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The idea that competitive markets are sufficient to ensure efficient outcomes and stable economies is under heavy intellectual fire

The crisis has prompted a fundamental re-think of the relationship between markets and governments

but between competing systems of political economy and models of governance.

The stock market is not the economy. But rarely has the gap between Wall Street and Main Street felt so wide.

The United States is going through its worst race crisis since 1968 following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. Riots have hit cities across the nation. Looting is rampant. And President Donald Trump is threatening to send in the military to stop the violence.

The civil unrest could exacerbate the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 100,000 Americans. That in turn could deepen the economic collapse that has forced more than 40 million people to file for unemployment.

For all its forward-thinking companies and liberal social and environmental policies, the state has mostly put higher-value jobs and industries in expensive coastal enclaves, while pushing lower-paid workers and lower-cost housing to inland areas like the Central Valley. This has made California the most expensive state — with a median home value of $550,000, about double that of the nation — and created a growing supply of three-hour “super commuters.” And while it has some of the highest wages in the country, it also has the highest poverty rate based on its cost of living, an average of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2018. That helps explain why the state has lost more than a million residents to other states since 2006, and why the population growth rate for the year that ended July 1 was the lowest since 1900.“What’s happening in California right now is a warning shot to the rest of the country,”

“It’s a warning about income inequality and suburban sprawl, and how those intersect with quality of life and climate change.” You can see this in California economic forecasts for 2020, which play down the threat of a global trade war and play up the challenge of continuing to add jobs without affordable places for middle- and lower-income workers to live.

The record 3.3 million jobless claims reported Thursday mark the beginning of an economic crisis facing American workers and businesses — a slump, experts say, that will only end when the coronavirus pandemic is contained.

Although no official figures exist yet, the unemployment rate has likely jumped to at least 5.5 percent, says economist Martha Gimbel of Schmidt Futures, a level not seen since 2015 and up from 3.5 percent in February.“The most terrifying part about this is this is likely just the beginning of the layoffs,” Gimbel said

The bill, which gives most Americans checks worth $1,200 or more and provides billions in low-cost loans to businesses, is likely to provide a lifeline to workers and companies facing devastation, but it won’t stop a severe recession nor be adequate to sustain workers if the coronavirus health crisis lasts more than a month or two.

Many small business owners who received loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program say the program's rules are forcing them to make a difficult decision: Either take on more debt or spend money in ways that don't actually benefit their business.

At issue is a key rule that says in order for a PPP loan to be forgiven, a small business owner must spend at least 75% of it on payroll expenses in the first eight weeks of the loan. The remaining 25% may be spent on mortgage interest, rent, utilities and interest on other business-related debt obligations.

That means for businesses that had to shutter and let employees go, they must rehire their workers -- many of whom just started receiving unemployment benefits -- and pay them for eight weeks even though there is no work for them to do. Then one of two things will happen: the business won't be allowed to reopen yet and its employees will have to go back on unemployment; or the business may reopen, but have a hard time paying employees because it's unlikely to turn a profit quickly.

A new 25-year observational study published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage resulted in an estimated 3.4% to 5.9% decrease in suicide rates among adults ages 18 to 64, and a $2 increase could have prevented an estimated 40,000 suicides alone between 2009 and 2015.

In 2017, there were an estimated 1.4 million attempted suicides among American adults and 47,173 suicide-related deaths. An estimated 1.7% of unemployed US adults attempted suicide in 2017 compared with 0.4% of those working full-time and 0.7% of those working part-time, the study said.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and 29 states and the District of Columbia pay more, while 21 states pay the federal rate. If the minimum wage had increased by $1 from 2009 to 2015 — following peak unemployment in 2009 — the researchers estimated that 13,800 suicides could have been prevented among people in that age group with a high school education or less. A $2 increase in the minimum wage could have prevented an estimated 25,900 suicides in the same period, the study says.

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers — a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.

two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause. “We found that the problem was a lot worse than we thought,”

the rising rate of retractions reflects perverse incentives that drive scientists to make sloppy mistakes or even knowingly publish false data.

Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy

As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.

At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.

The same statistical revolution that changed baseball has now entered American politics, and no one has been more successful in popularizing a statistical approach to political analysis than New York Times blogger Nate Silver, who of course cut his teeth as a young sabermetrician. And on Nov. 6, after having faced a torrent of criticism from old-school political pundits -- Washington's rough equivalent of statistically illiterate tobacco chewing baseball scouts -- the results of the presidential election vindicated Silver's approach, which correctly predicted the electoral outcome in all 50 states.

Today, there are several dozen ongoing, public projects that aim to in one way or another forecast the kinds of things foreign policymakers desperately want to be able to predict: various forms of state failure, famines, mass atrocities, coups d'état, interstate and civil war, and ethnic and religious conflict. So while U.S. elections might occupy the front page of the New York Times, the ability to predict instances of extreme violence and upheaval represent the holy grail of statistical forecasting -- and researchers are now getting close to doing just that.

In 2010 scholars from the Political Instability Task Force published a report that demonstrated the ability to correctly predict onsets of instability two years in advance in 18 of 21 instances (about 85%)

I am a deluded throwback to carefree days, and in my attempt to raise a conscious, creative and socially and environmentally responsible child while lacking the means to also finance her conscious, creative and environmentally and socially responsible lifestyle forever, I’d accidentally gone and raised a hothouse serf. Oops.

Reich’s thesis is that some inequality is inevitable, even necessary, in a free-market system. But what makes an economy stable and prosperous is a strong, vibrant, growing middle class. In the three decades after World War II, a period that Reich calls “the great prosperity,” the G.I. Bill, the expansion of public universities and the rise of labor unions helped create the biggest, best-educated middle class in the world. Reich describes this as an example of a “virtuous circle” in which productivity grows, wages increase, workers buy more, companies hire more, tax revenues increase, government invests more, workers are better educated. On the flip side, when the middle class doesn’t share in the economic gains, it results over time in a downward vicious cycle: Wages stagnate, workers buy less, companies downsize, tax revenues decrease, government cuts programs, workers are less educated, unemployment rises, deficits grow. Since the crash that followed the deregulation of the financial markets, we have struggled to emerge from such a cycle.

What if the kid got it in her head that it was a good idea to go into public service, the helping professions, craftsmanship, scholarship or — God help her — the arts? Wouldn’t a greedier, more back-stabby style of early education be more valuable to the children of the shrinking middle class ­ — one suited to the world they are actually living in?

Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs

It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the United States leads the world

But this is no ordinary group. The mentor is an ex-con working for the city. The teens are suspected of the worst types of crimes but haven't faced prosecution, for lack of evidence. The mentor's job: Get them to put down their guns, stop their violent ways and transform their lives beyond the streets.

Fueled by gang violence, neighborhood rivalries and large-scale unemployment among black youth, the violence led to 47 homicides in Richmond in 2007

The next year, Boggan saw the killings drop to 27 -- a 40% decline -- as he began his strategy of hiring reformed ex-cons and sending them into the most violent neighborhoods to keep the peace.

“go to college” is such a proven prescription

college graduates have lower unemployment rates, earn higher wages and even have longer-lasting marriages

7.2 million students who need federal loans to attend college

Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave, free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits

What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t?

A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.

few would have guessed that the economic order built upon Mr. Reagan’s and Mrs. Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.

The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.

It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto-fascist political parties across Europe. It is the same anger fueling the candidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States.

It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008

Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.

Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.

On Sunday, it will put on trial 43 people, including at least 16 U.S. citizens, for allegedly bringing unregistered funds into Egypt to promote democracy without a license. Egypt has every right to control international organizations operating within its borders. But the truth is that when these democracy groups filed their registration papers years ago under the autocracy of Hosni Mubarak, they were informed that the papers were in order and that approval was pending. The fact that now — after Mubarak has been deposed by a revolution — these groups are being threatened with jail terms for promoting democracy without a license is a very disturbing sign. It tells you how incomplete the “revolution” in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back.

Egypt is running out of foreign reserves, its currency is falling, inflation is rising and unemployment is rampant. Yet the priority of a few retrograde Mubarak holdovers is to put on trial staffers from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are allied with the two main U.S. political parties, as well as from Freedom House and some European groups. Their crime was trying to teach Egypt’s young democrats how to monitor elections and start parties to engage in the very democratic processes that the Egyptian Army set up after Mubarak’s fall. Thousands of Egyptians had participated in their seminars in recent years.

It is the tendency to look for dignity in all the wrong places — to look for dignity not by building up the capacity of Egypt’s talented young people so they can thrive in the 21st century — with better schools, better institutions, export industries and more accountable government. No, it is the tendency to go for dignity on the cheap “by standing up to the foreigners.”

members of the upper class are more likely than others to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a prize.“Greed is a robust determinant of unethical behavior,” the authors conclude. “Relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.”

Our findings suggest that when a person is suffering, upper-class individuals perceive these signals less well on average, consistent with other findings documenting reduced empathic accuracy in upper-class individuals (Kraus et al., 2010). Taken together, these findings suggest that upper-class individuals may underestimate the distress and suffering in their social environments.

each participant was assigned to listen, face to face, from two feet away, to someone else describing real personal experiences of suffering and distress.The listeners’ responses were measured two ways, first by self-reported levels of compassion and second by electrocardiogram readings to determine the intensity of their emotional response. The participants all took a test known as the “sense of power” scale, ranking themselves on such personal strengths and weaknesses as ‘‘I can get people to listen to what I say’’ and ‘‘I can get others to do what I want,” as well as ‘‘My wishes do not carry much weight’’ and ‘‘Even if I voice them, my views have little sway,’’ which are reverse scored.The findings were noteworthy, to say the least. For “low-power” listeners, compassion levels shot up as the person describing suffering became more distressed. Exactly the opposite happened for “high-power” listeners: their compassion dropped as distress rose.