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The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.

Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.

This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations

This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.

At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work

According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.

There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics

This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.

Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”

such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”

These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.

These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.

This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.

Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle

Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.

A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio

the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.

The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.

Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?

The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:

Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.

Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.

Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.

Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.

Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.

Many of the worlds’ greatest medical challenges stem from poverty, inequality, discrimination, pollution, and environmental devastation, as critical race, gender, and decolonization scholars have shown us.

Let’s be alert to the ways in which risks and ethical issues present themselves at every stage of developing and implementing promising new treatments. Scientists themselves do not have to do this work. That is what social scientists do.

Soon, they begin to understand the principle of “equity” – a “fair” distribution can be unequal if it takes into account people’s need, effort or merit. For instance, a sibling who does more chores may be entitled to more cookies. This shift toward equity appears to be universal in humans and follows similar patterns across cultures.

Our interpretation is that the young brains used that short lag time to consider why an adult might have handed out the treats in a slightly unfair way and then resolved that it may actually have been fair.

So the EEG recordings indicate that even 4-year-old children expect distributions to be perfectly equal, which makes sense given their natural preference for equality. When children, especially after age 5, watch an adult make a completely unfair distribution, they work to try to understand why this might be the case.

Put more generally, how do people balance self-interest against fairness for others when those motivations conflict?

The proposer was actually a computer that let us manipulate the fairness of the offers. We found that both fairness for self and fairness for the other were important for participants’ decisions, but people were more willing to tolerate offers which were unfair to others if they themselves received an unfair offer.

But in our studies, we found that rather than shared brain areas, distinct brain networks were involved in thinking about fairness for self and other.

Overall, these results suggest that people prioritize their own payoffs first and only later integrate how their options affect other people

One implication from our work is that when people want to reach a compromise, it may be important to ensure that no one feels taken advantage of. Human nature seems to be to make sure you’ve taken care of yourself before you consider the needs of others.

Norway’s experience doesn’t mean that younger, healthier people should avoid being vaccinated.

Official reports of allergic reactions have been rare as governments rush to roll out vaccines to try to contain the global pandemic.

All the reported deaths related to “elderly people with serious basic disorders,”

The first people to be immunized in many places have been older than that as countries rush to inoculate nursing-home residents at high risk from the virus.

for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences. For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.

This does not mean that there is a causal link between vaccination and death.

Over half (51 percent) of respondents reported that they either didn’t believe or weren’t sure that the data recorded in their EMRs was accurate.

The healthcare industry’s growing reliance on clinical data and EHRs requires that patients are educated and empowered about data collection, sharing, and use, the report authors noted. Bridging knowledge gaps between health systems and patients has the potential to significantly improve care, medical research, and health equity.

All these examples tell us that increased efficiency is good, and that removing friction increases efficiency. But the financial crisis, along with the activities of the Occupy movement and the criticism being leveled at Mr. Romney, suggests that maybe there can be too much of a good thing. If loans weren’t securitized, bankers might have taken the time to assess the creditworthiness of each applicant. If homeowners had to apply for loans to improve their houses or buy new cars, instead of writing checks against home equity, they might have thought harder before making weighty financial commitments. If people actually had to go into a bank and stand in line to withdraw cash, they might spend a little less and save a little mor

Finding the “mean” isn’t easy, even when we try to. It is sometimes said that the only way to figure out how much is enough is by experiencing too much. But the challenge is even greater when we’re talking about companies, because companies aren’t even trying to find the “mean.” For an individual company and its shareholders, there is no such thing as too much efficiency. The price of too much efficiency is not paid by the company. It is what economists call a negative externality, paid by the people who lose their jobs and the communities that suffer from job loss. Thus, we can’t expect the free market to find the level of efficiency that keeps firms competitive, provides quality goods at affordable prices and sustains workers and their communities. If we are to find the balance, we must consider stakeholders and not just shareholders. Companies by themselves won’t do this. Sensible regulation might.

So the real criticism embodied by current attacks on Bain Capital is not a criticism of capitalism. It is a criticism of unbridled, single-minded capitalism. Capitalism needn’t be either of those things. It isn’t in other societies with high standards of living, and it hadn’t been historically in the United States. Perhaps we can use the current criticism of Bain Capital as an opportunity to bring a little friction back into our lives. One way to do this is to use regulation to rekindle certain social norms that serve to slow us down. For example, if people thought about their homes less as investments and more as places to live, full of the friction of kids, dogs, friends, neighbors and community organizations attached, there might be less speculation with an eye toward house-flipping. And if companies thought of themselves, at least partly, as caretakers of their communities, they might look differently at streamlining their operations.

We’d all like a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon. The forces of friction that slow us down are an expensive annoyance. But when we’re driving a car, we know where we’re going and we’re in control. Fast is good, though even here, a little bit of friction can forestall disaster when you encounter an icy road. Life is not as predictable as driving. We don’t always know where we’re going. We’re not always in control. Black ice is everywhere. A little something to slow us down in the uncertain world we inhabit may be a lifesaver.

Of the 1,027 private colleges studied, 761 have graduation rates of less than 67 percent.

the rate is even lower, 46 percent

high schools in which more than a third of students do not graduate on time are labeled to receive special attention by federal standards.

a college can have a graduation rate as low as 2 percent and still preserve its accreditation

“We act as if they’re all the same right now. In K-12 we differentiate.”

“Graduation rates are primarily two factors: what the student brings and what the college brings to the experience,”

Colleges with lower graduation rates tend to admit a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, which usually go to lower-income students.

money is a huge roadblock to graduation.

“That is the No. 1 reason our students give when they drop out,”

any setback or poor grade can make them question whether they should be in college in the first place

colleges are not fulfilling their promise of upward mobility to students, particularly those who are trying to become the first in their families to earn a degree

“It’s not that the low-income students are destined to fail,” Mr. Shireman said. “It’s just that they have more challenges, so it takes a lot more resources to ensure that they succeed.”

“Up” comes off as a rebuke to traditional cable shout-fests like CNN’s late “Crossfire.” Thanks to its early weekend time slot, the program has the freedom to unwind over two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Guests are encouraged to go deep into the issues of the week, and not try to score cheap-shot points to win the debate.

“The first and foremost important rule of the show: we’re not on television — no talking points, no sound bites,” he said, his hair still a bed-head tangle and his suit collar askew. “We have a lot of time for actual conversation. So actually listen, actually respond.”

An hour later, as the cameras rolled, Mr. Hayes and his guests waded thigh-deep into an analysis of private equity and whether it is bad for the economy. At a table of wonks, Mr. Hayes, who studied the philosophy of mathematics at Brown, came off as the wonkiest as he deconstructed the budgetary implications of tax arbitrage. Opinions were varied and passionate, but there was no sniping, no partisan grandstanding.

“I like t

he fact that it’s dialogic, small-d ‘democratic,’ ” Mr. Hayes said of his show. “We’re all sitting at t

Since Dec. 26, it has been No. 1 on average in its Sunday time slot on cable news channels among viewers ages 18 to 34, according to Nielsen figures provided by the network.

Ms. Maddow said on her program that “Up” was “the best news show on TV, including this one.” “Chris is the antidote to the anti-intellectual posing that has characterized the last decade in cable news,”

“No one else in cable is even trying long-form, off-the-news-cycle dives like him — let alone succeeding at them as he is. He’s giving the network Sunday shows a run for their money.”

As a student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, he aspired to write. “My dream when I was 14,” he said, “was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in The New York Review of Books.”

The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke

The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early

Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.

Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."

robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.

Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.

The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?

if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.

Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.

In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change

Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories

Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.

We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.

Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them

in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.

the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles

in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.

In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too

Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.

Take driverless cars.

The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced

There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin

we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.

The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.

we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."

would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?

Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.

 economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"

In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.

it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.

When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see

A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.

Perhaps what makes Bernanke's case so worrisome is that he has an almost universal reputation for probity. If the revolving-door system is so powerful that it can make even him look suspect, is it beyond redemption?

That doesn't even include non-hedge-fund and private-equity moves. Peter Orszag, who led President Obama's Office of Management and Budget, took a job with Citigroup when he left. The Obama administration had been closely involved with Citi in the aftermath of the financial collapse, and the bank received nearly $500 billion in bailouts. Orszag is not allowed to deal with the federal government directly, but as The Times noted, perhaps wryly, "Mr. Orszag’s actual duties are murky at best. He is expected to draw on his deep knowledge of public sector financial issues and his experience overseeing the federal budget to counsel Citi’s clients on various policy actions."

This is, of course, how systemic problems work—few individual cases are obviously unacceptable, but the whole is horrifying. In this case, it's the "revolving door" of movement between government positions and the financial sector—that is to say, from modestly paying positions in the public sector, overseeing financial firms, to higher-paying jobs in the private sector.

This is a revealing definition of “human rights,” I’d argue, particularly as it’s one that never addresses things like liberty, equality, or justice. It never addresses freedom of expression or freedom of assembly or freedom of association.

in certain countries, a number of people say they do not use the Internet yet they talk about how much time they spend on Facebook. According to one survey, 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. A survey in Nigeria had similar results:

Evgeny Morozov has described this belief as “Internet-centrism,” an ideology he argues permeates the tech industry, its PR wing the tech blogosphere, and increasingly government policy

“Internet-centrism” describes the tendency to see “the Internet” – Morozov uses quotations around the phrase – as a new yet unchanging, autonomous, benevolent, and inevitable socio-technological development. “The Internet” is a master framework for how all institutions will supposedly operate moving forward

“The opportunity to connect” as a human right assumes that “connectivity” will hasten the advent of these other rights, I suppose – that the Internet will topple dictatorships, for example, that it will extend participation in civic life to everyone and, for our purposes here at this conference, that it will “democratize education.”

“The Silicon Valley Narrative,” as I call it, is the story that the technology industry tells about the world – not only the world-as-is but the world-as-Silicon-Valley-wants-it-to-be.

Facebook is really just synecdochal here, I should add – just one example of the forces I think are at play, politically, economically, technologically, culturally.

it matters at the level of ideology. Infrastructure is ideological, of course. The new infrastructure – “the Internet” if you will – has a particular political, economic, and cultural bent to it. It is not neutral.

This infrastructure matters. In this case, this is a French satellite company (Eutelsat). This is an American social network (Facebook). Mark Zuckerberg’s altruistic rhetoric aside, this is their plan – an economic plan – to monetize the world’s poor.

The content and the form of “connectivity” perpetuate imperialism, and not only in Africa but in all of our lives. Imperialism at the level of infrastructure – not just cultural imperialism but technological imperialism

Empire is not simply an endeavor of the nation-state – we have empire through technology (that’s not new) and now, the technology industry as empire.

To better analyze and assess both technology and education technology requires our understanding of these as ideological, argues Neil Selwyn – “‘a site of social struggle’ through which hegemonic positions are developed, legitimated, reproduced and challenged.”

This narrative has several commonly used tropes

It often features a hero: the technology entrepreneur. Smart. Independent. Bold. Risk-taking. White. Male

“The Silicon Valley narrative” invokes themes like “innovation” and “disruption.” It privileges the new; everything else that can be deemed “old” is viewed as obsolete.

Facebook is “the Internet” for a fairly sizable number of people. They know nothing else – conceptually, experientially. And, let’s be honest, Facebook wants to be “the Internet” for everyone.

“The Silicon Valley narrative” fosters a distrust of institutions – the government, the university. It is neoliberal. It hates paying taxes.

“The Silicon Valley narrative” draws from the work of Ayn Rand; it privileges the individual at all costs; it calls this “personalization.”

“The Silicon Valley narrative” does not neatly co-exist with public education. We forget this at our peril. This makes education technology, specifically, an incredibly fraught area.

Here’s the story I think we like to hear about ed-tech, about distance education, about “connectivity” and learning: Education technology is supportive, not exploitative. Education technology opens, not forecloses, opportunities. Education technology is driven by a rethinking of teaching and learning, not expanding markets or empire. Education technology meets individual and institutional and community goals.

That’s not really what the “Silicon Valley narrative” says about education

It is interested in data extraction and monetization and standardization and scale. It is interested in markets and return on investment. “Education is broken,” and technology will fix it

If “Silicon Valley” isn’t quite accurate, then I must admit that the word “narrative” is probably inadequate too

The better term here is “ideology.”

It contends that its workings are meritocratic: anyone who hustles can make it.

We tend to not see technology as ideological – its connections to libertarianism, neoliberalism, global capitalism, empire.

The California ideology ignores race and labor and the water supply; it is sustained by air and fantasy. It is built upon white supremacy and imperialism.

As is the technology sector, which has its own history, of course, in warfare and cryptography.

So far this year, some $3.76 billion of venture capital has been invested in education technology – a record-setting figure. That money will change the landscape – that’s its intention. That money carries with it a story about the future; it carries with it an ideology.

I want to show you this map, a proposal – a failed proposal, thankfully – by venture capitalist Tim Draper to split the state of California into six separate states: Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California. The proposal, which Draper tried to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot in California, would have created the richest state in the US – Silicon Valley would be first in per-capita income. It would also have created the nation’s poorest state, Central California, which would rank even below Mississippi.

We in education would be naive, I think, to think that the designs that venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs have for us would be any less radical than creating a new state, like Draper’s proposed state of Silicon Valley, that would enormously wealthy and politically powerful.

When I hear talk of “unbundling” in education – one of the latest gerunds you’ll hear venture capitalists and ed-tech entrepreneurs invoke, meaning the disassembling of institutions into products and services – I can’t help but think of the “unbundling” that Draper wished to do to my state: carving up land and resources, shifting tax revenue and tax burdens, creating new markets, privatizing public institutions, redistributing power and doing so explicitly not in the service of equity or justice.

When a venture capitalist says that “software is eating the world,” we can push back on the inevitability implied in that. We can resist – not in the name of clinging to “the old” as those in educational institutions are so often accused of doing – but we can resist in the name of freedom and justice and a future that isn’t dictated by the wealthiest white men in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.

that’s not all that Silicon Valley really does.

And achieving the Fed's 2-percent inflation target is exactly the type of thing that would the cause such a surge in borrowing costs.

Japan has been mired in an economic morass for decades.

Once inflation targets are reached, they will have to begin winding down purchases of sovereign debt or risk pushing prices out of control.

investors will rush to front-run the offer to sell sovereign debt and equities from central banks.

I am not a wonk, but I did prepare this chart based on data in the College Scorecard and the federal data system IPEDS

The value-neutral approach to the collegiate earnings data ignores the facts of life about women and families.

74% of all undergraduates have at least one "non-traditional" characteristic, and more than 55% have two or more non-traditional characteristics such as having children, being a caregiver, delaying college enrollment, attending part-time, working full-time.

But the College Scorecard completely ignores the increasingly non-traditional nature of the nation's undergraduate student body today, and instead, presents data as if most college students are privileged children whiling away four years in some grove of academic luxury

The Obama administration claims that the new College Scorecard will provide more "transparent" data to students and families trying to decide which college to attend. Unfortunately, by presenting some data in value-neutral or misleading ways, and ignoring other truly important questions in the college choice process

the administration presents a data mashup with limited utility for consumers but large potential for misrepresentation of social realities.

He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.

Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.

The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.

The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.

perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.

I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s

they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus

They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.

it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.

This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.

“It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”

the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines

In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.

It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.

In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.

As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions

On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma

The Agriculture Department has faced sharp criticism from minority farmer groups for lacking diversity and ignoring complaints of bias in its programs.

That includes $8 billion that the Agriculture Department will use toward crop purchases, grants to food processors and distributors, and other programs to help farmers struggling with the pandemic.

The bill also provides “sums as may be necessary” from the Treasury Department to help minority farmers and ranchers pay off loans granted or guaranteed by the Agriculture Department, providing debt relief and aid for members of minority racial and ethnic groups that have long experienced discrimination at the hands of the government.

With the onset of the coronavirus, many farmers were forced to plow under crops or dump their milk, even as grocery store shelves emptied out and many American families went hungry.

A driving force behind the provisions for minority farmers was Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia whose election in January helped give Democrats control of the chamber.

Those factors led to a substantial loss of land.

The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes.

“If we had the same amount of investment that the other farmers had, a lot of Black farmers would still be farming this date.”

Injecting race into the relief effort has stirred backlash and criticism from some Republican lawmakers who have described the program as a kind of “reparations” for discrimination toward Black farmers.

“The same people who are complaining and using language to try to vilify this priority for African-American farmers are the same people who didn’t say a peep when tens of billions of dollars went out to the richest farmers in America,”

Mr. Vilsack is creating a commission to be a watchdog for racial equity issues at the agency

“Black farmers don’t trust the United States Department of Agriculture.”

‘Listen, I have all this vaccine. And people are afraid to get it here,’” Ms. Platten recalled. “‘If you have any friends, or there’s anyone you know who wants a vaccine, please have them call me.’”

“The result has been a mini boom of visitors on an island whose tourism economy, like most others, has been brutalized by the pandemic.”

“Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine, anybody over 16,” Mr. Bryan said on Monday. On March 1, the islands also opened two federally supported community vaccination centers on St. Thomas and St. Croix.

“On the public health side, it’s a plus,” she said. “On the equity side, I don’t see it as significant issue.”

“My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit,”

Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. But a fascinating new book by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive’s definition of addiction could apply to our relationship with another group of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.

In his new book, “Hooked,” Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.

Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

In another cynical move, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started buying a slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight we gained from eating their products.

Heinz, the processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to other parent companies.

“The food industry blocked us in the courts from filing lawsuits claiming addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the diet industry,”

“I’ve been crawling through the underbelly of the processed food industry for 10 years and I continue to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not just tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain control of our habits.”

The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to achieve a “bliss point” that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry.

In the 1980s, Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies.

“I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” he said. “I thought it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to crack cocaine was beyond me.”

Witness

But as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed

One crucial element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we consume it compulsively is how quickly it excites the brain.

The faster it hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its impact.

That is why smoking crack cocaine is more powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch

: Smoking reduces the time it takes for drugs to hit the brain.

But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,

This puts the term “fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.

Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods.

In “Hooked,” Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods.

As litigation against tobacco companies gained ground in the 1990s, one of the industry’s defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies.

It may have been on to something.

“Smoking was given an 8.5, nearly on par with heroin,” Mr. Moss writes. “But overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills.

But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a result of misconceptions about what addiction entails.

For one, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive.

Studies show that most people who drink or use cocaine do not become dependent

Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted.

Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try simple strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives like a handful of nuts. But for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.

“It depends where you are on the spectrum,” he said. “I know people who can’t touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and by the time they got home their car would be littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution.”

But the truth is more nuanced, and, statistically at least, the question of how burdensome student debt is and the extent to which it is disrupting major life events depends on a number of factors, including when you graduated from college with debt.

For those who graduated with debt as the economy was crashing, it was a double-whammy, said Keys, “so you’re seeing delayed marriage, delayed child-bearing, which are at least in part a function of the ongoing damage from the Great Recession.

Before the Great Recession, student debt levels were below auto loans, credit card debt and home-equity lines of credit in the ranking of household debt. Since then, student loan debt has surpassed these other debts

A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public four-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership,

Individuals who attain higher education average higher salaries, which translates into a higher tax base. With higher levels of education attainment, there is also less reliance on social welfare programs, as individuals who attain higher education are more likely to be employed, less likely to be unemployed, and less likely to be in poverty. Higher levels of education are also associated with greater civic engagement, as well as lower crime.”

In 2014, the largest chunk of student debt — nearly 40% — belonged to people owing between $1 and $10,000.

The bigger problem, Webber said, comes when students take out loans and then don’t graduate from college

Nationally, 60% of people who start at a four-year institution wind up graduating within the next six years

There are other ways in which all debt is not created equal. “Many of the people who have the largest loans and are the most likely to default are also the people who got the worst credentials and poorest quality training when they graduated or potentially didn’t even graduate

But although $1.5 trillion is a big number, it may not be an unreasonable amount given the value it is creating

In 2002, a bachelor’s degree holder could expect to make 75% more than someone with just a high school diploma, and nearly a decade later that premium had risen to 84%

A bachelor’s degree is worth about $2.8 million over a lifetime, the study also found.

Australia has a system that links the repayment of loans with the tax system. “Income-driven repayment options have been created in the U.S.,” said Perna, “but these options are more cumbersome and administratively complex than in Australia and some other nations. By linking the amount of the monthly payment to an individual’s income, income-driven repayment options can help to protect borrowers against the risk of non-repayment. But a more seamless system wouldn’t require borrowers to annually report their income to the U.S. Department of Education

“Promise” or “free tuition” programs cropping up in some states are also worth examining

“Right now there is, frankly, very little accountability that schools have; they practically have no skin in the game. If students default on their loans, there is no bad effect for the school.”