Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Patterns

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
6More

Officer Who Quit Wisconsin Police Job Under Pressure Joins Nearby Sheriff's Dept. : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ure-joins-nearby-sheriffs-dept police US Culture policy
shared by carolinehayter on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Joseph Mensah, who quit his job as a police officer in Wauwatosa, Wis., after shooting and killing three people in the line of duty over a five-year period, has a new job as a sheriff's deputy. Sheriff Eric Severson of neighboring Waukesha County says multiple authorities concluded Mensah's controversial use of force was both legal and in line with his training.
  • In announcing the hire, Severson acknowledged that "some have expressed concerns about Mr. Mensah's past uses of force." But he said Mensah had gone through "an extensive, thorough and exhaustive hiring process."
  • Mensah, who is Black, was the subject of intense protests in Wauwatosa last October, after the Milwaukee County district attorney announced no charges would be filed against him in the shooting death of 17-year-old Alvin Cole on Feb. 2. The prosecutor's office concluded Mensah had acted in self-defense.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Cole was the third person to have been shot and killed by Mensah since 2015, according to multiple reports.
  • "Mensah's two earlier shootings had also been found to be in self-defense, and the officer was not disciplined," as NPR's Brakkton Booker reported.
  • carolinehayter on 28 Jan 21
     
    Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns
51More

Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views

diigo.com/0kw206 Postman media politics amusing text language censorship television print tyranny power freedom
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
  • I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
  • The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.
  • An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
  • the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
  • evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
  • Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
  • t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
  • the commercial insists ~n . , an unprecedented brevity of expression.
  • One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
  • More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
  • ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
  • Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
  • For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
  • But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
  • Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
  • The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
  • his is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would ap-
  • Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
  • The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
  • such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
  • This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
  • But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
  • In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
  • The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
  • It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
  • "The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
  • Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
  • A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
  • We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
  • But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
  • The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
  • "History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
  • profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
  • We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
  • To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
  • Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
  • The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
  • I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
  • in fact, information and ideas did not become a
  • Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
  • The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue, which was largely won in the twentieth.
  • What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
  • Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
  • iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
  • That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
  • hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
  • How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
23More

Can DNA tests tell us who we are? Only if we're racists. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html dna tests ethnicity racism
shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • What I regret is the ease with which I accepted the racist implications underlying the test: a desire to understand who I am through DNA.
  • In using DNA ancestry tests, we reduce the culture and lived experience that have long defined ethnicity to a biological, racial signifier that is neither especially relevant nor particularly accurate.
  • By joining in, I inadvertently bought into the dangerous notion that who we are lies fundamentally in our blood.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • instead of allowing it to cement racialized ways of thinking, we can use these tests to highlight how meaningless genetic ancestry is compared with the many other factors that shape our experience of ourselves and our communities.
  • For most of human history, the concept of peoplehood — of belonging to a group larger than one’s extended family — has been largely determined by shared cultural practices (such as religion, customs and language) or political institutions.
  • This more capacious notion of belonging is how heritage is lived day to day for most people. I didn’t need a DNA test to identify as a Jew of European ancestry.
  • race science got a new lease on life when, in the 1950s, scientists discovered the molecular structure of DNA. By the 1980s DNA testing could reliably prove paternity
  • More than 26 million people are estimated to have taken genealogical DNA tests.
  • The answer goes back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when European colonialism and the slave trade birthed the modern concept of race.
  • As societies were built and genocides committed on the basis of racial hierarchy, it became imperative for racists to prove the biological existence of race. And so race “science” emerged, seeking to dislodge cultural heritage as the prime difference between groups of people.
  • “Aryan” became synonymous with “German,” excluding the many Jewish and Slavic speakers of the language.
  • et, no matter how strong it was, this sense of cultural heritage didn’t feel like enough for me. In a society that determines so much based on blood — money, connections, assumptions about character — culture by itself felt like an unreliable narrator of my identity.
  • Ironically, as academics were reaching the consensus that race is a social construct with no basis in biology — about 94 percent of human genetic variation occurs within so-called racial groups, with racial difference accounting for only 6 percent — the popularity of DNA testing was helping undermine that very idea.
  • almost 53 percent of Americans think biology at least somewhat determines their racial identity
  • Two-thirds of white Americans believe that their racial identity is determined by their DNA, compared with about half of black, Latino and Asian Americans
  • Only 35 percent of those surveyed believe that shared history or culture determines their racial identity.
  • DNA tests merely compare patterns in your genome with those of groups of people who have been identified as belonging to different ethnicities based on traditional genealogical research (vital records, family trees, etc.)
  • “If your 23andMe test says you’re 29 percent British, it’s because 29 percent of the pieces of your DNA were most likely to have come from a group that 23andMe’s reference library has labeled ‘British.’ ”
  • This means ethnicity estimates from companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA tell a much narrower story than consumers — led along by marketing campaigns — read into them
  • such estimates are only as good as the companies’ pattern-matching algorithms and DNA reference libraries, which can be incomplete and haphazardly assembled
  • In fact, these companies’ ethnicity estimates for the same person can vary substantially.
  • In a society that continues to structure lives along the hierarchy of race, it is difficult to leave behind the reassuring neatness of blood ancestry — of, in an age of turbulence and uncertainty, knowing exactly and objectively who we are — for the reality of mixing, moving and contradiction that makes up our history on this planet.
  • As Chuck Hoskin Jr., then the Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, wrote in response to Warren’s DNA testing controversy, “We are [tribal] citizens through historical documentation, adopted laws and a shared language and culture that make us unique.” DNA tests, he said, are “useless to determine tribal citizenship.”
29More

Why parents need to stop pushing happiness on their kids - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...kids-happiness-emotions parenting parents happiness psychology meaning of life
shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As a psychologist, I can’t help but wonder: Who in this world has ever gotten happy because someone else told them they have to be?
  • And worse, what if our culture’s incessant demands to be happy are actually making our kids miserable?
  • It seems counterintuitive, of course, but to be happy in the long run, we should more fully embrace the times when we’re not.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • this approach to emotional development neglects the full, complicated range of unhappy feelings that are just as valid a part of human life as happiness is — from sadness to frustration, from anger to fear, from guilt to disappointment, boredom or disgust.
  • Much research on well-being makes clear that Americans’ typical approaches to the pursuit of happiness is far from helpful to our kids. Anxiety and mental health problems in children and teens have been steadily increasing
  • In fact, the more we teach our kids to stay positive, at the expense of helping them accept occasional difficult feelings, the less we equip them with tools to manage such feelings when life inevitably gets hard
  • We tend to have a similar disdain for negative thoughts. Americans like to believe that our thoughts define us: that we need to control that running commentary, shape it and aggressively avoid the “bad” thoughts that supposedly doom us to unhappiness
  • Research into mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy reveals that it’s not negative thoughts that cause depression, anxiety, amotivation or any other mental rut we’re afraid of. It is when negative thoughts become sticky that we are more prone to those problems.
  • The more we fight with our thoughts, the more we give them the power to stick.
  • Being fixated on having only the “right” kind of thoughts breeds the cognitive rigidity that creates tunnel vision, locks us into unhelpful patterns, increases our risk of rumination, obsessions and compulsions, and decreases our ability to adapt to setbacks.
  • Commit to teaching and practicing the pause.
  • forced happiness, happiness as a sole goal without a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, or the pretense of happiness that stems from the expectation that anything less is toxic, can turn such “happiness” harmful in its own right.
  • If you can help your child develop meta-cognition — the ability to think about their thoughts and keep from getting stuck within them — and mindfulness, which helps them become a gentle, nonjudgmental observer of their thoughts and feelings, attuned in the moment to their experience, then you are giving them psychological tools to help them for a lifetime.
  • ADEncourage turning anxious thought patterns into characters.
  • What better time to begin teaching our kids that unhappiness has a rightful place in a full and — yes — truly happy life? It is often the difficult emotions that have the most to teach us about ourselves, and that give us the opportunity to find meaning and connect with others.
  • Encourage labeling distressing thoughts like “I’m having the thought no one likes me” rather than “No one likes me,” which helps your child separate from them.
  • a child with social anxiety may call their negative self-talk “The Stage-Fright Bully” and decide that it has nothing important to say — and that the show can go on.
  • Take the stance that feelings, even big ones, are always okay.
  • Emphasize that it’s how we handle emotions that matters most, and we can choose those actions mindfully
  • Teach your kids that their thoughts don’t define them. Encourage your children to observe their thoughts with curiosity rather than fear, in a nonjudgmental way rather than with shame.
  • teach them that the anger is okay, but we must think through our actions carefully, noticing our thoughts and bodily sensations without launching into autopilot.
  • Every time they fully engage with a feeling and choose functional behavior, they strengthen their emotional intelligence and make it more likely that that feeling won’t impel them toward unhealthy habits in the future.
  • Enlarge your vocabulary about emotions
  • From “I” statements (“I was sad when you said that to me” rather than “You are being mean!”) to encouraging your kids to write or draw their feelings in a journal, research shows that the mere act of labeling a feeling can help us feel more in control and allow it to pass more quickly.
  • Observe and adjust your own habits of talking about feelings.
  • Pay particular attention to the times you invalidate your child’s emotions or try to force a different internal reaction: “You’re okay,”
  • Instead, choose empathy: “Sounds like that’s really upsetting; let’s think about how we can work through this.”
  • Talk about true happiness as more than just pleasure or ease.
  • We all want our kids to be happy. But what they absorb about what that means is crucial. By opening them up to the idea of a sense of purpose, finding meaning in their life, or defining the values important to them, they will have a better understanding of how even challenging, difficult times can cultivate happiness.
12More

Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-economic-recovery.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July.
  • Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won.
  • In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016.
  • local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living — perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories).
  • Still, the future looks far more promising than the present for blue states’ economies.
  • mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20
     
    " different mix of jobs in red and blue places. The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July. Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won. In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016. local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home. Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living - perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher. So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living. Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs. The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). Still, the future looks far more promising t
54More

The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-rules.html Politics US policy
shared by kaylynfreeman on 20 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility
  • The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
  • China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
  • China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
  • The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
  • American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
  • Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
  • Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
  • The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise
  • At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy
  • mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
  • In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
  • party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant
  • The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
  • These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
  • They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
  • It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
  • the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
  • even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.
  • China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
  • The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs
  • Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
  • The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
  • Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.
  • Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain
  • Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
  • In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
  • The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
  • The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
  • The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
  • “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
  • “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
  • China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
  • Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
  • both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
  • Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
  • there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
  • Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
  • Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries
  • Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
  • n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must
  • Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
  • But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
  • In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
  • Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
  • The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
  • kaylynfreeman on 08 Feb 21
     
    "In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must. Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning"
45More

Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...smith-college-race.html college race class power BLM white privilege
shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.
  • The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.
  • “All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, offered profuse apologies and put the janitor on paid leave. “This painful incident reminds us of the ongoing legacy of racism and bias,” the president wrote, “in which people of color are targeted while simply going about the business of their ordinary lives.”
  • a law firm hired by Smith College to investigate the episode found no persuasive evidence of bias. Ms. Kanoute was determined to have eaten in a deserted dorm that had been closed for the summer; the janitor had been encouraged to notify security if he saw unauthorized people there. The officer, like all campus police, was unarmed.
  • Smith College officials emphasized “reconciliation and healing” after the incident. In the months to come they announced a raft of anti-bias training for all staff, a revamped and more sensitive campus police force and the creation of dormitories — as demanded by Ms. Kanoute and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.
  • But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.
  • The atmosphere at Smith is gaining attention nationally, in part because a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw, has attracted a fervent YouTube following by decrying what she sees as the college’s insistence that its white employees, through anti-bias training, accept the theory of structural racism.
  • The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.
  • Those tensions come at a time when few in the Smith community feel comfortable publicly questioning liberal orthodoxy on race and identity, and some professors worry the administration is too deferential to its increasingly emboldened students.
  • “My perception is that if you’re on the wrong side of issues of identity politics, you’re not just mistaken, you’re evil,” said James Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and a conservative.
  • Faculty members, however, pointed to a pattern that they say reflects the college’s growing timidity in the face of allegations from students, especially around the issue of race and ethnicity.
  • In 2016, students denounced faculty at Smith’s social work program as racist after some professors questioned whether admissions standards for the program had been lowered and this was affecting the quality of the field work. Dennis Miehls, one of the professors they decried, left the school not long after.
  • This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates
  • “Stop demanding that I admit to white privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment,”
  • Student workers were not supposed to use the Tyler cafeteria, which was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee, mentioned that to Ms. Kanoute when she saw her getting lunch there and then decided to drop it. Staff members dance carefully around rule enforcement for fear students will lodge complaints.
  • “We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.
  • A well-known older campus security officer drove over to the dorm. He recognized Ms. Kanoute as a student and they had a brief and polite conversation, which she recorded. He apologized for bothering her and she spoke to him of her discomfort: “Stuff like this happens way too often, where people just feel, like, threatened.”
  • That night Ms. Kanoute wrote a Facebook post: “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color.”
  • Her two-paragraph post hit Smith College like an electric charge. President McCartney weighed in a day later. “I begin by offering the student involved my deepest apology that this incident occurred,” she wrote. “And to assure her that she belongs in all Smith places.”
  • Ms. McCartney did not speak to the accused employees and put the janitor on paid leave that day.
  • Ms. McCartney appeared intent on making no such missteps in 2018. In an interview, she said that Ms. Kanoute deserved an apology and swift action, even before the investigation was undertaken. “It was appropriate to apologize,” Ms. McCartney said. “She is living in a context of ‘living while Black’ incidents.”The school’s workers felt scapegoated.
  • “It is safe to say race is discussed far more often than class at Smith,” said Prof. Marc Lendler, who teaches American government at the college. “It’s a feature of elite academic institutions that faculty and students don’t recognize what it means to be elite.”
  • The repercussions spread. Three weeks after the incident at Tyler House, Ms. Blair, the cafeteria worker, received an email from a reporter at The Boston Globe asking her to comment on why she called security on Ms. Kanoute for “eating while Black.” That puzzled her; what did she have to do with this?
  • The food services director called the next morning. “Jackie,” he said, “you’re on Facebook.” She found that Ms. Kanoute had posted her photograph, name and email, along with that of Mr. Patenaude, a 21-year Smith employee and janitor.
  • “This is the racist person,” Ms. Kanoute wrote of Ms. Blair, adding that Mr. Patenaude too was guilty. (He in fact worked an early shift that day and had already gone home at the time of the incident.) Ms. Kanoute also lashed the Smith administration. “They’re essentially enabling racist, cowardly acts.”
  • Ms. Blair was born and raised and lives in Northampton with her husband, a mechanic, and makes about $40,000 a year. Within days of being accused by Ms. Kanoute, she said, she found notes in her mailbox and taped to her car window. “RACIST” read one. People called her at home. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a caller said. “You don’t deserve to live,” said another.
  • Smith College put out a short statement noting that Ms. Blair had not placed the phone call to security but did not absolve her of broader responsibility. Ms. McCartney called her and briefly apologized. That apology was not made public.
  • By September, a chill had settled on the campus. Students walked out of autumn convocation in solidarity with Ms. Kanoute. The Black Student Association wrote to the president saying they “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.”
  • Smith officials pressured Ms. Blair to go into mediation with Ms. Kanoute. “A core tenet of restorative justice,” Ms. McCartney wrote, “is to provide people with the opportunity for willing apology, forgiveness and reconciliation.”
  • Ms. Blair declined. “Why would I do this? This student called me a racist and I did nothing,” she said.
  • On Oct. 28, 2018, Ms. McCartney released a 35-page report from a law firm with a specialty in discrimination investigations. The report cleared Ms. Blair altogether and found no sufficient evidence of discrimination by anyone else involved, including the janitor who called campus police.
  • Still, Ms. McCartney said the report validated Ms. Kanoute’s lived experience, notably the fear she felt at the sight of the police officer. “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I,” she wrote, “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”
  • Ms. McCartney offered no public apology to the employees after the report was released. “We were gobsmacked — four people’s lives wrecked, two were employees of more than 35 years and no apology,” said Tracey Putnam Culver, a Smith graduate who recently retired from the college’s facilities management department. “How do you rationalize that?”
  • Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, cautioned against drawing too much from the investigative report, as subconscious bias is difficult to prove. Nor was he particularly sympathetic to the accused workers.
  • “It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society,” he said. “Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”
  • Ms. Blair was reassigned to a different dormitory, as Ms. Kanoute lived in the one where she had labored for many years. Her first week in her new job, she said, a female student whispered to another: There goes the racist.
  • Anti-bias training began in earnest in the fall. Ms. Blair and other cafeteria and grounds workers found themselves being asked by consultants hired by Smith about their childhood and family assumptions about race, which many viewed as psychologically intrusive. Ms. Blair recalled growing silent and wanting to crawl inside herself.
  • The faculty are not required to undergo such training. Professor Lendler said in an interview that such training for working-class employees risks becoming a kind of psychological bullying. “My response would be, ‘Unless it relates to conditions of employment, it’s none of your business what I was like growing up or what I should be thinking of,’” he said.
  • In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.
  • The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”
  • “I was accused of being the racist,” Mr. Patenaude said. “To be honest, that just knocked me out. I’m a 58-year-old male, we’re supposed to be tough. But I suffered anxiety because of things in my past and this brought it to a whole ’nother level.”
  • He recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”
  • This past autumn the university furloughed her and other workers, citing the coronavirus and the empty dorms. Ms. Blair applied for an hourly job with a local restaurant. The manager set up a Zoom interview, she said, and asked her: “‘Aren’t you the one involved in that incident?’”
  • “I was pissed,” she said. “I told her I didn’t do anything wrong, nothing. And she said, ‘Well, we’re all set.’”
10More

America's $2 Trillion Rescue Leaves Black Neighborhood Behind - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...aves-black-neighborhood-behind recovery funding black neighborhood wealth government help pandemic
shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between their shifts as corrections officers.
  • A tiny church serving a vulnerable corner of American society is having a life-or-death moment that will never show up in the data. And it’s doing so with little help at a time when the government and economists are hailing all that’s being poured into the economy and calling for more.
  • Concerns about deficits, debt, and inflation have been set aside. The consensus these days has rallied around a whatever-it-takes approach that, though focused on businesses and markets, has included social programs setting new benchmarks for economic impact.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • At a time when the U.S. is engaged in another conversation about its foundational racial inequities, the rescue is amplifying those imbalances in places like Cleveland, where half the population is Black, and fueling the anger of a new generation in communities too used to being left out.
  • “I’m not going to play my people for a fool,” says Stephen Rowan, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church, pointing to what he sees as a pattern where wealthy institutions such as the nearby Cleveland Clinic receive $200 million in Cares Act help and increasingly frustrated members of his congregation miss out. “There comes a point in time when I cannot justify or say to them that ‘God will make a way’ despite what they are seeing right in front of their face.”
  • The virus has also reinforced the city’s long-standing gaping economic disparities between largely Black neighborhoods east of the Cuyahoga River and predominantly White ones to its west. At $21,769, the median income of Black households in the city in 2018 was about half the $40,485 of White ones. The legacies of decades of redlining and other discriminatory lending policies are plain to see. Roughly one-third of Black households own their homes; three-quarters of White ones do.
  • In the 44102 zip code between Cleveland’s downtown and the affluent suburb of Lakewood, where 47% of the population is White, small businesses received 343 loans of less than $150,000 each, for a total $11.9 million, or $260 per person. In the 44104 zip code, home to Scott’s church and a population that’s 96% Black, small businesses received just 83 loans of less than $150,000 each, for a total $2.8 million, the equivalent of $140 for each resident.
  • For those who live on the East Side, it’s a repeat of an economic pattern that last manifested itself in the foreclosures that accompanied the financial crisis more than a decade ago, but one with 400-year-old roots in slavery.
  • Loaded up is a video in which author Kimberly Jones (no relation) likens the economic travails of Black Americans to a centuries-old Monopoly game in which White players get a pile of cash to start and Black ones get nothing. Worse, whenever Black players build up a little wealth, the White players take it away. The protests that hit cities including Cleveland after George Floyd’s death, the video argues, are the equivalent of Black Americans upending the board in anger. “See,” the barber says. “It’s all about economics.”
  • The issue of criminal records has had other repercussions. The Small Business Administration, which administers the loan program, initially barred anyone with a criminal conviction within the past five years. The rule was changed after Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, intervened on behalf of a constituent with a conviction who ran a small business that hired other workers with criminal pasts.The criminal record exclusion was emblematic of the ways in which the Cares Act, assembled hastily over 10 days of bipartisan negotiations, inadvertently discriminated against the Black community, Portman says. “We just didn’t think through all this stuff, because it’s hard to.”
24More

The Roman Republic Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rome-caesar-volcano.html environmental volcano crisis roman republic empire
shared by Javier E on 24 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption — and others before it and since — played a role in changing the course of history.
  • At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it’s not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit “cold room.” Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long-ago eruptions within their layers.
  • Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the institute, and his collaborators are in the business of looking for that debris. Using an instrument they designed and built, they melt the ice and pipe the water into an array of sensors. With hundreds of feet of tubing, the setup looks downright chaotic, but it’s exquisitely sensitive. The sensors pinpoint many substances, including about 30 different elements, and they do so by catching just tiny whiffs.“They have sensitivities of parts per quadrillion,” Dr. McConnell said.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,
  • Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.
  • The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”
  • In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.
  • Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”
  • The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”
  • This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.
  • “They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”
  • Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.
  • That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”
  • Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.
  • For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.
  • “It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”
  • The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.
  • Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.
  • But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.
  • he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.
  • Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.
  • “There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”
  • Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.
53More

Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ro-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic china pandemic politics policy censorship origins
shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • By now, with worldwide infections at thirty-five million and counting, and with near-total silence on the part of the Chinese government, the market has become a kind of petri dish for the imagination.
  • One common Chinese conspiracy theory claims that the U.S. Army deliberately seeded the virus during the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan that October. On the other side of the world, a number of Americans believe that the virus was released, whether accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research includes work on coronaviruses.
  • There’s no evidence to support these theories, and even the prevalent animal-market connection is unclear. There weren’t many wildlife dealers in the market—about a dozen stalls, according to most published reports—and Wuhan natives have little appetite for exotic animals.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.
  • When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.
  • Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”
  • Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.
  • Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.
  • I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.
  • Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.
  • There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.
  • “I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said
  • The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.
  • In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).
  • Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.
  • Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.
  • In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.
  • One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.
  • After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”
  • In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.
  • When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps
  • Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,
  • Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”
  • For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.
  • El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”
  • There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.
  • But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”
  • Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”
  • His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”
  • Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.
  • He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”
  • Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.
  • There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.
  • “Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”
  • He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”
  • In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.
  • I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.
  • At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”
  • Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”
  • Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.
  • In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.
  • But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”
  • There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”
  • No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.
  • Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.
  • The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.
  • In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.
  • In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.
  • Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.
  • Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”
  • In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”
  • I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”
  • He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.
28More

Scientists Predicted the Coronavirus Pandemic - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...613003 pandemic prediction science epidemiology china Covid-19
shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The now-prophetic words could be found at the end of a research paper published in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews in October of 2007: “The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.”
  • The warning—made nearly 13 years ago and more than four years after the worrying first wave of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, killed nearly 800 people globally—was among the earliest to predict the emergence of something like SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the current COVID-19 pandemic.
  • ilar.”
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Dogged by skepticism and inconsistent funding, these coronavirus researchers were stymied from developing treatments and vaccines for SARS—many of which could have been helpful in the current crisis.
  • funding declines hobbled individual investigators who weren’t part of these larger consortia. Pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines and therapies scaled back on coronavirus research, too. Within a few years after the SARS outbreak, public health funding agencies both in the United States and abroad “no longer regarded coronaviruses as a high public health threat compared to other diseases,” Saif wrote in an email.
  • to some experts whose business it is to hunt potential pathogens before they spill over into human populations, the many years spent not girding for a serious coronavirus outbreak were tragically—and unnecessarily—wasted.
  • “We were out there on the ground after SARS, working on coronaviruses with Chinese colleagues in collaboration,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based nonprofit group that took part in a large federally funded effort, called Predict, to hunt for new pandemic viruses in wildlife in 31 countries, including China. That program was famously defunded last fall, just before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began.
  • “But we were the only group of western scientists,” Daszak added. “How can we be the only people looking for these viruses when there was such a clear and present danger?”
  • when SARS emerged in late 2002, there was initially “general disbelief among medical people that a coronavirus could be the basis of such a huge outbreak.”
  • As that epidemic spread, an influx of new researchers crowded the field. More grants were awarded, and funding started to climb. “Everyone wanted to know where the virus had come from,” said Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Initial findings pointed to wild civets and raccoon dogs sold for meat and pelts, respectively, in Chinese markets. Later evidence began to implicate horseshoe bats as the original source of the infections. Some researchers whose pre-SARS careers had been grounded in basic coronavirus biology began working on therapies and vaccines—and they made steady progress for several years.
  • Another similarly affected researcher was Brenda Hogue, a virologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Hogue had devoted her career to studying coronaviruses, focusing on the protein machinery that drives their assembly. After SARS, she and her colleagues turned part of their attention toward developing a vaccine. But when the funding dropped off in 2008, she said, the vaccine went into limbo “and we put our efforts into other directions.”
  • Then on May 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government was responding in kind, “by stalling international efforts to find the source of the [SARS-CoV-2] virus amid an escalating U.S. push to blame China for the pandemic.”
  • To demonstrate that a particular virus is actually harmful to people, scientists need to isolate and culture the microbe and show it infects human cells in the lab
  • Led by virologist Zheng-Li Shi, the Wuhan team reported in 2013 that this particular virus, called WIV1, binds with ACE2 in civet and human cells, and then replicates efficiently inside them. “That was the red flag,” Saif said. Earlier evidence suggested that direct contact with these bats could lead to viral spillover in humans. “Now there was proof of that.”
  • The bats had been trapped in a cave in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. At least seven other SARS-like strains were present in that same colony, leading the researchers to speculate that bat coronaviruses remained “a substantial global threat to public health.”
  • They created a hybrid microbe by attaching the spike protein from SHC014 to the genetic backbone of a SARS-like virus that was previously adapted to grow in mice. Called a chimera—an organism containing cells with more than one genotype—this lab-made microbe had no problem binding with ACE2 and infecting human cells. Baric’s research team concluded that like WIV1, any SARS-like viruses outfitted with the SHC014 spike could pose cross-species threats to people.
  • Baric acknowledged the risky nature of the research but emphasized the safety protocols. “In general, we don’t know the transmissibility or virulence potential of any bat viruses or chimeras,” Baric said in an email message. “Hence it’s best to keep and work with them under biosafety level 3 laboratory conditions to maximize safety.”
  • Baric also pointed out that a chimera would display a genetic signature “that says what it is.” The adjoining parts of a chimera segregate discreetly in a logical pattern.
  • A genetic analysis of the chimera produced in his lab, for instance, “would come out to be mouse-adapted SARS everywhere but the spike, which is SHC014.” Similar logical patterns are absent in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 evolved naturally.
  • ven as Baric and others were generating lab evidence that more SARS-like viruses were poised for human emergence, another outbreak—in pigs, not people—provided another strong and recent signal: Some 25,000 piglets were killed by a coronavirus in the Guangdong province of China, starting in 2016. That virus, too, was found in horseshoe bats, and Buchmeier described the outbreak as both a major cross-species spillover and a warning shot that was never really picked up by the broader public-health community.
  • The EcoHealth Alliance, which had been part of the Predict effort, maintained its own collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds supplied by the National Institutes of Health. But on April 24, the Trump administration—which is investigating whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped accidentally from the Wuhan Institute, an allegation that’s been broadly discredited—directed the NIH to cut off that support.
  • hen cases of those diseases fell off, public-health responders shifted to other viral emergencies such as Ebola and Zika, and coronavirus research funding dropped sharply.
  • To disease experts, the bickering is a worrying—perhaps even astonishing—indicator that at least some global leaders still aren’t hearing what they have to say about the threat of coronaviruses, and Baric asserted that the ongoing pandemic exposes the need for better communication between countries, not less. “That is absolutely key,” he said. “Critical information needs to be passed as quickly as possible.”
  • Many other warnings would follow.Indeed, evidence of a looming and more deadly coronavirus pandemic had been building for years. Yet experts who specialize in coronaviruses—a large family of pathogens, found especially in birds and mammals, that can cross over to humans from other mammals and cause varying degrees of illness—struggled to convince a broader audience of the risk
  • the number of coronavirus-research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health—which had increased from a low of 28 in 2002 to a peak of 103 in 2008—went into a tailspin.
  • Though support for coronavirus research spiked a bit with the MERS outbreak in 2012, the increase was short-lived. Since that outbreak was quickly contained, the disease didn’t raise wider concerns and grant opportunities declined further.
  • Ironically, just as funding for drugs and vaccines was drying up, evidence that other coronavirus threats lurked in wildlife was only getting stronger
  • Ten years would pass, however, before researchers could show there were other SARS-like viruses in nature that also bind with ACE2. The evidence came from a team based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
7More

Election Showed a Wider Red-Blue Economic Divide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-red-blue-economic-divide.html politics culture
shared by saberal on 12 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides.
  • Based on counties with at least 98 percent of estimated votes reported, the correlation between a swing away from President Trump and the college-educated share in a county was 0.49.
  • More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016. Highly educated Republican-leaning counties, like Williamson County near Nashville and Forsyth County near Atlanta, have become rarer with each recent election.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Overall voting patterns tend to change very little from election to election
  • Put another way, only 7 percent of counties (weighted by their vote) swung more than 10 points in either direction between 2016 and 2020.
  • Many more places swung toward Mr. Biden relative to 2016 than toward Mr. Trump, but the most significant local shifts were toward Mr. Trump. These included heavily Hispanic areas in Miami-Dade County and along the Texas border, and the more heavily Mormon counties of Utah and Idaho (though some of these counties are still below 98 percent reporting).
  • Despite some demographic realignments, the economies of red and blue places drifted further apart. And as these gaps widen, it gets ever more challenging for America to have a shared view of the state of the economy and of the policies most urgently needed.
12More

Election Showed a Wider Red-Blue Economic Divide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-red-blue-economic-divide.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 12 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides. Preliminary vote totals indicate that the partisan gap of urban versus suburban places shrank, along with the traditional Democratic advantage in heavily Hispanic counties. Whites and nonwhites are now in somewhat greater alignment in how they vote.
  • That makes the resilience of the economic divide all the more striking. In fact, the gap between red and blue counties in their education levels, household incomes and projected long-term job growth did not just persist; it widened.
  • Based on counties with at least 98 percent of estimated votes reported, the correlation between a swing away from President Trump and the college-educated share in a county was 0.49.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016.
  • A more educated work force bodes well for future local economic success — and places with brighter prospects swung toward Joe Biden.
  • Jobs requiring more education are projected to grow faster and be at less risk from automation. Counties where more jobs are “routine” (in the sense of being at greater risk from automation) voted strongly for Mr. Trump in 2016 and even more so in 2020, while counties with fewer such jobs swung toward Mr. Biden. Similarly, counties with a mix of occupations that are projected to grow faster voted even more strongly for Mr. Biden in 2020 than for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
  • Not only did places with brighter economic prospects swing more toward Mr. Biden, but places with a stronger economy during the past four years did, too.
  • Overall voting patterns tend to change very little from election to election.
  • Put another way, only 7 percent of counties
  • swung more than 10 points in either direction between 2016 and 2020.
  • Many more places swung toward Mr. Biden relative to 2016 than toward Mr. Trump, but the most significant local shifts were toward Mr. Trump. These included heavily Hispanic areas in Miami-Dade County and along the Texas border, and the more heavily Mormon counties of Utah and Idaho
  • Both denser and more sprawling suburbs of large metros swung toward Mr. Biden by around five percentage points, while more traditionally Democratic urban counties didn’t shift much either way. Non-metropolitan, largely rural counties also shifted little.
54More

Opinion | It's Time to Break Up Facebook - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html facebook monopoly social media antitrust politics policy
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.
  • Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones
  • Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations
  • In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
  • Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.
  • Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.
  • Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products
  • Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.
  • When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.
  • Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved
  • The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
  • Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.
  • As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum
  • In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.
  • As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)
  • I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur
  • It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen
  • a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination
  • It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.
  • It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”
  • Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.
  • We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.
  • The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
  • The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.
  • The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.
  • Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.
  • What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
  • In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”
  • As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
  • No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.
  • Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control
  • Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.
  • In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.
  • I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.
  • We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.
  • Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.
  • First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.
  • How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.
  • Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.
  • others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.
  • The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.
  • But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit
  • The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
  • The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time
  • The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.
  • Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media
  • We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.
  • These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation
  • I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak
  • Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”
  • Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.
  • The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.
  • This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.
12More

The French Catholic church acknowledges a staggering pattern of sexual abuse | The Econ... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...gering-pattern-of-sexual-abuse politics history Culture
shared by woodlu on 07 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • between 1950 and 2020 at least 216,000 children were sexually abused in France by Catholic clergy.
  • on October 5th, concluded a two-year, independent inquiry commissioned by the church. Jean-Marc Sauvé, the president of the commission that conducted the investigation, said it uncovered “the lead weight of silence smothering the crimes” committed by 2,900-3,200 clergy. If lay members were also included, the number of abused could reach 330,000.
  • “for a very long time the Catholic church’s immediate reaction was to protect itself as an institution and it has shown complete, even cruel, indifference to those having suffered abuse.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • France has an unusual relationship with Catholicism, due chiefly to strict secular rules, known as laïcité, entrenched by law in 1905 and designed to keep the state neutral in religious affairs. Catholic schools, which are all private, cater only to a small minority of pupils.
  • As was revealed after reports of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in other countries, including America, Chile, Germany and Ireland, the crimes in France involved a sinister web of misplaced trust, manipulated authority, concealment, silence and shame.
  • The abuse was not confined to a particular region, or diocese, but was spread across the country: including in local parishes, scout groups and catechism classes.
  • About 90% of the victims were boys, many between ten and 13 years old.
  • The country lacks the wide network of church-linked boarding schools and powerful state institutions that helped to conceal paedophilia in some other countries.
  • the Catholic church in France is a hollowed-out version of its former self. It struggles to recruit priests. Numbering 12,000 today, the priesthood is half what it was 20 years ago—and half of those serving are older than 75.
  • Only 49% say they believe in God. Two years ago, as the scandal began to emerge, 56% said in one survey that they held a bad image of the Catholic church.
  • Catholic church is not the only arena of French society in which deceit and denial of sexual abuse have been uncovered in recent years. Another is politics, where, until #MeToo, abuse and sexual violence, mostly towards women, tended to be covered up.
  • By exposing the manipulation and cruelty of the predators, those brave enough to speak out, as in the report on the Catholic church, may also prevent such abuse in the future from going undetected for so long.
14More

N.Y. Attorney General Outlines Pattern of Possible Fraud at Trump Business - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ation-fraud-letitia-james.html trump gop fraud economics
shared by clairemann on 19 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The attorney general, Letitia James, released new details of her investigation as she argued for the need to question Donald J. Trump and two of his children under oath.
  • Still, the filing marked the first time that the attorney general’s office leveled such specific accusations against the former president’s company.
  • “We have uncovered significant evidence that suggests Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization falsely and fraudulently valued multiple assets and misrepresented those values to financial institutions for economic benefit,”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Ms. James’s filing argued that the company misstated the value of the properties to lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service. Many of the statements, the filing argued, were “generally inflated as part of a pattern to suggest that Mr. Trump’s net worth was higher than it otherwise would have appeared.”
  • After receiving the subpoenas, lawyers for Mr. Trump filed a federal lawsuit seeking to halt Ms. James’s civil investigation and to bar her office from participating in the district attorney’s criminal investigation.
  • Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she can sue Mr. Trump and his company but cannot file criminal charges. Her inquiry is running parallel to a criminal investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, which is examining some of the same conduct.
  • Ms. James already questioned another of Mr. Trump’s sons, Eric Trump, in October 2020. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself in response to more than 500 questions, the new court filing said.
  • “Three years later, she is now faced with the stark reality that she has no case,” the spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
  • A case could be hard to prove. Property valuations are often subjective, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers are likely to note that his lenders and insurers — sophisticated financial institutions that turned a profit off their relationship with the Trumps — did not rely on the company’s estimates.
  • The Manhattan district attorney’s office and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business, the Trump Organization, engaged in criminal fraud by intentionally submitting false property values to potential lenders.
  • The Atlanta district attorney is conducting a criminal investigation of election interference in Georgia by Mr. Trump and his allies.
  • In 2015, for example, while seeking to refinance a loan on his 40 Wall Street tower in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s statement of financial condition estimated that the property was worth $735 million. Yet one lender concluded it was worth only $257 million.
  • Ms. James’s lawyers also argued that Mr. Trump submitted at least two misleading statements to the Internal Revenue Service, saying that he substantially overstated the value of land at both his Seven Springs Estate in Westchester County and his Los Angeles Golf Club. The value of Seven Springs, Ms. James said, had been boosted by counting the value of seven nonexistent mansions, said to be worth $61 million. Mr. Trump received tax deductions worth millions of dollars on both properties.
  • Mr. Weisselberg, the filing contends, also falsely told one of Mr. Trump’s insurance companies that the property valuations were based on assessments by professional appraisers, when that was not the case. In reality, “the valuations were prepared by Trump Organization staff,” the filing said.
24More

Ocean Currents in the Atlantic Could Slow by Century's End, Research Shows - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...antic-ocean-tipping-point.html atlantic ocean turning point environment crisis tipping point
shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.
  • That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.
  • A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.
  • the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.
  • As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.
  • Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.
  • In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).
  • These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.
  • adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.
  • Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.
  • Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
  • Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.
  • Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.
  • “Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”
  • They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.
  • Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.
  • they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.
  • Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.
  • Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.
  • Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,
  • scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.
  • “It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”
  • the projects began collecting data in 2004 at the earliest, which isn’t enough time to draw firm long-term conclusions. “It is extremely difficult to look at a short record for the ocean overturning and say what it is going to do over 30, 40 or 50 years,”
17More

Opinion | Will A.I. Transform the Economy, and if So, How? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ai-jobs-economy-budget.html economy ai effects employment debt inequality policy economics
shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • what we’ve been calling A.I. — or what more careful people call “generative A.I.” — isn’t really intelligence. What it is instead is extrapolation from pattern recognition. Or as some people I talk to put it, it’s basically souped-up autocorrect.
  • a lot of what human workers, even workers considered highly skilled, do for a living is also arguably souped-up autocorrect. How many workers regularly engage in creative thinking? Even among creative workers, how much time is spent being creative as opposed to engaging in pattern recognition?
  • what we’re calling A.I. could be a big deal for the economy even if it doesn’t lead to the creation of HAL 9000 or SkyNet.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Some people are trying to figure out the impact from the bottom up, looking at various kinds of work and guesstimating how much of that work can be replaced or augmented by A.I. The most widely circulated numbers come from Goldman Sachs, whose base case has A.I. increasing the growth rate of productivity — output per person-hour — by almost 1.5 percentage points a year over a decade, for a total over that decade of about 15 percent:
  • By the time the productivity surge tapered off, productivity was about 12 percent higher than the previous trend would have led you to expect it would be. Since A.I. is arguably an even more profound innovation than the technologies that drove the 1995-2005 boom, 15 percent isn’t at all unreasonable.
  • economists often identify total factor productivity growth with technological progress. That’s sometimes a bit dubious, since T.F.P. is really a “measure of our ignorance,” simply the part of economic growth we can’t explain otherwise. But from 1995 to 2005 it seems fairly clear that the boom was driven by information technology.
  • Here’s another view of that boom, in which I show the natural log of productivity — so that a straight line corresponds to steady growth — and plot a continuation of the growth rate from 1973 to 1995 (the red line), so that you can see how actual growth compared:
  • Is this plausible? Actually, yes. One parallel, if you’ve studied the historical relationship between technology and productivity, is the productivity boom from 1995 to 2005, which followed decades of weak productivity growth.
  • But will higher productivity make us richer or simply reduce the number of jobs? Fears of technological unemployment — a term invented by none other than John Maynard Keynes in 1930 — go back at least to the early 19th century.
  • While technology has often eliminated some jobs, however, historically this has always been, as Keynes wrote, “a temporary phase of maladjustment,” with other forms of employment rising to replace the jobs lost
  • while there’s no reason to believe that what we’re calling A.I. will lead to mass unemployment, it may well hurt the people who are displaced from their jobs and either have trouble finding new employment or are obliged to accept lower wages. Who are the potential losers?
  • The likely answer is that big impacts will fall on relatively high-end administrative jobs, many of them currently highly paid, while blue-collar jobs will be largely unscathed
  • there are other applications of big data that may affect blue-collar work. For example, with all the buzz around ChatGPT there has been relatively little attention paid to the fact that after years of failed hype, self-driving cars are actually beginning to go into service.
  • Still, at this point it seems more likely than not that A.I. will, unlike technological progress over the past 40 years, be a force for lower rather than higher income inequality.
  • rapidly rising interest rates have made debt considerably more worrisome. Conventional estimates of the economy’s long-run sustainable growth rate, like those of the Federal Reserve, tend to put it around 1.8 percent. And real interest rates on federal debt are now above that number:
  • if optimistic estimates of the boost from the technology are at all right, growth will be much higher than 1.8 percent over the next decade, and debt won’t be a big concern after all — especially because faster growth will boost revenue and reduce the budget deficit.
  • All of this is, of course, highly speculative. Nobody really knows how big an impact A.I. will have. But again, it doesn’t have to be “true” artificial intelligence to be a big deal for the economy, and the best guess is that it will probably matter a lot.
12More

J.G.A. Pocock, Historian Who Argued for Historical Context, Dies at 99 - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jga-pocock-dead.html historian linguistic constraints context
shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • J.G.A. Pocock, who brought new perspectives to historical scholarship by arguing that the first step in understanding events of the past is to identify their linguistic and intellectual context
  • Among the most important were “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century” (1957), “The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition” (1975) and, most notably, “Barbarism and Religion,” a six-volume study of the life and times of Edward Gibbon,
  • Professor Pocock, Quentin Skinner and other like-minded scholars, known collectively as the Cambridge School, came to prominence in the late 1960s with a fresh approach to the study of political thought, characterized by an emphasis on context and an unwillingness to assume that all ideas and problems were viewed in the past as they would be viewed today.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “Pocock rejected the idea that politics or philosophy addressed the same problems over time — what justice meant for Aristotle did not mean the same for Hobbes or for Rousseau,”
  • “So explaining what political ideas meant in theory and in practice became the historian’s task.”
  • The Cambridge School attracted devotees across the world in departments of politics, history, philosophy, literature and language — scholars who were admonished to set aside any modern-day assumptions and prejudices they might hold when delving into the past.
  • “Readers, Christian or non-believing, who may find themselves involved in analyses of thought they consider obsolete or false, are asked to remember that they are studying the history of a time when such thinking was offered and read seriously,” he wrote.
  • Professor Pocock’s first book, “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law,” made clear that he would not be a conventional historian. The book asked how people in the 17th century viewed their past, and he wasn’t satisfied with drawing on the go-to philosopher of the period, John Locke. As Colin Kidd wrote in The London Review of Books in 2008, the book “drove a bypass around Locke” and “concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert Brady.”
  • “The Machiavellian Moment” cemented Professor Pocock’s reputation among historians, and it continued to grow from there. The first volume of “Barbarism and Religion” came out in 1999, when Professor Pocock was in his mid-70s. Volume 6 appeared in 2015. He also edited or co-edited “The Political Works of James Harrington” (1977), “Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1987) and “The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800” (1993), among other books.
  • “Pocock’s central contention,” the Oxford historian Keith Thomas wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1986, “is that a work of political thought can only be understood if the reader is aware of the contemporary linguistic constraints to which its author was subject, for these constraints prescribed both his subject matter and the way in which that subject matter was conceptualized.”
  • its application to the history of political ideas forms a great contrast to the assumptions of the 1950s, when it was widely thought that the close reading of a text by an analytic philosopher was sufficient to establish its meaning, even though the philosopher was quite innocent of any knowledge of the period in which the text was written or of the linguistic traditions within which its author operated.”
  • “Historians need to understand that the history of discourse is not a simple linear sequence in which new patterns overcome and replace the old,” he wrote in 1988 in a preface to a reissue of “Politics, Language and Time,” a 1971 essay collection, “but a complex dialogue in which these patterns persist in transforming one another.”
14More

Why the Children of Immigrants Get Ahead | Time - 0 views

time.com/...mmigrants-children-us-mobility children immigrants US politics time
shared by lilyrashkind on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Abramitzky is a Professor of Economics and the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at Stanford University. Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves at the Director of Industrial Relations Section. Their new book is Streets of Gold: America's Untold of Immigrant Success
  • In paging through the profiles, we couldn’t help noticing one group of Americans who defies this trend: the children of immigrants. Sonya Poe was born in a suburb of Dallas, Texas to parents who immigrated from Mexico. “My dad worked for a hotel,” Sonya recalled. “Their goal for us was always: Go to school, go to college, so that you can get a job that doesn’t require you to work late at night, so that you can choose what you get to do and take care of your family. We’re fortunate to be able to do that.”
  • One pattern that is particularly striking in the data is that the children of immigrants raised in households earning below the median income make substantial progress by the time they reach adulthood, both for the Ellis Island generation a century ago and for immigrants today. The children of first-generation immigrants growing up close to the bottom of the income distribution (say, at the 25th percentile) are more likely to reach the middle of the income distribution than are children of similarly poor U.S.-born parents.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The second notable takeaway is that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos outperform the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. The children of immigrants from Central American countries—countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua that are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border—move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada).
  • To conduct our analysis, we needed data that links children to parents. For the historical data, we used historical census records to link sons living in their childhood homes to census data collected 30 years later when these young men had jobs of their own.
  • Our modern data is based on federal income tax records instead. The tax records allow researchers to link children to their parents as tax dependents, and then observe these children in the tax data as adults.
  • The first striking takeaway is that, as a group, children of immigrants achieve more upward mobility than the children of U.S.-born fathers. We focus on the children of white U.S.-born fathers because the children of Black fathers tend to have lower rates of upward mobility. So, the mobility advantage that we observe for the children of immigrants would be even larger if we compared this group to the full population.
  • Children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic today are just as likely to move up from their parents’ circumstances as were children of poor Swedes and Finns a hundred years ago.
  • Today, we might not be that surprised to learn that the children of past European immigrants succeeded. We are used to seeing the descendants of poor European immigrants rise to become members of the business and cultural elite. Many prominent leaders, including politicians like President Biden, regularly emphasize pride in their Irish or Italian heritage. But, at the time, these groups were considered the poorest of the poor. In their flight from famine, Irish immigrants are not too dissimilar from immigrants who flee hurricanes, earthquakes, and violent uprisings today.
  • One question that arises with our work is: what about children who arrive without papers? Undocumented children face more barriers to mobility than other children of immigrants. Fortunately, this group is relatively small even in recent years: only 1.5 million (or five percent) of the 32 million children of immigrant parents are undocumented today. Indeed, this number is small because many children of undocumented immigrants are born in the U.S. and thus are granted citizenship at birth.
  • What enables the children of immigrants to escape poor circumstances and move up the economic ladder? The answer we hear most often is that immigrants have a better work ethic than the US-born and that immigrant parents put more emphasis on education.
  • U.S.-born parents who were raised down the block, or in the same town. This pattern implies that the primary difference between immigrant families and the families of the U.S.-born is in where they choose to live.
  • Ironically, J.D. Vance (who is now running for Senate in Ohio on an anti-immigration platform) poses this question in his bestseller Hillbilly Elegy,aboutgrowing up in Middletown, Ohio, only 45 minutes from the border with Kentucky, the state where his family had lived for generations. For Vance, moving up the ladder meant moving out of his childhood community, a step that many Americans are unwilling to take. He went on to enlist in the Marines, and then to Ohio State and Yale Law School—“Though we sing the praises of social mobility,” he writes, “it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something.”
  • Adapted from Abramitzky and Boustan’s new book Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 448 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page