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Javier E

The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...cent-are-only-half-the-problem

inequality divergence social class income union

shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Since 1979, the one-percenters have doubled their share of the nation’s collective income from about 10 percent to about 20 percent.
  • And between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2011, the one-percenters saw their average income rise by 11 percent even as the 99-percenters saw theirs fall slightly
  • This dismal litany invites the conclusion that if we would just put a tight enough choke chain on the 1 percent, then we’d solve the problem of income inequality. But alas, that isn’t true, because it wouldn’t address the other half of the story: the rise of the educated class.
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  • There’s also a pleasing simplicity to the causes of the growing gap between the 1 and the 99. There are only two, and both are familiar liberal targets: the rise of a deregulated financial sector and the erosion of accountability in compensating top executives outside finance
  • On those rare occasions when conservatives do bring it up, it’s the skills-based gap that usually draws their attention, because it offers an opportunity to criticize our government-run system of public education and especially teachers’ unions.
  • Liberals resist talking about the skills-based gap because they don’t want to tell the working classes that they’re losing ground because they didn’t study hard enough. Liberals prefer to focus on the 1 percent-based gap.
  • Conceiving of inequality as something caused by the very richest people has obvious political appeal, especially since (by definition) nearly all of us belong to the 99 percent.
  • One reason the left plays down the growing skills-based gap is that it accepts at face value the conservative claim that educational failure is its root cause.
  • both represent a dramatic reversal of economic trends that prevailed in the United States for most of the 20th century. From the 1930s through the 1970s the 1 percent saw its share of national income decline, while the “college premium” either fell or followed no clear up-or-down pattern over time.
  • Since 1979 the income gap between people with college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has grown. Broadly speaking, this is a gap between working-class families in the middle 20 percent (with incomes roughly between $39,000 and $62,000) and affluent-to-rich families (say, the top 10 percent, with incomes exceeding $111,000)
  • Another reform both conservatives and liberals have supported — though at different times — is withholding federal aid from colleges and universities that can’t control tuition increases
  • THERE is also more bipartisan support than you might suppose for restricting some of the Wall Street excesses that enrich the 1 percent.
  • a growing chorus of conservative voices, including the columnist George F. Will, the former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, favor breaking up the big banks.
  • At least some of the tools to restore these more egalitarian trends shouldn’t be divisive ideologically. Liberals and conservatives both recognize the benefits of preschool education,
  • But the decline of labor unions is just as important. At one time union membership was highly effective at reducing or eliminating the wage gap between college and high school graduates. That’s much less true today
  • Only about 7 percent of the private-sector labor force is covered by union contracts, about the same proportion as before the New Deal. Six decades ago it was nearly 40 percent.
  • Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing
  • the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income.
Javier E

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

www.scientificamerican.com/...re-too-low-to-reduce-emissions

carbon prices

shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Carbon prices are spreading throughout the world’s largest economies. The only problem for climate hawks: They’re nowhere near high enough to produce a meaningful reduction in carbon emissions.
  • The analysis identified a gap of 76.5 percent between real climate costs and carbon prices implemented today across 42 OECD and Group of 20 countries. The gap has narrowed by 3 percent over the last three years, the report found
  • “The gulf between today’s carbon prices and the actual cost of emissions to our planet is unacceptable,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said in a statement
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  • “Pricing carbon correctly is a concrete and cost-effective way to slow climate change. We are wasting an opportunity to steer our economics along a low-carbon growth path and losing precious time with every day that passes.”
  • An abundance of carbon credits and exemptions for major emitters has plagued emission-trading systems in Europe and California, making credits cheap and hindering their effectiveness
  • A series of recent developments, though, have provided a glimmer of hope for would-be carbon taxes. The United Kingdom’s adoption of a carbon tax in the power sector produced a 58 percent drop in emissions from 2012 to 2016.
  • The biggest development of all may be in China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, which has taken steps toward its own emissions trading program. China’s move has the potential to narrow the gap between global carbon prices and climate costs to 63 percent in the early 2020s, OECD found.
  • The OECD report compared effective carbon rates—taxes on fossil fuels, carbon taxes and emission-trading credits—against estimated climate costs, which it projected at €30 ($35) per ton of carbon. The result is a carbon pricing gap, the difference between actual carbon rates and climate costs.
  • The organization found that countries with larger carbon pricing gaps tend to have more energy-intensive economies. Russia and China, for instance, have gaps of 100 percent and 90 percent, respectively, OECD found.
  • Less energy-intensive economies, by contrast, have less ground to make up. OECD measured the gap in Spain at 51 percent, Ireland at 42 percent and France at 41 percent
  • The carbon pricing gap in the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, was 75 percent.
kennyn-77

A once-remote patch of rainforest is now packed with migrants trying to reach the U.S. ... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rainforest-darien-gap-migrants

rainforest immigration Darién Gap

shared by kennyn-77 on 19 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • For centuries, jungle-covered mountains, swamps and poisonous snakes scared people away from the Darién Gap, the dense rainforest separating North and South America. It's still the only spot where the Pan-American Highway, that runs from Alaska all the way to the tip of South America, dissolves into mud. But thanks to the large numbers of migrants trying to get to the United States, the Darién Gap is no longer a no man's land.
  • In fact, when NPR first reached the region in September, birds singing and monkeys howling could not be heard. The main sound came from dozens of motorcycles. The passengers sitting on the back were migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, India and African countries. But because they lacked U.S. visas, they had to travel overland, first through South and Central America and then Mexico.
  • The hardest part is crossing the roadless, 60-mile-wide Darién Gap. To cover the first few miles, migrants can pay to ride on the back of motorcycles that navigate muddy trails. But soon the jungle thickens, and they must start walking.
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  • "It's really difficult," says Gegrand Joseph, 44, a Haitian who had hiked across the Darién Gap five years ago, was deported by the Trump administration and is tackling this patch of jungle a second time to get back to the U.S. "But there is no alternative."
  • "It's sad," Villalón says of all the garbage. "You cannot drink water from the river. Two years ago I was drinking water on this same river you know. This is not a pristine jungle anymore."
  • But the wilderness is being slowly whittled away. On the Colombian side of the border, I come across a bulldozer carving a road through the jungle. It's illegal but there are no police in sight. The area is controlled by a drug cartel called the Gulf Clan, which also makes a lot of money off the migrants.
  • The next day, some 700 migrants break camp and hit the jungle trails on foot, leaving behind plastic bottles, empty food tins and dirty diapers. The migrants relieve themselves in the rivers and toss camping gear and clothes into the water.
  • So far this year more than 100,000 migrants have walked across the Darién Gap, more than triple the previous annual record, according to the International Organization for Migration. Many had been working in South America but lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic and figured that, under the Biden administration, they would have a better chance of getting into the U.S.
  • But Claudio Madaune of the Darién Foundation, a Colombian conservation group, says that the pollution caused by the migrants is negligible compared to damage caused by illegal ranchers and gold miners who have moved into the area. He says the worst change is that the Darién has become far more dangerous. Gunmen frequently rob, rape and kill migrants. Government officials from Panama and Colombia have discussed setting up a boat service across the Caribbean to transport migrants between the two countries. That would reduce the risks and help protect the rainforest.
Javier E

The inadequacy of the stories we told about the pandemic - 0 views

messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/...oakv2

race partisan covid infection fatalities research results pandemic culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Increasingly, it feels possible to take stock not just of what happened but also of the inadequacy of some of the stories we told ourselves to make sense of the mess.
  • This week, I want to consider two prominent frameworks about the pandemic that are nevertheless rarely considered alongside each other: disparities in Covid mortality by race and by partisanship.
  • Partisanship was a huge driver of that more significant second-year failure, since Republican resistance to vaccination explains a large share of cumulative American Covid mortality
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  • Black mortality was 65 percent higher and Hispanic mortality 75 percent higher.
  • at least in Ohio and Florida, despite what seemed at the time to be almost unbridgeable divides over things like mask wearing and school closures, social distancing and lockdowns, the excess mortality gap between Republicans and Democrats in the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic was relatively small, with Republican excess mortality only 22 percent higher than the death rate among Democrats.
  • The country clearly stumbled in 2020. And yet before vaccines were widely available, and when we tried to slow the spread of the disease through behavioral measures, the scale of the failure was relatively small compared with what followed in the years after.
  • In 2020, American death rates and excess mortality fell merely at the worse end of its peer countries — above Germany and barely France but below Britain, Italy and Spain, for instance
  • In the vaccine era of the pandemic, American performance has been much worse, with our death rates becoming much more conspicuous and dramatic outliers — enough to make the country by far the worst performing of its peers.
  • Overall — from the beginning of the pandemic until the arrival of Omicron — Republican excess mortality in Ohio and Florida was 76 percent higher than Democratic excess mortality.
  • only 62 percent of Republicans have completed their primary vaccinations, compared with 87 percent of Democrats.
  • income and education tell a similar story: Only 67 percent of Americans with household incomes below $40,000 have completed their primary vaccinations, compared with 85 percent with household incomes above $90,000
  • What does this all mean for the next pandemic fall and winter? Well, thankfully, the racial and ethnic gaps around vaccination have almost entirely closed, which is one major reason the mortality gap has, too: According to Kaiser, 74 percent of Black and Hispanic Americans have been vaccinated, compared with 77 percent of whites
  • The demographic gaps for boosters are slightly larger: 50 percent of white adults have been boosted, according to Kaiser, compared with 43 percent of Black adults and 40 percent of Hispanic adults. (Only 31 percent of Republicans have been boosted.)
  • while the news from Europe isn’t especially reassuring, it would probably take an Omicron-like curveball to deliver a new American peak like those we experienced each of the previous two winters, and there does not seem to be anything like that on the horizon.
  • But according to The Times’s global vaccination tracker, Americans are doing almost exactly as poorly with boosters as we did with the first round of vaccines, not worse. The country ranks 66th globally in the share of population that has completed a primary vaccination course. For a first booster, it ranks 71s
  • One set of answers is implied by the story of vaccination and mortality by race, and the way improvements on one measure changed the trajectory of the other: more first shots and more boosting. This is the central strategy offered by the Biden administration. But the vaccinated share of the country has barely grown in months, and the uptake of next generation bivalent boosters looks, in the early stages, quite abysmal.
  • yet Americans are still dying at an annualized rate above 100,000 — a rate that may well grow as we head deeper into the fall. What are we doing about that?
  • another possible set of responses suggests itself too, one that wouldn’t require a reversal of vaccination trends or a transformation of the pandemic culture war either: an approach to public health infrastructure, both literal and legal, that would reduce spread through background interventions without meaningfully burdening individual Americans at all.
  • in a perverse way the arrival of vaccines seemed to almost retire them from public discussion. They include better ventilation in public buildings, particularly schools
  • Testing could help, too, of course, though culturally it seems to have been dumped into a bucket with masks, as an individual tool and individual burden, rather than one with investments in ventilation improvements, as part of an invisible Covid-mitigating infrastructure
  • Over the last six months, an individual risk approach to Covid has predominated — both at the level of public health guidance and for most individuals navigating the new, quasi-endemic landscape
  • This argument is unhelpful, not just because it is needlessly toxic but also because the terms themselves are inadequate. One of the lessons of that early phase of the pandemic, and especially its racial disparities, is that mitigation is not strictly a matter of individual risk management. Spread matters, too, as do structural factors. We have tools to help both, without returning the country psychologically to the depths of Covid panic.
  • And although the partisan gap grew with the arrival of vaccines, it never grew as large as the racial gap had been in early 2020. In 2021, Republican excess mortality in those two states was at its highest, compared to Democratic levels: 153 percent. At the peak of racial disparity in the pandemic’s first wave, Black Americans were dying more than three times as much as white Americans.
  • structural factors — not only race but class and education, too — appear to loom just as large, complicating any intuitive model of what went wrong here that emphasizes the pandemic culture war above all else.
  • Especially in the initial phases of spread, it can be hard to disentangle the effects of policy and behavioral response from somewhat random drivers like where the virus arrived first, what sorts of places those were and what kinds of people populated them, and even what the weather was like
  • This dynamic changed almost on a dime with the introduction of vaccines, with an enormous gap opening up between Democrats and Republicans in 2021
  • the excess mortality data collected here suggests that however self-destructive red states and Republican individuals seemed to be, in 2020, the ultimate cost of that recklessness was less dramatic.
  • For Americans without college degrees, the number is also 67 percent, compared with 85 percent of college graduates. For uninsured adults under 65, it is just 60 percent
Javier E

No Rich Child Left Behind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...no-rich-child-left-behind

education inequality early learning

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
  • e proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a ba
  • chelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
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  • new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
  • average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s.
  • The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly.
  • the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
  • For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand
  • It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
  • The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decade
  • schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students.
  • That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
  • The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
  • The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
  • the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool
  • one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality
  • High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
  • even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
  • from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period
  • the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents.
  • much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
  • not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
  • the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
  • how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers.
  • improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
  • Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
Javier E

Gap's Fashion-Backward Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-fashion-backward-moment.html

fashion clothing industry trends culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The contrast summed up the state of American retailing. One by one, iconic brands like Gap, J. Crew, American Apparel and Abercrombie & Fitch have reported slumping sales, while chic and cheap foreign fast-fashion brands like H&M, Uniqlo and Zara are opening bustling stores and luring away customers once devoted to a more basic American style.
  • Once the master of casual, supplying Americans with staple khakis, denims and button-down shirts, the company is finding that its once-stable American customer base has splintered. Luxury is booming; at the other end of the market, discount retailers like T. J. Maxx and Burlington Stores are seeing robust gains. Gap, Abercrombie and their peers are stuck in the middle.
  • “Back in the ’80s and ’90s, there wasn’t real access to higher-level fashion,” said Kate Davidson Hudson, co-founder and chief executive of Editorialist, an online fashion magazine. “It was the heyday of business casual, and stores did well selling core staples.”“But now, everybody sees what’s on the runways on social media and on blogs, and everybody’s a critic, and shoppers want it as soon as they see it,” she said. “Brands like Gap just feel very dated.”
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  • Sales at Gap stores open for at least a year, a closely watched figure in the retail industry, have fallen for 13 straight months. The company’s upmarket brand, Banana Republic, has also stumbled, though Gap’s cheaper Old Navy label has done well.
  • At a vibrant, three-story Uniqlo, Dhushyanthy Tharan of Hoboken, N.J., shopping on her 26th birthday for a long-sleeve button-down shirt, said she found the selection to be of higher quality and more stylish than at the Gap. “I love their materials, the cotton and linen, and their style,” she said. “It’s very young.”
jlessner

Women Still Earn a Lot Less Than Men - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-earn-a-lot-less-than-men.html

US politics policy

shared by jlessner on 14 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, the day selected each year by the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of women’s, civil rights and labor groups, to draw attention to how much longer women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year
  • Another measure of the wage gap, computed by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, shows that, in 2014, the ratio of female-to-male weekly earnings was 82.5 percent.
  • The longer the gap persists, the less it can be explained away by factors other than discrimination.
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  • For example, recent research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that men still outearn women at every rung of the income ladder. The higher up the ladder, the bigger the gap. In 2014, women in the 95th percentile of female earners made 79 percent of wages for men at the 95th percentile, while women in the lowest 10th percentile made 91 cents for each $1 earned by their male counterparts.
  • Men even make more than women in traditionally female occupations. Recent research led by the University of California, San Francisco, shows that male registered nurses outearn female registered nurses by an average of $5,100 per year across most specialties and positions — an earnings gap that has not improved over the past 30 years. Other research has shown that male schoolteachers tend to outearn female schoolteachers.
  • In 2010, 2012 and 2014, congressional Republicans blocked consideration of the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill supported by President Obama that would have extended pay-equity rules that apply to federal contractors to the entire American work force, in addition to making needed updates to the Equal Pay Act. Obstructionism has only made the problem worse, and an even more pressing one for the presidential candidates to address.
Javier E

The Education Gap That Explains American Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...575113

education gap politics parties

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • 61 percent of non-college-educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans while just 45 percent of college-educated white voters did so. Meanwhile 53 percent of college-educated white voters cast their votes for Democrats compared with 37 percent of those without a degree
  • Non-college-educated white voters used to solidly belong to Democrats, and college-educated white voters to Republicans. Several events over the past six decades have caused these allegiances to switch, the most recent being the candidacy, election, and presidency of Donald Trump.
  • Last night’s results confirm that the diploma divide is likely here to stay—especially if the GOP maintains its alignment with Trump and the nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments he hangs his hat on. The gap is likely to be one of the most powerful forces shaping American politics for decades to come.
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  • Democratic and Republican Parties looked a lot different in 1952, when the American National Election Studies—surveys of voters conducted before and after presidential elections—were in their infancy. The Republicans, to some extent, were still regarded as the party of Lincoln, even though they had shifted their focus to courting southern white voters, causing black people to leave the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats were the party of a coalition that pushed for social services—the party of the New Deal. There were far fewer college-educated Americans at the time, but the white Americans who did have degrees tended to vote Republican, and those who didn't sided with the Democrats by a significant margin.
  • “The shift in whites without a college degree away from the Democratic Party begins as the Democratic Party becomes identified as the party of civil rights,” starting in the 1960s, Robby P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. Disaffected white southern Democrats, in particular, fled in droves.
  • in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, signaled that the Democrats were becoming the party of progressive racial politics. “Obama’s presidency simplifies the politics of race,” Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, says. “If you were a low-educated white, you were much more likely to know about the partisan differences on race [after Obama] than you were before.”
  • In the 2016 election, 48 percent of college-educated white voters voted for Trump, compared with 66 percent of non-college-educated white voters. A Marist poll in October of this year found that 55 percent of non-college-educated white voters approved of the job Trump was doing, compared with just 39 percent of college-educated white voters.
  • Every year, on its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks Americans whether they “think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?” Fifty percent of Americans say that it’s gotten better in this year’s poll, and 47 percent say that it has gotten worse.
  • for white voters, the answer to that question is split by education level. Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse
  • When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.
  • That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment
  • When researchers control for voter attitudes on race in addition to white voters’ education level, Tesler says, the diploma divide disappears. No other factor, he says, explains the education gap as well—not economic anxiety, ideology, income, or gender.
  • David N. Smith, a professor at the University of Kansas, came to a similar conclusion when he and Eric Hanley took a dive into the 2016 American National Election Survey. They found that demographic data such as education are important predictors of which party someone votes for. But “when you bring the attitudes variables into account as well, what emerges is that attitudes loom even larger than demographics,” he told me.
  • Here’s how he put it: If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level
  • “Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is complete, and the former ‘fringe’ has become so thoroughly intertwined with the ‘establishment’ that the two are virtually indistinguishable.”
  • The growing diploma divide is less a result of non-college-educated white voters becoming Republicans, and more of college-educated white voters finding that they can’t fully support the party anymore. “What's happened since 2016 is that the low-educated whites have kind of plateaued in their support for the Republicans,” Tesler says. “But you've seen this trend increase [of] high-educated whites [moving] towards the Democrats.”
  • Over time, those who supported Ted Cruz, who called Trump a “sniveling coward” during the campaign, and those who supported Marco Rubio, who called him a “con man,” tended to come around to Trump.
  • the voters that stand out, Smith said, are those who initially supported John Kasich. “They, in many instances, agree with Trump on policy issues, but the best data indicates that they are uncomfortable with him personally,” he said. “There are key aspects of his rhetorical style, of his governing style, that they don't like.”
  • Hidden in that gap is a threat to higher education itself. Last year, Pew issued a sobering survey. “Republicans have soured on higher education,” the survey declared, and it threw people into a frenzy.
  • Sixty-seven percent of Republicans, the survey found, had “some” to “little” confidence in colleges as institutions. A number of factors contribute to this distrust, the rising cost of tuition and the perception of a liberal bent at colleges among them. And if one major party believes that higher education is an engine of liberal indoctrination
  • Decades of funding cuts by state governments have already hit the institutions hard. And these cuts, in turn, have driven an increase in tuition costs and more animosity toward higher education. As Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Politico, “The next big Republican culture war will be a war on college.”
Javier E

When the next generation looks racially different from the last, political tensions rise - 0 views

theconversation.com/-political-tensions-rise-90209

generation politics diversity history tension california

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • The racial generation gap is technically measured as the difference between the percent of those 65 or older who are white, minus the percent of those aged 17 and younger who are white. The bigger the gap, the more demographically distinct the generations.
  • the problem is that when seniors have trouble seeing themselves in children and young adults, social cohesion is at risk, as are investments in the future.
  • in a clear sign of retreating from the future, Arizona also made the largest cuts in K-12 state spending per student between 2008 and 2015.
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  • Even when you take all those other factors into account, the larger the racial generation gap, the less the state spends per student.
  • The peak of the racial generation gap occurred in California around 1994 to 1998. During this era, Proposition 187 passed, followed by a series of “racial propositions” that ended affirmative action, banned bilingual education and stepped up the incarceration of young men of color.
  • When the racial generation gap peaked, the damage to the California Dream was deep – and the state is still trying to work its way back from the wreckage.
  • California fell from among the top spending states on education to become one of the stingiest. Our state prison population increased by more than sixfold between 1980 and 2006, twice as fast as in the rest of the country. And we went from being roughly in the middle of the pack in terms of income inequality back in the glory days of the late 1960s to the sixth most unequal state in 2012.
  • Would California have gone through the same turmoil had the generational gap been narrower? It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s also not prudent to wait around for elders to come to their political senses or for the younger generation to age into power. We need a national game plan that can accelerate what the slower pace of demographic change might push along.
  • In my new book, “State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future,” I suggest that the U.S. can draw lessons from California’s political and social shifts.
  • Term limits, for example, opened up opportunities for new politicians of color. Easier voter registration helped lower the barriers for new and young voters. The power to “redistrict” – to draw the lines for state and congressional seats – was taken from a state legislature eager to protect incumbents and given to a citizen commission less invested in the past.
  • However, such structural reforms are only effective if there is a citizenry ready to take advantage of them. To make that happen, a new generation of community-based organizers became more adept at linking together communities, mobilizing voters and promoting winnable policy change.
  • to get there, the nation will need to overcome the tension between what journalist Ron Brownstein has called the “coalition of restoration” – older Trump voters seeking a way back to what they see as American greatness – and a “coalition of transformation” that consists of younger and more diverse constituents.
  • Closing that social distance will be crucial. The California Dream was never just about one person (or one generation) and their route to individual success. It was about the promise of a state that welcomed newcomers, confidently invested in its children and looked forward to its future. That’s a recipe for progress in the Golden State and America alike.
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
lilyrashkind

China faces a nearly $1 trillion funding gap. It will need more debt to fill it. - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...need-more-debt-to-fill-it.html

funding gap

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Chinese government faces a growing shortfall of cash, analysts say, as they predict an increase of debt to fill the gap.The analysts did not share specific figures on how much additional debt might be needed. But they pointed to growing pressure on growth that would require more support from deb
  • BEIJING — The Chinese government faces a growing shortfall of cash, analysts say, as they predict an increase of debt to fill the gap.“The latest wave of Omicron and the widespread lockdowns in place since mid-March have resulted in a sharp contraction in government revenue, including land sales revenue,” Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura, and a team said in a report last week.
  • “Much of the incoming ‘stimulus measures’, be it special government bonds or incremental lending by policy banks, will be merely used to fill this funding gap,” the Nomura analysts said.
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  • “Many cities without Omicron outbreaks also suffered, as their economies are linked to those currently under lockdown,” Zhang said in an email in mid-May. “The economic costs are not limited to a small number of cities, it is a national problem.”
  • Excluding tax cuts and refunds, the Ministry of Finance said local fiscal revenue grew by 5.4% during the first four months of the year from a year ago. Eight of China’s 31 province-level regions saw a drop in fiscal revenue during that time, the ministry said, without naming them.Incomplete data for the period from Wind Information showed the regions of Qinghai, Shandong, Liaoning, Hebei, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan and Tianjin posted year-on-year declines in fiscal revenue for the first four months of the year. Tianjin was the worst with a 27% decline.
  • Even before the latest Covid outbreak, land sales, a significant source of local government revenue, have plunged following Beijing’s crackdown on real estate developers’ high reliance on debt. Local governments are also responsible for implementing tax cuts and refunds that Beijing has announced to support growth.
  • Although financial data isn’t readily available for many Chinese cities, the southern tech hub of Shenzhen released figures showing a 44% year-on-year drop in fiscal revenue in April to 25.53 billion yuan. That followed a 7% year-on-year decline in March to 22.95 billion yuan.
  • Beijing in March already announced an increase in transfer of funds from the central to local governments. When asked in May whether that would be expanded, the Ministry of Finance noted some funding for next year would be transferred ahead of time to help local governments with tax refunds and cuts this year.
  • In late April, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a nationwide push to develop infrastructure ranging from waterways to cloud computing infrastructure. It was not clear at what scale or timeframe the projects would be constructed.
  • “We expect the debt to continue to climb this year as a result of these economic pressures,” Yuan said, noting it remains to be seen how Beijing decides to balance economic growth with debt levels this year.
Javier E

The Great Divorce - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-great-divorce.html

class division polarization inequality social class divergence US culture war

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society.
  • His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big.
  • More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage
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  • Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
  • People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.
  • Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe.
  • In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.
  • there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country).
  • Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.
  • Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties
  • Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.
  • It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.
  • The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.
  • Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.
aleija

U.S. life expectancy: Americans are dying young at alarming rates - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html

health US culture

shared by aleija on 26 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has seen increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people ages 25 to 64, who should be in the prime of their lives. In contrast, other wealthy nations have generally experienced continued progress in extending longevit
  • Although earlier research emphasized rising mortality among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S., the broad trend detailed in this study cuts across gender, racial and ethnic lines. By age group, the highest relative jump in death rates from 2010 to 2017 — 29 percent — has been among people ages 25 to 34.
  • About a third of the estimated 33,000 “excess deaths” that the study says occurred since 2010 were in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana — the first two of which are critical swing states in presidential elections. The state with the biggest percentage rise in death rates among working-age people in this decade — 23.3 percent — is New Hampshire, the first primary state.
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  • “It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.”
  • The opioid epidemic is a major driver of the worrisome numbers, but far from the sole cause. The study found that improvements in life expectancy, largely because of lower rates of infant mortality, began to slow in the 1980s, long before the opioid epidemic became a national tragedy
  • Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones
  • Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”
  • The risk of death from drug overdoses increased 486 percent for midlife women between 1999 and 2017; the risk increased 351 percent for men in that same period. Women also experienced a bigger relative increase in risk of suicide and alcohol-related liver disease.
  • The all-cause death rate — meaning deaths per 100,000 people — rose 6 percent from 2010 to 2017 among working-age people in the United States
  • There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” she said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”
  • . The general trend: Life expectancy improved a great deal for several decades, particularly in the 1970s, then slowed down, leveled off, and finally reversed course after 2014, decreasing three years in a row.
  • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in America today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more
  • Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose much-publicized report in 2015 highlighted the death rates in middle-aged whites, published a paper in 2017 pointing to a widening gap in health associated with levels of education, a trend dating to the 1970s. Case told reporters their research showed a “sea of despair” in the United States among people with only a high school diploma or less. She declined to comment on the new report.
  • “When they get up into their 20s, 30s and 40s, they’re carrying the risk factors of obesity that were acquired when they were children. We didn’t see that in previous generations.”
  • Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population ages 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population ages 2 to 19 is obese.
  • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998 and since then, the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as America’s “health disadvantage.”
  • Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data.
  • The 33,000 excess deaths are an estimate based on the number of all-cause midlife deaths from 2010 to 2017 that would be expected if mortality was unchanged vs. the number of deaths actually recorded by medical examiners.
  • Outside researchers praised the study for knitting together so much research into a sweeping look at U.S. mortality trends.“This report has universal relevance. It has broad implications for all of society,” said Howard Koh, a professor of public health at Harvard University who was not part of the research team.
  • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998, and since then the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as the United States’ “health disadvantage.”
  • For example, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, cigarette companies aggressively marketed to women, and the health effects of that push may not show up for decades.
  • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more. Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population age 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population age 2 to 19 is obese.
clairemann

Why Women Vote for Democratic Presidential Candidates More | Time - 0 views

time.com/...gender-gap-politics

US history Culture election gop

shared by clairemann on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • As the electoral odds facing President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have continued to diverge in national and state polls, there’s at least one area where the divergence has been particularly striking: By early October, one national poll had Biden leading Trump by over 20 points among registered female voters; Trump and Biden were tied among likely male voters
  • Nationally, women in the U.S. have had the vote for 100 years. For the last 40 of those years, they have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in greater numbers than men have.
  • It took 60 years for women to vote in the same proportion as men. In 1980, for the first time since the passage of the 19th Amendment, women voted at the same rate as men. That was also the first time they voted noticeably differently from men.
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  • The party removed support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from its platform that year, after 40 years of relatively consistent support. Further, for the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, there was a clear divide between the candidates on support for abortion rights, as Reagan was on the record supporting a constitutional amendment banning them.
  • What then was driving the gap?
  • Political analysts attributed this loss to the GOP’s continuing failure to win over women voters.
  • In the end, the explanation Hinckley offered was predictable and mundane: women were voting their economic interests.
  • Reagan spent quite a bit of time and energy in 1982 and 1983 trying to appeal to women. He nominated women to his cabinet and put energy into promoting accomplishments like expanded tax credits for childcare. He was not, however, willing to address the issue that his pollsters had identified as driving the gender gap; he continued to cut government benefits.
  • Reagan never really tried to win over Black women, for example; instead, he focused on white homemakers and professionals and tried to persuade those women that his economic policies were in their best interests.
  • At the same time, Democrats have recognized women more broadly as a key element of their coalition. The Democratic platform has continuously paid proportionally more attention to women’s issues such as abortion rights and family leave than the GOP platform.
  • That these were both bills specifically addressing women’s economic interests is unlikely to be an accident. Women drive Democratic victories, and women’s economic experiences drive their votes.
  • If Joe Biden manages to win in November, it is likely to be with the largest gender gap ever recorded. The question that should be on voters’ minds is what legislation women want him to act on first.
Javier E

Inequality Is a Choice - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...inequality-is-a-choice

inequality politics economics

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one?
  • Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America.
  • the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II.
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  • starting around the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, economic globalization accelerated and the gap between nations began to shrink. The period from 1988 to 2008 “might have witnessed the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution,”
  • While the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed — namely, between Asia and the advanced economies of the West — huge gaps remain. Average global incomes, by country, have moved closer together over the last several decades, particularly on the strength of the growth of China and India. But overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. (The Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality, improved by just 1.4 points from 2002 to 2008.)
  • So while nations in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as a whole, might be catching up with the West, the poor everywhere are left behind, even in places like China where they’ve benefited somewhat from rising living standards.
  • income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark.
  • With a few exceptions — France, Japan, Spain — the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.
  • Over these same years, countries like Chile, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and Hungary managed to reduce (in some cases very high) income inequality significantly, suggesting that inequality is a product of political and not merely macroeconomic forces.
  • Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.
  • Excessive financialization — which helps explain Britain’s dubious status as the second-most-unequal country, after the United States, among the world’s most advanced economies — also helps explain the soaring inequality
  • Mobile capital has demanded that workers make wage concessions and governments make tax concessions. The result is a race to the bottom
  • None of this is inevitable. Some countries have made the choice to create more equitable economies: South Korea, where a half-century ago just one in 10 people attained a college degree, today has one of the world’s highest university completion rates.
katyshannon

The Empathy Gap: Why Have the Paris Attacks Gotten More Attention Than the Beirut Bombi... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...416121

empathy gap paris attacks attention beirut bombing media the atlantic politics culture crisis

shared by katyshannon on 18 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.
  • Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.
  • There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.
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  • Closely related is a divergence in expectations. In January, Matt Schiavenza argued perceptively in The Atlantic that one striking difference between the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and a roughly contemporary suicide bombing by a 10-year-old in Nigeria was that France is not a country with a failing government or chronic conflict. As a result, attacks there are more shocking.
  • Many Americans hear “Paris” and think of the Eiffel Tower; they hear “Beirut” and immediately associate it with war. Yet that’s an outdated impression, as
  • Beirut, in fact, was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. And while that name is no longer in common usage, there are still similarities between the cities. In the centers, prosperous neighborhoods offer fine dining and glamorous shopping. Farther out, less wealthy residents—many of them immigrants or children of immigrants—live in working-class districts. Paris’s suburban districts, known as banlieues, are heavily populated by Muslim immigrants.
  • Nor is Paris quite as calm as Americans might imagine. For example: Riots of considerable size are roughly a yearly event, especially in the banlieues; in 2005, during some of the largest riots in recent memory, three people were killed in violence triggered by police chasing three boys, but clearly emblematic of deeper tensions. This may not be the Paris that many Americans think of, but it is Paris just the same. (Both Paris and Beirut even suffered serious garbage-collection strikes this year.)
  • Or should the empathy gap be attributed to an American and European press that focuses too heavily on attacks in the “West”? It’s far easier to get reporters to Paris than, say, Nairobi, though the critique is unfair to the brave reporters who report from dangerous parts of the globe year-round, not just when violence erupts. It’s a good bet that if American news organizations had devoted every resource that they dedicated to the Paris attacks to the bloodshed in Beirut instead, readers, watchers, and listeners wouldn’t have paid nearly the same amount of attention.
  • In an article for The Atlantic last year, Jacoba Urist reported on the findings of a study of natural disasters around the world, which found that the level of American media attention correlated with geographic proximity to the U.S. and the number of American tourists who had visited the country in question. (Urist noted that a 1976 Guatemalan earthquake with 4,000 fatalities accrued a third of the media coverage of an Italian earthquake with 1,000 deaths.) And as Faine Greenwood suggested after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, journalists and their audience alike suffer from a novelty bias. If it isn’t new—a new attack, a new place—it won’t garner the same buzz.
  • Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the only reason there was no safety check-in for Beirut was that Facebook decided only after the Paris attack to deploy the feature for non-natural disasters. That aside, it makes sense that Facebook would move faster on Paris. After all, there are twice as many people in the Paris urban area as there are in all of Lebanon. Even assuming 100-percent Facebook penetration in Lebanon (not far off, probably), there are simply more Facebook users in Paris for the company to respond to.
runlai_jiang

France labour: Firms to be fined over gender pay gap - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-43320041

gender france

shared by runlai_jiang on 08 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • French companies caught discriminating against women over pay will be given three years to close the gap or face fines under new labour proposals.
  • Larger firms - those employing at least 250 staff - would get the new software next year while firms employing between 50 and 249 staff would be affected from 2020.
  • Across the 28 EU member states, the average "unexplained" gender pay gap is a little higher than France's at 11.5%, according to Eurostat figures.
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  • Neighbouring Belgium has a gap of just 2.5% whereas for women in Lithuania, it is a staggering 24.2%.
Javier E

Opinion | The Coming G.O.P. Apocalypse - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-generation-gap.html

gop youth Generation Z millennials differences pluralism diversity

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • older Democrats prefer a more moderate candidate who they think can win. Younger Democrats prefer a more progressive candidate who they think can bring systemic change.
  • The generation gap is even more powerful when it comes to Republicans. To put it bluntly, young adults hate them.
  • The difference is ideological. According to Pew, 57 percent of millennials call themselves consistently liberal or mostly liberal. Only 12 percent call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.
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  • today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away.
  • Unlike the Silent Generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day. Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is
  • Young voters approve of these trends. Seventy-nine percent of millennials think immigration is good for America. Sixty-one percent think racial diversity is good for America.
  • They have constructed an ethos that is mostly about dealing with difference
  • They are much less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world.
  • Matthew Continetti recently identified the key blocs on the new right in an essay in The Washington Free Beacon. These included the Jacksonians (pugilistic populists), the Paleos (Tucker Carlson-style economic nationalists), the Post-Liberals (people who oppose pluralism and seek a return to pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy). To most young adults, these tendencies will look like cloud cuckooland.
  • There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down
  • A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed
  • My mentor William F. Buckley vowed to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over.
Javier E

Can a 'No Excuses' Charter Teach Students to Think for Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-think-for-themselves.html

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.
  • Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?
  • “There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”
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  • “One said, ‘In college you have to teach yourself more than half the content on your own,’” Ms. Toll said. That is very different from what is required in high school, she said, “and that sort of led to the whole concept of self-directed learning.”
  • For much of the day, each classroom is split in two, with one teacher working more traditionally with half of the students while a second teacher supervises students wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working on their own on laptops.
  • Mr. Cuban said he was particularly impressed with the way that Summit schools asked students to set goals for themselves.
  • But he added that he thought the impact of online teaching tools depended on how they were implemented and that the ultimate test, for both Summit and for Achievement First, would be what happens to college graduation rates.
  • the team came to believe that Achievement First students were not sufficiently engaged in school. The expeditions, also borrowed from Summit, are intended to spark passions and inspire long-term ambitions.
  • Achievement First’s Greenfield model also emphasizes setting goals. Twice a week students meet with a teacher, referred to as a “goal coach,” to go over their progress in different areas and set goals for the week.
  • Twice a week, students participate in what the network calls “circles” — a structure borrowed from the social-emotional curriculum of another charter network, Valor Collegiate Academies, in Nashville.
  • Mr. Samouha said that one of the surprising discoveries in his team’s interviews with alumni who had dropped out of college was that, in some cases, their parents had actually encouraged them to drop out, because they didn’t like seeing them struggle and didn’t know that such difficulties were normal and surmountable. He said the Greenfield team traced that back to the network having not made the parents full partners in their children’s schooling.
  • So in the Greenfield model, parent-teacher conferences are student-led, and attended by the members of a student’s “dream team,” which includes parents or other caregivers, as well as other mentors, like older siblings, pastors, coaches or family friends.
  • “We’re not going to solve this through a weekly parent seminar on challenges your child will face in college,” Mr. Samouha said. “We’re going to solve it by literally building an experience where parents are at the table with teachers and students.”
  • The network’s ultimate goal is to raise its college completion rate to 75 percent, and it says among its more recent classes about half of graduates are on track to finish college.
Javier E

Black families pay significantly higher property taxes - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...black-property-tax

Black Lives Matter racial disparity inequality white privilege

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • State by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, black families pay 13 percent more in property taxes each year than a white family would in the same situation, a massive new data analysis shows.
  • Black-owned homes are consistently assessed at higher values, relative to their actual sale price, than white homes
  • To expose the structural and historical factors behind these discriminatory property tax assessments, the economists analyzed more than a decade of tax assessment and sales data for 118 million homes throughout the country.
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  • In almost every state, property tax assessments were higher in areas with more black and Hispanic residents
  • The gap between white families and minority households remains large — 10 percent — when you combine data for Hispanic and black families
  • “We’ve always considered that in addition to paying your regular tax, there was a black tax that goes along with it,”
  • “It’s almost like it’s in the soil,” he said. “It stretches all across the board. It’s not just real estate. It’s not just housing. It’s not just food deserts. It’s not just racism on the street. It’s not just that you can’t get a cab at night. It’s everything.”
  • “The structure of the property tax system operates to disadvantage black Americans,” she said. “That’s how structural racism is. It’s built into the system. The property tax system itself discriminates against black Americans.”
  • One in five black households have reported missing a mortgage payment since mid-March, compared with about 1 in 20 white ones
  • Facing the accumulated disadvantages of centuries of repression and systemic racism, black Americans are likely to earn less than similar white workers in lower-paying service jobs, a dynamic that makes it more difficult to buy a home. Now, by hitting those jobs first and hardest, the coronavirus pandemic has made a bad situation worse
  • “During the Jim Crow era, local white officials routinely manipulated property tax assessments to overburden and punish black populations and as a hidden tax break to landowning white gentry,”
  • white officials going to extreme lengths to hike black taxes. In one such case in 1932, a black North Carolina resident was taxed for the value of two stray dogs that had been seen on her property.
  • Many county assessors intentionally overvalued black properties, sometimes in direct retaliation for black political action
  • As early as 1901, W.E.B. Du Bois showed that because of their unequal tax burden, black people paid more in taxes than they received in public education funds,
  • The fiction that “black people take services but they don’t pay taxes” remains widespread,
  • The values of black-owned homes tend to grow more slowly than values of white-owned ones. The white people who make up the vast majority of home buyers tend to avoid black neighborhoods, which cuts black sellers off from many potential buyers.
  • Given that difference in price appreciation, if an assessor assumes a black-owned home gains value as quickly as a white-owned home, the assessed value of the black-owned home will quickly outstrip its market value.
  • Nearby white families benefit from the opposite trend: Their homes increase in value more rapidly than their assessments, giving them an ever-growing tax break.
  • the appeals process illustrates how much of the property tax system functions in a way that penalizes black wealth, even as it appears neutral on its face.
  • While neighborhood and race are the biggest drivers of the property tax gap, the economists found others
  • As part of their study, the economists reviewed 3.4 million property tax appeals from Chicago and surrounding Cook County and found black homeowners were significantly less likely to appeal their property tax assessments. When they did appeal, black homeowners were less likely to win. And when they won, they earned smaller assessment reductions.
  • “White people feel more comfortable working within the system that was set up to make them succeed,”
  • “It makes sense that a black family who has been disenfranchised from these systems wouldn’t challenge it.” It is also difficult to work within the system for Latinos, many of whom do not speak English as a first language, she added.
  • was not taught about appealing property taxes or any of the other small strategies white homeowners have used to accumulate generational wealth.
  • “They feel their property taxes were being used to push them out of their places, especially when communities started gentrifying,” Avenancio-León said. It helped him see how property taxation can be used as a means of social engineering.
  • the duo, then working on doctorate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, combined 118 million real estate transactions and assessments from 2005 to 2016 with maps of more than 75,000 local taxing entities — such as counties, school districts, airport authorities and utility districts.
  • They used the maps to sort homes into areas that faced the same property tax burdens, identified the races of homeowners using federal mortgage data, and looked at every time a dwelling was assessed and then sold in the same year. That allowed them to compare a home’s assessed value and its market value, alongside the homeowner’s race and ethnicity.
  • The property tax gaps are worst for low earners, but even the highest-earning black Americans pay more on average in property taxes than similarly well-off white peers living nearby.
  • Whether or not these gaps were caused by explicit racism, Brown said, “you should be just as outraged that this is going on, and we should find a way to fix it.”
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