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Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing?

Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power

According to figures compiled by the Cato Institute’s David Bier, since the Revolutionary War in 1783, the United States’ average annual rate of legal immigration has been about 0.4 percent of the population. For our current population, that would amount to about 1.33 million people, pretty close to Noorani’s proposal.

. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.

A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century.

The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.

But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in.

Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth.

Soon Americans may start to appreciate how fortunate we are to have the world’s teeming strivers still wanting to make our country their home — and we might finally begin to see them not as a burden but a blessing.

brokered a deal to move the Port of Los Angeles toward 24/7 operations, joining Long Beach, which is already operating around the clock, and that they are encouraging states to accelerate the licensing of more truck drivers.

On Wednesday, the White House will host leaders from the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to discuss the difficulties at ports, as well as hold a round table with executives from Walmart, UPS and Home Depot.

Imports for the fourth quarter are on pace to be 4.7 percent higher than in the same period last year, which was also a record-breaking holiday season,

Companies are exacerbating the situation by rushing to obtain products and bidding up their own prices.

Administration officials acknowledged on Tuesday in a call with reporters that the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed into law in March had contributed to supply chain issues by boosting demand for goods, but said the law was the reason the U.S. recovery has outpaced those of other nations this year.

Consumer demand for exercise bikes, laptops, toys, patio furniture and other goods is booming, fueled by big savings amassed over the course of the pandemic.

The blockages stretch up and down supply chains, from foreign harbors to American rail yards and warehouses.

Home Depot, Costco and Walmart have taken to chartering their own ships to move products across the Pacific Ocean.

the average anchorage time had stretched to more than 11 days.

Companies that had been trying to avoid passing on higher costs to customers may find that they need to as higher costs become longer lived.

worsening supplier delivery times and conditions at ports suggested that product shortages would persist into mid- to late next year.

governments around the world could help to smooth some shortages and dampen some price increases, for example by encouraging workers to move into industries with labor shortages, like trucking

“But to some extent, they need to let markets do their work,” she said.

a Transportation Department official gathering information on what the administration could do to address the supply chain shortages had contacted his company. Flexport offered the administration suggestions on changing certain regulations and procedures to ease the blockages, but warned that the problem was a series of choke points “stacked one on top of the other.”

from the whole big picture, the supply capacity is really hard to change in a noteworthy way.”

The shortages have come as a shock for many American shoppers, who are used to buying a wide range of global goods with a single click, and seeing that same product on their doorstep within hours or days.

The political risk for the administration is that shortfalls, mostly a nuisance so far, turn into something more existential. Diapers are already in short supply. As aluminum shortages develop, packaging pharmaceuticals could become a problem,

slow deliveries could make for slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.

Consumer price inflation probably climbed by 5.3 percent in the year through September, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected to show on Wednesday.

They often point out that much of the surge has been spurred by a jump in car prices, caused by a lack of computer chips that delayed vehicle production.

the pandemic has shut down factories and slowed production around the world. Port closures, shortages of shipping containers and truck drivers, and pileups in rail and ship yards have led to long transit times and unpredictable deliveries for a wide range of products

Tesla, for instance, had been hoping to reduce the cost of its electric vehicles and has struggled to do that amid the bottlenecks.

If demand slumps as households spend away government stimulus checks and other savings they stockpiled during the pandemic downturn, that could leave purveyors of couches and lawn furniture with fewer production backlogs and less pricing power down the road.

If buying stays strong, and shipping remains problematic, inflation could become more entrenched.

To get their own orders fulfilled, companies have placed bigger orders and offered to pay higher prices.

Nevertheless, many commentators have ignored this evidence. They conclude not only that there are widespread shortages, but that the culprit is pandemic unemployment insurance benefits. Governors in 25 Republican-led states have now said they will no longer accept federal unemployment benefits. This will cut aid to nearly four million impacted workers, despite the absence of compelling evidence that jobless benefits are causing problems in the labor market. Instead, we have considerable evidence that it is helpful.

But employers of low-wage workers typically have a great deal of power to suppress wages. Out of desperation, these workers often have no choice but to take any job no matter how bad the wages, unsafe the labor, or chaotic the schedule as they try to cobble together child care or elder care. Unemployment insurance isn’t keeping people out of the labor market en masse right now. But, when expanded benefits mean some individuals don’t feel the same pressure to accept a terrible job, that is what economists would call efficiency enhancing.

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”

We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

“The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years

a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010

The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.

Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.

The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”

By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.

These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,

Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure

“We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”

teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.

the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.

Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.

How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.

policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.

The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.

“On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”

Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”

These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”

Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress

In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364

Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.

White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.

and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar

A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint

Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?

Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.

Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.

Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.

Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.

The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.

These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.

State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.

Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?

Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years

the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low

Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years

The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.

Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.

The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color

We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions

We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.

In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.

If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.

Economists have long warned that the aging US population means the nation will need to rely on a steady influx of foreign workers to meet demand. Yet Washington has repeatedly failed to reach a deal on immigration reform. And the Trump administration repeatedly put up obstacles to legal immigration, including restrictions imposed in 2020 that cited the pandemic's impact on the jobs market.

"Immigration was completely upended by the pandemic," said Bradley. "Go to any resort town in America. Where you would normally have individuals on temporary J-1 visas, they are nonexistent."

"But labor supply will be a longer run issue, just like before the pandemic," Zandi said. "There are reasons to believe it will be a bigger problem post-pandemic because immigration is a shadow of what it was."

"The survivability of your business comes down to how lucky you are in the lottery," Bradley said.

"The [Biden] administration deserves a lot of credit for taking that step," Bradley said. "They are operating within the limits of where the current law exists."

Beyond immigration reform, the Chamber told CNN Business it will urge states to use American Rescue Plan funding to help parents struggling with the high cost of childcare.

"There is no question the disruption of in-person schooling and childcare has reduced the number of caregivers, principally women, who are in the workforce and able to work," Bradley said.

Arizona announced plans on May 13 to use funds from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to assist working parents with childcare costs. The state said it will provide three months of childcare assistance to people making $52,000 or less who return to work after collecting unemployment benefits. The initiative is part of Arizona's decision to end the $300 enhanced unemployment benefit.

"The president deserves credit for identifying a lot of important problems that we need to discuss with the American Families Plan," Bradley said, specifically citing the affordability and accessibility of childcare. /* dynamic basic css */ .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {margin:0;padding:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container .ob-clearfix {display:block;width:100%;float:none;clear:both;height:0px;line-height:0px;font-size:0px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container.ob-multi-row {padding-top: 2%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {position:relative;margin:0;padding;0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link:hover {text-decoration:none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon-container {position:absolute;left:0;height:50%;width:100%;text-align:center;top:25%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon {display:inline-block;height:100%;float:none;opacity:0.7;transition: opacity 500ms;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon:hover {opacity:1;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image {background-color:white;background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image.ob-lazy-bgimg{background:none!important;}.AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what{direction:ltr;clear:both;padding:5px 10px 0px;} .AR_36 .ob_what a:after {content: "";vertical-align:super;;;background-image: url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/achoice.svg');background-size:75% 75%;width:12px;height:12px;padding-left:4px;display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:right center;border-left:1px solid #999;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what a{color:#757575;font-size:11px;font-family:arial;text-decoration: none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what.ob-hover:hover a{text-decoration: underline;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{vertical-align:baseline !important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 5px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid{width:auto;height:16px;max-height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:22px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_smartFeedLogo.min.svg') no-repeat center top;width:140px;height:21px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sphere_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_sphere.svg') no-repeat center top;width:93px;height:27px;vertical-align:baseline!important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 0px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(min-resolution: 192dpi) { .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px; 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For the industry to meet customer demand, restaurants would probably have to draw workers from other industries, but there are indications that the opposite is true. An analysis of job seekers’ search history data by the company review site Glassdoor found that people who used to search for “restaurant server” are now more likely to type in “office assistant,” “data entry” or “Amazon,” for example.

Fast-food wages historically trail those in other service industry jobs, with the typical U.S. worker collecting about $11.80 per hour or $24,540 a year as of May 2020,

Some current and former fast-food workers say labor shortages merely reflect the limited appeal of low-wage work that can be physically demanding and stressful, conditions that existed long before the pandemic.

some economists question the accuracy of the term “labor shortage” in this context, saying businesses are simply offering too low a wage for an hour’s work.

When I go shopping for an Audi and I can’t afford it, I don’t get to declare an Audi shortage,” said Erica Groshen, a labor economist with Cornell University. “At the wage being offered, businesses still aren’t getting as many applicants for work.”

“I think the problem is workers are being paid too little working full time. That’s the real scandal,” he said.

Of the nearly 10 million job openings in the United States, roughly 1 in 6 are in the leisure and hospitality sector that includes food service workers,

Nonsupervisory workers in the accommodations and food service sector made an average of $15.91 per hour as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February 2020, they made an average of $14.46 per hour.

“The fact that nominal wages have been increasing so rapidly over the last several months is itself pretty strong evidence that businesses really are doing a lot to attract and retain workers. … The labor market is just really competitive,”

McDonald’s announced that it had raised its hourly rate to a range of $11 to $17 for entry-level workers, and $15 to $20 for managers.

one of the company’s locations in Hendersonville, N.C., recently increased its starting hourly wage to $19, for example.

For many fast-food establishments, the pandemic has accelerated a trend toward online and app-based ordering, and drive-through technology.

quarter — momentum that CEO David Gibbs said was underpinned by the Louisville-based company’s digital investments and “ability to serve customers through multiple on- and off-premise channels.”

McDonald’s also reported strong-second quarter gains, boosted by growth in its delivery and digital platforms and higher menu prices. U.S. sales were 25.9 percent higher than the same period in 2020 and 14.9 percent above where they were in a pre-pandemic 2019, the company said.

The average cost to close a restaurant to improve or add an advanced drive-through ranges from $125,000 to $250,000

drive-throughs account for about half of annual sales for all fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, or roughly $169 billion.

“One of other things they have done is turn all of us into the cashiers,” he said, pointing to restaurant apps, and touch-screen kiosks that have taken the place of some food service workers. “We did a study on automation and robotics and found that at least half could be replaced with robots or automation.”

Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million

And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.

In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars.

family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners.

“There is this sense of, well, if you show that physician incomes put them at the top of the income distribution, then you’re somehow implying that they’re instead going into medicine because they want to make money. And that narrative is uncomfortable to people.”

why did those figures ruffle so many physician feathers?

“You can want to help people and you can simultaneously want to earn money and have a nicer lifestyle and demand compensation for long hours and long training. That’s totally normal behavior in the labor market.”

Yale University economist Jason Abaluck notes that when he asks the doctors and future doctors in his health economics classes why they earn so much, answers revolve around the brutal training required to enter the profession. “Until they finish their residency, they’re working an enormous number of hours and their lifestyle is not the lifestyle of a rich person,” Abaluck told us.

why do physicians make that much?

On average, doctors — much like anyone else — behave in ways that just happen to drive up their income. For example, the economists found that graduates from the top medical schools, who can presumably write their own ticket to any field they want, tend to choose those that pay the most.

“Our analysis shows that certainly physicians respond to earnings when choosing specialties,” Polyakova told us. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

“In general, U.S. physicians are making about 50 percent more than German physicians and about more than twice as much as U.K. physicians,

Grover said the widest gaps were “really driven by surgeons and a handful of procedural specialties,” doctors who perform procedures with clear outcomes, rather than preventing disease or treating chronic condition

“we’re not about prevention, you know?” he said, noting that his own PhD is in public health. “I wish it was different, but it ain’t!”

The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

In 1970, based on a slightly different measure that’s been tracked for longer, America had more licensed physicians per person than all but two of the 10 countries for which we have data. What caused the collapse?

the United States has far fewer residency slots than qualified med school graduates, which means thousands of qualified future physicians are annually shut out of the residency pipeline, denied their chosen career and stuck with no way to pay back those quarter-million-dollar loans.

“I’d like to see an in-depth analysis of the effect of the government capping the number of residency spots and how it’s created an artificial ‘physician shortage’ even though we have thousands of talented and graduated doctors that can’t practice due to not enough residency spots,”

Such an analysis would begin with a deeply influential 1980 report,

That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems.

ssociation of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent.

Federal support for residencies was also ratcheted down, making it expensive or impossible for hospitals to provide enough slots for all the medical school graduates hitting the market each year. That effort peaked with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act which, among other things, froze funding for residencies — partially under the flawed assumption that HMOs would forever reduce the need for medical care in America, Orr writes. That freeze has yet to fully unwind.

or decades, many policymakers believed more doctors caused higher medical spending. Orr says that’s partly true, but “the early studies failed to differentiate between increased availability of valuable medical services and unnecessary treatment and services.”

“In reality, the greater utilization in places with more doctors represented greater availability, both in terms of expanded access to primary care and an ever-growing array of new and more advanced medical services,” he writes. “The impact of physician supply on levels of excessive treatment appears to be either small or nonexistent.”

“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”

Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.

Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.

it’s because states have responded to the shortage by empowering nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform tasks that once were the sole province of physicians. Over the past 20 years, the number of registered nurses grew almost twice as quickly as the number of doctors, and the number of physician assistants grew almost three times as rapidly, our analysis showed.

While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.

Just as a return to even a new normal is unthinkable for the foreseeable future — and well past Easter, Mr. Trump — a complete shutdown and shelter-in-place strategy cannot last for months

A middle-ground approach is the only realistic one — and defining what that looks like means doing our best to keep all such workers safe.

In three to four weeks, there will be a major shortage of chemical reagents for coronavirus testing

When leaders tell the truth about even near-desperate situations, when they lay out a clear and understandable vision, the public might remain frightened, but it will act rationally and actively participate in the preservation of its safety and security.

begin by stating a number of hard truth

The first is that no matter what we do at this stage, numerous hospitals in the United States will be overrun. Many people, including health care workers, will get sick and some will die. And the economy will tank. It’s too late to change any of this now.

It also means leadership. Above all, it means being realistic about what is possible and what is not, and communicating that clearly to the American public.

The second hard truth is that at this stage, any public health response that counts on widespread testing in the United States is doomed to fail.

it simply won’t be available.

Much better, instead, to immediately gear up for epidemic intelligence

illness surveillance, in which epidemiologists survey a sample of doctors’ offices in a given geographic region each day to learn how many patients sought care for illnesses with symptoms of fever, cough and muscle aches.

A third hard truth is that shortages of personal protective equipment — particularly N-95 masks — for health care workers will only get worse in the United States as global need continues to rise precipitously

If you can’t make nearly enough masks to meet the need, then you must conserve the masks you can make. Unfortunately, some hospitals in the United States are not employing science-based methods for conserving these invaluable lifesaving masks.

Making ventilators — machines that breathe for patients who cannot effectively do so on their own — poses an even more formidable challenge

a Medtronic ventilator has about 1,500 parts, supplied by 14 separate countries.

More machines might, at best, be manufactured by the hundreds a month — but not by the thousands, as is needed right now.

a national strategy and leadership are crucial. Otherwise, hospitals, governors and politicians will only vie against one anothe

“Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,” Mr. Trump said

This is exactly the wrong message. The White House must take charge, keeping track of national inventory, purchasing the precious resources and distributing them where they are most needed at the moment.

More than anything, what the United States needs right now is for the president to undertake an intellectual Manhattan Project: gather the best minds in public health, medicine, medical ethics, catastrophe preparedness and response; political leadership; and private-sector manufacturing and the pharmaceutical industry.

The effort against Covid-19 will need to be bear fruit within days — and come up with a comprehensive but realistic blueprint for getting America through the next 12 to 18 months, or however long it takes for a vaccine to become widely available or herd immunity to take hold in the population

Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.

ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.

Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.

Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown

Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,

Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.

No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.

So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.

Despite a 20% pullback in recent weeks, random-length lumber futures are still up more than 400% from their April 2020 low. Lumber prices have skyrocketed so much that it's causing remodeling nightmares and creating even more sticker shock in the booming housing market.

Likewise, prices for US hot-rolled, coil steel, the most widely produced finished steel product, have spiked almost 270% since bottoming out last August and hit a record high of $1,616 per ton on Friday, according to S&P Global Platts. Before this boom, the prior peak was $1,100 in 2008.

Murphy, whose organization opposed the Section 232 steel tariffs from the beginning, argued tariff relief is a way government can help accelerate the recovery while simultaneously easing inflation jitters.

Meanwhile, both the steel and lumber industries are strongly urging Biden to keep the tariffs in place. Removing them could prove to be politically unpopular, especially among steel workers in battleground Rust Belt states.

Scott argued the steel tariffs effectively supported the industry and that removing them, along with quotas limiting imports, would lead to both a "hemorrhaging of jobs" and importing steel that is in many cases worse for the environment than what is made in America.

The Biden administration does not appear to have made a decision yet on lifting the steel or lumber tariffs, though new efforts are being made to address rising inflation concerns.

Biden announced late last week his administration will soon take unspecified steps to fight supply chain pressures, beginning with construction materials and transportation bottlenecks.

This should be a wake-up call for a country that has spent decades mistreating, neglecting and radically underpaying its workers.

Consider: The US has not raised the federal minimum wage in more than a decade, and $7.25 an hour was a paltry sum even then. If today's minimum wage were commensurate with productivity increases over the last 50 years, it would be $22 an hour. Workers' purchasing power has been stagnant for 40 years, and even though workers are more productive than ever, their compensation has barely budged since the 1970s. Even more egregious is the minimum wage for tipped workers, which is an insulting $2.13 an hour, a number that hasn't gone up in 30 years.

Some employers say that they simply cannot afford to pay a living wage. But that failure should fall on the business, not on would-be employees. Businesses have been badly hurt by the pandemic, and while they've received some governmental support, it's been wildly inadequate. But even outside of pandemic times, workers were struggling, while too many businesses felt entitled to a steady supply of poorly-paid workers, often assigning them unpredictable and exhausting schedules that came along with inconsistent income. That is not a good or sustainable business model, and it's not one we should return to.

But it's likely not just too little pay keeping would-be workers from surging into the workforce -- there is also fear of illness (Covid still isn't over), lack of affordable childcare and a general recalibration of priorities and goals after a once-in-a-century pandemic. That recalibration is happening at every level, as white-collar employees push for greater workplace flexibility and their employers navigate how to structure the return to the office.

"We don't have anything but diesel. We were expecting a delivery, but it never showed up; it was supposed to have been there at midnight last night,"

The Biden administration said federal agencies are responding and urged consumers to remain calm and only buy what they need, assuring the public the pipeline will be back and running at full capacity soon.

Medical staff say they could have avoided the medicine shortages that have forced some facilities to ration drugs. There also could have been more time to set up a more effective triage system to avoid overcrowding

ne of the fundamental problems with China’s health system is its overreliance on hospitals for even the most basic care.

“In the U.S. people have their own primary physicians, but there are few ways in China to get care from the medical system except to go to an E.R. at a big hospital,” said Dr. Qiao Renli, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at the University of Southern California, who has taught and practiced medicine in both China and the United States.

The deluge of Covid patients is not the only challenge hospitals are facing. One of the ripple effects of the outbreak has been a widespread shortage of blood for transfusions because of the shrinking pool of eligible donors.In the southwestern city of Kunming, a blood bank said in a statement that the city was getting a fraction of the 500 donors per day it needs to keep up with demand, and that the shortage had started to affect pregnant women and patients in intensive care units.

what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.

She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational

The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.

What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.

The Early Years: Warnings Ignored

2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic

February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”

May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.

One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded

Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not

January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:

A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”

Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.

2020: COVID-19 Arrives

anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China

January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus

Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.

January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”

January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 

January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”

January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”

January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:

(1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.

(3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.

January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”

January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.

Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.

Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.

January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.

February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.

Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.

February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.

February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”

February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.

February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”

February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.

February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance

February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.

Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”

February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.

February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”

March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”

March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis

March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.

Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.

March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment

March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it

At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.

March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th

March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”

March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)

As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.

But survivors, funeral directors and scientists say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures. The sheer number of patients has all but collapsed the health system in a country that invests less on public health — just above 1% of its gross domestic product — than most of its peers. (Brazil spends more than 9% of its GDP on health; in the U.S., the figure is nearly 18%.)

Each day, he goes to every crematorium and burial ground in his district of the capital, tallying deaths from COVID-19. Of his 11 staff members, five currently have COVID-19, he said.

Last year, at the height of the pandemic's first wave in India, Sirohi said he was counting about 220 COVID-19 deaths a day. When NPR spoke to him Wednesday, he counted 702 for that day. He passes those numbers up the chain of command. But the death figures the government ultimately publishes for his region have been at least 20% lower than what he's seeing on the ground, he said.

He attributed this disparity to administrative chaos.

There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed: hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared that the country was in the "endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic." Daily cases had hit record lows of about 8,000 a day in early February, down from a peak of nearly 100,000 cases a day in September.

But over the winter, as cases began creeping up, some politicians didn't pay attention — or perhaps didn't believe the coronavirus could return.

There have also been allegations that some politicians tried to suppress inconvenient news about rising case numbers.

Fewer positive results mean fewer confirmed infections and fewer deaths attributed to the coronavirus. India's total pandemic deaths this week crossed the 200,000 mark. But that's still lower than the overall death tolls in the United States, Brazil and Mexico, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

There are reasons why fewer Indians might die from COVID-19. India is a very young country. Only 6% of Indians are older than 65. More than half the population is under 25. They're more likely to survive the disease.

By analyzing total excess deaths – i.e., the difference between total deaths in Mumbai one year, compared with the year before — he estimates that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 would have to have been undercounted by at least two-thirds to account for the higher 2020 death tally.

Those calculations are based on data from Mumbai, India's richest major city, where access to health care is better than elsewhere. So the number of undercounted deaths could be even higher in less well-off parts of the country — such as in Santosh Pandey's village.

Scientists said recorded infections are even more of an underestimate. But they have a better idea of how much infections have been undercounted because they have serological data from random antibody tests that authorities conducted across large swaths of the country.

Results of a third national serological survey conducted in December and January showed that roughly a fifth of India's population had been exposed to the virus. That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.

She's a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who's designed models that show India's reported infections will peak in late May. She predicts India could be confirming as many as 1 million new cases a day and 4,500 daily deaths by then.

The institute's director, Chris Murray, told NPR that India may be detecting only 3% or 4% of its daily infections.

India's deaths in this latest wave would peak around the third week of May, according to the institute's model.

That could mean more shortages, fewer hospital beds and more tragedy on top of what India has already endured in recent weeks.

Poor grain harvests led to riots as far back as 1529 in the French city of Lyon. During the so-called Grande Rebeyne (Great Rebellion), thousands looted and destroyed the houses of rich citizens, eventually spilling the grain from the municipal granary onto the streets.

a group of economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of land development and that agricultural products should be highly priced.

In late April and May 1775, food shortages and high prices ignited an explosion of popular anger in the towns and villages of the Paris Basin.

The wave of popular protest became known as the Flour War.

A huge rise in population had occurred (there were 5-6 million more people in France in 1789 than in 1720) without a corresponding increase in native grain production.

As the monarch was required to ensure the food supply of his subjects, the king was nicknamed “le premier boulanger du royaume” (First Baker of the Kingdom).

in 1789 to foment rebellion against the crown, allegedly proposed several articles, the second of which was to “do everything in our power to ensure that the lack of bread is total, so that the bourgeoisie are forced to take up arms.” Shortly thereafter the Bastille was stormed.

the revolution did not end French anxiety over bread.

On October 21, 1789, a baker, Denis François, was accused of hiding loaves from sale as part of a plot to deprive the people of bread. Despite a hearing which proved him innocent, the crowd dragged François to the Place de Grève, hanged and decapitated him and made his pregnant wife kiss his bloodied lips.

Do not meddle with bread.

a slump in investment in oil wells, natural-gas hubs and coal mines. This is partly a hangover from the period of abundance, with years of overinvestment giving rise to more capital discipline.

A rule of thumb is that oil companies are supposed to allocate about four-fifths of their capital expenditure each year just to stopping their level of reserves from being depleted. Yet annual industry capex has fallen from $750bn in 2014 (when oil prices exceeded $100 a barrel) to an estimated $350bn this year

Oil crossed $81 a barrel after the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and allies such as Russia who are part of the OPEC+ alliance, resisted calls to increase output at a meeting on October 4th.

But it may at least accelerate the shift to greener—and cheaper—sources of energy.

result of growing pressures to decarbonise.

over the same period, the number of years’ worth of current production held in reserves in some of the world’s biggest projects has fallen from 50 to about 25

The industry would usually respond to robust demand and higher prices by investing to drill more oil. But that is harder in an era of decarbonisation.

big private-sector oil companies, such as ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, are being pressed by investors to treat oil and gas investments like week-old fish

shareholders reckon that demand for oil will eventually peak, making long-term projects uneconomic, or because they prefer to hold stakes in companies that support the transition to clean energy

Another factor inhibiting oil investment is the behaviour of OPEC+ countries. The half-decade of relatively low prices during the “age of abundance”, which reached its nadir with a price collapse at the start of the pandemic, g

utted state coffers. That cut funding for investment. As prices recover, governments’ priority is not to ex

pand oil-production capacity but to shore up national budgets.

Investment in thermal coal is weakest of all. Even in China and India, which have big pipelines of new coal-fired power plants, the mood has swung against the dirtiest fossil fuel.

All this places fossil-fuel producers in something of a bind. A slump in investment could enable some oil, gas and coal investors to make out like bandits. But the longer prices stay high, the more likely it becomes that the transition to clean energy ultimately buries the fossil-fuel industry. Consumers, in the meantime, must brace for more shortages.