We're increasing our ability to affect our world, and have yet to realize what that means.
A major recent survey by the World Wildlife Fund estimated that the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish worldwide has declined a whopping 52 percent between 1970 and 2010. The main culprits? Humans. Mainly through hunting, fishing, deforestation, pollution, and other forms of habitat destruction...
We leave digital traces everywhere. That's a good thing, and a bad thing. We have quite a bit of work to do to figure out the proper balance.
President Bashar al-Assad acknowledged in an unusually frank public admission on Sunday that the Syrian military is unable to hold on to some parts of the country because his forces have been depleted by desertions and defections.
The Japanese company Panasonic announced recently that it will start selling an exoskeleton designed to help workers lift and carry objects more easily and with less risk of injury. The suit was developed in collaboration with a subsidiary company called ActiveLink. It weighs just over 13 pounds and attaches to the back, thighs, and feet, enabling the wearer to carry 33 pounds of extra load. The device has been tested by warehouse handlers in Osaka, Japan, and is currently in trials with forestry workers in the region.
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Another Japanese company, Cyberdyne, already sells exoskeletons for medical and industrial use. The company’s technology, which was spun out of the University of Tsukuba, uses nerve signals to detect a wearer’s intention to move before applying assistive force. Earlier this year, Cyberdyne signed an agreement with the Japanese automation company Omron to develop assistive technology for use in factories.
Thought experiment: what would happen if nearly everyone in the U.S. was considered a freelancer or temp? And therefore noone had employer-backed benefits? or even a reasonable guarantee of medium-term employment? What would that do to politics? How would that affect the healthcare system?
As it happens, though, Uber is not so much a labor-market innovation as the culmination of a generation-long trend. Even before the founding of the company in 2009, the United States economy was rapidly becoming an Uber economy writ large, with tens of millions of Americans involved in some form of freelancing, contracting, temping or outsourcing.
The decades-long shift to these more flexible workplace arrangements, the venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and the labor leader David Rolf argue in the latest issue of Democracy Journal, is a “transformation that promises new efficiencies and greater flexibility for ‘employers’ and ‘employees’ alike, but which threatens to undermine the very foundation upon which middle-class America was built.”
Along with other changes, like declining unionization and advancing globalization, the increasingly arm’s-length nature of employment helps explain why incomes have stagnated and why most Americans remain deeply anxious about their economic prospects six years after the Great Recession ended.
The Earned Income Tax Credit isn't super well-known, but it's one of the best tools the federal government has for fighting poverty. It functions as a wage subsidy for the working poor, providing an average of $2,982 a year to families with children come tax season. The results are impressive. According to the Census Bureau, refundable tax credits like the EITC and the similarly structured Child Tax Credit cut the poverty rate (correctly measured) by 3 percentage points in 2013 — that's 9.4 million people kept out of poverty.
But a new study suggests that even that is an underestimate. UC Berkeley economist Hilary Hoynes and the Treasury Department's Ankur Patel find that the EITC might be twice as effective at fighting poverty as the census estimate suggests.
Josh Barro has a piece at Upshot about increasing work hours. In it, he plays the irritating game of describing certain institutional choices that help to determine how many hours people work as "distortions" and also wrongly downplays the degree to which the US truly is a bizarrely overworked country.
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Normally, when a country increases its per-hour productivity, it reduces the amount of work it does. This is because life is not all about maximizing total GDP for the sake of it, but also occasionally includes such things as spending time with family and friends and pursuing personal projects. Relative to the general tendency across countries, US workers put in 462 more hours per year than the US level of GDP/hour would predict. For Ireland, that same number is 358 hours. For South Korea (whose GDP/hour is the same as Greece's), it's even lower at 274 hours.
All three of these countries are well above the norm, but none more so than the US:
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It's not just these one-year comparisons either. Consider change over time since 1970 for the countries whose data runs back that far.
Despite doubling our GDP/hour over this period, the US only cut 114 hours off its work year, a 6% reduction. Every other country cut hours further, with the top being France whose workers cut 518 hours off its work year, a 26% reduction.
Given our high GDP/hour, there is absolutely no reason the US needs to be working as much as we currently do, and certainly no reason why we need to be working more. While I can't speak for Barro obviously, to me, the idea that we shoud be trying to reshape our institutions so as to claim an even greater share of workers' scarce lives for toil is unthinkable...
Grusky and Pablo Mitnik, his co-author and colleague at the Center on Poverty and Inequality, use a new data set provided to them by the IRS to show that in the U.S., roughly half of parental income advantages are passed onto the next generation in the form of higher earnings. This proportion increases for the wealthier: For people whose parents are between the 50th and 90th percentiles of earners, about two-thirds of this parental edge is perpetuated. (It’s also worth noting that two-thirds of 90th-percentile earnings is substantially more money than two-thirds of 50th-percentile earnings.)