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Javier E

The Employer Mandate News | National Review Online - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...oyer-mandate-news-reihan-salam

obamacare health-care politics

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • a delay won’t fix the real problem or unwind the consequences already seen: a pile-up in lost hours worked for modest-wage earners.
  • A delay to 2015 is not long at all, since many employers acted to curb hours in the spring of 2013, well before the original 2014 start date. Thus, the delay is unlikely to provide comfort to workers already impacted — or to Democrats ahead of the 2014 mid-terms.
  • Obama needed the mandate to get Obamacare passed because it would reduce participation in the exchanges and therefore the law’s overall costs. One of his key selling points for the law was that it would cut the deficit. Now that the law has passed, his administration is freer to pursue changes that will raise Obamacare’s cost to taxpayers but improve its effects on the economy.Delaying the employer mandate, perhaps indefinitely, is one way to do that.
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  • the delay might accelerate the unraveling of employer-sponsored health coverage:If you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate. Democrats put the employer mandate in Obamacare because the President was worried that, without a mandate, employers would dump coverage, violating his oft-repeated promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.
  • (the “American Job Protection Act”) is that one can very easily imagine it being taken up by left-wing Democrats as well as right-wing Republicans, albeit for different reasons.
  • delaying the employer mandate could lead, ultimately, to its repeal, which would do much to transition our insurance market from an employer-sponsored one to an individually-purchased one.
  • If the employer mandate were to ultimately be repealed, or never implemented, today’s news may turn out to be one of the most significant developments in health care policy in recent memory.
  • Even if the Obama administration’s delay lasts for only one year, that delay will give firms time to restructure their businesses to avoid offering costly coverage, leading to an expansion of the individual insurance market and a shrinkage of the employer-sponsored market.
  • If we transition from employer-provided coverage to tightly-regulated state-based insurance markets, it is possible that the insurance business will become even more rigid than it already is — this is why I’ve called for a national exchange as a kind of escape hatch. And of course if the private insurance market becomes more dysfunctional, a single-payer, Medicare-for-all alternative will become more politically attractive. 
Javier E

The Curse of Econ 101 - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513155

economics policy minimum wage

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

Millions of Americans are about to lose their health insurance in a pandemic | Wendell ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...mic-americans-health-insurance

health-care health insurance insurance us medicare unemployment politics culture crisis pandemic

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • he tragic effects of our battle with the novel coronavirus are seemingly endless. But arguably the most mind-blowing is this: the very pandemic that threatens to infect and kill millions is simultaneously causing many to also lose their health coverage at their gravest time of need.
  • Here’s how: the virus has caused a public health crisis so severe that people have been forced to stay home, causing businesses to shutter and lay off workers. And with roughly half of Americans getting their health insurance from their employer, these layoffs mean not only losing their income but also their medical coverage
  • In other words, just as our need for medical care skyrockets in the face of a global pandemic, fewer will have health insurance or be able to afford it.
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  • Even in better times, this arrangement was a bad idea from a health perspective. Most Americans whose families depend on their employers for coverage are just a layoff away from being uninsured.
  • Many will sadly lose their jobs over the coming weeks – with one estimate projecting as many as 30%. And as they do, Americans are about to learn something horrifying: how irrational and irresponsible it is for so many to be dependent on employers for health insurance.
  • Take it from me. I’m a former health insurance executive who once profited from this system. It’s time for it to stop.
  • the cost of treatment for Covid-19 can run around $35,000. As the patient in the report exclaimed: “I was pretty sticker-shocked. I personally don’t know anybody who has that kind of money.”
  • During the last big recession, researchers at Cornell University found that 9.3 million Americans lost their health insurance between 2007 and 2009
  • During this time, roughly six in 10 Americans who lost their jobs became uninsured.
  • this problem compounds itself. If the reason you lost your health insurance is that you no longer have steady employment, how are you now going to be able to afford monthly premiums for some other private health care plan?
  • even in good times, the employer-based model fails to cover enough of us, with the number of Americans covered through an employer steadily dropping in general. Since 1999, the percentage of those with job-based coverage has declined by nine points.
  • at a time in our nation’s history where more will need quality care than ever before, the human cost will simply be too much to bear.
Javier E

A Hidden Consensus on Health Care - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-consensus-on-health-care.html

obamacare health-care mandate

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The politicians’ consensus is that health care reform shouldn’t alter or disrupt the way the majority of Americans get their insurance today
  • The policy consensus, though, is that the status quo is actually the problem, and that it deserves to be threatened, undermined and replaced as expeditiously as possible. Wonks of the left and right disagree on what that replacement should look like. But they’re united in regarding employer-provided coverage as an unsustainable relic: a burden on businesses, a source of perverse incentives for the health care market and an obstacle to more efficient, affordable and universal coverage.
  • Obamacare has an unwieldy, Frankenstein’s monster quality in part because the law is trying to serve both consensuses at once. The core of the bill, the subsidies for the uninsured and the exchanges where they can purchase plans, is designed to offer a center-left alternative to the existing system. But much of the surrounding architecture is designed to prop up existing arrangements — and in the process, protect Obama from exactly the kind of criticisms he once leveled against McCain.
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  • If it dropped the employer mandate, the Obama White House would be fully committed to a more disruptive future, in which exchanges and subsidies gradually replaced the employer-based system.  And since those exchanges and subsidies are going to be implemented by this administration no matter what — barring a Martian invasion or a zombie apocalypse, at least — the sooner we find out if they really work and what they really cost the better.
  • “if you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate.” And if you don’t like Obamacare (as Roy doesn’t), and don’t expect it to work, then all the mandate does is delay a necessary reckoning with the new system’s flaws.
  • Either way, the White House’s decision is a step toward honesty in policy-making. It takes us a little closer to a world where politicians of both parties actually level with the public, and acknowledge that employer-provided health insurance is an idea whose time has passed.
Javier E

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nology-wrecks-the-middle-class

economics employment trends technology middle-class

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly
  • the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.
  • Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year?
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  • Economists have historically rejected what we call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false.
  • Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor.
  • The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.
  • Computers excel at “routine” tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs
  • Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it has boosted demand for workers who perform “nonroutine” tasks that complement the automated activities
  • At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity.
  • On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction.
  • Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined.
  • overall employment rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization.
  • So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging.
  • Spurred by growing demand for workers performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable price tag, higher education has perhaps never been a better investment.
  • The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take advantage of human flexibility
  • we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will combine routine technical tasks with abstract and manual tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction, adaptability and problem-solving.
  • this category includes numerous jobs for people in the skilled trades and repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service representatives; and even clerical workers who are required to do more than type and file
  • Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational skills the “new artisans.”
  • The outlook for workers who haven’t finished college is uncertain, but not devoid of hope. There will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of the past
  • we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the “new artisans”: licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches and guides
Javier E

Envisioning the End of Employer-Provided Health Plans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nce-may-be-on-the-way-out.html

health-care system obamacare

shared by Javier E on 01 May 14 - No Cached
  • By 2020, about 90 percent of American workers who now receive health insurance through their employers will be shifted to government exchanges created by the health law, according to a projection
  • The S&P researchers tried to estimate what it would save the biggest American companies. Their answer: $700 billion between 2016 and 2025, or about 4 percent of the total value of those companies.
  • The idea is this: Now that federal and state exchanges exist where anyone, even those with pre-existing illnesses, can gain coverage, employers might decide to give their workers a stipend to pay for health insurance on the exchanges rather than sponsor a plan themselves.
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  • In truth, the American system of health care — in which most people get their private health insurance through their employer — has always been rather odd. Why should quitting a job also mean you have to get a new health insurance plan? Why should your boss get to decide what options you have and negotiate the cost of them? Employers don’t get to select our auto insurance or mortgage company, so why should health insurance be any different?
Javier E

A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-leap-in-employment-rate-.html

safety net work subsidies transport children education scandinavia employment economics

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • It is a simple idea supported by both economic theory and most people’s intuition: If welfare benefits are generous and taxes high, fewer people will work. Why bother being industrious, after all, if you can get a check from the government for sitting around
  • The idea may be backward.
  • The United States and many other nations with relatively low taxes and a smaller social safety net actually have substantially lower rates of employment.
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  • Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries.
  • In Scandinavian countries, working parents have the option of heavily subsidized child care. Leave policies make it easy for parents to take off work to care for a sick child. Heavily subsidized public transportation may make it easier for a person in a low-wage job to get to and from work. And free or inexpensive education may make it easier to get the training to move from the unemployment rolls to a job.
  • In short, more people may work when countries offer public services that directly make working easier, such as subsidized care for children and the old; generous sick leave policies; and cheap and accessible transportation. If the goal is to get more people working, what’s important about a social welfare plan may be more about what the money is spent on than how much is spent.
  • , it could mean that more direct aid to the working poor could help coax Americans into the labor force more effectively than the tax credits that have been a mainstay for compromise between Republicans and Democrats for the last generation.
  • In Denmark, someone who enters the labor force at an average salary loses 86 percent of earnings to a combination of taxes and lost eligibility for welfare benefits; that number is only 37 percent in the United States. Yet the percentage of Danes between the ages of 20 and 59 with a job is 10 percentage points higher than in the United States.
  • In the United States, the major policies aimed at helping the working poor are devised around tax subsidies that put more cash in people’s pockets so long as they work, most notably through the Earned-income tax credit and Child Tax Credit.
  • There is a solid correlation, by Mr. Kleven’s calculations, between what countries spend on employment subsidies — like child care, preschool and care for older adults — and what percentage of their working-age population is in the labor force.
  • Collectively, these policies and subsidies create flexibility such that a person on the fence between taking a job versus staying at home to care for children or parents may be more likely to take a job.
  • The employment subsidies Mr. Kleven cites surely help coax more Scandinavians into the work force, Mr. Greenstein agrees, but shouldn’t be viewed in isolation.
  • wages for entry-level work are much higher in the Nordic countries than in the United States, reflecting a higher minimum wage, stronger labor unions and cultural norms that lead to higher pay
  • There are countless differences between Northern European countries and the rest of the world beyond child care policies and the like. The Scandinavian countries may have cultures that encourage more people to work, especially women.
  • Every country has a mix of taxes, welfare benefits and policies to promote work that reflects its politics and culture. In the large, diverse United States, there is deep skepticism of social welfare programs and direct government spending, along with a greater commitment to keeping taxes low.
Javier E

Walmart's Visible Hand - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...man-walmarts-visible-hand.html

social science economics labor wages income policy theory middle-class government research history politics

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Conservatives — with the backing, I have to admit, of many economists — normally argue that the market for labor is like the market for anything else. The law of supply and demand, they say, determines the level of wages, and the invisible hand of the market will punish anyone who tries to defy this law.
  • Specifically, this view implies that any attempt to push up wages will either fail or have bad consequences. Setting a minimum wage, it’s claimed, will reduce employment and create a labor surplus, the same way attempts to put floors under the prices of agricultural commodities used to lead to butter mountains, wine lakes and so on
  • Pressuring employers to pay more, or encouraging workers to organize into unions, will have the same effect.
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  • But labor economists have long questioned this view
  • the labor force — is people. And because workers are people, wages are not, in fact, like the price of butter, and how much workers are paid depends as much on social forces and political power as it does on simple supply and demand.
  • What’s the evidence? First, there is what actually happens when minimum wages are increased. Many states set minimum wages above the federal level, and we can look at what happens when a state raises its minimum while neighboring states do no
  • the overwhelming conclusion from studying these natural experiments is that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little or no negative effect on employment.
  • Then there’s history. It turns out that the middle-class society we used to have didn’t evolve as a result of impersonal market forces — it was created by political action, and in a brief period of time
  • America was still a very unequal society in 1940, but by 1950 it had been transformed by a dramatic reduction in income disparities, which the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo labeled the Great Compression.
  • How did that happen?
  • Part of the answer is direct government intervention, especially during World War II, when government wage-setting authority was used to narrow gaps between the best paid and the worst paid. Part of it, surely, was a sharp increase in unionization. Part of it was the full-employment economy of the war years, which created very strong demand for workers and empowered them to seek higher pay.
  • the Great Compression didn’t go away as soon as the war was over. Instead, full employment and pro-worker politics changed pay norms, and a strong middle class endured for more than a generation. Oh, and the decades after the war were also marked by unprecedented economic growth.
  • Walmart is under political pressure over wages so low that a substantial number of employees are on food stamps and Medicaid. Meanwhile, workers are gaining clout thanks to an improving labor market, reflected in increasing willingness to quit bad jobs.
  • its justification for the move echoes what critics of its low-wage policy have been saying for years: Paying workers better will lead to reduced turnover, better morale and higher productivity.
  • What this means, in turn, is that engineering a significant pay raise for tens of millions of Americans would almost surely be much easier than conventional wisdom suggests. Raise minimum wages by a substantial amount; make it easier for workers to organize, increasing their bargaining power; direct monetary and fiscal policy toward full employment, as opposed to keeping the economy depressed out of fear that we’ll suddenly turn into Weimar Germany. It’s not a hard list to implement — and if we did these things we could make major strides back toward the kind of society most of us want to live in.
  • The point is that extreme inequality and the falling fortunes of America’s workers are a choice, not a destiny imposed by the gods of the market. And we can change that choice if we want to.
maddieireland334

There's nothing wrong with grade inflation - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-wrong-with-grade-inflation

Education US college grades inflation opinion

shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • By the early ’90s, so long as one had the good sense to major in the humanities — all bets were off in the STEM fields — it was nearly impossible to get a final grade below a B-minus at an elite college.
  • According to a 2012 study, the average college GPA, which in the 1930s was a C-plus, had risen to a B at public universities and a B-plus at private schools. At Duke, Pomona and Harvard, D’s and F’s combine for just 2 percent of all grades
  • Some blame students’ consumer mentality, a few see a correlation with small class sizes (departments with falling enrollments want to keep students happy), and many cite a general loss of rigor in a touchy-feely age. 
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  • According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects. Yale and Harvard, while making noises about grade inflation, have never instituted tough rules to stem it.
  • Overall, graded students are less interested in the topic at hand and — and, for obvious, common-sense reasons — more inclined to pick the easiest possible task when given the chance.
  • Grades should motivate certain students: those afraid of the stigma of a bad grade or those ambitious, by temperament or conditioning, to succeed in measurable ways.
  • Although recent research on the effects of grades is limited, several studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s measured how students related to a task or a class when it was graded compared to when it was ungraded.
  • Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?
  • To top humanities PhD programs, letters of reference and writing samples matter more than overall GPA (although students are surely expected to have received good grades in their intended areas of study).
  • We need to move to a post-grading world. Maybe that means a world where there are no grades — or one where, if they remain, we rely more on better kinds of evaluation.
  • According to a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring, behind internships, extracurricular activities and previous employment.
  • Yes, the student who gets a 100 on a calculus exam probably grasps the material better than the student with a 60 — but only if she retains the knowledge, which grades can’t show.
  • Right now, students end up being evaluated twice: once with an inflated and meaningless letter grade, then again by teachers asked to write letters of recommendation.
  • They said employers want a GPA of 3.0 or even 3.5. But again, that standard would include almost every Harvard student — which suggests that GPAs serve not to validate students from elite schools but to keep out those from less-prestigious schools and large public universities, where grades are less inflated. Grades at community colleges “have actually dropped” over the years, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a co-author of the 2012 grade-inflation study.
  • That means we have two systems: one for students at elite schools, who get jobs based on references, prestige and connections, and another for students everywhere else, who had better maintain a 3.0.
  • Students can compare evaluations from different classes, too, “read across all of them, see what they need improvement on.” And when they graduate, they — and employers or grad-school admission offices — get far more than a printed page of grades.
  • The trouble is that, while it’s relatively easy for smaller colleges to go grade-free, with their low student-to-teacher ratios, it’s tough for professors at larger schools, who must evaluate more students, more quickly, with fewer resources.
  • teaching five classes for poverty wages can’t write substantial term-end comments, so grades are a necessity if they want to give any feedback at all.
  • perhaps the small, progressive colleges can inspire other schools to follow, as they have in, say, abolishing the SAT as an admissions requirement
  • It would mean hiring more teachers and paying them better (which schools should do anyway). And if transcripts become more textured, graduate-school admission offices and employers will have to devote more resources to reading them, and to getting to know applicants through interviews and letters of reference
  • When I think about getting rid of grades, I think of happier students, with whom I have more open, democratic relationships.
  • Even in my Yale classrooms filled with overachievers, most of whom want to learn for the sake of learning, some respond well to the clarity of a grade.
Javier E

Coronavirus May Add Billions to the Nation's Health Care Bill - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...surance-premium-increases.html

health-care health cost pandemic treatment

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Insurance premiums could spike as much as 40 percent next year, a new analysis warns, as employers and insurers confront the projected tens of billions of dollars in additional costs of treating coronavirus patients.
  • Mr. Lee’s organization estimated the total cost to the commercial insurance market, which represents the coverage currently offered to 170 million workers and individuals through private health plans.
  • Depending on how many people need care, insurers, employers and individuals could face anywhere from $34 billion to $251 billion in additional expenses from the testing and treatment of Covid-1
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  • At the high end, the virus would add 20 percent or more to current costs of roughly $1.2 trillion a year.
  • Insurers and employers are already prodding Congress to consider helping them pay for the crisis by setting up a special reinsurance program that would cover the most expensive medical claims
  • While insurers have enjoyed strong profits in recent years, they say the cost of the pandemic could be overwhelming, especially to employers and workers already struggling to pay for coverage.
  • Employers and others have launched a new group, the Alliance to Fight for Health Care, that includes many of the same parties that worked together to defeat the enactment of the so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost employer plans
  • Mr. Lee warned that insurers are likely to seek rates that are double their additional costs from the virus. If their costs go up 20 percent, Mr. Lee says rates could jump as much as 40 percent in 2021.
  • He thinks his clients in New York, which is being particularly hard hit by the virus, could see additional costs of 4 to 5 percent. In other areas, if there are many fewer cases, costs could be less.
  • Rate increase requests still might be difficult for some states and consumers to swallow. The nation’s largest insurers, which include giant for-profit companies like Anthem, CVS Health and UnitedHealth, reported billions of dollars in profits last year, and analysts say these companies have abundant capital to absorb any losses because of the pandemic
  • Since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, health care inflation has remained in the single digits.
  • Increases in medical costs of 3 to 4 percent “would be manageable by most insurers,” concluded a recent analysts at S&P Global Ratings
  • If costs were to go up by 10 to 12 percent, the analysts say the stress on the companies would be greater, with insurers reporting losses and forced to use their capital reserves to pay claims.
  • But some actuaries are predicting costs are likely to be much lower. One actuary said insurers have told him that they have no plans to raise rates sharply because the do not think the pandemic will change their predictions about ongoing medical expenses once it has run its course.
  • other actuaries are coming up with estimates that are lower because they have different assumptions about how many people might be hospitalized and whether that would be offset by the declines in medical care for other illnesses or surgeries as people stay home and elective procedures are postponed indefinitely
  • “These increased costs could mean that many of the 170 million Americans in the commercial market may lose their coverage and go without needed care as we battle a global health crisis,”
  • Another big unknown is whether people will be able to get treatment for Covid-19 or other illnesses, in spite of needing care.
  • If patients can’t get care, overall costs could be much lower than they would otherwise be,
  • Even then, how much the private sector will pay is unclear, especially if the government starts setting up hospital beds and temporary hospitals in various regions, and supplying staff to treat patients.
  • Another unknown factor is how much it will cost to treat those coronavirus patients who are hospitalized. “Everybody is still guessing what a coronavirus hospitalization stay looks like,”
  • While there are some estimates hovering around $20,000 for a hospital stay based on a typical pneumonia case, his group is estimating that the average could be closer to $72,000 for severe cases
Javier E

Why Americans Are Dying from Despair | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ericans-are-dying-from-despair

despair crisis death rate mortality economic inequality income health-care

shared by Javier E on 01 May 20 - No Cached
  • Outside of wars or pandemics, death rates for large populations across the world have been consistently falling for decades
  • Yet working-age white men and women without college degrees were dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease at such rates that, for three consecutive years, life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole had fallen. “The only precedent is a century ago, from 1915 through 1918, during the First World War and the influenza epidemic that followed it,”
  • Between 1999 and 2017, more than six hundred thousand extra deaths—deaths in excess of the demographically predicted number—occurred just among people aged forty-five to fifty-four.
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  • their explanation begins by dismantling several others.
  • Was the source of the problem America’s all-too-ready supply of prescription opioids?
  • About a million Americans now use heroin daily or near-daily. Many others use illicitly obtained synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
  • As Case and Deaton note, most people who abuse or become addicted to opioids continue to lead functional lives and many eventually escape their dependence
  • The oversupply of opioids did not create the conditions for despair. Instead, it appears, the oversupply fed upon a white working class already adrift.
  • although opioid deaths plateaued, at least temporarily, in 2018, suicides and alcohol-related deaths continue upward.
  • Could deaths of despair be related to the rising incidence of obesity?
  • Case and Deaton report that we’re seeing the same troubling health trends “among the underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese.”
  • Is the problem poverty?
  • Overdose deaths are most common in high-poverty Appalachia and along the low-poverty Eastern Seaboard, in places such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut. Meanwhile, some high-poverty states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, have been less affected. Black and Hispanic populations are poorer but less affected, too.
  • How about income inequality? Case and Deaton have found that patterns of inequality, like patterns of poverty, simply don’t match the patterns of mortality by race or region.
  • A consistently strong economic correlate, by contrast, is the percentage of a local population that is employed
  • In the late nineteen-sixties, Case and Deaton note, all but five per cent of men of prime working age, from twenty-five to fifty-four, had jobs; by 2010, twenty per cent did not.
  • What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.
  • Conservatives tend to offer cultural explanations
  • People are taking the lazy way out of responsibilities, the argument goes, and so they choose alcohol, drugs, and welfare and disability checks over a commitment to hard work, family, and community. And now they are paying the price for their hedonism and decadence—with addiction, emptiness, and suicide.
  • Yet, if the main problem were that a large group of people were withdrawing from the workforce by choice, wages should have risen in parallel.
  • Case and Deaton argue that the problem arises from the cumulative effect of a long economic stagnation and the way we as a nation have dealt with it
  • For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the early two-thousands, it was less than one per cent. This past decade, it remained below 1.5 per cent.
  • Different populations have experienced this slowdown very differently
  • Anti-discrimination measures improved earnings and job prospects for black and Hispanic Americans. Though their earnings still lag behind those of the white working class, life for this generation of people of color is better than it was for the last.
  • Not so for whites without a college education. Among the men, median wages have not only flattened; they have declined since 1979. The work that the less educated can find isn’t as stable: hours are more uncertain, and job duration is shorter
  • Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States.
  • In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees—the majority of the working-age population—have seen themselves become ever less valued in our economy. Their effort and experience provide smaller rewards than before, and they encounter longer periods between employment.
  • The problem isn’t that people are not the way they used to be. It’s that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be
  • Today, about seventy-five per cent of college graduates are married by age forty-five, but only sixty per cent of non-college graduates are
  • Nonmarital childbearing has reached forty per cent among less educated white women.
  • Religious institutions previously played a vital role in connecting people to a community. But the number of Americans who attend religious services has declined markedly over the past half century, falling to just one-third of the general population today.
  • Case and Deaton see a picture of steady economic and social breakdown, amid over-all prosperity.
  • climate—the amount of social and economic instability not only in your life but also in your family and community—matters, too. Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago that despair and then suicide result when people’s material and social circumstances fall below their expectations.
  • why has the steep rise in deaths of despair been so uniquely American
  • The United States has provided unusually casual access to means of death.
  • The availability of opioids has indeed played a role, and the same goes for firearms
  • The U.S. has also embraced automation and globalization with greater alacrity and fewer restrictions than other countries have. Displaced workers here get relatively little in the way of protection and support.
  • And we’ve enabled capital to take a larger share of the economic gains. “Economists long thought that the ratio of wages to profits was an immutable constant, about two to one,” Case and Deaton point out. But since 1970, they find, it has declined significantly.
  • A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly health-care system.
  • The focus of Case and Deaton’s indictment is on the fact that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance.
  • As they show, the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers.
  • According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent.
  • “For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,” Case and Deaton write. “For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.”
  • between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income.
  • this makes American health care itself a prime cause of our rising death rates.
  • we must change the way we pay for health care. Instead of preserving a system that discourages employers from hiring, retaining, and developing workers without bachelor’s degrees, we need to make health-care payments proportional to wages—as with tax-based systems like Medicare.
  • So far, the American approach to the rise in white working-class mortality has been to pour resources into addiction-treatment centers and suicide-prevention programs. Yet the rates of suicide and addiction remain sky-high. It’s as if we’re using pressure dressings on a bullet wound to the chest instead of getting at the source of the bleeding.
  • Case and Deaton want us to recognize that the more widespread response is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. And here culture does play a role.
  • When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you
  • We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest. But that’s exactly the situation, and “Deaths of Despair” shows how the immiseration of the less educated has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, even as the economy has thrived and the stock market has soared.
  • capitalism, having failed America’s less educated workers for decades, must change, as it has in the past. “There have been previous periods when capitalism failed most people, as the Industrial Revolution got under way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and again after the Great Depression,” they write. “But the beast was tamed, not slain.”
  • Today, the battles are over an employer-based system for financing health care, corporate governance that puts shareholders’ interests ahead of workers’, tax plans that benefit capital holders over wage earners.
  • We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal.
mattrenz16

A Year Later, Who Is Back to Work and Who Is Not? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-employment-demographics.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • As a proportion of their employment levels before the pandemic, significantly fewer Black and Hispanic women are working now than any other demographic, according to the latest government data — and women are lagging behind men across race and ethnicity.
  • Hispanic women fell into the deepest hole at the peak of the job losses, going from 12.4 million workers in February 2020, the last month of job gains before the pandemic, to 9.4 million in April — a 24 percent drop.
  • No demographic has returned to prepandemic employment levels, but significant differences remain. There are nearly 10 percent fewer employed Black women than a year ago, but only 5 percent fewer employed white men.
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  • One way to see disparities in employment that existed well before the pandemic is to look at the share who are employed among the working age population in each demographic over time. This measure, known as the employment-population ratio, has long been lower for women and Black men.
  • Workers on the older and younger ends of the spectrum also experienced outsize losses. Younger people, who also tend to be overrepresented in some of the most affected industries like food service, were much more likely to lose work early in the outbreak and are still among the farthest from their prepandemic employment levels. However, they have regained jobs more rapidly than older people, who may be more wary of returning to work and increasing their exposure to the coronavirus.
  • One common feature is that many people who lost jobs earned low wages. According to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group, workers in the lowest quartile of earners lost almost eight million jobs from 2019 to 2020, while the highest wage earners gained jobs.
mattrenz16

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.
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  • 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
Javier E

Opinion | The Meaning of an Awesome Employment Report - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...awesome-employment-report.html

inflation 2023 economic politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Americans, they said, just don’t want to work. Socialism has made them lazy. They’d rather play video games. They don’t have the skills required by a 21st-century economy. High unemployment is “structural” and can’t be solved with monetary and fiscal stimulus.
  • none of them were true
  • the speed and extent of America’s recovery from the pandemic shock have been incredible.
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  • After the 2008 financial crisis, it took 12 years for employment rates to get back to pre-crisis levels. But only three years after Covid struck, employment is fully back for almost every age and demographic group.
  • At this point the employed percentage of adults is at or above early 2020 levels for every age group except those 70 or older.
  • The overall unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent; we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969. Black unemployment is at a record low. There’s good news everywhere you look.
  • So whaddya know: Provide enough job opportunities, and lazy video-game-playing Americans will take those jobs and, apparently, demonstrate enough skill that employers want to keep them.
  • Full employment also turns out to be a powerful force for equality, on multiple dimensions. The gap between Black and white unemployment is now a fifth of what it was when Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” A tight labor market has led to big gains for low-wage workers, sharply reducing overall wage inequality.
  • The big question now is whether the good news on jobs is somehow a mirage, based on an unsustainably hot labor market that will have to cool off drastically to contain inflation.
  • what does the current data say? To some extent the answer is, whatever you want to hear.
  • maybe the important point is that almost every measure of inflationary pressure I’m aware of has improved substantially over the past year, with no increase in the unemployment rate
  • there’s good reason to believe that we can sustain the incredibly good job market we have right now, even while getting inflation under control. And it will be a real tragedy if exaggerated fear of inflation causes the Federal Reserve to push interest rates too high for too long, leading to a gratuitous recession that throws away many of the gains we’ve made.
  • Republicans keep insisting President Biden’s policies have been an economic disaster, and that even the mainstream news media has tended to emphasize inflation — which has been a nasty shock, even though it may be subsiding — rather than job gains.
  • So it does seem worth pointing out that at this point Biden is presiding over the best job market America has seen in a generation — specifically since the boom of the late Clinton years. And that, as Biden himself might (almost) say, is a big something deal.
James Flanagan

In Michigan, A Conservative Governor Takes Careful Aim at Unions | TIME.com - 0 views

swampland.time.com/...or-takes-careful-aim-at-unions

shared by James Flanagan on 17 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • When he ran for governor of Michigan in 2010, Rick Snyder adopted an endearingly dweebish slogan: “One Tough Nerd.” The moniker, which was cooked up by the eccentric Republican adman Fred Davis and still serves as Snyder’s Twitter handle, sought to make a virtue out of the candidate’s colorless persona. In a state where ineffectual leadership in both the public and private sectors has exacerbated a dizzying economic tailspin, Snyder’s C-suite resume helped him win.
  • While fellow Midwestern governors Scott Walker and John Kasich led assaults on collective-bargaining rights in neighboring Wisconsin and Ohio, Snyder carefully slalomed around the issue, calling it “divisive.” And no wonder: Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers and a cradle of organized labor, has an unmatched organized-labor tradition.
  • On Dec. 11, the state passed a pair of sweeping bills designed to cripple unions by barring the requirement that workers pay dues as a condition of employment. The freshman governor signed the controversial bills the evening of Dec. 12, making Michigan the 24th state to adopt so-called “right-to-work” laws.
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  • In 2010, union workers made an average of 28% more per week than non-unionized workers, according to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • The term “right to work,” coined by foes of union influence, is somewhat misleading. It has little to do with whether workers are eligible for employment. Instead, it restricts unions’ ability to require employees to pay union dues if they work for a unionized employer. Unions argue that anyone who benefits from union representation should foot his or her share of the cost, while proponents of right-to-work legislation counter that right-to-work laws mitigate costs for employers, boosting the state’s ability to lure potential business and create jobs.
  • . Across the Rust Belt, unions’ clout has been crumbling — even in Michigan, where a referendum to enshrine collective-bargaining rights in the state’s constitution was soundly defeated in November. Anti-union forces sensed weakness, and the state’s Republican-controlled legislature pushed a package of right-to-work bills.
  • On a trip to a Detroit factory on Monday, Barack Obama told autoworkers that right-to-work was a political tactic masquerading as economics. “What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money,” Obama said.
  • . More than 10,000 people thronged the capital in Lansing on Tuesday, brandishing signs like “Kill the Bill” and “One Term Nerd” and locking arms in a tense standoff with baton-wielding police decked out in riot gear. According to reports, pepper spray and tear gas were deployed against a handful of protesters, some of whom tore down a tent outside the capitol belonging to the Koch-funded conservative organization Americans for Prosperity
  • “I think it’s important to make a distinction with Wisconsin and Ohio,” Snyder told MSNBC on Tuesday. “That was about collective bargaining. That was about the relationship between employers and unions. This has nothing to do with that. Right-to-work has to do with the relationship between unions and workers.” And while the Badger and Buckeye State bills targeting public-sector unions, Michigan’s legislation deals with both.
  • As the backlash builds, Michigan is about to find out how tough their nerd can be.
Javier E

The future of jobs: The onrushing wave | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...e-long-run-employment-not-less

employment technology trends innovation inequality

shared by Javier E on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978
  • In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes’s “Possibilities”, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.
  • A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.
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  • The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.
  • The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change
  • Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.
  • A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free
  • Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms
  • Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.
  • the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.
  • Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.
  • A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice—but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?
  • Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth
  • The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.
  • The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to roll (see chart 3). These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors.
  • though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price,
  • owever, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up
  • As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity—such as houses in desirable places—are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.
  • Adaptation to past waves of progress rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order. But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries will be hard to duplicate.
  • Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious students.
  • Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity
  • However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.
Javier E

Why Trump Now? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-trump-now.html

politics crisis demagogue populism 2016 economic economy

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The economic forces driving this year’s nomination contests have been at work for decades. Why did the dam break now?
  • The share of the gross national product going to labor as opposed to the share going to capital fell from 68.8 percent in 1970 to 60.7 percent by 2013
  • the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 36 percent, from 19.3 million in 1979 to 12.3 million in 2015, while the population increased by 43 percent, from 225 million to 321 million.
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  • The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stoppe
  • Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.
  • that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.
  • After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder.
  • The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated
  • If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.
  • High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”
  • The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.
  • The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.
  • “It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,
  • , TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.
  • The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.
  • On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.
  • A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.
  • . Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.
  • By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”
  • To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.
  • Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.
  • A September 2015 Ispos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.
  • If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.
  • the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.
  • This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.
  • The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.
  • In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.
  • Missing in your narrative were 2 other factors that contributed to American anger and the turn to Mr. Trump. Those two factors are: the group of very wealthy American's who were convened by the Koch brothers to pool their resources to destroy President Obama and the Congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, e.g. Senator Lugar.
  • were suffering from a major contraction and the drying up of credit & jobs and the President unwisely & wrongly appointed the Simpson-Bowles commission to rein in the debt. Remember Harvard's Rogoff & Reinhart who came up with that Debt to GDP ratio? And the rally of our elites & Pete Peterson et al that Deficits were the problem, when the truth, based on history, was just the opposite.
  • The 2nd factor which can also be attributed to the White House as well as Democrats in the Congress who joined Republicans in misdiagnosing the problem as deficits and debt.
jongardner04

Employers 'fight it out' for top graduates - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...education-35322460

education graduates economic jobs college

shared by jongardner04 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • he UK's leading employers are "fighting it out" for a handful of top candidates, as the graduate jobs market continues to improve, a report says.
  • The report by the High Fliers market research company found that about 1,000 graduates turned down job offers at the last minute, leaving employers searching for replacements in 2015.
  • "But as the job market goes from strength to strength, it's clear that our brightest graduates are becoming increasingly choosy about the employers they join."
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  • The number of graduates hired rose 3.3% in 2015 with their starting salary at the UK's leading employers remaining at about £30,000 for the second year running.
Javier E

Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-race-for-american-jobs.html

robot employment jobs economic crisis

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.
  • “The conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it’s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover,” Mr. Acemoglu said.
  • “If you’ve worked in Detroit for 10 years, you don’t have the skills to go into health care,” he said. “The market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The study analyzed the effect of industrial robots in local labor markets in the United States. Robots are to blame for up to 670,000 lost manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007, it concluded, and that number will rise because industrial robots are expected to quadruple.
  • The paper adds to the evidence that automation, more than other factors like trade and offshoring that President Trump campaigned on, has been the bigger long-term threat to blue-collar jobs. The researchers said the findings — “large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages” — remained strong even after controlling for imports, offshoring, software that displaces jobs, worker demographics and the type of industry.
  • Robots affected both men’s and women’s jobs, the researchers found, but the effect on male employment was up to twice as big.
  • The data doesn’t explain why, but Mr. Acemoglu had a guess: Women are more willing than men to take a pay cut to work in a lower-status field.
  • The findings fuel the debate about whether technology will help people do their jobs more efficiently and create new ones, as it has in the past, or eventually displace humans.
  • Mr. Restrepo said the problem might be that the new jobs created by technology are not in the places that are losing jobs, like the Rust Belt. “I still believe there will be jobs in the years to come, though probably not as many as we have today,” he said. “But the data have made me worried about the communities directly exposed to robots
  • The next question is whether the coming wave of technologies — like machine learning, drones and driverless cars — will have similar effects, but on many more people.
ethanshilling

For the Economy, the Present Doesn't Matter. It's All About the Near Future. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...economy-jobs-future.html

US economics pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The economy is at a major inflection point, and the question is whether job creation will accelerate in the months ahead.
  • The new jobs numbers that the Labor Department released Friday morning don’t matter.These numbers can sometimes be unimportant in the sense that any one economic report offers only a partial view of what is going on, and is subject to margins of error and future revisions.
  • One worrisome sign in the new employment numbers: State and local governments appear to be cutting jobs en masse. They cut a total of 83,000 positions, about 69,000 in education.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But the economy is still in a deep hole, with nine million fewer jobs than a year ago, or around 12 million shy of where we would be if pre-pandemic job growth had continued over the last year.
  • In normal times, the total employment gains reported Friday would be a blockbuster number. But continuing to add jobs at that pace would still mean a two-year grind back to pre-pandemic employment levels.
  • The report that 379,000 jobs were added in February and that the unemployment rate edged down to 6.2 percent is good news.
  • Will many of these jobs come back, if schools are able to operate at full capacity by the fall? The Biden pandemic rescue plan before the Senate includes $130 billion to help schools reopen safely, and an additional $350 billion to support state and local government budgets more broadly.
  • Huge job gains were reported in February in some of the sectors most directly affected by the pandemic, specifically an increase of 355,000 in leisure and hospitality jobs, most of it tied to restaurant employment.
  • Things remain murky on the longer-term implications of the crisis. The surge in employment in February was entirely driven by people no longer being on temporary layoff — the number of these temporarily unemployed workers fell by 517,000 people.
  • It is easy to describe the pathway back for jobs at schools and restaurants. But true economic health will mean that those 2.2 million people find their way back into the ranks of the employed as well, and that could take more than just a shot in the arm.
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