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Americans have since ramped up spending on everything from home improvements to bicycles with the help of stimulus checks sent to millions, though overall expenditures remain below pre-pandemic levels.

A nationwide decline in combined state revenue has happened after only two events in 90 years: following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. economy has steadily recovered since the spring, and more than 11 million jobs of the 22 million lost earlier in the year have come back. Still, the unemployment rate recently hovered at 7.9%, and there has been an uptick in permanent layoffs.

Economists warn a two-track recovery is emerging, with well-educated and well-off people and some businesses prospering, at the same time lower-wage workers with fewer credentials, old-line businesses and regions tied to tourism are mired in a deep decline.

After 2008, some states implemented or added to rainy day funds—cash reserves that can be used to fill revenue gaps caused by a potential shock

School systems also usually receive local funds through property taxes.

Schools received federal aid from the pandemic-stimulus packages passed by Congress earlier this year.

The money was quickly spent

The Ohio Education Association, a teachers union, said the state’s school districts could face budget shortfalls for the 2022 and 2023 budget years of between 20% and 25%.

Many states are pleading for more aid from Congress, which has so far sent money in its coronavirus relief packages to deal with the health crisis but not to offset revenue losses.

Congress has doled out about $150 billion in Covid-19 response dollars to state and local governments, plus some additional money to cover elevated Medicaid costs.

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said they don’t want Covid-19 aid used to address longstanding financial problems.

Community Health Resources, which offers mental-health and addiction services to 27,000 children and adults, is concerned it won’t receive its expected more than $40 million in state funding—62% of the organization’s annual budget—in the next fiscal year, which begins in July.

But when such crises occur during a sitting president's reelection campaign, voters have historically turned him out in favor of a challenger offering a new direction for the nation. In short, incumbents fail when they cannot convince the American people to stay the course.

Times were flush in America when the nation elected Hoover -- touted as the "Great Engineer" -- as president in 1928. Four years later, the country faced the worst economic crisis in its history, the Great Depression. The popular outcry against the president summoned new words into existence: "Hooverville" for a shantytown of the homeless and "https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Furldefense.proofpoint.com%2Fv2%2Furl%3Fu%3Dhttps-3A__nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com_-3Furl-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Furldefense.proofpoint.com-252Fv2-252Furl-253Fu-253Dhttps-2D3A-5F-5Fnam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com-5F-2D3Furl-2D3Dhttps-2D253A-2D252F-2D252Fwww.ushistory.org-2D252Fus-2D252F48d.asp-2D26data-2D3D04-2D257C01-2D257Cbalcerskit-2D2540easternct.edu-2D257Cf504669cb9cd421b19d308d87ba94456-2D257C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a-2D257C1-2D257C0-2D257C637395314221385811-2D257CUnknown-2D257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-2D253D-2D257C1000-2D26sdata-2D3DZ-2D252BQzKDaHxQ2jYBKYrQvJuRk1RPwMeJOLvEB-2D252B7DyJGH4-2D253D-2D26reserved-2D3D0-2526d-253DDwMGaQ-2526c-253Dtq9bLrSQ8zIr87VusnUS9yAL0Jw-5FxnDiPuZjNR4EDIQ-2526r-253DfqdvyATuskufZZ6lHWLDX7rjOgtfuIwFFgyFWTSfNss-2526m-253DxIZtC-5FUtx-2DbHITyb6-2D8CwaYXg5eK-5Fmk9FWumiGu6d6M-2526s-253Dq96yS8DFGwSISOOmLLR5WbA0V2YS1apeWBDmpXUf00E-2526e-253D-26data-3D04-257C01-257Cbalcerskit-2540easternct.edu-257C8d842cd7f6654944dc0d08d87babf248-257C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a-257C1-257C0-257C637395325741251331-257CUnknown-257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-253D-257C1000-26sdata-3DkRZ-252FoKQ05pJxDSHqKx2XgnLUHtWa-252BHnkZddOrHzzXfc-253D-26reserved-3D0%26d%3DDwMGaQ%26c%3Dtq9bLrSQ8zIr87VusnUS9yAL0Jw_xnDiPuZjNR4EDIQ%26r%3DfqdvyATuskufZZ6lHWLDX7rjOgtfuIwFFgyFWTSfNss%26m%3DPsd0YU3mz1QSXOmUwvnRXVoJyl9RuP_TWfEHJ0yDWxw%26s%3DqL37mqHWsBhBnO2QOtSnmsOuXDDjmapvvunVTxkoapo%26e%3D&data=04%7C01%7Cbalcerskit%40easternct.edu%7C0d8701f780904a7323f608d87bad4758%7C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a%7C1%7C

But Hoover's own actions made matters far worse. To combat the depression, he promoted voluntarism with limited government intervention.

In July 1932, Hoover ordered the US Army, under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, to clear out the "Bonus Army" encampment of World War I veterans. Then, as now, the optics were terrible.

Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt touted a "New Deal" for the American people.

The nation elected Bush with a wave of popular support in 1988. Like Hoover before him, Bush followed two terms of Republican control of the White House. But by 1992, a sharp recession had set in, leaving many Americans out of work and facing difficult times.

Political life in America reached a new low in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned amid scandal. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned the ex-president, leaving him vulnerable to a Democratic challenger in 1976. Former Georgia Gov. Carter ran as an outsider and won a narrow victory.

An unprecedented 40 million Americans voted that November, yielding FDR an even larger popular victory than Hoover had won four years earlier.

In 1979, Carter described a "crisis in confidence" affecting the country.

To make matters worse, Carter asked for the resignation of his entire Cabinet, and five members acceded to the demand.

Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, by contrast, projected a sunny optimism, famously declaring recovery happens "when Jimmy Carter loses his" job.

As the 1970s yielded to the 1980s, the nation chose a new direction, handing Reagan a resounding victory over the incumbent Carter

By 1980, however, a global economic downturn had weakened the country. Oil shocks, rising inflation and industrial competition from abroad all took a toll. Abroad, the United States suffered a humiliating setback when Iranian militants took Americans hostage at the US embassy in Tehran.

With the government facing revenue shortfalls, Bush went against his own campaign rhetoric -- his "read my lips" promise to not raise taxes -- and increased taxes in 1991.

Political controversies also hurt. The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, during which Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, rankled. When combined with domestic challenges, such as the Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992, Bush was the definition of an embattled incumbent president.

Democratic challenger Bill Clinton proved popular, leading many to choose the younger candidate and informal motto: "It's the economy, stupid." Bush also likely lost votes to the third-party candidate Ross Perot. Although no candidate won a majority of the popular vote in November, Clinton secured enough electoral votes to become president.

Yet Bush could not win reelection in 1992 for similar reasons to his long-ago predecessor -- an economic downturn had soured the American people against him.

imilar increases occurred at the same time for girls in Canada for mood disorders and for self-harm. Girls in the U.K. also experienced very large increases in anxiety, depression, and self-harm (with much smaller increases for boys).

Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Z’s increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.

The available evidence suggests that Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls. If public officials want to make that case, it could go like this:

from 2010 to 2014, high-school students moved much more of their lives onto social-media platforms.

National surveys of American high-school students show that only about 63 percent reported using a “social networking site” on a daily basis back in 2010.

But as smartphone ownership increased, access became easier and visits became more frequent. By 2014, 80 percent of high-school students said they used a social-media platform on a daily basis, and 24 percent said that they were online “almost constantly.”

2. The timing points to social media.

Notably, girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram (which by 2013 had more than 100 million users), followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

Boys are glued to their screens as well, but they aren’t using social media as much; they spend far more time playing video games. When a boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him

Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.

3. The victims point to Instagram.

In 2017, British researchers asked 1,500 teens to rate how each of the major social-media platforms affected them on certain well-being measures, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Instagram scored as the most harmful, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook.

Facebook’s own research, leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, has a similar finding: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps.

4. No other suspect is equally plausible.

A recent experiment confirmed these observations: Young women were randomly assigned to use Instagram, use Facebook, or play a simple video game for seven minutes. The researchers found that “those who used Instagram, but not Facebook, showed decreased body satisfaction, decreased positive affect, and increased negative affect.”

Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.

(Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.)

The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens.

In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.

Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a “dose-response relationship.” Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones.

his framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the user’s lack of self-control. That’s exactly what Bosworth concluded: “Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves.” The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model. The company can simply offer more tools to help Instagram and Facebook users limit their consumption.

social-media platforms are not like sugar. They don’t just affect the individuals who overindulge. Rather, when teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.

Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.

Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk. Play also strengthens friendships.

When girls started spending hours each day on Instagram, they lost many of the benefits of play.

First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.

The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter

Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates

Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.

f those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm.

Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.

Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy.

Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.

Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.

Right now, families are trapped. I have heard many parents say that they don’t want their children on Instagram, but they allow them to lie about their age and open accounts because, well, that’s what everyone else has done.

Nearly three quarters of the child and adolescent population in Pakistan experienced learning difficulties after widespread floods devastated the country in 2010.

For many young people, worry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other symptoms

And those feelings are often amplified by a pervasive sense that older people aren’t doing enough to fix the climate problem. “There’s a feeling of intergenerational injustice,” says Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, DC, who specializes in the mental health effects of climate change. “Many young people feel invalidated, betrayed, and abandoned.”

Research on effective interventions is virtually nonexistent, and parents and other people who want to help have little to go on. Professional organizations are only now beginning to provide needed resources.

News reports and researchers often refer to these feelings collectively as climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, but Pinsky admits to having misgivings about the terms.

“Many people interpret anxiety as a pathological response that needs to be treated and solved,” she says. “But it’s also a constructive emotion that gives us time to react in the face of danger. And anxiety in the face of climate change is a healthy response to a real threat.”

others become progressively hyperaroused and panicky, Pinsky says, or else fall into a sort of emotional paralysis

Some people manage their climate-triggered emotions without spiraling into distress

These reactions can be especially debilitating for people who already struggle with underlying mental health disorders.

anxieties over climate change can interlace with broader feelings of instability over the pace of technological and cultural change,

“Technology is accelerating faster than culture can keep up, and humans in general are unmoored and struggling to adapt,” she says. “For some people, climate change is psychologically the last straw. You realize you can no longer count on the stability of your planet, your atmosphere — your very world.”

Van Susteren describes that anxiety as a type of pre-traumatic stress disorder, with few existing precedents in the United States apart from fears of nuclear annihilation and the decades-ago experience of living through classroom drills on how to survive an atom bomb attack.

Talk therapy for anxiety typically aims to help people identify and replace irrational thoughts, called cognitive distortions, with alternative thinking that isn’t so stressful. But since climate anxiety is based on rational fears, this particular approach risks alienating anyone who might feel their worries are being dismissed.

Younger people were increasingly arriving at Bryant’s office frightened, depressed, and confused about how to manage climate-triggered emotions. Some were even wondering if they should bring children into such a world.

“We’re not saying that anxiety is good or bad,” he says. “We just want to bring those feelings out into the open. It’s more about validating that climate concerns are reasonable given what we’re reading in the news every day.” Ann-Christine Duhaime

Emerging evidence suggests that young people do best by cultivating a sense of agency and hope despite their climate concerns.

getting to that point involves talking through feelings like despair, grief, or rage first. Without doing that, he says, many people get stuck in maladaptive coping strategies that can lead to burnout, frustration, or hopelessness. Bryant describes jumping into an urgent, problem-focused coping strategy as “going into action mode so you don’t have to feel any grief.”

Problem-focused coping has a societal benefit in that it leads to “pro-environmental behavior,” meaning that young people who engage in it typically spend a lot of time learning about climate change and focusing on what they can do personally to help solve the problem

But climate change is far beyond any one person’s control, and problem-focused coping can leave people frustrated by the limits of their own capacity and make them unable to rid themselves of resulting worry and negative emotions

she and her colleagues describe emotion-focused coping, whereby young people ignore or deny climate change as a means of avoiding feeling anxious about it. In an email, Ojala notes that people who gravitate toward emotional distancing typically come from families that communicate about social problems in “pessimistic doom-and-gloom ways.”

Ojala

Ojala and other experts favor a third coping strategy that balances negative feelings about climate change with faith in the power of social forces working to overcome it. Called meaning-focused coping, this approach takes strength from individual actions and climate beliefs, while “trusting th

her societal actors are also doing their part,”

since meaning-focused coping allows negative and positive climate emotions to coexist, young people who adopt it have an easier time maintaining hope for the future.

The overall goal, she says, is for young people to achieve more resilience in the face of climate change, so they can function in spite of their environmental concerns

When people find meaning in what they do, she says, they have a greater sense of their own agency and self-efficacy. “You’re more empowered to take action, and that can be a powerful way to deal with strong negative emotions,”

Duhaime cautions that anyone taking action against climate change should know they shouldn’t expect a quick payback

The brain’s reward system, which forms a core of human decision-making, evolved over eons of history to strengthen neural associations between actions and outcomes that promote short-term survival. And that system, she says, responds to the immediate consequences of what we do. One problem with climate change, Duhaime says, is that because it’s so vast and complex, people can’t assume that any single act will lead to a discernible effect on its trajectory

young people may benefit from seeking the rewards that come from being part of a group or a movement working to advance an agenda that furthers actions that protect the planet’s climate. “Social rewards are really powerful in the climate change battle, especially for young people,

Recognizing the mismatch between how the brain processes reward and the novel challenges of the climate crisis may help people persist when it feels frustrating and ineffective compared to causes with more immediately visible effects. Even if you don’t see climate improvements or policy changes right away, she says, “that won’t diminish the importance of engaging in these efforts.”

Malits adds that she wasn’t overly burdened by her emotions. “I’m an optimist by nature and feel that society does have the capacity to make needed changes,” she says. “And what also helps me avoid climate anxiety on a daily basis is the community that I’ve been lucky enough to connect with here at Harvard. It helps to surround yourself with people who are similarly worried about these issues and are also engaging with you on solutions, in whatever capacity is meaningful to you.”

“Climate anxiety is an important catalyst for the work I do,” Malits says. “I think you need avenues to channel it and talk about it with loved ones and peers, and have communities through which you can process those feelings and come up with remedies.” Collaborative activism dampens the anxiety, Malits says, and gives young people a sense of renewed hope for the future. “That’s why it’s important to roll up your sleeves and think about how you’d like to tackle the problem,”

Malits says she worries most about how climate change is affecting marginalized communities, singling out those who live in urban heat islands, where inadequate green space intensifies extreme heat.

nearly 30 percent of Honduras’s population works for the agricultural sector, where rising temperatures and drought are contributing to a mass exodus, as documented that year by PBS NewsHour.

Researchers are finding that young people with the most extreme fears over climate change live predominantly in the developing world. The Philippines and India, for instance, are near the top of a list of recently surveyed countries where young people report climate-driven feelings that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”

Nearly a year after Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, 18 percent of children living in the area were still struggling with PTSD-like symptoms, and nearly 30 percent of those who lived through Hurricane Katrina in 2005 wound up with complicated grief, in which strong feelings of loss linger for a long time.

Even when people are not uprooted by disaster, a variety of climate-related mechanisms can affect their mental health or the safety of their mental health treatment. High heat and humidity worsen irritability and cognition, he points out, and they can also exacerbate side effects from some common psychiatric medications

Levels of lithium — a mood stabilizer used for treating bipolar disorder and major depression — can rise to potentially toxic concentrations in a person who is perspiring heavily; they can become dehydrated and  may develop impaired kidney funtion, potentially causing tremor, slurred speech, confusion and other dangerous effects

“I believe the fundamental and best treatment for youth climate distress is a rapid and just transition from fossil fuels,” Pinsky says. “I genuinely consider all that work to be in the area of mitigating climate anxiety.”    

By all means let’s try to reduce deficits and bring down government indebtedness once normal conditions return and the economy is no longer depressed. But right now we’re still dealing with the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. This is no time for austerity.

just look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.

here we are, more than five years into the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and one of our two great political parties has seen its economic doctrine crash and burn twice: first in the run-up to crisis, then again in the aftermath. Yet that party has learned nothing; it apparently believes that all will be well if it just keeps repeating the old slogans, but louder.

“The first great globalization wave, in the half-century or so before WWI, sparked a populist backlash too, and ultimately came crashing down in the cataclysms of 1914 to 1945,”

From the mid-19th century to 1914, advances like steamships, the telegraph, the telephone and the Suez and Panama canals dramatically shrunk distances and increased communication, and the world underwent a period of rapid globalization.

There are many differences among these eras of globalization and retrenchment, Feinman is careful to say. The World Wars and Great Depression were not just about a rejection of globalization, and that rejection of globalization was as much a result of those events as their cause,

Yet there are some strong parallels, Feinman says. “Modern globalization has been spurred by some of the same forces that powered the pre-WWI epoch: New technologies, an open, free-trade, rules-based world economic system underpinned by the leading power of the day, and a period of general peace among major countries.”

Today, the free flow of capital and trade exceeds what it was in the pre-World War I era. And the share of Americans who are foreign-born and the share of wealth owned by the richest Americans — an indicator of inequality — have returned to pre-World War I levels, after dipping during the mid-1900s, as the two graphs below show

Feinman says that globalization is far from solely responsible for the economic malaise that some in the United States and around the world experience. In addition to globalization, technology, social changes and government policies have all been instrumental in determining who benefits and who loses out from global economic integration in past decades.

At this point, the threat to globalization is mostly a risk rather than a reality, says Feinman, and “cooler heads may well prevail.” The global economy is still remarkably integrated, and new techno

The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession were nowhere nearly as painful as the Great Depression. But the effects are similar. The heady growth of the 2000s led Europeans and Americans to believe they were on firm economic ground; the shattering of banks, real estate markets and governments in the wake of the crash left tens of millions of people at sea, angry at the institutions that had failed them, above all the politicians who claimed to be in charge.

Why, voters ask, did the government allow so many bankers to behave like criminals in the first place? Why did it then bail out banks while letting car factories go under? Why is it welcoming millions of immigrants? Are there separate rules for the elites, defined by a hypermodern liberal worldview that ridicules the working class — and their traditional values — as yokels?

In America and Europe, the rise of anti-establishment movements is a symptom of a cultural shock against globalized postmodernity, similar to the 1930s’ rejection of modernity

Today, as in the 1930s, we are seeing the failure of the liberal mainstream to respond to serious challenges, even those that threaten its very existence.

And it’s happening again, both in Europe and in America.

To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.

Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.

When George Bush left office in 2008, some worried that Stewart would run out of material. This proved as shortsighted as the hope that Obama would be America’s grand salvation. Stewart, who describes himself as “a leftist”, has always hammered the Democrats with the vigour of a disappointed supporter, and subjected Obama to one of his most damaging interviews during his first term: the president admitted that his 2008 slogan probably should have been “Yes We Can, But...” At the time, Stewart laughed, but today he admits with a shrug, “It was heartbreaking. It’s generally heartbreaking – that’s what the gig is.”

His seemingly effortless interview with Tony Blair in 2008 cut through Blair’s crusader mentality in a mere six minutes, as Stewart calmly rejected Blair’s theory that any kind of military action can keep the west safe. As Blair stammered, huffed and shifted in his seat, Stewart concluded that: “19 people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough, to make the world safe enough, that 19 people wouldn’t want to do harm to us. So it seems like we have to rethink a strategy that is less military-based.”

it’s also fair to say that some of the interviews, generally those with actors and authors, seem like mere puffery, a point with which Stewart agrees (he embraces criticism as eagerly as he deflects compliments).

How often does he really connect with his interviewees? “Have you seen the show? Mostly, I’m not even listening. But I can bullshit anyone for six minutes.”

“[If I left the show,] I would do what I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?”

“Honestly, it was a combination of the limitations of my brain and a format that is geared towards following an increasingly redundant process, which is our political process. I was just thinking, ‘Are there other ways to skin this cat?’ And, beyond that, it would be nice to be home when my little elves get home from school, occasionally.”

Stewart likes to credit “the team”, but given that he has always been deeply involved in the script (unusually for a host), writing and rewriting drafts right up to the last minute, the show will be a pretty different beast without him

He can be brutal about the leftwing media, too (CNN has been a frequent target, for being mediocre and too attached to pointless computer graphics). MSNBC, the liberal 24-hour news network, is, Stewart says, “better” than Fox News, “because it’s not steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.”

Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”

Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realise, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”

Isn’t he being a bit faux modest, I ask, especially when he insists that what he does is comedy and not news? That comes with a certain profile. He thinks about this for a few seconds. “It’s not that I… I mean, it’s satire, so it’s an expression of real feelings. So I don’t mean that in the sense of, ‘I don’t mean this.’ What I mean is, the tools of satire should not be confused with the tools of news. We use hyperbole, but the underlying sentiment has to feel ethically, intentionally correct, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”

Greece, without its own currency, didn’t have that option.

the ruling leftist coalition, was willing to accept the austerity that has already been imposed. All it asked for was, in effect, a standstill on further austerity.

But the troika was having none of it. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but the essential point now is that Greece has been presented with a take-it-or-leave-it offer that is effectively indistinguishable from the policies of the past five years.

The purpose must therefore be to drive him from office, which will probably happen if Greek voters fear confrontation with the troika enough to vote yes next week.

But they shouldn’t, for three reasons. First, we now know that ever-harsher austerity is a dead end: after five years Greece is in worse shape than ever. Second, much and perhaps most of the feared chaos from Grexit has already happened. With banks closed and capital controls imposed, there’s not that much more damage to be done.

Finally, acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence.

it’s time to put an end to this unthinkability. Otherwise Greece will face endless austerity, and a depression with no hint of an end.

Hooray for Obamacare JUN 25

Larger consumer inventories don't just increase variety. They reduce the wear and tear on each individual item, extending its useful life

The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

This shoe falling in the public psyche – a sense that we are in a deep structural impasse for the middle class, rather than a temporary recessionary hit – means a profound disillusionment with the future. And the fact that neither party seems to have a workable answer to this problem intensifies the sense of drift.

The emergence of ISIS has dimmed that hope as well. It does two things at once: it calls into question whether our departure from Iraq can be sustained, and it presents the threat of Jihadist terror as once again real and imminent. So ISIS is a reminder of the worst of 9/11 and the worst of Iraq.

The last great triumph of the US – the end of the Cold War, the liberation of Central Europe, the emergence of a democratic Russia – is now revealed as something more complicated. If Americans thought that the days were long gone that they had to worry about Russian military power, they’ve been disabused of that fact this past year.

the other recent success: getting out of Iraq and defeating al Qaeda. For many of us, this was one of Obama’s greatest achievements: to cauterize the catastrophe of the Iraq War, to decimate al Qaeda’s forces in Af-Pak, and to enable us to move forward toward a more normal world.

Events overseas have had another, deeply depressing effect.

So the core narrative of the Obama presidency – rescuing us from a second Great Depression and extricating us from a doomed strategy in response to Jihadism – has been eclipsed by events. And that’s why Obama has lost the thread. He has lost the clear story-line that defined his presidency.

You can argue, and I would, that Obama is not really responsible for the events behind this narrative-collapse.

But most Americans are not going to parse these trends and events and come to some nuanced view. They see the economy as still punishing, Jihadist terror just as frightening, and they are increasingly unable to avoid the fact that we lost – repeat, lost – the Iraq War. They’re also aware that the US, after Iraq, simply has historically low leverage and power in the world at large, as the near-uselessness of our massive military in shaping the world as we would like has been exposed in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan. Now throw in a big bucket of Ebola, and what on earth is there to be cheerful about?

And who else do you hold responsible if not the president?

They want to create a Carter-like narrative that can bring down the Democrats and turn the Obama presidency into an asterisk. But the difference between now and the late 1970s is that Obama is not a Carter and the GOP have no Reagan, or, more importantly, no persuasive critique of Obama that is supplemented by a viable alternative policy agenda that isn’t just a warmed-over version of the 1980s.

The future as yet seems to contain no new or rallying figure to chart a different course. Ever-greater gridlock seems the likeliest result of the mid-terms; polarization continues to deepen geographically and on-line

the Democrats have only an exhausted, conventional dynasty to offer in 2016; and the Republicans either have dangerous demagogues, like Christie or Cruz, or lightweights, like Walker or Rubio or Paul, or, even another fricking Bush.

it is not too late for Obama to lead the way, to construct a new narrative that is as honest and as realist as it is, beneath it all, optimistic. It’s a hard task – but since his likeliest successors are failing to do so, he has as good a shot as any. In these circumstances, treating the last two years of a presidency as irrelevant could not be more wrong. They could, with the right policies and the right message, be the most relevant of them all.

In the past, drug abuse deaths were more common in middle-aged blacks than in middle-aged whites. Now they are more common in whites. The same pattern holds for deaths from alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. The suicide rate for whites was four times that of blacks.

Could people be taking drugs and killing themselves as a response to the economic slowdown? Maybe. But, if so, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case said, then why aren’t people in other countries responding the same way?

Recent reports of illness and disability might provide some clues. More middle-aged whites report that their general health is not good; and, more report chronic pain

older people are actually doing better — less addiction, disability rates falling.

how much of what they are seeing might be attributed to the explosive increase in prescription narcotics.

the people who report pain in middle age are the people who report difficulty in socializing, shopping, sitting for three hours, walking for two blocks.

Dr. Deaton envisions poorly educated middle-aged white Americans who feel socially isolated are out of work, suffering from chronic pain and turning to narcotics or alcohol for relief, or taking their own lives. Starting in the 1990s, he said, there was a huge emphasis on controlling pain, with pain charts going up in every doctor’s office and a concomitant increase in prescription narcotics.

Dr. Deaton noted that blacks and Hispanics may have been protected to an extent. Some pharmacies in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics live do not even stock those drugs, and doctors have been less likely to prescribe them for these groups.

So we're all the same after all.Under the right conditions - no control over your life, low pay, no job, little in the way of job prospects, no healthcare, little education, families break down when the man can't be the breadwinner, and then along comes poor health, substance abuse, depression, despair - all those ills that were blamed on black people's supposed lack of morals.Now that white kids are dying of heroin we need to change the laws, end the war on drugs, legalize pot, and change how we talk about what were formerly known as 'junkies'.White men are in despair as a result of economic problems, white kids are doing hard drugs in numbers that everyone's starting to notice, and AIDS is plaguing white communities, and now we need to care. So we're all human?

Because white people are depressed over their diminution in society by the policies of the Federal Government, the education system, racial animosity and biased media outlets that are rampant through the society. These doctors are clueless liberals that will try to find any reason to blame, other than the truth. It's not the drugs, it's what is causing them to want the drugs. White males have been denigrated for the past 50 years. The effects have to be building up and weighing on them.

John is a trusted commenter Boston 6 hours ago No, their diminution in society came from globalized capitalism. A lot of these working class white people were Reagan voters. I'm the same age as them, I saw it happen. They thought they were getting "Morning in America" but instead they got morning for Walmart and sunset for the working class. That's enough to make anybody turn to pills and booze.

DougH Lithonia, GA 7 hours ago To some extent, it's of their own making. High school educated whites tend to vote Republican. Over the last 30 years, Republicans have sold them a bill of goods. They abandoned unions, opposed increases in the minimum wage, and opposed regulation, including safety, wage fairness, etc.So now they are paid less. They have no way of changing that (short of high education) and the big beneficiaries of lower taxes have been the businesses and owners that for which they work. Did those owners bless the workers with the fruits of their benefits? Of course not. They kept the reduced expenses as profit, increased CEO wages, and kept cutting benefits before finally shipping their jobs overseas.Perhaps, if they stopped voting against their own interests, they would fair better.

dw659 Chicago 8 hours ago Why? Simple. Because to males, a 'loss of control' is an unacceptable change. 200 years of being 'in control' just because you are born white and male is ending. Many men can't face a world where they are of 'lower status' than women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. They don't want to live in that world.....

dale south africa 5 hours ago Its true ! I am a conservative man and i live i johannesburg. I cant imagine what it must be like respecting all things under the suns . From females, gays blacks etc Children of slaves dictating societies . oprah picking presidents. the bully is not allowed to be at his natural best and strongest with this new liberal socialist agenda , everyone equal attitude. im not white but if I was who would want that

Linda is a trusted commenter Oklahoma 54 minutes ago I know so many white men in this small town I live in who never had anything to do with their children. They didn't care about anybody through their productive years and now they're surprised that nobody cares about them.

AC USA 5 hours ago Could it be because these guys have no close family ties? They are the ages that their parents are probably in nursing homes or already passed away. These blue collar, high school educated guys fathered unwanted children with women to whom they may or may hot have been married and divorced. But now at middle age comes time for them to feel wanted and valued by their progeny (dad, dispense some life wisdom to us, help us with college, getting married, a down payment on a house, take your grand-kids fishing, etc.), but they dumped their kids by not wanting to pay child support, or having a bad attitude and not helping their kids at all past age 18. So they kids moved on without dad's love and "support" (monetary or emotionally). The "all for myself mentality" they have espoused has finally come home to roost. There is no going back in time, they are all alone, have no purpose as jobs are hard to come by at that age - even more-so blue collar ones - so they drink/take pills to dull the pain, then overdo it.

suzinne bronx 5 hours ago Think white families more often DO NOT stick together. At middle age and white, have ZERO contact with any family members. By the time I was 16 most had died, moved away or become estranged. Know this amps up my chances for suicide, and that's probably going to pan out too. Flag

Paul '52 is a trusted commenter NYC 2 hours ago The is the first cohort to experience the phenomenon that if you do the same job as your parents you won't do as well or better. These are the auto workers, the airport baggage handlers, the truck drivers. They are, in fact, more productive than their fathers, but they're not paid as well and they don't have pensions. And the disappointment is taking its toll.

One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.”

From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success.

Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.

The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents.

The kids in the affluent communities she studied felt their parents to be no more available to them, either emotionally or physically, than the kids in severe poverty did.

Some of the measures Luthar used were objective: Did the family eat dinner together, or hang out in the evenings? Here, she discovered that some busy parents would leave adolescents alone in the afternoon and evening and often weren’t home at all during those hours

Children had the sense that their parents monitored their activities and cared deeply about how they were spending their time, but that didn’t translate into feeling close. Many children felt they were being prodded toward very specific goals and behaviors by parental cues, some subtle, some less so.

a feeling of closeness to parents was inversely linked to household income, meaning that the most-affluent kids felt the most alienated.

In the past couple of years, other best sellers have sounded a similar note. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor who contributes to this magazine, argues in Excellent Sheep that elite education “manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.”

But it turns out that this combination can be just as hard on a child’s well-being.

Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute.

Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice.

Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow

Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.

Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.

The meeting she attended with select parents, scholars, mental-health professionals, and community leaders was academically rigorous and yielded many important insights. But it was “eerie” in its almost complete lack of feeling

“There are a lot of very hard truths that are just not being spoken.”

Gunn is more than 40 percent Asian, and some non-Asian parents, particularly ones who’d grown up in town when the Asian population was smaller, felt the shift was poisoning the culture of the entire school.

Her first semester, Chiu got an F on a geometry test, which “totally traumatized me.” Her relationship with her parents started to fray, “because it just took too much energy to speak in a polite tone of voice.” She began to dread swim practice and even Girl Scouts and band, “but I didn’t want to be a quitter.” She remembers wishing that someone had broken up with her, or that she was anorexic, or that she had some reason to explain to her parents why she felt so sad. “I also felt like I was already saying that I was too stressed, and nobody—neither my parents nor my teachers—seemed to care or take me seriously.

well-educated parents are quick to distance themselves from the Tiger Mom. We might admire her children’s accomplishments, but we tend to believe these can be coaxed out of a child through applause, not scolding. In fact, this particular combination of lavish praise and insistence on achievement defines our era of protective, meritocratic parenting

In March, after spending two days among Palo Alto’s parents and civic leaders, Luthar came to see the community, still in shock over the suicides, as hovering somewhere between fear and denial.

Providing praise and love when a child performs especially well can look like healthy parenting, he says, because the parents are giving the child more of a good thing. But if praise comes only when a child succeeds, the child is likely to develop a sense that his or her parents’ affection depends upon good grades, or touchdowns, or mastery of a religious text, or whatever the parents’ priorities might be.

The aim of healthy parenting, Assor says, should not be to shower children only with praise and trophies, or to encourage self-esteem based on no real achievements. It should be to disentangle love from the project of parental or pedagogical guidance

Giving specific, positive feedback about something a child has tried hard at, or critical yet constructive feedback when a child fails, is perfectly appropriate. “But being warm and nice is a different matter,” he says. “We want to be nice and warm also when our kids do not achieve and when they do not try hard to achieve.”

The hope is that, secure in love, a child can experiment more freely and begin to find his or her own voice.

With the help of therapists and time, Chiu could better explain what she had experienced—depression, the dangers of not sleeping enough. She learned that her idea that she could escape by manufacturing a mental-health crisis was itself a sign of a mental-health crisis.

Not atypically for people who come to consider suicide, she’d lost her ability to think clearly or solve problems, and ended up trapped in a tunnel ruminating about escape, until self-destruction became the only light she could see.

Almost by definition, suicide points to underlying psychological vulnerability. The thinking behind it is often obsessive and then impulsive; a kid can be ruminating about the train for a long time and then one night something ordinary—a botched quiz, a breakup—leads him or her to the tracks.

the closer I got to the heart of this story, the less I felt I understood that link. Some details neatly fit the narrative that academic pressure has caused lethal amounts of stress in Palo Alto—Taylor Chiu’s experience, for example. Will Dickens, who died in 2009, had a learning disability, and his mother, Janet Dixon-Dickens, told me he never forgot it at Gunn. Cameron Lee, on the other hand, wasn’t obviously oppressed by schoolwork, and neither was J.P. Blanchard, or Sonya Raymakers, a girl who died in June 2009, soon after being accepted into her dream program at New York University.

In these days of assumed meritocracy, where children can be turned into anything, we admire them as displays of remarkable engineering, to be tweaked and fine-tuned into bilingual perfection. What we’ve lost, perhaps, is a sense that there may be things about them we can’t know or understand, and that that mysterious quality, separate from us, is what we should marvel at.

Admitting we don’t entirely know why teenagers kill themselves isn’t an invitation to do nothing to prevent it from happening. It’s just a call for humility, a short pause to acknowledge that a sense of absolute certainty about what children should do or be or how they should operate is part of what landed us here.

starting a cycle of devaluation

The U.S. is the world’s only large net importer

China’s global trade surplus has risen sharply to an all-time high of $592 billion during the past 12 months

As the U.S. dollar rises, Beijing’s ability to keep the yuan stable against an already strong dollar weakens

managing yuan “neutrality”

Chinese leaders could also claim they are committed to avoiding competitive devaluation, and receive credit for helping avert a currency war—just as they did during the Asian financial crisis.

struggled to communicate effectively with markets

A shift in Beijing’s long-standing currency regime brings risks, both for China and for the world

In the 19th century, the secularization of Western society led to the secularization of pain. It was no longer a passion to be endured but a sensation to be quashed.

The concept of pain as a purely physical phenomenon reached its zenith in the 1990s

having pain designated a “fifth vital sign,” alongside blood pressure, temperature and breathing and heart rate.

This coincided with the release of long-acting opioids like OxyContin. Doctors believed they now had an effective remedy for their patients’ suffering

looking back it’s clear that using opioids to treat chronic pain — backaches, bum knees and the like — might well be considered the worst medical mistake of our era.

ecades of research suggests that opiates provide little to no benefit for chronic noncancer pain

Why is this? Studies have shown that opioids can reduce patients’ pain thresholds.

They can also result in a condition called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, in which people feel more and more pain as they are prescribed higher and higher doses of opioids

the mind does play a pivotal role in the experience of pain. After a pain signal reaches the brain, it undergoes significant reprocessing.

How much something hurts can vary depending on factors like your expectations, your mood and how distracted you are

pain is contagious and transmittable.

Conditions like depression and anxiety greatly increase the chance of developing chronic pain, while patients who experience pain are at high risk of developing depression or anxiety

there is considerable overlap in the areas of the brain that deal with pain and emotion.

Objectively, there is no doubt that illnesses and injuries can cause immense suffering. The question is how severe that suffering is, and how long it lasts

pain sensitivity varies significantly among people, most likely as a result of genetic differences.

rug companies greatly underplayed the risks of opioids, while billions of dollars in marketing told people that pills were the only answer to their ailments.

future doctors should be taught that pain is part of the story of the person who suffers from it, not just a separate physical phenomenon.

this education should incorporate ways to avoid prescribing opioids for chronic use.

Perhaps the most important tool physicians need to manage pain is empathy.

Physical therapy that doesn’t just manipulate joints but also addresses the context pain comes alive in, encourages optimism and builds emotional resilience has been found to be more effective.

unfortunately our health system encourages doctors to see as many patients as possible as quickly as possible. We need to change how physicians are paid in order to give them the time to really talk with patients about their pain.

I felt that the pain was my body’s way of telling me that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to silence that voice with a temporary fix.

What pulled me out after almost a year of agony was not just rigorous physical therapy that molded my spine back into shape but also the kindness of my friends, my family and my future wife.

a spiritual and emotional experience alleviated through prayers rather than prescriptions.