Freakonomics: Which Jobs Will Come Back, and When?

Covid-19 is the biggest job killer in a century. As the lockdown eases, what does re-employment look like? Who will be first and who last? Which sectors will surge and which will disappear? Welcome to the Great Labor Reallocation of 2020.

Today’s show is the first of two episodes about employment and of course unemployment, considering what’s been happening with the Covid-19 pandemic. It is especially about re-employment — that is, what kind of jobs are coming back and when, and which jobs aren’t coming back. So we will hear from a labor economist with the Federal Reserve; another economist who used to work in the White House and the Department of Labor; another economist who thinks that even before the pandemic, we had automated away too many jobs; and another person who shares that view about jobs and automation: the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, whose call for a universal basic income has become a lot more urgent in the past few months.

But these two episodes are also about prisoners — specifically, prisoners and re-employment. And we’ll ask whether that research can tell us anything about Covid-19 re-employment generally. We are living through a historic disruption, a jolt to the labor markets that was unimaginable just a few months ago. There will be books and books written about it, and 50 years from now, it will show up in economics textbooks. Maybe they’ll call it then what we’re calling it now: the Great Labor Reallocation of 2020.

listen to the podcast

Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS: MacKinnon on Patriarchy

Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) challenges two dominant ways of thinking about politics: liberalism, which wants to protect us from the power of the state, and Marxism, which wants to liberate us through the power of the state. What if neither is good enough to emancipate women? Mackinnon explains why patriarchal power permeates all forms of modern politics. David discusses what she thinks we can do about it.

listen to the podcast

Politico: American nationalists’ European vacation

“It’s a definite paradox,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics firm that tracks these campaigns. “The U.S. far right, a nationalist and racist movement, is now trying to go global itself.” [...]

Despite a groundswell in the volume of American-made misinformation in Europe, activists’ efforts largely failed to sway public opinion, according to online campaign analysts, hate-speech experts and policymakers who have tracked the growth of American digital activists operating in the EU over the last four years. [...]

Soon, the hashtags #GetBrexitDone and #TakeBackControl started trending in the U.S., despite most Americans being largely apathetic toward Brexit. The idea of a polarized Britain — and a leader like Johnson who rose to the occasion to champion the will of the people — served to boost Trump’s “stick it to the elites” narrative. [...]

While the groups failed to get much attention in France, their anti-Macron hashtag was soon trending back home in the U.S. — despite most American Twitter users not interested in European politics. That allowed these activists to portray the soon-to-be French president as someone from a corrupt political elite and to link the scandal to Trump’s pledges to “drain the swamp.” [...]

Ahead of the European Parliament election in May, 2019, for instance, European activists grew tired, and even angry, over American groups’ interest. The efforts coincided with the failed attempt by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, to unify the region’s nationalist political parties under one umbrella. [...]

Increasingly, political operators — on the right and the left — are moving away from paid-for social media ads and toward so-called organic content, or regular social media posts published in private Facebook groups to reach their target audiences.

read the article

Social Europe: Women in power: it’s a matter of life and death

Current data show that countries with women in position of leadership have suffered six times as few confirmed deaths from Covid-19 as countries with governments led by men. Moreover, female-led governments have been more effective and rapid at flattening the epidemic’s curve, with peaks in daily deaths again roughly six times as low as in countries ruled by men. Finally, the average number of days with confirmed deaths was 34 in countries ruled by women and 48 in countries with male-dominated governments.

Of course, correlation is not causation. But when we look at most female-led governments’ approach to the crisis, we find similar policies that may have made a difference vis-à-vis their male counterparts: they did not underestimate the risks, they focused on preventative measures and they prioritised long-term social wellbeing over short-term economic considerations. [...]

Over the past few years, most women-led governments have also placed a stronger emphasis on social and environmental wellbeing, investing more in public health and reducing air pollution (which seems to be closely associated with Covid-19 deaths). Our analysis shows that countries with higher female representation in national parliaments perform better in terms of reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, containment of air pollution and biodiversity conservation. [...]

On the other hand, the leadership style promoted by some of these female leaders may also matter: they have explicitly adopted development philosophies that are centred on social and environmental wellbeing, understanding that this has a positive effect on society’s resilience and benefits the economy too. It would be wise for their male colleagues to take note.

read the article

Social Europe: The big failure of small government

From the United States and the United Kingdom to Europe, Japan and South Africa, governments are investing billions—and, in some cases, trillions—of dollars to shore up national economies. Yet, if there is one thing we learned from the 2008 financial crisis, it is that quality matters at least as much as quantity. If the money falls on empty, weak or poorly-managed structures, it will have little effect, and may simply be sucked into the financial sector. Too many lives are at stake to repeat past errors.[...]

Consider two core government responsibilities during the Covid-19 crisis: public health and the digital realm. In 2018 alone, the UK government outsourced health contracts worth £9.2 billion ($11.2 billion), putting 84 per cent of beds in care homes in the hands of private-sector operators (including private-equity firms). Making matters worse, since 2015, the UK’s National Health Service has endured £1 billion in budget cuts. [...]

New Zealand is another success story, and not by coincidence. After initially adopting the outsourcing mantra in the 1980s, the New Zealand government changed course, embracing a ‘spirit of service’ and an ‘ethic of care’ across its public services, and becoming the first country in the world to adopt a wellbeing budget. Owing to this vision of public management, the government adopted a ‘health first, economy second’ approach to the current crisis. Rather than seeking herd immunity, it committed early to preventing infection.

read the article

Social Europe: Keeping the promise of eurozone convergence

Fundamentally, they are political. Technical proposals for rendering the eurozone robust have been tabled time and again: a eurozone investment budget, a European deposit-insurance scheme, a proper eurozone unemployment-(re)insurance system, the issuance of joint- and several-liability eurobonds. And, time and time again, these have been discussed, diluted and typically disposed of in a drawer.

The truth is there is insufficient trust to move forward. Resilience requires risk-sharing; risk-sharing requires trust. Trust, however, has been eroded by disappointment—disappointment that a decade of austerity has failed to reduce debt, disappointment that two decades of the euro have failed to bring convergence. [...]

This promise has not been fulfilled. On the contrary, the eurozone has been drifting apart—since long before the current crisis. While in 1999, GDP per capita in northern Europe was around €2,000 above the eurozone average, by 2019 it was €4,500 higher. Conversely, Italy and other southern-European countries have lost ground, from about €4,000 below the eurozone average in 1999 to €7,500 below 20 years later. Instead of shrinking, the gap has doubled. [...]

A more promising approach is to even out the regional distribution of value added. Andalusia, the Uckermark and metropolitan areas such as Naples or Thessaloniki should be brought to similar levels of productivity as Munich, Milan or the Amsterdam metropolitan area.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction

There’s experimental evidence for this. Children, for example, sometimes actually believe that puppets are alive. Even animals sometimes react to pictures the same way they react to real things. The industrialized world is so full of human faces, like in ads, that we forget that it’s just ink, or pixels on a computer screen. Every time our ancestors saw something that looked like a human face, it probably was one. As a result, we didn’t evolve to distinguish reality from representation. The same perceptual machinery interprets both.

The rational parts of our minds, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, do indeed know that what we’re looking at, or reading, isn’t real. One way to understand this is by thinking about optical illusions. In the Muller-Lyer illusion, we can trace and know the two horizontal lines are the same length, but at the same time appear to be different lengths. Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we have when we consume fiction.

These perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions. That’s why emotions don’t just motivate us to act in certain ways but force us to interpret the world differently. A 2011 paper, for example, explained how fear can affect vision, moods can make us more or less susceptible to visual illusions, and desire can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects. The authors proposed that emotions offer information “about the costs and benefits of anticipated action,” knowledge that can be used swiftly, without thought, “circumventing the need for cogitating on the possible consequences of potential actions.”

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times

Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Traveling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about four hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history. 

So what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang? A volcano on Krakatoa had just erupted with a force so great that it tore the island apart, emitting a plume of smoke that reached 17 miles into the atmosphere, according to a geologist who witnessed it. You could use this observation to calculate that stuff spewed out of the volcano at over 1,600 miles per hour—or nearly half a mile per second. That’s more than twice the speed of sound. [...]

By 1883, weather stations in scores of cities across the world were using barometers to track changes in atmospheric pressure. Six hours and 47 minutes after the Krakatoa explosion, a spike of air pressure was detected in Calcutta. By 8 hours, the pulse reached Mauritius in the west and Melbourne and Sydney in the east. By 12 hours, St. Petersburg noticed the pulse, followed by Vienna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Munich. By 18 hours the pulse had reached New York, Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Amazingly, for as many as five days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure recurring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.

read the article

Rule of Law in Poland: The European Commission intervenes on “LGBT-free” zones in Poland

The addressees of the European Commission’s letter are the marshals (wojewodowie) of five provinces (voivodships, województwa) that have adopted anti-LGBT resolutions or their equivalent, i.e. the homophobic ‘Local Government Charter on the Rights of the Family’ drawn up by an NGO Ordo Iuris. These are the Lublin, Łódź, Malopolskie, Podkarpackie and Świętokrzyskie provinces. [...]

The obligation to combat discrimination based on sex, race or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation is also included in art. 7 of the Regulation on EU funds dating from 2013. Moreover, the preventive actions to which the beneficiaries of EU funds are obliged are explicitly included in the partnership agreement, and include both investments and programmes run by local authorities, as well as soft activities accompanying them, such as ‘communication’. [...]

Anna Błaszczak-Banasiak, a lawyer of the Commissioner for Human Rights’ Office says the EC’s position confirms that the anti-LGBT resolutions, regardless of their form, directly affect the lives of citizens. [...]

The Commission’s letter coincides with the position adopted by the European Parliament, which in December 2019 called on the Polish authorities to repeal homophobic resolutions by administrative means, i.e. via the provincial governor (wojewoda) or the administrative courts. The Parliament also urged the EC to verify whether the local governments that adopted anti-LGBT resolutions and still collect money from the EU are using it for purposes that violate human rights and the principle of equal treatment.

read the article