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Javier E

The coronavirus shows how backward the United States has become - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Our self-confidence, verging on hubris, should be shaken by the coronavirus. The United States has been a laggard, not a world leader, in confronting the pandemic
  • self-confidence has been bolstered by a century of achievements: We saved Western civilization from German and Soviet militarism, built the most prosperous society in history, and landed a man on the moon.
  • a German company shipped more than 1.4 million diagnostic tests for the World Health Organization by the end of February. During that same time, U.S. efforts to produce our own test misfired. By Feb. 28, only 4,000 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been used
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  • “Losing two months is close to disastrous, and that’s what we did,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Bloomberg.
  • if we are being honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that the United States has long been failing. We remain one of the richest countries in the world, but by international standards we look more like a Third World nation.
  • we lag in almost every measure of societal well-being among the wealthy nations (now 36) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
  • we had the second-highest poverty rate, the highest level of income inequality and the highest level of obesity.
  • We were also below average on renewable energy, infrastructure investment and voter turnout.
  • We spent the most on education but produced less-than-average results
  • We are the only OECD nation that doesn’t mandate paid family leave.
  • One area where we do lead is gun violence. Our homicide rate is nearly 50 percent above the OECD average.
  • We spend more on health care than any other country in the world, but we are the only OECD country without universal medical coverage (27.9 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2018)
  • Child mortality in the United States is the highest in the OECD, and life expectancy is below average
  • We have far fewer hospital beds per 1,000 people than other advanced democracies (2.4 compared to 12.2 in South Korea), which makes us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic.
  • Why has America become so backward? That is a complex topic. I would direct readers to the work of analysts such as Jonathan Rauch, Francis Fukuyama, and Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann
  • I would ascribe a lot of what’s wrong to growing partisan polarization that makes it almost impossible to address our most pressing needs. Republicans are getting more conservative and Democrats more liberal — although not to the same degree. The GOP is far more extreme than the Democratic Party.
  • President Trump has exacerbated the problem, but he didn’t start it. He is himself the product of decades of right-wing revolt against government and increasingly against reason itself.
  • America is unusual in having a major party — and a major television network — devoted to climate denialism and protecting the “right” of everyone to own an assault rifle. The GOP and the right-wing media have long been a hotbed of nutty conspiracy theories, and their reluctance to face the reality of the new coronavirus set back efforts to save lives.
  • The Republicans’ decades-long demonization of government has consequences
  • the federal civilian workforce has fallen as a percentage of total nonfarm employment from 18 percent in 1980 to 15 percent today, and their salaries top out at just under $200,000 — “only slightly more than an entry-level engineer makes at Google.”
  • There are still plenty of high-quality civil servants, but their ranks are too thin, and they are too much at the mercy of political yahoos.
  • “When a typical European parliamentary government changes hands from one party to another, the ministers and a handful of staffers turn over,” Fukuyama notes. “In the U.S., a change of administration (even within the same party) opens up some 5,000 ‘Schedule C’ job positions to political appointees.”
  • We must not only beat this pandemic; we must also address a host of other ills that have been festering for decades. In recent years, America has been “exceptional” mainly in the scale of our governmental failures compared with those of other industrialized democracies.
Javier E

Carbon Prices Are Too Low to Reduce Emissions - Scientific American - 0 views

  • Carbon prices are spreading throughout the world’s largest economies. The only problem for climate hawks: They’re nowhere near high enough to produce a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions.
  • The analysis identified a gap of 76.5 percent between real climate costs and carbon prices implemented today across 42 OECD and Group of 20 countries. The gap has narrowed by 3 percent over the last three years, the report found
  • “The gulf between today’s carbon prices and the actual cost of emissions to our planet is unacceptable,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said in a statement
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  • “Pricing carbon correctly is a concrete and cost-effective way to slow climate change. We are wasting an opportunity to steer our economics along a low-carbon growth path and losing precious time with every day that passes.”
  • An abundance of carbon credits and exemptions for major emitters has plagued emission-trading systems in Europe and California, making credits cheap and hindering their effectiveness
  • A series of recent developments, though, have provided a glimmer of hope for would-be carbon taxes. The United Kingdom’s adoption of a carbon tax in the power sector produced a 58 percent drop in emissions from 2012 to 2016.
  • The biggest development of all may be in China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, which has taken steps toward its own emissions trading program. China’s move has the potential to narrow the gap between global carbon prices and climate costs to 63 percent in the early 2020s, OECD found.
  • The OECD report compared effective carbon rates—taxes on fossil fuels, carbon taxes and emission-trading credits—against estimated climate costs, which it projected at €30 ($35) per ton of carbon. The result is a carbon pricing gap, the difference between actual carbon rates and climate costs.
  • The organization found that countries with larger carbon pricing gaps tend to have more energy-intensive economies. Russia and China, for instance, have gaps of 100 percent and 90 percent, respectively, OECD found.
  • Less energy-intensive economies, by contrast, have less ground to make up. OECD measured the gap in Spain at 51 percent, Ireland at 42 percent and France at 41 percent
  • The carbon pricing gap in the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, was 75 percent.
Javier E

The Fake Freedom of American Health Care - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Republican leaders seem unfazed by this, perhaps because, in their minds, deciding not to have health care because it’s too expensive is an exercise of individual free will.
  • The idea is that buying health care is like buying anything else. The United States is home to some of the world’s best medical schools, doctors, research institutes and hospitals, and if you have the money for the coverage and procedures you want, you absolutely can get top-notch care.
  • This approach might result in extreme inequalities and it might be expensive, but it definitely buys you the best medical treatment anywhere. Such is the cost of freedom.
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  • In practice, though, this Republican notion is an awfully peculiar kind of freedom. It requires most Americans to spend not just money, but also time and energy agonizing over the bewildering logistics of coverage and treatment — confusing plans, exorbitant premiums and deductibles, exclusive networks, mysterious tests, outrageous drug prices.
  • I never had to worry whether I was covered. All Finns are covered for all essential medical care automatically, regardless of employment or income.
  • If you can’t afford it, not buying it is hardly a choice.
  • in Finland I never worried about where my medical care came from or whether I could afford it. I paid my income taxes — which, again despite the stereotypes, were about the same as what I pay in federal, state and local income taxes in New York City — and if I needed to see a doctor, I had several options.
  • And more often than not, individual choices are severely restricted by decisions made by employers, insurers, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other private players. Those interest groups, not the consumer, decide which plans are available, what those plans cover, which doctors patients can see and how much it will cost.
  • Meanwhile, life expectancy at age 65 is higher in 24 other developed nations, including Canada, Britain and most European nations.
  • According to the latest report of the O.E.C.D. — an organization of mostly wealthy nations — the United States as a whole does not actually outshine other countries in the quality of care.
  • In fact, the United States has shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality and fewer doctors per capita than most other developed countries.
  • When it comes to outcomes in some illnesses, including cancer, the United States does have some of the best survival rates in the world — but that’s barely ahead of, or even slightly behind, the equivalent survival rates in other developed countries.
  • the United States are South Korea, Israel, Australia, Sweden and Finland, all with some form of government-managed universal health care.
  • And when it comes to cervical cancer, American women are at a significant disadvantage: The United States comes in only 22nd
  • According to the Republican orthodoxy, government always takes away not only people’s freedom to choose their doctor, but also their doctor’s ability to choose the correct care for patients. People are at the mercy of bureaucrats. Waiting times are long. Quality of care is dismal.
  • Americans might still assume that long waits for care are inevitable in a health care system run by the government. But that’s not necessarily the case either.
  • A report in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation specializing in health care research, ranked the United States third in the world in access to specialists. That’s a great achievement. But the Netherlands and Switzerland did better
  • When it comes to nonemergency and elective surgery, patients in several countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, all of which have universal, government-guided health care systems, have faster access than the United States.
  • in fact Americans who are getting a raw deal. Americans pay much more than people in other countries but do not get significantly better results.
  • The trouble with a free-market approach is that health care is an immensely complicated and expensive industry, in which the individual rarely has much actual market power
  • It is not like buying a consumer product, where choosing not to buy will not endanger one’s life. It’s also not like buying some other service tailored to individual demands, because for the most part we can’t predict our future health care needs.
  • The point of universal coverage is to pool risk, for the maximum benefit of the individual when he or she needs care
  • And the point of having the government manage this complicated service is not to take freedom away from the individual
  • The point is the opposite: to give people more freedom. Arranging health care is an overwhelming task, and having a specialized entity do the negotiating, regulating and perhaps even much of the providing is just vastly more efficient than forcing everyone to go it alone
  • What passes for an American health care system today certainly has not made me feel freer. Having to arrange so many aspects of care myself, while also having to navigate the ever-changing maze of plans, prices and the scarcity of appointments available with good doctors in my network, has thrown me, along with huge numbers of Americans, into a state of constant stress. And I haven’t even been seriously sick or injured yet.
  • As a United States citizen now, I wish Americans could experience the freedom of knowing that the health care system will always be there for us regardless of our employment status. I wish we were free to assume that our doctors get paid a salary to look after our best interests, not to profit by generating billable tests and procedures. I want the freedom to know that the system will automatically take me and my family in, without my having to battle for care in my moment of weakness and need. That is real freedom.
  • So is the freedom of knowing that none of it will bankrupt us. That is the freedom I had back in Finland.
  • It’s true that in countries with universal health care the cost of hiring a new employee can be significant, especially for a small employer. Yet these countries still have plenty of thriving businesses, with lower administrative burdens. It can be done.
  • in a nation that purports to champion freedom, the outdated disaster that is the United States health care system is taking that freedom away.
Javier E

(1) Chartbook 313 Being realistic in the polycrisis? Or, does the West/global North kno... - 0 views

  • The challenge of actually being in medias res as fully as possible, is what preoccupies me in recent books, shorter writing, this newsletter and the podcast.
  • More simply this challenge can also be formulated in a series of snappy questions: Where are we? Do we know what planet we are actually on? Can we come back down to earth? Who is “we”? And, most urgently, the classic refrain: “What time is it?
  • Do we know, do we really know how fast the clock is ticking and where we are on the timeline of history?
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  • In this spirit, in my FT column I’ve repeatedly harped on questions of global development as particularly glaring examples of the way in which Western governments and their publics fail to rise to the scale of contemporary global challenges.
  • Conversely, flights from reality, blindspots and structural hypocrisies are profoundly telling as to our actual interests and willingness to summon the will, the power and the resources to act effectively in the world we are actually in.
  • These questions are not contemplative. They are not posed out of idle curiosity. They are urgent and practical. They are the first step, if we want to claim to be realistically engaged with the world as it is and thus to have any hope of informed and purposive agency.
  • In previous one column I addressed the failure of rich countries to seize the huge opportunity of investing at scale in global public health
  • In a world of polycrisis, in which intersecting problems compound each other and there are few easy wins, it is all the more important to recognise those policy choices that are truly obvious. Vaccines are one such investment. Since the 1960s, global vaccination campaigns have eradicated smallpox, suppressed polio and contained measles
  • . Modest expenditures on public health have saved tens of millions of lives, reduced morbidity and allowed children around the world to develop into adults capable of living healthy and productive lives.  … Unfortunately, in public policy, pandemic preparedness is all too often relegated to the cash-starved budgets of development agencies or squeezed into strained health budgets.
  • Where such spending properly belongs is under the flag of industrial policy and national security. 
  • As the IMF declared: “vaccine policy is economic policy.” And pandemic preparedness belongs under national security because there is no more serious threat to a population. A far larger percentage of the UK died of Covid between 2020 and 2023 (225,000 out of 67mn) than were killed by German bombs in the second world war (70,000 out of 50mn)
  • The annual defence budget of just one of the larger European countries would suffice to pay for a comprehensive global pandemic preparedness programme
  • The money lavished on just one of the UK’s vainglorious aircraft carriers was enough to have made the world safe against both the ghastly Ebola and Marburg viruses. 
  • After last week’s Brics meeting in South Africa, the question hangs in the air: what does the west have to offer a new, multipolar world? Nowhere is that question more urgent than in Africa. The Niger coup extends the comprehensive rout of western strategy across the Sahel. The debacle of western military intervention, notably on the part of the French, is embarrassing. But the wave of coups also represents a failure of Europe’s effort to link economic development and security in the programme known as the Sahel Alliance
  • This multinational group jointly promoted by France and Germany co-ordinated aid and development projects across the region. Launched in July 2017, as of 2023 it counts more than 1,100 projects with a cumulative funding commitment of €22.97bn. For Niger, project commitments under the Sahel Alliance come to over €5.8bn. And this is only a part of the financial assistance that Niger was receiving in the years prior to the coup.
  • According to OECD data, the combined total of official development assistance for Niger in 2021 came to $1.78bn. These numbers sound impressive until you place them in relation to the scale of the Sahel’s development needs. The western Sahel is home to 100mn of some of the poorest people on Earth. Niger’s population of 25mn has the third-lowest human development index in the world and the highest birth rate. Long hailed as the western bastion in the region, almost two-thirds of the population cannot read. Niger desperately needs investment in education, irrigation and basic health services. To meet these priorities, on a per capita basis foreign aid in 2021 came to just $71 for every inhabitant of Niger, or $1.37 per week. Of this miserly total, roughly 7 cents were spent on education, 15 cents on health, and 30 cents on production and infrastructure. Twenty-six cents were devoted to the basics of keeping alive.
  • Last month I took up the issue of the prevailing fatalism in the USA when it comes to the question of development in Central America
  • The attack line from the Republicans is predictable: Kamala Harris was Biden’s border tsar. The crisis on the border with Mexico shows that she failed. So too is the response from the Democrats: No, the vice-president never was in charge of the border. Her role was to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. No one can blame her for failing. It was mission impossible
  • The striking thing about this retort is not that it is unreasonable, but that it sets such a low bar. Whereas for the Republicans the desperation in Central America is reason to seal the border even more firmly, for the Democrats the deep-seated nature of those problems is an excuse. Apparently, no one expects Harris or anyone else to succeed in addressing the poverty and insecurity in the region. Shrugging its shoulders, the US settles down to live with polycrisis on its doorstep.
  • I returned to the question of the scale of global aid and European aid in particular for the African continent.
  • Uncontentious estimates of global development need put the sum of investment required to achieve comprehensive sustainable develoment at between $ 3 and 4 trillion per annum. That is an immense amount, but given the rewards on offer and the fact that global GDP stands at $105 trillion it cannot be dismissed out of hand as “utopian”.
  • FDI and private lending will do some of the work. But it is highly volatile and not willing to take the risks necessary for comprehensive development. So support and derisking, on carefully managed terms, must come from public balance sheets. Some will come from multilateral development banks like the World Bank. But a substantial amount will depend on concessional loans and aid in the form of grants. The crucial question is, how much is being made available? How far does it reflect the needs of the moment?
  • According to the OECD, the volume of official development assistance (ODA) in 2023 was 224 billion, a new high. Of that amount only $36 billion went to Africa, the continent with the most dramatic development needs.
  • So, what might these figures look like, if the West was actually invested in changing the trajectory of Africa’s development through material assistance? To this question, too the OECD data provide an answer.
  • The upshot is startling: In 2023 money flows to Ukraine classified by the OECD as official development assistance (ODA) exceeded the equivalent flows to the entire African continent.
  • At this moment, millions in Sudan are at risk of outright famine. The UN’s funding appeal for Sudan famine relief is for $2.6 billion, less than the monthly rate of support for Ukraine in 2023. So far it has raised $1 billion.
  • This is a stark measure of the difference between a crisis in which the Western donors see their interests directly and urgently engaged and one to which they are relatively indifferent.
  • It is the difference between a crisis happening to “people just like us”, people who have been welcomed in their millions into their neighboring European countries, and a crisis happening in Africa to black people with whom the donor populations feel on the whole only an abstract form of sympathy and identification.
  • It is the difference between crises happening on either side of the global colour line.
  • These discrepancies reveal the extraordinary extent to which, for all the common place talk of globalization, racial hierarchies and geographical division continue to undergird our political discourse and policy.
  • They are a sad commentary on where we are at and what time we are in. They also force the question of whether and by what means this line will be maintained and at what cost.
Javier E

Opinion | American exceptionalism has become a hazard to our health - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Taiwan gets the gold medal for its coronavirus strategy. It has close ties with mainland China, where the disease originated, receiving almost 3 million visitors from there in a typical year. It is a densely populated land, and Taipei, the capital city, has crowded public transit. And yet, with a population of nearly 24 million, Taiwan has had just seven deaths. New York state, with a smaller population, has had 33,000.
  • SARS also came out of China, where authorities bungled the initial response and withheld information from the outside world. The Taiwanese were caught unprepared and made several mistakes. In the aftermath, they totally overhauled their pandemic preparedness procedures. They ensured they had adequate supplies of equipment on hand. They made plans to act early, smartly and aggressively.
  • Many Asia-Pacific countries have succeeded against covid-19 — South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. All were hit by SARS or witnessed its economic damage, and they learned from the experience. The only non-Asian country with a SARS outbreak was Canada, and it, too, changed its procedures after 2003 and took precautions.
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  • SARS doesn’t explain the success of every country that has handled covid-19 well, but it reveals an important aspect of the story.
  • Consider, on the other hand, countries that have handled covid-19 badly. Anthropologist Martha Lincoln, writing in Nature, points out that several of these countries tend to think of themselves as exceptional in some way. She notes that the United States, Britain, Brazil and Chile all have strong national narratives that see themselves as separate, distinct and better than others.
  • That sense of being special makes a country unlikely to adopt the standard attitude of any business when confronting a challenge — to look for best practices.
  • Bill Gates recently wrote that he has always approached problem-solving by starting with two fundamental questions: “Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?
  • And yet the United States is remarkably uninterested in how other countries approach similar challenges.
  • Dozens of advanced countries have health-care systems that deliver better results at half the cost of America’s. Most have a fraction of our homicide rates. Many much poorer countries have better infrastructure, which they build at far lower cost. They ensure that money does not dominate their elections. Not only do we not learn from them, we barely bother to look.
  • In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Konyndyk argues that “American exceptionalism — the notion that the United States is unique among nations and that the American way is invariably the best — has blinded the country’s leaders (and many of its citizens) to potentially lifesaving lessons from other countries.
  • He quotes the eminent U.S. historian Eric Foner, who once explained that American exceptionalism translates into “hubris and closed-mindedness, and . . . ignorance about the rest of the world. Since the United States is so exceptional, there is no point in learning about other societies.” Konyndyk concludes: “That mentality is now costing American lives.”
Javier E

The Profound Social Cost of American Exceptionalism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The United States is one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations in the history of humanity. And yet it accepts — proudly defends, even — a degree of social dysfunction that would be intolerable in any other rich society.
  • My first column pondered why Americans didn’t care more about the nation’s income gap, so much starker than that of any other advanced democracy. I suggested that my compatriots might come to a consensus that inequality is harmful when they realized how vast inequities could gum up the cogs of economic and social mobility
  • You can bet it has gone higher, given the bull run in the stock market since then. And Republicans just passed another round of tax cuts to offer a helping hand to the upper crust.
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  • Most interestingly, Americans still don’t care that much. Sure, two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed, according to Gallup. Still, more than three out of five — compared with just over half six years ago — are satisfied with “the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.”
  • As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.
  • Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.
  • Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.
  • The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.
  • The children of poverty who survive will most likely hobble through life with mediocre educations — lagging their more affluent peers even before their first day in school and then falling farther behind, deprived of the resources that disadvantaged children in other advanced nations routinely enjoy.
  • Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?
  • America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.
  • populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.
Javier E

'Parasite' paints a nightmarish picture of Korean inequality. The reality in America is... - 0 views

  • Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is a dark parable about the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor in South Korea. It’s a story of a society where the working class have no hope of attaining a better life, and instead squabble among themselves for the literal scraps of prosperity cast off by the wealthy as they move serenely through their charmed lives.
  • By any number of measures, inequality here in the States is much, much worse than in Bong’s South Korea.
  • Returning to the pie analogy, the richest American gets a whopping 39 slices, while the bottom 50 don’t have any. In fact, they are actually in pie debt, collectively owing a tenth of a slice to their creditors (most of whom, incidentally, are probably in that top 1 percent).
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  • Think of it this way: If South Korea were a country of 100 people and the nation’s wealth were a pie with 100 slices, the richest person would get 25 slices of that pie all to himself, while the poorest 50 would have to split two slices between them all. That disparity is at the heart of “Parasite.”
  • As many economists have noted, growing inequality in the United States is no accident, but rather the direct result of policy decisions made by lawmakers and their wealthy allies in the business community.
  • t the bottom half owns something of value. In America, the bottom 50 percent have literally none of the nation’s wealth and, in fact, have a negative net worth. That’s a relatively new phenomenon: As recently as the late 1980s, the bottom half of Americans could claim several percent of the country’s wealth as their own.
  • “People in positions of power tend to capture political processes.” The wealthy use their power to write rules that allow them to accrue more wealth.
  • there are some big differences. South Korea provides universal health care, for starters — something many economists and public health experts have identified as a key tool in the fight against poverty. The country also provides much more support for working families: New parents can claim up to 40 weeks of paid leave (American parents, by contrast, are guaranteed nothing). The country also provides universal early-childhood education, something lacking in the United States, and subsidizes child care for children under age 3.
  • On the revenue side, South Korea collects bigger taxes on corporate profits than the United States does. South Korea also collects four times as much revenue (as a share of GDP) from estate, gift and inheritance taxes as the United States does. Those taxes, if used correctly, have the potential to be a powerful corrective of runaway inequality.
  • it’s not difficult to imagine that if the United States had similar social programs and collected a similar level of corporate and estate taxes, the distribution of wealth here would be similar to that in South Korea.
  • The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”
Javier E

Opinion | What Europe Can Teach Us About Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Americans have a hard time learning from foreign experience. Our size and the role of English as an international language (which reduces our incentive to learn other tongues) conspire to make us oblivious to alternative ways of living and the possibilities of change.
  • Unfortunately, any suggestion that Europe does something we might want to emulate tends to be shouted down with cries of “socialism.”
  • an under-discussed aspect of the current economic scene: Europe’s comparative success in getting workers idled by the pandemic back into the labor force.
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  • the Great Resignation, it turns out, is largely an American phenomenon. European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels. What explains this difference?
  • Europe, on the other hand, mainly relied on job retention schemes — government aid intended to keep people on employer payrolls even if they weren’t working at the moment.
  • where European labor support helped keep workers linked to their old jobs, facilitating a rapid return, U.S. policy allowed many of those links to be severed, making an employment recovery harder.
  • Perhaps one reason Europeans aren’t engaging in an American-style Great Resignation is that they don’t hate their jobs quite as much.
  • a significant number may have realized that low-paying jobs with lousy working conditions weren’t worth having
  • some jobs that are grueling and poorly paid here are less awful on the other side of the Atlantic. Famously, in Denmark McDonald’s pays more than $20 an hour and offers six weeks of paid vacation each year
  • the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time and for failing to offer parental and sick leave
Javier E

How Low Are U.S. Taxes Compared to Other Countries? - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • personal tax rates on $100,000 around the world. The U.S. comes in at 55th out of 114.
  • Unlike most advanced economies, the U.S. don't supplement personal income taxes with a national sales tax, or value-added tax (VAT). Consumption taxes accounted for about a fifth of total U.S. revenue in 2008 (mostly at the state and local level) compared to an OECD average of 32 percent. In other words, the U.S. relies uniquely on personal tax rates to raise revenue -- and we have relatively low personal tax rates.
  • The best way to answer the question "Are U.S. taxes high or low compared to other countries?" is to look at taxes as a share of the economy. Here's how the U.S. stacks up to other OECD countries in a graph from the Tax Policy Center. (We're at the bottom of the stack, 25 percent below the average.)
Javier E

How Poor Are the Poor? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the U.S. in recent decades, primarily due to the success of anti-poverty programs” and the declining cost of “food, air-conditioning, communications, transportation, and entertainment,”
  • Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about the problem of relative poverty, what we are now calling inequality
  • Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.
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  • Democratic supporters of safety net programs can use Jencks’s finding that poverty has dropped below 5 percent as evidence that the war on poverty has been successful.
  • At the same time liberals are wary of positive news because, as Jencks notes:It is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse
  • The plus side for conservatives of Jencks’s low estimate of the poverty rate is the implication that severe poverty has largely abated, which then provides justification for allowing enemies of government entitlement programs to further cut social spending.
  • At the same time, however, Jencks’s data undermines Republican claims that the war on poverty has been a failure – a claim exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 quip: “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”
  • Jencks’s conclusion: “The absolute poverty rate has declined dramatically since President Johnson launched his war on poverty in 1964.” At 4.8 percent, Jencks’s calculation is the lowest poverty estimate by a credible expert in the field.
  • his conclusion — that instead of the official count of 45.3 million people living in poverty, the number of poor people in America is just under 15 million — understates the scope of hardship in this country.
  • There are strong theoretical justifications for the use of a relative poverty measure. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts it this way:In order to participate fully in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norms of a community. For example, the clothing budget that allows a child not to feel ashamed of his school attire is much more related to national living standards than to strict requirements for physical survival
  • using a relative measure shows that the United States lags well behind other developed countries:If you use the O.E.C.D. standard of 50 percent of median income as a poverty line, the United States looks pretty bad in cross-national relief. We have a relative poverty rate exceeded only by Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel (which has seen a big increase in inequality in recent years). And that rate in 2010 was essentially where it was in 1995
  • While the United States “has achieved real progress in reducing absolute poverty over the past 50 years,” according to Burtless, “the country may have made no progress at all in reducing the relative economic deprivation of folks at the bottom.”
  • the heart of the dispute: How severe is the problem of poverty?
  • Kathryn Edin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, and Luke Schaefer, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, contend that the poverty debate overlooks crucial changes that have taken place within the population of the poor.
  • welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), which limited eligibility for welfare benefits to five years. The limitation has forced many of the poor off welfare: over the past 19 years, the percentage of families falling under the official poverty line who receive welfare benefits has fallen from to 26 percent from 68 percent. Currently, three-quarters of those in poverty, under the official definition, receive no welfare payments.
  • he enactment of expanded benefits for the working poor through the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit.According to Edin and Schaefer, the consequence of these changes, taken together, has been to divide the poor who no longer receive welfare into two groups. The first group is made up of those who have gone to work and have qualified for tax credits. Expanded tax credits lifted about 3.2 million children out of poverty in 2013
  • he second group, though, has really suffered. These are the very poor who are without work, part of a population that is struggling desperately. Edin and Schaefer write that among the losers are an estimated 3.4 million “children who over the course of a year live for at least three months under a $2 per person per day threshold.”
  • ocusing on these findings, Mishel argues, diverts attention from the more serious problem of “the failure of the labor market to adequately reward low-wage workers.”To support his case, Mishel points out that hourly pay for those in the bottom fifth grew only 7.7 percent from 1979 to 2007, while productivity grew by 64 percent, and education levels among workers in this quintile substantially improved.
Javier E

America's Exploding Pipe Dream - NYTimes.com - 3 views

  • in a report released on Thursday by the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation of Germany entitled “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?” It analyzed some metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and ranked America among the ones at the bottom.
krystalxu

France - Economic forecast summary (November 2017) - OECD - 0 views

  • To strengthen the economy’s growth potential and social outcomes, this should be based on structural reforms that reduce inefficiencies and non-priority spending, while preserving expenditure on education, training and infrastructure, benefitting lower-income households in particular.
krystalxu

3 Economic Challenges France Faces in 2016 | Investopedia - 0 views

  • France's economy is heavily exposed to the service sector, which represents more than 70% of domestic production, according to some estimates.
  • The OECD has urged France to reform its labor market and reduce public spending, and some regulators, such as Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, have moved to answer these calls for change.
Javier E

Opinion | The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst - The New York Times - 0 views

  • About four out of five people known to have had the virus had only mild symptoms, and even among those older than 90 in Italy, 78 percent survived.
  • Two-thirds of those who died in Italy had pre-existing medical conditions and were also elderly
  • “I’m not pessimistic. I think this can work.” She thinks it will take eight weeks of social distancing to have a chance to slow the virus, and success will depend on people changing behaviors and on hospitals not being overrun. “If warm weather helps, if we can get these drugs, if we can get companies to produce more ventilators, we have a window to tamp this down,”
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  • Dr. Neil M. Ferguson, a British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the best disease modelers in the world, produced a sophisticated model with a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
  • I asked Ferguson for his best case. “About 1.1 million deaths,” he said.
  • one can argue that the U.S. is not only on the same path as Italy but is also less prepared, for America has fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than Italy does — and a shorter life expectancy even in the best of times.
  • up to 366,000 I.C.U. beds might be needed in the United States for coronavirus patients at one time, more than 10 times the number available. A Harvard study reached a similar conclusion.
  • This is an interval of quiet when the United States should be urgently ramping up investment in vaccines and therapies, addressing the severe shortages of medical supplies and equipment, and giving retired physicians and military medics legal authority to practice in a crisis
  • During World War II, the Ford Motor Company turned out one B-24 bomber every 63 minutes; today, we should be rushing out ventilators and face masks, but there’s nothing like the same sense of urgency.
  • After initial missteps in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first discovered, China adopted protocols for protective gear that are more rigorous than those in the United States, involving N95 masks and face shields, double gowns, gloves and shoe covers, plus special areas to remove protective clothing — and all this worked. Not one of the 42,000 health workers sent to Wuhan is known to have become infected with the coronavirus. The United States isn’t protecting health workers with the same determination; it seems to be betraying them.
  • In Italy, 8.3 percent of coronavirus cases involve health workers. A doctor in the Seattle area who is forced to reuse N95 masks told me that she and her colleagues fear that the lack of supplies will be deadly.
  • “We are all making dying contingency plans at this point just in case,” she said. “Wills, backup people to take care of kids, recording bedtime stories.”
  • The United States is in a weaker position than some other countries to confront the virus because it is the only advanced country that doesn’t have universal health coverage, and the only one that does not guarantee paid sick leave
  • with infectious diseases, the burden will be shared by all Americans
  • This crisis should be a wake-up call to address long-term vulnerabilities. That means providing universal health coverage and paid sick leave — and if you think that the coronavirus legislation Trump signed on Wednesday achieves that, think again. It guarantees sick leave to only about one-fifth of private-sector workers. It’s a symbol of the inadequacy of America’s preparedness.
  • We may dodge a bullet this time, but experts have been warning for decades that a killer pandemic will come;
  • if we, too, can be scared enough to invest in public health and fix our health care system, then something good can come from this crisis — and in the long run, that may save lives.
  • Ferguson questions whether South Korea and other countries can sustain their success for 18 months until a vaccine is ready, even as new cases are constantly being imported
  • America and South Korea reported their first Covid-19 cases on the same day, but South Korea took the epidemic seriously, promptly created an effective test, used it widely and has seen cases go down more than 90 percent from the peak.
  • In contrast, the United States badly bungled testing, and President Trump repeatedly dismissed the coronavirus, saying it was “totally under control” and “will disappear,” and insisting he wasn’t “concerned at all.” The United States has still done only a bit more than 10 percent as many tests per capita as Canada, Austria and Denmark.
  • Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me that he and his colleagues have a candidate vaccine for the coronavirus but still haven’t been able to line up sufficient funding for clinical trials.
Javier E

Even Tories increasingly fear they have inflicted the worst of all worlds on Britain | ... - 0 views

  • The most straightforward way to assess the UK’s performance is to compare the number of deaths with the fatalities normally experienced for the time of year.
  • The “excess death” rate over the average of the previous five years has topped 60,000. With 955 “excess deaths” for every million people, the UK has the grimmest record of all countries providing comparable data. In that respect only can the Johnson government’s performance be said to be “world-beating”.
  • The OECD is projecting that the UK will suffer the deepest downturn among advanced economies. It is only a forecast, but it chimes with other indicators suggesting that this country will pay a uniquely high price for its sluggish imposition of the lockdown and the government’s chaotic mismanagement of the attempt to grope towards an exit.
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  • All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk
  • public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.
  • the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.
  • Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime
  • Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.
  • The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.
  • Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.
  • Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign
  • , this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”
  • The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.
  • His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.
  • No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.
Javier E

French Food Giant Danone Sued Over Plastic Use Under Landmark Law - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Throughout their life cycle, plastics, which are manufactured from fossil fuels, release air pollutants, harm human health and kill marine life. In 2015, they were responsible for 4.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, one recent study found, more than all of the world’s airplanes combined.
  • Figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that, over the past seven decades, plastics production has soared from two million metric tons (there are about 2,200 pounds per metric ton) to more than 400 million — and is expected to almost triple by 2060.
  • Danone alone used more than 750,000 metric tons of plastic — about 74 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower — in water bottles a, yogurt containers and other packaging in 2021, according to its 2021 financial report.
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  • “We’re not going to recycle our way out of this,” Mr. Weiss of ClientEarth said.
  • Environmental groups also say that recycling has not proved effective at the scale necessary: Only 9 percent of all plastics ever made have been recycled, according to the United Nations, with most of the rest ending up in landfills and dumps.
  • The company said that it reduced its plastic consumption by 12 percent from 2018 to 2021, and that it has committed to use only reusable, recyclable or compostable plastic packaging by 2025. But Danone is not on track to reach that target, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which set up a voluntary program with the United Nations for big companies to address plastic pollution.
  • To sue Danone, the environmental groups have relied on the so-called duty of vigilance law, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that France passed in 2017. It requires large companies to take effective measures to identify and prevent human rights violations and environmental damages throughout their chain of activity.
  • The French duty of vigilance law, the first of its kind in Europe, has since inspired similar legislation in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as a proposed European Union directive.
  • There is nothing like a duty of vigilance law in the United States. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would require plastic producers to finance waste and recycling programs, and ban single-use plastic bags and the exporting of plastic waste to developing countries, is currently in committee.
  • “It’s often about streamlining existing practices,” said Pauline Barraud de Lagerie, a sociologist at University Paris Dauphine who published a book on corporate responsibility. She added that by suing companies, “N.G.O.s are trying to somehow bring back an obligation of result.”So far, around 15 legal cases based on the French law have been reported. Half of them have gone to court and are still awaiting judgment, which could take years.
  • The lawsuit is part of a wider trend of climate litigation that has gained momentum in recent years, expanding the climate fight beyond traditional demonstrations and civil disobedience initiatives.
  • The number of climate change lawsuits globally has more than doubled from 2017 to 2022, from about 900 to more than 2,000 ongoing or concluded cases, according to data from the Grantham Research Institute and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
Javier E

Why Ending Extreme Poverty Isn't Good Enough - Businessweek - 0 views

  • “We believe that we have a historic opportunity to end extreme poverty within a generation,” they declared, pledging to reduce the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day worldwide to 3 percent by 2030.
  • for most of history, most of humanity has lived on less than $1.25 a day.  As recently as 1990, more than two-fifths of the population of the developing world lived in extreme poverty, and even today, the proportion remains close to one-fifth
  • among those living on $2 a day or less in urban areas of Tanzania, only 21 percent have a water tap in their house. In rural areas, it is less than 2 percent. The number with access to electricity is similarly dire. In rural areas, nearly one in 10 children die before their first birthday—most from easily preventable diseases. Two dollars is not nearly enough to ensure the basics of the good life.
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  • What is a reasonable “income floor” above which we should hope all people worldwide live? At the moment, we define $1.25 as extreme poverty and $2 as poverty, plain and simple.
  • The global median income is around $3 to $4 a day. Despite the fact that 50 percent of the population of the planet lives on less than that today, that’s still an insufficient floor.
  • those living on more than $2 a day in developing countries see infant mortality rates five times those of the poorest and most deprived areas of rich countries. It’s possible to reduce death rates considerably using very cheap techniques, from bed nets to vaccines, but at some point the approaches start getting more expensive. 
  • Pritchett suggests the global floor should be something closer to the poverty lines of rich countries—around $15 per day. Other economists have suggested the “global middle class” bottoms out at an income of around $10 per day.
  • Worldwide, somewhere shy of 2 billion make it over the $10 line. But only about two percent (PDF) of sub-Saharan Africa lives on more than $10 a day, compared with 51 percent who live at more than $1.25 a day
  • until you get above $10 per day, high-income economies still see a very small proportion of their population in “global poverty.”
  • According to the World Bank, current world GDP is about $76.4 trillion, of which about 62 percent is consumed by households. If all 7 billion people on the planet lived on $10 a day, that would take $26 trillion, or (give or take) a $41 trillion global economy
  • If it weren’t for the incredible size of global income disparities, you could shrink the world’s economy, reduce our environmental footprint, and still get everyone over the poverty line.
  • There’s a lot more to quality of life than income. In fact, the greatest development success of the past 60 years has been to make the quality of life cheaper. 
anonymous

US election: Why does the US have such low voter turnout? - BBC News - 1 views

  • After a long campaign, it's less than two weeks before millions of Americans cast their votes. But turnout could be as low as 50%. Why do so few people vote?
  • urnout has been on a historic downward trend in recent years - with the exception of President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for the Election Innovation and Research.
  • Among OECD countries, the US ranked 31 of 34 for percentage of voting-age population.
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  • "The burden has always been on the voter to find out how to register and get themselves registered," Mr Becker said.
  • Other states have passed more stringent voter ID laws, which some critics say make it more difficult for minorities to cast a ballot.
  • Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia now work with ERIC, which Mr Becker helped create, and somewhere between 10 and 20 million people will have been contacted to register by this fall.
  • The historical lack of enthusiasm for voting in the US has been heightened in this year's bitter presidential election - which has seen gruelling months of mudslinging and a rise in hateful invective - leaving some voters no other option than to tune it out.
  • "I don't want to know what the other person's not going to do. I want to know what you are going to do."
Javier E

Business - Derek Thompson - The New Economics of Happiness - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Happiness is a cake with a million recipes. The same factors that make it so hard for the OECD Better Life Index to compare the "good life" country-by-country make it hard to devise any sort of happiness-centric public policy.
  • Happiness and income might have a controversial relationship. But plenty of evidence suggests that unemployment makes you miserable, no matter where you live
  • " It's conceivable that employment-maximizing policies might be more important, from a happynomics standpoint, than income-egalitarian policies.
Javier E

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World's Richest - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States
  • The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.
  • Finally, governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income.
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  • the most commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are averages, which do not capture the distribution of income.
  • Three broad factors appear to be driving much of the weak income performance in the United States. First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, making it harder for the American economy to maintain its share of highly skilled, well-paying jobs.
  • technology skills that are above average relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in rest of the industrialized world
  • Younger Americans, though, are not keeping pace: Those between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia
  • The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.
  • Whatever the causes, the stagnation of income has left many Americans dissatisfied with the state of the country. Only about 30 percent of people believe the country is headed in the right direction,
  • both opinion surveys and interviews suggest that the public mood in Canada and Northern Europe is less sour than in the United States today.
  • Elsewhere in Europe, economic growth has been slower in the last few years than in the United States, as the Continent has struggled to escape the financial crisis. But incomes for most families in Sweden and several other Northern European countries have still outpaced those in the United States, where much of the fruits of recent economic growth have flowed into corporate profits or top incomes.
  • Even in Germany, though, the poor have fared better than in the United States, where per capita income has declined between 2000 and 2010 at the 40th percentile, as well as at the 30th, 20th, 10th and 5th.
  • the poor in the United States have trailed their counterparts in at least a few other countries since the early 1980s. With slow income growth since then, the American poor now clearly trail the poor in several other rich countries. At the 20th percentile — where someone is making less than four-fifths of the population — income in both the Netherlands and Canada was 15 percent higher than income in the United States in 2010.
  • By contrast, Americans at the 95th percentile of the distribution — with $58,600 in after-tax per capita income, not including capital gains — still make 20 percent more than their counterparts in Canada, 26 percent more than those in Britain and 50 percent more than those in the Netherlands. For these well-off families, the United States still has easily the world’s most prosperous major economy.
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