Social Europe: Tackling insecure work in Europe—a critical moment

Europe has a growing crisis of insecure work. Just before Christmas, the European Commission triumphantly announced that employment in the EU had reached record levels in the latter part of 2018, with over 239 million people in work. Good news indeed, but much less prominence was given to recognition that the number of hours worked is still lower than in 2008, before the crisis began. So perhaps there is more employment, but spread more thinly—because too many people are in insecure jobs with too few hours to guarantee a decent living.[...]

Consequently, in January 2018, the commission published proposals for a Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions Directive. It was weaker than the European Trade Union Confederation hoped but, nonetheless, includes very important protections for workers. For example, employers must supply written details of the employment relationship on the first day of work. This means that seasonal-agricultural, domestic, on-demand, platform and other precarious workers will get stronger legal rights. The draft goes further in proposing measures to ensure that online platforms are held accountable as employers. [...]

The ETUC has watched the rise in precarious working conditions in Europe—platform working, zero-hours contracts, bogus self-employment and so on—with deep concern. Research in the UK found that young people on zero-hours contracts, for example, were far more likely to report mental and physical health problems than their counterparts in stable jobs. A study by the University of Limerick in Ireland warned that people on non-guaranteed hours could become ‘trapped in a cycle of poverty which strengthens employers’ control’, generating a fear of being penalised if they raised grievances about working conditions. In response, the Irish government has taken steps to prohibit the use of zero-hours contracts, unless the employer can show a genuine business need. Guaranteeing transparent and predictable working conditions would have wide-ranging benefits, in terms of workers’ health, work-life balance and employee retention.

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The New Yorker: The Two Faces of Suicide

The timing of Bering’s book is hardly coincidental. Between 2008 and 2016, suicide rates went up in almost every state, and a spate of recent articles have purported to explain why certain demographics—farmers, veterans—have been killing themselves in unprecedented numbers. Bering’s volume thus joins a niche canon of suicide studies—or suicidologies—which, throughout history, has sought to explore the lure of self-destruction. Such volumes include Émile Durkheim’s “Suicide: A Study in Sociology,” Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” and A. Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study in Suicide.” Each of these books is a fossil record of its specific historical context. Durkheim’s tome, which was published in 1897, is a glittering testament to the Progressive Era, what with its dogged faith in social engineering and its suggestion that suicides can be thwarted via institutional reform. “The Savage God,” meanwhile, was published in 1971, and is haunted by the spectre of Freud and his theory of psychoanalysis.

Somewhat predictably, then, Bering’s book reflects our own cultural fixations. An early chapter, for instance, wonders if suicide should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation. He summarizes the neuroscientist Denys deCatanzaro, who pioneered the gene-centric view of suicide in the nineteen-eighties, as having said that suicidal thinking is “most common in people facing poor reproductive prospects” and who consume “resources without contributing to their family.” Picture a thirty-year-old burnout who relies on the munificence of a more successful older brother. By committing suicide, this individual might insure his own genetic survival; from a biological standpoint, the older brother’s offspring will have a better chance of thriving if the sponger no longer exists. (As Bering has noted, these “adaptive” decisions aren’t conscious but result, instead, from latent, primordial triggers.) A similar logic underwrites the altruistic suicides that the explorer Knud Rasmussen observed among the Netsilik Inuit community in Canada, where elderly clan members truncated their lives to reduce the caretaking burdens on the next generation. [...]

“Suicidal” contains no mention of economic inequality or the 2008 recession. For those interested in the nonbiological motivations for suicide, these are strange omissions. After all, to ignore the extent to which depression and suicide are responses to the larger culture is to assume that the deprivations of our moment cannot be amended. For the psychologist Oliver James, the author of “The Selfish Capitalist,” attributing depression and suicide to genetics reveals an unchecked commitment to neoliberalism. “That genes explain our behavior and well-being distracts attention from society as a cause,” he writes. Bering admits that suicide isn’t “inescapably” determined by genes, but he fixates throughout on the pathology of the individual. The critic Mark Fisher, who himself committed suicide, in 2017, rejected this approach in his book “Capitalist Realism”: “The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.” [...]

For Bering, parsing the etiology of a person’s mental health leaves little room for the musty errand of ideological contemplation. At one point, Bering notes that churchgoers—who place a high premium on communal fallibility—are four times less likely to commit suicide compared with their secular counterparts. But Bering cannot extract any comfort from this statistic. He admits that he cannot espouse “religion or any other belief system in which human suffering is conceived as meaningful.” Setting aside the question of what sorts of suffering Bering means by this, the point is not that we should all don vestments and recite the catechism. Instead, it’s that the systems we embrace might not be value-neutral, at least insofar as they buttress us against the despair that Camus so painstakingly explored.

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UnHerd: How politics makes us irrational

It turns out that conservative-minded people are quite a lot better at spotting false syllogisms when they have liberal conclusions, and vice versa. It wasn’t an enormous effect, but it was significant – in one of the experiments, conservatives spotted unsound arguments about 80% of the time when they had liberal conclusions, but only 60% when they had conservative ones, and the effect was almost exactly reversed for liberals. The effect was somewhat smaller in the other experiments, but it was seen in all three, which were carried on different groups of subjects. [...]

It’s interesting to note as well that this is a very bipartisan arrangement. Both Left-wingers and Right-wingers find it harder, to roughly the same degree, to make accurate judgments in the face of an ideological headwind. This, incidentally, is also what another study – an upcoming meta-analysis to be published in Perspectives on Psychological Science – finds: a modest but consistent bias preventing us from reliably understanding arguments that undermine our beliefs, present almost equally in liberals and conservatives. [...]

He suggests we could do something similar. If you think some policy is good or bad – raising taxes, say – then say in advance what effect you think it will have, in explicit terms. I think a no-deal Brexit will be followed by at least two quarters of negative economic growth, for example. If, then, you don’t see what you were expecting, then it should give you some pause to think that your reasoning was influenced by your political beliefs.

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Social Europe: Tackling poverty and inequality in Europe

National poverty rates in the EU vary between over 25 per cent in Romania and less than 10 per cent in the Czech Republic. For Germany, the figure is 16.5 per cent (2016). The official Eurostat figure for the EU as a whole is 17.3 per cent, which puts poverty in the EU only slightly higher than the level in Germany. However, if a proper EU-wide poverty threshold is calculated, the figure comes out significantly higher. [...]

The poverty rate has decreased slightly since 2015, with the number of people at risk of poverty in the EU falling by around 4 million. This fall is equivalent to just under one percentage point. Any progress may be due to relatively strong growth, especially in the poorer countries. [...]

(a) Intra-country inequality is increased by welfare cuts and labour-market deregulation, technological change and globalisation. All these causes can be addressed by government policy. For example, in Germany the introduction of a minimum wage has halted the rise in inequality observable since 1995. In the EU, a stricter Posted Workers Directive could curb wage competition. In his most recently published book, the late Tony Atkinson presented numerous suggestions for how intra-country inequality could be reduced, covering all categories of cause. Unfortunately, the EU’s economic-policy advice and the requirements it has imposed on indebted countries have instead tended to increase inequality.

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Quartz: Why al-Shabaab targets Kenya and how to stop the attacks

Al-Shabaab was originally dedicated to removing foreign influence from Somalia and bringing a strict form of Islamic governance to the country. At the height of its power, around 2008-2010, it controlled the capital, Mogadishu, and a sizeable territory south and west of the capital, including the ports of Merca and Kismayo. [...]

Brendon Cannon: The group began attacking targets outside Somalia in 2007. Its first attack on Kenyan soil was in 2008. The Kenyan government responded with force. In 2011, to “protect national security”, the country’s defence forces entered southern Somalia to create a buffer zone between al-Shabaab held territories and Kenya. In the process, the Kenyan forces captured the port of Kismayo and quickly joined troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia in battling al-Shabaab.[...]

But it’s also motivated to attack Kenya because of the benefits vis-à-vis recruitment and fundraising that are a partial byproduct of international press coverage. That is, front page news of the group’s attacks in Kenya inadvertently provides an outlet for al-Shabaab to showcase its attacks with few filters and to exploit such media stories in its own propaganda. The results of the deadly carnage often serve as prime recruiting tools in terms of foot soldiers and funding.[...]

Kenya has high international visibility and its relatively free and independent media widely publicises terrorist attacks. Another factor is that Kenya has developed a lucrative tourist sector which provides soft targets.

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The Atlantic: Theresa May Lives to Fight Another Day. But for What?

Still, it’s unclear just how far the prime minister is willing to go. Addressing lawmakers on Wednesday, May signaled that she would rule out a so-called soft Brexit preferred by some Labour lawmakers, which would see the country maintain closer links to the EU’s trade rules and regulations after it formally leaves the bloc. [...]

While a new British consensus would be welcomed by the EU, which has repeatedly called on Britain to clarify its position, it almost certainly wouldn’t lead to the reopening of negotiations over the transitional deal, which concluded late last year. The best London can hope for is to update the political declaration, a nonbinding part of the agreement that sets out the framework of the United Kingdom and the EU’s future relationship. [...]

Though prolonging the U.K.’s departure would require the unanimous consent of the EU’s 27 other member states, the bloc is already treating this option as the most likely scenario. “What is apparent is that [May] is going to struggle to deliver Brexit by the 29th of March,” Neena Gill, a Labour Party member of the European Parliament, told me. “An extension to July is a real possibility.”

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Vox: British Prime Minister Theresa May wins confidence vote despite Brexit defeat

May survived, and has not given any real indication that she will resign. But it’s hard to count this as a real “win.” She still doesn’t have support from her own party on her Brexit deal, and she’s already faced an internal party revolt last month. May’s own Conservative party tried to oust her in a (failed) no-confidence vote in December, and more than 100 Tories voted against her deal on Tuesday. So did Northern Ireland’s DUP. [...]

None of those factions, though, want to risk a prime minister or party coming to power that is opposed to their camp’s aims. If May’s government had lost the no-confidence vote, it could trigger general elections. And that could have potentially brought Labour to power — and handed Jeremy Corbyn the prime ministership, something especially unpalatable to hardline Conservatives or the DUP. [...]

So to recap, May survived the vote due to party loyalty, and the fear among the different Conservative party factions and the DUP that if her government went down, something worse would take its place. It’s not exactly a reassuring outcome. May could face another no-confidence vote in the House of Commons before this Brexit debate is over, or she could resign if she feels she doesn’t have the support for her brand of Brexit.

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Open Culture: Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

Bertrand Russell saw the history of civilization as being shaped by an unfortunate oscillation between two opposing evils: tyranny and anarchy, each of which contain the seed of the other. The best course for steering clear of either one, Russell maintained, is liberalism.[...]

But the liberal attitude does not say that you should oppose authority. It says only that you should be free to oppose authority, which is quite a different thing. The essence of the liberal outlook in the intellectual sphere is a belief that unbiased discussion is a useful thing and that men should be free to question anything if they can support their questioning by solid arguments. The opposite view, which is maintained by those who cannot be called liberals, is that the truth is already known, and that to question it is necessarily subversive.  [...]

Russell concludes the New York Times piece by offering a "new decalogue" with advice on how to live one's life in the spirit of liberalism. "The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows," he says:

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