any more economically productive than other sectors of society, but on the consumption side, it's hard to dispute that Americans today are increasingly tailoring their expectations to a different kind of Middle Class life. 

And as Main Street goes, so goes Madison Avenue. If the Betty Draper of today is shopping at Costco, her huband is trying to figure out a way to make fuel economy sound sexy.