Actually, Income Growth for the Middle Class Is No Mystery →

Five years?!

A NYT article on efforts to overcome stagnating incomes for the middle class bizarrely skipped over the most obvious and proven method: low unemployment. The problem shows up in the very first sentence, which tells readers:

"For average American families, the United States economy is like a football team that cannot move the ball, and has not been able to for 30 years."

Actually, the football team moved the ball very well in the years from 1996 to 2001, when families at middle and bottom of the income ladder saw large wage gains. In fact, this five year period accounted for all the growth in wage income for middle class families since 1980. The problem was that the recession that began in 2001 following the collapse of the stock market bubble led to higher unemployment and took away workers bargaining power.

Congratulations, 2014! You could’ve been a lot worse. →

It’s not that there was no positive news — the fall in global energy pricesput more money in people’s pockets, and crime continued to decline in the United States. Still, the bad seemed to crowd out the good.
But what if 2014 turned out better than expected? Thinking about what actually happened this past year may not be the best way to judge it. After all, an awful lot of smart people predicted a lot of even-more-terrible things that never came to pass. And these averted catastrophes point toward some interesting ways to think about 2015.

After several biohazardous screw-ups, the CDC is hiring a safety chief →

The bit about ebola isn't meant to be alarmist, any more than the rest of these failures. As with everything, there needs to be a careful cost/benefit analysis, and we, as a society, guided by experts, need to figure out where to draw the line.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hire a chief of laboratory safety, according to a Reuters report. Because apparently there wasn't one before; creating the position was a major recommendation of a lengthy internal investigation into mishandling of anthrax and bird flu in the agency's labs, according to a memo Reuters obtained.

The announcement comes a week after another lab mix-up — one involving Ebola.Last week, a wrong transfer of a sample containing the Ebola virus exposed at least one lab technician to the disease. The technician wore gloves and a gown, standard gear for inactivated viruses, but not all of the protective gear — like a face mask — recommended for working with the live virus. The worker was showing no symptoms as of December 29th; that person is being monitored for the standard 21 days. The CDC said Tuesday the worker's risk of being sickened by Ebola is "low, but not zero."

China May Have Committed A Tiananmen Square-Scale Massacre This Year — And Totally Covered It Up →

In early August, the president of the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress claimed that at least 2,000 members of China's Uyghur minority had been killed the previous month in and around Elishku, a town in China's far west. China's 12 million Uyghurs are Muslims who speak a language related to Turkish and who enjoy few civil, national, political, or religious rights under China's nationalistic and authoritarian system.

Beijing eventually admitted to killing 96 people in the incident, but did not allow any international or independent media or human rights monitors into the area. The incident took place in a very remote area; the violence likely involved police opening fire on demonstrators, rather than tanks or heavy vehicles.

...

 

Which is a reminder of just how unique an event the Hong Kong protests have been.

In a cosmopolitan center of international finance, Beijing has had to carefully tread around its handling of mass dissent. It wants to impose its will on a restive population without having to resort to measures that could tarnish China's image or risk a further escalation.

The Afghan war that didn't really end yesterday ended in defeat →

As the author summarizes on Twitter:

While most of America's NATO allies that hadn't already washed their hands of combat will now do so, American fighting and dying will continue, with 11,000 US troops remaining in the country. There will be talk of "advising," and "training" and "non-combat" presence. But for the most part that can be safely ignored.
Over 4,000 Afghan soldiers and cops were killed fighting in 2014 alone, compared to 2,224 US soldiers killed fighting there since 2001. Civilian deaths had soared to 3,188 by the end of November, making this year the bloodiest for civilians since at least 2009, when the UN began tracking civilian deaths. The civilian death toll is at least a 20 percent increase over last year.
If Afghan history is anything to go by, it's due to get worse as America's longest war war winds down to its inevitable conclusion. For the Afghans, who have been embroiled in a civil war with heavy foreign meddling since 1979, the prospect of peace seems slim.

As Syria’s Revolution Sputters, a Chaotic Stalemate →

Being able to send weapons and dollars to "moderate" anti-Assad groups may impossible:

The assault this month was led by the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria, which claimed the spoils. By contrast, many of the first Syrians to rise up against Mr. Assad in 2011 — civilian demonstrators and army defectors alike — followed the battle from the sidelines here, unable to enter Syria under threat of death from the extremists of Nusra and its rival group, the Islamic State.

As Syria’s war heads toward its fourth year, the complex battleground is increasingly divided between the government and the extremists, leaving many Syrians feeling that the revolution on which they gambled their lives and livelihoods has failed.