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Javier E

Why the Rich Are So Much Richer by James Surowiecki | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...tz-why-rich-are-so-much-richer

inequality redistribution rent politics economics economic policy

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.
  • “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”
  • Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.
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  • Stiglitz has made the case that the rise in inequality in the US, far from being the natural outcome of market forces, has been profoundly shaped by “our policies and our politics,” with disastrous effects on society and the economy as a whole. In a recent report for the Roosevelt Institute called Rewriting the Rules, Stiglitz has laid out a detailed list of reforms that he argues will make it possible to create “an economy that works for everyone.”
  • his entire career in academia has been devoted to showing how markets cannot always be counted on to produce ideal results. In a series of enormously important papers, for which he would eventually win the Nobel Prize, Stiglitz showed how imperfections and asymmetries of information regularly lead markets to results that do not maximize welfare.
  • He also argued that this meant, at least in theory, that well-placed government interventions could help correct these market failures
  • in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) he offered up a stinging critique of the way the US has tried to manage globalization, a critique that made him a cult hero in much of the developing world
  • Stiglitz has been one of the fiercest critics of the way the Eurozone has handled the Greek debt crisis, arguing that the so-called troika’s ideological commitment to austerity and its opposition to serious debt relief have deepened Greece’s economic woes and raised the prospect that that country could face “depression without end.”
  • For Stiglitz, the fight over Greece’s future isn’t just about the right policy. It’s also about “ideology and power.
  • there’s a good case to be made that the sheer amount of rent-seeking in the US economy has expanded over the years. The number of patents is vastly greater than it once was. Copyright terms have gotten longer. Occupational licensing rules (which protect professionals from competition) are far more common. Tepid antitrust enforcement has led to reduced competition in many industries
  • The Great Divide is somewhat fragmented and repetitive, but it has a clear thesis, namely that inequality in the US is not an unfortunate by-product of a well-functioning economy. Instead, the enormous riches at the top of the income ladder are largely the result of the ability of the one percent to manipulate markets and the political process to their own benefit.
  • Inequality obviously has no single definition. As Stiglitz writes:There are so many different parts to America’s inequality: the extremes of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, the increase of poverty at the bottom. Each has its own causes, and needs its own remedies.
  • his preoccupation here is primarily with why the rich today are so much richer than they used to be.
  • the main reason people at the top are so much richer these days than they once were (and so much richer than everyone else) is not that they own so much more capital: it’s that they get paid much more for their work than they once did, while everyone else gets paid about the same, or less
  • while incomes at the top have risen in countries around the world, nowhere have they risen faster than in the US.
  • One oft-heard justification of this phenomenon is that the rich get paid so much more because they are creating so much more value than they once did
  • as companies have gotten bigger, the potential value that CEOs can add has increased as well, driving their pay higher.
  • Stiglitz will have none of this. He sees the boom in the incomes of the one percent as largely the result of what economists call “rent-seeking.”
  • from the perspective of the economy as a whole, rent-seeking is a waste of time and energy. As Stiglitz puts it, the economy suffers when “more efforts go into ‘rent seeking’—getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie—than into enlarging the size of the pie.”
  • The work of Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez has been instrumental in documenting the rise of income inequality, not just in the US but around the world. Major economic institutions, like the IMF and the OECD, have published studies arguing that inequality, far from enhancing economic growth, actually damages it. And it’s now easy to find discussions of the subject in academic journals.
  • . After all, while pretax inequality is a problem in its own right, what’s most destructive is soaring posttax inequality. And it’s posttax inequality that most distinguishes the US from other developed countries
  • All this rent-seeking, Stiglitz argues, leaves certain industries, like finance and pharmaceuticals, and certain companies within those industries, with an outsized share of the rewards
  • within those companies, the rewards tend to be concentrated as well, thanks to what Stiglitz calls “abuses of corporate governance that lead CEOs to take a disproportionate share of corporate profits” (another form of rent-seeking)
  • This isn’t just bad in some abstract sense, Stiglitz suggests. It also hurts society and the economy
  • It alienates people from the system. And it makes the rich, who are obviously politically influential, less likely to support government investment in public goods (like education and infrastructure) because those goods have little impact on their lives.
  • More interestingly (and more contentiously), Stiglitz argues that inequality does serious damage to economic growth: the more unequal a country becomes, the slower it’s likely to grow. He argues that inequality hurts demand, because rich people consume less of their incomes. It leads to excessive debt, because people feel the need to borrow to make up for their stagnant incomes and keep up with the Joneses. And it promotes financial instability, as central banks try to make up for stagnant incomes by inflating bubbles, which eventually burst
  • exactly why inequality is bad for growth turns out to be hard to pin down—different studies often point to different culprits. And when you look at cross-country comparisons, it turns out to be difficult to prove that there’s a direct connection between inequality and the particular negative factors that Stiglitz cites
  • This doesn’t mean that, as conservative economists once insisted, inequality is good for economic growth. In fact, it’s clear that US-style inequality does not help economies grow faster, and that moving toward more equality will not do any damage
  • Similarly, Stiglitz’s relentless focus on rent-seeking as an explanation of just why the rich have gotten so much richer makes a messy, complicated problem simpler than it is
  • When we talk about the one percent, we’re talking about two groups of people above all: corporate executives and what are called “financial professionals” (these include people who work for banks and the like, but also money managers, financial advisers, and so on)
  • The emblematic figures here are corporate CEOs, whose pay rose 876 percent between 1978 and 2012, and hedge fund managers, some of whom now routinely earn billions of dollars a year
  • Shareholders, meanwhile, had fewer rights and were less active. Since then, we’ve seen a host of reforms that have given shareholders more power and made boards more diverse and independent. If CEO compensation were primarily the result of bad corporate governance, these changes should have had at least some effect. They haven’t. In fact, CEO pay has continued to rise at a brisk rate
  • So what’s really going on? Something much simpler: asset managers are just managing much more money than they used to, because there’s much more capital in the markets than there once was
  • that means that an asset manager today can get paid far better than an asset manager was twenty years ago, even without doing a better job.
  • there’s no convincing evidence that CEOs are any better, in relative terms, than they once were, and plenty of evidence that they are paid more than they need to be, in view of their performance. Similarly, asset managers haven’t gotten better at beating the market.
  • More important, probably, has been the rise of ideological assumptions about the indispensability of CEOs, and changes in social norms that made it seem like executives should take whatever they could get.
  • It actually has important consequences for thinking about how we can best deal with inequality. Strategies for reducing inequality can be generally put into two categories: those that try to improve the pretax distribution of income (this is sometimes called, clunkily, predistribution) and those that use taxes and transfers to change the post-tax distribution of income
  • he has high hopes that better rules, designed to curb rent-seeking, will have a meaningful impact on the pretax distribution of income. Among other things, he wants much tighter regulation of the financial sector
  • t it would be surprising if these rules did all that much to shrink the income of much of the one percent, precisely because improvements in corporate governance and asset managers’ transparency are likely to have a limited effect on CEO salaries and money managers’ compensation.
  • Most importantly, the financial industry is now a much bigger part of the US economy than it was in the 1970s, and for Stiglitz, finance profits are, in large part, the result of what he calls “predatory rent-seeking activities,” including the exploitation of uninformed borrowers and investors, the gaming of regulatory schemes, and the taking of risks for which financial institutions don’t bear the full cost (because the government will bail them out if things go wrong).
  • The redistributive policies Stiglitz advocates look pretty much like what you’d expect. On the tax front, he wants to raise taxes on the highest earners and on capital gains, institute a carbon tax and a financial transactions tax, and cut corporate subsidies
  • It’s also about investing. As he puts it, “If we spent more on education, health, and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” So he wants more investment in schools, infrastructure, and basic research.
  • The core insight of Stiglitz’s research has been that, left on their own, markets are not perfect, and that smart policy can nudge them in better directions.
  • Of course, the political challenge in doing any of this (let alone all of it) is immense, in part because inequality makes it harder to fix inequality. And even for progressives, the very familiarity of the tax-and-transfer agenda may make it seem less appealing.
  • the policies that Stiglitz is calling for are, in their essence, not much different from the policies that shaped the US in the postwar era: high marginal tax rates on the rich and meaningful investment in public infrastructure, education, and technology. Yet there’s a reason people have never stopped pushing for those policies: they worked
Javier E

Opinion | Notes on a Butter Republic - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...otes-on-a-butter-republic.html

denmark social democracy socialism culture Politics

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • in Denmark’s case globalization seems to have been equalizing, both politically and economically: instead of fostering dominance by foreign corporations or domestic landowners, it led to dominance by rural cooperatives.
  • Why was the Danish story so happy? The Danes may have been lucky in the product in which they turned out to have a comparative advantage. Also, like the Asian countries that led the first wave of modern developing-country growth, they came into globalization with a well-educated population by world standards. They may also have been lucky in the enlightened behavior of their elites.
  • I’m not pushing a universal lesson that globalization is great for everyone; just the opposite. The point is that the results depend on the details: a country can produce agricultural products, be “dependent” by most definitions, yet use that as the basis for permanent elevation into the first world.
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  • for decades the right has tried to shout down any attempt to sand down some of the rough edges of capitalism, whether through health guarantees, income supports, or anything else, by yelling “socialism.” Sooner or later people were bound to say that if any attempt to make our system less harsh is socialism, well, they’re socialists.
  • The truth is that there are hardly any people in the U.S. who want the government to seize the means of production, or even the economy’s commanding heights. What they want is social democracy – the kinds of basic guarantees of health care, protection against poverty, etc., that almost every other advanced country provides.
  • Denmark, where tax receipts are 46 percent of GDP compared with 26 percent in the U.S., is arguably the most social-democratic country in the world.
  • According to conservative doctrine, the combination of high taxes and aid to “takers” must really destroy incentives both to create jobs and to take them in any case.
  • Danish adults are more likely to be employed than their U.S. counterparts. They work somewhat shorter hours, although that may well be a welfare-improving choice. But what Denmark shows is that you can run a welfare state far more generous than we do – beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives – and still have a highly successful economy.
  • while GDP per capita in Denmark is lower than in the U.S. – basically because of shorter work hours – life satisfaction is notably higher.
  • While the long-term performance has been great, Denmark hasn’t done too well since the 2008 financial crisis, with real GDP per capita falling substantially, then taking a long time to recover. In particular, Denmark has lagged far behind Sweden:
  • There’s no mystery about this recent underperformance. Denmark isn’t on the euro, but unlike Sweden, it has pegged its currency to the euro. So it has shared in the euro area’s problems
  • this is a reminder that microeconomics – things like the incentive effects of a strong welfare state – is different from macroeconomics. You can do great things on the micro front and still screw up your monetary policy
Javier E

Opinion | A Better Path to Universal Health Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...health-care-germany.html

universal health-care germany

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Germany offers a health insurance model that, like Canada’s, results in far less spending than in the United States, while achieving universal, comprehensive coverage
  • this model, pioneered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883, was the first social health insurance system in the world. It has since been copied across Europe and Asia, becoming far more common than the Canadian single-payer model.
  • Germans are required to have health insurance, but they can choose between more than 100 private nonprofit insurers called “sickness funds.” Workers and employers share the cost of insurance through payroll taxes, while the government finances coverage for children and the unemployed.
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  • Insurance plans are not tied to employers. Services are funded through progressive taxation, so access is based on need, not ability to pay, and financial contributions are based on wealth, not health.
  • Contributions to sickness funds are centrally pooled and then allocated to individual insurers using a per-beneficiary formula that factors in differences in health risks.
  • Editors’ PicksYou Know the Lorena Bobbitt
  • The United States has the foundation for this kind of system. Its Social Security and Medicare systems use taxation to pay for social insurance policies, and the health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act provide marketplaces for insurance policies.
  • In Germany, for example, insurers can charge only small out-of-pocket fees limited to 2 percent or less of household income annually
  • Compared with the mostly fee-for-service, single-payer arrangements in Canada or the Medicare system, enrolling Americans in managed care plans paid on a per-patient basis would offer greater incentives to increase efficiency, improve quality of care and promote coordination of care.
  • Under a German-style plan, states could still be given flexibility in regulating nonprofit insurers to reflect regional priorities, similar to the flexibility offered to states in managing Medicaid and the A.C.A. exchanges.
  • Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and other countries with similar systems vastly underspend the United States.
  • Americans may be concerned that lower spending reflects rationing of care, but research has consistently found that not to be the case
  • Administrative and governance costs in multipayer systems are higher than in single-payer systems — 5 percent of health spending in Germany compared with 3 percent in Canada.
  • While recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans support so-called Medicare for all, approval diminishes when the plan is explained or clarified.
  • Americans have long valued choice and competition in their health care. The German model offers both: Patients choose private insurers that compete for enrollees, in the process driving innovation and improving quality.
  • Advocates and policymakers should pick carefully among these paths, choosing one that strikes a balance between what is possible and what is ideal for the United States health system
  • While the single-payer model serves Canada well, transitioning the United States to a multipayer model like Germany’s would require a far smaller leap. And that might encourage Americans to finally make the jump
krystalxu

Economy In France | France Economy | Economy Of France - 0 views

www.liveandinvestoverseas.com/...economy-in-france

France economy

shared by krystalxu on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • he expat who is looking to know more about France’s economy will find himself reassured. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it has “an enviable standard of living” and that “Inequality is not excessive and the country has come through the [financial] crisis without suffering too heavily,”
krystalxu

What is the French economic problem? - BBC News - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...business-36152571

France economy

shared by krystalxu on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • But all is not well. Unemployment is high and the government's finances are weak. "France's fundamental economic problem," the OECD says, "is a lack of growth."
Javier E

The Curse of Econ 101 - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513155

economics policy minimum wage

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because many working people simply don’t make very much money. This is possible because the minimum wage that businesses must pay is low: only $7.25 per hour in the United States in 2016 (although it is higher in some states and cities). At that rate, a person working full-time for a whole year, with no vacations or holidays, earns about $15,000—which is below the poverty line for a family of two, let alone a family of four.
  • A minimum-wage employee is poor enough to qualify for food stamps and, in most states, Medicaid. Adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum is roughly the same as in the 1960s and 1970s, despite significant increases in average living standards over that period.
  • At first glance, it seems that raising the minimum wage would be a good way to combat poverty.
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  • The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage, as a proportion of its average wage, of any advanced economy,
  • On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment.
  • The minimum wage has been a hobgoblin of economism since its origins
  • Think tanks including Cato, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute have reliably attacked the minimum wage for decades, all the while emphasizing the key lesson from Economics 101: Higher wages cause employers to cut jobs.
  • In today’s environment of increasing economic inequality, the minimum wage is a centerpiece of political debate
  • The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate.
  • In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger evaluated an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage by comparing fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. They concluded, “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”
  • Card and Krueger’s findings have been vigorously contested across dozens of empirical studies. Today, people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw.
  • economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment.
  • The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case.
  • The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle.
  • The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101
  • there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably.
  • In short, whether the minimum wage should be increased (or eliminated) is a complicated question. The economic research is difficult to parse, and arguments often turn on sophisticated econometric details. Any change in the minimum wage would have different effects on different groups of peop
  • At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers
  • In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families.
  • In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs.
  • why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things
  • If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output
  • Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth
  • Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers.
  • Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost
  • Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics
  • This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action
  • one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem.
  • A recent study by researchers at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, however, found that higher minimum wages have not affected either the number of restaurants or the number of people that they employ, contrary to the industry’s dire predictions, while they have modestly increased workers’ pay.
  • The fact that this is the debate already demonstrates the historical influence of economism
  • Low- and middle-income workers’ reduced bargaining power is a major reason why their wages have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. According to an analysis by the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, one-fifth to one-third of the increase in inequality between 1973 and 2007 results from the decline of unions.
  • With unions only a distant memory for many people, federal minimum-wage legislation has become the best hope for propping up wages for low-income workers. And again, the worldview of economism comes to the aid of employers by abstracting away from the reality of low-wage work to a pristine world ruled by the “law” of supply and demand.
Javier E

'Biggest compliment yet': Greta Thunberg welcomes oil chief's 'greatest threat' label |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...l-chiefs-greatest-threat-label

oil industry climate change

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there was a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil, which was “beginning to … dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry”
  • He said the pressure was also being felt within the families of Opec officials because their own children “are asking us about their future because … they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry”.
  • “Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!” tweeted Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish initiator of the school student strike movement, which continues every Friday.
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  • Insurance companies – which have the most to lose from storms, floods, fires and other extreme weather – are increasingly pulling investment from fossil fuel assets. The governor of the Bank of England has warned of growing climate risks to the financial sector.
  • Earlier this week, the London Stock Exchange reclassified oil and gas companies under a non-renewable energy category that effectively puts them on the wrong side of climate crisis.
  • Parliaments in three countries – the UK, Canada, France – have declared a climate emergency, as have dozens of municipalities. They include most recently a first major US city, New York, which has previously filed a lawsuit against the five biggest private oil companies
  • “Our policies have to be made with our children’s future in mind … short-term decision-making can lock countries into expensive mistakes in financing and developing infrastructure … that will be neither necessary nor profitable in a low-emissions world, they will be stranded assets,” said the OECD secretary general Angel Gurría.
  • “By this point, most people realise that the oil companies lied for decades about global warming – they are this generation’s version of the tobacco companies. And it’s clearly affecting their ability to raise capital, to recruit employees and so on. People set out to cost them their social licence, and it’s working. Whether it’s working fast enough – that’s another question.”
aleija

The World Is Fat - Obesity Rates in Developed Countries from the OECD - The New York Times - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-world-is-fat

health US

shared by aleija on 23 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • In almost half of developed countries, one out of every two people is overweight or obese. These populations are expected to get even heavier in the near future, and in some countries two out of three people are projected to be obese within 10 years.
  • in rates of overweight and obese residents, the United States is second to only one industrialized country: Mexico. In America, 28 percent of the adult population is obese and 68 percent is overweight; in Mexico, the respective rates are 30 percent and 70 percent.
  • Until 1980, fewer than one in 10 people in industrialized countries like the United States were obese.
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  • Today, these rates have doubled or tripled.
  • The United States does, however, hold the dubious honor of fattest population of children, tied with Scotland.
lmunch

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities | Annual Re... - 0 views

www.annualreviews.org/...annurev-environ-102016-061053

shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the most recent iteration, the AR5, each WG report contains more than 1,200 pages. An SPM of approximately 30 pages is produced for each WG report, as well as for the Synthesis Report.
  • The full WG reports are endorsed by government representatives by accepting them, which means that they have not been edited line by line. Each SPM, however, goes through a process of line-by-line editing during approval plenaries in which government representatives approve the final version of the SPM
  • Government representatives from any country can object to and potentially veto any line, requiring IPCC authors to rework the sentence in question until it is rewritten to everyone's satisfaction. In this sense, the SPM produces reports through processes of enforced consensus.
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  • Some authors argue that the consensus process in approval plenaries results in sharper messages, the identification of better and more relevant questions, and greater investment by policymakers in the ultimate outcomes (26). In contrast, a well-known early critique of the IPCC argued that it resulted in bland outputs that do not engage with questions of high disagreement (27). More recently, some authors argue that the process imposes unity in the form of least-common denominator generalities on the very issues that, because they are politically challenging, may be of greatest policy relevance (28–30).
    • lmunch
      lmunch on 09 Mar 21
       
      pros and cons of consensus in SPMs
  • In their study of how eight SPMs produced for the AR4 and AR5 changed through the approval plenaries, Mach et al. (22) find that sensitive issues are often reworked and expanded through approval plenaries. But they also find that sometimes the most sensitive topics are expunged completely
  • When the newly elected Chair of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee (2015) declared that promoting the involvement of developing country scientists was a cornerstone for his tenure, he was articulating a theme of inclusivity that has been present since the IPCC's inception (82).
  • From 1990 to 2007, the number of IPCC authors from developing countries quadrupled, but their numbers are still proportionally low. The number of authors from developed countries also increased over the same period of time; only 17% of authors in the AR4 are from developing countries (83). As a result, there is still a significant “north-south divide” that results in an overrepresentation of science from OECD countries or countries that are classified as high income by the World Bank (84)
  • Quantitative bibliometric analysis of climate change publications reveals not only that climate change research is concentrated in the developed countries, but also that developed countries tend to focus more on issues of mitigation whereas developing countries focus more on adaptation, droughts, and disease impacts (86).
  • This tendency is also reflected in the composition of the IPCC; where representation from developing countries has improved, much of it is focused on WGII, which publishes regional chapters on impacts and adaptation (83). Science that is conducted in developing countries, which contribute the least to GHG emissions but are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, often has a different focus than in developed countries, which tend to focus more on large-scale positivist understandings of the physical system and the economics of mitigation (87). Many authors from developing countries who participated in WGIII's AR5 did so through coauthorship relationships and “institutional pathways” that are based in the developed world (88). This might be responsible for the “strong harmonization of views [in AR5 WGIII], compared with the diversity one finds across the social sciences of climate change more broadly” (88, p. 98). The forgoing considerations give rise to the question, how should the IPCC engage with the realities of unequal global development and the vast differences between rich and poor nations.
  • The IPCC has innovated strategies to improve capacity building, one of which was to recruit early-career scientists to managerial roles in chapter writing processes for WGII and WGIII. Such programs can assist with equalizing quality among chapters and can provide early-career scientists with an opportunity to participate in the IPCC process (89).
  • The justification for inclusivity of science produced in and for developing countries is multifaceted. The credibility of the IPCC in some countries is potentially undermined if it is seen as only representing Western science
  • But different geographical contexts often have different ways of judging the quality and relevance of scientific knowledge. Developing country scientists may have different but equally valid epistemological norms as those found in developed countries, but those norms might be downplayed in favor of so-called Western standards (93).
  • For this reason, redressing the imbalance of knowledge in GEAs requires more than simply increasing the numbers of authors from developing nations; it also is a matter of maintaining critical awareness of the assumptions that inform the social authority of science in developed countries (95, 96). As will be seen in the following case study, this comes to the fore when we consider how adaptation is framed in the IPCC.
  • The international politics of climate change, for most of the IPCC's history, retained this initial focus on abatement and mitigation. The topic of adaptation was shunned partly because it could be interpreted as giving the fossil fuel industry a free pass or capitulating to the status quo. However, since the IPCC's founding in 1988, the impacts of climate change have become more pronounced, and some of the world's most vulnerable people are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, which makes discussion of adaptation imperative (97–99).
  • The IPCC only gave scant attention to adaptation in its first two Assessment Reports, treating it primarily as a “residual” phenomenon that results from the failure to mitigate climate change in particular local contexts (109). Starting with the Third Assessment Report published in 2001, however, adaptation became increasingly important in the IPCC. Early work in climate change adaptation drew from the literature on natural disasters in which human vulnerability is conceptualized as exposure to hazards, as well as work on the resilience of complex social-ecological systems (110–112). This literature developed the concept of adaptive capacity that theorizes adaptation as a generalizable quality which allows human societies to adapt to negative events.
rerobinson03

Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suez-canal-blocked-ship.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
  • And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
  • The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
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  • But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
  • ut first comes the technical quagmire of freeing the Ever Given. Pictures from the canal showed the container-laden ship sitting sideways at such an angle that the name of the company that operates it, Evergreen, was clearly visible from the ship behind it.“Ship in front of us ran aground while going through the canal and is now stuck sideways,” an Instagram user who gave her name as Julianne Cona, a ship’s engineer onboard another vessel, posted alongside a photo of the stricken ship on Tuesday evening. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit…”
mariedhorne

Covid-19 Hit Hardest Where Financial Crisis Led to Health-Care Cuts - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...o-health-care-cuts-11610372026

coronavirus pandemic crisis

shared by mariedhorne on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Dr. Zanon, who until the end of December was the medical director at a hospital in Como in Italy’s hard-hit Lombardy region, says when the pandemic arrived he didn’t have enough doctors and nurses. Intensive-care unit beds were scarce and there wasn’t a large network of local clinics to help take the strain. With money tight, technology used in the hospital had also fallen behind.
  • Per capita private and public spending on health care, adjusted for inflation, fell by 2.6% in Italy between 2009 and 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Greece, it plunged by almost a third. Health-care costs tend to rise faster than overall inflation, because of the rising health-care needs of aging populations as well as technological advances, so even keeping spending constant often requires cutting something, such as staff or services offered.
  • “There’s no doubt that if southern European countries had kept up with spending in recent years, their health-care systems would have had more capacity to respond to the pandemic and deaths would have been lower,” said Gavino Maciocco, a doctor and professor of public health at the University of Florence. “If you spend less, you will have worse outcomes for patients.”
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  • A law passed in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis forced Italian regions to reduce annual spending on health-care workers to 1.4% below the 2004 level. While the limit wasn’t always respected, there was a sharp reduction in the number of doctors and other medical personnel employed in the national health service because those who retired often weren’t replaced.
  • The U.S. has one of the highest per capita rates of deaths attributed to the virus. Yet the country’s health-care spending equaled 17% of gross domestic product in 2019, according to the OECD, compared with 8.7% in Italy and 11.7% in Germany.
Javier E

Being rich wrecks your soul. We used to know that. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-9fc6-c7ef4bc58d13_story.html

rich wealth morality vice evil soul corruption

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • We used to think that having vast sums of money was bad and in particular bad for you — that it harmed your character, warping your behavior and corrupting your soul. We thought the rich were different, and different for the worse.
  • Today, however, we seem less confident of this. We seem to view wealth as simply good or neutral, and chalk up the failures of individual wealthy people to their own personal flaws, not their riches.
  • The idea that wealth is morally perilous has an impressive philosophical and religious pedigree. Ancient Stoic philosophers railed against greed and luxury, and Roman historians such as Tacitus lay many of the empire’s struggles at the feet of imperial avarice. Confucius lived an austere life. The Buddha famously left his opulent palace behind. And Jesus didn’t exactly go easy on the rich, either — think camels and needles, for starters
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  • The point is not necessarily that wealth is intrinsically and everywhere evil, but that it is dangerous — that it should be eyed with caution and suspicion, and definitely not pursued as an end in itself; that great riches pose great risks to their owners; and that societies are right to stigmatize the storing up of untold wealt
  • Over the past few years, a pile of studies from the behavioral sciences has appeared, and they all say, more or less, “Being rich is really bad for you.” Wealth, it turns out, leads to behavioral and psychological maladies. The rich act and think in misdirected ways.
  • When it comes to a broad range of vices, the rich outperform everybody else. They are much more likely than the rest of humanity to shoplift and cheat , for example, and they are more apt to be adulterers and to drink a great deal. They are even more likely to take candy that is meant for children.
  • The rich are the worst tax evaders, and, as The Washington Post has detailed, they are hiding vast sums from public scrutiny in secret overseas bank accounts.
  • They also give proportionally less to charity — not surprising, since they exhibit significantly less compassion and empathy toward suffering people.
  • Studies also find that members of the upper class are worse than ordinary folks at “reading” people’ s emotions and are far more likely to be disengaged from the people with whom they are interacting — instead absorbed in doodling, checking their phones or what have you. Some studies go even further, suggesting that rich people, especially stockbrokers and their ilk (such as venture capitalists, whom we once called “robber barons”), are more competitive, impulsive and reckless than medically diagnosed psychopaths.
  • Some studies go so far as to suggest that simply being around great material wealth makes people less willing to share. That’s right: Vast sums of money poison not only those who possess them but even those who are merely around them. This helps explain why the nasty ethos of Wall Street has percolated down, including to our politics (though we really didn’t need much help there).
  • Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre
  • They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore.
anonymous

Opinion | The Coronavirus Has Laid Bare the Inequality of America's Health Care - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...id-inequality-health-care.html

crisis politics pandemic

shared by anonymous on 25 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The notion of price control is anathema to health care companies. It threatens their basic business model, in which the government grants them approvals and patents, pays whatever they ask, and works hand in hand with them as they deliver the worst health outcomes at the highest costs in the rich world.
  • The American health care industry is not good at promoting health, but it excels at taking money from all of us for its benefit. It is an engine of inequality.
  • the virus also provides an opportunity for systemic change. The United States spends more than any other nation on health care, and yet we have the lowest life expectancy among rich countries. And although perhaps no system can prepare for such an event, we were no better prepared for the pandemic than countries that spend far less.
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  • One way or another, everyone pays for health care. It accounts for about 18 percent of G.D.P. — nearly $11,000 per person. Individuals directly pay about a quarter, the federal and state governments pay nearly half, and most of the rest is paid by employers.
  • Many Americans think their health insurance is a gift from their employers — a “benefit” bestowed on lucky workers by benevolent corporations. It would be more accurate to think of employer-provided health insurance as a tax.
  • Rising health care costs account for much of the half-century decline in the earnings of men without a college degree, and contribute to the decline in the number of less-skilled jobs.
  • Employer-based health insurance is a wrecking ball, destroying the labor market for less-educated workers and contributing to the rise in “deaths of despair.”
  • We face a looming trillion-dollar federal deficit caused almost entirely by the rising costs of Medicaid and Medicare, even without the recent coronavirus relief bill.
  • Rising costs are an untenable burden on our government, too. States’ payments for Medicaid have risen from 20.5 percent of their spending in 2008 to 28.9 percent in 2019. To meet those rising costs, states have cut their financing for roads, bridges and state universities. Without those crucial investments, the path to success for many Americans is cut off
  • Every year, the United States spends $1 trillion more than is needed for high quality care.
  • executives at hospitals, medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies, and some physicians, are very well paid.
  • American doctors control access to their profession through a system that limits medical school admissions and the entry of doctors trained abroad — an imbalance that was clear even before the pandemic
  • Hospitals, many of them classified as nonprofits, have consolidated, with monopolies over health care in many cities, and they have used that monopoly power to raise prices
  • These are all strategies that lawmakers and regulators could put a stop to, if they choose.
  • The health care industry has armored itself, employing five lobbyists for each elected member of Congress. But public anger has been building — over drug prices, co-payments, surprise medical bills — and now, over the fragility of our health care system, which has been laid bare by the pandemic
  • A single-payer system is just one possibility. There are many systems in wealthy countries to choose from, with and without insurance companies, with and without government-run hospitals. But all have two key characteristics: universal coverage — ideally from birth — and cost control.
  • In the United States, public funding is likely to play a significant role in any treatments or vaccines that are eventually developed for Covid-19. Americans should demand that they be available at a reasonable price to everyone — not in the sole interest of drug companies.
  • We are believers in free-market capitalism, but health care is not something it can deliver in a socially tolerable way.
  • They choose not to. And so we Americans have too few doctors, too few beds and too few ventilators — but lots of income for providers
  • America is a rich country that can afford a world-class health care system. We should be spending a lot of money on care and on new drugs. But we need to spend to save lives and reduce sickness, not on expensive, income-generating procedures that do little to improve health. Or worst of all, on enriching pharma companies that feed the opioid epidemic.
  • Medical device manufacturers have also consolidated, in some cases using a “catch and kill” strategy to swallow up nimbler start-ups and keep the prices of their products high.
  • Ambulance services and emergency departments that don’t accept insurance have become favorites of private equity investors because of their high profits
  • Britain, for example, has the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which vets drugs, devices and procedures for their benefit relative to cost
  • At the very least, America must stop financing health care through employer-based insurance, which encourages some people to work but it eliminates jobs for less-skilled workers
  • Our system takes from the poor and working class to generate wealth for the already wealthy.
  • passed a coronavirus bill including $3.1 billion to develop and produce drugs and vaccines.
  • The industry might emerge as a superhero of the war against Covid-19, like the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain during World War II.
  • illions have lost their paychecks and their insurance
aleija

Young and Jobless in Europe: 'It's Been Desperate' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...youth-unemployment-europe.html

politics history crisis economics

shared by aleija on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Her job as a personal assistant at a London architecture firm, where she had worked for two years, was eliminated in September, leaving her looking for work of any kind.
  • After scores of rejections, and even being wait-listed for a food delivery gig at Deliveroo, she finally landed a two-month contract at a family-aid charity that pays 10 pounds (about $13) an hour.
  • The scarring effects may linger. “If you’re unemployed earlier on in your career, you’re more likely to experience joblessness in the future,” said Neal Kilbane, a senior economist at Oxford Economics.
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  • The jobless rate for people 25 and under jumped from 14.7 percent in January to 17.6 percent in August, its highest level since 2017.
  • But in Europe, the pandemic’s economic impact puts an entire generation at risk, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
  • Graduates are facing unprecedented competition for even entry-level positions from a tsunami of newly laid-off workers.
  • “At the moment I will take anything I can get,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s been desperate.”
  • Many are resorting to internships, living with parents or returning to school to ride out the storm. Young workers without higher education risk sliding even further.
  • Ms. Davis recently took a four-week gig conducting surveys for a car company. It pays Britain’s minimum wage of £8.20 an hour.
  • The work leaves her with less time to push out job applications, and she wonders when she will get an opportunity to start a career in occupational psychology.
  • “I have energy, and I know how to roll up my sleeves at any sort of job,” Mr. Palumbo said. “But everything is stuck, and my hands are tied.”
  • To earn extra cash, she babysits occasionally and would tend bar at night if she could. But her current workload leaves her exhausted with little time to spare.
Javier E

Opinion | I Studied Five Countries' Health Care Systems. We Need to Get More Creative W... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...health-care-reform.html

health health care system comparative US international

shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • I’m convinced that the ability to get good, if not great, care in facilities that aren’t competing with one another is the main way that other countries obtain great outcomes for much less money. It also allows for more regulation and control to keep a lid on prices.
  • Because of government subsidies, most people spend less than 25 percent of their income on housing and can choose between buying new flats at highly subsidized prices or flats available for resale on an open market.
  • Other social determinants that matter include food security, access to education and even race. As part of New Zealand’s reforms, its Public Health Agency, which was established less than a year ago, specifically puts a “greater emphasis on equity and the wider determinants of health such as income, education and housing.” It also specifically seeks to address racism in health care, especially that which affects the Maori population.
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  • When I asked about Australia’s rather impressive health outcomes, he said that while “Australia’s mortality that is amenable to, or influenced by, the health care system specifically is good, it’s not fundamentally better than that seen in peer O.E.C.D. countries, the U.S. excepted. Rather, Australia’s public health, social policy and living standards are more responsible for outcomes.”
  • Addressing these issues in the United States would require significant investment, to the tune of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars a year. That seems impossible until you remember that we spent more than $4.4 trillion on health care in 2022. We just don’t think of social policies like housing, food and education as health care.
  • Other countries, on the other hand, recognize that these issues are just as important, if not more so, than hospitals, drugs and doctors. Our narrow view too often defines health care as what you get when you’re sick, not what you might need to remain well.
  • When other countries choose to spend less on their health care systems (and it is a choice), they take the money they save and invest it in programs that benefit their citizens by improving social determinants of health
  • In the United States, conversely, we argue that the much less resourced programs we already have need to be cut further. The recent debt limit compromise reduces discretionary spending and makes it harder for people to access government programs like food stamps.
  • When I asked experts in each of these countries what might improve the areas where they are deficient (for instance, the N.H.S. has been struggling quite a bit as of late), they all replied the same way: more money. Some of them lack the political will to allocate those funds. Others can’t make major investments without drawing from other priorities.
  • Singapore will need to spend more, it’s very unlikely to go above the 8 percent to 10 percent of G.D.P. that pretty much all developed countries have historically spent.
  • That is, all of them except the United States. We currently spend about 18 percent of G.D.P. on health care. That’s almost $12,000 per American. It’s about twice what other countries currently spend.
  • We cannot seem to do what other countries think is easy, while we’ve happily decided to do what other countries think is impossible.But this is also what gives me hope. We’ve already decided to spend the money; we just need to spend it better.
Javier E

The fourth leading cause of death in the US? Cumulative poverty | Reverend William Barb... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ing-cause-death-poverty-crisis

poverty death policy politics history poor

shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses.
  • Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills
  • poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.
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  • if this is true, why do we hear so much about crime rates, opioids and gun violence in America, but so little from our elected leaders about the crisis of poverty? Why is there no “Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-wage jobs?
  • we as a people have become numb to the unnecessary deaths that are normalized by the ways we often think and talk about the economy in public life.
  • the United States is the leader in poverty among the rich countries of the world. As of 2019, the US had the worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in children specifically (20.9%) among the other 25 wealthy countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
  • Seventy-five percent of all Americans between 20-75 years of age will be among the “current” poor or near poverty for at least one year of their lives.
  • Contrary to popular belief, poverty is hardly just the province of the inner city: only 10% of poor Americans live in high-poverty census tracts – most are spread out across the country. They are our neighbors. And although the rates of poverty are highest among communities of color, by sheer volume most people living in poverty are white.
  • poverty is a drag on our economy. Child poverty alone in the US presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag, based on reductions in adult productivity, criminal justice costs and the costs of healthcare for children from poor families.
  • Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, estimates that we could lift everyone within our borders above the poverty line for less than 1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending poverty is within our grasp. It is something we can accomplish together. So what’s stopping us?
  • As the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson said in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, “those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose”.
  • recent book Poverty, By America: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”
  • The incentives for maintaining the status quo, for keeping many Americans poor, rest on the fact that some people find considerable financial benefit from presiding over the misery of others
  • what a young Friedrich Engels – observing the deaths of factory-workers, the conditions of the slums, and the exploitation of children in Manchester, England in the mid-19th century – called “social murder”. Many were dying, while a few made a killing from their suffering. It was true then, and it is true now.
  • “Woe unto those who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” But this prophetic challenge isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation to life. Together, we can become the land of “liberty and justice for all” that has never yet bee
Javier E

Working from home and the US-Europe divide - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-home-and-the-us-europe-divide

leisure US Europe culture policy economics

shared by Javier E on 04 May 24 - No Cached
  • there is one explanation that seems almost too simplistic: that “Americans just work harder”,
  • The numbers do in fact bear out this assertion—a rare case of national stereotypes being empirically provable
  • On average Americans work 1,811 hours per year, according to data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. That is 15% more than in the EU, where the average is 1,571 hours
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  • it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.
  • which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose
  • Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms.
  • the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours
  • The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.
  • A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off
  • As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.
  • the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more
  • American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.
  • Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation
  • Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated
  • A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of GDP, compared with 40% or so in Europe.
  • A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.
  • Regulation seems to matter more.
  • European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working tim
  • most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.
  • Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less
  • A recent paper by the IMF shows a remarkably strong link between GDP per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria.
  • Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?
  • Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers
  • A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law.
  • Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.
  • One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work
  • In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days
  • a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.
  • In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past
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