I’ve been thinking of industries that are ripe for (human) domestic labor that contributes to the welfare of this country (infrastructure, gov’t tech updating and maintenance, green energy). I remember when I was visiting colleges myself and with siblings, many schools really pushed how important (and profitable) elderly care will be, and this pandemic has exposed how much room for improvement we have in this field and child care. I feel this is a point Biden needs to be hammering home.
Ambitious investments in child and elder care could boost labor supply enough to support 3 million new jobs
July 21, 2020 by Josh Bivens
“Key takeaways:
Today, the Biden campaign released a plan calling for $775 billion of investments in child and elder care over the next decade, a large increase over current levels.
Based on our research, such an investment would support 3 million new jobs and substantially help stem the erosion of women’s labor force participation in the United States relative to our advanced country peers.
These public investments would provide support that makes child and elder care more affordable for families while also providing a needed boost to the pay and training of the care workforce.
It has been apparent for years that the United States could benefit enormously from a large public investment in care work—including early child care education and elder care. A substantial investment in children would lead to a more productive workforce in the future, spurring large income gains. Investments in seniors would ensure that a decent and dignified retirement is available to all, a commitment that the United States has so far failed to sustain.
Crucially, both sorts of investment would greatly expand the opportunities for working-age adults to seek paid employment. It is well documented by now that the employment rate of prime-age (between 25 and 54 years old) U.S. adults (particularly women) has stagnated relative to our advanced country peers, and it is equally as well documented that the failure to invest in child and elder care is a key reason why.
This morning, the Biden campaign released a plan calling for a broad set of investments in child and elder care. Their plan would invest $775 billion over the next decade, a large increase over current levels. Such an investment would substantially help stem the erosion of women’s labor force participation in the United States relative to our advanced country peers. In 1990, for example, women’s prime-age labor force participation in the United States ranked 7th of 24 among the advanced economies with available data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By 2000, the United States had slipped to 16th of 35 OECD countries, while in 2019 our ranking was 30th of 35.
In an earlier paper, we noted that closing the gap in women’s labor force participation between the United States and its advanced country peers would lead to a gain of almost 5 million jobs. If an ambitious policy proposal—like the one proposed by the Biden campaign—could just halve that gap, then this would boost labor supply by roughly 2.5 million jobs.
In our earlier paper, we estimated the gains caused by a similar (but actually smaller) package of investments on just the child care and education side. These public investments would provide support that make this care and education more affordable for families while also providing a needed boost to the pay and training of the care workforce—a workforce that is dedicated but grievously underpaid relative to the importance of their work.
We found these policies would boost labor supply by nearly 2 million by themselves, drawing on work from Blau and Kahn (2013). Given that the Biden plan includes more generous child care and education subsidies as compared with the plan we evaluated, and given that it also includes substantial investments in elder care, we anticipate that the full labor supply boost caused by their plan could be closer to 3 million.
The potential labor supply gains by providing greater support for elder care are utterly enormous. For example, it has been shown that U.S. families provide nearly 34 billion hours of unpaid, personal work every year to provide care for older relatives. Any investment that allowed a nontrivial fraction of this work to be performed by professional care workers instead of unpaid family members would open up opportunities for these family members to search for jobs themselves.
It should be noted that many Republican policymakers are currently claiming they care deeply about the importance of spurring labor supply. This concern is the justification they often give for paring back the enhanced unemployment insurance (UI) benefits provided in the CARES Act passed in response to the economic shock of the coronavirus epidemic. But their stated concerns about the labor supply effects of these UI enhancements should not be taken seriously.
For one, in the near term, the number of jobs created in the U.S. economy will be entirely driven by labor demand, not supply. Evidence of this can be seen in the historically large job growth of the past two months, precisely when the extra $600 in weekly UI benefits was still available. In these past two months, even as enhanced UI benefits were available, an increase in labor demand (following the historic job losses of previous months) spurred historically rapid job growth (with 7.5 million jobs created in just two months), demonstrating conclusively that the constraint on job growth in this time was demand, not supply.
For another, boosting labor supply by impoverishing workers and chasing them back into any job that will take them in a depressed economy over the coming months would counteract the need to keep them safe and able to turn down work that might lead them to becoming vectors of spreading the virus. Given the recent explosion of new cases and virus spread, this is a real concern.
The appropriate time to worry about U.S. labor supply being a binding constraint on growth is in the long run after the virus is fully under control and the economy’s demand shortfall is in the past. And the way to boost labor supply in an effective and humane way is not to make the safety net as stingy as possible, but instead to make public investments that broaden the range of opportunities available for working-age adults. The Biden campaign’s commitment to making these investments is most welcome.”
Why Can’t Trump’s America Be Like Italy?
On the coronavirus, the “sick man of Europe” puts us to shame.
By Paul Krugman
A few days ago The New York Times published a long, damning article * about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn’t see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy’s experience.
Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.
We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s. On a typical recent day, more than 800 Americans but only around a dozen Italians died from Covid-19.
Although Donald Trump keeps boasting that we’ve had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy?
I don’t mean to peddle facile national stereotypes. For all its problems, Italy is a serious and sophisticated country, not a comic-opera stage set. Still, Italy entered this pandemic with major disadvantages compared with the United States.
After all, Italy’s bureaucracy isn’t famed for its efficiency, nor are its citizens known for their willingness to follow rules. The nation’s government is deeply in debt, and this debt matters because Italy doesn’t have its own currency; this means that it can’t do what we do, and print lots of money in a crisis.
Unfavorable demography and economic troubles are also major Italian disadvantages. The ratio of seniors to working-age adults is the highest in the Western world. Italy’s growth record is deeply disappointing: Per capita G.D.P. has stagnated for two decades.
When it came to dealing with Covid-19, however, all these Italian disadvantages were outweighed by one huge advantage: Italy wasn’t burdened with America’s disastrous leadership.
After a terrible start, Italy quickly moved to do what was necessary to deal with the coronavirus. It instituted a very severe lockdown, and kept to it. Government aid helped sustain workers and businesses through the lockdown. The safety net had holes in it, but top officials tried to make it work; in a supreme case of non-Trumpism, the prime minister even apologized for delays in aid.
And, crucially, Italy crushed the curve: It kept the lockdown in place until cases were relatively few, and it was cautious about reopening.
America could have followed the same path. In fact, the Covid-19 trajectory in the Northeast, which was hard-hit in the beginning but took the outbreak seriously, actually does look a lot like Italy’s.
But the Trump administration and its allies pushed for rapid reopening, ignoring warnings from epidemiologists. Because we didn’t do what Italy did, we didn’t crush the curve; quite the opposite. Matters were made worse by pathological opposition to things like wearing masks, the way even obvious precautions became battlegrounds in the culture wars.
So cases and then deaths surged. Even the promised economic payoff from rapid, what-me-worry reopening was a mirage: many states are reimposing partial lockdowns, and there is growing evidence that the jobs recovery is stalling, if not going into reverse.
Incredibly, Trump and his allies seem to have given no thought at all about what to do if the overwhelming view of experts was right, and their gamble on ignoring the coronavirus didn’t pan out. A miraculous boom was Plan A; there was no Plan B.
In particular, tens of millions of workers are about to lose crucial unemployment benefits, and Republicans haven’t even settled on a bad response. On Wednesday Senate Republicans floated the idea of reducing supplemental benefits from $600 a week to just $100, which would spell disaster for many families.
For someone like Trump, all this must be humiliating — or would be if anyone dared tell him about it. After three and a half years of Making America Great Again, we’ve become a pathetic figure on the world stage, a cautionary tale about pride going before a fall.
These days Americans can only envy Italy’s success in weathering the coronavirus, its rapid return to a kind of normalcy that is a distant dream in a nation that used to congratulate itself for its can-do culture. Italy is often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”; what does that make us?
Chinese mainland reports 21 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 21 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, 6 from overseas and 15 domestically transmitted, according to the National Health Commission on Friday.
Of the 15 domestically-transmitted cases, 13 are in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 2 others in Liaoning Province.
Of the 6 cases from overseas, 1 was reported in Shanghai and 5 others in Guangdong Province.
No deaths related to the disease were reported Thursday, while 18 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Spain’s Coronavirus Crisis Accelerated as Warnings Went Unheeded
The Spanish epidemic has become a painful example of the tendency of one government after another to ignore the experiences of countries where the virus has already struck.
By Raphael Minder
As Japan Nears 1,000 Daily Coronavirus Infections, It Shies From Restrictions
Case numbers are climbing fast, with virus clusters in nursing homes, schools and elsewhere. But fingers are being pointed at Japan’s so-called hostess bars.
By Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida
Quick Reminder: Casey Mulligan Argued that a Main Factor Pushing Unemployment Higher in the Great Recession Was Food Stamps
By Dean Baker
This is worth keeping in mind when reading a New York Times article * discussing Republican plans to cut the weekly $600 supplement to unemployment insurance benefits. The piece cites Mulligan as a conservative economist who argues that this supplement is discouraging people from working and therefore keeping unemployment high. In this context, it is worth remembering that Mulligan made the same argument ** about the high unemployment in the Great Recession.
The institutional difference in these healthcare systems needs to be recognized and understood, no matter the prejudice fostered against the Cuban system. The Dominican Republic after all has been the fastest growing country in the Americas in GDP per capita since 1970.
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 57,615)
Deaths ( 1,006)
59,077+1,4621,036
Deaths per million ( 95)
A weighted lottery gives everyone a chance at a drug or vaccine in short supply. But some have a better shot than others.
When a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, who should get it first?
A preliminary plan devised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this spring gives priority to health care workers, then to people with underlying medical conditions and older people. The C.D.C. has not yet decided whether the next in line should be Blacks and Latinos, groups disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.
But let’s suppose that health care workers and people with underlying medical conditions use up the first doses of the available vaccine. Should some be held in reserve for Black and Latino people? What about bus drivers and train conductors? Perhaps teachers or schoolchildren should get it so they can return to classrooms with peace of mind.
If shortages happen, most of the nation will have no chance to get the initial lots of a vaccine under the C.D.C.’s plan. And as the United States combats a soaring number of coronavirus cases, rising demand for drugs and maybe ventilators is expected. They, too, will need a fair system of distribution.
One solution that is starting to attract the attention of public health experts is a so-called weighted lottery, which gives everyone a chance at access, although some get a better shot than others.
Doctors and ethicists rank patients, deciding which groups should be given preference and how much. First-responders, for example, may be weighted more heavily than, say, very sick patients who are unlikely to recover.
The goal is to prevent haphazard or inequitable distribution of a treatment or vaccine when there isn’t enough to go around. Such a system has already been used in allocations of remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the coronavirus. …
Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds
The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks.
By Apoorva Mandavilli
Idriss Z
Impressive. Thanks.
There’s been tremendous downward pressure on wages at these facilities. There will be attempts to make the working class pay for any improvements when the increased costs should fall to capitalism since capitalists are the ones being subsidized.
Trump Administration Is Bypassing Arms Control Pact to Sell Large Armed Drones
The move has been opposed internally by arms control officials and lawmakers trying to limit the proliferation of such drones, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
By Edward Wong
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Friday that it would allow the sale of advanced armed drones to other nations and bypass part of an international weapons export control agreement that the United States helped forge more than three decades ago….
My experience with child is that people get rational very quickly once they get into it. What at first seems like terrible pricing starts to seem fair, but questions of its net worth get more serious. Right now I don’t sense a serious child care problem in the US really. The costs are high but fair. The market offer isn’t out of balance with customers who actually are doing more than kicking tires. Child care is a pretty normal business. If the current providers insist on very high margins, new providers will and do enter. If the new entrants convince parents of their quality, pricing moderates and more parents look to buy. Owners who are smart and work hard get rich. That’s good really.
Absolutely agree Ken, I wish it wasn’t as tough a sell as it is because it makes sense in the long run psychologically. All the corporate interests have to do is apply all of the logic that side of the aisle is using to argue for opening schools and apply it to Pre-K and younger for working families.
Which gets us to Eric’s point, I’ll take your word about the pricing being fair but the fact that pricing is above what an average family can reasonably afford hurts our communities. If the corporations want American parents to work the hours they currently work resulting in the profits the corporations and markets currently enjoy, then a small slice of that should go to subsidizing child care for those that can’t afford it so that the future generations are healthier and more productive. If you want a completely capitalist analysis, human capital requires different investment from traditional capital and child care is an essential investment. It doesn’t matter about the fairness of the price if the people that need it can’t afford it.
I agree that fair child care pricing comes as a shock to a lot of potential customers. But I think directly subsidizing paid child care is a poor approach. Better simply to decide how much support families might get and cut families a check. If a family buys a service or not really is a complicated decision. My family bought both day care center services and then in-home care, with all the payroll charges, but I can’t think of a good reason to not support families that sacrifice outside income potential entirely to provide the “traditional” care of an at home parent. Don’t give providers money and don’t give it families only if they purchase care. Let families decide across the full spectrum of care options and keep the commercial care providers working hard for the business.
Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus Vaccine
Well-timed stock bets have generated big profits for senior executives and board members at companies developing vaccines and treatments.
1- “I agree that fair child care pricing comes as a shock to a lot of potential customers. But I think directly subsidizing paid child care is a poor approach.”
IZ- Again, not trying to look at this in a bubble. On the child care front, we have two dual crises we are trying to solve: 1- in an economic downturn many average families cannot afford quality child care which has a negative effect on the children, families, and communities; 2- a massive unemployment rate, but somehow this is an industry that needs (competent) more supply, yet somehow, there are not enough desirable jobs and adequate training to fill demand.
“Crucially, both sorts of investment would greatly expand the opportunities for working-age adults to seek paid employment. It is well documented by now that the employment rate of prime-age (between 25 and 54 years old) U.S. adults (particularly women) has stagnated relative to our advanced country peers, and it is equally as well documented that the failure to invest in child and elder care is a key reason why.”
2- ” Better simply to decide how much support families might get and cut families a check. If a family buys a service or not really is a complicated decision. My family bought both day care center services and then in-home care, with all the payroll charges, but I can’t think of a good reason to not support families that sacrifice outside income potential entirely to provide the “traditional” care of an at home parent.”
IZ- That’s just a stimulus check, which is what they’re currently doing, no? I gave you a few examples in my last post why more income brackets need access to quality child care. The support that “families that sacrifice outside income potential” get is that they don’t pay for the child care… I also am unsure if you understand how off your characterization is- they’re not sacrificing out of a familal preference, they are sacrificing that income because they don’t have a real choice because we do not have enough quality child care.
In our earlier paper, we estimated the gains caused by a similar (but actually smaller) package of investments on just the child care and education side. These public investments would provide support that make this care and education more affordable for families while also providing a needed boost to the pay and training of the care workforce—a workforce that is dedicated but grievously underpaid relative to the importance of their work.”
3- “Don’t give providers money and don’t give it families only if they purchase care. Let families decide across the full spectrum of care options and keep the commercial care providers working hard for the business.”
IZ- These economic papers give you a few decades of evidence that this idea doesn’t work. Do you have any metrics that show why you’re idea will work? Serious question. At some point we need to take theoretical debates out of theory. I’m sorry for being blunt, but your ideas do not, have not, and will not work because (a) this is an economic downturn, (b) labor in this field is underpaid and undertrained so there is no incentive for commercial care providers at lower income levels to “work” hard and the work given at current wages is not enough, (c) the pandemic means that there are extra costs to providing this service which, if not subsidized, will certainly take more people out of it, (d), the magnitude and importance is unclear as we do not know when schools will be reopening, (e) the Biden plan allows for different subsidization based on localities and how severe their problem is, yours ignores area-specific issues and differences.,, etc, etc… (see below)
“For one, in the near term, the number of jobs created in the U.S. economy will be entirely driven by labor demand, not supply. Evidence of this can be seen in the historically large job growth of the past two months, precisely when the extra $600 in weekly UI benefits was still available. In these past two months, even as enhanced UI benefits were available, an increase in labor demand (following the historic job losses of previous months) spurred historically rapid job growth (with 7.5 million jobs created in just two months), demonstrating conclusively that the constraint on job growth in this time was demand, not supply.
For another, boosting labor supply by impoverishing workers and chasing them back into any job that will take them in a depressed economy over the coming months would counteract the need to keep them safe and able to turn down work that might lead them to becoming vectors of spreading the virus. Given the recent explosion of new cases and virus spread, this is a real concern.
The appropriate time to worry about U.S. labor supply being a binding constraint on growth is in the long run after the virus is fully under control and the economy’s demand shortfall is in the past. And the way to boost labor supply in an effective and humane way is not to make the safety net as stingy as possible, but instead to make public investments that broaden the range of opportunities available for working-age adults. “
In August 2019 and before the first case of COVID, the 30 year German bond offered a less than negative 0.25 percent in interest payments.
Something was seriously amiss globally before the pandemic. And that something was cumulative un-repayableGerman, Euro and global debt. Central Banks pushing on the thinnest of strings is the appropriate verbiage.
The deterministic sudden crash devaluation of global equities, commodities, gold, silver, and cryptocurrenciesover the next five trading days – which, if reviewed, will elevate asset-debt macroeconomics to a patterned science – isprincipally due to that accumulated un-repayable debt – not a virus.
From a US-centric point of view, 38 years of a Volcker-less Federal Reserve Central Bank and 25 years of a Perot-lessNAFTA global expansion policy has led the US to where it is – without sufficient toilet paper and government-providedUS mass-produced masks.
Quick Reminder: Insider Trading Does not Maximize Shareholder Value
By Dean Baker
The New York Times had an interesting piece * on how top executives and corporate board members at drug companies working on coronavirus vaccines and treatments are cashing out options and selling stock just after big announcements of contracts or progress in research. While there are no explicit allegations, the implication is that many of these sales are based on inside information.
It is widely asserted in policy circles, especially by those on the left, that corporations are being run to maximize shareholder value. I have argued ** that corporations are actually being run to maximize the pay of top executives and pointed to the historically low returns to shareholders in the last two decades. If insider trading is in fact a major phenomena, it is hard to argue that companies are being run to maximize returns to shareholders, since insider trading effectively means top executives are stealing from the companies they run.
Thanks for all the above articles and info, always appreciated. On the insider trading issue I think whether SVM or corporate pay is the dominant regime depends on the industry. I mean, I think that’s a natural result from shareholder activism and corporate raiding. The winner in court and board battles determines whether the issue we face in that specific industry. If there is parity among top shareholders then profiting from insider trading becomes incredibly difficult. If one entity is the dominant owner then the oversight will be minimal and self-enrichment aplenty.
If there is parity among top shareholders then profiting from insider trading becomes incredibly difficult. If one entity is the dominant owner then the oversight will be minimal and self-enrichment aplenty.
[ Importantly so, however top shareholders are often passive funds along with active and managing shareholders. Active shareholders can and do point to standards to support positions, such as on pay levels for top management. ]
The feeling is mutual, and I am very grateful for the one stop shop for pertinent data. I think Robert Reich is one of the Left who blame a lot of it on SVM theory, he cites an MIT/NYU finding that “from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.”
But I think your point is much more prescient. As Jeff Ubben said ““Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximized their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back … There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right.” So where do people go from there? It seems insider trading is the obvious answer as the owners become passive (or retiring), looking for other opportunities. Moreover, it is a serious issue because of ethical rot, if they’re willing to cut those corners, the other corners cut will be much less “victim-less.” https://www.ft.com/content/eaa28471-e295-44a9-a138-dda047db6d1c
When Bosses Shared the Profits
TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2020 by Robert Reich https://robertreich.org/post/623663886645837824
After the bruising crises we’re now going through, it would be wonderful if we could somehow emerge a fairer nation. One possibility is to revive an old idea: sharing the profits.
The original idea for businesses to share profits with workers emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In December 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers, thereby “fostering the development of a larger spirit of harmony and cooperation, and resulting, incidentally, in greater efficiency and larger gains.”
That same year, Sears, Roebuck and Co., one of America’s largest corporations, with 30,000 to 40,000 employees, announced a major experiment in profit-sharing. The company would contribute 5 percent of net earnings, without deduction of dividends to shareholders, into a profit-sharing fund. (Eventually the company earmarked 10 percent of pretax earnings for the plan.) Employees who wished to participate would contribute 5 percent of their salaries. All would be invested in shares of Sears stock. The plan’s purpose, according to The New York Times, was to “to engender loyalty and harmony between employer and employee.” In reviewing its first three years, The Times noted that 92 percent of Sears’s employees had joined up and that “the participating employee not only found an ever-increasing sum of money to his credit, but eventually discovered he was a shareholder in the corporation, with a steadily growing amount of stock to his name.”
Sears’s plan was admirably egalitarian. Distributions of shares were based on years of service, not rank, and the longest-serving workers received nearly $3 for every dollar they contributed. By the 1950s, Sears workers owned a quarter of the company. By 1968, the typical Sears salesman could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, S.C. Johnson, Hallmark Cards and U.S. Steel — some because it seemed morally right, others because it seemed a means to higher productivity.
Profit-sharing did give workers an incentive to be more productive. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions, because payroll costs dropped as profits did. But it subjected workers to the risk that when profits were down, their paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, they’d lose all their investments in it. (Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.) The best profit-sharing plans came in the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wished, on top of predictable base wages.
Profit-sharing fit perfectly with the evolution of the American corporation. By the 1950s, most employees of large companies had spent their entire working lives with the company. Companies and their employees were rooted in the same communities. C.E.O.s typically worked their way up, and once at the top rarely earned more than 20 times the average wage of their employees (now they’re often paid more than 300 times more). Over a third of private-sector workers were unionized. In 1958 the United Auto Workers demanded that the nation’s automakers share their profits with their workers.
Some remnants of profit-sharing remain today. Both Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture maker in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Lincoln Electric Company, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of welding equipment, tie major portions of annual wages to profits. Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif.
But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same.
This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of profit-sharing with top executives and “talent.” Big Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private-equity funds began doling out bonuses, stock and stock options to lure and keep the people they wanted. They were soon followed by high-tech companies, movie studios and start-ups of all kinds.
Even before tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and incomes in the current pandemic, the pay of the typical worker had barely risen since the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, ever-greater wealth continues to concentrate at the very top.
Since 2000, the portion of total national income going to American workers has dropped farther than in other rich nations. A steadily larger portion has gone into corporate profits, which have been reflected in higher share prices. But a buoyant stock market doesn’t help most Americans. The richest 1 percent now own half the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent, 92 percent.
Those higher share prices have come out of the pockets of workers. Daniel Greenwald at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Martin Lettau at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and Sydney Ludvigson at N.Y.U. found that from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.
Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty.
If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904.
There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees.
It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few.”
As Jeff Ubben said ““Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximized their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back … There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right.”
The key contradiction is the idea that you combat something with extremely high externality (*infectious* disease) by letting people make free decisions based on the estimate of their own welfare only. It cannot work. And it is not working.
The key contradiction is the idea that you combat something with extremely high externality (*infectious* disease) by letting people make free decisions based on the estimate of their own welfare only. It cannot work. And it is not working.
Anne it can’t work. You can’t expect one generation of corporate leadership to respect the deals made by a previous generation of corportate leadership. To expect self-interest to lead to fairness is wishful thinking. What can be done is to tax more and distribute the funds raised as a national dividend.
I am also thinking that we need to change company law. I have toying with the idea of forbidden companies (after all companies are devined by law) from buying voting shares in other companies. Only individuals should be allowed to do that.
WASHINGTON — On the second Friday in June, a group of political operatives, former government and military officials, and academics quietly convened online for what became a disturbing exercise in the fragility of American democracy.
The group, which included Democrats and Republicans, gathered to game out possible results of the November election, grappling with questions that seem less far-fetched by the day: What if President Trump refuses to concede a loss, as he publicly hinted recently he might do? How far could he go to preserve his power? And what if Democrats refuse to give in?
“All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse,” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Defense Department official who co-organized the group known as the Transition Integrity Project. She described what they found in bleak terms: “The law is essentially … it’s almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”
Using a role-playing game that is a fixture of military and national security planning, the group envisioned a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, one in which Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it.
If it sounds paranoid or outlandish — a war room of seasoned politicos and constitutional experts playing a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons in which the future of the republic hangs in the balance — they get it. But, as they finalize a report on what they learned and begin briefing elected officials and others, they insist their warning is serious: A close election this fall is likely to be contested, and there are few guardrails to stop a constitutional crisis, particularly if Trump flexes the considerable tools at his disposal to give himself an advantage.
“He doesn’t have to win the election,” said Nils Gilman, a historian who leads research at a think tank called the Berggruen Institute and was an organizer of the exercise. “He just has to create a plausible narrative that he didn’t lose.”
The very existence of a group like this one, which was formed late last year, underscores the extent of the fear in Washington’s political circles — and beyond — that Trump will take the same hammer he has used to fracture the norms of executive governance over the past three years and upend the nation’s delicate tradition of orderly political transitions of power by refusing to concede if he loses.
“We have norms in our transition, rather than laws,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Foundation, who was not part of the game. “This entire election season is something a democracy expert would worry about.”
It is a fear that has been stoked by the president himself, who has repeatedly warned, without offering evidence, of widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots — which voters are likely to use at unprecedented levels because the pandemic has made in-person voting a potential health risk — to cast doubt on the results of November’s election.
“I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace last Sunday. When asked if he would accept the election results, he said: “I’ll have to see.”
Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has taken to issuing foreboding warnings of his own. “This president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work — they’re not real, they’re not fair,” he said at a fund-raiser on Thursday night. He has also mused publicly about Trump having to be escorted, forcibly if need be, from the White House.
That happened in one of the four scenarios the Transition Integrity Project gamed out, according to summaries of the exercises provided to The Boston Globe. But constitutional experts — and the game play — was less focused on the possibility of a cinematic, militarized intervention on Inauguration Day, which is a possibility many still consider remote, than the room the Constitution appears to leave for a disastrous and difficult transition if the incumbent does not accept a loss.
“How well is our constitutional legal system designed to deal with an incumbent president who insists that he won an election but for the presence of fraud?” said Lawrence Douglas, a professor at Amherst College who has written a book on what would happen if Trump took such a stand. “And I think the rather unfortunate answer is our system is not well designed at all to deal with that problem,” said Douglas, who was not involved in the game.
Brooks got the seed of the idea for the Transition Integrity Project after a dinner where a federal judge and a corporate lawyer each told her they were convinced the military or the Secret Service would have to escort Trump out of office if he lost the election and would not concede. Brooks wasn’t so sure. She and Gilman decided to turn the Washington parlor game into an actual exercise; they held an early meeting in Washington, with about 25 people, in December.
“When we started talking about this we got a lot of reactions — oh, you guys are so paranoid, don’t be ridiculous, this isn’t going to happen,” Brooks said.
Two things have happened since then: Trump has displayed increased willingness to challenge mail-in ballots, and his administration has deployed federal forces to quell protests in front of the White House and in Portland, Ore., and has threatened to do so in other cities.
“That has really shaken people,” Brooks said. “What was really a fringe idea has now become an anxiety that’s pretty widely shared.”
Brooks, Gilman, and others recruited a slate of players including a former swing state governor, a former White House chief of staff, and a former head of the Department of Homeland Security. They invited both Democrats and Republicans who they knew had concerns about Trump’s comments on the election; nearly 80 people in all were involved. The Republicans were described by participants as “never Trump” or “not Trump Republicans.”
They played using the so-called Chatham House Rules — in which participants can discuss what was said, but not who was there; some participants were willing to be named. They included Republicans Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky secretary of state, and conservative commentator Bill Kristol, as well as Democrats Leah Daughtry, who was CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Convention Committees, former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, and progressive Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson.
The game was elaborate. The participants took on the roles of the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign, relevant government officials, and the media —generally, Democrats played Democrats and Republicans played Republicans — and used a 10-sided die to determine whether a team succeeded in its attempted moves. The games are not meant to be predictive; rather, they are supposed to give people a sense of possible consequences in complex scenarios.
Each scenario involved a different election outcome: An unclear result on Election Day that looked increasingly like a Biden win as more ballots were counted; a clear Biden win in the popular vote and the Electoral College; an Electoral College win for Trump with Biden winning the popular vote by 5 percentage points; and a narrow Electoral College and popular vote victory for Biden.
In the scenarios, the team playing the Trump campaign often questioned the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which often boosted Biden as they came in — shutting down post offices, pursuing litigation, and using right-wing media to amplify narratives about a stolen election.
To some participants, the game was a stark reminder of the power of incumbency.
“The more demonstrations there were, the more demands for recounts, the more legal challenges there were, the more funerals for democracy were held, the more Trump came across as the candidate of stability,” said Edward Luce, the US editor of the Financial Times, who played the role of a mainstream media reporter during one of the simulations. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
In multiple scenarios, officials on both sides homed in on narrowly decided swing states with divided governments, such Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, hoping to persuade officials there to essentially send two different results to Congress. If a state’s election is disputed, a legislature controlled by one party and governor of another each could send competing slates of electors backing their party’s candidate.
Both sides turned out massive street protests that Trump sought to control — in one scenario he invoked the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to use military forces to quell unrest. The scenario that began with a narrow Biden win ended with Trump refusing to leave the White House, burning government documents, and having to be escorted out by the Secret Service. (The team playing Biden in that scenario, meanwhile, sought to patch things up with Republicans by appointing moderate Republican governors, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, to Cabinet positions.)
The scenario that produced the most contentious dynamics, however, was the one in which Trump won the Electoral College — and thus, the election — but Biden won the popular vote by 5 percentage points. Biden’s team retracted his Election Night concession, fueled by Democrats angry at losing yet another election despite capturing the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016. In the mock election, Trump sought to divide Democrats — at one point giving an interview to The Intercept, a left-leaning news outlet, saying Senator Bernie Sanders would have won if Democrats had nominated him. Meanwhile, Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made.
That scenario seemed highly far-fetched, but it envisioned a situation in which both sides may have incentives to contest the election.
“There is a narrative among activists in both parties that the loss must be illegitimate,” he said.
According to the Constitution, the presidency ends at noon on Jan. 20, at which point the newly inaugurated president becomes the commander in chief.
The games, ultimately, were designed to explore how difficult it could be to get there.
“The Constitution really has been a workable document in many respects because we have had people who more or less adhered to a code of conduct,” said retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, a Republican and former chief of staff to Colin Powell who participated in games as an observer. “That seems to no longer to be the case. That changes everything.”
You can’t expect one generation of corporate leadership to respect the deals made by a previous generation of corporate leadership. To expect self-interest to lead to fairness is wishful thinking. What can be done is to tax more and distribute the funds raised as a national dividend.
I am also thinking that we need to change company law. I have toying with the idea of forbidding companies (after all companies are defined by law) from buying voting shares in other companies. Only individuals should be allowed to do that.
Some of the president’s opponents fear that he’ll refuse
to leave the White House if he loses the election. Here’s why.
… If Biden were to notch a narrow victory, Trump could look to contest the results and claim he’d actually won. He could put the military and other tools of presidential power in an awkward spot, pressuring them to pick sides and untangle competing claims about who won. A supine Justice Department led by Attorney General William Barr might bolster Trump’s claims by putting out statements that the vote was tainted.
“It’s really hard for anyone in the military, at any level, to say anything other than ‘Yes, sir.’ They’re not lawyers,” Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration and a professor at Georgetown Law, told me.
The potential for chaos exposes the frailties of an electoral tradition that depends on the goodwill of the two candidates involved. If one won’t cooperate, the system seizes up. The nation survived a couple of scares, but only because the loser was willing to fold. In 2000, Al Gore conceded the race when a divided Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida, locking in George W. Bush’s narrow victory. When he bowed out, Gore ended his career in elective politics, a gesture that Trump might not be so quick to emulate. …
Trump’s political career is the story of norms upended. He’s denigrated war heroes and sparred with Gold Star families. Would he honor one of the nation’s most precious norms—the peaceful transfer of power—if it meant admitting failure?
When the fateful moment arrives, Trump would need to accept the same sobering reality that Gore absorbed: He lost. What some in Washington ask is whether he’d be in denial. …
Brooks, the Georgetown Law professor and former Obama official, is helping lead an informal bipartisan group called the Transition Integrity Project that is looking to ensure the election and potential transition go smoothly. More than 60 people are involved, including former governors and Cabinet secretaries. They’re planning to meet on Zoom in the next few weeks and hold “tabletop” exercises meant to think through various scenarios: a narrow Trump defeat, a clear Trump victory, and a resounding Biden victory among them. They’ll game out what might happen if Trump and his supporters use social media to intimidate the election workers tallying votes, or if he refuses to leave in the event of defeat, among other possibilities …
Coronavirus ravaged Florida, as Ron DeSantis sidelined scientists and followed Trump
By Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Isaac Stanley-Becker, Lori Rozsa and Josh Dawsey – Washington Post
More Thoughts on the Post-Pandemic Economy
What are the chances and risks facing us in the current economic crisis?
By Dean Baker
I have written before * on the post-pandemic economy and how it should actually provide enormous opportunities, but it is worth clarifying a few points. First and most importantly, there is an important measurement issue with GDP that people will need to appreciate.
It is often said that GDP is not a good measure of well-being, we see this in a very big way in the post-pandemic period. It is likely that many of the changes in behaviour forced by the pandemic, first and foremost telecommuting, will be enduring.
Most immediately, this will show up as a sharp drop in GDP. We will be consuming much less of the goods and services associated with commuting to and from work. This means that we will be driving less. That means we will be buying less gas and needing fewer cars, car parts, and care repair services. We’ll also need less auto insurance. In addition, there will be many fewer taxi or Uber trips, as well as trips on buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation.
There is also an economy built up around serving the people working in downtown office buildings. This includes the offices themselves and the people who service and clean them. There are also the restaurants, gyms, and other businesses that serve the people who come into the city to work each day. And, there are all the items that people have to spend money on for office work, such as business clothes and shoes and dry-cleaning services.
We will see a huge reduction in demand in all these areas if much of the work being done on-line stays on-line. We will also see less business travel, which means fewer air plane trips, taxi rides, and stays in hotels.
This fall into demand will translate into a large loss of GDP, but it translates into very little by way of real loss in well-being. This doesn’t mean there will not be some loss. People may miss seeing work colleagues on a daily basis, or the opportunity to meet up with friends for lunch near the office. Some people may actually enjoy business travel. But the drop in GDP will dwarf whatever losses of these sorts people may feel, and in most cases they will be offset by gains, such as not having to spend two hours a day commuting and having more time to spend with friends and family.
So, let’s say that we see GDP drop by 3.0 percent ($660 billion a year), how should we think about this? (This is a very crude guess, not a careful calculation) On its face, that would look like a very severe downturn. In the Great Recession, GDP only fell by 4.0 percent from peak to trough, so this looks like a very serious hit to the economy.
But that really misses the story. To take an analogous situation, let’s say for some reason, such as better diet, more exercise, or an act of god, everyone’s health got hugely better. Imagine that we could have the same outcomes in terms of life expectancy and quality of overall health using half as many health care services. This would mean half as many doctors’ visits, surgeries, MRIs, prescription drugs and everything else in health care that costs money.
This reduction in health care consumption would mean a drop in GDP of more than 8.5 percent, yet everyone’s health would be just as good as it had been previously. In this story, no one in their right mind would be concerned about the loss of GDP, what we value is health, not the number of times we see a doctor or the amount of drugs we take. The decline in the resources needed to maintain our health is effectively an increase in productivity. We have seen a jump of 8.5 percent in the level of productivity, as we can get the same output as we had previously, with 8.5 percent fewer inputs. ** In other words, we are much richer as a result of this remarkable improvement in the public’s health.
We should think about my hypothesized savings of 3.0 percent of GDP on work-related expenses the same way. We had been expending a large amount of resources to maintain an office work system that is no longer needed. This is effectively a huge jump in productivity. By comparison, over the last 15 years productivity growth has averaged just 1.3 percent annually.
This matters hugely in how we think about the post-pandemic economy. If we look at the lost GDP associated with fewer work-related expenses we would think that the economy is really suffering. However, if we think of this as a big jump in productivity, then it effectively means that we have extra resources to address long-neglected social needs.
And, these resources should be readily visible in the form of all the workers who are no longer employed in restaurants, gyms, dry cleaners, or the making, servicing, or driving of cars. These are people who can be instead employed providing child care, senior care, doing energy audits of buildings, installing solar panels and energy conserving appliances, or other tasks that address neglected needs.
As I have pointed out before, we need not think that every person who lost their job waiting tables will get a job installing solar panels or as a child care provider. That’s not the way the labour market works. People in fact switch jobs frequently. In a normal pre-pandemic economy more than 5.5 million people lose or leave their job every month. If we create jobs in installing solar panels, energy audits, and child care, people will leave other jobs to fill these newly created positions, which can leave openings for laid off restaurant and hotel workers to again get jobs in hotels and restaurants, as well as other sectors.
The fact that we have a large number of idle workers, because of this effective jump in productivity, means that we should not be shy about large amounts of government spending to address these unmet needs, even though it will mean large budget deficits. For the near-term future, we will not have to worry about deficits creating too much demand in the economy and causing inflation. In the longer term, excessive demand and the resulting inflation can be a problem, which will require addressing the factors that redistribute so much money upward (e.g. patent and copyright monopolies, a corrupt corporate governance structure, and a bloated financial sector), but that will not be a problem as we recover from the recession.
If we do let obsessions with government deficits and debt curtail spending, then we can expect to see a long and harsh recession. To set up the analogy, suppose there were a 3.0 percent jump in productivity, but there was no increase in workers’ real wages. Assume all the money went to higher corporate profits. Since profits have little relationship to investment, there is no reason to expect any notable increase in investment. Let’s assume that consumption spending out of dividends and share buybacks is limited.
In this case, the economy can produce the same output with 3 percent fewer workers, meaning that 4.8 million people will be out of jobs. And, that situation can persist for a long period of time, since there is nothing inherent to the workings of the economy to bring us back to full employment.
That would really be a disaster story, especially if the correct figure for this implicit jump in productivity is something more like 5 percent, or even more. The key to preventing this sort of disaster is to understand that the reduced spending on work-related expenses is effectively an increase in productivity.
And, we also have to recognize that when we have a serious problem of unemployment, the failure to run large deficits is incredibly damaging to the country. Millions of workers will needlessly suffer, as will their family. And the failure is increased when it means not spending in areas that will have long-term benefits for the country, like child care and slowing global warming. It is tragic that deficit hawks are able to do so much harm to our children under the guise of saving our children.
** For those being technical, I am not using “productivity” precisely here. A reduction equal to 8.5 percent of GDP in the value of goods or services devoted to health care, does not necessarily mean that the amount of labour used in the health care sector has fallen by an amount equal to 8.5 percent of the economy’s annual labour usage. But I’m ignoring this point for now.
Similarly, the different experiences of Cuba and Dominican Republic in dealing with the spread of the coronavirus reflects a difference in the healthcare systems that is profound. This, even though Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the Americas since 1970.
The unfortunate way in which Israel went from control of the coronavirus to a general spread of infections, by opening business and schools with little caution.
When Is a Coronavirus Test Not a Coronavirus Test?
If it takes 12 days to get results, it’s basically pointless.
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Desperate to continue the tradition of a family beach week, I hatched a plan that would allow some mask- and sanitizer-enhanced semblance of normality.
We hadn’t seen my two 20-something children in months. They’d spent the lockdown in Brooklyn; one of them most likely had the disease in late March, before testing was widely available. My mother had died of Covid-19 in May.
So a few weeks ago I rented a cute house on the Delaware shore. It had a screened-in front porch and a little cottage out back, in case someone needed to quarantine.
I asked my son, who had participated in several protests and had been at a small outdoor July 4 gathering, to get tested before he came. Testing had been recommended by the governor and the mayor, and many centers were offering an anticipated 48-hour turnaround.
He got one and downloaded the app for results. And waited. And waited. And waited. For 12 days….
A couple of months ago, before the great reopening disaster, I did several interviews in which I was asked about the tradeoff between the economy and fighting the pandemic. I answered that there was no tradeoff; you can't recover until you beat the virus. 1/
A couple of months ago, before the great reopening disaster, I did several interviews in which I was asked about the tradeoff between the economy and fighting the pandemic. I answered that there was no tradeoff; you can’t recover until you beat the virus. 1/
12:31 PM · Jul 26, 2020
But that seemed impossible for the interviewers to process: each time they would come back with, “Yes, but how should we make the tradeoff between the economy and fighting the pandemic?” 2/
But there really isn’t a tradeoff. The US is now lagging behind other countries that didn’t rush to reopen 3/
As for testing, China published the genetic code for Covid-19 on January 11 and within a few days tests were developed by the World Health Organization and Germany and China. With South Korea coming on a little later. Failure of the US to develop a test, reflects a serious technology problem. This needs to be understood. Of course, we could have used the WHO test from the beginning.
Thoughts on Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
By Dean Baker
I just finished reading Carter’s book and I will agree with the general assessment. It is an outstanding book that brings together much useful material on the life and influence of Keynes.
While I am of course familiar with Keynes’ history and the history of Keynesianism, there is much that I learned here. In particular, I am impressed with the importance he gives Joan Robinson in spreading the ideas of Keynes, especially to followers from the United States.
When I first started taking economics, I hugely appreciated Robinson’s writing. She both did very important analytic work, especially her pathbreaking analysis of imperfect competition, but was also tremendously witty in her popular writing. I will always remember her great comment on unemployment: “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”
Anyhow, I am happy to see her given the starring role in the spread of Keynesian thought, especially given that, as a woman, she had a huge amount to overcome in a field that was, and is, tremendously sexist.
Carter also provides a fascinating account of the friendship/rivalry between John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson. While these luminaries spent decades together in Cambridge, I was not aware of their personal history.
If I have any quibbles with the book, it is probably with its run through of the last fifty years and the decline of Keynes’ radical vision in economics. There are certainly some items I would give a bit more attention, like the decline of the labor movement, but covering fifty years of U.S. history in 100 pages is a major undertaking.
There are two items that do need some correction. First, from a labor market perspective, the recession following the collapse of the 1990s stock bubble was not mild. While the economy quickly rebounded in 2002 from a recession that did not even have two consecutive quarters of negative growth (the standard definition for a recession), the economy continued to shed jobs all the way through 2002 and most of the way through 2003. It did not recover the jobs lost in the downturn until February of 2005, four full years after the pre-recession peak. At the time, this was the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression. In other words, bursting bubbles have real consequence, as John Kenneth Galbraith had warned.
The other item is considerably more important. Carter buys the often-told story that bailing out the banks in the Great Recession saved us from a Second Great Depression. No biographer of Keynes should ever say anything like this.
First and foremost, Keynes taught us how to get out of the first Great Depression. The secret is spending money. If the government had gone on a huge spending spree in 1930, in response to the initial crash, instead of waiting to go full Keynesian in response to World War II, we never would have had the first Great Depression.
If we had let the market work its magic on Citigroup, Goldman, and the rest, there is no doubt that the initial downturn would have been worse. But if we responded with a massive public investment program in clean energy, health care, child care and other areas, we quickly would have recovered. And, we would have eliminated a massive source of economic waste in the bloated financial sector. It is also worth noting that the bloated financial sector is a major generator of inequality. It is where many of the seven, eight, and even nine figure paychecks can be found.
We should be clear; the bailout was about saving the very rich and their institutions. We could have rescued the economy just fine without them.
This gets me to the question that Carter poses at the end as to why the radicalism at the core of Keynes’ vision withered away after he died. Carter partially endorses Joan Robinson’s answer that Keynes was too naïve in believing good ideas could triumph on their own.
While this is undoubtedly in part true, I would add a bit to this in saying that Keynes and his followers were not quite radical enough in their ideas. Specifically, they were too willing to accept the idea of a natural market that is somehow pre-existing but may require the intervention of the government to achieve both full employment and important public goals. This acceptance lends way too much legitimacy to the critiques posed by Hayek, Friedman, and other neo-liberal opponents of Keynesianism.
The point is that the government structures the market in very fundamental ways. It can and does structure it differently through time in ways that have an enormous impact on the distribution of income.
To take my favorite example, patent and copyrights are government-granted monopolies that redistribute an enormous amount of income upward. I put the figure in the neighborhood of $1 trillion a year, or roughly half of all corporate profits. The United States would still be a capitalist economy without these government granted monopolies, although we would have a far more equal distribution of income. As I like to say, in the world without patent and copyright monopolies, Bill Gates would still be working for a living. *
To take another example, the government sets the rules of corporate governance. In the United States we have a structure of governance that makes it extremely difficult for shareholders to rein in the pay of CEOs and other top management. This is another source of massive inequality as the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of ordinary workers has exploded from just around 20 to 1 five decades ago, to around 200 to 1 today.
Incredibly, many on the left seem to think that the soaring pay of top executives is about maximizing shareholder value, even as returns to shareholders have been relatively weak in the last two decades. Even stories about insider trading, which obviously benefits top management at the expense of the corporation, do not shake this view. Anyhow, a capitalist system that made it easier for shareholders to rein in CEO pay is still very much a capitalist system.
I could cite other ways in which we have shaped the market to redistribute income upward (this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer – it’s free ** ), but the point should be clear. The neo-liberals are not arguing for the market as an alternative to government intervention, they are arguing for a particular structure of the market that ensures that a grossly disproportionate share of income goes to those on top.
The left gives away a huge amount in the ideological battle when it allows neo-liberals to be champions of the market, as opposed to being recognized for the champions of policies that give money to the rich. The market has real uses, and there is an inherent appeal to much of the public for the idea of leaving things to the market, rather than government bureaucrats. By contrast, saying that we want to structure the market to give as much money to the rich as possible has much less appeal.
The neo-liberals are about the latter, and the left has given them way more legitimacy than they deserve by implying that they actually have an abstract commitment to the market as a matter of principle. Exposing this deception may not be sufficient to turn the tide and bring back Keynes radical vision, but the failure to expose it is serious political and economic malpractice.
* Carter does mention this issue briefly in reference to trade deals and the WTO, but does not pursue the larger implications.
Big fan of Baker, but he continues with his inability to take economics out of the classroom and apply it to the real world. Very disappointing.
He states that the big banks should have been allowed to die, while admitting it would have made the Great Recession worse. But economics knew how to fix that, so it should have been done. The fix?
“if we responded with a massive public investment program in clean energy, health care, child care and other areas, we quickly would have recovered.”
Works in the classroom. But somehow he ignores what actually happened. The size and shape of the ARRA was under the total control of the 3 GOP Senators that voted to end debate. The result was a too small, ill-directed stimulus. Subsequently, the GOP Senators filibustered any further stimulus (see the American Jobs Act).
More than a decade later, Baker is still ignoring reality preaching economic policy as a fix for a problem when that policy is not being applied.
Guess what?
We’re about to see it again this week. Appears obvious that the current stimulus package being negotiated will be too small and ill-directed.
When the world first heard about COVID-19, the initial idea was that it was a respiratory disease, but in recent months experts have realised it can cause serious neurological problems in many patients.
More than 300 studies from around the world have found a prevalence of neurological abnormalities in COVID-19 patients, ranging from delirium, confusion and anxiety to brain inflammation, nerve damage and stroke.
Estimates vary but it seems that around 50 percent of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 have experienced neurological problems. At the mild end of the scale, patients may experience lingering symptoms such as poor memory and tiredness.
But the severe symptoms can result in disability and even death, with growing evidence showing that the virus can, in rare cases, enter the central nervous system.
“Acute onset of delirium or encephalopathy is affecting anywhere between 40-50 percent of patients with moderate and severe COVID-19 in hospitals.”
He said: “I’m speaking about these repercussions of infection with the disease and some of which I believe could have, and many of my colleagues believe, could have some long-lasting effects way beyond the acute phase of infection.”
Stevens revealed that the neurological complications are wide-ranging: “If we’re talking about acute onset of delirium or encephalopathy, this is affecting anywhere between 40-50 percent of patients with moderate and severe COVID-19 in hospitals. This is being shown in a number of different studies.”
The Doctor Behind the Disputed Covid Data
Dr. Sapan Desai, who supplied the data for two prominent and later retracted studies, is said to have a history of cutting corners and misrepresenting information in pursuit of his ambitions.
By Ellen Gabler and Roni Caryn Rabin
A college degree at 19. A medical school graduate with a Ph.D. at 27.
By the time he completed training in vascular surgery in 2014, Dr. Sapan Desai had cast himself as an ambitious physician, an entrepreneur with an M.B.A. and a prolific researcher published in medical journals.
Then the novel coronavirus hit and Dr. Desai seized the moment. With a Harvard professor, he produced two studies in May that almost instantly disrupted multiple clinical trials amid the pandemic….
The Doctor Behind the Disputed Covid Data
Dr. Sapan Desai, who supplied the data for two prominent and later retracted studies, is said to have a history of cutting corners and misrepresenting information in pursuit of his ambitions.
[ Ah, I understand the full problem.
Beyond the evidently faulty data supplied to researchers by Sapan Desai, the researchers never looked to and examined the original data. ]
The difference in the experience of the spread of the coronavirus in the Dominican Republic and Cuba should be studied as a difference in effectiveness of healthcare systems. The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP since 1970, while Cuba has been beset by sanctions, but health outcomes in Cuba are starkly better.
The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America
The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.
By Paul Krugman
America’s response to the coronavirus has been a lose-lose proposition.
The Trump administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis insisted that there was no trade-off between economic growth and controlling the disease, and they were right — but not in the way they expected.
Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: Adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from Covid-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada. Yet the “rocket ship” recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: Job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.
So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?
On the face of it, the answer is that Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.
And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.
For one thing, people truly focused on restarting the economy should have been big supporters of measures to limit infections without hurting business — above all, getting Americans to wear face masks. Instead, Trump ridiculed those in masks as “politically correct,” while Republican governors not only refused to mandate mask-wearing, but they prevented mayors from imposing local mask rules.
Also, politicians eager to see the economy bounce back should have wanted to sustain consumer purchasing power until wages recovered. Instead, Senate Republicans ignored the looming July 31 expiration of special unemployment benefits, which means that tens of millions of workers are about to see a huge hit to their incomes, damaging the economy as a whole.
So what was going on? Were our leaders just stupid? Well, maybe. But there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.
You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.
Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.
This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.
Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk. And that’s the kind of thing America’s right just hates, hates to hear.
Indeed, it sometimes seems as if right-wingers actually make a point of behaving irresponsibly. Remember how Senator Rand Paul, who was worried that he might have Covid-19 (he did), wandered around the Senate and even used the gym while waiting for his test results?
Anger at any suggestion of social responsibility also helps explain the looming fiscal catastrophe. It’s striking how emotional many Republicans get in their opposition to the temporary rise in unemployment benefits; for example, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that these benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies.” Why such hatred?
It’s not because the benefits are making workers unwilling to take jobs. There’s no evidence that this is happening — it’s just something Republicans want to believe. And in any case, economic arguments can’t explain the rage.
Again, it’s the principle. Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens. And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.
What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.
America Fails the Marshmallow Test
We lack the will to beat Covid-19.
By Paul Krugman
The marshmallow test is a famous psychological experiment that tests children’s willingness to delay gratification. Children are offered a marshmallow, but told that they can have a second marshmallow if they’re willing to wait 15 minutes before eating the first one. Claims that children with the willpower to hold out do much better in life haven’t held up well, but the experiment is still a useful metaphor for many choices in life, both by individuals and by larger groups.
One way to think about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it poses a kind of marshmallow test for society….
I’ve been thinking of industries that are ripe for (human) domestic labor that contributes to the welfare of this country (infrastructure, gov’t tech updating and maintenance, green energy). I remember when I was visiting colleges myself and with siblings, many schools really pushed how important (and profitable) elderly care will be, and this pandemic has exposed how much room for improvement we have in this field and child care. I feel this is a point Biden needs to be hammering home.
Ambitious investments in child and elder care could boost labor supply enough to support 3 million new jobs
July 21, 2020 by Josh Bivens
“Key takeaways:
Today, the Biden campaign released a plan calling for $775 billion of investments in child and elder care over the next decade, a large increase over current levels.
Based on our research, such an investment would support 3 million new jobs and substantially help stem the erosion of women’s labor force participation in the United States relative to our advanced country peers.
These public investments would provide support that makes child and elder care more affordable for families while also providing a needed boost to the pay and training of the care workforce.
It has been apparent for years that the United States could benefit enormously from a large public investment in care work—including early child care education and elder care. A substantial investment in children would lead to a more productive workforce in the future, spurring large income gains. Investments in seniors would ensure that a decent and dignified retirement is available to all, a commitment that the United States has so far failed to sustain.
Crucially, both sorts of investment would greatly expand the opportunities for working-age adults to seek paid employment. It is well documented by now that the employment rate of prime-age (between 25 and 54 years old) U.S. adults (particularly women) has stagnated relative to our advanced country peers, and it is equally as well documented that the failure to invest in child and elder care is a key reason why.
This morning, the Biden campaign released a plan calling for a broad set of investments in child and elder care. Their plan would invest $775 billion over the next decade, a large increase over current levels. Such an investment would substantially help stem the erosion of women’s labor force participation in the United States relative to our advanced country peers. In 1990, for example, women’s prime-age labor force participation in the United States ranked 7th of 24 among the advanced economies with available data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By 2000, the United States had slipped to 16th of 35 OECD countries, while in 2019 our ranking was 30th of 35.
In an earlier paper, we noted that closing the gap in women’s labor force participation between the United States and its advanced country peers would lead to a gain of almost 5 million jobs. If an ambitious policy proposal—like the one proposed by the Biden campaign—could just halve that gap, then this would boost labor supply by roughly 2.5 million jobs.
In our earlier paper, we estimated the gains caused by a similar (but actually smaller) package of investments on just the child care and education side. These public investments would provide support that make this care and education more affordable for families while also providing a needed boost to the pay and training of the care workforce—a workforce that is dedicated but grievously underpaid relative to the importance of their work.
We found these policies would boost labor supply by nearly 2 million by themselves, drawing on work from Blau and Kahn (2013). Given that the Biden plan includes more generous child care and education subsidies as compared with the plan we evaluated, and given that it also includes substantial investments in elder care, we anticipate that the full labor supply boost caused by their plan could be closer to 3 million.
The potential labor supply gains by providing greater support for elder care are utterly enormous. For example, it has been shown that U.S. families provide nearly 34 billion hours of unpaid, personal work every year to provide care for older relatives. Any investment that allowed a nontrivial fraction of this work to be performed by professional care workers instead of unpaid family members would open up opportunities for these family members to search for jobs themselves.
It should be noted that many Republican policymakers are currently claiming they care deeply about the importance of spurring labor supply. This concern is the justification they often give for paring back the enhanced unemployment insurance (UI) benefits provided in the CARES Act passed in response to the economic shock of the coronavirus epidemic. But their stated concerns about the labor supply effects of these UI enhancements should not be taken seriously.
For one, in the near term, the number of jobs created in the U.S. economy will be entirely driven by labor demand, not supply. Evidence of this can be seen in the historically large job growth of the past two months, precisely when the extra $600 in weekly UI benefits was still available. In these past two months, even as enhanced UI benefits were available, an increase in labor demand (following the historic job losses of previous months) spurred historically rapid job growth (with 7.5 million jobs created in just two months), demonstrating conclusively that the constraint on job growth in this time was demand, not supply.
For another, boosting labor supply by impoverishing workers and chasing them back into any job that will take them in a depressed economy over the coming months would counteract the need to keep them safe and able to turn down work that might lead them to becoming vectors of spreading the virus. Given the recent explosion of new cases and virus spread, this is a real concern.
The appropriate time to worry about U.S. labor supply being a binding constraint on growth is in the long run after the virus is fully under control and the economy’s demand shortfall is in the past. And the way to boost labor supply in an effective and humane way is not to make the safety net as stingy as possible, but instead to make public investments that broaden the range of opportunities available for working-age adults. The Biden campaign’s commitment to making these investments is most welcome.”
Dude, lockdowns distorted “job growth”. The data is weak and poorly sampled. Those UI benefits were non events. All data is suspect.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/opinion/us-italy-coronavirus.html
July 23, 2020
Why Can’t Trump’s America Be Like Italy?
On the coronavirus, the “sick man of Europe” puts us to shame.
By Paul Krugman
A few days ago The New York Times published a long, damning article * about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn’t see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy’s experience.
Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.
We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s. On a typical recent day, more than 800 Americans but only around a dozen Italians died from Covid-19.
Although Donald Trump keeps boasting that we’ve had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy?
I don’t mean to peddle facile national stereotypes. For all its problems, Italy is a serious and sophisticated country, not a comic-opera stage set. Still, Italy entered this pandemic with major disadvantages compared with the United States.
After all, Italy’s bureaucracy isn’t famed for its efficiency, nor are its citizens known for their willingness to follow rules. The nation’s government is deeply in debt, and this debt matters because Italy doesn’t have its own currency; this means that it can’t do what we do, and print lots of money in a crisis.
Unfavorable demography and economic troubles are also major Italian disadvantages. The ratio of seniors to working-age adults is the highest in the Western world. Italy’s growth record is deeply disappointing: Per capita G.D.P. has stagnated for two decades.
When it came to dealing with Covid-19, however, all these Italian disadvantages were outweighed by one huge advantage: Italy wasn’t burdened with America’s disastrous leadership.
After a terrible start, Italy quickly moved to do what was necessary to deal with the coronavirus. It instituted a very severe lockdown, and kept to it. Government aid helped sustain workers and businesses through the lockdown. The safety net had holes in it, but top officials tried to make it work; in a supreme case of non-Trumpism, the prime minister even apologized for delays in aid.
And, crucially, Italy crushed the curve: It kept the lockdown in place until cases were relatively few, and it was cautious about reopening.
America could have followed the same path. In fact, the Covid-19 trajectory in the Northeast, which was hard-hit in the beginning but took the outbreak seriously, actually does look a lot like Italy’s.
But the Trump administration and its allies pushed for rapid reopening, ignoring warnings from epidemiologists. Because we didn’t do what Italy did, we didn’t crush the curve; quite the opposite. Matters were made worse by pathological opposition to things like wearing masks, the way even obvious precautions became battlegrounds in the culture wars.
So cases and then deaths surged. Even the promised economic payoff from rapid, what-me-worry reopening was a mirage: many states are reimposing partial lockdowns, and there is growing evidence that the jobs recovery is stalling, if not going into reverse.
Incredibly, Trump and his allies seem to have given no thought at all about what to do if the overwhelming view of experts was right, and their gamble on ignoring the coronavirus didn’t pan out. A miraculous boom was Plan A; there was no Plan B.
In particular, tens of millions of workers are about to lose crucial unemployment benefits, and Republicans haven’t even settled on a bad response. On Wednesday Senate Republicans floated the idea of reducing supplemental benefits from $600 a week to just $100, which would spell disaster for many families.
For someone like Trump, all this must be humiliating — or would be if anyone dared tell him about it. After three and a half years of Making America Great Again, we’ve become a pathetic figure on the world stage, a cautionary tale about pride going before a fall.
These days Americans can only envy Italy’s success in weathering the coronavirus, its rapid return to a kind of normalcy that is a distant dream in a nation that used to congratulate itself for its can-do culture. Italy is often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”; what does that make us?
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-failure-leadership.html
July 23, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,169,991)
Deaths ( 147,333)
India
Cases ( 1,288,130)
Deaths ( 30,645)
Mexico
Cases ( 362,274)
Deaths ( 41,190)
UK
Cases ( 297,146)
Deaths ( 45,554)
Germany
Cases ( 205,142)
Deaths ( 9,187)
Canada
Cases ( 112,672)
Deaths ( 8,874)
China
Cases ( 83,729)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Sweden
Cases ( 78,763)
Deaths ( 5,676)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-24/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-13-in-Xinjiang-SnvgE1lEuQ/index.html
July 24, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 21 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland registered 21 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, 6 from overseas and 15 domestically transmitted, according to the National Health Commission on Friday.
Of the 15 domestically-transmitted cases, 13 are in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and 2 others in Liaoning Province.
Of the 6 cases from overseas, 1 was reported in Shanghai and 5 others in Guangdong Province.
No deaths related to the disease were reported Thursday, while 18 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-24/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-13-in-Xinjiang-SnvgE1lEuQ/img/0c8e99fb43cd40c4ba6dee228774c4c1/0c8e99fb43cd40c4ba6dee228774c4c1.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-24/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-13-in-Xinjiang-SnvgE1lEuQ/img/8ff2b4ee28844a6db0a0bf4a15b2c10c/8ff2b4ee28844a6db0a0bf4a15b2c10c.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-24/Chinese-mainland-reports-21-new-COVID-19-cases-13-in-Xinjiang-SnvgE1lEuQ/img/e6e4e21ba49f454e8c7207970d16a02a/e6e4e21ba49f454e8c7207970d16a02a.jpeg
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,197,515)
Deaths ( 147,676)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/world/europe/spain-coronavirus.html
April 7, 2020
Spain’s Coronavirus Crisis Accelerated as Warnings Went Unheeded
The Spanish epidemic has become a painful example of the tendency of one government after another to ignore the experiences of countries where the virus has already struck.
By Raphael Minder
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/world/asia/japan-coronavirus.html
July 24, 2020
As Japan Nears 1,000 Daily Coronavirus Infections, It Shies From Restrictions
Case numbers are climbing fast, with virus clusters in nursing homes, schools and elsewhere. But fingers are being pointed at Japan’s so-called hostess bars.
By Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida
July 24, 2020
Quick Reminder: Casey Mulligan Argued that a Main Factor Pushing Unemployment Higher in the Great Recession Was Food Stamps
By Dean Baker
This is worth keeping in mind when reading a New York Times article * discussing Republican plans to cut the weekly $600 supplement to unemployment insurance benefits. The piece cites Mulligan as a conservative economist who argues that this supplement is discouraging people from working and therefore keeping unemployment high. In this context, it is worth remembering that Mulligan made the same argument ** about the high unemployment in the Great Recession.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/business/economy/unemployment-benefits.html
** https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/a-keynesian-blind-spot/
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
UK
Cases ( 297,914)
Deaths ( 45,677)
Notice the deaths to confirmed coronavirus cases ratio in the United Kingdom is a remarkable 15.3%.
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 59,475)
Deaths ( 448)
Deaths per million ( 49)
———————————–
July 23, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 57,982)
Deaths ( 442)
Deaths per million ( 48)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
What opening business and schools without proper precautions has meant for Israel, after the spread of the coronavirus was supposed to be controlled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/world/coronavirus-covid-19.html
July 24, 2020
New C.D.C. Guidance for Reopening Schools Takes a Political Tone
The agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools, downplaying the health risks, after President Trump criticized its earlier recommendations.
A number of virus clusters in the U.S. have been traced back to school-related events or gatherings of teenagers.
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,208,518)
Deaths ( 147,930)
The institutional difference in these healthcare systems needs to be recognized and understood, no matter the prejudice fostered against the Cuban system. The Dominican Republic after all has been the fastest growing country in the Americas in GDP per capita since 1970.
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 57,615)
Deaths ( 1,006)
59,077+1,4621,036
Deaths per million ( 95)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,469)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
Properly editing:
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 59,077)
Deaths ( 1,036)
Deaths per million ( 95)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,469)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
Who Gets the Covid-19 Vaccine First?
NY Times – July 23, 2020
A weighted lottery gives everyone a chance at a drug or vaccine in short supply. But some have a better shot than others.
When a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, who should get it first?
A preliminary plan devised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this spring gives priority to health care workers, then to people with underlying medical conditions and older people. The C.D.C. has not yet decided whether the next in line should be Blacks and Latinos, groups disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.
But let’s suppose that health care workers and people with underlying medical conditions use up the first doses of the available vaccine. Should some be held in reserve for Black and Latino people? What about bus drivers and train conductors? Perhaps teachers or schoolchildren should get it so they can return to classrooms with peace of mind.
If shortages happen, most of the nation will have no chance to get the initial lots of a vaccine under the C.D.C.’s plan. And as the United States combats a soaring number of coronavirus cases, rising demand for drugs and maybe ventilators is expected. They, too, will need a fair system of distribution.
One solution that is starting to attract the attention of public health experts is a so-called weighted lottery, which gives everyone a chance at access, although some get a better shot than others.
Doctors and ethicists rank patients, deciding which groups should be given preference and how much. First-responders, for example, may be weighted more heavily than, say, very sick patients who are unlikely to recover.
The goal is to prevent haphazard or inequitable distribution of a treatment or vaccine when there isn’t enough to go around. Such a system has already been used in allocations of remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the coronavirus. …
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html
July 18, 2020
Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds
The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks.
By Apoorva Mandavilli
Idriss Z
Impressive. Thanks.
There’s been tremendous downward pressure on wages at these facilities. There will be attempts to make the working class pay for any improvements when the increased costs should fall to capitalism since capitalists are the ones being subsidized.
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,230,696)
Deaths ( 148,180)
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,242,586)
Deaths ( 148,348)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/politics/trump-arms-sales-drones.html
July 24, 2020
Trump Administration Is Bypassing Arms Control Pact to Sell Large Armed Drones
The move has been opposed internally by arms control officials and lawmakers trying to limit the proliferation of such drones, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
By Edward Wong
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Friday that it would allow the sale of advanced armed drones to other nations and bypass part of an international weapons export control agreement that the United States helped forge more than three decades ago….
My experience with child is that people get rational very quickly once they get into it. What at first seems like terrible pricing starts to seem fair, but questions of its net worth get more serious. Right now I don’t sense a serious child care problem in the US really. The costs are high but fair. The market offer isn’t out of balance with customers who actually are doing more than kicking tires. Child care is a pretty normal business. If the current providers insist on very high margins, new providers will and do enter. If the new entrants convince parents of their quality, pricing moderates and more parents look to buy. Owners who are smart and work hard get rich. That’s good really.
Absolutely agree Ken, I wish it wasn’t as tough a sell as it is because it makes sense in the long run psychologically. All the corporate interests have to do is apply all of the logic that side of the aisle is using to argue for opening schools and apply it to Pre-K and younger for working families.
Which gets us to Eric’s point, I’ll take your word about the pricing being fair but the fact that pricing is above what an average family can reasonably afford hurts our communities. If the corporations want American parents to work the hours they currently work resulting in the profits the corporations and markets currently enjoy, then a small slice of that should go to subsidizing child care for those that can’t afford it so that the future generations are healthier and more productive. If you want a completely capitalist analysis, human capital requires different investment from traditional capital and child care is an essential investment. It doesn’t matter about the fairness of the price if the people that need it can’t afford it.
I agree that fair child care pricing comes as a shock to a lot of potential customers. But I think directly subsidizing paid child care is a poor approach. Better simply to decide how much support families might get and cut families a check. If a family buys a service or not really is a complicated decision. My family bought both day care center services and then in-home care, with all the payroll charges, but I can’t think of a good reason to not support families that sacrifice outside income potential entirely to provide the “traditional” care of an at home parent. Don’t give providers money and don’t give it families only if they purchase care. Let families decide across the full spectrum of care options and keep the commercial care providers working hard for the business.
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,248,327)
Deaths ( 148,490)
India
Cases ( 1,337,022)
Deaths ( 31,406)
Mexico
Cases ( 370,712)
Deaths ( 41,908)
UK
Cases ( 297,914)
Deaths ( 45,677)
Germany
Cases ( 205,960)
Deaths ( 9,201)
Canada
Cases ( 113,206)
Deaths ( 8,881)
China
Cases ( 83,750)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Sweden
Cases ( 78,997)
Deaths ( 5,697)
July 24, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,248,327)
Deaths ( 148,490)
There were 78,336 new confirmed coronavirus cases on July 24.
Dean Baker @DeanBaker13
This is your occasional reminder that insider trading by top execs does not maximize shareholder value
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/business/coronavirus-vaccine-profits-vaxart.html
Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus Vaccine
Well-timed stock bets have generated big profits for senior executives and board members at companies developing vaccines and treatments.
8:51 AM · Jul 25, 2020
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
July 25, 2020
Coronavirus
UK
Cases ( 297,914)
Deaths ( 45,677)
France
Cases ( 180,528)
Deaths ( 30,192)
Notice the coronavirus deaths to cases ratios for the United Kingdom and France are 15.3% and 16.7% respectively.
Eric,
1- “I agree that fair child care pricing comes as a shock to a lot of potential customers. But I think directly subsidizing paid child care is a poor approach.”
IZ- Again, not trying to look at this in a bubble. On the child care front, we have two dual crises we are trying to solve: 1- in an economic downturn many average families cannot afford quality child care which has a negative effect on the children, families, and communities; 2- a massive unemployment rate, but somehow this is an industry that needs (competent) more supply, yet somehow, there are not enough desirable jobs and adequate training to fill demand.
“Crucially, both sorts of investment would greatly expand the opportunities for working-age adults to seek paid employment. It is well documented by now that the employment rate of prime-age (between 25 and 54 years old) U.S. adults (particularly women) has stagnated relative to our advanced country peers, and it is equally as well documented that the failure to invest in child and elder care is a key reason why.”
2- ” Better simply to decide how much support families might get and cut families a check. If a family buys a service or not really is a complicated decision. My family bought both day care center services and then in-home care, with all the payroll charges, but I can’t think of a good reason to not support families that sacrifice outside income potential entirely to provide the “traditional” care of an at home parent.”
IZ- That’s just a stimulus check, which is what they’re currently doing, no? I gave you a few examples in my last post why more income brackets need access to quality child care. The support that “families that sacrifice outside income potential” get is that they don’t pay for the child care… I also am unsure if you understand how off your characterization is- they’re not sacrificing out of a familal preference, they are sacrificing that income because they don’t have a real choice because we do not have enough quality child care.
In our earlier paper, we estimated the gains caused by a similar (but actually smaller) package of investments on just the child care and education side. These public investments would provide support that make this care and education more affordable for families while also providing a needed boost to the pay and training of the care workforce—a workforce that is dedicated but grievously underpaid relative to the importance of their work.”
3- “Don’t give providers money and don’t give it families only if they purchase care. Let families decide across the full spectrum of care options and keep the commercial care providers working hard for the business.”
IZ- These economic papers give you a few decades of evidence that this idea doesn’t work. Do you have any metrics that show why you’re idea will work? Serious question. At some point we need to take theoretical debates out of theory. I’m sorry for being blunt, but your ideas do not, have not, and will not work because (a) this is an economic downturn, (b) labor in this field is underpaid and undertrained so there is no incentive for commercial care providers at lower income levels to “work” hard and the work given at current wages is not enough, (c) the pandemic means that there are extra costs to providing this service which, if not subsidized, will certainly take more people out of it, (d), the magnitude and importance is unclear as we do not know when schools will be reopening, (e) the Biden plan allows for different subsidization based on localities and how severe their problem is, yours ignores area-specific issues and differences.,, etc, etc… (see below)
“For one, in the near term, the number of jobs created in the U.S. economy will be entirely driven by labor demand, not supply. Evidence of this can be seen in the historically large job growth of the past two months, precisely when the extra $600 in weekly UI benefits was still available. In these past two months, even as enhanced UI benefits were available, an increase in labor demand (following the historic job losses of previous months) spurred historically rapid job growth (with 7.5 million jobs created in just two months), demonstrating conclusively that the constraint on job growth in this time was demand, not supply.
For another, boosting labor supply by impoverishing workers and chasing them back into any job that will take them in a depressed economy over the coming months would counteract the need to keep them safe and able to turn down work that might lead them to becoming vectors of spreading the virus. Given the recent explosion of new cases and virus spread, this is a real concern.
The appropriate time to worry about U.S. labor supply being a binding constraint on growth is in the long run after the virus is fully under control and the economy’s demand shortfall is in the past. And the way to boost labor supply in an effective and humane way is not to make the safety net as stingy as possible, but instead to make public investments that broaden the range of opportunities available for working-age adults. “
July 25, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,270,828)
Deaths ( 148,829)
In August 2019 and before the first case of COVID, the 30 year German bond offered a less than negative 0.25 percent in interest payments.
Something was seriously amiss globally before the pandemic. And that something was cumulative un-repayableGerman, Euro and global debt. Central Banks pushing on the thinnest of strings is the appropriate verbiage.
The deterministic sudden crash devaluation of global equities, commodities, gold, silver, and cryptocurrenciesover the next five trading days – which, if reviewed, will elevate asset-debt macroeconomics to a patterned science – isprincipally due to that accumulated un-repayable debt – not a virus.
From a US-centric point of view, 38 years of a Volcker-less Federal Reserve Central Bank and 25 years of a Perot-lessNAFTA global expansion policy has led the US to where it is – without sufficient toilet paper and government-providedUS mass-produced masks.
July 25, 2020
Quick Reminder: Insider Trading Does not Maximize Shareholder Value
By Dean Baker
The New York Times had an interesting piece * on how top executives and corporate board members at drug companies working on coronavirus vaccines and treatments are cashing out options and selling stock just after big announcements of contracts or progress in research. While there are no explicit allegations, the implication is that many of these sales are based on inside information.
It is widely asserted in policy circles, especially by those on the left, that corporations are being run to maximize shareholder value. I have argued ** that corporations are actually being run to maximize the pay of top executives and pointed to the historically low returns to shareholders in the last two decades. If insider trading is in fact a major phenomena, it is hard to argue that companies are being run to maximize returns to shareholders, since insider trading effectively means top executives are stealing from the companies they run.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/business/coronavirus-vaccine-profits-vaxart.html
** https://www.cepr.net/if-corporations-are-being-run-to-maximize-returns-to-shareholders-why-are-returns-so-low/
Anne,
Thanks for all the above articles and info, always appreciated. On the insider trading issue I think whether SVM or corporate pay is the dominant regime depends on the industry. I mean, I think that’s a natural result from shareholder activism and corporate raiding. The winner in court and board battles determines whether the issue we face in that specific industry. If there is parity among top shareholders then profiting from insider trading becomes incredibly difficult. If one entity is the dominant owner then the oversight will be minimal and self-enrichment aplenty.
July 25, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,286,934)
Deaths ( 149,045)
Idriss:
If there is parity among top shareholders then profiting from insider trading becomes incredibly difficult. If one entity is the dominant owner then the oversight will be minimal and self-enrichment aplenty.
[ Importantly so, however top shareholders are often passive funds along with active and managing shareholders. Active shareholders can and do point to standards to support positions, such as on pay levels for top management. ]
Idriss,
I think carefully about and learn from each of your comments; nice.
Anne,
The feeling is mutual, and I am very grateful for the one stop shop for pertinent data. I think Robert Reich is one of the Left who blame a lot of it on SVM theory, he cites an MIT/NYU finding that “from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.”
But I think your point is much more prescient. As Jeff Ubben said ““Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximized their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back … There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right.” So where do people go from there? It seems insider trading is the obvious answer as the owners become passive (or retiring), looking for other opportunities. Moreover, it is a serious issue because of ethical rot, if they’re willing to cut those corners, the other corners cut will be much less “victim-less.” https://www.ft.com/content/eaa28471-e295-44a9-a138-dda047db6d1c
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/business/dealbook/jeff-ubben-valueact-esg.html
When Bosses Shared the Profits
TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2020 by Robert Reich
https://robertreich.org/post/623663886645837824
After the bruising crises we’re now going through, it would be wonderful if we could somehow emerge a fairer nation. One possibility is to revive an old idea: sharing the profits.
The original idea for businesses to share profits with workers emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In December 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers, thereby “fostering the development of a larger spirit of harmony and cooperation, and resulting, incidentally, in greater efficiency and larger gains.”
That same year, Sears, Roebuck and Co., one of America’s largest corporations, with 30,000 to 40,000 employees, announced a major experiment in profit-sharing. The company would contribute 5 percent of net earnings, without deduction of dividends to shareholders, into a profit-sharing fund. (Eventually the company earmarked 10 percent of pretax earnings for the plan.) Employees who wished to participate would contribute 5 percent of their salaries. All would be invested in shares of Sears stock. The plan’s purpose, according to The New York Times, was to “to engender loyalty and harmony between employer and employee.” In reviewing its first three years, The Times noted that 92 percent of Sears’s employees had joined up and that “the participating employee not only found an ever-increasing sum of money to his credit, but eventually discovered he was a shareholder in the corporation, with a steadily growing amount of stock to his name.”
Sears’s plan was admirably egalitarian. Distributions of shares were based on years of service, not rank, and the longest-serving workers received nearly $3 for every dollar they contributed. By the 1950s, Sears workers owned a quarter of the company. By 1968, the typical Sears salesman could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, S.C. Johnson, Hallmark Cards and U.S. Steel — some because it seemed morally right, others because it seemed a means to higher productivity.
Profit-sharing did give workers an incentive to be more productive. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions, because payroll costs dropped as profits did. But it subjected workers to the risk that when profits were down, their paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, they’d lose all their investments in it. (Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.) The best profit-sharing plans came in the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wished, on top of predictable base wages.
Profit-sharing fit perfectly with the evolution of the American corporation. By the 1950s, most employees of large companies had spent their entire working lives with the company. Companies and their employees were rooted in the same communities. C.E.O.s typically worked their way up, and once at the top rarely earned more than 20 times the average wage of their employees (now they’re often paid more than 300 times more). Over a third of private-sector workers were unionized. In 1958 the United Auto Workers demanded that the nation’s automakers share their profits with their workers.
Some remnants of profit-sharing remain today. Both Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture maker in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Lincoln Electric Company, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of welding equipment, tie major portions of annual wages to profits. Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif.
But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same.
This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of profit-sharing with top executives and “talent.” Big Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private-equity funds began doling out bonuses, stock and stock options to lure and keep the people they wanted. They were soon followed by high-tech companies, movie studios and start-ups of all kinds.
Even before tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and incomes in the current pandemic, the pay of the typical worker had barely risen since the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, ever-greater wealth continues to concentrate at the very top.
Since 2000, the portion of total national income going to American workers has dropped farther than in other rich nations. A steadily larger portion has gone into corporate profits, which have been reflected in higher share prices. But a buoyant stock market doesn’t help most Americans. The richest 1 percent now own half the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent, 92 percent.
Those higher share prices have come out of the pockets of workers. Daniel Greenwald at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Martin Lettau at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and Sydney Ludvigson at N.Y.U. found that from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.
Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty.
If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904.
There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees.
It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few.”
July 25, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,300,313)
Deaths ( 149,219)
Idriss:
As Jeff Ubben said ““Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximized their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back … There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right.”
Nice; the rest is excellent.
Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan
The key contradiction is the idea that you combat something with extremely high externality (*infectious* disease) by letting people make free decisions based on the estimate of their own welfare only. It cannot work. And it is not working.
7:28 PM · Jul 24, 2020
Anne it can’t work. You can’t expect one generation of corporate leadership to respect the deals made by a previous generation of corportate leadership. To expect self-interest to lead to fairness is wishful thinking. What can be done is to tax more and distribute the funds raised as a national dividend.
I am also thinking that we need to change company law. I have toying with the idea of forbidden companies (after all companies are devined by law) from buying voting shares in other companies. Only individuals should be allowed to do that.
Typo alert … defined by law not … devined by law. But maybe it works that way as well.
A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election
via @BostonGlobe – July 26
WASHINGTON — On the second Friday in June, a group of political operatives, former government and military officials, and academics quietly convened online for what became a disturbing exercise in the fragility of American democracy.
The group, which included Democrats and Republicans, gathered to game out possible results of the November election, grappling with questions that seem less far-fetched by the day: What if President Trump refuses to concede a loss, as he publicly hinted recently he might do? How far could he go to preserve his power? And what if Democrats refuse to give in?
“All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse,” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Defense Department official who co-organized the group known as the Transition Integrity Project. She described what they found in bleak terms: “The law is essentially … it’s almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”
Using a role-playing game that is a fixture of military and national security planning, the group envisioned a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, one in which Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it.
If it sounds paranoid or outlandish — a war room of seasoned politicos and constitutional experts playing a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons in which the future of the republic hangs in the balance — they get it. But, as they finalize a report on what they learned and begin briefing elected officials and others, they insist their warning is serious: A close election this fall is likely to be contested, and there are few guardrails to stop a constitutional crisis, particularly if Trump flexes the considerable tools at his disposal to give himself an advantage.
“He doesn’t have to win the election,” said Nils Gilman, a historian who leads research at a think tank called the Berggruen Institute and was an organizer of the exercise. “He just has to create a plausible narrative that he didn’t lose.”
The very existence of a group like this one, which was formed late last year, underscores the extent of the fear in Washington’s political circles — and beyond — that Trump will take the same hammer he has used to fracture the norms of executive governance over the past three years and upend the nation’s delicate tradition of orderly political transitions of power by refusing to concede if he loses.
“We have norms in our transition, rather than laws,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Foundation, who was not part of the game. “This entire election season is something a democracy expert would worry about.”
It is a fear that has been stoked by the president himself, who has repeatedly warned, without offering evidence, of widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots — which voters are likely to use at unprecedented levels because the pandemic has made in-person voting a potential health risk — to cast doubt on the results of November’s election.
“I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace last Sunday. When asked if he would accept the election results, he said: “I’ll have to see.”
Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has taken to issuing foreboding warnings of his own. “This president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work — they’re not real, they’re not fair,” he said at a fund-raiser on Thursday night. He has also mused publicly about Trump having to be escorted, forcibly if need be, from the White House.
That happened in one of the four scenarios the Transition Integrity Project gamed out, according to summaries of the exercises provided to The Boston Globe. But constitutional experts — and the game play — was less focused on the possibility of a cinematic, militarized intervention on Inauguration Day, which is a possibility many still consider remote, than the room the Constitution appears to leave for a disastrous and difficult transition if the incumbent does not accept a loss.
“How well is our constitutional legal system designed to deal with an incumbent president who insists that he won an election but for the presence of fraud?” said Lawrence Douglas, a professor at Amherst College who has written a book on what would happen if Trump took such a stand. “And I think the rather unfortunate answer is our system is not well designed at all to deal with that problem,” said Douglas, who was not involved in the game.
Brooks got the seed of the idea for the Transition Integrity Project after a dinner where a federal judge and a corporate lawyer each told her they were convinced the military or the Secret Service would have to escort Trump out of office if he lost the election and would not concede. Brooks wasn’t so sure. She and Gilman decided to turn the Washington parlor game into an actual exercise; they held an early meeting in Washington, with about 25 people, in December.
“When we started talking about this we got a lot of reactions — oh, you guys are so paranoid, don’t be ridiculous, this isn’t going to happen,” Brooks said.
Two things have happened since then: Trump has displayed increased willingness to challenge mail-in ballots, and his administration has deployed federal forces to quell protests in front of the White House and in Portland, Ore., and has threatened to do so in other cities.
“That has really shaken people,” Brooks said. “What was really a fringe idea has now become an anxiety that’s pretty widely shared.”
Brooks, Gilman, and others recruited a slate of players including a former swing state governor, a former White House chief of staff, and a former head of the Department of Homeland Security. They invited both Democrats and Republicans who they knew had concerns about Trump’s comments on the election; nearly 80 people in all were involved. The Republicans were described by participants as “never Trump” or “not Trump Republicans.”
They played using the so-called Chatham House Rules — in which participants can discuss what was said, but not who was there; some participants were willing to be named. They included Republicans Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky secretary of state, and conservative commentator Bill Kristol, as well as Democrats Leah Daughtry, who was CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Convention Committees, former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, and progressive Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson.
The game was elaborate. The participants took on the roles of the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign, relevant government officials, and the media —generally, Democrats played Democrats and Republicans played Republicans — and used a 10-sided die to determine whether a team succeeded in its attempted moves. The games are not meant to be predictive; rather, they are supposed to give people a sense of possible consequences in complex scenarios.
Each scenario involved a different election outcome: An unclear result on Election Day that looked increasingly like a Biden win as more ballots were counted; a clear Biden win in the popular vote and the Electoral College; an Electoral College win for Trump with Biden winning the popular vote by 5 percentage points; and a narrow Electoral College and popular vote victory for Biden.
In the scenarios, the team playing the Trump campaign often questioned the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which often boosted Biden as they came in — shutting down post offices, pursuing litigation, and using right-wing media to amplify narratives about a stolen election.
To some participants, the game was a stark reminder of the power of incumbency.
“The more demonstrations there were, the more demands for recounts, the more legal challenges there were, the more funerals for democracy were held, the more Trump came across as the candidate of stability,” said Edward Luce, the US editor of the Financial Times, who played the role of a mainstream media reporter during one of the simulations. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
In multiple scenarios, officials on both sides homed in on narrowly decided swing states with divided governments, such Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, hoping to persuade officials there to essentially send two different results to Congress. If a state’s election is disputed, a legislature controlled by one party and governor of another each could send competing slates of electors backing their party’s candidate.
Both sides turned out massive street protests that Trump sought to control — in one scenario he invoked the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to use military forces to quell unrest. The scenario that began with a narrow Biden win ended with Trump refusing to leave the White House, burning government documents, and having to be escorted out by the Secret Service. (The team playing Biden in that scenario, meanwhile, sought to patch things up with Republicans by appointing moderate Republican governors, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, to Cabinet positions.)
The scenario that produced the most contentious dynamics, however, was the one in which Trump won the Electoral College — and thus, the election — but Biden won the popular vote by 5 percentage points. Biden’s team retracted his Election Night concession, fueled by Democrats angry at losing yet another election despite capturing the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016. In the mock election, Trump sought to divide Democrats — at one point giving an interview to The Intercept, a left-leaning news outlet, saying Senator Bernie Sanders would have won if Democrats had nominated him. Meanwhile, Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made.
That scenario seemed highly far-fetched, but it envisioned a situation in which both sides may have incentives to contest the election.
“There is a narrative among activists in both parties that the loss must be illegitimate,” he said.
According to the Constitution, the presidency ends at noon on Jan. 20, at which point the newly inaugurated president becomes the commander in chief.
The games, ultimately, were designed to explore how difficult it could be to get there.
“The Constitution really has been a workable document in many respects because we have had people who more or less adhered to a code of conduct,” said retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, a Republican and former chief of staff to Colin Powell who participated in games as an observer. “That seems to no longer to be the case. That changes everything.”
You can’t expect one generation of corporate leadership to respect the deals made by a previous generation of corporate leadership. To expect self-interest to lead to fairness is wishful thinking. What can be done is to tax more and distribute the funds raised as a national dividend.
I am also thinking that we need to change company law. I have toying with the idea of forbidding companies (after all companies are defined by law) from buying voting shares in other companies. Only individuals should be allowed to do that.
[ Interesting. ]
April 10, 2017
Instead of Taxes, Make Corporations Give the Government Stock
By Dean Baker – Los Angeles Times
July 25, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,315,709)
Deaths ( 149,398)
There were 67,382 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the US on July 25.
Trump Could Still Break Democracy’s Biggest Norm
The Atlantic – June 16
Some of the president’s opponents fear that he’ll refuse
to leave the White House if he loses the election. Here’s why.
… If Biden were to notch a narrow victory, Trump could look to contest the results and claim he’d actually won. He could put the military and other tools of presidential power in an awkward spot, pressuring them to pick sides and untangle competing claims about who won. A supine Justice Department led by Attorney General William Barr might bolster Trump’s claims by putting out statements that the vote was tainted.
“It’s really hard for anyone in the military, at any level, to say anything other than ‘Yes, sir.’ They’re not lawyers,” Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration and a professor at Georgetown Law, told me.
The potential for chaos exposes the frailties of an electoral tradition that depends on the goodwill of the two candidates involved. If one won’t cooperate, the system seizes up. The nation survived a couple of scares, but only because the loser was willing to fold. In 2000, Al Gore conceded the race when a divided Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida, locking in George W. Bush’s narrow victory. When he bowed out, Gore ended his career in elective politics, a gesture that Trump might not be so quick to emulate. …
Trump’s political career is the story of norms upended. He’s denigrated war heroes and sparred with Gold Star families. Would he honor one of the nation’s most precious norms—the peaceful transfer of power—if it meant admitting failure?
When the fateful moment arrives, Trump would need to accept the same sobering reality that Gore absorbed: He lost. What some in Washington ask is whether he’d be in denial. …
Brooks, the Georgetown Law professor and former Obama official, is helping lead an informal bipartisan group called the Transition Integrity Project that is looking to ensure the election and potential transition go smoothly. More than 60 people are involved, including former governors and Cabinet secretaries. They’re planning to meet on Zoom in the next few weeks and hold “tabletop” exercises meant to think through various scenarios: a narrow Trump defeat, a clear Trump victory, and a resounding Biden victory among them. They’ll game out what might happen if Trump and his supporters use social media to intimidate the election workers tallying votes, or if he refuses to leave in the event of defeat, among other possibilities …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coronavirus-ravaged-florida-as-ron-desantis-sidelined-scientists-and-followed-trump/2020/07/25/0b8008da-c648-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html
July 25, 2020
Coronavirus ravaged Florida, as Ron DeSantis sidelined scientists and followed Trump
By Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Isaac Stanley-Becker, Lori Rozsa and Josh Dawsey – Washington Post
July 24, 2020
More Thoughts on the Post-Pandemic Economy
What are the chances and risks facing us in the current economic crisis?
By Dean Baker
I have written before * on the post-pandemic economy and how it should actually provide enormous opportunities, but it is worth clarifying a few points. First and most importantly, there is an important measurement issue with GDP that people will need to appreciate.
It is often said that GDP is not a good measure of well-being, we see this in a very big way in the post-pandemic period. It is likely that many of the changes in behaviour forced by the pandemic, first and foremost telecommuting, will be enduring.
Most immediately, this will show up as a sharp drop in GDP. We will be consuming much less of the goods and services associated with commuting to and from work. This means that we will be driving less. That means we will be buying less gas and needing fewer cars, car parts, and care repair services. We’ll also need less auto insurance. In addition, there will be many fewer taxi or Uber trips, as well as trips on buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation.
There is also an economy built up around serving the people working in downtown office buildings. This includes the offices themselves and the people who service and clean them. There are also the restaurants, gyms, and other businesses that serve the people who come into the city to work each day. And, there are all the items that people have to spend money on for office work, such as business clothes and shoes and dry-cleaning services.
We will see a huge reduction in demand in all these areas if much of the work being done on-line stays on-line. We will also see less business travel, which means fewer air plane trips, taxi rides, and stays in hotels.
This fall into demand will translate into a large loss of GDP, but it translates into very little by way of real loss in well-being. This doesn’t mean there will not be some loss. People may miss seeing work colleagues on a daily basis, or the opportunity to meet up with friends for lunch near the office. Some people may actually enjoy business travel. But the drop in GDP will dwarf whatever losses of these sorts people may feel, and in most cases they will be offset by gains, such as not having to spend two hours a day commuting and having more time to spend with friends and family.
So, let’s say that we see GDP drop by 3.0 percent ($660 billion a year), how should we think about this? (This is a very crude guess, not a careful calculation) On its face, that would look like a very severe downturn. In the Great Recession, GDP only fell by 4.0 percent from peak to trough, so this looks like a very serious hit to the economy.
But that really misses the story. To take an analogous situation, let’s say for some reason, such as better diet, more exercise, or an act of god, everyone’s health got hugely better. Imagine that we could have the same outcomes in terms of life expectancy and quality of overall health using half as many health care services. This would mean half as many doctors’ visits, surgeries, MRIs, prescription drugs and everything else in health care that costs money.
This reduction in health care consumption would mean a drop in GDP of more than 8.5 percent, yet everyone’s health would be just as good as it had been previously. In this story, no one in their right mind would be concerned about the loss of GDP, what we value is health, not the number of times we see a doctor or the amount of drugs we take. The decline in the resources needed to maintain our health is effectively an increase in productivity. We have seen a jump of 8.5 percent in the level of productivity, as we can get the same output as we had previously, with 8.5 percent fewer inputs. ** In other words, we are much richer as a result of this remarkable improvement in the public’s health.
We should think about my hypothesized savings of 3.0 percent of GDP on work-related expenses the same way. We had been expending a large amount of resources to maintain an office work system that is no longer needed. This is effectively a huge jump in productivity. By comparison, over the last 15 years productivity growth has averaged just 1.3 percent annually.
This matters hugely in how we think about the post-pandemic economy. If we look at the lost GDP associated with fewer work-related expenses we would think that the economy is really suffering. However, if we think of this as a big jump in productivity, then it effectively means that we have extra resources to address long-neglected social needs.
And, these resources should be readily visible in the form of all the workers who are no longer employed in restaurants, gyms, dry cleaners, or the making, servicing, or driving of cars. These are people who can be instead employed providing child care, senior care, doing energy audits of buildings, installing solar panels and energy conserving appliances, or other tasks that address neglected needs.
As I have pointed out before, we need not think that every person who lost their job waiting tables will get a job installing solar panels or as a child care provider. That’s not the way the labour market works. People in fact switch jobs frequently. In a normal pre-pandemic economy more than 5.5 million people lose or leave their job every month. If we create jobs in installing solar panels, energy audits, and child care, people will leave other jobs to fill these newly created positions, which can leave openings for laid off restaurant and hotel workers to again get jobs in hotels and restaurants, as well as other sectors.
The fact that we have a large number of idle workers, because of this effective jump in productivity, means that we should not be shy about large amounts of government spending to address these unmet needs, even though it will mean large budget deficits. For the near-term future, we will not have to worry about deficits creating too much demand in the economy and causing inflation. In the longer term, excessive demand and the resulting inflation can be a problem, which will require addressing the factors that redistribute so much money upward (e.g. patent and copyright monopolies, a corrupt corporate governance structure, and a bloated financial sector), but that will not be a problem as we recover from the recession.
If we do let obsessions with government deficits and debt curtail spending, then we can expect to see a long and harsh recession. To set up the analogy, suppose there were a 3.0 percent jump in productivity, but there was no increase in workers’ real wages. Assume all the money went to higher corporate profits. Since profits have little relationship to investment, there is no reason to expect any notable increase in investment. Let’s assume that consumption spending out of dividends and share buybacks is limited.
In this case, the economy can produce the same output with 3 percent fewer workers, meaning that 4.8 million people will be out of jobs. And, that situation can persist for a long period of time, since there is nothing inherent to the workings of the economy to bring us back to full employment.
That would really be a disaster story, especially if the correct figure for this implicit jump in productivity is something more like 5 percent, or even more. The key to preventing this sort of disaster is to understand that the reduced spending on work-related expenses is effectively an increase in productivity.
And, we also have to recognize that when we have a serious problem of unemployment, the failure to run large deficits is incredibly damaging to the country. Millions of workers will needlessly suffer, as will their family. And the failure is increased when it means not spending in areas that will have long-term benefits for the country, like child care and slowing global warming. It is tragic that deficit hawks are able to do so much harm to our children under the guise of saving our children.
* https://www.cepr.net/the-post-pandemic-economy/
** For those being technical, I am not using “productivity” precisely here. A reduction equal to 8.5 percent of GDP in the value of goods or services devoted to health care, does not necessarily mean that the amount of labour used in the health care sector has fallen by an amount equal to 8.5 percent of the economy’s annual labour usage. But I’m ignoring this point for now.
July 26, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,330,843)
Deaths ( 149,526)
We have an institutional reflected by this data. Beyond a leadership failure, this is a failure of the healthcare system and a failure of technology.
July 26, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 62,908)
Deaths ( 1,063)
Deaths per million ( 98)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,495)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
Similarly, the different experiences of Cuba and Dominican Republic in dealing with the spread of the coronavirus reflects a difference in the healthcare systems that is profound. This, even though Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the Americas since 1970.
July 26, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 61,764)
Deaths ( 468)
Deaths per million ( 51)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
The unfortunate way in which Israel went from control of the coronavirus to a general spread of infections, by opening business and schools with little caution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opinion/covid-test-turnaround.html
July 24, 2020
When Is a Coronavirus Test Not a Coronavirus Test?
If it takes 12 days to get results, it’s basically pointless.
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Desperate to continue the tradition of a family beach week, I hatched a plan that would allow some mask- and sanitizer-enhanced semblance of normality.
We hadn’t seen my two 20-something children in months. They’d spent the lockdown in Brooklyn; one of them most likely had the disease in late March, before testing was widely available. My mother had died of Covid-19 in May.
So a few weeks ago I rented a cute house on the Delaware shore. It had a screened-in front porch and a little cottage out back, in case someone needed to quarantine.
I asked my son, who had participated in several protests and had been at a small outdoor July 4 gathering, to get tested before he came. Testing had been recommended by the governor and the mayor, and many centers were offering an anticipated 48-hour turnaround.
He got one and downloaded the app for results. And waited. And waited. And waited. For 12 days….
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
A couple of months ago, before the great reopening disaster, I did several interviews in which I was asked about the tradeoff between the economy and fighting the pandemic. I answered that there was no tradeoff; you can’t recover until you beat the virus. 1/
12:31 PM · Jul 26, 2020
But that seemed impossible for the interviewers to process: each time they would come back with, “Yes, but how should we make the tradeoff between the economy and fighting the pandemic?” 2/
But there really isn’t a tradeoff. The US is now lagging behind other countries that didn’t rush to reopen 3/
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-26/europe-s-economy-set-to-outpace-u-s-in-upending-of-past-roles?…
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ed3bNVFXYAEG16a?format=png&name=small ]
Within the US, states that threw caution to the wind gained a short-term boost but are now falling behind 4/
https://washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/21/arizona-struggles-neighboring-new-mexico-found-more-cautious-path-sustained-growth/…
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ed3bcBmWkAEcQkY?format=png&name=small ]
So we sacrificed tens of thousands of lives for nothing, or less than nothing. MAGA! 5/
As for testing, China published the genetic code for Covid-19 on January 11 and within a few days tests were developed by the World Health Organization and Germany and China. With South Korea coming on a little later. Failure of the US to develop a test, reflects a serious technology problem. This needs to be understood. Of course, we could have used the WHO test from the beginning.
July 26, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,364,479)
Deaths ( 149,769)
July 25, 2020
Thoughts on Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
By Dean Baker
I just finished reading Carter’s book and I will agree with the general assessment. It is an outstanding book that brings together much useful material on the life and influence of Keynes.
While I am of course familiar with Keynes’ history and the history of Keynesianism, there is much that I learned here. In particular, I am impressed with the importance he gives Joan Robinson in spreading the ideas of Keynes, especially to followers from the United States.
When I first started taking economics, I hugely appreciated Robinson’s writing. She both did very important analytic work, especially her pathbreaking analysis of imperfect competition, but was also tremendously witty in her popular writing. I will always remember her great comment on unemployment: “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”
Anyhow, I am happy to see her given the starring role in the spread of Keynesian thought, especially given that, as a woman, she had a huge amount to overcome in a field that was, and is, tremendously sexist.
Carter also provides a fascinating account of the friendship/rivalry between John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson. While these luminaries spent decades together in Cambridge, I was not aware of their personal history.
If I have any quibbles with the book, it is probably with its run through of the last fifty years and the decline of Keynes’ radical vision in economics. There are certainly some items I would give a bit more attention, like the decline of the labor movement, but covering fifty years of U.S. history in 100 pages is a major undertaking.
There are two items that do need some correction. First, from a labor market perspective, the recession following the collapse of the 1990s stock bubble was not mild. While the economy quickly rebounded in 2002 from a recession that did not even have two consecutive quarters of negative growth (the standard definition for a recession), the economy continued to shed jobs all the way through 2002 and most of the way through 2003. It did not recover the jobs lost in the downturn until February of 2005, four full years after the pre-recession peak. At the time, this was the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression. In other words, bursting bubbles have real consequence, as John Kenneth Galbraith had warned.
The other item is considerably more important. Carter buys the often-told story that bailing out the banks in the Great Recession saved us from a Second Great Depression. No biographer of Keynes should ever say anything like this.
First and foremost, Keynes taught us how to get out of the first Great Depression. The secret is spending money. If the government had gone on a huge spending spree in 1930, in response to the initial crash, instead of waiting to go full Keynesian in response to World War II, we never would have had the first Great Depression.
If we had let the market work its magic on Citigroup, Goldman, and the rest, there is no doubt that the initial downturn would have been worse. But if we responded with a massive public investment program in clean energy, health care, child care and other areas, we quickly would have recovered. And, we would have eliminated a massive source of economic waste in the bloated financial sector. It is also worth noting that the bloated financial sector is a major generator of inequality. It is where many of the seven, eight, and even nine figure paychecks can be found.
We should be clear; the bailout was about saving the very rich and their institutions. We could have rescued the economy just fine without them.
This gets me to the question that Carter poses at the end as to why the radicalism at the core of Keynes’ vision withered away after he died. Carter partially endorses Joan Robinson’s answer that Keynes was too naïve in believing good ideas could triumph on their own.
While this is undoubtedly in part true, I would add a bit to this in saying that Keynes and his followers were not quite radical enough in their ideas. Specifically, they were too willing to accept the idea of a natural market that is somehow pre-existing but may require the intervention of the government to achieve both full employment and important public goals. This acceptance lends way too much legitimacy to the critiques posed by Hayek, Friedman, and other neo-liberal opponents of Keynesianism.
The point is that the government structures the market in very fundamental ways. It can and does structure it differently through time in ways that have an enormous impact on the distribution of income.
To take my favorite example, patent and copyrights are government-granted monopolies that redistribute an enormous amount of income upward. I put the figure in the neighborhood of $1 trillion a year, or roughly half of all corporate profits. The United States would still be a capitalist economy without these government granted monopolies, although we would have a far more equal distribution of income. As I like to say, in the world without patent and copyright monopolies, Bill Gates would still be working for a living. *
To take another example, the government sets the rules of corporate governance. In the United States we have a structure of governance that makes it extremely difficult for shareholders to rein in the pay of CEOs and other top management. This is another source of massive inequality as the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of ordinary workers has exploded from just around 20 to 1 five decades ago, to around 200 to 1 today.
Incredibly, many on the left seem to think that the soaring pay of top executives is about maximizing shareholder value, even as returns to shareholders have been relatively weak in the last two decades. Even stories about insider trading, which obviously benefits top management at the expense of the corporation, do not shake this view. Anyhow, a capitalist system that made it easier for shareholders to rein in CEO pay is still very much a capitalist system.
I could cite other ways in which we have shaped the market to redistribute income upward (this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer – it’s free ** ), but the point should be clear. The neo-liberals are not arguing for the market as an alternative to government intervention, they are arguing for a particular structure of the market that ensures that a grossly disproportionate share of income goes to those on top.
The left gives away a huge amount in the ideological battle when it allows neo-liberals to be champions of the market, as opposed to being recognized for the champions of policies that give money to the rich. The market has real uses, and there is an inherent appeal to much of the public for the idea of leaving things to the market, rather than government bureaucrats. By contrast, saying that we want to structure the market to give as much money to the rich as possible has much less appeal.
The neo-liberals are about the latter, and the left has given them way more legitimacy than they deserve by implying that they actually have an abstract commitment to the market as a matter of principle. Exposing this deception may not be sufficient to turn the tide and bring back Keynes radical vision, but the failure to expose it is serious political and economic malpractice.
* Carter does mention this issue briefly in reference to trade deals and the WTO, but does not pursue the larger implications.
** https://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/Rigged.pdf
Big fan of Baker, but he continues with his inability to take economics out of the classroom and apply it to the real world. Very disappointing.
He states that the big banks should have been allowed to die, while admitting it would have made the Great Recession worse. But economics knew how to fix that, so it should have been done. The fix?
“if we responded with a massive public investment program in clean energy, health care, child care and other areas, we quickly would have recovered.”
Works in the classroom. But somehow he ignores what actually happened. The size and shape of the ARRA was under the total control of the 3 GOP Senators that voted to end debate. The result was a too small, ill-directed stimulus. Subsequently, the GOP Senators filibustered any further stimulus (see the American Jobs Act).
More than a decade later, Baker is still ignoring reality preaching economic policy as a fix for a problem when that policy is not being applied.
Guess what?
We’re about to see it again this week. Appears obvious that the current stimulus package being negotiated will be too small and ill-directed.
Deja vu all over again.
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,392,833)
Deaths ( 149,973)
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 63,581)
Deaths ( 474)
Deaths per million ( 52)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Results of early openings of business and schools in Israel, after the coronavirus spread was close to being controlled.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tuzq
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for United States and Israel, 1980-2018
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tuzB
January 30, 2018
Infant Mortality Rate for United States and Israel, 1980-2018
https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-27/How-COVID-19-affects-the-brain-SrXg5TA04o/index.html
July 27, 2020
How COVID-19 affects the brain
When the world first heard about COVID-19, the initial idea was that it was a respiratory disease, but in recent months experts have realised it can cause serious neurological problems in many patients.
More than 300 studies from around the world have found a prevalence of neurological abnormalities in COVID-19 patients, ranging from delirium, confusion and anxiety to brain inflammation, nerve damage and stroke.
Estimates vary but it seems that around 50 percent of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 have experienced neurological problems. At the mild end of the scale, patients may experience lingering symptoms such as poor memory and tiredness.
But the severe symptoms can result in disability and even death, with growing evidence showing that the virus can, in rare cases, enter the central nervous system.
“Acute onset of delirium or encephalopathy is affecting anywhere between 40-50 percent of patients with moderate and severe COVID-19 in hospitals.”
He said: “I’m speaking about these repercussions of infection with the disease and some of which I believe could have, and many of my colleagues believe, could have some long-lasting effects way beyond the acute phase of infection.”
Stevens revealed that the neurological complications are wide-ranging: “If we’re talking about acute onset of delirium or encephalopathy, this is affecting anywhere between 40-50 percent of patients with moderate and severe COVID-19 in hospitals. This is being shown in a number of different studies.”
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/coronavirus-retracted-studies-data.html
July 27, 2020
The Doctor Behind the Disputed Covid Data
Dr. Sapan Desai, who supplied the data for two prominent and later retracted studies, is said to have a history of cutting corners and misrepresenting information in pursuit of his ambitions.
By Ellen Gabler and Roni Caryn Rabin
A college degree at 19. A medical school graduate with a Ph.D. at 27.
By the time he completed training in vascular surgery in 2014, Dr. Sapan Desai had cast himself as an ambitious physician, an entrepreneur with an M.B.A. and a prolific researcher published in medical journals.
Then the novel coronavirus hit and Dr. Desai seized the moment. With a Harvard professor, he produced two studies in May that almost instantly disrupted multiple clinical trials amid the pandemic….
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,400,997)
Deaths ( 150,099)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/coronavirus-retracted-studies-data.html
July 27, 2020
The Doctor Behind the Disputed Covid Data
Dr. Sapan Desai, who supplied the data for two prominent and later retracted studies, is said to have a history of cutting corners and misrepresenting information in pursuit of his ambitions.
[ Ah, I understand the full problem.
Beyond the evidently faulty data supplied to researchers by Sapan Desai, the researchers never looked to and examined the original data. ]
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 64,156)
Deaths ( 1,083)
Deaths per million ( 100)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,532)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
The difference in the experience of the spread of the coronavirus in the Dominican Republic and Cuba should be studied as a difference in effectiveness of healthcare systems. The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP since 1970, while Cuba has been beset by sanctions, but health outcomes in Cuba are starkly better.
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,417,715)
Deaths ( 150,229)
India
Cases ( 1,482,503)
Deaths ( 33,448)
Mexico
Cases ( 390,516)
Deaths ( 43,680)
UK
Cases ( 300,111)
Deaths ( 45,759)
Germany
Cases ( 207,370)
Deaths ( 9,204)
France
Cases ( 183,079)
Deaths ( 30,209)
Canada
Cases ( 114,175)
Deaths ( 8,891)
China
Cases ( 83,891)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Notice the ratios of deaths to coronavirus cases of 15.2% and 16.5% for the United Kingdom and France.
CDC Coronavirus Dashboard – Updated July 27, 2020
Cases in the US
TOTAL CASES: 4,225,687 (61,795 New Cases*)
TOTAL DEATHS: 146,546 (564 New Deaths*)
*Compared to yesterday’s data
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,423,674)
Deaths ( 150,270)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,433,410)
Deaths ( 150,444)
India
Cases ( 1,482,503)
Deaths ( 33,448)
Mexico
Cases ( 390,516)
Deaths ( 43,680)
UK
Cases ( 300,111)
Deaths ( 45,759)
Germany
Cases ( 207,379)
Deaths ( 9,205)
France
Cases ( 183,079)
Deaths ( 30,209)
Canada
Cases ( 114,597)
Deaths ( 8,901)
China
Cases ( 83,891)
Deaths ( 4,634)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/us-republicans-coronavirus.html
July 27, 2020
The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America
The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.
By Paul Krugman
America’s response to the coronavirus has been a lose-lose proposition.
The Trump administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis insisted that there was no trade-off between economic growth and controlling the disease, and they were right — but not in the way they expected.
Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: Adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from Covid-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada. Yet the “rocket ship” recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: Job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.
So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?
On the face of it, the answer is that Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.
And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.
For one thing, people truly focused on restarting the economy should have been big supporters of measures to limit infections without hurting business — above all, getting Americans to wear face masks. Instead, Trump ridiculed those in masks as “politically correct,” while Republican governors not only refused to mandate mask-wearing, but they prevented mayors from imposing local mask rules.
Also, politicians eager to see the economy bounce back should have wanted to sustain consumer purchasing power until wages recovered. Instead, Senate Republicans ignored the looming July 31 expiration of special unemployment benefits, which means that tens of millions of workers are about to see a huge hit to their incomes, damaging the economy as a whole.
So what was going on? Were our leaders just stupid? Well, maybe. But there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.
You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.
Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.
This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.
Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk. And that’s the kind of thing America’s right just hates, hates to hear.
Indeed, it sometimes seems as if right-wingers actually make a point of behaving irresponsibly. Remember how Senator Rand Paul, who was worried that he might have Covid-19 (he did), wandered around the Senate and even used the gym while waiting for his test results?
Anger at any suggestion of social responsibility also helps explain the looming fiscal catastrophe. It’s striking how emotional many Republicans get in their opposition to the temporary rise in unemployment benefits; for example, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that these benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies.” Why such hatred?
It’s not because the benefits are making workers unwilling to take jobs. There’s no evidence that this is happening — it’s just something Republicans want to believe. And in any case, economic arguments can’t explain the rage.
Again, it’s the principle. Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens. And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.
What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/coronavirus-reopening-marshmallow-test.html
June 9, 2020
America Fails the Marshmallow Test
We lack the will to beat Covid-19.
By Paul Krugman
The marshmallow test is a famous psychological experiment that tests children’s willingness to delay gratification. Children are offered a marshmallow, but told that they can have a second marshmallow if they’re willing to wait 15 minutes before eating the first one. Claims that children with the willpower to hold out do much better in life haven’t held up well, but the experiment is still a useful metaphor for many choices in life, both by individuals and by larger groups.
One way to think about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it poses a kind of marshmallow test for society….