In the first nine months of 2019, developers put up 150 new wind turbines across the country with a total capacity of 514MW — more than 80 per cent below the average build rate in the past five years and the lowest increase in capacity for two decades. The sharp decline has raised alarm among political leaders, industry executives and climate campaigners.
“For the fight against climate change, this is a catastrophe,” said Patrick Graichen, the director of Agora Energiewende, a think-tank in Berlin. “If we want to reach the 65 per cent renewables target we need at least 4GW of new onshore wind capacity every year. This year we will probably not even manage 1GW.”
The problem was two-fold, he said: “The federal states have not made available enough areas for new wind turbines, and those that are available are fought tooth and nail by local campaigners.”
California regulators are trying to crack down on a company that orders Ubers for the blind and elderly.
In February, the Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED) of the California Public Utilities Commission—the state body that regulates transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft—issued a citation to GoGo Grandparent for operating a for-hire transportation service without permission.
Regulators demanded that the company pay a $10,000 fine and obtain the necessary permit to run a transportation network company, which would involve getting $1 million liability insurance for its vehicles and handing over lists of its drivers to the state.
But GoGo doesn't own any vehicles, and it doesn't contract directly with any drivers.
Instead, for the past four years, the company has been providing a toll-free hotline that customers without a smartphone can call to order an Uber or Lyft ride to their home or another prearranged location. Using customer-provided information, GoGo's software automatically orders a ride, then charges a 27-cent-per-mile fee for its services.
GoGo's service is aimed at elderly and disabled people who either don't have or can't use smartphones. Its novelty and perceived public benefit—improving mobility for seniors—has earned the company coverage from such outlets as The New York Times and TechCrunch.
State regulators have taken a more negative view.
California law defines a for-hire ride service—referred to as "charter-party carriers"—as any "person engaged in the transportation of persons by motor vehicle for compensation." CPED argues that this applies to GoGo. In regulatory filings, it has used the Merriam-Wester definition of "engaged" as "involved in [the] activity."
The division officially cited GoGo in February. In March, the company filed an appeal, arguing that the regulations it was being asked to comply with were inapplicable to its business model.
"GoGo allows a flip phone to act as a substitute for a smartphone for the rider summoning a ride through a [transportation network company] such as Uber or Lyft," says the appeal, which notes that the company neither employs or contracts with drivers. "For the [Public Utilities Commission] to regulate them would be equivalent to regulating a smartphone or the Google Alexa Device or a computer code."
In an August opinion, an administrative law judge agreed with GoGo, noting that the CPED had used a more narrow definition of transportation service in the past—and that if regulators' expansive definition of what it meant to be "engaged" in transporting people were accepted, those same regulators might themselves be labeled a for-hire transportation service.
CPED regulators "are 'engaged' in the transportation of persons by motor vehicle by virtue of this enforcement action and they are compensated for their activity," the judge noted. "This absurd result of relying on its dictionary definition demonstrates the ambiguity of the term 'engaged.'"
The full utility commission still needs to vote to ratify this decision, and the vote keeps getting delayed. The five-member commission was initially supposed to vote to dismiss the citation issued against GoGo in October, but that was moved back to November, and now early December.
A spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission told the San Francisco Chronicle that a few delays are pro forma. Not so, says Tom MacBride, GoGo's attorney, who told the paper that multiple delays usually happen only for major commission business, not a minor citation like the one issued against his client. He speculates that CPED staff could be holding up proceedings.
Regardless of what's behind these delays, it's ridiculous that GoGo is in this position in the first place. The company is performing a useful and innovative service by helping seniors to make use of technology that might otherwise have left them behind. For their trouble, they've been beset by dictionary-quoting regulators who are stretching state law to penalize the company.
Chun-Li, a mainstay of the Street Fighter series, has joined the Power Rangers. She's not part of the TV series, or included in the upcoming movie sequel that has been rumored, though--instead she's joined the mobile game Power Rangers: Legacy Wars to battle against the villain M. Bison. You can see her in her Power Rangers garb, and see how her moves translate to the game, in the video below.
The video description sums up the plot for this new Chun-Li episode within the game: "As Chun-Li’s allies fended off M. Bison’s army of Evil Rangers, she faced him one on one. With her courage, determination, and teamwork, she was able to retrieve the Phoenix Power Coin and save her newfound friends."
The mobile fighting game developed by nWay pits characters from the TV show against each other, and this is not the first time it has crossed over with Street Fighter. The Street Fighter Showdown event introduced Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile, Akuma, M. Bison and Cammy to the game in 2018, but they didn't get the full Power Rangers suit treatment as Chun-Li has now. Her moveset has been faithfully carried across from the Street Fighter series (which continues to grow with the recent announcement of Street Fighter V: Champion Edition.)
Power Rangers: Legacy Wars is an online tag-team fighting game based on the massively popular franchise. It features series antagonist Rita Repulsa as a major villain, and is free-to-play. As of March 2019, it had been downloaded over 50 million times.
Better late than never? Better rich than never too, even in a Democratic presidential primary. At a point in time where the field should be narrowing, here comes Deval Patrick as a wannabe-come-lately into the 2020 mix. Savannah Guthrie picked up the news for NBC's Today:
Hopefully this will start being talked about more.
More than 400 pages of internal Chinese government documents obtained by The New York Times show the origins and execution of China’s detention of as many as 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other predominately Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region.
Why it matters: This is "one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades," per the Times. The documents, shared by an anonymous member of the Chinese political establishment, imply "greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known."
What the documents reveal: The leaked papers contain internal directives and speeches.
Uighur militant attacks at no point threatened Communist control in the region, per the Times. "[T]hey remained relatively small, scattered and unsophisticated."
Yet, against a "backdrop of bloodshed," Xi's private speeches, starting in 2014, set the tone for the clampdown. He called for a “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy," the Times writes.
“The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated. People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”
Xi Jinping on April 30, 2014, after his first and only trip to Xinjiang
Terror overseas, such as the Sept. 11 attacks,furthered anxieties that violence may carry over into China.
The appointment of regional leader Chen Quango in 2016 led to a rapid increase in internment camps and people being held at them.
“Round up everyone who should be rounded up.”
Chen Quanguo said. The sweeping order appears repeatedly in internal documents from 2017.
Since 2017, authorities in Xinjiang have detained hundreds of thousands Muslim minorities. In the camps, inmates endure up to years of "indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party."
"The documents also show that the government acknowledged internally that the campaign tore families apart — even as it explained it as a modest job-training effort — and the program faced unexpected resistance from officials who feared backlash and economic damage."
Some officials were forced out or punished. Those who resisted the government's efforts worried it would harm economic growth while further increasing ethnic tensions.
The other side: While the Chinese government's efforts to "cure" Uighur Muslims may have put an end to violent unrest today, experts warn these extreme measures could lead to resentment and worse ethnic clashes in the future, the Times notes.
Our thought bubble per Axios' Dave Lawler: While the detentions in Xinjiang have sparked growing international outrage, and senior members of the Trump administration have raised the issue publicly, most governments are silent and others have even defended Beijing. That’s a testament to China’s economic might and willingness to punish those who dare criticize its human rights abuses.
We don’t know the precise natural rate of unemployment, but according to most estimates the natural rate has fallen from roughly 5%-6% during the 1980s to below 4% today. In Germany, the natural rate has fallen much more dramatically.
We also don’t know all of the reasons for this decline. Perhaps the rise of the “gig economy” has made it easier for the unemployed to find jobs.
The share of jobless people receiving unemployment benefits fell after the 2007-09 recession and has stagnated at a historically low level since. Last year, 28% of jobless people received benefits, down from 37% in 2000—a period of similarly low unemployment.
Among the main reasons, experts say: After the last recession ended, state legislatures passed policies reducing unemployment benefits and tightening eligibility requirements.
They also provide a chart:
In 2014, Congress cut back on federal unemployment benefits. Some Keynesians argued that this would reduce aggregate demand and therefore slow job growth. In April 2014, Paul Krugman criticized the view that lower benefits would boost employment:
Ben Casselman points out that we’ve had a sort of natural experiment in the alleged effects of unemployment benefits in reducing employment. Extended benefits were cancelled at the beginning of this year; have the long-term unemployed shown any tendency to find jobs faster? And the answer is no.
Let me parse this a bit more, and ask, how was it, exactly, that reduced benefits were supposed to encourage employment in the first place?
Making the unemployed miserable arguably increases labor supply, as workers become less choosy and more willing to take whatever job they can find. But the US labor market in 2014 isn’t constrained by supply, it’s constrained by demand: given what firms can sell, they have no need for as many hours of work as workers are willing to give.
I argued that the policy change would boost aggregate supply and increase job growth. It turns out that I was correct; payroll employment growth in 2014 surged to 3 million, versus 2.3 million in 2013 and 2.2 million in 2012.
Both aggregate supply and aggregate demand play a big role in the labor market.
BTW, the WSJ article cites one of my colleagues at the Mercatus Center:
Some economists like Michael Farren, a research fellow at the right-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University, say the state unemployment-insurance cutbacks and policy changes have motivated jobless Americans to undertake faster searches for new work.
Absent the state changes, he said, “you end up with policies created in the crisis that may help smooth the passage through the crisis, but…actually help stall the recovery.”
William Dalrymple is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. He burst upon the scene in 1989 as a precocious, if occasionally a bit snotty travel writer, with In Xanadu in which he traced the path of Marco Polo from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Xanadu in Inner Mongolia. He really hit stride, however, with City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, an essentially perfect example of the “Year in” genre that combines humor, history and analysis and remains to this day an excellent guide to historical Delhi. In From the Holy Mountain Dalrymple traveled from Greece to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt to understand the ancient roots of the Christian populations in these countries. Sadly, Dalrymple’s trip has become in some respects a last document of cultures now disappearing under the stress of war, revolution and suppression. As Dalrymple aged he turned more and more to pure history. In The Last Mughal and Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, Dalyrmple gives what I think are the definitive accounts of the Indian mutiny of 1857 and the British invasion of Afghanistan of 1839-1842. Especially notable in both of these books is that Dalyrmple draws on previous ignored or underused Indian and Afghani accounts. There are other books, collections of journalistic essays, photographs and more but I will mention just one more, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, a beautiful and unforgettable account of nine people in modern India each walking a unique religious path.
In his latest book, The Anarchy, Dalrymple recounts the remarkable history of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. I review The Anarchy at EH.net. Here’s one bit from my review:
The Mughal emperor Shah Alam, for example, had been forced to flee Delhi leaving it to be ruled by a succession of Persian, Afghani and Maratha warlords. But after wandering across eastern India for many years, he regathered his army, retook Delhi and almost restored Mughal power. At a key moment, however, he invited into the Red Fort with open arms his “adopted” son, Ghulam Qadir. Ghulam was the actual son of Zabita Khan who had been defeated by Shah Alam sixteen years earlier. Ghulam, at that time a young boy, had been taken hostage by Shah Alam and raised like a son, albeit a son whom Alam probably used as a catamite. Expecting gratitude, Shah Alam instead found Ghulam driven mad. Ghulam took over the Red Fort and cut out the eyes of the Mughal emperor, immediately calling for a painter to immortalize the event.
The legendary game programmer is stepping away from his position at the top of Facebook's virtual reality unit, though he says he will remain a "consulting CTO."
Carmack will now focus his time on working on artificial general intelligence, a branch of AI focusing on building flexible, human-like intelligence with machines.
Top Facebook executive and legendary game programmer John Carmack is stepping away from his role as chief technology officer at Facebook-owned virtual reality unit Oculus to focus on artificial intelligence research.
The newest "Star Wars" story has arrived on Disney Plus, and with it comes a whole new cast of interesting characters from around the galaxy. There is the unnamed title character, "The Mandalorian" himself, plus several others played by Carl Weathers, Werner Herzog, and more.
Keep reading for a list of all the major characters on "The Mandalorian" you should know. We'll be updating this list with each new episode as new faces join the protagonist bounty hunter.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for "The Mandalorian" episode one.
The main character in "The Mandalorian" is an unnamed bounty hunter.
Disney
Known simply as the Mandalorian, not much was revealed about this guy other than his prowess for fighting and connection to the warriors of the planet called Mandalore. The Mandalorian says he was a "foundling" once, but has now become part of the Mandalorian troop. So far this mystery man hasn't shown his face.
We know underneath is the face of actor Pedro Pascal, best known for his role as Oberyn Martell on "Game of Thrones" and Netflix's "Narcos."
Greef Carga is the man who gets the Mandalorian bounty assignments.
Disney/Lucasfilm
Greef Carga is the name of the man who the Mandalorian delivers his bounty assets to. Carga pays the Mandalorian, and then gives him info about an off-the-books job with a new client who has deep pockets.
The Client is a mysterious man who commissions the Mandalorian for a new bounty hunt.
Disney/Lucasfilm
Similar to the Mandalorian, very little information about the "Client" is given on the first episode.
We know he has access to the rare metal called Beskar, and he wears an Imperial insignia — which means he's still loyal to the fallen Empire. This was made clear thanks to his Stormtrooper bodyguards, too.
There were 496 scripted TV shows made in the US last year, more than double the 216 series released in 2010. In the past eight years the number of shows grew by 129 per cent, while the US population rose only 6 per cent. The trend is set to deepen, as groups like AT&T’s WarnerMedia commission dozens of new series to convince people to sign up for their streaming services.
…In the span of about six months, Disney, Apple, AT&T and Comcast are launching new streaming services, asking people to pay nothing for some services or up to $15 a month to watch their libraries of films and shows.
Here is more from Anna Nicolaou and Alex Barker at the FT. Yes, you might be tempted to short this sector and perhaps I am too. Still, another possible part of the equilibrium adjustment is simply that the market swallows the content and factor prices fall, a’la music streaming. That would be one way to get all of those costly special effects out of so many movies.
No, it is not one of the great Boomer rip-offs, as I argue in my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt:
According to his [Blahous’s] estimates [link here], if no further steps are taken to shore up the finances of Social Security, the system will stop being able to meet its scheduled payment obligations sometime in the 2030s. (Note that benefit hikes are part of the schedule.) That would be bad, but even under this scenario the system is still paying out a roughly constant level of inflation-adjusted benefits over time, at least as those benefits are defined as a percentage of workers’ taxable earnings (about 13%). Of course, to the extent those taxable earnings rise, the benefits will be rising too, even if not at a spectacular pace.
Keep in mind that this is the worst-case scenario offered by a relative pessimist.
Another way to describe the problem is that, over the next 75 years, about 17% of scheduled benefits are currently unfinanced. Blahous estimates that the U.S. could cover that gap if the Social Security payroll tax were raised from 12.4% to 15.1%.
Now, you might have strong views about the wisdom of that kind of tax increase, but you should acknowledge that this is a very different reality than a bankrupt system. With Social Security on full cruise control, and with no forward-looking reforms, today’s younger earners still are slated to receive more than their parents did — just not very much more.
Dean Baker, an economist to the left of Blahous, also has studied Social Security. He estimates that retirees 30 to 40 years from now will receive monthly checks that are about 10% higher in real terms than today’s benefits. And keep in mind those are estimates per year. To the extent life expectancy rises, total benefits received will be higher yet.
I recently had the privilege of reading an advance copy of philosopher Chris Freiman‘s Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics. (You may know Chris from such nerdtastic venues as Unreasonable Anti-Rawls Memes). Here’s one highlight on the cost of voting.
Yes, Freiman concedes, merely going to the polls and filling in your ballot takes an hour or so. But filling in the ballot intelligently takes many years of time. Here’s why:
Merely voting may only take an hour or so at periodically available, formally arranged times, but voting with care takes a much larger commitment of time and energy to politics. By analogy, it’s false that “answering SAT questions with care” is an easy thing to do simply because the SAT only requires a few hours at periodically available, formally arranged times. The real investment takes place long before the test. Similarly, the real investment in voting with care takes place long before the polls open. Doing it with care is costly, which in turn soaks up more resources from other moral endeavors.
Important point here. Big business is the ultimate beneficiary of these regulations.
The Bay Area of California is ground zero of NIMBYism. Daniel Herriges has a very good article on the issue:
A few months ago, I wrote about San Bruno, California’s rejection of a 425-unit apartment complex, even after the developer jumped through an insane series of hoops. To get the project approved, Mike Ghielmetti’s Signature Development followed San Bruno’s own voter-approved downtown vision to the letter. The project was near mass transit. It would have had 64 affordable homes, a grocery store, community space, and Ghielmetti would also have paid $10 million into the city’s general fund—a concession that feels like a bribe in all but name.
The rejection, by a single vote and two abstentions on San Bruno’s city council, was easy to treat as a symbol of California’s utter dysfunction when it comes to housing: in a county with a universally recognized housing crisis, which added 19 jobs for every one new home from 2010 to 2015, someone wanting to build housing could do everything the city asked for and still be capriciously turned down (in part due to a bizarre procedure in San Bruno in which abstaining council members’ votes were counted as “no” votes).
Well, now there’s an update on the story: predictably, the developer is taking advantage of a state law to move ahead anyway with a *larger* project with *fewer* concessions! . . .
There’s a much deeper source of dysfunction here, and that is that it’s so onerous to develop in San Bruno (or virtually anywhere in coastal California), and there are so many costly regulatory hurdles and delays involved that it’s virtually only viable to do so at an enormous scale like 425 or 600 apartments. Imagine jumping all those same hurdles just to build 20 or 30 apartments on a much smaller piece of land. Who would be crazy enough to try?
This is a system designed to turn each individual development proposal into a high-stakes battle. And when that’s the case, the only developers in the arena will be the ones big enough to throw their weight around.
A new Cato study of wealth inequality (by Chris Edwards and Ryan Bourne) also points to the role of regulation:
Section 4 looks at cronyism, which refers to insiders and businesses securing narrow tax, spending, and regulatory advantages. Cronyism is one cause of wealth inequality, and it has likely increased over time as the government has grown.
When I was young, lots of smaller developers built 4 unit apartment buildings all over the place. I don’t see much of that anymore. Regulation (and intellectual property laws) increasingly favors big business.
A common refrain in coverage of the Democratic primary campaign is that the race looks much different in the early states than it does nationally, with a wider playing field, greater strength for upstart candidates such as Pete Buttigieg, and signs of weakness for the leader in national polls, Joe Biden.
The refrain is true if you look only at Iowa or only at New Hampshire, but it’s mostly not true overall. Taken collectively, polls in the four early states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — tell almost the same story as national polls: Biden leads, Elizabeth Warren is in second, Bernie Sanders is in third, and Buttigieg is still a fairly distant fourth.
There are some differences: Tom Steyer, who has poured millions of dollars into advertisements in the early states, is notably stronger in all four of them than in national polls. But Biden’s position is pretty much the same in the four early states taken together as in national polls. If anything, Warren and Sanders lose slightly more ground in early-state polls relative to national ones than he does.
Overall, among the nine Democrats who have qualified so far for this month’s debate, the correlation between national polls and early state polls (weighted by the number of Democratic voters in each state) is .99, or nearly perfect. It seems like perceptions to the contrary derive from ignoring South Carolina (a strong state for Biden) and Nevada (strong for Biden and also Sanders’s strongest early state) and their more diverse and moderate electorates at the expense of white and liberal voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Let’s look at some data. Below, I’ve calculated a polling average in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina using polls in FiveThirtyEight’s polling database. Polls are weighted based on their sample size and their pollster rating (please don’t hesitate to check out our newly-updated pollster ratings!). Because recent polling is a bit sparse in some of these states — and because the race doesn’t seem to be changing that much anyway — I’ve gone back and included all polls since the September debate, but polls since the October debate are weighted double. If a polling firm surveyed a state multiple times in this period, only its most recent poll is included. I’ve also calculated a national polling average using the same method. (All polling averages are through early Tuesday.)
National polls and early-state polls look similar
Weighted polling averages in early states vs. national polling averages for Democratic candidates who have qualified for the November debate
Polling Averages
Candidate
Iowa
N.H.
Nev.
S.C.
Early State Avg*
National
Biden
19.1%
21.1%
27.4%
35.7%
27.5%
28.6%
Warren
22.3
24.7
19.9
15.5
19.5
21.7
Sanders
13.7
16.1
18.4
11.0
14.2
16.7
Buttigieg
15.0
9.1
4.5
4.0
7.6
6.5
Harris
3.6
3.6
4.1
6.1
4.7
4.8
Yang
2.1
2.9
3.7
1.8
2.5
2.5
Klobuchar
3.4
3.2
1.5
1.5
2.2
2.1
Booker
1.9
1.7
1.3
2.9
2.1
1.9
Steyer
2.5
2.5
3.5
3.9
3.3
0.9
* Weighted by the number of Democrats in each state.
Source: Polls
The Iowa numbers do look quite a bit different than national polls, with Buttigieg much stronger and Biden much weaker. Interestingly, Warren isn’t doing appreciably better in Iowa than in national polls, perhaps because she loses support to Buttigieg (both are competing for white, college-educated voters). Sanders is a tiny bit weaker in Iowa than he is nationally. Steyer and Amy Klobuchar are slightly stronger.
In New Hampshire, some of the same patterns hold, although less profoundly. And Warren slightly overperforms her national numbers.
But Iowa and New Hampshire’s Democratic electorates are both quite white and quite liberal, which plays to the strength of some candidates more than others. It’s disadvantageous for Biden, who relies on a coalition of black Democrats and moderate, usually non-college-educated white Democrats.
Nevada, which is more working-class and more racially diverse, is a stronger state for Biden, as well as for Sanders, who like Biden does better among voters who did not attend college. And South Carolina, which has both a lot of African-American voters and a lot of moderate white voters, is a very strong state for Biden, as his polling average there (35.7 percent) more than doubles that of the second-place candidate, Warren.
Overall, if you weight the early-state polling averages by the number of Democrats in each state,4 they show Biden at 27.5 percent — similar to his national polling average during this period, which is 28.6 percent. Warren, at 19.5 percent in the early-state average, and Sanders, at 14.2 percent, are actually a bit weaker in early states overall than in national polls. And Buttigieg is at best slightly stronger in the early states; his good numbers in Iowa and to a lesser extent New Hampshire are counteracted by weak ones in Nevada and South Carolina.
The one candidate who really does appear stronger in the early states is Steyer, who averages at least 2.5 percent in each of them — but only registers at 0.9 percent in national polls.
Of course, Iowa and New Hampshire vote first — and could therefore affect voting in the subsequent states, including Nevada and South Carolina. But the media ought to be careful about implying that Biden is especially weak in the early states or that Buttigieg is especially strong in them. Those characterizations only hold if you look at Iowa and New Hampshire, which have electorates that are highly unrepresentative of the Democratic Party as a whole. Biden does just fine in the more diverse early states, conversely.
Put differently, there isn’t much evidence that Biden does worse with voters who see him up close and personal, as often seems to be the implication of coverage that focuses heavily on Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, he does worse with liberal, college-educated whites, who are plentiful in these states. Intentionally or not, the intense media focus on Iowa and New Hampshire serves to give more influence to liberal, college-educated whites at the expense of African-Americans, Hispanics, moderate Democrats and working-class Democrats, groups that are also key parts of the Democratic coalition.
Ask anyone and they will tell you that their prescription costs are rising. But generic drug prices are falling (also here) and generics are 80-90 percent of all prescriptions. Moreover, although branded drugs are expensive total out-of-pocket costs for the population as a whole are flat or even decreasing as Michael Mandel points out:
[A] May 2019 research report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that average out-of-pocket spending for prescribed medications, among persons who obtained at least one prescribed medication, declined from $327 in 2009 to $238 by 2016, a decrease of 27 percent. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey shows that average household spending on prescription drugs fell by 11% between 2013 and 2018.
Moreover, OECD data shows that average out- of-pocket spending on prescribed medicines in the United States ($143 per capita in 2017) is actually lower than countries such as Canada ($144), Korea ($156), Norway ($178), and Switzerland ($215).
So are people simply mistaken about what they are experiencing? Not quite. Mandel uses the metaphor of the prescription escalator to explain the apparent paradox:
It turns out that an escalator is the appropriate model for prescription drug costs for individuals. As people get older, they unwillingly ride the prescription escalator, with their average spending on prescription drugs rising by about 5-6% per year. This figure assumes no change in the underlying price of drugs. Rather, people fill more prescriptions as they age.
In other words, every individual experiences an increase in prescription costs as they age even though for the population as a whole prescription prices are flat or falling–a form of Simpson’s paradox. The driver of higher costs is usage not price. People aged 65-74 have on average 25 (!) prescriptions to fill, more than two and half times as many as people aged 25-34 (about 9 per year).
Understanding the prescription escalator is important because regulating drug prices–aside from being a bad idea–won’t solve the perceived problem.
…even if drug reform efforts were successful and there were no more increases in drug costs, every individual would still face a 5.6% increase each year in drug spending as they got older. That would total 30% after five years, and 70% after ten years, across the board.These are enormous increases.
Indeed, the prescription escalator is a sign of success. If drugs weren’t successful we wouldn’t buy more of them when we were older and sicker and costs wouldn’t rise.
And it was paired with an even more striking chart suggesting that the top 400 richest people in America pay a lower average tax rate than the middle class or the poor — and that this is a new phenomenon. The Times plotted a tax rate curve for every year from 1950 to 2018 (the interactive on their site lets you look through it year by year) and showed that while rates used to slope upward, they’re now largely flat until reaching the top 99.99 percent, after which they begin to plunge.
Data from UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
The analysis is based on a new book by French-born UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. They want to make the rich pay by levying a wealth tax on large fortunes, exactly the approach now advocated by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders; Saez and Zucman worked as outside advisers to Warren when she crafted her wealth tax proposal.
Leonhardt presented the chart as simply based on “newly released data” from the book and dedicated the bulk of his column to addressing other issues posed by Saez and Zucman’s case for higher taxes on the rich. But the chart itself has touched off a weeks-long furor on economics Twitter plus an in-person debate including Saez, Zucman, and Larry Summers, a top economic adviser in both the Clinton and Obama administrations.
The duel over the chart is in part a technical battle, in part an ideological one, and in part a personality-focused clash about Warren. All the key participants in the fight are economists, and the battle is in part a fight about the economics profession and its role in the policymaking process — with traditionalists seeing Saez and Zucman as throwing professional good practice out to make a rhetorical point and Saez and Zucman seeing the profession as engaged in a process of mystification to serve the interests of the wealthy.
But beyond the specifics, the debate is also an object lesson in the annoying reality that the distinction between questions of facts and questions of values is not as clear in practice as one might like. Even a seemingly simple question like “how much do different people pay in taxes?” doesn’t have a clear-cut and unambiguous answer.
The mysteries of tax incidence
So how much do you pay in taxes?
This starts out looking like a simple question. You add up your income, then you add up how much tax you paid, and then you do a little division and you get a number. That’s easy enough to do for federal income and payroll taxes. And, indeed, the Congressional Budget Office regularly computes these numbers and invariably finds that the rich pay a higher share of their income in taxes. But that’s not the whole story. For one thing, you need to factor in state and local taxes, which tend to hit the middle class harder than the rich.
More importantly, though, you have to determine who really pays specific taxes, what economists call “tax incidence.”
Payroll taxes in the United States, for example, are levied half on employees and half on employers. A standard assumption in the economics literature is that even the taxes formally paid by employers in reality come out of workers’ wages. Sales taxes raise a similar question: Are they paid by customers or by vendors? And there is considerable controversy over who really pays the corporate income tax: shareholders, workers, customers, etc. Estate taxes, similarly, are formally paid by the estates of dead people, but to get a comprehensive view of the tax code, you need to assign them to someone who’s alive.
What’s more, for rich people there is some ambiguity as to how to think about income. For rhetorical purposes, at least, people sometimes talk about increases in share prices as if they are income — meaning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “makes” thousands of dollars per minute during times when the stock market is going up.
Count to ten. In those ten seconds, Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, just made more money than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year. An entire year.
For tax purposes, however, these kinds of capital gains only count as income when stocks are actually sold and investment returns are realized.
That’s why inequality charts that count capital gains as income, like this one from Saez, end up showing so much year-to-year instability in the earnings of the top one percent.
A further complicating factor are tax credits liked the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Tax Credit that are fully or partially refundable. The way a $100 tax credit works is that you calculate what you owe in income taxes and then subtract $100 from the figure — so the credit is a tax cut. But a refundable credit can reduce your tax liability to less than zero, in which case the IRS sends you a “refund” check.
This is a kludgy way to do policy, but Congress in its wisdom has chosen to use wholly or partially refundable credits as a means to help low-income families, and whether you count those refunds as “negative taxes” or government spending can change considerably how these charts look.
Last but by no means least, just as some taxes are levied on corporations, some income accrues to corporations and then just sits on their balance sheet as retained earnings. It’s normal to just ignore this, but for the sake of completeness, it would be better to consider it. Zucman and Saez do consider it and, in fact, make a whole series of contestable choices about these questions driven in part by an urge to completely account for all income in the economy.
A complete view of national income
Gross domestic product — the total of all the value of goods and services produced in a country, or the total value of all income earned in that country — is a critical economic statistic. So critical, in fact, that it’s conventional to say “the economy” grew 3 percent when we mean GDP grew 3 percent.
One project that Saez, Zucman, and Thomas Piketty have been involved with is an effort to develop distributive national accounts that would let us know whose income grew 3 percent when overall national income grew by 3 percent.
To make that comprehensive income accounting work, you need to attribute the retained corporate earnings to someone — so they add it to the incomes of the (mostly wealthy) people who own the corporations. You also need to make various choices about taxes. They follow the official GDP figures in construing refundable tax credits as government spending — equivalent to Medicare mailing a reimbursement to a doctor, Social Security sending a check to a retiree — rather than negative taxes. They say that employer-side payroll taxes are paid by workers, that retail sales taxes are paid by consumers, and in that paper they say that corporate income taxes are paid by owners of capital (except for housing).
These are all plausible ways of looking at the situation, but they all make important differences, and making different assumptions changes things. Saez and Zucman made one critical change in their model of how corporate taxes work between the publication of their national accounts paper with Piketty and the release of their book.
Prior to that, the Saez/Zucman data shows the top 400 taxpayers paying a lower overall tax rate than the top 0.01 percent or the top 0.1 percent, but a similar rate to the rest of the top 20 percent of the income distribution and a clearly higher rate than the bottom 80 percent.
The solid orange line represents the tax rates estimated by Saez, Zucman, and Piketty’s scholarly article, using the assumption that the burden of the corporate income tax is spread across all non-housing capital (including small businesses and such), whereas the dotted line shows the Saez/Zucman book’s estimates based on the idea that corporate taxes are all paid by corporate shareholders.
Since ownership of corporations is very highly concentrated among the richest people, if you consider a corporate tax rate cut to be a pure tax cut for owners of tax-paying corporations, then you will get the conclusion that the Trump tax cut was an incredible windfall for the top 400 taxpayers.
On the right, it’s popular to argue the exact opposite of this: that the economic burden of the corporate income tax falls largely on workers and that Trump’s tax changes are a boon to wage growth. There are well-qualified people with a whole range of views about this, though as Saez and Zucman argue in their book, it does seem telling that rich people tend to lobby loudly for corporate income tax cuts and labor unions do not (if corporate tax cuts really do help workers, unions should be the biggest champions for corporate tax cuts).
In any case, the shocking new fact presented in Leonhardt’s column — that the very richest people pay a lower tax rate than the middle class — is not just a result of policy changes but a result of changes in how Saez and Zucman think we should understand the corporate income tax, changes from their own work just a year prior.
Beyond those modeling issues, the income estimate for the top 400 taxpayers is not a direct measurement; the tax data necessary to estimate their income after Trump’s tax cuts is not yet available from the IRS. Instead, Saez and Zucman write in a technical appendix that it “is based on triangulating publicly available sources and it could be refined in future work” and they offer various hopes that more precise estimation will be possible in the future.
To pile together several controversial assumptions, pair them with an uncertain estimate relating to the wealthiest people, compile that into a striking new fact that becomes the centerpiece of a media rollout aimed simultaneously at promoting a popular book and intervening in a presidential primary campaign — all this rubs academic instincts the wrong way and helps explain a fair amount of the scholarly backlash to Saez and Zucman.
Meanwhile, the reason this debate is interesting to regular people is that it’s relevant to contemporary politics. But in crucial ways it’s not clear that the fact (or perhaps fake fact) that played such a heavy role in the marketing of the book is all that relevant to policy. You could make the chart of rich people’s taxes over time look much “better” by adopting policies that progressives like Saez and Zucman would strongly oppose, which suggests the chart isn’t a great barometer for policy.
The payroll taxes that finance Social Security are flat for the first $132,900 that a person earns and then the rate drops to zero percent. What’s more, the tax falls only on wage income — exempting interests, dividends, capital gains, and other forms of income that are earned primarily by the wealthy. Rich people, in other words, uncontroversially pay a much lower share of their income in Social Security taxes than do working-class people. Consequently, if you completely eliminated Social Security, then the American tax code would end up looking more progressive.
This is not, however, a policy view that Saez and Zucman or any other progressive supports.
The main things they are trying to argue for are a crackdown on corporations’ use of tax avoidance and the creation of a new wealth tax. Those are ideas that, if implemented, would change the shape of the Saez/Zucman tax curve and make it clearly progressive. But the case for or against those ideas really stands or falls on issues that don’t have much to do with the chart.
Everything hinges on a big capital taxation debate
There are a lot of technical and practical differences between dividend and capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, estate taxes, and corporate income taxes, but they are all trying to tax capital, rather than labor or consumption.
Since ownership of capital is highly concentrated, capital taxation is a way of raising revenue from the people who will least miss the money. But there is a long tradition in economics of thinking that taxing capital is a bad idea, except perhaps as an emergency measure to finance a war or stave off an imminent government default crisis.
As with everything in economics, there are a lot of complicated arguments and mathematical models about this, but the basic idea is that financial capital is a representation of real things — office buildings, factories, machines, restaurants, inventions — that people use to do their jobs and create more value. If you tax capital, you’ll end up with less of that stuff, and the country as a whole will end up a lot poorer.
Zucman and Saez argue that for the purposes of drawing a chart about how much taxes people pay, this kind of secondary economic impact should be ignored — just as they ignore the fact that Social Security taxes fund useful benefits.
The key thing, however, is that Zucman and Saez also believe that the traditional argument against capital taxation is wrong. They argue in the book that “over the last hundred years, there is no observable correlation between capital taxation and capital accumulation” and that models positing big economic impacts of the kind of taxes they favor are ungrounded in empirical reality. Instead of taxes on the rich, they say, “the more important ... forces are the regulations that affect private savings behavior.”
These assertions, rather than the chart that served as the anchor of the public debate, are in practice the key arguments of the book. If it’s true that higher taxes on capital significantly reduce economic growth and broadly impoverish everyone, as conservatives believe, then they’re probably a bad idea regardless of the impact on inequality.
But if that’s not true and we can finance lots of useful public services by taking money away from people who are indisputably very rich, then that’s probably a good idea, regardless of exactly how high a tax rate we think they’re already paying.
I'm not sure what the problem is with a speed up or slow down function for Netflix. I don't really sympathize with the people "speaking out" against it.
5. “I find that lowering the level of [NIMBY] restrictions in California back to its level in 2000 results in a large reallocation of labor. The state’s population rises by 45%, while the income gap and house value gap between California and the rest of the U.S. falls by 3.7% and 2.7%, respectively.” From Don Jayamaha, on the job market from NYU. Updated paper link here.
It is not obviously a winner policy, at least not from the point of view of boosting women’s labor market opportunities. In fact it seems to harm them:
This paper uses IRS tax data to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (PFLA) on women’s careers. Our research design exploits the increased availability of paid leave for women giving birth in the third quarter of 2004 (just after PFLA was implemented). These mothers were 18 percentage points more likely to use paid leave but otherwise identical to multiple comparison groups in pre-birth demographic, marital, and work characteristics. We find little evidence that PFLA increased women’s employment, wage earnings, or attachment to employers. For new mothers, taking up PFLA reduced employment by 7 percent and lowered annual wages by 8 percent six to ten years after giving birth. Overall, PFLA tended to reduce the number of children born and, by decreasing mothers’ time at work, increase time spent with children.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Martha J. Bailey, Tanya S. Byker, Elena Patel, and Shanthi Ramnath. And are you wondering why the number of children falls as a response? Because the mother ends up staying home with them? Or do mothers invest more in child quality, thereby lower quantity, as in a Becker model? In any case a good question.
"Instead, Son gave that money to Neumann to rent empty offices, buy a lot of plate glass and create what a WeWork tenant of my acquaintance called 'a high-tech prison' with 'concentric rectangles of fully transparent cells.' ". Seems pretty accurate.
Adam Neumann held a whole company hostage, legally.
Chicago’s guaranteed annual stipend level as of now is $31,000. The new funding model begins next fall and will take two years to fully adopt. Once it is in place, all students will have paid health insurance premiums and full tuition coverage, in addition to the guaranteed stipend.
What!?!?!
For all you millennials who think we boomers had it so much easier, here’s my experience at the UC during the late 1970s. A total stipend of $1000 for three years, vs. $93,000 today. No health insurance. I had to pay full tuition. I borrowed the money to pay my tuition and worked a job to pay for my food, rent, clothing, health costs, etc. (No money from my parents.) I bought almost no clothing during my three years there, my diet was basically hot dogs and bread, and I cut my own hair to save money. I eventually paid back all of my loans. So excuse me if I don’t get out in the streets and march in favor of forgiving all college debts.
White supremacists sometime argue against interracial marriage, worrying that it will dilute the gene pool of their precious white race. But it looks like multi-racial kids might be better students than white kids:
Ivon widiahtuti’s job is, on the face of it, straightforward. As an auditor at the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Assessment Agency (lppom), an organisation in the leafy city of Bogor, Ms Widiahtuti reviews the applications of companies hoping their products will be deemed halal, meaning that their consumption or use does not break any of the strictures of Islam. . . . some applications concern products that aren’t edible. As she lists the musical instruments and sex toys that she and her team have inspected recently, she giggles at the absurdity of asking: is this vibrator halal?
All of the world’s 73 residential towers over 250 metres high were built after the year 2000. Another 64 are under construction.
This is obvious when you think about it, but still seems odd:
The result is a paradoxical relationship of the left to industry and industrial workers. Democratic votes today, Rodden shows, are geographically correlated with manufacturing employment a century ago, while Republican votes are correlated with contemporary manufacturing.
From the same issue of the NYR of Books, there’s an interesting article on a white nationalist who later rejected this hateful ideology. Unfortunately, his family did not:
The redemption story of Stormfront’s former crown prince has been a quiet one. Derek Black still sees his parents, although there are deep strains when they talk politics. He has chosen to continue his graduate studies in history rather than, as so often happens in America, to make a new career out of his extraordinary change of heart. But he did allow himself to be interviewed on radio and television several times when Saslow’s book appeared, soberly taking responsibility for the violence he had helped stimulate earlier in his life, and saying that he was not entitled to any praise merely for having ceased preaching hate. In one TV appearance, he mentioned that his parents were now frequent viewers of Fox News: “My family watches the Tucker Carlson show once and then watches it on the replay because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have and they’re trying to get some tips.”
The Economist recent had a thoughtful and well-written piece on poverty, which still ended up being rather disappointing:
Severely reducing or eliminating child poverty through the simplest means imaginable—unrestricted cash transfers—can seem starry-eyed until one studies the details. David Grusky of Stanford University says that the state of California, which has the highest share of poor people after accounting for taxes, transfers and cost of living, could end deep child poverty with targeted cash transfers that amount to a mere $2.8bn per year. This is “insane”, he adds. It is a quarter of the sum the state spends on prisons.
I have a different view. I think it’s “insane” to believe that after everything we’ve learned since the 1960s, throwing money at poverty will solve the problem. It is insane to believe that a state that spends $600,000 building housing units for homeless individuals will be skilled enough to cure child poverty. Having said that, if they want to release every drug crime prisoner in California and divert the money to poor children, I’m all for it.
Yet all that is less reassuring than might be hoped. Post-crisis, both governments and markets have proved surprisingly tolerant of risky borrowing. Despite household deleveraging, companies have taken on enough debt to keep private borrowing high; at 150% of gdp in America, for instance, roughly the level of 2004. In America the market for syndicated business loans has boomed, to over $1trn in 2018, and loan standards have fallen. Many loans are packaged into debt securities, much as dodgy mortgages were before the crisis. Regulators have declined to intervene—remarkably, considering how recent was the crisis.
Remarkable? I suppose it seems that way if you believe the myth that the 2008 crisis was due to “deregulation”. I happen to believe that government regulators in the US like it when banks make lots of risky loans, which is why in the early 2000s the entire financial system was set up to encourage risky lending, and still is.
In no previous century had the human population doubled. In the 20th century it came within a whisker of doubling twice. In no previous century had world gdp doubled. In the 20th century it doubled four times and then some.
I suspect that in no future century will the world’s population even double.
In the UK, authorities recently discovered 39 dead bodies in the back of a truck. To people like Trump these illegal migrants are scum, lots of “rapists and murders” or “people from shit-hole countries.” But regardless of your view of illegal immigration (and there are good arguments on both sides) it’s important to be aware that these are real people:
The UK police had given “an initial steer” in the early stages of the investigation that the victims were believed to be Chinese nationals. But on Friday, Hoa Nghiem, a Vietnamese human rights activist, said that one of the people found dead in the truck might have come from Vietnam.
She said she had been contacted by the family of Pham Thi Tra My, 26, who were trying to determine whether she was among those in the truck after receiving text messages from her saying that she “can’t breathe” and was dying, saying: “I’m sorry Mom. My path to abroad doesn’t succeed.”
A bit surprising Arkansas doesn't have an administrative code.
Now Mercatus has completed an analysis of state-level regulation. State RegData 1.0 analyzes the administrative codes of 46 states plus the District of Columbia, and the results are informative. The average state has 131,000 restrictive terms and about 9 million words in its code, which would require roughly twelve work weeks to read at a normal reading pace.
But there is huge variation. The least regulated state is South Dakota, with about 44,000 regulatory restrictions, while the most regulated state is California, with 395,000. All told, the least regulated states are South Dakota, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and North Dakota, while the most regulated states are California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to include Vermont, New Jersey, Arkansas, and Hawaii. Arkansas is the easiest to explain: It has no administrative code, at least not yet. Its state agencies produce regulations, but until this year no one had ever bothered to compile them in one place. Fortunately — perhaps partly in response to RegData — legislation was passed this year to create an official Code of Arkansas Rules by January 2023, so Arkansas’s regulatory landscape will eventually come to light.
That is from James Broughel and Patrick A. McLaughlin, there is more at the link.
How do you catch a predator in Sarasota, Florida? You create one.
The Sarasota County Sheriff's Office (SCSO) is going to "outrageous lengths" to make law-abiding lonely guys into sex offenders. That's according to Noah Pransky, a fearless journalist who has been covering Florida's addiction to entrapment for years.
In September, SCSO arrested 23 men for allegedly soliciting underage girls for sex. Pransky's most recent piece in Florida Politics chronicles the elaborate back and forth between one of those men and a police officer pretending to be a young female. Pransky writes:
In one example from a 2017 operation, SCSO spent two days trying to seduce a 20-year-old man who showed no interest in having sex with a child. Detectives, who posted an ad for an 18-year-old woman on Tinder, matched with the young man and proceeded to swap "getting-to-know-you" texts for more than an hour; only then did detectives tell the man he was chatting with a 14-year-old girl, not an 18-year-old.
Undercover detectives continued to try and talk about sex with the man the next day; he again rebuffed the attempts, but continued the small talk because he indicated he was bored. Detectives then sent unsolicited, flirty photos to the man; a tactic that violates best practices and ethical standards for this type of stings.
The terrible thing about this case is that the sheriff's office is not trying to save any actual kids. It is just trying to get an easy win.
Most parents who worry about predators online are picturing a creepy guy lurking on some kiddie site where he lures unsuspecting youngsters away to a sordid encounter at the Dairy Queen.
But the SCSO folks flip that scenario entirely. They log onto adult sites, claiming to be adult age. It's only once they establish some kind of bond with an adult who went online hoping to find a legal-age companion that they then confess that they are underage.
Normally, the SCSO destroys the records of these stings, preventing the public from understanding the sordid process that produced the arrest of the supposed sex offender. But in the case highlighted above, the 20-year-old man was actually a civilian employee of the SCSO, and he preserved the chat log:
Even though the man never suggested meeting up with an underage child, never brought up sex during their two full days of online chats, and appeared to be a model employee, he was suspended by the sheriff's office following the exchange. He said he was then pressured to resign to keep the episode private.
I would pressure him to keep it private, too, if I'd been as duplicitous as the SCSO:
The chat log reveals detectives willing to dedicate hours trying to build the trust — and romantic interest — of a man who thinks he is talking to another adult, before informing the man that the woman showing him affection is actually four years younger than she had led him to believe.
Detectives "swiped right" on the Tinder profile of the 20-year-old sheriff's office employee, whose profile read, "literally just want to hang with someone and be able to eat and not feel judged." On Sunday morning, May 20, he introduced himself to 18-year-old "Stephanie," told her he was bored at work, and the two spent the rest of the day texting back and forth.
Their small talk covered the weather, life in Sarasota, and dirt track racing. When "Stephanie" said she would liven up the man's slow workday ("I'll stir up trouble for you"), he steered the conversation back to their mutual hobbies. When detectives suggested talk about drugs, the man steered the conversation back to Sarasota life.
But detectives kept pressing, suggesting they meet up. "Just lookin for a friend to chill with," they wrote the man, then telling him "Stephanie" was only 14 years old.
The pace of the conversation slowed down, but the two continued to talk about work, where they grew up, and a coffee table the man was planning on buying.
Then they sent a fake photo and asked the guy to send one in return. He didn't.
Eventually, they tried to steer the conversation toward sex. "I like older guys … I've never had sex before … I waant," wrote 'Stephanie.'
The mark responded: "You're 14 just relax growing up is not all the hype."
After another day of this aggressive flirting on the detective's part, the 20-year-old cut off the conversation. Had he taken the bait, he could be facing years in prison and registration as a sex offender. Instead, he merely lost his job.
In another article, Pransky profiled a 62-year-old man who did take the bait: Hamid Keshmirian, who went to a site that purported to provide adult escorts. He began talking with someone who claimed to be an adult female, but once a friendship was established, she revealed herself to be 14-year-old prostitute eager to have sex with old men.
The girl was actually a cop. "Deputies went as far as to put a man on the phone with Keshmirian, claiming to be the girl's father, giving permission for the encounter," Pransky writes.
Keshmirian's daughters say their dad had battled depression for eight years. When he went to meet the "girl" on his birthday, September 19, he was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. Two days later a friend bailed him out.
He killed himself that night.
Sarasota Sheriff Tom Knight posted about his team's recent successes at catching predators, writing, "I wish I could say these operations were no longer needed but time and time again, even after we make dozens of arrests, these men keep coming back for more."
Someone keeps coming back for more. But is it "these men," or the cops?
That is the highly controversial book by Frederick Martel, subtitled Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy. For some time I had been resisting reading the book, as usually I find tales of corruption and scandal boring. But I misunderstood the fundamental nature of the account. It is not quite a homage, but Martel seems to admire the evolved culture of homosexuality (not my preferred word, but appropriate in this context) in the Vatican. See this review: “The tone falters because Martel seems unsure whether to be horrified by the church’s corruption or to let out a gasp of high-camp amazement at its excesses.”
If anything, the study reminds me of Diego Gambetta’s work on the Mafia, at least in terms of some of its methods.
Have you ever thought “there should be more books about how things actually work!?” — well, this is one of them. Here is one excerpt:
‘Being of the parish’ could even be this book’s subtitle. The expression is an old one in both French and Italian: I have found it in the homosexual slang of the 1950s and 1960s. It may pre-date those years, so similar it is to a phrase in Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah and Jean Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs — even though I don’t think it appears in either of those books. Was it more of a vernacular phrase, from the gay bars of the 1920s and 30s? Not impossible. In any case, it heroically combines the ecclesiastical universe with the homosexual world.
‘You know I like you,’ La Paiva announces suddenly. ‘But I’m cross with you for not telling me if you prefer men or women. Why won’t you tell me? Are you at least a sympathizer?’
I’m fascinated by La Paiva’s indiscretion.
And another bit:
It took me several months of careful observation and meetings to understand the subtle nocturnal geography of the boys of Roma Termini. Each group of prostitutes has its patch, its marked territory. It’s a division that reflects racial hierarchies and a wide range of prices. So the Africans are usually sitting on the guardrail by the south-western entrance to the station; the Maghrebis, sometimes the Egyptians, tend to stay around Via Giovanni Giolitti, at the crossing with the Rue Manin or under the arcades on Piazza dei Cinquecento; the Romanians are close to Piazzadella Repubblica, beside the naked sea-nymphs of the Naiad Fountain or around the Dogali Obelisk; the ‘Latinos’ last of all, cluster more towards the north of the square, on Viale Enrico de Nicola or Via Marsala. Sometimes there are territorial wars between groups, and fists fly.
You can buy the book here. I would add this: I do not have much knowledge in this area, but Martel seems to go out of his way to avoid making speculative accusations. But if you would like to read a negative Catholic review of the book, here it is.
From Maine to Maryland, from San Francisco to San Diego, legislators and city councilmembers have been banning expanded polystyrene—often known by the brand name Styrofoam—because they believe these products can last for millennia in the ocean. But new research suggests that polystyrene might break down into organic compounds much more quickly than expected, lessening its long-term environmental impact.
Earlier this month, researchers with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study finding that sunlight can breakdown polystyrene into organic carbon and trace amounts of carbon dioxide within a few decades.
"The sunlight creates a pair of photochemical scissors and cuts the plastic enough so that it is no longer plastic, it's this cut up skeleton of a plastic," says Chris Reddy, one of the authors of the study. The end result is organic carbon that then dissolves in seawater.
That process can take decades. Sunlight can also complete oxidize polystyrene into carbon dioxide (converting it into "thin air," Reddy says), a process that can take about 10 times as long.
In the past, scientists and policy makers had assumed that the degradation of polystyrene was controlled by how quickly tiny microbes could break the material down. Because polystyrene is difficult for these microbes to devour, people believed it would effectively last forever in the oceans. But the same things that make polystyrene hard for microbes to consume also make it easier for sunlight to break it apart.
While this study only focused on polystyrene, sunlight may play a similar role in breaking down other plastics. Reddy tells Reason that "it's entirely reasonable that photochemistry may be a factor in other plastics as well."
Previous estimates of how much plastic debris is in the ocean were predicated on the idea that any plastic that entered the marine environment was effectively going to stick around forever. And yet when scientists have gone looking for that plastic, they've turned up a lot less than they were expecting. One 2014 study estimated that 99 percent of the stuff was missing.
One theory at the time was that fish were eating the plastic and then passing it out in feces which then sank to the ocean floor. Another idea was that organisms were sticking to the plastic pieces and dragging them to the bottom of the ocean.
The decades-long period of time it takes for the sun to breakdown polystyrene still makes it an environmental hazard, Reddy stresses.
"Even if we removed the plastic in a decade or 20 years, it's still 20 years of it being able to create to some kind injury to wildlife," says Reddy. "By no means are we giving any sort of plastic pollution a free pass."
But if polystyrene does eventually dissolve, that means the material is more manageable than previously thought. And that in turn makes case for plastic bans weaker, particularly in rich countries with well-functioning waste management systems.
The U.S. and Europe are responsible for about 40 percent of plastic production but only 2 percent of marine plastic waste, according to a 2016 World Economic Forum study. Asia is responsible for 45 percent of plastic production and 82 percent of plastic waste. A better environmental solution, therefore, would focus on better waste collection, particularly in Asia.
A new Iowa survey of the 2020 Democratic presidential race shows Pete Buttigieg surging in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, locked in a three-way race with front-runners Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
Eighteen percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers back the former vice president, while 17 percent favor the Massachusetts senator and 13 percent prefer the South Bend, Indiana, mayor, according to a Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll released Monday.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost the 2016 caucuses to Hillary Clinton by less than 1 percentage point, achieved 9 percent support in the poll, followed by billionaire activist Tom Steyer with 3 percent.
Three candidates who garnered 3 percent because of rounding are tied for sixth place: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, California Sen. Kamala Harris and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Still, 29 percent of caucus-goers say they remain undecided.
The latest Iowa poll was conducted in the days after the fourth Democratic debate, during which Buttigieg adopted a more aggressive posture and accused Warren of equivocating on the cost of her Medicare For All proposal.
In recent weeks, Buttigieg has sought to establish himself as a pragmatic alternative to primary voters unmoved by Warren's brand of progressive populism and reluctant to embrace the more moderate Biden, whose standing in public polling has begun to diminish.
Buttigieg has also maintained a formidable fundraising operation, raking in $19.1 million in the three months ending in September, the third-largest amount raised by a Democratic candidate in the third quarter of this year— behind Sanders with $25 million and Warren with $24.6 million.
Buttigieg’s top-tier finish in Monday's survey represents a marked improvement from his performance in an earlier Suffolk/USA TODAY poll conducted following the first Democratic debate in late June.
In that summer survey of likely Democratic caucus-goers, Biden led the field with 24 percent, followed by Harris at 16 percent, Warren at 13 percent, Sanders at 9 percent and Buttigieg at 6 percent.
The Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll was conducted Oct. 16-18, surveying 500 likely Democratic caucus-goers. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Payton Hobart, the titular teenage hero—well, protagonist; this show so has no heroes—of Ryan Murphy's new series The Politician, is brooding to his therapist that he doesn't seem to have the same emotions other people do. Or maybe any emotion at all.
Pish-posh, replies the therapist. Of course you do. You cry, don't you? When's the last time you cried? Hobart, giving it some thought, finally agrees: He cried last Christmas while watchingIt's A Wonderful Life. "Because you were really moved?" replies the therapist. "Or because you thought you were supposed to?"
Hobart's brow furrows as he asks: "Does it matter?"
That's the key question in The Politician, a rollicking meditation on fakes, frauds, and phonies, where anything from a spouse to a case of cancer can turn out to be counterfeit—and probably will.
The Politician, which follows the life of the sociopathically ambitious Hobart from his days rigging high school elections to his quest for the White House, is Murphy's first series since making his celebrated jump from Fox to Netflix.
If you were expecting the freedom of streaming services to further loosen Murphy's putative inhibitions—his work on broadcast and basic cable shows has already dealt with everything from teenage three-ways to self-circumcision—you're liable to be disappointed; he doesn't unleash anything in The Politician that you couldn't have seen in his FX shows.
But if you've missed the exuberant dementia of Glee or Scream Queens, The Politician is a welcome return to the dotty world of Murphy and his producing partners Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan.
As always, there are about 1.2 million plotlines going on at any given moment as the show bobs from gay-on-gay sexual blackmail to Munchausen-by-proxy manipulation to the adventures of a lesbian stable hand played by, of all people, Martina Navratilova. "Gay" and "lesbian" are terms of convenience; nearly all the show's characters embrace what they call "gender fluidity," itself a term of convenience for "sexual omniverance."
But The Politician is much more than an amusing tangle of meandering weirdness. At every turn, it's strapping a lie detector to its characters and almost always getting a clang-clang-clang of abject falsity.
The most obvious questions of authenticity concerns Hobart himself (played with perfect glossy entitlement by Ben Platt of the Pitch Perfect films) and his barbarous student pol-pals.
Hobart is the youngest son of a family with literally everything—Picassos on the walls of the maid's room, a Chippendale toilet in the loo—but the White House, which he intends to acquire as soon as constitutionally possible.
Hobart is using the family coffers to buy whatever he can for his resume and stealing the rest, including the upcoming student body presidential election at his high school. Only obstacle: His hunky jock pal, River Barkley (David Corenswet, House Of Cards), who decides to oppose Hobart for the job only because his covetous blonde girlfriend thinks it'll work better than a simple bribe to a college admissions office.
What follows will be familiar to anybody who's been watching the Democratic debates this year: an avalanche of identity-politics pandering. Hobart negotiates to offer the vice presidential slot on his ticket to a kid with Down syndrome; Barkley counters with a black lesbian; Hobart raises the ante to a dying cancer victim.
All the while the campaign braintrusts are breathlessly checking polling data on their cell phones like a slavering pack of teenaged Lewandowskis and Abedins. At times, the partisan side of The Politician plays like a Gleeful version of the high school Watergate comedyElection.
Trashing politicians—even teenaged ones, or if my high school was in any way typical, especially teenaged ones—as lying swine is great sport. But Murphy and the rest of his writing team seem sense a broader and more serious degree of sham afoot in our age.
Spouses in The Politician are inevitably trophies or sugar daddies. Romances are faked for prestige or swag, and so are breakups. Sex is not only unrelated to love but even physical pleasure; one girl boasts to her boyfriend that her erotic proficiency will give him the self-confidence he needs to get into Stanford.
Hobart's supposedly cancer-ridden running mate may be faking the disease, and she is certainly using it to shamelessly jump the line at Olive Garden and score free trips to Disneyland. When Hobart murmurs "fake it till you make it" in an unguarded moment, he's not just talking about his dubious claim to speak fluent Mandarin, but his entire life.
In some ways, the most interesting thing about The Politician is that nearly all the characters sense that they live in an a wholly ersatz world and don't care. Hobart's mother (nicely portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow, one of several Murphy repertory players in the cast) says it's the inevitable fallout of Twitter and Facebook. "Your generation got the terrible idea that it was best to vomit every thought and feeling all over each other," she tells her son. "It's a pandemic of overcommunication that has led to an absence of intimacy."
If that sounds like a chilly universe, perhaps it can be warmed through a sort of moral agnosticism. "You don't have to be a good person as long as you do good things," says one of Hobart's political supporters, an aphorism surely borrowed from Richard Nixon, unless it came from Hillary Clinton.
Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott’s Against The Grain as “basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist”. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, “fascist” isn’t quite the right aspersion to use here.
Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as “progress” towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn’t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was “progress” only from a state’s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.
Against the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, “The Devil was the first Whig”, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.
Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.
Intensive cereal cultivation is miserable work requiring constant toil with little guarantee of a good harvest. Why would anyone leave this wilderness Eden for a 100% wheat diet?
Not because they were tired of wandering around; Scott presents evidence that permanent settlements began as early as 6000 BC, long before Uruk, the first true city-state, began in 3300. Sometimes these towns subsisted off of particularly rich local wildlife; other times they practiced some transitional form of agriculture, which also antedated states by millennia. Settled peoples would eat whatever plants they liked, then scatter the seeds in particularly promising-looking soil close to camp – reaping the benefits of agriculture without the back-breaking work.
And not because they needed to store food. Hunter-gatherers could store food just fine, from salting animal meat to burying fish and letting it ferment to just having grain in siloes like everyone else. There is ample archaeological evidence of all of these techniques. Also, when you are surrounded by so much bounty, storing things takes on secondary importance.
And not because the new lifestyle made this happy life even happier. While hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable and varied diet, agriculturalists subsisted almost entirely on grain; their bones display signs of significant nutritional deficiency. While hunter-gatherers were well-fed, agriculturalists were famished; their skeletons were several inches shorter than contemporaneous foragers. While hunter-gatherers worked ten to twenty hour weeks, agriculturalists lived lives of backbreaking labor. While hunter-gatherers who survived childhood usually lived to old age, agriculturalists suffered from disease, warfare, and conscription into dangerous forced labor.
Scott argues that intensive grain cultivation was a natural choice not for cultivators, but for the states oppressing them. The shift from complicated and mobile food webs to a perfectly rectangular grid of wheat fields was the same sort of “progress” as scientific forestry and planned cities thousands of years later:
Why should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation? More broadly, why have no “lentil states,” chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record? Many of these cultivars provide more calories per unit of land than wheat and barley, some require less labor, and singly or in combination they would provide comparable basic nutrition. Many of them meet, in other words, the agro-demographic conditions of population density and food value as well as cereal grains. Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.
The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops—legumes, tubers, and starch plants—have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.
The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary.
Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the reaminder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly. Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by invading armies.
The “aboveground” simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops. A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax. If a year-to-year adjustment is required, fields can be surveyed and crop cuttings taken from a representative patch just before harvest to arrive at an estimated yield for that particular crop year. As we shall see, state officials tried to raise crop yields and taxes in kind by mandating techniques of cultivation; in Mesopotamia this included insisting on repeated ploughing to break up the large clods of earth and repeated harrowing for better rooting and nutrient delivery. The point is that with cereal grains and soil preparation, the planting, the condition of the crop, and the ultimate yield were more visible and assessable.
Scott’s great advantage over other writers is the care he takes in analyzing the concrete machinery of statehood. Instead of abstractly saying “the state levies a 10% tax”, he realizes that some guy in a palace has resolved to take “ten percent” of the “value” produced in some vast area, with no natural way of knowing who is in that area or how much value they produce. For most of the Stone Age, this problem was insurmountable. You can’t tax hunter-gatherers, because you don’t know how many they are or where they are, and even if you search for them you’ll spend months hunting them down through forests and canyons, and even if you finally find them they’ll just have, like, two elk carcasses and half a herring or something. But you also can’t tax potato farmers, because they can just leave when they hear you coming, and you will never be able to find all of the potatoes and dig them up and tax them. And you can’t even tax lentil farmers, because you’ll go to the lentil plantation and there will be a few lentils on the plants and the farmer will just say “Well, come back next week and there will be a few more”, and you can’t visit every citizen every week.
But you can tax grain farmers! You can assign them some land, and come back around harvest time, and there will be a bunch of grain just standing there for you to take ten percent of. If the grain farmer flees, you can take his grain without him. Then you can grind the grain up and have a nice homogenous, dense, easy-to-transport grain product that you can dole out in measured rations. Grain farming was a giant leap in oppressability.
In this model, the gradual drying-out of Sumeria in the 4th millennium BC caused a shift away from wetland foraging and toward grain farming. The advent of grain farming made oppression possible, and a new class of oppression-entrepreneurs arose to turn this possibility into a reality. They incentivized farmers to intensify grain production further at the expense of other foods, and this turned into a vicious cycle of stronger states = more grain = stronger states. Within a few centuries, Uruk and a few other cities developed the full model: tax collectors, to take the grain; scribes, to measure the grain; and priests, to write stories like The Debate Between Sheep And Grain, with immortal lines like:
From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised. People should submit to the yoke of Grain. Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cattle, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has Grain, and pass his time there
And so the people were taught that growing grain was Correct and Right and The Will Of God and they shouldn’t do anything stupid like try to escape back to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty.
…turns out lots of people in early states escaped to the very close and easily-escapable-to areas where everyone was still living in Edenic plenty. Early states were necessarily tiny; overland transportation of resources more than a few miles was cost-prohibitive; you could do a little better by having the state on a river and adding in water transport, but Uruk’s sphere of influence was still probably just a double-digit number of kilometers. Even in good times, peasants would be tempted to escape to the hills and wetlands; in bad times, it started seeming crazy not to try this. Scott suggests that ancient Uruk had a weaker distinction between “subject” and “slave” than we would expect. Although there were certainly literal slaves involved in mining and manufacturing, even the typical subject was a serf at best, bound to the land and monitored for flight risk.
In one of my favorite parts of the book, Scott discusses how this shaped the character of early Near Eastern warfare. Read a typical Near Eastern victory stele, and it looks something like “Hail the glorious king Eksamplu, who campaigned against Examplestan and took 10,000 prisoners of war back to the capital.” Territorial conquest, if it happened at all, was an afterthought; what these kings really wanted was prisoners. Why? Because they didn’t even have enough subjects to farm the land they had; they were short of labor. Prisoners of war would be resettled on some arable land, given one or another legal status that basically equated to slave laborers, and so end up little different from the native-born population. The most extreme example was the massive deportation campaigns of Assyria (eg the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), but everybody did it because everybody knew their current subjects were a time-limited resources, available only until they gradually drained out into the wilderness.
Early states were pretty time-limited themselves. Scott addresses the collapse of early civilizations, which was ubiquitous; typical history disguises this by talking about “dynasties” or “periods” rather than “the couple of generations an early state could hold itself together without collapsing”.
Robert Adams, whose knowledge of the early Mesopotamian states is unsurpassed, expresses some astonishment at the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), in which five kings succeeded one another over a hundred-year period. Though it too collapsed afterward, it represented something of a record of stability.
Scott thinks of these collapses not as disasters or mysteries but as the expected order of things. It is a minor miracle that some guy in a palace can get everyone to stay on his fields and work for him and pay him taxes, and no surprise when this situation stops holding. These collapses rarely involved great loss of life. They could just be a simple transition from “a bunch of farming towns pay taxes to the state center” to “a bunch of farming towns are no longer paying taxes to the state center”. The great world cultures of the time – Egypt, Sumeria, China, whereever – kept chugging along whether or not there was a king in the middle collecting taxes from them. Scott warns against the bias of archaeologists who – deprived of the great monuments and libraries of cuneiform tablets that only a powerful king could produce – curse the resulting interregnum as a dark age or disaster. Probably most people were better off during these times.
The book ends with a chapter on “barbarians”. Scott reminds us that until about 1600, the majority of human population lived outside state control; histories that focus on states and forget barbarians are forgetting about most humans alive. In keeping with his thesis, Scott reviews some ancient sources that talk about barbarians in the context of people who did not farm or eat grain. Also in keeping with his thesis, he warns against thinking of barbarians as somehow worse or more primitive. Many barbarians were former state citizens who had escaped state control to a freer and happier lifestyle. Barbarian tribes could control vast trading empires, form complex confederations, and enter in various symbiotic relationships with the states around them. Scott wants us to think of these not as primitive people vs. advanced people, but as two different interacting lifestyles, of which the barbarian one was superior for most people up until a few centuries ago.
Overall I liked this book. I’m not sure how convinced I am – Scott occasionally mentions how much denser (in terms of calories produced per unit land) grain is than other forms of subsistence, and this surely deserves more consideration as an alternative explanation for its success. But overall the theory is plausible as at least one of many explanations for the grain/state correlation.
My only other complaint is the constant insistence throughout the book that we should be having our minds blown by it. Scott talks about how he wanted to give a lecture on the rise of civilization in Sumeria, hadn’t studied the subject for a few decades, thought he’d do a quick review of what had been discovered in the interim, and instead found that everything he knew was wrong. He talks a lot about how the conventional narrative of the dawn of agriculture has been turned on its head, overthrown, debunked, etc, and how you need to unlearn all your brainwashing about the superiority of states to hunter-gatherers.
But Jared Diamond was calling agriculture The Worst Mistake In THe History Of The Human Race back in the 1980s. And the changes to the Sumeria story I learned in school seem like updates rather than paradigm shifts. Yes, people were sedentary agriculturalists long before Uruk – but I remember a page in my elementary school textbook (so we’re talking 1995 or so) going over Catal Huyuk and its neighbors in 6000 BC. Yes, early city-states sucked – but does anyone think of “Bronze Age god-king” and imagine a nice guy committed to egalitarianism? The Epic of Gilgamesh was talking about the suckiness of Bronze Age city-states before the Bronze Age even ended. The most surprising revision to the standard story in Against The Grain was the setting of early Sumer in wetland rather than desert. And even that is only a small change; the first cities were on a kind of flat alluvium separate from the wetland proper, and their environmental damage quickly dried the region up into the irrigation-heavy desert we know today.
Scott tries to downplay his own role in the book, emphasizing how much he is just relaying the discoveries of more accomplished Sumer experts than himself. But the part I most appreciated was the part that was most clearly Scott-ish: the role of grain as a state-builder. In this story, the beginning of civilization – like the progress of the High Modernists – wasn’t an advance in human welfare or economic growth. It was an advance in tax collecting and the machinery of oppression; everything else followed.
“From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised”, said the Sumerians. And the ancient Greeks had their Eleusinian Mysteries, where “the mighty, and marvelous, and most perfect secret suitable for one initiated into the highest truths” was the “revelation of the mystic grain”. Can we trace a direct line from there to the sheaves of wheat that feature on fifteen out of fifty US state seals? On the National Emblem of China? The Coat of Arms of the Soviet Union? Does this last one really show the Earth caught in a pincers between two giant stalks of wheat? Should we really make impressionable schoolchildren sing songs of praise for “amber waves of grain”?
Read this book, and you may never think about cereal crops the same way again.
Franchises like Starbucks have become a casualty of the protesters’ outrage. | Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
The conflict is bad for US companies like Zara, Tiffany’s, or the NBA — no matter who they side with.
Hong Kong’s massive anti-government demonstrations began in June, when protesters rallied against an extradition bill that could bring Hong Kong residents into mainland China’s legal system. Since then, the conflict has escalated, leading to violent confrontations between protesters and police, major transportation shutdowns, and ongoing unrest.
Protesters are fighting to determine the democratic future of Hong Kong, which means challenging the Beijing-backed local government and China itself. (Hong Kong’s chief executive is chosen through an election committee that’s composed mostly of Beijing loyalists.)
Hong Kong has historically been seen as a Western-friendly hub for American business interests, spanning back to the mid-19th century. The region was a British colony until 1997, when its sovereignty was transferred back to China’s Communist Party under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
Under the agreement, Hong Kong was to maintain a free market system and liberal trade policies — key points of interest for the US, according to a 1996 memo written by Richard Mueller, former US Consul General to Hong Kong. The memo also expressed the US’s vested interest in Hong Kong’s autonomy and its development into a democracy.
Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Anti-government protesters hold up signs to denounce the shooting of a student protester by police on October 1.
At a United Nations meeting in September, President Donald Trump backed Hong Kong and said he expects China will “protect Hong Kong’s freedom, legal system, and democratic ways of life.”
The protests have since taken a violent turn during the week of China’s 70th anniversary celebration of its Communist regime. An 18-year-old was the first protester to be shot by Hong Kong police, and the government issued a ban on face masks. These escalations have captured overseas attention, and American businesses — some operating in both Hong Kong and China — have found themselves entangled in the standoff.
It kicked off, as things do these days, with a tweet.On October 4, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted a pro-democracy message in support of the Hong Kong protesters. He was subsequently subtweeted by his boss and was forced to delete his tweet and apologize.
The National Basketball Association has distanced itself from his views in an effort to appease Chinese fans and their government. But the damage had already been done: The Chinese Basketball Association announced it will suspend work with the Rockets and the team has lost at least two Chinese sponsorships. Lawmakers from both parties also swiftly condemned the NBA on Twitter for its stance.
1/ I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China. I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.
On Tuesday, Activision Blizzard, one of America’s biggest gaming companies, suspended a professional Hong Kong-based player for vocally supporting his country’s liberation movement. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp points out, Blizzard’s userbase is “overwhelmingly non-Chinese,” but declining overall. He explains that the company “is counting on expansion in the very large Chinese market to reverse the downward momentum.” How successful that play will be remains to be seen.
These are just two examples of the dilemma companies are facing. Businesses could align with the US to back Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters and risk alienation from China, the world’s biggest economy. Or, they couldsweep the issue under the rug, as the NBA and Blizzard have opted to do, through actions that range from ignoring the conflict to censoring employees’ political opinions.
As major companies find themselves mired in the conflict, they’re forced to make a choice. Brands are struggling to weigh the loss of customers from China’s vast market against supporting traditionally American, pro-democracy values. It’s a paradox in which espousing the principles of capitalism could mean losing out on profits. For now, that trade-off doesn’t appear to be good for business.
Digital giants Apple and Google have removed Hong Kong-related protest apps
Apple and Google have both pulled apps related to the Hong Kong protests from virtual stores this week.
On Wednesday, Apple removed HKMap.live, a real-time crowdsourced map of the city’s protests that was launched by volunteers in early August. In a company-wide memo on Thursday, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple received credible information from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau and users in Hong Kong that the app was “being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present.”
In a company statement, Apple determined that the app “has been used in ways that endanger law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong,” which violates its guidelines and local laws. The HKMap.live app was reportedly the most downloaded app in the travel category for Hong Kong, according to the Guardian.
The decision follows the tech giant’s September 30 decision to remove the Quartz News app from China’s App Store because it featured content illegal in China, according to a note Quartz received from Apple. Apple has also received public blowback from The People’s Daily, a newspaper of China’s Communist Party, for “protecting rioters” in keeping the app up. (The company made the decision to remove the HKMap.live app of its own accord, Recode reported.)
The Chinese newspaper also criticized Apple for having the song “Glory to Hong Kong,” an anthem adopted by the anti-government protesters, available for download on the iTunes store, Bloomberg reported.
On Twitter, the developers of HKMap.live countered Apple’s claims, saying that a majority of the user reviews in the App Store said it “improved public safety, not the opposite.”
On October 3, local Taiwanese news sites reported that Apple removed the Taiwanese flag emoji in its recent iOS 13 update for phones sold in Hong Kong and Macau. (The flag had been previously removed for phones sold in China.)
Google removed a mobile game called The Revolution of Our Times from its Google Play store, the Wall Street Journal reported. The game allows players to role-play as a Hong Kong protester and partake in fictionally recreated protests.
The anonymous developer told the Hong Kong Free Press that 80 percent of funds earned from the game would be pledged to Spark Alliance, a legal fund for detained protesters.
A Googlespokesman told the Journal that the app violated company policy that prohibits “capitalizing on sensitive events” in an attempt “to make money from ongoing conflicts or tragedies” through a developed game. In response to the removal, Hong Kong-based users of an online forum have accused Google of “appeasing the Communist Party,” the Hong Kong Free Press reported.
Franchise stores like Starbucks are caught in the crossfire
Starbucks, Yoshinoya, and other franchise stores have become prime targets for vandalism by protesters in Hong Kong. Franchises, which are owned by third-party retailers and not directly operated by the corporation, have become a casualty of the protesters’ outrage.
Protesters have directed their anger toward the Hong Kong-based operators of these chains, like Maxim’s Caterers (Starbucks, Shake Shack) and Hop Hing Group (Yoshinoya), who they see as compliant to the Chinese government. They believe major Hong Kong business owners have close ties with Beijing. In August, around 500 of Hong Kong’s business elite and pro-Beijing politicians attended a meeting in Shenzhen, where they discussed the state of the protests.
Emilio Navas/Getty Images
Protesters taped stickers on a Yoshinoya restaurant after news that the Japanese chain fired employees over a Facebook post that mocked Hong Kong police officers.
After rumors that Japanese beef bowl chain Yoshinoya fired employees over a Facebook post that mocked Hong Kong police officers, protesters organized against the shop, the Nikkei Asian Review reported. They taped signs denouncing the store, and at least one franchise was vandalized. Activists were already outraged at Marvin Hung, CEO of Hop Hing Group, for attending a rally for Hong Kong police, the Review reported.
At a United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in September, Annie Wu, the daughter of Maxim’s founder, defended the Hong Kong government’s treatment of the protesters. This incited outrage among protesters, who already perceive Hong Kong’s wealthy to be out of touch with the public. More than 50,000 people have signed onto a Change.org petition calling on Starbucks to cut ties with Maxim’s.
We herein urge the Board of Directors to consider whether Maxim's truly represents the social values of Starbucks and terminate the franchise to Maxim's immediately. We enroll people to demand Starbucks to stop the franchise to Maxim's immediately. https://t.co/iJJpMw4UFIpic.twitter.com/iwPhApiGNL
While the caterer also operates other American restaurants, like Shake Shack and the Cheesecake Factory, Starbucks is more commonly a target of vandalism, the Journal reported. This tactic could be a bid for American recognition. According to the creators of the Change.org petition, attracting the attention of the coffee giant’s relatively liberal US leadership and shareholders seemed like a better hope than the rest of Maxim’s portfolio. Maxim’s also has a nearly two-decade-long partnership with Starbucks, operating franchises in Hong Kong, Macau, and other parts of Asia.
So far, the companies haven’t issued an official response on how the protests have affected their franchises.
Fashion brands and houses have distanced themselves from the protests
From fast fashion companies to luxury labels, brands have found themselves struggling to appease customers from both Hong Kong and the largest fashion market in the world, China.
Vans was threatened with boycotts from Hong Kong customers after the skateboarding apparel brand removed a popular entry from its sneaker design competition. The design had multiple elements that referenced Hong Kong and alluded to the anti-government protests: a yellow umbrella that was a symbol for Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy protests, the red five-petal flower on Hong Kong’s flag, and an illustration of protesters wearing yellow shirts, hard hats, and gas masks.
Vans issued a statement on Facebook in Chinese and English to explain why some submissions were removed. “As a brand that is open to everyone, we have never taken a political position and therefore review designs to ensure they are in line with our company’s long-held values of respect and tolerance, as well as with our clearly communicated guidelines for this competition,” the statement read.
In some cases, companies have been unwittingly roped into the conflict and needed to quickly clarify their corporate stances. On September 2, several Zara stores wereopened hours later than usual on the day thousands of Hong Kong students went on strike. According to BBC, a Hong Kong-based newspaper published a photo of a sign at a Zara store, which indicated that it would be closed that day.
This led Chinese social media users to speculate that delayed openings were done in solidarity with the protesters. Zara soon apologized for the “misunderstanding” in a statement posted to Weibo, a Chinese social media site. The fast fashion brand’s parent company told CNN that “transportation difficulties” caused the late store openings.
Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images
Protesters hold open umbrellas inside a train to disrupt public transit during a September 2 protest.
Any official or unofficial corporate behavior has the potential to be politicized. MainlandChinese customers seized on Tiffany’s latest ad campaign, accusing it of promoting a pro-Hong Kong message. The ad, which has since been removed, featured Chinese model Sun Feifei using her right jeweled hand to cover her right eye, a pose similar to what protesters have adopted in protest. A Tiffany spokesman told the AFP that the ad was created in May and was not “intended to be a political statement of any kind.”
A number of designer fashion labels, including Versace, Coach, Givenchy, and Calvin Klein, have publicly apologized to China over references to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau on their websites and items of clothing. These territories operate under China’s “one country, two systems” policy, and the brands had listed them as independent countries, which angered Chinese consumers online.
A backlash on Chinese social media sites ensued, with multiple high-profile Chinese models and brand ambassadors ending their contracts with the brands. Donatella Versace took to Instagram to apologize, writing in a caption: “Never have I wanted to disrespect China’s National Sovereignty and this is why I wanted to personally apologize for such inaccuracy and for any distress that it might have caused.”
The Company apologizes for the design of its product and a recall of the t-shirt has been implemented in July. The brand accepts accountability and is exploring actions to improve how we operate day-to-day to become more conscientious and aware. pic.twitter.com/5K8u3c4Dbm
As China emerges as one of the fastest-growing markets for luxury goods, fashion labels are realizing that an offending message could cost them their reputation and, consequently, their bottom line.
These once-unusual public apologies and statements of regret are coming from a swath of American companies. But Chinese customers are wary of official corporate statements, judging by their social media responses to Zara, Tiffany’s, and the NBA; they see these public apologies as an insincere form of damage control for a Western company that has disrespected their national identity.
At the same time, these statements can have a negative ripple effect at home: In an era when more and more US brands are showcasing liberal politics to domestic customer acclaim, coming out against citizens protesting their government is unlikely to result in good PR.
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William Dalrymple is one of my favorite writers of non-fiction. He burst upon the scene in 1989 as a precocious, if occasionally a bit snotty travel writer, with 
Hollis Johnson
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Disney/Lucasfilm
Disney
Disney/Lucasfilm
Disney/Lucasfilm
I recently had the privilege of reading an advance copy of philosopher 
A rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2017 against Republican tax cuts on the rich. | Duane Prokop/Getty Images for MoveOn.org
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Franchises like Starbucks have become a casualty of the protesters’ outrage. | Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images
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