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Did Merkel Pave the Way for the War in Ukraine? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...or-the-war-in-ukraine-4abef297 merkel germany foreign policy war ukraine legacy evaluation
shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • The ceremony belatedly jolted Germany into reappraising Merkel’s role in the years leading up to today’s European crises—and the verdict has not been positive.
  • Merkel’s critics argue that the close ties she forged with Russia are partly responsible for today’s economic and political upheaval. Germany’s security policies over the past year have been, in many ways, a repudiation of her legacy. Earlier this month, Berlin announced a new $3 billion military aid package to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and an approaching NATO summit is expected to discuss how to include Ukraine in Europe’s security architecture—an extension of the alliance that Merkel consistently resisted.
  • Merkel was a key architect of the agreements that made the economies of Germany and its neighbors dependent on Russian energy imports. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed that strategic partnership, forcing Germany to find its oil and natural gas elsewhere at huge costs to business, government and households.
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  • Merkel’s successive governments also squeezed defense budgets while boosting welfare spending. Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais, commander of the army, posted an emotional article on his LinkedIn profile on the day of the invasion, lamenting that Germany’s once-mighty military had been hollowed out to such an extent that it would be all but unable to protect the country in the event of a Russian attack.
  • her refusal to stop buying energy from Putin after he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014—she instead worked to double gas imports from Russia—emboldened him to finish the job eight years later.
  • Joachim Gauck, who was president of Germany when Putin first invaded Ukraine in 2014, said Merkel’s decision to boost energy imports from Russia in the wake of Putin’s aggression was clearly a mistake. “Some people recognize their mistakes earlier, and some later,” he said.
  • Since leaving office, Merkel has defended the pipeline project as a purely commercial decision. She had to choose, she said, between importing cheap Russian gas or liquefied natural gas, which she said was a third more expensive.
  • After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then NATO secretary general, warned her against making Germany more dependent on a rogue Putin, who had just occupied and annexed part of a European nation. For Putin, he said, the pipeline “had nothing to do with business or the economy—it was a geopolitical weapon.”
  • Officials who served under Merkel, including Schäuble and Frank-Walter Steinmeier (her former foreign minister and now Germany’s federal president), have apologized or expressed regret for their roles in these decisions. They believe that Merkel’s policies empowered Putin without setting boundaries to his imperial ambitions.
  • At an event last year, Merkel recalled that after annexing Crimea, Putin had told her that he wanted to destroy the European Union. But she still forged ahead with plans to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, linking Germany directly to Siberia’s natural gas fields, in the face of protests from the U.S. Merkel’s government also approved the sale of Germany’s largest gas storage facilities to Russia’s state-controlled gas giant Gazprom.
  • That mistake had its roots in another decision by Merkel: Her move to greatly accelerate Germany’s planned phasing out of nuclear energy in 2011, in response to the Fukushima disaster in Japan. The gap in energy supply created by this dramatic shift meant that Germany had to import more energy, and it had to do so as cheaply as possible.
  • Merkel’s role in shaping NATO policy toward Ukraine goes back to 2008, when she vetoed a push by the Bush administration to admit Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official and presidential adviser on Russia.
  • Merkel instead helped to broker NATO’s open but noncommittal invitation to Ukraine and Georgia, an outcome that Hill said was the “worst of all worlds” because it enraged Putin without giving the two countries any protection. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 before marching into Ukraine.
  • After Putin first attacked Ukraine, Merkel led the effort to negotiate a quick settlement that disappointed Kyiv and imposed no substantial punishment on Russia for occupying its neighbor, Hill added. “No red lines were drawn for Putin,” she said. “Merkel took a calculated risk. It was a gambit, but ultimately it failed.”
  • Merkel still has supporters, and as Germany begins to grapple with her complicated legacy, many still hold a more nuanced view of her role in laying the groundwork for today’s crises
  • Kaeser, who now chairs the supervisory board of Siemens Energy, a listed subsidiary, agrees that Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas grew under Merkel, but he says that there was—and is—no alternative for powering Europe’s industrial engine at a viable price.
  • “We didn’t expect that there would be war in Europe with the methods of the 20th century. This never featured in our thinking,” said Kaeser, who himself met Putin several times. He believes that Merkel’s Russia policy was justified. Even Germany’s new government has not found a sustainable and affordable replacement for Russian energy exports, he said, which could lead to deindustrialization.
  • Many defenders of Merkel say that she merely articulated a consensus. Making her country dependent on Washington for security, on Moscow for energy and on Beijing for trade (China became Germany’s biggest trade partner under her chancellorship) was what all of Germany’s political parties wanted at the time, said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution.
  • “Without backing from the U.S.A., which was very restrained at the time, any tougher German reaction to the annexation of Crimea could hardly have been possible,” said Jürgen Osterhammer, a historian whose work on globalization and China has been cited by Merkel as an influence on her thinking.
  • In retirement, Merkel told the German news magazine Der Spiegel, she has watched “Munich,” a Netflix movie about Prime Minister Neville’s Chamberlain’s infamous negotiations with Hitler in the run-up to World War II. Though Chamberlain’s name has become synonymous with the delusions of appeasement, the film offers a more nuanced picture of the British leader as a realist statesman working to postpone the inevitable conflict. That reinterpretation appealed to Merkel, the magazine reported.
  • In April, Merkel was again asked on stage at a book fair whether she would not reconsider her refusal to admit having made some mistakes. “Frankly,” she responded, “I don’t know whether there would be satisfaction if I were to say something that I simply don’t think merely for the sake of admitting error.”
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How Insurers Exploited Medicare Advantage for Billions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vantage-fraud-allegations.html medicare insurance industry fraud cheating overbilling
shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks. Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or a bonus in their paycheck.
  • Anthem, a large insurer now called Elevance Health, paid more to doctors who said their patients were sicker. And executives at UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest insurer, told their workers to mine old medical records for more illnesses — and when they couldn’t find enough, sent them back to try again.
  • Each of the strategies — which were described by the Justice Department in lawsuits against the companies — led to diagnoses of serious diseases that might have never existed.
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  • But the diagnoses had a lucrative side effect: They let the insurers collect more money from the federal government’s Medicare Advantage program.
  • Medicare Advantage, a private-sector alternative to traditional Medicare, was designed by Congress two decades ago to encourage health insurers to find innovative ways to provide better care at lower cost.
  • by next year, more than half of Medicare recipients will be in a private plan.
  • a New York Times review of dozens of fraud lawsuits, inspector general audits and investigations by watchdogs shows how major health insurers exploited the program to inflate their profits by billions of dollars.
  • The government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a set amount for each person who enrolls, with higher rates for sicker patients. And the insurers, among the largest and most prosperous American companies, have developed elaborate systems to make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment, according to the lawsuits.
  • As a result, a program devised to help lower health care spending has instead become substantially more costly than the traditional government program it was meant to improve.
  • Eight of the 10 biggest Medicare Advantage insurers — representing more than two-thirds of the market — have submitted inflated bills, according to the federal audits. And four of the five largest players — UnitedHealth, Humana, Elevance and Kaiser — have faced federal lawsuits alleging that efforts to overdiagnose their customers crossed the line into fraud.
  • The government now spends nearly as much on Medicare Advantage’s 29 million beneficiaries as on the Army and Navy combined. It’s enough money that even a small increase in the average patient’s bill adds up: The additional diagnoses led to $12 billion in overpayments in 2020, according to an estimate from the group that advises Medicare on payment policies — enough to cover hearing and vision care for every American over 65.
  • Another estimate, from a former top government health official, suggested the overpayments in 2020 were double that, more than $25 billion.
  • The increased privatization has come as Medicare’s finances have been strained by the aging of baby boomers
  • Medicare Advantage plans can limit patients’ choice of doctors, and sometimes require jumping through more hoops before getting certain types of expensive care.
  • At conferences, companies pitched digital services to analyze insurers’ medical records and suggest additional codes. Such consultants were often paid on commission; the more money the analysis turned up, the more the companies kept.
  • they often have lower premiums or perks like dental benefits — extras that draw beneficiaries to the programs. The more the plans are overpaid by Medicare, the more generous to customers they can afford to be.
  • Many of the fraud lawsuits were initially brought by former employees under a federal whistle-blower law that allows them to get a percentage of any money repaid to the government if their suits prevail. But most have been joined by the Justice Department, a step the government takes only if it believes the fraud allegations have merit. Last year, the department’s civil division listed Medicare Advantage as one of its top areas of fraud recovery.
  • In contrast, regulators overseeing the plans at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., have been less aggressive, even as the overpayments have been described in inspector general investigations, academic research, Government Accountability Office studies, MedPAC reports and numerous news articles,
  • Congress gave the agency the power to reduce the insurers’ rates in response to evidence of systematic overbilling, but C.M.S. has never chosen to do so. A regulation proposed in the Trump administration to force the plans to refund the government for more of the incorrect payments has not been finalized four years later. Several top officials have swapped jobs between the industry and the agency.
  • The popularity of Medicare Advantage plans has helped them avoid legislative reforms. The plans have become popular in urban areas, and have been increasingly embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans.
  • “You have a powerful insurance lobby, and their lobbyists have built strong support for this in Congress,”
  • Some critics say the lack of oversight has encouraged the industry to compete over who can most effectively game the system rather than who can provide the best care.
  • But for insurers that already dominate health care for workers, the program is strikingly lucrative: A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group unaffiliated with the insurer Kaiser, found the companies typically earn twice as much gross profit from their Medicare Advantage plans as from other types of insurance.
  • In theory, if the insurers could do better than traditional Medicare — by better managing patients’ care, or otherwise improving their health — their patients would cost less and the insurers would make more money.
  • But some insurers engaged in strategies — like locating their enrollment offices upstairs, or offering gym memberships — to entice only the healthiest seniors, who would require less care, to join. To deter such tactics, Congress decided to pay more for sicker patients.
  • Almost immediately, companies saw ways to exploit that system. The traditional Medicare program provided no financial incentive to doctors to document every diagnosis, so many records were incomplete
  • Under the new program, insurers began rigorously documenting all of a patient’s health conditions — say depression, or a long-ago stroke — even when they had nothing to do with the patient’s current medical care.
  • “Even when they’re playing the game legally, we are lining the pockets of very wealthy corporations that are not improving patient care,”
  • The insurers also began hiring agencies that sent doctors or nurses to patients’ homes, where they could diagnose them with more diseases.
  • Cigna hired firms to perform similar at-home assessments that generated billions in extra payments, according to a 2017 whistle-blower lawsuit, which was recently joined by the Justice Department. The firms told nurses to document new diagnoses without adjusting medications, treating patients or sending them to a specialist
  • Nurses were told to especially look for patients with a history of diabetes because it was not “curable,” even if the patient now had normal lab findings or had undergone surgery to treat the condition.
  • Adding the code for a single diagnosis could yield a substantial payoff. In a 2020 lawsuit, the government said Anthem instructed programmers to scour patient charts for “revenue-generating” codes. One patient was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although no other doctor reported the condition, and Anthem received an additional $2,693.27, the lawsuit said. Another patient was said to have been coded for “active lung cancer,” despite no evidence of the disease in other records; Anthem was paid an additional $7,080.74. The case is continuing.
  • The most common allegation against the companies was that they did not correct potentially invalid diagnoses after becoming aware of them. At Anthem, for example, the Justice Department said “thousands” of inaccurate diagnoses were not deleted. According to the lawsuit, a finance executive calculated that eliminating the inaccurate diagnoses would reduce the company’s 2017 earnings from reviewing medical charts by $86 million, or 72 percent.
  • Some of the companies took steps to ensure the extra diagnoses didn’t lead to expensive care. In an October 2021 lawsuit, the Justice Department estimated that Kaiser earned $1 billion between 2009 and 2018 from additional diagnoses, including roughly 100,000 findings of aortic atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. But the plan stopped automatically enrolling those patients in a heart attack prevention program because doctors would be forced to follow up on too many people, the lawsuit said.
  • Kaiser, which both runs a health plan and provides medical care, is often seen as a model system. But its control over providers gave it additional leverage to demand additional diagnoses from the doctors themselves, according to the lawsuit.
  • At meetings with supervisors, he was instructed to find additional conditions worth tens of millions of dollars. “It was an actual agenda item and how could we get this,” Dr. Taylor said.
  • few analysts expect major legislative or regulatory changes to the program.
  • Even before the first lawsuits were filed, regulators and government watchdogs could see the number of profitable diagnoses escalating. But Medicare has done little to tamp down overcharging.
  • Several experts, including Medicare’s advisory commission, have recommended reducing all the plans’ payments.
  • Congress has ordered several rounds of cuts and gave C.M.S. the power to make additional reductions if the plans continued to overbill. The agency has not exercised that power.
  • The agency does periodically audit insurers by looking at a few hundred of their customers’ cases. But insurers are fined for billing mistakes found only in those specific patients. A rule proposed during the Trump administration to extrapolate the fines to the rest of the plan’s customers has not been finalized.
  • Ted Doolittle, who served as a senior official for the agency’s Center for Program Integrity from 2011 to 2014, said officials at Medicare seemed uninterested in confronting the industry over these practices. “It was clear that there was some resistance coming from inside” the agency, he said. “There was foot dragging.”
  • Last year, the inspector general’s office noted that one company “stood out” for collecting 40 percent of all Medicare Advantage’s payments from chart reviews and home assessments despite serving only 22 percent of the program’s beneficiaries. It recommended Medicare pay extra attention to the company, which it did not name, but the enrollment figure matched UnitedHealth’s.
  • “Medicare Advantage overpayments are a political third rail,” said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, a former hospital and insurance executive and a former top regulator at Medicare, in an email. “The big health care plans know it’s wrong, and they know how to fix it, but they’re making too much money to stop. Their C.E.O.s should come to the table with Medicare as they did for the Affordable Care Act, end the coding frenzy, and let providers focus on better care, not more dollars for plans.”
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Opinion | Lina Khan: We Must Regulate A.I. Here's How. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-lina-khan-ftc-technology.html AI FTC competition history policy economics
shared by Javier E on 03 May 23 - No Cached
  • The last time we found ourselves facing such widespread social change wrought by technology was the onset of the Web 2.0 era in the mid-2000s.
  • Those innovative services, however, came at a steep cost. What we initially conceived of as free services were monetized through extensive surveillance of the people and businesses that used them. The result has been an online economy where access to increasingly essential services is conditioned on the widespread hoarding and sale of our personal data.
  • These business models drove companies to develop endlessly invasive ways to track us, and the Federal Trade Commission would later find reason to believe that several of these companies had broken the law
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  • What began as a revolutionary set of technologies ended up concentrating enormous private power over key services and locking in business models that come at extraordinary cost to our privacy and security.
  • The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable — it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices. And we now face another moment of choice. As the use of A.I. becomes more widespread, public officials have a responsibility to ensure this hard-learned history doesn’t repeat itself.
  • the Federal Trade Commission is taking a close look at how we can best achieve our dual mandate to promote fair competition and to protect Americans from unfair or deceptive practices.
  • we already can see several risks. The expanding adoption of A.I. risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms. A handful of powerful businesses control the necessary raw materials that start-ups and other companies rely on to develop and deploy A.I. tools. This includes cloud services and computing power, as well as vast stores of data.
  • Enforcers have the dual responsibility of watching out for the dangers posed by new A.I. technologies while promoting the fair competition needed to ensure the market for these technologies develops lawfully.
  • generative A.I. risks turbocharging fraud. It may not be ready to replace professional writers, but it can already do a vastly better job of crafting a seemingly authentic message than your average con artist — equipping scammers to generate content quickly and cheaply.
  • bots are even being instructed to use words or phrases targeted at specific groups and communities. Scammers, for example, can draft highly targeted spear-phishing emails based on individual users’ social media posts. Alongside tools that create deep fake videos and voice clones, these technologies can be used to facilitate fraud and extortion on a massive scale.
  • we will look not just at the fly-by-night scammers deploying these tools but also at the upstream firms that are enabling them.
  • these A.I. tools are being trained on huge troves of data in ways that are largely unchecked. Because they may be fed information riddled with errors and bias, these technologies risk automating discrimination
  • We once again find ourselves at a key decision point. Can we continue to be the home of world-leading technology without accepting race-to-the-bottom business models and monopolistic control that locks out higher quality products or the next big idea? Yes — if we make the right policy choices.
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Three Young Activists Who Never Worked in an Auto Factory Helped Deliver Huge Win for t... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ge-win-for-auto-union-717c54c8 union auto industry strike success outsider leader new
shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • hree 30-something labor activists were brought in by new UAW President Shawn Fain to remake the union into a more independent, media savvy and creative challenger to car companies.
  • They included a communications specialist who helped craft campaigns for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York labor attorney who once wrote on progressive labor issues and a former reporter who later would help win major concessions from the New York Times for the NewsGuild of New York.  
  • The result was a sharper and more bitter collective-bargaining battle with Detroit—and one of the biggest wins in decades.
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  • New communications director Jonah Furman, 33, coordinated a publicity campaign to make Fain and coverage of the strike ubiquitous in the media. Fain shared details of the contract talks on weekly livestream updates, a tactic that stunned auto executives accustomed to behind-closed-doors discussions.
  • Fain, a former electrician who made an unexpected ascent to the top role this spring, and his team deployed a pugnacious strategy that hit directly at criticism that the UAW has long been too chummy with carmakers. 
  • “I thought it was important to bring in people that weren’t ingrained in the system,”
  • The group includes Chris Brooks, a 39-year-old labor activist recruited early this year to manage the new president’s transition team who then became a top aide. He helped overhaul the 88-year-old union, bringing a renewed militancy and empowering rank-and-file workers by pushing for frequent rallies and events where Fain heard them out.  
  • Part of his strategy has also been to make sure nonunion workers at factories in the South were listening. Fain indicated on Sunday that the union would turn to organizing at automakers such as EV leader Tesla and foreign car companies.
  • New York labor attorney Ben Dictor, 36, was heavily involved in the union’s biggest break from the past: holding talks with the three big automakers simultaneously. For decades, the UAW had picked one company to negotiate a new contract, and then used those terms as a template for the other two automakers. This time, the union combined talks to pit the companies against one another and accelerate deals with all three. 
  • Today, the UAW’s 146,000 automotive members at the Detroit Three account for a fraction of the nation’s more than one million auto-factory jobs
  • Longtime UAW members also worked closely with the new leader to shape its current strategy. Members must vote to approve the deals in coming weeks.
  • In the wake of GM and Chrysler’s government-led restructurings in 2009, priority was put on bringing their labor costs more in line with foreign rivals.
  • UAW leadership had long been regarded as insular, predictable and guarded, composed of union lifers who rose up from the auto-factory floor and spent years on negotiation teams before taking the lead.  
  • Fain, 55, won after a change in rules let members, instead of chapter officials, vote directly for their leadership. The voting revision came after a corruption scanda
  • Brooks was central to Fain’s chaos-inducing strike strategy, in which select facilities at each of the Detroit automakers were taken down with little notice. Fain said the approach, which he escalated during the strike by adding more and more facilities, allowed the union to be nimble and apply pressure at key profit centers that hurt the automakers. It was a change from the all-company walkouts that were previously typical—and had never been tried before by the UAW at all three companies. 
  • Furman, who had worked for Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and was the lead singer and bassist in a Boston indie-rock band named Krill, spearheaded the union’s bare-knuckle social-media strategy, where it updated members on negotiations and frequently posted videos taunting company executives about their pay. 
  • “Jim Farley took in $21 million last year,” said Fain in a livestream, referring to Ford’s chief executive. “We need him to do two things right now: Look in the mirror and look in Ford’s bank account.” 
  • The contracts are the most lucrative since the 1960s, union leaders said.  
  • The newly assembled group prioritized swift decision-making and responses to the companies, which required cutting through bureaucracy that had impeded previous bargaining rounds, people familiar with the union’s inner workings said. The UAW pumped out pamphlets and videos to communicate with members—key to ensuring buy-in amid a strike that affected workers unevenly.
  • “What has moved the needle is our willingness to take action, to be flexible, to be aggressive when we have to,” Fain said in an early October livestream to members.
  • Fain also recruited union longtimers to join his team, including people in research and organizing who were knowledgeable about the group’s history and had relationships with local chapters. They were key to identifying strike targets that would both cause pain to companies and be supported by workers
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Bernanke review is not about blame but the Bank's outdated practices - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...s-outdated-practices-drlv8vvn0 central bank UK policy history economics
shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Bernanke’s 80-page assessment, the result of more than seven months’ work, is the most comprehensive independent analysis of a big central bank’s performance since an inflationary crisis hit the world economy in early 2022. He offers a dozen recommendations for change at the Bank, the strongest of which is for the MPC to begin publishing “alternative scenarios” that show how its inflation forecasts stand up in extreme situations, for example in the face of an energy price shock.
  • The review lays bare how the Bank and its international peers all failed to model the impact of the huge energy price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the disruption in global trade during the pandemic after 2020 and how workers and companies would respond to significant price changes.
  • In choosing Bernanke, one of the most respected central bankers of his generation, to lead the review, the Bank has ensured that his findings will be difficult to ignore. The former Fed chairman carried out more than 60 face-to-face interviews with Bank staff and market participants and sat in on the MPC’s November 2023 forecasting round to assess where the Bank’s forecasts and communication were failing short, from the use of computer models to the role played by “human judgment”.
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  • In his review, Bernanke compared the MPC’s forecasting record with six other central banks — in the Nordic countries, New Zealand, the United States and the eurozone — and found the Bank was particularly bad at understanding dynamics in the jobs market and had consistently forecast far higher unemployment, which had not materialised. Its other errors, on forecasting future inflation and growth, put it largely in the “middle of the pack” with its peers.
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Behind Spain's turmoil lies a cronyism that stifles the young and ambitious | John Carl... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...john-carlin-spain-work-debt spain culture work crisis economics
shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • the Spanish are not inherently idle; the labour market in Spain does not sufficiently reward talent and hard work. The Spanish disease that both these young men said they had fled was "amiguismo" –"friendism" – a system where one gets ahead by who one knows.
  • I recently asked a boss at a well-known Spanish company what percentage of the 300 or so middle-class staff under him did their jobs to the best of their abilities. Despondent, he replied: "The number is low." The deeper sin lies in an institutionalised Spanish system where both the financial and moral incentives to work well are undercut by the perception that if you do not know the right people there is little point in giving the best of yourself at work.
  • Where does all this come from?
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  • Going to school in Spain is a pretty deadly business. The emphasis is all on learning by rote. Creativity and curiosity are not part of the package. School is not, remotely, fun. Work, the idea is instilled ominously early on, cannot be much fun either.
  • For my cousin, as for so many Spaniards, work is a necessary evil, a nuisance to be dispensed with as briskly as possible before turning to the serious business of life – drinking, nibbling tapas, hanging out with friends until the small hours.
  • Now that the bubble has burst, people's approach to work matters a great deal. The brightest, the boldest or the most restless young people go abroad for money and fulfilment; the rest, half of whom are unemployed, stay at home – baffled, desperate, increasingly angry, kicking out at government and being kicked back.
  • What's needed if Spain is not to sink gradually back into a sort of bucolic, early 20th-century Mediterranean poverty is a revolution across the board in attitudes to work. Like it or not, the system has to be overhauled and replaced by one where the rules are fair and merit is rewarded. Everywhere.
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The End Of Mexico's Great Migration? « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...end-of-mexicos-great-migration mexico population migration
shared by Javier E on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • Not long ago Mexico was a country with high birth rates that produced many young adults who had trouble finding jobs. Now, the Mexican total fertility rate (TFR)- the number of children born to a typical woman over her lifetime- has plummeted to about 2.25. This rate is only a little above the population replacement rate of 2.1. Unlike in the past, the number of young people in Mexico will no longer be growing rapidly over time, so that the numbers looking for work in the Mexican labor market will be on the decline.
  • The push from Mexico has also diminished because its economy has been growing at a good clip during the past 9 years. Excluding the large drop in 2009, the growth rate in real GDP has been over 4% per year. Mexico’s growth rate after 2009 considerably exceeds the American rate of under 2%, which is remarkable since about 80% of all Mexican exports go to the depressed American economy. One consequence is that the gap between earnings in Mexico and the United States is narrowing. This clearly reduces the demand to immigrate to America, especially under the difficult circumstances illegal immigrants face.
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American Christianity and Secularism at a Crossroads - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ecularism-at-a-crossroads.html US Christianity religion public secularism survey attitudes
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional authority in general.
  • If individual impiety flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion that has undergirded our common life for so long
  • The Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance” premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private assent to a set of propositional beliefs,”
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  • The idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence (they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech. For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.
  • The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”
  • He worries about what might happen if an unpredictable Supreme Court agrees to hear conservative Christians’ challenges to the contraception mandate, or their pleas for exemptions for charities that accept federal grants but discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. “The court could create something vastly more dangerous than corporate free speech: a ‘corporate conscience’ claim,
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Now, With No Further Ado, We Present ... the Digital Public Library of America! - Rebec... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274963 library national digital books
shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • we will have a platform that others can build upon. All the data will be licensed under CC0 -- that's really a public domain declaration. It means that we're giving away all this data for free for people to use in whatever way they want. And we will have an API -- a very powerful API -- that third-party developers will be able to use to create innovative apps based on the contents of the DPLA. So if you're a developer of a mobile app, maybe one for a local walking tour of a city, you can take the material you already have and mix it up with all the great content from the DPLA for that particular location.
  • We act as the top-level aggregator of all this great material, and the service hubs do an amazing job of normalizing the metadata and bringing in this content from thousands of sites across the United States.
  • act as a very strong advocate for public options for reading and research in the 21st century. We really want to work to expand the realm of publicly available materials. So, obviously, a big part of that is working with non-profit groups like libraries, archives, and museums to get that stuff online and out to the public, but there will also be a component here where I'm going to push, along with my colleagues at the DPLA, to see how we can get other materials into the DPLA and out to the public. It very much has that spirit of the public library. We want to make the maximal amount of content available in a maximally open way.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • we are in the process of geocoding as much of them as possible, so that they'll work great in those kinds of GPS-based devices and apps. So, that platform is going to be a big part of it and we're hoping to see a lot of partners -- commercial and non-profit -- use that.
  • we're going to provide some really unique services that will help supplement what's going on in public and research libraries. For instance, that map interface is a way to browse the collections. That's not generally an interface that you see on your local public library's website.
  • I hope that the DPLA can act, in some senses, as a market maker. I hope we can bring a huge audience to content, and when that happens, you might have, for instances, authors or publishers becoming very interested in how they might be able to put materials into DPLA to attract new readers and researchers.
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After Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...emains-wary-of-regulation.html regulation Texas culture business
shared by Javier E on 10 May 13 - No Cached
  • Five days after an explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled a wide swath of this town, Gov. Rick Perry tried to woo Illinois business officials by trumpeting his state’s low taxes and limited regulations. Asked about the disaster, Mr. Perry responded that more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the nation’s worst industrial accidents in decades.
  • Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.
  • Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs.
  • “The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,”
  • This antiregulatory zeal is an outgrowth of a broader Texas ideology: that government should get out of people’s lives, a deeply held belief throughout the state that touches many aspects of life here, including its gun culture, its Republican-dominated Legislature and its cowboy past and present.
  • That is particularly true in the countryside. “In rural Texas,” said Stephen T. Hendrick, the engineer for McLennan County, where the explosion occurred, “no one votes for regulations.”
  • But federal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)
  • This week, Mr. Perry’s press office announced that Texas had been ranked for the ninth year in a row as the country’s most pro-business state, according to a survey by the magazine Chief Executive. Texas accounted for nearly a third of all private sector jobs created over the last decade, according to federal labor data. And under Mr. Perry, it has given businesses more tax breaks and incentives than any other state, roughly $19 billion a year.
  • “Businesses can come down here and do pretty much what they want to,” Mr. Burka said. “That is the Texas way.”
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Raise That Wage - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-raise-that-wage.html minimum wage economics research
shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • there are strong reasons to believe that the kind of minimum wage increase the president is proposing would have overwhelmingly positive effects.
  • the great preponderance of the evidence from these natural experiments points to little if any negative effect of minimum wage increases on employment.
  • Why is this true? That’s a subject of continuing research, but one theme in all the explanations is that workers aren’t bushels of wheat or even Manhattan apartments; they’re human beings, and the human relationships involved in hiring and firing are inevitably more complex than markets for mere commodities. And one byproduct of this human complexity seems to be that modest increases in wages for the least-paid don’t necessarily reduce the number of jobs.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The tax credit — which has traditionally had bipartisan support, although that may be ending — is also good policy. But it has a well-known defect: Some of its benefits end up flowing not to workers but to employers, in the form of lower wages. And guess what? An increase in the minimum wage helps correct this defect. It turns out that the tax credit and the minimum wage aren’t competing policies, they’re complementary policies that work best in tandem.
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Sputtering Startups Weigh on U.S. Economic Growth - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...u-s-economic-growth-1477235874
shared by abbykleman on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 24 Oct 16
     
    The U.S. economy is inching along, productivity is flagging and millions of Americans appear locked out of the labor market. One key factor intertwined with this loss of dynamism: The U.S. is creating startup businesses at historically low rates. The American economy has long relied on fast-growing young companies to fuel job growth and spread the latest innovations.
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After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humili... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...st-and-learn-a-little-humility conservatism reform history culture crisis interpretation subsidiarity individualism nostalgia
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
  • he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
  • Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
  • Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
  • These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
  • Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
  • The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
  • In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
  • for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
  • “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
  • Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
  • This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
  • the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
  • “In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
  • “Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
  • In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
  • In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
  • The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
  • he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
  • The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
  • He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
  • “we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
  • It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
  • So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
  • He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
  • a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
  • He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
  • Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
  • “In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
  • Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
  • In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
  • he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
  • in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
  • in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
  • Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
  • I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
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How to avert America's Brexit - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html business fairness politics crisis social working class government Policy
shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.
  • The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.
  • every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • For decades, the United States has led the way as the world’s markets for manufacturing, labor and capital have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This has benefited poorer nations around the world — most prominently China — as well as large multinational corporations with the reach and balance sheets to compete globally. It has also contributed to a surge in the incomes of well-educated professionals with globally competitive skills.
  • our leaders in business and government have offered up a consensus view that chief among the gains from open trade is a small financial benefit — reflected mostly in lower prices for a host of imported goods — spread in a thin layer over an enormous number of people, which in the aggregate offsets the narrowly focused devastation wreaked on discrete industries, workers and communities.
  • today’s practical lesson is much simpler: The deal on offer to the U.S. working and middle classes from globalization is in tatters. We have ignored at our peril the dislocations and the uneven distribution of the benefits.
  • We need a new agenda promising fairness and growth in equal measure.
  • The business community’s agenda for accelerating economic growth is straightforward. It includes making our corporate tax system simpler and more globally competitive; subjecting regulations to rigorous cost-benefit criteria; reforming our immigration laws to admit more highly educated and skilled workers, particularly in the technology and engineering fields; and adopting more free-trade agreements, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, to stimulate global flows of goods and services. Corporate leaders (and many economists) are convinced that this is the clear path to accelerated growth and job formation.
  • in order to create the social circumstances necessary to make this commercial agenda at all politically feasible, the business community must find a way to support — and especially be willing to pay for — an array of policies designed to foster economic fairness that are traditionally opposed by the business lobby.
  • This list is long but would include increasing the minimum wage, expanding the earned-income tax credit and reforming unemployment programs; investing in early-childhood education, vocational training, prison-to-work assistance, apprenticeships and college affordability; financing a large-scale infrastructure building program; implementing robust transition assistance for workers dislocated by foreign competition and technological change; and ensuring health-care and retirement income for aging citizens in need.
  • The cost of all of this would be, of course, high. But the price of inaction is certainly far more dear. One of the best ways to finance it all might be a national sales levy along the lines of a progressive value-added tax
  • To restore credibility to the business community’s agenda, we must work to set in motion the policies necessary to stimulate growing incomes and rising equality. In actuality, growth and fairness agendas are compatible and mutually reinforcing because a stronger middle class — and healthier consumer — would be as good for business as it is for society.
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Why the Economy Doesn't Roar Anymore - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...doesnt-roar-anymore-1476458742 economic Policy history theory productivity golden age
shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach.
  • But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree.
  • It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.
  • Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year
  • these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.
  • looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.
  • that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.
  • The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.
  • Many factors played a role in this achievement.
  • The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.
  • As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.
  • New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.
  • Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.
  • Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.
  • The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.
  • But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.
  • The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973
  • and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.
  • the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.
  • With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right
  • Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.
  • But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them
  • Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.
  • It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control
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The Dangers of Disruption - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-disruption.html disruption nativism protectionism illiberal democracy liberalism politics culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.
  • For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions.
  • So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.
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  • globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.
  • statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities
  • from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.
  • This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.
  • Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property
  • The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole
  • Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one
  • Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world’s chief practitioner of illiberal democracy. Mr. Putin has become very popular in Russia, particularly since his annexation of Crimea in 2014. He does not feel bound by law: Mr. Putin and his cronies use political power to enrich themselves and business wealth to guarantee their hold on power.
  • Mr. Orbán, Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan all came to power in countries with an electorate polarized between a more liberal, cosmopolitan urban elite — whether in Budapest, Moscow or Istanbul — and a less-educated rural voter base. This social division is similar to the one that drove the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise in the United States..
  • Mr. Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy.
  • Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump seemsto want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once in office
  • The citizens of India and Japan have elected nationalist leaders who many say they believe champion a more closed form of identity than their predecessors
  • How far will this trend toward illiberal democracy go? Are we headed for a period like that of the early 20th century, in which global politics sank into conflict over closed and aggressive nationalism?
  • The outcome will depend on several critical factors, particularly the way global elites respond to the backlash they have engendered.
  • In America and Europe, elites made huge policy blunders in recent years that hurt ordinary people more than themselves.
  • Deregulation of financial markets laid the groundwork for the subprime crisis in the United States, while a badly designed euro contributed to the debt crisis in Greece, and the Schengen system of open borders made it difficult to control the flood of refugees in Europe. Elites must acknowledge their roles in creating these situations.
  • Now it’s up to the elites to fix damaged institutions and to better buffer those segments of their own societies that have not benefited from globalization to the same extent.
  • Above all, it is important to keep in mind that reversing the existing liberal world order would likely make things worse for everyone, including those left behind by globalization. The fundamental driver of job loss in the developed world, after all, is not immigration or trade, but technological change.
  • We need better systems for buffering people against disruption, even as we recognize that disruption is inevitable. The alternative is to end up with the worst of both worlds, in which a closed and collapsing system of global trade breeds even more inequality.
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Donald Trump just forfeited in his first fight with China - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-in-his-first-fight-with-china trump trade non-tariff barriers world order diplomacy history policy obama
shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • the real reason to support the TPP wasn't economics so much as geopolitics. It was about keeping an economic foot firmly planted in China's backyard, and writing the trade rules so they couldn't.
  • this kind of logic was a part of almost all our trade deals the past 70 years. Initially, these were about setting a system to promote prosperity abroad so fragile postwar democracies could resist Communist pressure. But even after the Berlin Wall came down, they were still a way to not only open up markets, but also reward countries for reforming their economies like we wanted.
  • that was why NAFTA made more sense than any economic model would have told you. If we rejected Mexico's liberalizing government, it might have collapsed — and an anti-American one could have taken its place.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • he simple story is that we've already pushed tariffs about as low as they can go, and all that's left is to negotiate over non-tariff trade barriers
  • NAFTA really did move a decent chunk of our manufacturing base south of the border
  • And granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status in 2000 really did seem to give companies the confidence they needed to shift production there on a far larger scale than they had before, since they no longer had to worry about the risk of tariffs rising.
  • the era of big trade deals is over. And that was true even before Trump announced his candidacy before a raucous crowd of paid actors.
  • that's not to say that all trade deals are economically irrelevant. They aren't.
  • the problem is that those sorts of things — say, rules about intellectual property or government procurement — are what we used to think of as the sole province of domestic policy.
  • Which is why they can feel like they're infringing on a country's sovereignty.
  • The result is that these new trade deals are more difficult politically and less useful economically than previous ones.
  • what's changing with Trump is that we aren't even trying to lead on trade anymore. He doesn't see these deals as a way to win friends and influence people, but rather to win manufacturing jobs and influence his approval rating.
  • That might sound like common sense to some people, but it does leave an opening for other countries — yes, China — to negotiate where we're not. The risk, then, is that globalization might not proceed on our terms or with our values.
  • there's a greater danger. It's not that Trump won't make further progress on trade, but rather will backtrack on where we are. New trade deals might not help much, but unraveling old ones would hurt. At that point, we wouldn't have the luxury of worrying about whose globalization we had. The answer would be nobody's. And the whole world would be a little bit poorer.
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Congress Is Running Out of Time to Save Puerto Rico - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...480027 congress puerto rico politics crisis economic policy
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  • A Commonwealth in Crisis
  • On Sunday, Puerto Rico will likely default again on some of its debts, which now total over $70 billion.
  • It is an entity that is often almost completely at the whim of Congress, the most dysfunctional body in national politics today.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • . Its economy has not grown in over a decade, and there is a $28 billion gap in funding over the next five years alone.
  • Public hospitals and health-care facilities may close, exacerbating an ongoing crisis that already sees Puerto Rican patients receiving far worse health care than their mainland counterparts.
  • Puerto Rico has attempted to solve its debt issues by granting itself bankruptcy powers under rules that grant service providers in the states the ability to seek relief, but that decision remains under Supreme Court review and has been opposed in no uncertain terms by the federal government.
  • The plan also exempts Puerto Rican workers under 25 years old from the labor protections of a federally-mandated minimum wage and overtime regulation, with the goal of making Puerto Rico’s job market more competitive in comparison to its neighbors.
  • Representatives of those who hold the territory’s general obligation bonds oppose the bill as well, because it would allow Puerto Rico to restructure its debts and delay payment, as well as limit the ability of bondholders to sue if it defaults.
  • In 1984 Congress specifically carved Puerto Rico out from Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protections that it once had, offering no reason for singling out the territory.
  • Also in 1996, Congress passed legislation to phase out Section 936 of the federal tax code, a law that exempted U.S. industries from taxes on income in Puerto Rico. With no replacement plan to promote development or growth, Puerto Rico’s economy suffered.
  • The Medicaid underpayment deficit alone accounts for almost one-fifth of the current total deficit in the territory. A legislative medical-funding scheme could both help right the financial ship in Puerto Rico and help its crippled health-care system face the siege of Zika.
  • Granted, the government of Puerto Rico is not blameless in this saga. Its public-services monopolies are extraordinarily inefficient; the territorial government has not been good with spending, budgeting, or long-term fiscal planning; and the two major parties––for statehood and the status quo––have supported some congressional reforms with the goal of forcing the other side’s hand, instead of promoting good governance.
  • Congress’s dysfunctions might run so deep that they keep it from even addressing a humanitarian crisis in the country, a total failure of the body’s special duty towards Puerto Rico. Congress’s current plan might provide short-term relief, but it is a bit of a Hobson’s choice.
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I'm with the banned: International visitors are already turning their back on Trump-era... - 1 views

www.economist.com/...i-m-banned international visitors us tourism crisis economic trump effects
shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • a market research firm, looked at online searches for flights into America, comparing the final weeks of the Obama administration with the first weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency. It found that these searches had declined by 17%.
  • The overwhelming majority of countries studied showed a drop in interest. The most notable exception was Russia
  • it is “hard to see any other short-term significant events that could be related,” other than Mr Trump’s assumption of the presidency and his travel ban.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Another study, this time looking specifically at business travel, backs up these findings. The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), which represents corporate travel managers, found that business travel transactions in America declined by 3.4% over the course of one week following the president’s order.
  • If a 3.4% decline sounds small, consider the group’s assertion that a 1% drop in business travel over the course of a year correlates with a loss of 71,000 American jobs and close to $5bn in gross domestic product
  • a net $185m in business travel bookings was lost
  • as Mr Trump is broadly unpopular in much of the world, some people were probably already thinking twice about coming to America before the executive order was announced.
  • Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, a consultancy, told Forbes that the furore will probably “severely damage the US travel sector this year”
  • He cites the $246bn that international visitors spent in America last year, a figure that vastly exceeds the value of other major American exports such as cars ($152bn), agricultural products ($137bn) and petroleum products ($97bn)
  • Those high stakes explain why travel firms, normally reluctant to annoy customers by taking a political stance, have gone out of their way to condemn Mr Trump. 
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The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Te... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...256046 technology startups future innovation
shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?
  • There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.
  • we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.
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  • We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower
  • Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.
  • On the mobile side, we're working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That's the palette that everyone has been working with -- and I hate to say it, but we're at the end of the line.
  • despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most
  • more than the bandwidth or the stagnant hardware, I think the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of the business model. The dominant idea has been to gather users and get them to pour their friends, photos, writing, information, clicks, and locations into your app. Then you sell them stuff (Amazon.com, One King's Lane) or you take that data and sell it in one way or another to someone who will sell them stuff (everyone). I return to Jeff Hammerbacher's awesome line about developers these days: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." 
  • The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean.
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