Should Americans just embrace the idea that fast recoveries are a thing of the past?
Economy-watchers have basically spent the last three years coming up with new and more metaphorically-illuminating ways of saying the same thing, over and over: "Things are getting better, but too slowly." In fact, this is what they've been saying for much of the last 30 years. Between 1950 and 1990, private GDP growth in the two years after a recession averaged between 5% and 6%. But the last three recoveries, it averaged only 2.5%.
You can blame the government -- and you probably should. Monday's NYTreport about businesses pulling back in fear of the fiscal cliff is a good reminder of Congress's ineptitude. But there are also some who think that something deeper is happening. Jon Moynihan, Executive Chairman of PA Consulting Group, brings the doom in his presentation, "The Continued Economic Decline of the West," at the London School of Economics. I don't always agree with his prescriptions. (Moynihan is a debt hawk, but debt-to-GDP is a ratio, and I'd prefer policies that grew both top and bottom to policies that lead to less debt and less growth, which is what's happening in Europe). But the descriptions and graphs are pretty, illuminating, and provocative. Here are 11 of my favorites, some annotations under some of the charts (via Simone Foxman): Poorer countries can more easily achieve "catch-up" growth by plucking some low-hanging fruit that isn't available to richer countries. For example, multinational companies can outsource and contract to China and India, paying wages that are strong, locally, but much cheaper than they would have to pay in the United States. So, it's relatively easy for a poorer country to benefit from globalization and the off-shoring of work. Once China and India achieve similar GDP/capita to the West, they'll almost certainly do the same thing. The three worst decades for job growth since 1940 were the last three.
Some of this is due to population growth, which accelerated in the 1940s
and 1950s and has slowed recently. Much of it is due to the fact that
this decade was book-ended by weak recoveries. This is one of those nice cut-and-save graphs on the value of an education. Wages for college grads have gone flat. But the wage gap between college-grads and high school grads has never been greater. So, when you hear that the value of college has stopped growing AND that the value of college has never been higher, this graph explains why both can be true, in their own way.
This is a pretty extraordinary picture that shows how after 1990, CEO compensation took off, relative to average wages. Some of this represents the trend of loading up compensation packages with stock -- those spikes represent pure capital gains (note the fluctuations in the dot-com crash the Great Recession). The other trend this revelas is wage stagnation for the average worker compared with rising wages at the top for all -- doctors, lawyers, financiers, and corporate executives. Finally, the graph also reveals some gamesmanship corporate boards, which competing boards bidding up the value of CEO compensation to get their man, or woman.
We're not living in a post-employee economy, exactly, but much of the value captured in Apple revenues are pure profit or work done across Apple's immense supply chain. It's not that Apple is evil, it's just that times have changed. GM made cars here, because they didn't really have a choice. Apple makes iPhones overseas, because they can. The recovery after 2001 wasn't much more electric than this. In fact, if you look exclusively private sector jobs, it was even weaker.
In global economics, demographics is like the Wizard of Oz. You can't always see it, and some people don't talk about it, but it's the quiet and powerful force behind almost everything. The Western world basically got very rich and old at the same time, and lurking behind our debt crises is the fact that, in flusher times, we made promises to the elderly, with pensions and health care, that many rich countries now are nervous about fulfilling. The U.S. is in a better position that most. Higher birthrates and healthy immigration means our working-age population is growing considerably faster than countries like the UK and Japan, which bodes well for our ability to finance our welfare system.
According to new research, sexual victimization by women is more common than gender stereotypes would suggest.
Two years ago, Lara Stemple, Director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, came upon a statistic that surprised her: In incidents of sexual violence reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of victims were men––a figure much higher than in prior surveys. Intrigued, she began to investigate: Was sexual violence against men more common than previously thought?
The inquiry was a timely one. For years, the FBI definition of rape was gendered, requiring “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” But a recent redefinition focused instead on forced penetration with no mention of gender. Meanwhile, other data-gatherers had started to track a new category of sexual violence that the Centers for Disease Control call “being forced to penetrate.” And still others were keeping better track of sexual violence in prisons.
There are more restrictions to professional freedom in the United States, and the educators find the school day overly rigid.
“I have been very tired—more tired and confused than I have ever been in my life,” Kristiina Chartouni, a veteran Finnish educator who began teaching American high-school students this autumn, said in an email. “I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”
Chartouni, who is a Canadian citizen through marriage, moved from Finland to Florida with her family in 2014, due in part to her husband’s employment situation. After struggling to maintain an income and ultimately dropping out of an ESL teacher-training program, a school in Tennessee contacted her this past spring about a job opening. Shortly thereafter, Chartouni had the equivalent of a full-time teaching load as a foreign-language teacher at two public high schools in the Volunteer State, and her Finnish-Canadian family moved again. (Chartouni holds a master’s degree in foreign-language teaching from Finland’s University of Jyväskylä.)
A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.
As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.
A man who will literally have life and death power over much of humanity seems not to understand or care about the difference between truth and lies. Is there any way for democratic institutions to cope? This is our topic in the post-Thanksgiving week.
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Being back in China in the U.S.-election aftermath naturally leads to thoughts about how societies function when there is no agreed-on version of “reality,” public knowledge, or news.
We take for granted that this was a challenge for Soviet citizens back in the Cold War days, when they relied on samizdat for non-government-authorized reports and criticisms. Obviously it’s a big issue for China’s public now. But its most consequential effects could be those the United States is undergoing, which have led to the elevation of the least prepared, most temperamentally unfit, least public-spirited person ever to assume the powers of the U.S. presidency.
The actress and former Church devotee takes aim at its practices in a new eight-part series on A&E.
The last ten years haven’t been easy for Scientology. After the religion/self-knowledge practice/tax-exempt corporation arguably peaked in 2006 with the spectacular Italian wedding of its most famous congregant, Tom Cruise, the Church since then has faced a barrage of reports alleging nefarious practices—from physical violence committed by senior executives to widespread harassment of people seen as enemies of Scientology. Going Clear, a meticulously reported book about the organization by The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, while a documentary based on the book by Alex Gibney was nominated for an Academy Award. And several of Scientology’s celebrity members—the Church’s most powerful recruitment tool—have quit, none in a more high-profile and outspoken fashion than Leah Remini.
Lessons of physical prosperity in a despotic regime
On public-access TV in 1985, Bernie Sanders defended an element of Fidel Castro’s regime: It was rarely mentioned that Castro provided health care to his country. Sanders grumbled that the same could not be said of then-President Reagan.
The comment came back to haunt Sanders in the wake of Castro’s death. On Sunday on ABC’s This Week, host Martha Raddatz played the old clip and then asked Sanders if he was aware that “this was a brutal dictatorship despite the romanticized version that some Americans have of Cuba.” She reminded Sanders that Castro rationed food and punished dissidents, then hit him with the big question: “So have you changed your view of Castro since 1985?”
Sanders said he didn’t exactly remember the context for his comment (being 31 years ago) but that Cubans “do have a decent health-care system.”
How Trump’s government could change America’s approach to terrorism
In the fall of 1990—around the time U.S. troops arrived in Saudi Arabia, enraging Osama bin Laden—the historian Bernard Lewis sounded an alarm in The Atlantic about brewing anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. “[W]e are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them,” he wrote. “This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.”
Fallows is on a plane once again, this time back from China, so he asked me to help compile and edit all the most insightful and varied emails among the tsunami sent to him directly and sent to our hello@ inbox. This first reader dissents over Jim’s mega-popular note, “How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media” (follow-up note here):
Public trust in institutions is very low (all-time low?), and trust in the media is particularly low. Following the advice of James Fallows will make your core readership feel righteous and satisfied and dare I say smug, but it will further erode everyone else’s trust in you. To Trump supporters, it will look like a partisan attack by the liberal media, but there’s probably no hope of winning them over anyway, so let’s put them aside for now. To many other people—regular folks who simply don’t have time or skills to weigh evidence and evaluate sources—it will just look like opposing assertions.
Instead, what if instead of making this “illegal votes” episode a story about a “tweet” or a “lie” or even a liar, the media made it a story about a serious and dangerous claim by our president-elect? What if you actually doubled-down on the “normalizing” and gave Trump every opportunity to back up his claims with evidence? What if you refused to move on from this very serious issue and instead demanded that he explain seriously and at length why he believes that three million illegal votes were cast, and why they were cast only for Clinton?
What if you refused to move on from this one tweet for several weeks? What if the media did that for every dangerous claim made by this (elected) administration, baseless or otherwise? Don’t accuse him of lying. Instead, force him to use his platform to either back it up or back down. Don’t try to shoot him; give him a rope to hang himself with.
The president-elect doesn’t understand that war is politics, because he lacks experience in both war and politics.
“Just met with General Petraeus—was very impressed!” tweeted President-elect Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Petraeus described his conversation to reporters. “[Trump] basically walked us around the world, showed a great grasp of a variety of the challenges that are out there and some of the opportunities as well. Very good conversation, and we’ll see where it goes from here.” In a process not entirely dissimilar to that of the hit show The Apprentice, Trump is currently finalizing his Cabinet selections, including the prize role of secretary of state. The finalists appear to include Petraeus, Mitt Romney, and Senator Bob Corker. Petraeus is a controversial and flawed selection, but if chosen he could also be an essential part of Trump’s White House.
The proximate cause for his tweet seems to be a contretemps at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where earlier this month students lowered the American flag to half-staff in protest of Trump’s victory in the presidential election. One student reportedly burned a flag as well. In response, the college decided to remove the flag. On Monday, veterans staged a protest of that action.
