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hannahcarter11

Opinion | A Divided America Is a National Security Threat - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-national-security.html

opinion america national security politics us trump policy

shared by hannahcarter11 on 23 Sep 20 - No Cached
    • hannahcarter11
      hannahcarter11 on 23 Sep 20
       
      It is absolutely remarkable that Climate Change is missing from this list. This is not a political issue. If we can't unite across the aisle to fight this, there will be nothing to fight for in just a few years.
  • 75 percent of Democrats deem it a critical concern
  • Climate change does not even rank in the top seven for either Republicans or independents
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  • China is conspicuously absent from Democrats’ top seven, notwithstanding Beijing’s increasing predations in the economic
  • Independents, not surprisingly, occupy the center, placing Covid-19 first and China fourth.
  • independents identify domestic political polarization as a top threat, second only to the pandemic.
  • Political polarization is a “force multiplier” that worsens other threats and cripples our ability to combat them.
  • our polarization prevents us from effectively confronting vital challenges, from the pandemic and its economic consequences to climate change; from the rise of white supremacist groups, which account for the bulk of domestic terrorism, to reforming our immigration system.
  • Whether reprising discredited eugenics theories of white racial superiority, stoking fears of “low income” people invading white suburbs, demanding “patriotic education” in public schools that whitewashes slavery and institutionalized racism, falsely declaring mail-in voting corrupt or expressing contempt for “blue state” America, Mr. Trump seeks to perpetuate himself in power at great cost to our national cohesion.
  • Mr. Trump and his party are happy to ignite the ire of many Americans, a majority of whom oppose this brazenly hypocritical and illegitimate move.
  • national security threats are best understood as anything that can kill or severely harm large numbers of Americans, devastate our economy or upend our way of life.
  • Americans rank the top seven critical threats to U.S. vital interests as: 1) the Covid-19 pandemic; 2) domestic violent extremism; 3) China; 4) global economic downturn; 5) political polarization; 6) international terrorism; 7) foreign interference in U.S. elections. Each is properly conceived as a national security threat, and at this extraordinary time, we are contending with almost all of them simultaneously.
  • threat perceptions vary significantly, depending on political party affiliation.
martinelligi

Obama delivers a blistering rebuke of Trump in his return to the campaign trail - CNNPo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

obama trump politics Election

shared by martinelligi on 22 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)Former President Barack Obama delivered an often-incredulous and blistering account of his successor's first four years in office on Wednesday in Philadelphia, making his most direct attacks on President Donald Trump to date both on substance and on a personal level.
  • "I never thought Donald Trump would embrace my vision or continue my polices, but I did hope for the sake of the country, that he might show some interest in taking the job seriously," Obama said. "But it hasn't happened. He hasn't showed any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends."
  • Obama, after largely sitting out the Democratic primary, has steadily ramped up his anti-Trump rhetoric, after years of trying to hue to a longstanding tradition that former presidents avoid attacking their successors. Trump, however, changed that calculation and Obama has ramped up his critiques of the President.
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  • The speech also showed Obama is closely watching the day-to-day news about Trump, including a Tuesday report that the President maintains a Chinese bank account.
  • "The pandemic would've been tough for any president," Obama said. "But the degree of incompetence and misinformation, the number of people who might not had died had we just done the basics, the degree to which it has impacted low income communities so disproportionally, that's something that I'm not just confident that it can be fixed, there's proof."
  • "We've got to turn out like never before. We cannot leave any doubt in this election," Obama said, recalling the final days of the 2016 campaign. "A whole bunch of people stayed at home and got lazy and complacent. Not this time. Not in this election."
Javier E

The Cascading Complexity Of Diversity - The Weekly Dish - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...cading-complexity-of-diversity

violence silence gop future conservatism equity demographics anti-racism goals

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • the News Guild of New York — the union that represents 1200 New York Times employees — recently set out its goals for the newspaper, especially with respect to its employees of color. Money quote: “Our workforce should reflect our home. The Times should set a goal to have its workforce demographics reflect the make-up of the city — 24 percent Black, and over 50 percent people of color — by 2025.”
  • what I want to focus on is the core test the Guild uses to judge whether the Times is itself a racist institution. This is what I’ll call the Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?
  • systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.
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  • The appeal of this argument is its simplicity. You can tell if a place is enabling systemic racism merely by counting the people of color in it; and you can tell if a place isn’t by the same rubric. The drawback, of course, is that the world isn’t nearly as simple
  • On some measures, the NYT is already a mirror of NYC. Its staff is basically 50 - 50 on sex (with women a slight majority of all staff on the business side, and slight minority in editorial). And it’s 15 percent Asian on the business side, 10 percent in editorial, compared with 13.9 percent of NYC’s population. 
  • But its black percentage of staff — 10 percent in business, 9 percent in editorial — needs more than doubling to reflect demographics. Its Hispanic/Latino staff amount to only 8 percent in business and 5 percent in editorial, compared with 29 percent of New York City’s demographics, the worst discrepancy for any group
  • notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing.
  • We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean
  • Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be
  • Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews
  • 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic.
  • Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.
  • It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx.
  • My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself
  • Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations
  • It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented? 
  • that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity?
  • take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up? 
  • The more you think about it, the more absurdly utopian the Kendi project turns out to be. That’s because its core assumption is that any demographic discrepancies between a profession or institution and its locale are entirely a function of oppression.
  • That’s how Kendi explains racial inequality in America, and specifically denies any alternative explanation.
  • So how is it that a white supremacist country has whites earning considerably less on average than Asian-Americans? How does Kendi explain the fact that the most successful minority group in America are Indian-Americans — with a median income nearly twice that of the national median?
  • Here’s a partial list of the national origins of US citizens whose median earnings are higher than that of white people in America: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Armenian, Hmong, Vietnamese.
  • But it is absurd to argue that racism is the sole reason for every racial difference in outcome in the extraordinarily diverse and constantly shifting racial demographics of New York City or the US
  • It’s true, of course, that historical injustices have deeply hurt African-Americans in particular in hobbling opportunity, which is why African-Americans who are descendants of slaves should be treated as an entirely separate case from all other racial categories. No other group has experienced anything like the toll of slavery, segregation and brutality that African-Americans have. This discrimination was enforced by the state and so the state has an obligation to make things right. 
  • You can argue that these groups are immigrants and self-selecting for those with higher IQs, education, motivation, and drive. It’s true. But notice that this argument cannot be deployed under the Kendi test: any inequality is a result of racism, remember?
  • In fact, to reduce all this complexity to a quick, crude check of race and sex to identify your fellow American is a kind of new racism itself.
  • It has taken off because we find it so easy to slip back into crude generalizations.
  • for all those reasons, attempting to categorize people in the crudest racial terms, and social engineering them into a just society where every institution looks like every other one, is such a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s a brutal, toxic, racist template being imposed on a dazzling varied and constantly shifting country.
  • this explicit reintroduction of crude racism under the guise of antiracism is already happening. How many institutions will it tear apart, and how much racial resentment will it foment, before it’s done? 
  • this cannot mean a return to the status quo ante. That would ignore the lessons of the 21st century — that neoconservatism’s desire to rule the world is a fantasy, and that zombie Reagonomics has been rendered irrelevant by its own success and unintended failures
  • What the right needs to do, quite simply, is to seize the mantle of cultural conservatism while moving sharply left on economics.
  • Here’s the gist of a platform I think could work. The GOP should drop the tax cut fixation, raise taxes on the wealthy, and experiment with UBI
  • It needs a workable healthcare policy which can insure everyone in the country, on Obamacare private sector lines. (Yes, get the fuck over Obamacare. It’s the most conservative way to achieve universal access to healthcare we have.
  • It has to promote an agenda of lower immigration as a boon to both successful racial integration and to raising working class wages.
  • It needs finally to acknowledge the reality of climate change and join the debate about how, rather than whether, to tackle it.
  • It has to figure out a China policy that is both protective of some US industries and firm on human rights.
  • It needs to protect religious freedom against the incursions of the cultural left.
  • And it needs to become a place where normie culture can live and thrive, where acknowledgment of America’s past failures doesn’t exclude pride in America’s great successes, and where the English language can still be plainly used.
  • No big need to change on judges (except finding qualified ones); and no reason either to lurch back to worrying about deficits in the current low-inflation environment.
  • I believe this right-of-center pragmatism has a great future. It was the core message behind the British Tories’ remarkable success in the 2019 election
  • The trouble, of course, is that GOP elites would have a hell of a time achieving this set of policies with its current membership. Damon Linker has a terrific piece about the problem of Republican voters most of whom “remain undaunted in their conviction that politics is primarily about the venting of grievances and the trolling of opponents. The dumber and angrier and more shameless, the better.”
  • I see no reason why someone else couldn’t shift it yet again — not back to pre-Trump but forward to a new fusion of nationalist realism, populist economics, and cultural conservatism. By cultural conservatism I don’t mean another round of the culture wars — but a defense of pride in one’s country, respect for tradition, and social stability. There is also, I suspect, a suppressed but real desire for the normality and calmness that Trump has eviscerated.
  • What I was trying to argue is that the roots of critical theory are fundamentally atheist, are very much concerned with this world alone, and have no place for mercy or redemption or the individual soul.
  • Christians who think they can simply adopt both are being somewhat naive. And yes, I feel the same way about “liberation theology” as well, however sympathetic the Pope now is.
  • It seems to me the logical outcome of a broad application of critical theory will be a wider revival of white supremacy. Where there’s no possibility of redemption, resistance becomes inevitable.
brookegoodman

Soviet Union: Stalin, Cold War & Collapse | HISTORY - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...history-of-the-soviet-union

politics culture crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface, before its fall and ultimate dissolution in 1991. The United Socialist Soviet Republic, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
  • A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.
  • Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.
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  • Between 1928 and 1940, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated.
  • Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.
  • The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.
  • The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
  • At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.
  • On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.
  • Gorbachev’s glasnost plan called for political openness. It addressed personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated remaining traces of Stalinist repression, such as the banning of books (like Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning “Dr. Zhivago”) and the much-loathed secret police (though the KGB wouldn’t fully dissolve until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991). Newspapers could criticize the government, and parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
  • During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.
  • An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.
Javier E

239 Experts With 1 Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-coronavirus-is-airborne.html

Covid-19 research transmission

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.
  • If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially distant settings.
  • Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.
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  • Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters.
  • in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations
  • Whether carried aloft by large droplets that zoom through the air after a sneeze, or by much smaller exhaled droplets that may glide the length of a room, these experts said, the coronavirus is borne through air and can infect people when inhaled
  • But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.
  • “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In early April, a group of 36 experts on air quality and aerosols urged the W.H.O. to consider the growing evidence on airborne transmission of the coronavirus. The agency responded promptly, calling Lidia Morawska, the group’s leader and a longtime W.H.O. consultant, to arrange a meeting.
  • But the discussion was dominated by a few experts who are staunch supporters of handwashing and felt it must be emphasized over aerosols, according to some participants, and the committee’s advice remained unchanged.
  • Dr. Morawska and others pointed to several incidents that indicate airborne transmission of the virus, particularly in poorly ventilated and crowded indoor spaces. They said the W.H.O. was making an artificial distinction between tiny aerosols and larger droplets, even though infected people produce both.
  • We’ve known since 1946 that coughing and talking generate aerosols,
  • Scientists have not been able to grow the coronavirus from aerosols in the lab.
  • Most of the samples in those experiments have come from hospital rooms with good air flow that would dilute viral levels.
  • In most buildings, she said, “the air-exchange rate is usually much lower, allowing virus to accumulate in the air and pose a greater risk.”
  • The W.H.O. also is relying on a dated definition of airborne transmission, Dr. Marr said. The agency believes an airborne pathogen, like the measles virus, has to be highly infectious and to travel long distances.
  • Dr. Marr and others said the coronavirus seemed to be most infectious when people were in prolonged contact at close range, especially indoors, and even more so in superspreader events — exactly what scientists would expect from aerosol transmission.
  • Experts all agree that the coronavirus does not behave that way.
  • “We have this notion that airborne transmission means droplets hanging in the air capable of infecting you many hours later, drifting down streets, through letter boxes and finding their way into homes everywhere,”
  • The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.
  • Many experts said the W.H.O. should embrace what some called a “precautionary principle” and others called “needs and values” — the idea that even without definitive evidence, the agency should assume the worst of the virus, apply common sense and recommend the best protection possible.
  • “There is no incontrovertible proof that SARS-CoV-2 travels or is transmitted significantly by aerosols, but there is absolutely no evidence that it’s not,
  • So at the moment we have to make a decision in the face of uncertainty, and my goodness, it’s going to be a disastrous decision if we get it wrong,” she said. “So why not just mask up for a few weeks, just in case?”
  • he agency also must consider the needs of all its member nations, including those with limited resources, and make sure its recommendations are tempered by “availability, feasibility, compliance, resource implications,” she said.
  • if the W.H.O. were to push for rigorous control measures in the absence of proof, hospitals in low- and middle-income countries may be forced to divert scarce resources from other crucial programs.
  • That’s the balance that an organization like the W.H.O. has to achieve,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘We’ve got to follow the precautionary principle,’ and ignore the opportunity costs of that.”
  • In interviews, other scientists criticized this view as paternalistic. “‘We’re not going to say what we really think, because we think you can’t deal with it?’ I don’t think that’s right,”
  • Even cloth masks, if worn by everyone, can significantly reduce transmission, and the W.H.O. should say so clearly, he added.
  • The W.H.O. tends to describe “an absence of evidence as evidence of absence,” Dr. Aldis added. In April, for example, the W.H.O. said, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
  • The statement was intended to indicate uncertainty, but the phrasing stoked unease among the public and earned rebukes from several experts and journalists. The W.H.O. later walked back its comments.
  • In a less public instance, the W.H.O. said there was “no evidence to suggest” that people with H.I.V. were at increased risk from the coronavirus. After Joseph Amon, the director of global health at Drexel University in Philadelphia who has sat on many agency committees, pointed out that the phrasing was misleading, the W.H.O. changed it to say the level of risk was “unknown.”
  • But W.H.O. staff and some members said the critics did not give its committees enough credit.“Those that may have been frustrated may not be cognizant of how W.H.O. expert committees work, and they work slowly and deliberately,”
katherineharron

Opinion: Whoever wins in November is going to have to solve the Covid-19 crisis - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

election

shared by katherineharron on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Despite the deep divisions ravaging our country ahead of the presidential elections, many Americans are looking for answers to a common threat -- the coronavirus. As the daily number of cases and deaths have risen, we remain in the throes of a pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 of our fellow citizens and torpedoed our economy. Indeed, the US is averaging more than 68,000 new cases a day.
  • the next president will confront a dual challenge: managing the current pandemic and ensuring that the country and the world are better prepared when the next plague strikes -- as it inevitably will.
  • Nothing has undercut the US response to Covid-19 more than the failure to develop -- to this day -- a comprehensive nationwide system of testing and tracing that allows public health authorities to rapidly identify infected individuals and their contacts in order to isolate the sick from healthy populations.
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  • It is past time for the nation to make the investments we need to prevent, detect and respond quickly to emerging infectious diseases, like the coronavirus, before they sicken Americans and force catastrophic economic shutdowns.
  • The pandemic has taken a grievous toll on the elderly and nursing home residents specifically. It has also hit essential workers hard, and Black, Latino, Native and low-income Americans suffer disproportionately. As of the end of September, according to the Atlantic, Black Americans have died from Covid-19 at 2.3 times the rate of White Americans, comprising 21% of all US deaths from the disease
  • The success of public health measures like contact tracing, mask-wearing, and social distancing depends on individuals and communities trusting and adhering to advice from medical professionals and scientists, sometimes delivered by elected and other officials
  • That public trust must be earned and sustained.
  • Elected US officials, including the President, often have fallen short as communicators in this pandemic.
  • authorities are too often flying blind, uncertain of the trajectory of the disease, slow to identify hot spots and unable to stop the spread of the virus through targeted measures that do not require shutting down entire communities and economies.
  • US government authorities at all levels should target public health investments to increase the resilience of these communities, including universal paid sick leave in declared pandemics, accessible and free testing, and workplace protections and personal protective equipment for essential workers. Social justice and equity in our existing health care system is not just a moral mandate -- it is a matter of basic pandemic preparedness.
  • The smarter choice is to reform and strengthen the WHO as an essential cornerstone of global pandemic preparedness
  • The coronavirus demonstrates that an international framework for pandemic detection and response that relies so heavily on the transparency, judgment and discretion of individual national governments leaves too many opportunities for failure.
  • Alerts from that network should, in turn, notify national public health agencies and the WHO -- and trigger an international response.
  • Finally, the next president must resist the siren song of vaccine nationalism
  • So far, the US has chosen not to join COVAX, a groundbreaking consortium of more than 150 countries created not only to develop a vaccine but to ensure that when one emerges it is shared equitably, rather than hoarded by individual countries. We hope that the next president -- whoever he may be -- will reconsider this decision.
  • When it comes to pandemics, we all sink or swim together,
katherineharron

Trump '60 Minutes' interview: President makes at least 16 false or misleading claims - ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 26 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump continued his dishonesty blitz in an interview with Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes."
  • Trump claimed of Whitmer, "They're not liking her so much cause she's got everybody locked down."
  • Trump claimed that coronavirus cases are rising simply "because we're doing so much testing.""If we didn't do testing, cases would be way down," he added in the extended footage.
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  • he repeatedly claims we have "turned the corner" on the pandemic and that it is "disappearing." Trump responded, "That's right, we have turned the corner."
  • Stahl said, "You called Dr. Fauci and other health officials idiots." Trump responded, "Where did I call him an idiot?"
  • Stahl told Trump that she couldn't believe that, after so many people who attended his White House event for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett in September got sick with the coronavirus, Trump still doesn't strongly encourage his rally attendees to wear masks.
  • Trump repeatedly denied that he had endorsed the idea of locking up Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
  • "When did I say lock her up? When did I say lock up the governor? I never said lock up the governor." After some back-and-forth with Stahl, which aired in the televised version, he said, "Lesley, that's such a vicious thing you just said. I didn't say lock up the governor of Michigan. I would never say that. Why would I say that?"
  • Trump promised, as he has in the past, that he will introduce a great health care plan to replace Obamacare, which he is trying to get the courts to invalidate. When Stahl asked why we haven't seen this plan, Trump said in the extended footage, "You have seen it. I've been putting out pieces all over the place."
  • We counted at least 16 false or misleading claims in the extended footage Trump posted, 10 of them pandemic-related.
  • Trump boasted about what he described as record job creation of 11.4 million jobs in the last five months.
  • Defending his handling of the pandemic, Trump, in the extended footage, repeated his false claim that "2.2 million people were supposed to die."
  • In the extended footage, Trump again said of his travel restrictions on China and Europe: "I closed it very early from China, heavily infected, and even from Europe, heavily infected."
  • Trump claimed in the extended footage that, under a Biden administration, "180 million people will lose their health care" from private insurers.
  • Trump boasted in the extended footage about how he "terminated" Obamacare's individual mandate, saying that this "actually makes Obamacare not Obamacare."
  • In the extended footage, Trump also accused the Democratic governors of Pennsylvania and North Carolina of imposing a lockdown on their residents.
  • Trump claimed in the extended footage, "I'm saving suburbia. He's gonna destroy suburbia. He's got a regulation, which I terminated, that he would put back, and even worse, that will destroy -- that will bring low-income housing projects into suburbia."
  • Stahl told Trump, "You said the other day to suburban women, 'Will you please like me? Please?" She used a pleading tone of voice in repeating Trump's comment.Trump responded, "Oh, I didn't say that. You know, that's so misleading the way -- I say jokingly, 'Suburban women, you should love me because I'm giving you security. And I got rid of the worst regulation.'" He repeated that he had made the comment "kiddingly," not as if he was "begging."
  • After Stahl asked Trump if he wants to lock up former President Barack Obama, Trump said in the extended footage, "No, I don't wanna lock him up, but he spied on my campaign. Obama and Biden spied on my campaign."
martinelligi

Taiwan's National Health Insurance: A Model for Universal Health Coverage - The Diplomat - 0 views

thediplomat.com/...-for-universal-health-coverage

taiwan

shared by martinelligi on 20 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • This has since been expanded to provide equal coverage to all citizens from birth, regardless of age, financial status or employment status. Furthermore, all foreigners who legally work or reside in Taiwan are also afforded the same coverage.
  • single-payer model
  • Implementing the Global Budget Payment on top of Fee-For-Service reimbursement method effectively reduced annual medical expenditure growth from 12 percent to 5 percent since 2003
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  • And the way premiums are collected has also changed from being purely payroll-based, to including supplementary premiums based on capital gains, which has created a surplus into the National Health Insurance Fund.
    • martinelligi
      martinelligi on 09 Nov 20
       
      Capital gains are the profits from the sale of an asset
  • In addition, the NHI’s information system has migrated to the cloud, making it much easier for hospitals, clinics, and doctors to access medical information. We encourage hospitals to upload computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans so they can be retrieved for follow-up consultations. A personalized cloud-based service called My Health Bank also enables patients to check their medical records at any time.
  • We have premium subsidies for low-income and near-poor households, as well as the unemployed.
    • martinelligi
      martinelligi on 09 Nov 20
       
      A subsidy is a benefit given to an individual, business, or institution, usually by the government. Premium is an amount paid periodically to the insurer by the insured for covering his risk.
  • Taiwan has a constructive role to play in creating a robust global health network, and the best way to share our experience with other countries is through participation in the World Health Assembly and the WHO.
mariedhorne

Denver Wants to Fix a Legacy of Environmental Racism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...city-parks.html

environmental racism

shared by mariedhorne on 01 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • DENVER — In most American cities, white residents live near parks, trees and baseball fields, while communities of color are left with concrete and the heat that comes with it. Now, in a push that could provide a road map for other cities, officials in Denver are working to rectify that historical inequity.
  • Correcting decades of discriminatory municipal planning is especially important as climate change heats up American cities. Adding green space, researchers have found, can help residents cope with rising heat and brings all sorts of side benefits, like filtering air pollution or boosting residents’ mental health.
  • “It’s always just felt more like it’s a whole front,” said Alfonso Espino, a community activist and lifelong Denver resident, speaking of the city’s parks initiative. “Not for us, you know. It’s for the people that are coming.”
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  • That year, the city allocated $1 million of the new tax money for saplings along the 16th Street Mall, the city’s downtown business district, with no funds for poorer neighborhoods with sparse canopies. By the end of 2020, the city will have allocated six times more for trees in downtown areas than in residential zones.
  • “There’s these tough histories that make it really hard for residents to trust government, to possibly trust nonprofits,” said Kim Yuan-Farrell, executive director of The Park People, a local nonprofit group that advocates for parks and helps organize tree plantings in low-income neighborhoods.However, Ms. Yuan-Farrell said, things seem to be changing.
Javier E

Hospital Prices Are Arbitrary. Just Look at the Kingsburys' $100,000 Bill. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...al-bills-insurance-11635428943

hospital pricing prices costs health care insurance policy

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The costs, which overwhelmed the Kingsburys and ruined their finances, didn’t have to be so large. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Ms. Kingsbury’s medical bills, insurance statements and newly public data on hospital prices shows how the nation’s seemingly arbitrary hospital pricing left the couple with charges that in some cases would have been far lower for other patients, through no fault of their own.
  • Ms. Kingsbury had insurance, but that’s no guarantee of a competitive price. Hospitals and insurers negotiate prices to hit financial targets, and their bargaining benefits some patients and disadvantages others, according to the Journal’s analysis and interviews with medical billing professionals and researchers.
  • A weak negotiator can get stuck with a lousy deal. Trade-offs can give one insurance plan the best deals for some hospital services, but not others. Hospitals often charge patients the highest rates of all when insurance doesn’t cover their medical care
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  • For many patients and their families, hospital fees are already complicated, opaque and stressful. The Kingsburys show just how little control consumers have.
  • None of this has been clear to consumers—until this year. Hospitals and insurers have long set prices through confidential negotiations. Starting Jan. 1, hospitals were required to make their prices public under a Trump administration policy that sought to expose the sector’s pricing to greater market pressure.
  • Compliance with the rule has been spotty, but the available data show that prices vary widely among the plans that negotiate contracts with hospitals. While the data remains difficult for consumers to use, knowing the full range of rates could ultimately help patients negotiate their bills.
  • Healthcare economists note that prices in other sectors, such as airlines, can also vary for the same service, but hospitals’ steep prices mean the dollar difference between the highest and lowest rates can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. “The order of magnitude of healthcare costs is different,”
  • Even within an insurance plan, prices aren’t consistently low or high. A plan’s prices for one service can be among the lowest a hospital negotiates, but among the highest for another,
  • A person insured by Minnesota-based HealthPartners would have received the most favorable price for a hospital stay because of back problems, but the cost of an emergency room visit with the same insurance was among the highest, according to the Journal’s analysis of the data.
  • When insurance didn’t cover some treatments, the Journal found, Avera McKennan Hospital set its own prices that ranked among the highest anywhere in the U.S. in the Journal’s analysis.
  • The LifeShield price of about $780 amounted to a discount of 53% off the hospital’s charge. Ms. Kingsbury paid all of it because her plan’s benefits didn’t cover the rest of the bill. The insurance was exempt from some federal rules that protect healthcare consumers. LifeShield didn’t respond to requests for comment.
  • Ms. Kingsbury earned roughly $17,700 last year, tax records reviewed by the Journal show. Her husband, who is retired, received about $22,800 in yearly income from Social Security. They bought insurance in 2019 from LifeShield National Insurance Co.
  • The range of prices is the product of a complex interplay of multiple payers and hospitals, and a lack of competitive pressure to hold down costs, economists said. Rates have been determined by trade-offs at the bargaining table between hospitals and insurers—such as an offer of cheaper prices in return for more business—and by market power, with higher prices where hospitals dominate.
  • Hospitals and insurers ultimately bargain for prices to meet financial targets for revenue and profit, said David Dillon, a healthcare actuary with the consulting firm Lewis & Ellis Inc. “It is kind of as simple as both sides of the table have their revenue requirements,” he said.
  • “The market for healthcare just doesn’t look at all like the market for tomatoes because somebody else is literally negotiating and purchasing on your behalf,” Mr. Cooper said.
  • The cost for the scan under LifeShield was $1,497, almost half the price charged under Avera. However, Ms. Kingsbury’s plan at LifeShield was exempt from Affordable Care Act rules to prevent gaps in coverage. LifeShield didn’t cover this scan. So Avera charged Ms. Kingsbury the price it sets for patients not covered by insurance, at $8,451, one of the highest prices in the Journal’s analysis of publicly available rates nationwide.
  • “Healthcare is a service and it can be an expensive service, especially for a serious condition. That’s why health insurance exists,” said Avera spokeswoman Ms. Meyers. “It is important for consumers to understand what they are buying and the coverage it provides.”
  • The Journal compared Avera McKennan’s 2019 PET CT price for Ms. Kingsbury with the price Medicare would pay, as calculated by price-comparison startup Turquoise Health Co. The hospital’s cash price for Ms. Kingsbury in 2019 was 5.7 times the Medicare rate, according to the Journal’s analysis using newly public data collected by Turquoise. That’s one of the highest multiples of any of the more than 1,200 U.S. hospitals in the analysis.
Javier E

Covid hospital bills arrive for patients as insurers restore deductibles and copays - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tal-bills-insurance-deductible

hospital costs Covid-19 health care insurance

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Nationally, covid hospitalizations under insurance contracts on average cost $29,000, or $156,000 for a patient with oxygen levels so low that they require a ventilator and ICU treatment,
  • The calculus in place in 2020 changed with the advent of vaccines, which now makes most hospitalizations preventable,
  • Hospitals along the Connecticut River, the border between Vermont and New Hampshire, draw patients from both states. Vermont health plans are waiving deductibles and co-pays into 2022. In New Hampshire, where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has a dominant presence, insurance companies have reinstated cost-sharing.
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  • Marvin Mallek, a doctor who treats covid patients from both sides of the river at Springfield Hospital in Vermont, said New Hampshire covid patients are now facing business as usual from insurers, suffering the same sort of financial stress that routinely affects patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious ailments.
  • “The inhumanity of our health-care system and the tragedies it creates will now resume and will now cover this one group that was exempted,'' he said. “The U.S. health-care system is sort of like a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs, and some people are going to get hurt and devastated financially.”
  • Hospitals also are in the position of having to resume billings and collections for individuals who may have been laid off because of the pandemic or been too sick to work, experts said.
  • “These waivers ended in January as we all had gained a better understanding of the virus, and people and communities became more familiar with best practices and protocols for limiting COVID-19 exposure and spread,” the company said in a statement. “Also, at this time vaccines, which are proven to be the safest and most effective way to protect oneself from COVID-19, were starting to become readily available.”Anthem took in $4.6 billion in profits in 2020, compared to $4.8 billion in 2019.
  • The reintroduction of cost-sharing mainly affects people with private or employer-based insurance. Patients with no insurance can have 100 percent of their expenses covered by the federal government, under a special program set up by the government for the pandemic, with hospitals reimbursed for care at Medicare rates.
  • Covid patients with Medicaid, the government plan for lower-income people that is paid for by states and the federal government, continue to be protected from cost-sharing, insurance specialists said
  • Patients on Medicare, the federal plan for the elderly, could face out-of-pocket costs if they do not have supplemental insurance.
  • Last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 88 percent of people covered by private insurance had their co-pays and deductibles for covid treatment waived. By August 2021, only 28 percent of the two largest plans in each state and D.C. still had the waivers in place, and another 10 percent planned to phase them out by the end of October,
  • general, a person with Azar’s type of plan would have an in-network deductible of $1,500 and an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $4,000,
  • “We still don’t know where the numbers will land because the system makes the family wait for the bills,” s
  • Bills related to her stay at the out-of-network rehab hospital in Tennessee could climb as high as $10,000 more, her relatives have estimated, but they acknowledged they were uncertain this month what exactly to expect, even after asking UnitedHealthcare and the providers.
  • In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available.
Javier E

How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620457

public health history Culture politics economics policy

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • when the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, it found a public-health system in disrepair. That system, with its overstretched staff, meager budgets, crumbling buildings, and archaic equipment, could barely cope with sickness as usual, let alone with a new, fast-spreading virus.
  • By one telling, public health was a victim of its own success, its value shrouded by the complacency of good health
  • By a different account, the competing field of medicine actively suppressed public health, which threatened the financial model of treating illness in (insured) individuals
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  • In fact, “public health has actively participated in its own marginalization,” Daniel Goldberg, a historian of medicine at the University of Colorado, told me. As the 20th century progressed, the field moved away from the idea that social reforms were a necessary part of preventing disease and willingly silenced its own political voice. By swimming along with the changing currents of American ideology, it drowned many of the qualities that made it most effective.
  • Germ theory offered a seductive new vision for defeating disease: Although the old public health “sought the sources of infectious disease in the surroundings of man; the new finds them in man himself,” wrote Hibbert Hill in The New Public Health in 1913
  • “They didn’t have to think of themselves as activists,” Rosner said. “It was so much easier to identify individual victims of disease and cure them than it was to rebuild a city.”
  • As public health moved into the laboratory, a narrow set of professionals associated with new academic schools began to dominate the once-broad field. “It was a way of consolidating power: If you don’t have a degree in public health, you’re not public health,”
  • Mastering the new science of bacteriology “became an ideological marker,” sharply differentiating an old generation of amateurs from a new one of scientifically minded professionals,
  • Hospitals, meanwhile, were becoming the centerpieces of American health care, and medicine was quickly amassing money and prestige by reorienting toward biomedical research
  • Public health began to self-identify as a field of objective, outside observers of society instead of agents of social change. It assumed a narrower set of responsibilities that included data collection, diagnostic services for clinicians, disease tracing, and health education.
  • Assuming that its science could speak for itself, the field pulled away from allies such as labor unions, housing reformers, and social-welfare organizations that had supported city-scale sanitation projects, workplace reforms, and other ambitious public-health projects.
  • That left public health in a precarious position—still in medicine’s shadow, but without the political base “that had been the source of its power,”
  • After World War II, biomedicine lived up to its promise, and American ideology turned strongly toward individualism.
  • Seeing poor health as a matter of personal irresponsibility rather than of societal rot became natural.
  • Even public health began to treat people as if they lived in a social vacuum. Epidemiologists now searched for “risk factors,” such as inactivity and alcohol consumption, that made individuals more vulnerable to disease and designed health-promotion campaigns that exhorted people to change their behaviors, tying health to willpower in a way that persists today.
  • This approach appealed, too, to powerful industries with an interest in highlighting individual failings rather than the dangers of their products.
  • “epidemiology isn’t a field of activists saying, ‘God, asbestos is terrible,’ but of scientists calculating the statistical probability of someone’s death being due to this exposure or that one.”
  • In 1971, Paul Cornely, then the president of the APHA and the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in public health, said that “if the health organizations of this country have any concern about the quality of life of its citizens, they would come out of their sterile and scientific atmosphere and jump in the polluted waters of the real world where action is the basis for survival.”
  • a new wave of “social epidemiologists” once again turned their attention to racism, poverty, and other structural problems.
  • The biomedical view of health still dominates, as evidenced by the Biden administration’s focus on vaccines at the expense of masks, rapid tests, and other “nonpharmaceutical interventions.”
  • Public health has often been represented by leaders with backgrounds primarily in clinical medicine, who have repeatedly cast the pandemic in individualist terms: “Your health is in your own hands,” said the CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, in May
  • the pandemic has proved what public health’s practitioners understood well in the late 19th and early 20th century: how important the social side of health is. People can’t isolate themselves if they work low-income jobs with no paid sick leave, or if they live in crowded housing or prisons.
  • Public health is now trapped in an unenviable bind. “If it conceives of itself too narrowly, it will be accused of lacking vision … If it conceives of itself too expansively, it will be accused of overreaching,
  • “Public health gains credibility from its adherence to science, and if it strays too far into political advocacy, it may lose the appearance of objectivity,”
  • In truth, public health is inescapably political, not least because it “has to make decisions in the face of rapidly evolving and contested evidence,” Fairchild told me. That evidence almost never speaks for itself, which means the decisions that arise from it must be grounded in values.
  • Those values, Fairchild said, should include equity and the prevention of harm to others, “but in our history, we lost the ability to claim these ethical principles.”
  • “Sick-leave policies, health-insurance coverage, the importance of housing … these things are outside the ability of public health to implement, but we should raise our voices about them,” said Mary Bassett, of Harvard, who was recently appointed as New York’s health commissioner. “I think we can get explicit.”
  • The future might lie in reviving the past, and reopening the umbrella of public health to encompass people without a formal degree or a job at a health department.
  • What if, instead, we thought of the Black Lives Matter movement as a public-health movement, the American Rescue Plan as a public-health bill, or decarceration, as the APHA recently stated, as a public-health goal? In this way of thinking, too, employers who institute policies that protect the health of their workers are themselves public-health advocates.
  • “We need to re-create alliances with others and help them to understand that what they are doing is public health,
Javier E

Opinion | Vaccine Hesitancy Is About Trust and Class - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vaccine-hesitancy-covid.html

collective action pandemic politics history crisis culture common

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”
  • For the past five years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups abroad and interviewed residents of the Bronx to better understand vaccine avoidance.
  • We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.
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  • Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health
  • First, people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them.
  • second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves.
  • an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.
  • “People are thinking, ‘If the government isn’t going to do anything for us,’” said Elden, “‘then why should we participate in vaccines?’”
  • Since the spring, when most American adults became eligible for Covid vaccines, the racial gap in vaccination rates between Black and white people has been halved. In September, a national survey found that vaccination rates among Black and white Americans were almost identical.
  • Other surveys have determined that a much more significant factor was college attendance: Those without a college degree were the most likely to go unvaccinated.
  • Education is a reliable predictor of socioeconomic status, and other studies have similarly found a link between income and vaccination.
  • It turns out that the real vaccination divide is class.
  • compared with white Americans, communities of color do experience the American health care system differently. But a closer look at the data reveals a more complicated picture.
  • during the 1950s polio campaigns, for example, most people saw vaccination as a civic duty.
  • But as the public purse shrunk in the 1980s, politicians insisted that it’s no longer the government’s job to ensure people’s well-being; instead, Americans were to be responsible only for themselves and their own bodies
  • Entire industries, such as self-help and health foods, have sprung up on the principle that the key to good health lies in individuals making the right choices.
  • Without an idea of the common good, health is often discussed using the language of “choice.”
  • there are problems with reducing public health to a matter of choice. It gives the impression that individuals are wholly responsible for their own health.
  • This is despite growing evidence that health is deeply influenced by factors outside our control; public health experts now talk about the “social determinants of health,” the idea that personal health is never simply just a reflection of individual lifestyle choices, but also the class people are born into, the neighborhood they grew up in and the race they belong to.
  • food deserts and squalor are not easy problems to solve — certainly not by individuals or charities — and they require substantial government action.
  • Many medical schools teach “motivational interviewing,”
  • the deeper problem:
  • Being healthy is not cheap. Studies indicate that energy-dense foods with less nutritious value are more affordable, and low-cost diets are linked to obesity and insulin resistance.
  • This isn’t surprising, since we shop for doctors and insurance plans the way we do all other goods and services
  • Another problem with reducing well-being to personal choice is that this treats health as a commodity.
  • mothers devoted many hours to “researching” vaccines, soaking up parental advice books and quizzing doctors. In other words, they act like savvy consumers
  • When thinking as a consumer, people tend to downplay social obligations in favor of a narrow pursuit of self-interest. As one parent told Reich, “I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”
  • Such risk-benefit assessments for vaccines are an essential part of parents’ consumer research.
  • Vaccine uptake is so high among wealthy people because Covid is one of the gravest threats they face. In some wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods, for example, vaccination rates run north of 90 percent.
  • For poorer and working-class people, though, the calculus is different: Covid-19 is only one of multiple grave threats.
  • When viewed in the context of the other threats they face, Covid no longer seems uniquely scary.
  • Most of the people we interviewed in the Bronx say they are skeptical of the institutions that claim to serve the poor but in fact have abandoned them.
  • he and his friends find reason to view the government’s sudden interest in their well-being with suspicion. “They are over here shoving money at us,” a woman told us, referring to a New York City offer to pay a $500 bonus to municipal workers to get vaccinated. “And I’m asking, why are you so eager, when you don’t give us money for anything else?”
  • These views reinforce the work of social scientists who find a link between a lack of trust and inequality. And without trust, there is no mutual obligation, no sense of a common good.
  • The experience of the 1960s suggests that when people feel supported through social programs, they’re more likely to trust institutions and believe they have a stake in society’s health.
  • Research shows that private systems not only tend to produce worse health outcomes than public ones, but privatization creates what public health experts call “segregated care,” which can undermine the feelings of social solidarity that are critical for successful vaccination drives
  • In one Syrian city, for example, the health care system now consists of one public hospital so underfunded that it is notorious for poor care, a few private hospitals offering high-quality care that are unaffordable to most of the population, and many unlicensed and unregulated private clinics — some even without medical doctors — known to offer misguided health advice. Under such conditions, conspiracy theories can flourish; many of the city’s residents believe Covid vaccines are a foreign plot.
  • In many developing nations, international aid organizations are stepping in to offer vaccines. These institutions are sometimes more equitable than governments, but they are often oriented to donor priorities, not community needs.
  • “We have starvation and women die in childbirth.” one tribal elder told us, “Why do they care so much about polio? What do they really want?”
  • In America, anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines themselves; efforts to immunize people against smallpox prompted bitter opposition in the turn of the last century. But after World War II, these attitudes disappeared. In the 1950s, demand for the polio vaccine often outstripped supply, and by the late 1970s, nearly every state had laws mandating vaccinations for school with hardly any public opposition.
  • What changed? This was the era of large, ambitious government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
  • The anti-measles policy, for example, was an outgrowth of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives.
  • While the reasons vary by country, the underlying causes are the same: a deep mistrust in local and international institutions, in a context in which governments worldwide have cut social services.
  • Only then do the ideas of social solidarity and mutual obligation begin to make sense.
  • The types of social programs that best promote this way of thinking are universal ones, like Social Security and universal health care.
  • If the world is going to beat the pandemic, countries need policies that promote a basic, but increasingly forgotten, idea: that our individual flourishing is bound up in collective well-being.
Javier E

Ukraine War Will Accelerate the Decline of Globalization - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...e-the-decline-of-globalization

globalization trade costs deglobalization immigration china sovereignty

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable.
  • A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and destruction, but wrong about being unthinkable. The Great War ended the first era of globalization, and it took generations to rebuild the level of worldwide integration that pertained before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a much smaller conflict than World War I, and the trade disruptions associated with the U.S./European quasi-embargo on Russia are smaller than the British blockade of the Central Powers.
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  • the clash is nonetheless a giant step away from globalization — and, unlike World War I, it comes at a time when the world has already been moving away from economic integration: Trade’s share of global GDP peaked in 2008, and has been falling for the past decade.
  • the war in Ukraine doesn’t necessarily mark sharp a break in history. But it underlines and will perhaps cement the decline of globalization.
  • Similarly, the U.S. and Europe got vaccinated not only before low-income countries, but also before other rich countries — because they had the production capabilities.
  • Eventually, the logic of geopolitical conflict entered the equation. President Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” initiative, for example, isn’t about creating jobs, it’s about securing economic space for China to operate with political autonomy.
  • even actors more benign than Putin can see the value of autonomy.
  • When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, national sovereignty took precedence over free trade almost everywhere.
  • That decline started with a populist backlash to the Great Recession and sluggish employment growth that made the politics of saving jobs more appealing than the politics of efficiency.
  • Meanwhile, in the U.S., one issue on which President Joe Biden hasn’t broken with his predecessor is trade with China.
  • Foreign nations see this, too. The sanctions regime against Russia is both extremely tough and surprisingly non-global.
  • There are good reasons for all this deglobalization. But it’s important to note that it will come at a cost.
  • Consumers around the world reaped large benefits from a world of specialization, comparative advantage, just-in-time shipping and elaborate supply chains.
  • But the populist economics that powered the current wave a decade ago are basically wrong. Mass unemployment after the financial crisis was a tragic mistake of demand-side policy, not a sin of globalization. America can absolutely drill more oil and gas, build more cars and microchips, and make more steel. But there is not a vast army of unemployed people to do that work.
  • If the U.S. reshores a large segment of tradeable goods, then it will have fewer people left to build houses, clean teeth, cut hair, cook food and care for children and the elderly.
  • To meet real security imperatives, these may be prices worth paying. Make no mistake, however: There is a price.
  • as more countries step away from globalization, the price will get steeper. A poorer world offers fewer customers for everyone’s exports, and a world less economically connected is one in which disruptions and conflict are more thinkable.
  • Are these costs unavoidable? Probably.
  • But they can be mitigated
  • One alternative to importing foreign-made goods, for example, is to import foreign-born workers. In an inflationary, supply-constrained, deglobalizing world, immigrants — including the so-called “unskilled” ones who clean houses, wash dishes and pick crops — are a valuable asset.
  • It’s also crucial to think pragmatically about what the actual issue any given policy is trying to address
  • there is a world of difference between a supply chain that depends on China and one that leads to Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean.
Javier E

China's Young People Can't Find Jobs. Xi Jinping Says to 'Eat Bitterness.' - The New Yo... - 0 views

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

china jobs young

shared by Javier E on 30 May 23 - No Cached
  • China’s young people are facing record high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.
  • A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the work force this year, and one in five young people are unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that gre
  • up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality
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  • The youth unemployment rate is a statistic the Chinese Communist Party takes seriously because it believes that idle young people could threaten its rule. Mao Zedong sent more than 16 million urban youth, including Mr. Xi, to toil in the fields of the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The return of these jobless young people to cities after the Cultural Revolution, in part, forced the party to embrace self-employment, or jobs outside the state planned economy.
  • Many people are struggling emotionally. A young woman in Shanghai named Ms. Zhang, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in city planning, has sent out 130 resumes and secured no job offers and only a handful of interviews. Living in a 100-square-foot bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment, she barely gets by with a monthly income of less than $700 as a part-time tutor.“At my emotional low point, I wished I were a robot,” she said. “I thought to myself if I didn’t have emotions, I would not feel helpless, powerless and disappointed. I would be able to keep sending out résumés.”
  • “To ask us to endure hardships is to try to shift focus from the anemic economic growth and the decreasing job opportunities,” said Ms. Zhang, who, like most people I interviewed for this column, wanted to be identified with only her family name because of safety concerns. A few others want to be identified only with their English names.
  • Mr. Xi’s instruction to move to the countryside is equally out of touch with young people, as well as with China’s reality. Last December he told officials “to systematically guide college graduates to rural areas.” On Youth Day a few weeks ago, he responded to a letter by a group of agriculture students who are working in rural areas, commending them for “seeking self-inflicted hardships.” The letter, also published on the front page of People’s Daily, triggered discussions about whether Mr. Xi would start a Maoist-style campaign to send urban youths to the countryside.
  • In the hierarchical Chinese society, manual jobs are looked down upon. Farming ranks even lower because of the huge wealth gap between cities and rural areas. “Women wouldn’t consider to become my girlfriends if they knew that I deliver meals,” said Wang. He would fare even worse in the marriage market if he becomes a farmer.
  • Out of 13 Chinese graduates from his school, the five who chose to stay in the West have found jobs at Silicon Valley or Wall Street firms. Only three out of the eight who returned to China have secured job offers. Steven moved back to China earlier this year to be closer to his mother.
  • Now after months of fruitless job hunting, he, like almost every young worker I interviewed for this column, sees no future for himself in China.“My best way out,” he said, “is to persuade my parents to let me run away from China.”
Javier E

Opinion | Why Aren't More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...marriage-women-men-dating.html

matchmaking dating marriage men male dysfunction culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, who recently scoffed at “the notion that love, not marriage, makes a family,” has a forthcoming book titled “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” All of these scolds typically rely on the same batch of academic studies, now compiled by economist Melissa Kearney in her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” which show that kids with two parents fare better on a variety of life outcomes than those raised by single parents, who are overwhelmingly women.
  • harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.
  • On the rare occasions that women are actually asked about their experiences with relationships, the answers are rarely what anyone wants to hear.
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  • In the late 1990s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed 162 low-income single mothers in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia to understand why they had children without being married. “Money is seldom the primary reason” why mothers say they are no longer with their children’s fathers. Instead, mothers point to “far more serious” offenses: “It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.”
  • But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive.
  • Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left, but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who’s funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — but a man who won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion.
  • “There are women that are just out here trying, and the men aren’t ready,” she told me. “They don’t care, most of them.” Who, exactly, is Ms. Camino supposed to marry?
  • For as long as people have been promoting marriage, they have also been observing that a good man is hard to find
  • what was once dismissed as the complaint of “picky” women is now supported by a raft of data
  • The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift” — men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health.
  • even this nod ignores the qualitative aspect of the dating experience — the part that’s hard to cover in surveys, or address with policy.
  • a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships, found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who meets their expectations, versus one-third of men.
  • For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.
  • Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,
  • He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully
  • Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”
  • educated women freeze their eggs because they’re unable to find a suitable male partner: Ms. Inhorn points to a large gap in the number of college-educated women versus college-educated men during their reproductive years — on the order of several million.
  • Ms. Inhorn’s book goes beyond these quantitative mismatches to document the qualitative experience of women who are actively searching for partners — the frustration, hurt and disappointment.
  • “Almost without exception,” she writes, “women in this study were ‘trying hard’ to find a loving partner,” mostly through dating sites and apps. Women in their late 30s reported “online ageism,” others described removing their Ph.D from their profiles so as not to intimidate potential dates; still others found that men were often commitment-averse.
  • Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “Alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “Polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends.
  • to truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation
  • in particular, we should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners.
  • It requires taking the stories of single women seriously, and not treating them as punchlines — something for which there is little historical precedent, but which a handful of scholars are slowly beginning to do.
criscimagnael

Brazil: Death toll from heavy rain rises - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Residents in Brazil's northeastern state of Pernambuco were bracing for more days of heavy rain after at least 91 people were killed as downpours triggered floods and landslides, according to the Civil Defense.
  • "Unfortunately, these catastrophes happen," Bolsonaro said during a press conference, saying "similar problems" happened before in other cities affected by heavy floods.
  • "We flew over the affected area, tried to land but, following recommendation from the pilots, decided not to due to inconsistency of the soil," Bolsonaro told reporters.
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  • Brazil's northeast has been suffering from exceptionally high volumes of rain, officials say. Some areas have registered more rain in a 24-hour period over the weekend than the total volume expected for the month of May.
  • The weekend downpour triggered the fourth major flooding event in five months in Brazil, according to a Reuters report, which highlighted a lack of urban planning in low-income neighborhoods throughout much of the country. Favelas -- slums or shantytowns -- are often erected on hillsides prone to giving way, usually outside major cities.
  • The climate crisis is making destructive extreme weather more common globally.
  • Why landslides occur is more complex, but they often happen during heavy rainfall in areas that have been overly deforested and built upon.
Javier E

Opinion | Wonking Out: Why Growth Can Be Green - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mic-growth-green-degrowth.html

growth environmental policy economic

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I want to take a break and talk about environmental policy — specifically, the relationship between protecting the environment and economic growth.
  • the Biden administration has taken a huge step forward in the fight against climate change. The strategically misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act is mainly a climate bill, using subsidies and tax credits to promote green energy
  • It’s not quite as aggressive as the climate plans in Biden’s original Build Back Better legislation, but modelers estimate that it will accomplish about 80 percent of what B.B.B. was trying to do.
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  • The biggest factor making this kind of climate initiative possible, after so many years of inaction, is the spectacular technological progress in renewable energy that has taken place since 2009 or so. This means that we can greatly reduce emissions using carrots instead of sticks: giving people incentives to use low-emission technologies rather than trying to regulate or tax them into giving up high-emission activities.
  • the politics of carrots are obviously a lot easier than the politics of sticks.
  • Above all, real G.D.P. says nothing about how stuff is produced. A kilowatt-hour of electricity counts the same whether it was generated by burning coal or wind power, but the environmental impact is completely different.
  • So let’s talk about why such claims are all wrong.
  • many people don’t understand what economic growth means, imagining that it necessarily involves producing the same things you were producing before, in the same ways, but just at a larger scale.
  • But that’s not at all what growth means. Currently, America’s real gross domestic product is about a third larger than it was in 2007. But the economy of 2023 isn’t just the economy of 2007 scaled up by a third. Production of some goods has gone way down — coal production has been cut roughly in half.
  • at this precise moment — the most hopeful moment for the environment, as far as I can tell, in decades — my inbox has been filling up with woeful claims that environmental protection is incompatible with economic growth. These claims are oddly bipartisan. Some of them come from people on the left who insist that the planet can’t be saved unless we give up on the notion of perpetual economic growth. Others come from people on the right who insist that we must give up on all this environmentalism if we want to preserve prosperity.
  • In fact, environmental quality is often better in rich countries, with high G.D.P. per capita, than in middle-income countries
  • As a result, there’s no reason a growing economy must place an increasing burden on the environment.
  • the environmental Kuznets curve.
  • , a comparison between the New York metropolitan area and Delhi, India. Delhi has a larger population but a much smaller G.D.P. So does New York’s big economy mean a highly stressed environment?
  • how does air quality in the two cities compare? As anyone who’s visited both places knows, New York air is, well, relatively OK, while Delhi air … isn’t.
  • at higher levels of development, delinking growth from environmental impact isn’t just possible in principle but something that happens a lot in practice.
  • Here’s a favorite chart of mine from the invaluable Our World in Data website. It shows carbon dioxide emissions per capita in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began. The early phases of industrialization were indeed associated with a huge rise in emissions. But more recently emissions have fallen back to the levels of the ’50s — the 1850s:
  • How did Britain do that? Part of the answer is that over time the British economy switched from relying on coal to relying on hydrocarbons, which when burned generate less carbon dioxide. Britain also learned to use energy more efficiently over time. But more recently a big factor has been the rise of renewable energy, especially, in Britain’s case, wind power
  • So when you hear an environmentalist say something like, “We live on a finite planet, so we can’t have unlimited economic growth,” what they’re actually revealing is that they don’t understand what economic growth means
  • in practice, they’re lending aid and comfort to anti-environmentalists, who want us to believe that protecting the environment is incompatible with rising living standards.
  • That said, while it’s possible to decouple growth from environmental harm, that’s not automatic. To combine rising living standards with an improving environment, we need policies that encourage the use of technologies that cause less environmental damage.
  • The good news is that the United States is finally implementing such policies. Still, we need a lot more action along those lines — not just in America but in the rest of the world. So we can do this — but we need to try, and not give in to counsels of despair.
Javier E

Opinion | When Public Health Loses the Public - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...public-health-trust.html

public health rigidity culture history crisis policy politics pandemic

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • “Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time,” Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, looks to his own field to explain the animating forces behind some of those disputes.
  • Despite remarkable successes, Galea argues, public health succumbed to a disturbing strain of illiberalism during the pandemic. This not only worsened the impact of the pandemic; it also destabilized public health institutions in ways that will serve us poorly when the next crisis comes.
  • : If Americans have come to distrust public health advice, what role may public health officials have played in fostering that distrust?
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  • American health experts advocated almost universal child vaccination; meanwhile, in Europe, experts cautioned against vaccinating young children, who were at low risk for serious illness, without more long-term data. “Were we pushing to vaccinate children for their sake or for ours?” Galea asks. “Were we doing it to support health or to make a political point?”
  • Scientists should have made more nuanced risk assessments and revisited them regularly. They should have taken into account the consequences and the disproportionate impact of strict lockdowns on lower-income workers and at-risk youth
  • This zero-sum mode of thinking — neglecting to take into account one’s own biases, succumbing to groupthink, operating according to the expectations of one’s “side,” discouraging good-faith debate — persisted even as the pandemic eased.
  • this tendency to view “core issues in Manichaean terms, with certain positions seen as on the side of good and others on the side of evil, with little gray area between,” as Galea puts it, has continued to inform public health postpandemic
  • It also undermines public faith in science, one of the few institutions that had maintained a high level of trust into the Trump era.
  • the percentage of Americans who believe science has a mostly positive effect on society dropped to 57 percent in 2023, from 67 percent in 2016. Those who say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists dropped to 23 percent, from 39 percent in 2020. And these declines took place among both Republicans and Democrats.
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