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Top economist: US coronavirus response is like third world country | Business | The Gua... - 0 views

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  • Donald Trump’s botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis has left the US looking like a third world country and on course for a second Great Depression, one of the world’s leading economists has warned.
  • Stiglitz, a long-term critic of Trump, said 14% of the population was dependent on food stamps and predicted the social infrastructure could not cope with an unemployment rate that could hit 30% in the coming months.
  • The inequality in the US is so large. This disease has targeted those with the poorest health. In the advanced world, the US is one of the countries with the poorest health overall and the greatest health inequality.”
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  • Stiglitz said Republicans had opposed proposals to give those affected by coronavirus 10 days’ sick leave, meaning many employees were going to work even while infected. “The Republicans said no because they said it would set a bad precedent. It is literally unbelievable.”
  • “If you leave it to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell [the Republican Senate majority leader] we will have a Great Depression. If we had the right policy structure in place we could avoid it easily.”
  • Encouraged by Trump, some parts of the US were determined to reopen in a way that would facilitate the transmission of the disease and lead to a fresh outbreak, he added.
  • “In those circumstances it won’t be the government enforcing the lockdown, it will be fear. The concern is that people are not going to be spending on anything other than food and that’s the definition of a Great Depression.
  • “We were unprepared but, even given the degree of unpreparedness, Trump’s decision to make this about politics rather than about science has meant we have responded far more poorly.”
  • Stiglitz said the current crisis would force countries to make themselves less vulnerable, and this would lead to shorter supply chains and a greater emphasis on self-sufficiency in food and energy.
  • He added that the complexity of modern production methods meant autarky was not feasible but added: “Fighting global pandemics and climate change require global cooperation. It’s just that the president of the United States doesn’t understand that.
  • “I hope we emerge from this with the perspective that multilateralism is even more important than we thought. It can’t just be a corporate-driven globalisation. We have to make it more resilient.’
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Trump echoes Herbert Hoover, who vetoed a Great Depression rescue package in an electio... - 0 views

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  • It was mid-July of 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression. Congress was pressing for a $2.1 billion emergency relief bill to fight staggering unemployment of more than 12 million Americans.
  • The frantic response mirrored current efforts to rescue the U.S. economy from the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic. In late March, Congress passed a $2 trillion economic stimulus bill signed by President Trump. Now, with 17 million Americans out of work, lawmakers and the White House are wrangling over another huge aid package to try to keep unemployment rates from rising toward Depression-era levels.
  • The 1932 bill’s inflation-adjusted price tag of $38 billion was dwarfed by this year’s $2 trillion price tag, but it was “gigantic” in its day. President Herbert Hoover, like Trump a Republican, had resisted federal spending, but this was an election year.
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  • On July 8, the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 41.22, down nearly 90 percent from its peak before the market crashed on Black Monday in October of 1929. Many of the homeless were living in shacks in “Hoovervilles.”
  • During his nearly four years in office, Hoover had focused on trying to balance the budget. But as the jobless rate rose to a record 23.6 percent in 1932, he proposed a $1.8 billion relief package
  • The foundation of both plans was $1 billion to expand loans by the government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the Garner-Wagner bill also called for up to $1.2 billion for public works to create jobs.
  • To Hoover this was spending money for “pork” and “unproductive” jobs. Republican Rep. Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York, shot back that the legislation was a “breadbasket bill” and represented “the first ray of hope that has been cast in a critical situation.”
  • By early July, it was clear that the House-Senate conference bill was doomed. “Weary leaders looked to the veto message already penned and waiting at the White House as marking the end of the long and bitter controversy over federal aid to the jobless,” the AP reported.On July 11, Congress sent its bill to Hoover. Sure enough, the next day Hoover vetoed the bill, saying it would “bring far more distress than it will cure.” It was a phrase similar to Trump’s declaration last month that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" as he considered urging Americans to end their coronavirus quarantines.
  • “In a night session which was astonishing for the swift and decisive action of its nonpartisan coalition,” the Senate passed a revised bill and sent it to the House, the AP reported. There, what was now called “the Hoover bill” passed by a vote of 296 to 46. When the final conference bill came back to the House, members passed it by unanimous consent. Only one lawmaker gave a speech, and he was nearly drowned out by cries of “Vote, vote!”
  • “Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. … But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows’ hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”
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What Can History Tell Us About the World After Trump? - 0 views

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  • U.S. President Donald Trump largely ignores the past or tends to get it wrong.
  • Whenever he leaves office, in early 2021, 2025, or sometime in between, the world will be in a worse state than it was in 2016. China has become more assertive and even aggressive. Russia, under its president for life, Vladimir Putin, carries on brazenly as a rogue state, destabilizing its neighbors and waging a covert war against democracies through cyberattacks and assassinations. In Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, a new crop of strongman rulers has emerged. The world is struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and is just coming to appreciate the magnitude of its economic and social fallout. Looming over everything is climate change.
  • Will the coming decades bring a new Cold War, with China cast as the Soviet Union and the rest of the world picking sides or trying to find a middle ground? Humanity survived the original Cold War in part because each side’s massive nuclear arsenal deterred the other from starting a hot war and in part because the West and the Soviet bloc got used to dealing with each other over time, like partners in a long and unhappy relationship, and created a legal framework with frequent consultation and confidence-building measures. In the decades ahead, perhaps China and the United States can likewise work out their own tense but lasting peace
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  • Today’s unstable world, however, looks more like that of the 1910s or the 1930s, when social and economic unrest were widespread and multiple powerful players crowded the international scene, some bent on upending the existing order. Just as China is challenging the United States today, the rising powers of Germany, Japan, and the United States threatened the hegemonic power of the British Empire in the 1910s. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an economic downturn reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  • The history of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates all too vividly that unchecked or unmoderated tensions can lead to extremism at home and conflict abroad. It also shows that at times of heightened tension, accidents can set off explosions like a spark in a powder keg, especially if countries in those moments of crisis lack wise and capable leadership.
  • If the administration that succeeds Trump’s wants to repair the damaged world and rebuild a stable international order, it ought to use history—not as a judge but as a wise adviser.
  • WARNING SIGNS
  • A knowledge of history offers insurance against sudden shocks. World wars and great depressions do not come out of the clear blue sky; they happen because previous restraints on bad behavior have weakened
  • In the nineteenth century, enough European powers—in particular the five great ones, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—came to believe that unprovoked aggression should not be tolerated, and Europe enjoyed more peace than at any other time in its troubled history until after 1945
  • Further hastening the breakdown of the international order is how states are increasingly resorting to confrontational politics, in substance as well as in style.
  • Their motives are as old as states themselves: ambition and greed, ideologies and emotions, or just fear of what the other side might be intending
  • Today, decades of “patriotic education” in China’s schools have fostered a highly nationalist younger generation that expects its government to assert itself in the world.
  • Public rhetoric matters, too, because it can create the anticipation of, even a longing for, confrontation and can stir up forces that leaders cannot control.
  • Defusing tensions is possible, but it requires leadership aided by patient diplomacy, confidence building, and compromise.
  • Lately, however, some historians have begun to see that interwar decade in a different light—as a time of real progress toward a strong international order.
  • Unfortunately, compromise does not always play well to domestic audiences or elites who see their honor and status tied up with that of their country. But capable leaders can overcome those obstacles. Kennedy and Khrushchev overruled their militaries, which were urging war on them; they chose, at considerable risk, to work with each other, thus sparing the world a nuclear war.
  • Trump, too, has left a highly personal mark on global politics. In the long debate among historians and international relations experts over which matters most—great impersonal forces or specific leaders—his presidency surely adds weight to the latter.
  • His character traits, life experiences, and ambitions, combined with the considerable power the president can exert over foreign policy, have shaped much of U.S. foreign policy over the last nearly four years, just as Putin’s memories of the humiliation and disappearance of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War have fed his determination to make Russia count again on the world stage. It still matters that both men happen to lead large and powerful countries.
  • When Germany fell into the clutches of Adolf Hitler, in contrast, he was able to start a world war.
  • THE NOT-SO-GOLDEN AGE
  • In relatively stable times, the world can endure problematic leaders without lasting damage. It is when a number of disruptive factors come together that those wielding power can bring on the perfect storm
  • By 1914, confrontation had become the preferred option for all the players, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which still hoped to prevent or at least stay out of a general European war.
  • Although they might not have realized it, many Europeans were psychologically prepared for war. An exaggerated respect for their own militaries and the widespread influence of social Darwinism encouraged a belief that war was a noble and necessary part of a nation’s struggle for survival. 
  • The only chance of preventing a local conflict from becoming a continent-wide conflagration lay with the civilian leaders who would ultimately decide whether or not to sign the mobilization orders. But those nominally in charge were unfit to bear that responsibility.
  • In the last days of peace, in July and early August 1914, the task of keeping Europe out of conflict weighed increasingly on a few men, above all Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. Each proved unable to withstand the pressure from those who urged war.
  • THE MISUNDERSTOOD DECADE
  • With the benefit of hindsight, historians have often considered the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to be a failure and the 1920s a mere prelude to the inevitable rise of the dictators and the descent into World War II.
  • Preparing for conflict—or even appearing to do so—pushes the other side toward a confrontational stance of its own. Scenarios sketched out as possibilities in more peaceful times become probabilities, and leaders find that their freedom to maneuver is shrinking.
  • The establishment in 1920 of his brainchild, the League of Nations, was a significant step, even without U.S. membership: it created an international body to provide collective security for its members and with the power to use sanctions, even including war, against aggressors
  • Overall, the 1920s were a time of cooperation, not confrontation, in international relations. For the most part, the leaders of the major powers, the Soviet Union excepted, supported a peaceful international order.
  • The promise of the 1920s was cut short by the Great Depression.
  • Citizens lost faith in the ability of their leaders to cope with the crisis. What was more ominous, they often lost faith in capitalism and democracy. The result was the growth of extremist parties on both the right and the left.
  • The catastrophe that followed showed yet again how important the individual can be in the wielding of power. Hitler had clear goals—to break what he called “the chains” of the Treaty of Versailles and make Germany and “the Aryan race” dominant in Europe, if not the world—and he was determined to achieve them at whatever cost.
  • The military, delighted by the increases in defense spending and beguiled by Hitler’s promises of glory and territorial expansion, tamely went along. In Italy, Mussolini, who had long dreamed of a second Roman Empire, abandoned his earlier caution. On the other side of the world, Japan’s new rulers were also thinking in terms of national glory and building a Greater Japan through conquest.
  • Preoccupied with their own problems, the leaders of the remaining democracies were slow to realize the developing threat to world order and slow to take action
  • This time, war was the result not of reckless brinkmanship or weak governments but of powerful leaders deliberately seeking confrontation. Those who might have opposed them, such as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, chose instead to appease them in the hope that war could be avoided. By failing to act in the face of repeated violations of treaties and international law, the leaders of the democracies allowed the international order to break.
  • OMINOUS ECHOES
  • Led by Roosevelt, statesmen in the Allied countries were determined to learn from this mistake. Even as the war raged, they enunciated the principles and planned the institutions for a new and better world order.
  • Three-quarters of a century later, however, that order is looking dangerously creaky. The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the world’s economy and set back international cooperation.
  • Tensions are building up as they did before the two world wars, with intensifying great-power rivalries and with regional conflicts, such as the recent skirmishes between China and India, that threaten to draw in other players.
  • Meanwhile, the pandemic will shake publics’ faith in their countries’ institutions, just as the Great Depression did.
  • Norms that once seemed inviolable, including those against aggression and conquest, have been breached. Russia seized Crimea by force in 2014, and the Trump administration last year gave the United States’ blessing to Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights and may well recognize the threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank that Israel conquered in 1967.
  • Will others follow the example set by Russia and Israel, as happened in the 1910s and the 1930s?
  • Russia continues to meddle wherever it can, and Putin dreams of destroying the EU
  • U.S.-Chinese relations are increasingly adversarial, with continued spats over trade, advanced technology, and strategic influence, and both sides are developing scenarios for a possible war. The two countries’ rhetoric has grown more bellicose, too. China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, so named by Chinese officials after a popular movie series, excoriate those who dare to criticize or oppose Beijing, and American officials respond in kind.
  • How the world copes will depend on the strength of its institutions and, at crucial moments, on leadership. Weak and indecisive leaders may allow bad situations to get worse, as they did in 1914. Determined and ruthless ones can create wars, as they did in 1939. Wise and brave ones may guide the world through the storms. Let us hope the last group has read some history.
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Opinion | America Is Averting Its Eyes From Something Very, Very Wrong - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-media-inequality.html social media psychology research effects blacks Hispanic teens
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  • social media use also differs by race and ethnicity — and there’s far less discussion of that. According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers ages 13 to 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers
  • One-third of Hispanic teenagers, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one-fifth of Black teenagers and one-tenth of white teenagers.
  • Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram.
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  • Overall, 55 percent of Hispanic teenagers and 54 percent of Black teenagers say they are online almost constantly, compared with 38 percent of white teenagers;
  • Black and Hispanic kids ages 8 to 12, another study found, also use social media more than their white counterparts.
  • we also have to ask,” she went on, “why they are so drawn to social media? Is it the messages on social media that’s exacerbating the depression and anxiety, or was the depression and anxiety already there to begin with and social media is a way to self-medicate?”
  • “It’s culturally more acceptable in youth of color households to use technology for social and academic reasons compared with white households,” Charmaraman said. “Parents don’t worry as much about it. There isn’t as much shame around it.”
  • “We know broadly that youth of minoritized communities have longer commutes, fewer opportunities to do after-school activities, fewer resources,” Magis-Weinberg told me. They may not have spaces to hang out safely with friends nearby; social media is a more accessible option. “But we have to ask,” Magis-Weinberg added, “what is social media use displacing?”
  • Largely because of lower income levels, Black and Hispanic teenagers are less likely to have broadband access or computers at home. This makes them disproportionately use their smartphones, where social media apps ping, whiz and notify
  • Lucia Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington who studies teenagers and tech, compares internet use of the phone to snorkeling, whereas computers allow more of a scuba dive.
  • WhatsApp, hugely popular in Latin America, is used by Hispanic teenagers more than by other demographic groups of the same ages.
  • “The way social media use presents itself is as something that is actively harmful,” Marsh told me. Already kids from these communities have few advantages, he explained. They may not have access to after-school programs. They’re often in single-parent households. They lack support systems. “I think in the long term,” he said, “we’re going to see real differences in the impact.”
  • Let’s consider just reading, which also happens to be correlated with both mental well-being and school achievement
  • According to Scholastic’s most recent Kids and Family Reading Report, the percentage of kids ages 6 to 17 who read frequently for pleasure dropped to 28 percent in 2022 from 37 percent in 2010.
  • Those numbers fall precipitously as kids get older; 46 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds read frequently in 2022 compared with only 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.
  • All this raises the possibility that disparities in internet use could in turn intensify overall declines and existing differences in reading across racial groups among adults.
  • The average daily time spent reading per capita by ethnicity in 2022 was 0.29 hours for white adults, 0.12 for Black adults and 0.10 for Hispanics.
  • In other words, one danger is that social media not only reflects real-world disparities, it could also exacerbate them.
  • Greater use of social media by Black and Hispanic young people “can help perpetuate inequality in society because higher levels of social media use among kids have been demonstrably linked to adverse effects such as depression and anxiety, inadequate sleep, eating disorders, poor self-esteem and greater exposure to online harassment,”
  • Akeem Marsh, medical director of the Home of Integrated Behavioral Health at the New York Foundling, a social services agency, said that among the hundreds of largely Black and Hispanic kids he sees from communities with fewer resources, social media use is often a primary concern or it comes up in treatment. Kids who use it frequently often respond with traumatized feelings and repeated anxiety.
  • The answer, according to experts, includes sports participation, in-person socializing, after-school clubs and activities, exploring the outdoors, reading and more.
  • We need greater awareness of the disparities as well, and most likely, immediate action. What we do not need is another “sudden” yet regrettably delayed realization that something has gone very, very wrong with America’s kids, but we were too busy looking the other way.
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Milton Friedman, Unperson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Friedman was an avid free-market advocate, who insisted that the market, left to itself, could solve almost any problem. Yet he was also a macroeconomic realist, who recognized that the market definitely did not solve the problem of recessions and depressions.
  • At a fundamental level, however, this was an inconsistent position: if markets can go so wrong that they cause Great Depressions, how can you be a free-market true believer on everything except macro? And as American conservatism moved ever further right, it had no room for any kind of interventionism, not even the sterilized, clean-room interventionism of Friedman’s monetarism.
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Triumph of the Unthinking - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • “Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
  • It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.
  • Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.
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  • What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.
  • every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong
  • Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?
  • Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)
  • The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.
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Germany's Cuts vs. America's Stimulus - Economic Scene - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Well, it turns out the German boom didn’t last long. With its modest stimulus winding down, Germany’s growth slowed sharply late last year, and its economic output still has not recovered to its prerecession peak. Output in the United States — where the stimulus program has been bigger and longer lasting — has recovered. This country would now need to suffer through a double-dip recession for its gross domestic product to be in the same condition as Germany’s.
  • Hoover’s austere instincts worsened the Depression. Roosevelt’s postelection reversal helped, but he also prolonged the Depression by raising taxes and cutting spending in 1937. Only the giant stimulus program known as World War II finally ended the Depression. When the private sector is hesitant to spend, the government has to — or no one will. Our recent crisis serves up the same lesson. Germany isn’t even the best example. Its response to the crisis has had some successful features, like an hours-reduction program to minimize layoffs, and Germany’s turn to austerity has not been radical. Britain’s has been radical, with a tax increase having already taken effect and deep spending cuts coming. Partly as a result, Britain’s economy is now in worse shape than Germany’s.
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Austerity's Grim Legacy - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • There are a few obvious lessons from this debacle. “All the important people say so” is not, it turns out, a good way to decide on policy; groupthink is no substitute for clear analysis. Also, calling for sacrifice (by other people, of course) doesn’t mean you’re tough-minded.
  • What this suggests is that the turn to austerity had truly catastrophic effects, going far beyond the jobs and income lost in the first few years. In fact, the long-run damage suggested by the Fatás-Summers estimates is easily big enough to make austerity a self-defeating policy even in purely fiscal terms: Governments that slashed spending in the face of depression hurt their economies, and hence their future tax receipts, so much that even their debt will end up higher than it would have been without the cuts.
  • countries that seem to have largely recovered from the crisis, like the United States, are far poorer than precrisis projections suggested they would be at this point. And a new paper by Mr. Summers and Antonio Fatás, in addition to supporting other economists’ conclusion that the crisis seems to have done enormous long-run damage, shows that the downgrading of nations’ long-run prospects is strongly correlated with the amount of austerity they imposed.
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  • At this point, however, the evidence practically screams hysteresis
  • The idea that policies that depress the economy in the short run also inflict lasting damage is generally referred to as “hysteresis.” It’s an idea with an impressive pedigree: The case for hysteresis was made in a well-known 1986 paper by Olivier Blanchard, who later became the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and Lawrence Summers, who served as a top official in both the Clinton and the Obama administrations
  • there’s growing evidence that we critics actually underestimated just how destructive the turn to austerity would be. Specifically, it now looks as if austerity policies didn’t just impose short-term losses of jobs and output, but they also crippled long-run growt
  • In 2010, more or less suddenly, the policy elite on both sides of the Atlantic decided to stop worrying about unemployment and start worrying about budget deficits instead.
  • Then it all went wrong. And the consequences of the wrong turn we took look worse now than the harshest critics of conventional wisdom ever imagined.
  • When economic crisis struck in 2008, policy makers by and large did the right thing. The Federal Reserve and other central banks realized that supporting the financial system took priority over conventional notions of monetary prudence. The Obama administration and its counterparts realized that in a slumping economy budget deficits were helpful, not harmful. And the money-printing and borrowing worked: A repeat of the Great Depression, which seemed all too possible at the time, was avoided.
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Andrew Sullivan: New Hope and New Danger on the Left - 0 views

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  • I can’t help drawing parallels between what we’re seeing in Democratic Party and the similar far-left wave of enthusiasm in Britain, where a new tide of youthful energy has flooded the British Labour Party and transformed its ambitions almost overnight from ameliorating capitalism to full-on socialism.
  • There was an infectiousness to the excitement in 2015, in part because full-fledged socialism seemed to be answering a genuine and massive crisis of capitalism.
  • It spoke to those under 40 whose futures are debt-ridden, who have little hope of property ownership, and struggle to manage with precarious, low wages. It rallied a sense of the common good against the isolation and depression of austerity. It actually took the science of climate catastrophe seriously
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  • It’s worth noting that the original version of the Green New Deal was devised by the left-leaning British National Economic Foundation, as a means for recovery after the 2008 economic collapse
  • Once Labour’s full, staggeringly bold proposals were unveiled, support for the party soared
  • Labour climbed a full 20 points in the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, robbing the Tories of a majority in the Parliament
  • So it seems to me there is a massive opportunity for the left now across the Western world. Look at how popular a 70 percent top rate is … in America! The left is correct to sense a huge opportunity and they are right, I think, to be bold.
  • I wrote about Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour last year in these pages, and that, under his leadership, “it turned out to be difficult to propel a new movement of left radicalism without simultaneously tapping into a vein of left extremism,” and that seems to me to be precisely the challenge in the U.S. as well
  • the full package from the contemporary radicalized left in both the U.K. and U.S. brings with it far more troubling ideas
  • If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists.
  • A passion for social justice curdles into attacks on free speech
  • Postmodern critical gender theory denies any meaningful natural differences between men and women, and casts an entire sex as inherently problematic
  • Concern about mass immigration is dismissed as nothing but racism and xenophobia.
  • so Labour, after so much promise and success, has not been able to get any sustainable polling lead over the most shambolic Tory government in memory.
  • If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win
  • If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much
  • If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.
  • Hostility to the policies of the state of Israel — a perfectly legitimate position — morphs swiftly into ugly anti-Semitic tropes
  • It’s not easy to find any heroes in Washington these days, so allow me to eulogize one. Walter Jones was a longtime Republican congressman from North Carolina, who died earlier this wee
  • Are they really capable of fucking this up once again? The answer that is emerging in the first months of the new Democratic House is: of course they can.
  • we may be underestimating what the constant drumbeat of news about the accelerating sixth great extinction has been doing to us psychologically.
  • I’m haunted all the time by the knowledge of what my lifetime will have witnessed. Humans are committing countless species to death; we are destroying the life of our oceans and skies; we are changing the planet’s ecosystem more quickly than at any time since the asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs. From the perspective of life itself, we are conducting a holocaust of the natural world. How is the knowledge of this not traumatizing?
  • A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research notes, according to the BBC, that “since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.”
  • Last week, research emerged showing that the insect biomass is declining by 2.5 percent a year, which means that we may wipe out the entire insect population within a century — and lose a quarter of it in the next ten years.
  • This amounts to what Jill Kieldash describes as the “actual structural and functional collapse of the natural systems which have supported life on Earth for the last 400 million years.”
  • I don’t know how this paradigm affects you every day, but it is for me the gutting context for everything, a growing nausea laced with guilt and shame.
  • In a century, we will have destroyed this Earth as we have known it — in absolutely full awareness of what we are doing. It’s the greatest crime humanity has ever committed
  • One answer could be that they are behaving in a classic way when a catastrophe strikes: They’re traumatized by this knowledge, and they cope with this trauma by a classic form of disassociation. In fact, we are all living through this collective trauma
  • Once we become aware of its true scope, depth, and accelerating pace, we then begin to view everything else through the traumatic lens of the climate crisis
  • How could anyone with a reasonably realistic, educated worldview not be haunted by the perpetual specter of Climate Trauma when considering fundamental life and identity choices?
  • I am not surprised by declining birth rates in the West. Having a child in today’s era means initiating another human being into the end of the world as we have known it
  • I find my own witnessing of the collapse of liberal democratic values in the West inseparable from the mass extinction of life on Earth our civilization has wrought — and the double depression this creates makes me want to escape
  • this collective trauma is never-ending. It’s a 9/11 all the time. Woodbury notes the similarity between our knowledge of future planetary collapse and a diagnosis of a terminal disease: “You may put it out of your mind for spells, but the grief associated with prospective loss comes at you in waves.
  • The challenge is to resist disassociation — which is “the human capacity to mentally escape an insufferable reality.
  • We are disassociating from America in our current dystopian politics. But we are also, more profoundly, disassociating ourselves from our deepest ecological reality: that we are killing what created us. And we cannot seem to stop.
  • If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders
  • when it became clear that the Iraq War had been based on phony intelligence, he actually changed his mind. More than that: He took moral responsibility for his vote for the war, and rethought a great deal of his previous views. Ashamed of what he had done — and the lives lost because of the war — he went on to write 12,000 letters to family members of service members killed
  • he tirelessly fought to bring back war-making powers to the Senate, where they belong. He took on his own party leadership in demanding votes before military adventures
  • He was that very rare creature: a true Republican fiscal conservative
  • Of course a man of this character was a dogged defender of his own constituents, especially those in the military subjected to unfairness or injustice of any kin
  • This didn’t make him a liberal. It made him a conservative. And he proved that to be a conservative these days — a humane, decent, honest, principled conservative — you really have no place in the Republican Party
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Opinion | Why Do We Think Suffering Is Good for Us? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ketamine-depression.html suffering therapy chemical drug
shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • as a psychiatrist — and an admittedly impatient one — I know that just because something feels bad doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good for you. I’m pretty confident that people who are suffering prefer relief sooner rather than later and that if there was any way to make the treatment — be it psychotherapy or medication — more effective, they would gladly try it.
  • So I am cautiously optimistic that on Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved esketamine, a nasal version of the drug ketamine, which appears to relieve depressive symptoms far faster than other antidepressants.
  • I have been wondering if esketamine could be used for another purpose, too: to strengthen the effects of therapy. This is because it targets the neurotransmitter glutamate, which plays an important role in learning and memory.
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  • There is intriguing neuroscience research that suggests that it may be possible to boost the efficacy of psychotherapy with drugs that share some of ketamine’s effects, somewhat the way athletes can enhance their performance with steroids
  • How might this work? D-cycloserine is an antibiotic that, like ketamine, increases the activity of glutamate in key brain regions, which promotes connections between neurons. It seems to amp up the molecular machinery of learning. And psychotherapy is all about learning — to overcome fear and to better handle stress, among other lessons.
  • For decades, psychoanalysts were against medicating anxiety at all, because they believed it would interfere with the therapeutic process. Fortunately, those days are largely over. Many are now comfortable giving patients anti-anxiety benzodiazepines like Klonopin if they are having a hard time grappling with issues that arise in therapy.
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Jordan Peterson on scandal, depression and family devastation | Times2 | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...d-family-devastation-xbtfgj577 peterson bio
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Have I, I wonder, lived a particularly fortunate life? Or has his been so difficult that it has delivered him to this vision of life red in tooth and claw?
  • “Do I feel I’ve had a hard life? There’s been some of it that’s been hard,” he says. “It’s by no means been hard compared to many people’s lives, but there’s a strong familial streak of depression that runs through my family. That’s been hard. My daughter’s illness was hard, very hard at times. It was very difficult to see her in pain for so long.
  • “On the other hand, I’ve had great good fortune. I have wonderful children [a son too]. I love my wife. I have a great extended family. I’ve had a wonderful career. I’ve had this strange streak of unparalleled success, but I’m distraught currently because of this unexpected occurrence in my family, which is quite devastating to everyone concerned. I’m having a difficult time reconciling myself to it, my own good advice notwithstanding.
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  • The public demands on his time and his concentration have meant him abandoning his teaching at the University of Toronto and his psychologist’s practice. Nevertheless, over the past three years he has been “terrified” of being “one slip of the tongue away from genuine and permanent trouble” (Rule 10: Be precise in your speech)
  • It is not the first time he has described himself as an emotional person, but it has been hard to accept the claim because of his adamantine Old Testament public face. Now I see that façade as an armour that protects him from himself as much as from his enemies. Life’s a battle, but his emotions count among the hostile insurgents.
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When Your Job Harms Your Mental Health - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...job-work-mental-health.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • But like the sports star, many of us have been stuck in situations that were detrimental to our mental health — at work or in our personal lives — feeling torn between societal expectations and self-preservation.
  • Her decision to avoid the press did not go over well with tennis officials. Ms. Osaka was fined $15,000, and the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian, French and United States Opens, and Wimbledon — threatened to expel her from the French Open.
  • A survey of over 5,000 employees conducted last year by the advocacy group Mental Health America found that 83 percent of respondents felt emotionally drained from work and 71 percent strongly agreed that the workplace affects their mental health. While the respondents were not representative of the general population — they most likely found the survey when visiting the organization’s mental health screening tools — their responses show just how anxious some workers have become.
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  • Women and people of color may shoulder a disproportionate amount of emotional stress both in and outside of the workplace.
  • Women are at least twice as likely to have had depression as men, according to federal data. And Black people are less likely than non-Hispanic white people to receive treatment for depression or prescription medications for mental health
  • For example, you might notice that you dread starting work each day, or you feel so anxious that you have trouble thinking about everything that you’re supposed to do. Perhaps your emails are piling up and you aren’t communicating with people as much as you typically would. If you’re feeling ineffective in your job, you may also start to engage in more negative self-talk, like: “I’m no good at my job anyway. I’m useless,” Dr. Gold said.
  • Once you realize you need help, seek out a trusted friend, mentor, co-worker, peer group or therapist, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who researches Black women’s mental health.
  • Remember that you are a worthy and valuable human being, separate from your job function, productivity and even how you might be evaluated by others,” Dr. Burnett-Zeigler said. “When feelings of self-doubt and not belonging show up, don’t lose sight of the unique talents and ideas that you bring to the workplace.”
  • It is illegal for an employer to discriminate against you simply because you have a mental health condition.
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From World War II, Economic Lessons for Today - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...conomic-lessons-for-today.html wwII depression economics policy history employment
shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • the oft-repeated notion that it took World War II to end the economic nightmare of the ’30s: If a global war was needed to return the economy to full employment then, what is going to save us today?
  • While the war helped the recovery from the Depression, the economy was improving long before military spending increased. More fundamentally, the wrenching wartime experience provides a message of hope for our troubled economy today: we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.
  • Starting in the mid-1930s, Hitler’s aggression caused capital flight from Europe. People wanted to invest somewhere safer — particularly in the United States. Under the gold standard of that time, the flight to safety caused large gold flows to America. The Treasury Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used that inflow to increase the money supply.
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  • The result was an aggressive monetary expansion that effectively ended deflation.
  • The economy responded strongly. From 1933 to 1937, real gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of almost 10 percent, and unemployment fell from 25 percent to 14. To put that in perspective, G.D.P. growth has averaged just 2.5 percent in the current recovery, and unemployment has barely budged.
  • The lesson here is that fiscal stimulus can help a depressed economy recover — an idea supported by new studies of the 2009 stimulus package. Additional short-run tax cuts or increases in government investment would help deal with our unemployment crisis.
  • What of the idea that monetary and fiscal policy can do little if unemployment is caused by structural factors, like a mismatch between workers’ skills and available jobs
  • businesses and workers found a way to get the job done. Factories simplified production methods and housewives learned to rivet.
  • Here the lesson is that demand is crucial — and that jobs don’t go unfilled for long. If jobs were widely available today, unemployed workers would quickly find a way to acquire needed skills or move to where the jobs were located.
  • at the end of World War II, that ratio hit 109 percent — one and a half times as high as it is now. Yet this had no obvious adverse consequences for growth or our ability to borrow.
  • what about the national debt? Given the recent debt downgrade, it might seem impossible for the United States to embark on fiscal stimulus that would increase its ratio of debt to G.D.P.
  • Everyone understood then why the nation was racking up so much debt: we were fighting for survival, and for the survival of our allies. No one doubted that we would repay our debts. We had done it after every other war, and raising taxes even before the attack on Pearl Harbor showed our leaders’ fiscal resolve.
  • someone needs to explain to the nation and to world markets just why we must increase the debt in the short run. Unemployment of roughly 9 percent for 28 months and counting is a national emergency. We must fight it with the same passion and commitment we have brought to military emergencies in our past.
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Child Labor - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...child-labor history culture
shared by brookegoodman on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Although children had been servants and apprentices throughout most of human history, child labor reached new extremes during the Industrial Revolution
  • The new supply of child workers was matched by a tremendous expansion of American industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that increased the jobs suitable for children.
  • During the Great Depression, Americans wanted all available jobs to go to adults rather than children
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  • In colonial America, child labor was not a subject of controversy. It was an integral part of the agricultural and handicraft economy.
  • They could be paid lower wages, were more tractable and easily managed than adults, and were very difficult for unions to organize.
  • In 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16.
  • Children were useful as laborers because their size allowed them to move in small spaces in factories or mines where adults couldn’t fit, children were easier to manage and control and perhaps most importantly, children could be paid less than adults.
  • Despite these activities, success depended heavily on the political climate in the nation as well as developments that reduced the need or desirability of child labor.
  • ucational reformers of the mid-nineteenth century convinced many among the native-born population that primary school education was a necessity for both perso
  • Many laws restricting child labor were passed as part of the progressive reform movement of this period.
  • The Great Depression changed political attitudes in the United States significantly, and child labor reform benefited.
  • Although child labor has been substantially eliminated, it still poses a problem in a few areas of the economy.
  • Employers in the garment industry in New York City have turned to the children of illegal immigrants in an effort to compete with imports from low-wage nations.
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Opinion | It's 2022. What Does Life Look Like? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navirus-economy-two-years.html pandemic effects
shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.
  • But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.
  • Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.
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  • the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach
  • Editors’ Picks
  • if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.
  • Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out
  • In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.
  • is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”
  • “It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
  • Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling
  • Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores
  • If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic
  • enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.
  • “The biggest danger that we face as a sector
  • It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression
  • for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.
  • Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.
  • “My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”
  • “Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”
  • That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features
  • The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave
  • The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,”
  • while Mr. Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”
  • If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.
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