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January 13, 2022 The new Cold Wars: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Russia • Tim Shorrock on China and North Korea
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January 6, 2022 William “Sandy” Darity, co-author along with A. Kirsten Mullen, of From Here to Equality, on reparations for black Americans
Nation pieces: inflation, AI
I had a couple of pieces in (on?) The Nation, recently.
The first is on inflation, which is real, not easy to solve, and a potential problem for a green agenda.
The standard remedy—raising interest rates and provoking a recession—would be disastrous in an economy still recovering from the Covid shock. But we can’t deny that huge deficit spending and an infusion of trillions of dollars conjured out of nothing has something to do with the problem. The deficit spending financed a remarkably generous, though too temporary, aid package. It boosted household incomes despite sudden and massive job loss in the early months of the pandemic. That aid is still keeping millions of households afloat and has left many others with unusually large savings balances.
It would be a crime to take those benefits away, but an immense amount of purchasing power was introduced into an economy that was stretched to the limit, with workers in some areas hard to find, taut global supply chains vulnerable to interruption (a lesson for labor militants!), a preference for keeping only the thinnest possible stock of inventories, and a public infrastructure ragged from decades of underinvestment.
And the second is a review of former Theranos board member Henry Kissinger and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Council on Foreign Relations, chewing the fat about AI.
Just for a moment, let’s cede the point that AI is something big that is changing the way we live. Schmidt and especially Kissinger worry about what this means for being human. (It’s weird when the architect of the secret bombing of Cambodia becomes the humanist on the program, but such are the politics of elite organizations.) Over the next 15 years, Schmidt claims, computers will increasingly set their own agenda, exploring paths and producing results beyond the intention or understanding of their human programmers. What will this do to our sense of ourselves, Schmidt asked, “if we’re not the top person in intelligence anymore?”
One response might be, “Well, maybe don’t let them go there?” But the authors will have none of that. “Once AI’s performance outstrips that of humans for a given task, failing to apply that AI, at least as an adjunct to human efforts, may appear increasingly as perverse or even negligent,” they declare. Will we delegate our war-making capacities to machines—not merely in guiding weapons to their targets but deciding whether to attack in the first place? Schmidt apparently thinks so, though he acknowledges that there are some complexities. “So, you’re in a war and the computer correctly calculates that to win the war you have to allow your aircraft carrier to be sunk, which would result in the deaths of 5,000 people, or what have you…. Would a human make that decision? Almost certainly not. Would the computer be willing to do it? Absolutely.”
I meant to add, Henry Kissinger would have made such a decision.
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December 30, 2021 Ben Burgis, author of Christopher Hitchens, on why he still matters • Patrick Blanchfield, author of this article, on the death drive
Who’s not getting vax’d and why
This is hardly an exhaustive treatment of a complex topic—just a quick attempt to illuminate who isn’t getting vaccinated against covid-19 and why. I started looking at these stats after a Twitter exchange and I thought I’d share the resulting graphics. The stats are drawn from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey—health table 5a, two-week period ending December 13, for those who are keeping score at home.
First, vaccination rates by income. Almost 80% of people in the lowest income category, report having gotten at least one shot—51% have gotten two and 22% have gotten three. This is the lowest of any income category, and the share rises as you go up the income ladder. It tops off at 95% who’ve gotten at least one shot among the $200,000+ set. (The under-$25,000 group accounts for 12% of the population; over $200,000, 6%.) Over half, 55%, have gotten three. By the way, racial gaps have largely disappeared; 82% of blacks and 84% of whites have been vaccinated.
And now a closer look at vaccine refusers—the share saying they will probably or certainly never take a shot. The highest share of refusers are in the lowest income bracket. Here the gradient isn’t as steep as with vaccination rates: about 9% of the bottom two income categories are determined never to take the needle, as are 7% of the next three. Then it starts falling, bottoming out at 4% of the richest group. In all categories, “definitely” exceeds the “probably” by 2–3 times.
And now reasons for not getting vaccinated. On the left, you often hear it said that difficulties getting a shot (sorry, can’t say “jab”) or worries about cost are important factors, but they’re way down on the bottom of this survey. Fear of side-effects, distrust of vaccines and/or the government, and belief in one’s invincibility are far more prominent reasons. Given these reasons, it’s not clear how persuadable the hard-core resisters would be with mere argument.
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December 16, 2021 Sam Adler-Bell, author of this article, on the young counterrevolutionary new right • Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica on how the very rich can pay no taxes
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December 2, 2021 Matt Kierkegard and David Adler of the Progressive International on the Honduran and Chilean elections • Sarah Lustbader, author of this article, on why trials are no substitute for politics
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November 25, 2021 Alex Vitale, just out with an updated edition of The End of Policing, on what cops really do and how we can get rid of them • Barry Eichengreen, co-author of In Defense of Public Debt, on the very long history of public borrowing
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November 18, 2021 Christina Gerhardt on the COP26 climate summit • Mike Lofgren on the dangers of Steve Bannon’s war on the administrative state (article here)
Americans staying put
There are certain things that people say that sound so true that others repeat them credulously without feeling the need to cite evidence. Two covid-era favorites: everybody’s working from home (WFH). And people have decamped en masse for the hinterlands, thanks to WFH. Neither is really true.
I wrote about the slim WFH numbers in September. In July, which was the most recent month available then, 13.2% of the employed were teleworking, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ favored term. In October, that had fallen to 11.6% (graph below). Their ranks were still dominated by highly credentialed professional and managerial workers. The miserably paid couriers who brought (and still bring) them food and other essentials were most certainly not working from home, though they easily fall out of some people’s conception of “everybody.”
Even if “everybody” wasn’t teleworking, lots were. But there’s no support at all for the mass decampment story. Freshly released data from the Census Bureau shows just 8.4% of Americans moved between 2020 and 2021, the smallest share since the Bureau started counting in 1948. That was down almost a full percentage point from the previous pair of years, a large decline by recent historical standards. But as the graph below shows, the share has been declining steadily since 1985’s 20.2%, when high oil prices and deindustrialization drove movers south and west in search of jobs. (Unfortunately for the energy migrants, oil prices collapsed in 1986.)
Also not surviving a confrontation with Census data: the claim that, freed from the need to go to an office, covid refugees headed for the hills (and beaches) in large numbers. They didn’t, as the next graph shows.
Yes, people have been moving out of cities for decades, but the net out-migration of 0.5% of the national population was smaller than the two previous years, and over a quarter less than the 1986–1999 average. (Reminder: these numbers count only in- and out-migration, not changes in population levels, which are also affected by births and deaths.) As the trendline shows, urban out-migration has been in a slowing trend since this data series began. Suburbs gained migrants, but at a rate slightly lower than the previous eight years. Metro areas—the combination of suburban areas and the “principal” cities associated with them— have seen steady, if declining, in-migration for all of the last 35 years. And nonmetro areas, supposedly the recipients of all those terrified urban refugees, lost migrants between 2020 and 2021—more, in fact, than any year since 2014.* That trendline ambles very lazily downward, though it’s hard to distinguish from the axis, because it’s so close to 0.
A larger question here, pandemic aside, is what happened to American mobility? Pulling up stakes and moving a long distance in search of fresh opportunity used to be a foundational national myth. Like many others, it needs to be retired.
* The Census Bureau reminds us that nonmetropolian areas are not the same as “rural” areas, since there are many rural-feeling regions that are nonetheless technically part of metro areas. Census has a point, but on the other hand, there are social differences between thinly populated areas that are close to major conurbations and those that aren’t. For example, parts of Westchester County, just north of New York City, may look rural, but it’s amenity-plentiful rich people’s country, and a short train ride away from the big city.
Striketober wasn’t
As marvelous as it would be to see a revival of labor militancy, people got a little ahead of things calling last month “Striketober.” According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stats, it was a blip by historical standards.
Here’s a graph of the number of workers involved in strikes or lockouts (the BLS counts them together) since 2000. There were 57 months with higher numbers of workers off the job. At the high point of this graph, May 2018, there were over fourteen times as many workers on strike as there were last month.
Here’s another measurement—what the BLS, in nice Victorian fashion, calls “days of idleness” as a percent of total days worked throughout the economy. It was 0.01% in October, a level that’s been matched in 39 other months since January 2000. And as the bottom graph shows, back in the old days when strikes were frequent, lost workdays were many times 0.01%. Before 1980, the low was 0.07%, set in 1957. From 1948 to 1979, it averaged 0.16%. In 1959, just two years after the pre-neoliberal era low, it was 0.43%, the series high.
People criticize the BLS data because it covers only large strikes, those involving over 1,000 workers or more. The government used to publish data on smaller strikes, but it looks to have disappeared from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service’s website after not having been updated for years (and it was always in a very user-unfriendly format). But when I looked at what data there was in 2018, it showed the same pattern of decline as the large strike data.
There’s certainly some promising labor agitation going on, like efforts to organize Amazon and Starbucks, and there’s plenty of atomized discontent floating around. But there’s no strike wave yet.
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November 11, 2021 Lisa Graves on the right-wing funding and strategy network around school protests • Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on the cultural politics around schools
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November 4, 2021 Sheryll Cashin, author of White Space, Black Hood, on the origins, mechanisms, and effects of residential segregation, mostly by race but also by class • Peter Victor and Robert Pollin debate the virtues of “degrowth” in avoiding climate catastrophe
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October 28, 2021 Samuel Moyn, co-author of this article, on the reactionary history of the Supreme Court and how to democratize it • Deepak Bhargava, one of the editors of Immigration Matters, on immigration policy, historical, current, and future
LBO News from Doug Henwood 