Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

China has acknowledged for the first time that a “war” is taking place in Ukraine and appears to be holding back aviation supplies from Russia in signs that Beijing may be seeking to put a little distance between itself and Moscow.

In another indication of a shift in attitude, China has been easing government exchange rate controls to allow the Russian rouble to fall faster in value against the yuan to help protect Beijing from economic sanctions on Moscow.

“We hope to see fighting and the war stop as soon as possible,” Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said in a call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian. The remark, reported by state media, represents a shift in the party line, which had avoided the words “war” and “invasion”.

China’s economy is in trouble because its authoritarian demons are catching up with it and paralyzing the private sector.

China’s economy is in trouble because its growth model exhausted itself and entrenched power structures make it hard to shift gear.

Both are very powerful explanations rooted in well-established social scientific models - institutional economics and Keynesian macro, respectively.

Long a linchpin of Chinese trade in Europe, Germany is increasingly caught in the diplomatic tussle between the world’s two largest economies — wooed by China but urged by Washington to move further away from Beijing

These companies provide the majority of Germany’s economic output, according to some studies. They employ 60 percent of its workers, and make up 99 percent of its private sector — a higher percentage than in any industrialized nation in the world.

These companies, known in German as the “Mittelstand,” are struggling to create a model for the future, as the country’s socioeconomic order begins to falter under the weight of stalled modernization and ruptures in global politics.

what happens in an “economy in search of a political raison d’être,” as the historian Werner Abelshauser once described the postwar Federal Republic, if its GDP suddenly stops growing? We are about to find out.

Germany’s economy is running out of steam, and not only because of COVID or because Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned off the gas tap.

A recent poll shows that, notwithstanding this radical program, only 57 percent of Germans now say that they could never imagine voting for the AfD

Chinese authorities have been so proactive about regulating some uses of AI, especially those that allow the general public to create their own content, that compliance has become a major hurdle for the country’s companies.

As the use of AI explodes, regulators in Washington and around the world are trying to figure out how to manage potential threats to privacy, employment, intellectual property and even human existence itself.

But there are also concerns that putting any guardrails on the technology in the United States would surrender leadership in the sector to Chinese companies.

The timing of this Japan obsession was impeccable: It came at almost the exact moment Japan’s remarkable rise turned into a sustained decline in economic power. Here’s the ratio of Japan’s gross domestic product to America’s, adjusted for differences in purchasing power:

China has seemed to be faltering lately, and some have been asking whether China’s future path might resemble that of Japan.

My answer is that it probably won’t — that China will do worse. But to understand why I say that, you need to know something about what happened to Japan, which wasn’t at all the catastrophe I think many people imagine.

A.I. is coming for workers in every sector, no matter their academic pedigree or sartorial choices. Now the W.G.A. has delivered a gift to future union negotiators. It’s illuminated an approach to negotiating around technology, and demonstrated the ways in which a white-collar rank-and-file can leverage labor solidarity toward the shared benefit of both management and employees.

Union negotiators can point to this agreement when employers refuse to bargain over technology in good faith. Moreover, the language in this agreement can serve as a model for other workers and employers, union and nonunion, who agree that neither an outright ban nor unchecked use of A.I. would be a sensible way forward. Workers can pressure employers to use technology to augment rather than automate work, asserting that technology does more than just increase the size of labor’s slice. It enlarges the whole pie.

I prefer a more neutral phrase, which emphasizes that this ideology focuses on the role that groups play in society and draws on a variety of intellectual influences such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory: the “identity synthesis.”

There is a way to warn about these views on identity that is thoughtful yet firm, principled yet unapologetic.

The first step is to recognize that they constitute a novel ideology — one that, though it has wide appeal for serious reasons, is profoundly misguided.

Several major crypto firms have collapsed over the past year, but Bankman-Fried and his team were supposed to be the adults in the room, trying to legitimize crypto by rehabilitating its reputation as a stubbornly immature sector. But it turns out that there are no adults, and no room

the problem is more fundamental than losing a bit of money. Crypto was built on the idea that you shouldn’t have to trust banks with your money, that people should be able to hold it themselves, hopefully somewhere a little more secure than a mattress.

though you can still technically do that, there’s no guarantee that the value of your tokens won’t someday plummet to zero, thanks to the actions of a few rogue billionaires with outsize effects on the market.

Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished “state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in decades, its “zero Covid” reversal

the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.

On the campaign trail and in office, promising a new prosperity, Boris Johnson used to talk incessantly about “leveling up.” But the last dozen years of uninterrupted Tory rule have produced, in economic terms, something much more like a national flatlining.

It was only at the end of April that Russia cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, the first two victims of its energy-pressure campaign. But overall gas shipments are at less than one-third the level they were just a year ago. In mid-June, shipments through Nord Stream 1 were cut by 75 percent; in July, they were cut again.

“It is wartime,” Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia, told her colleague Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to Barack Obama, on an eye-opening recent episode of the podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange.”

I think there’s been a gradual and growing recognition that we are headed into the worst global energy crisis at least since the 1970s and perhaps longer than that.

Among the first things you likely heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was its size.The bill, signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday, makes $369 billion in climate and energy investments — by far the largest such investment in American history.

But there are several ways to measure the size of a bill, and given how high the country’s emissions targets are, even many of the I.R.A.’s supporters will openly concede that it is, on its own, inadequate

it is ultimately how much carbon we put into the atmosphere and not how much solar power we produce that determines the future of warming. But the power of carrots also just reflects some new realities: To simplify radically, a 90 percent reduction in the cost of solar power over the last decade means that the same amount of money now goes ten times as far.

It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years. The bill is estimated to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40 percent below their all-time high, getting the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.

Far less attention has been paid to the ideas that animate the IRA.

, the IRA makes a particularly interesting and all-encompassing wager—a bet relevant to anyone who plans to buy or sell something in the U.S. in the next decade, or who plans to trade with an American company, or who relies on American military power

When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness.

A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.

In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.

The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks. Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or a bonus in their paycheck.

Anthem, a large insurer now called Elevance Health, paid more to doctors who said their patients were sicker. And executives at UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest insurer, told their workers to mine old medical records for more illnesses — and when they couldn’t find enough, sent them back to try again.

Each of the strategies — which were described by the Justice Department in lawsuits against the companies — led to diagnoses of serious diseases that might have never existed.

Making computer chips requires a lot of advanced equipment. Much of that advanced equipment is made by American companies. The new rules from the Biden administration make it so that any company, anywhere in the world, using certain advanced American equipment to make chips can’t sell those chips to Chinese-controlled companies.

at the stroke of a pen, China is getting cut off from the kind of advanced chips it can’t manufacture on its own. Which will cripple both military progress and tech-sector progress, too.

in case there was any question, it is clear that China is being viewed as an adversary, and that that view is a bipartisan one. Any tech company with business in China would do well to note that any further investments are fraught with risk, and previous investments need to be diversified sooner rather than later.

The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.

The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”

ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies

Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses.

Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills

poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.

A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 reported that among an international cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described themselves as very worried about the climate and nearly half said the anxiety affects their daily functioning.

Since young people expect to live longer with climate-related crises than their parents will, “they feel grief in the face of what they’re losing,” Pinsky says.

Young survivors of weather-related disasters report high rates of PTSD, depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues.