Tag Archives: economist

Notes from an Apocalypse – Mark O’Connell

by Myrna Posted on April 15, 2020

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Notes from an Apocalypse

A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

Mark O’Connell

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: April 14, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


"Harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell" —Jenny Offill “Fascinating…Oddly uplifting”  —The Economist "Smart, funny, irreverent, and philosophically rich" — Wall Street Journal By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine , an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Old postwar alliances are crumbling. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt.  Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have children—nothing if not an act of hope—in such unsettled times? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse , he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization's collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering readers a unique window into our contemporary imagination. Both investigative and deeply personal, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?

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Notes from an Apocalypse – Mark O’Connell

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God’s Doodle – Tom Hickman

by Myrna Posted on November 29, 2019

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God’s Doodle

The Life and Times of the Penis

Tom Hickman

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $10.99

Publish Date: October 21, 2013

Publisher: Counterpoint Press

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


“A remarkably entertaining and informative look at the male organ down through the ages . . . undeniably funny.” — Booklist   Throughout history, man has revered his penis as his “most precious ornament.” From small to large, thick to thin, smooth to wrinkled, Hickman lets the history of this mystery hang out for all to see. It is a stiff subject, but we easily settle in with the likes of Bill Clinton, Michelangelo’s David, and Shakespeare as they followed their heads. If you were to wrap your hands around anything less than two-inches, it should be God’s Doodle , a brilliant history of the penis that hits the topic right on the head. It reaches through time and looks at how the penis trended long before one was ever posted on Twitter.   You will be impotent with both laughter and information as you read “ . . . subtly, unhurriedly and mercilessly” (Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex ), as Hickman discusses ancient literatures and mathematical quandaries of possible positions, such as Greece’s “the lion on the cheese-grater,” which still keeps scholars from being cocksure about the potential.   “[A] well-researched, dryly witty and worthwhile read.” — Salon   “Tom Hickman tells the story of its ups and downs with enthusiasm and a mostly straight face.” — The Economist

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God’s Doodle – Tom Hickman

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Report: Climate change could flush your savings

by StephanWph Posted on December 10, 2018

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Businesses say risks to their bottom line from climate climate add up to tens of billions of dollars. That may seem like a lot, but their actual risks to business are at least 100 times higher, according to a study just published in Nature Climate Change. Trillions, instead of billions.

The mismatch between those numbers could liquify the money you’ve been saving for retirement. Company climate plans “give little inkling that up to 30 percent of manageable assets globally may be at risk,” researchers wrote.

Climate change could soon be “the defining issue for financial stability” according to Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England and former head of the Financial Stability Board, the international body established to make recommendations to prevent financial collapse. To take that out of econo-speak: Failure to fully comprehend climate risks — droughts, floods, heat waves — could lead to an economic crisis that makes the Great Recession look like a joyride.

The researchers had access to a treasure trove of data, environmental disclosures from 1,630 companies worth more than more than two-thirds of the world’s stock markets added together. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive study of this kind ever done. Some 83 percent of businesses said that they faced real risks from climate change, but only 21 percent had quantified those risks.

It’s fascinating to see how the one in five companies that have crunched the numbers anticipate climate change will affect their business. For example, Samsung estimated that if a cyclone shut down one of their semiconductor factories for a single day it would cost $110 million. And when monsoon floods stopped Hewlett-Packard’s hard drive manufacturing in Thailand, back in 2011, it cost the company $4 billion.

“It was just endlessly surprising, as I did the data analysis, to see all the ways that companies were being affected, and how they were adapting,” said Allie Goldstein a scientist at Conservation International and lead author on the paper.

Airlines are preparing plans to carry fewer passengers and cargo on extreme heat days, because warmer air temperature generate less lift for their planes. Rubber companies, concerned about droughts killing rubber trees, are investing in synthetic alternatives. The Colombian utility Celsia SA is planting thousands of trees upstream from its hydroelectric dams to improve the watershed and hedge against declining rainfall. The Japanese conglomerate Hitachi is installing anti-flood bulkheads in its factories.

“There’s a real thought and creativity going into this, and coming up with an amazing diversity of solutions,” said Will Turner, an executive at Conservation International who also worked on the study. “That’s the positive. The negative is that it’s all incremental progress — it represents just a nascent understanding of the risks.”

You might give less credence to a study like this, because it suggests a need for more action on climate change and comes from an environmental organization that pushes for more action on climate change. But the estimates of investor risk come from the Economist Intelligence Unit, academic research, and the World Economic Forum, not Conservation International. In this paper, the researchers simply tallied up all the adaptations companies are making.

“I always encourage people to be smart consumers of science and look at the methods and also who is doing it,” Goldstein said. “They will find that these findings are based on real data, and real results, not preconceived notions.”

It’s easy to think that average people have little influence over major companies But we have to think differently, if we want to prevent a financial meltdown as climate disasters begin to pile up, Goldstein said. “There’s a tendency to think that this is someone else’s problem, but if you are an employee, or a customer, or an investor, I’d encourage people to think of this as something they can influence themselves, by making a call or asking a question.”

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Report: Climate change could flush your savings

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The EPA airbrushed away 6 million cars to make your gas mileage worse

by IngeborgTeague Posted on December 7, 2018

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When President Donald Trump’s administration argued last August that they were going to save 1,000 lives a year by axing gas mileage rules, you pretty much knew it was BS. Now the same expert the administration relied on to make the claim has helped dismantle the argument in hilarious detail.

Let’s be honest here: Everything below will only confirm your initial impression that the administration’s arguments were hollow. Still, it’s satisfying to see what happened when experts took the time to scrutinize them.

The lead author of this critique — just published in Science — is the economist the EPA cited most frequently in making the case for rolling back the fuel standards, Antonio Bento, a professor at the University of Southern California. Bento and ten other researchers found that the administration’s justification “has fundamental flaws and inconsistencies,” and “is misleading.” For instance, they found that the EPA simply wished away 6 million cars, which made the regulatory rollback look at least $90 billion cheaper for Americans.

To grasp how nutty this is, you have to understand that the Trump administration’s basic argument was that fuel economy standards raise the price of new cars. So instead of buying new ones, people keep driving their old cars longer. That risks lives, they claimed, because new cars have better safety features. But if we scrapped fuel standards, people would be more likely to buy new cars, and therefore less likely to die.

To make the numbers support this line of argument, the EPA had to say that rolling back the standards would lead to 6 million fewer cars on the road by 2029. But the idea that making cars cheaper will lead to fewer cars on the road is, as the experts put it, “simply inconsistent with basic economic theory.”

(If you want to get into the weeds, there are more eyerollers in the full study.)

As it happens, Politico reported this week that EPA staffers disputed the agency’s analysis and that the agency will revise its estimates.

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The EPA airbrushed away 6 million cars to make your gas mileage worse

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A Review of Reviews of "The Handmaid’s Tale"

by EmilieLohman229 Posted on April 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Below are excerpts from a baker’s dozen reviews of Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Can you figure out what they all have in common?

New York Times: The television adaptation arrives with a newfound and unexpected resonance in Trump’s America….“We were hoping to be relevant, but we weren’t hoping it would be this relevant.”

io9: It’s incredibly difficult to watch The Handmaid’s Tale and not be affected, to feel like we’re so much closer to it being reality than when it was first written.

Washington Post: The phrase “now more than ever” has become a tiresome cliche in the past few months, but so what: “The Handmaid’s Tale” is here and it demands our attention, now more than ever.

Hollywood Reporter: Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale may be the most unintentionally timely show of the year.

Entertainment Weekly: Their performances — and the show’s consistent sense of textural, lived-in realism — anchor the drama in something beyond speculative sci-fi, making the story feel less like a quasi-fictional fable than an entirely possible preview of what’s to come.

Wall Street Journal: You can’t quite call it a bad dream come true, not yet. But given what might be termed “recent events,” it’s certainly cautionary, and more than urgent.

The Economist: As the Trump administration continues to cut funding and roll back family-planning services, it is easy to hear echoes of its rhetoric on the screen.

Vogue: Could the timing be any more apt?

TV Guide: The show and its source material feel more timely and relevant than ever….With women’s rights again on the chopping block under a Trump administration, and a common refrain from critics on the left to resist normalizing Trump, it’s difficult if not impossible not to draw parallels between the show and real-life events.

Deadline Hollywood: If ever a television series could border on being too relevant, Hulu’s gripping, chilling and brutal adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which launches with its first three episodes on April 26, would be the one.

Huffington Post: Whether the show sets out to directly compare its dystopian themes with today’s political climate, for some readers â&#128;&#149; and for the story’s author â&#128;&#149; the similarities are ripe for picking.

Vanity Fair: All dystopias are meant as cautionary tales. But at this particular moment in time—one marked by a powerful but misguided nostalgia, and religious zealotry, and an increasing sense that paranoia is justified, with the powers that be seemingly determined to chip away at the rights of women—The Handmaid’s Tale feels especially current, cutting, and vital.

Harper’s Bazaar: You won’t see a more timely or essential onscreen story this year than Hulu’s extraordinary rendering of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, reimagined as a fundamentalist nightmare for the Mike Pence era….Like all the best dystopias, Gilead is not a truly fictional world, and The Handmaid’s Tale is not a dark fantasy. It’s a warning.

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A Review of Reviews of "The Handmaid’s Tale"

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New Yorker Cover Takes a Swing at Trump’s White House

by MarciaBrummitt Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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The New Yorker offered a preview of its newest cover Friday, which takes aim at President Donald Trump and the ongoing chaos within the White House. The cover illustration, which features an unflattering looking Trump using the White House as his personal golf course, comes amid mounting anger over the president’s frequent golf trips. Trump appears on track to outpace former President Barack Obama’s visits to the golf course—despite routinely complaining that his predecessor enjoyed golfing from time to time.

Illustrator Barry Blitt, the mastermind behind several other recent covers that appeared critical of the president, explained to the magazine:

“I see that the word ‘duffer’ is defined as ‘a person inexperienced at something, especially at playing golf,’” Barry Blitt says, about his cover for the upcoming issue. “That’s the word that comes to mind as I watch President Trump plowing one drive after another through the glass windows of American politics.”

Coincidentally, the Economist‘s upcoming issue also features an image of a golf course, with someone attempting to dig themselves out of a hole. The image is paired with the headline, “The Trump presidency so far.”

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New Yorker Cover Takes a Swing at Trump’s White House

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Lead and Crime: The Brennan Center Weighs In

by LolitaMcKinley Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

The Brennan Center has released a lengthy report examining the reasons for the big crime decline of the 90s and aughts, and one section highlights the work of Jessica Reyes and others linking crime levels to gasoline lead emissions:

Reyes, and other researchers, have found that lead is connected to aggressive behavior and behavioral problems because it affects brain development of children….Reyes found that the decrease in lead caused a remarkable 56 percent of the decrease in violent crime in the 1990s….This theory had been previously suggested by another economist, Rick Nevin, in 1999. He illustrated a similarity in the trends between violent crime and gasoline lead 23 years prior.

….In December 2013, an NAS roundtable discussed the lead theory. There was an extended discussion in which most participants seemed to concur that the 56 percent drop in crime attributed to lead by Reyes was likely too large. Most experts seem to believe that lead played some role, but maybe not as high as the finding presented by Reyes. More research is needed to establish lead’s precise role in the crime decline.

….The authors do not draw a conclusion on this theory because they could not secure complete state-by-state data on this variable level for 1980 to 2013, as needed for the regression….Based on current research and expert reactions, it is possible that lead played some role in the 1990s drop in violent crime but perhaps not as large as that found by Reyes. Further, lead’s effect on the crime drop likely waned in the 2000s.

Now, you might think I’d be annoyed that lead was the 13th out of 13 theories they looked at, and that they downplayed the likelihood of a significant role for lead. In fact, I’m thrilled. This is one of the first reports I’ve seen that gives lead a substantial section of its own, and the authors clearly take the idea seriously. The fact that they want more research before committing themselves further is perfectly reasonable. It’s a new theory that needs more research from people not already committed to it one way or the other.

A couple of notes, though. First, if the authors are only willing to draw conclusions if they can get complete state-by-state data on lead emissions, then they’re stacking the deck. That data simply isn’t available, just as it’s not available for most things in a reliable way. Additionally, since people move in and out of states, even perfect data would be incomplete. This shouldn’t be an excuse for not analyzing the data that does exist, especially since it exists at local, state, national, and international levels.

It’s also worth noting something that I feel like I have to say again and again: state-level regressions aren’t the only evidence in favor of the lead-crime theory. In fact, regressions in general aren’t the only evidence available. There are also prospective studies and brain imaging studies that point in the same direction. Nobody should make the mistake of thinking that if only we had better data and could run cleaner regressions we’d get closer to the truth. What we really need at this point are tests of very specific hypotheses of the lead-crime theory. If, for example, a detailed cohort-level study failed to show age-specific effects of lead on crime, that would be a big blow to the overall theory. That would be a useful study—though, as usual, it would probably be very difficult to carry out properly because the raw data is unlikely to exist in detailed and reliable form.

I’d also note that although the authors are correct that the role of lead waned in the 2000s, it probably wasn’t until the late 2000s. Lead likely played a significant role in crime declines up to about 2008 or so, when the last cohort of children born in 1986 turned 22. Changes in crime rates since then are most likely due to other factors.

(Changes in incarceration rates, however, lag crime rates, and will probably be affected by the end of leaded gasoline for another decade or two. And in other countries, which banned lead in the 90s or the early aughts, the effect on crime rates will probably continue to be felt for another decade at least.)

Outfits like the Brennan Center are fundamentally interested in things like incarceration, poverty, and policing, and it’s only natural that these are the things they spend the most time discussing. Thus, the mere fact that they gave lead any attention at all is good news. It means people are taking the idea seriously, and eventually that might lead to the further research they’d like to see.

As always, if you want to read the complete argument in favor of the lead-crime hypothesis, it’s right here at Mother Jones in my 2013 piece, “America’s Real Criminal Element.” Just click for the whole story.

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Lead and Crime: The Brennan Center Weighs In

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Happy Holidays! Economic Growth Finally Starting to Look Robust.

by RoseS35zsysbowu Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hey, take a look at this. Yet another revision is in, and the Commerce Department now estimates that third-quarter GDP grew at a sizzling 5.0 percent rate, following a nearly-as-good 4.6 percent rate in the second quarter. Part of this is still a make-up for poor growth in the first quarter, but it’s good news nonetheless. The economy really does seem to have found a new gear this year:

Tuesday’s report showed stronger-than-expected spending by U.S. consumers, particularly on services like health care. Fixed nonresidential investment also was revised up, signaling more spending by businesses on new buildings and research and development.

“There is a positive feedback loop going on at the moment,” Mike Jakeman, global analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a note. “Job creation is running at the strongest rate for 15 years. More people in work means more income, which means more private spending, which means more business investment, which means more hiring.”

Corporate profits are also up, and the stock market is at new highs every day. Wage growth still needs to get stronger, but it showed signs of life last quarter. All things considered, five years after the Great Recession technically ended, we’re finally doing pretty well.

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Happy Holidays! Economic Growth Finally Starting to Look Robust.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

by Joellen54X Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

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How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor

by Cosetta Shallenberger Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is now behind an Iron Curtain-like paywall, which is too bad since apparently they ran a great story yesterday about Georgia’s practice of using private companies to collect fines and fees in the criminal justice system. I’ll farm out the job of summarizing the story to the Economist’s Jon Fasman:

It works like this: say you get a $200 speeding ticket, and you don’t have the money to pay it. You are placed on probation, and for a monthly supervisory fee you can pay the fine off in instalments over the course of your probation term. The devil, as ever, is in the details….Those supervisory fees vary markedly: in Cobb County, for instance, just north of Atlanta, the government charges a $22 monthly fee. Private companies charge $39, and often add extra costs on top of that to cover drug testing, electronic monitoring and even classes they decide offenders need.

….Even worse, people who fail to pay the fines imposed by these private companies can find warrants for their arrests sworn out and the period of their probation extended. I spoke with an attorney for a couple in Alabama who say they were threatened with Tasers and the removal of their children if they did not pay the company what they owed. In 2012 a court found that the fees levied by private-probation companies in Harpersville, Alabama, could turn a $200 fine and a year’s probation into $2,100 in fees and fines stretched over 41 months.

Isn’t that great? It’s the free market at work, all right. It reminds me of last year’s piece in the Washington Post about the privatization of the debt collection in Washington DC:

For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid.

But under the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay, a Washington Post investigation found.

As the housing market soared, the investors scooped up liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners thousands in legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, with rates for attorneys reaching $450 an hour.

You may remember this as the story of the 76-year-old man struggling with dementia who was thrown out on the street and had his house seized because of a mix-up over a $134 property tax bill. That in turn might remind you of all the stories you’ve heard about civil asset forfeiture, where local police agencies groundlessly extort property from people convicted of no crimes, and then use the money “for purchasing equipment and getting things you normally wouldn’t be able to get to fight crime.”

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

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How to Use Public-Private Partnerships to Screw the Poor

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