The Free-Time Paradox in America →

...It is a relief to know that one can be poor, young, and unemployed, and yet fairly content with life; indeed, one of the hallmarks of a decent society is that it can make even poverty bearable. But the long-term prospects of these men may be even bleaker than their present. As Hurst and others have emphasized, these young men have disconnected from both the labor market and the dating pool. They are on track to grow up without spouses, families, or a work history. They may grow up to be rudderless middle-aged men, hovering around the poverty line, trapped in the narcotic undertow of cheap entertainment while the labor market fails to present them with adequate working opportunities.
But when I tweeted Hurst’s speech this week, many people had a surprising and different take: That it was sad to think that a life of leisure should be so scary in the first place. After all, this was the future today’s workers were promised—a paradise of downtime for rich and poor, alike.
In the classic 1930 essay “Economic Possibility of Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast a future governed by a different set of expectations. The 21st century’s work week would last just 15 hours, he said, and the chief social challenge of the future would be the difficulty of managing leisure and abundance.
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Here is the conundrum: Writers and economists from half a century ago and longer anticipated that the future would buy more leisure time for wealthy workers in America. Instead, it just bought them more work. Meanwhile, overall leisure has increased, but it’s the less-skilled poor who are soaking up all the free time, even though they would have the most to gain from working. Why? ...

Religion in US 'worth more than Google and Apple combined' →

Religion in the United States is worth $1.2tn a year, making it equivalent to the 15th largest national economy in the world, according to a study. 
The faith economy has a higher value than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology companies in the US, including Apple, Amazon and Google, says the analysis from Georgetown University in Washington DC.
The Socioeconomic Contributions of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis calculated the $1.2tn figure by estimating the value of religious institutions, including healthcare facilities, schools, daycare and charities; media; businesses with faith backgrounds; the kosher and halal food markets; social and philanthropic programmes; and staff and overheads for congregations.
Co-author Brian Grim said it was a conservative estimate. More than 344,000 congregations across the US collectively employ hundreds of thousands of staff and buy billions of dollars worth of goods and services.
More than 150 million Americans, almost half the population, are members of faith congregations, according to the report. Although numbers are declining, the sums spent by religious organisations on social programmes have tripled in the past 15 years, to $9bn.

How Colombia's Voters Rejected Peace →

...Last Monday, September 26th, in an elaborately staged treaty-signing ceremony in Cartagena de Indias, a colonial-era Caribbean city, President Juan Manuel Santos and Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias Timochenko, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or farc, declared that the country’s fifty-two-year civil war was over. Dozens of V.I.P. guests, including John Kerry, King Juan Carlos of Spain (the former monarch, who abdicated in favor of his son), the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, and other heads of state, were in attendance. Then, in a plebiscite held on Sunday in Colombia, a majority of voters rejected the peace deal, by a margin of sixty-three thousand ballots out of thirteen million cast. The victory of the 'No' side has triggered a political crisis of unforeseeable proportions in Colombia. Nobody knows what will happen next.
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That plebiscite was the vote held Sunday, after which everything that was celebrated in Cartagena was thrown into an anxious limbo, including the major question of whether the current ceasefire, which has been in place since late July, will hold, or if the war will resume. During the talks, both sides had sought to reduce the fighting, and the death toll had fallen to its lowest level by far in years. In a country where seven million people have been displaced and at least a quarter of a million killed, possibly many more, this had been the main reward of the peace talks thus far. The plan had been for thousands of farc guerrillas, who remain armed, to gather in twenty mustering points and demobilize in the coming months under the auspices of U.N. peacekeepers; thanks to the No vote, there is now no legal authority for that to happen.

New Class War: What America’s ruling elite fears about the 2016 election →

...But there’s another side to the Trump phenomenon that is less about Trump or his voters than about the elites they are against. Resistance to the bipartisan establishment keeps growing, and even if Trump loses to Clinton in a landslide, he has carried the rebellion further than ever before by winning a major party’s nomination.
Since the Cold War ended, U.S. politics has seen a series of insurgent candidacies. Pat Buchanan prefigured Trump in the Republican contests of 1992 and 1996. Ralph Nader challenged the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party from the outside in 2000. Ron Paul vexed establishment Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012. And this year, Trump was not the only candidate to confound his party’s elite: Bernie Sanders harried Hillary Clinton right up to the Democratic convention.
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The insurgents clearly do not represent a single class: they appeal to eclectic interests and groups. The foe they have all faced down, however—the bipartisan establishment—does resemble a class in its striking unity of outlook and interest. So what is this class, effectively the ruling class of the country?
Some critics on the right have identified it with the “managerial” class described by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. But it bears a stronger resemblance to what what others have called “the New Class.” In fact, the interests of this New Class of college-educated “verbalists” are antithetical to those of the industrial managers that Burnham described. Understanding the relationship between these two often conflated concepts provides insight into politics today, which can be seen as a clash between managerial and New Class elites...

'The Situation ... Is Truly Catastrophic'; Hurricane Matthew Slams Into Haiti →

At 7 a.m. local time, the eye of Hurricane Matthew sat over Les Anglais, Haiti. The hurricane is so large and powerful that people in a 40-mile radius from its center were under hurricane warnings, and tropical storm-force winds were lashing areas as far as 185 miles away, near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

The Divided States of America →

Reading the nonstop coverage of what may well be a close presidential election, one might be forgiven for thinking that political competition is alive and well in America.
But look at the majority of states and congressional races, and a different picture emerges: In most places, meaningful two-party electoral competition is nonexistent. Rather than being one two-party nation, we are becoming two one-party nations.
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Consider some numbers. The House, the supposed “people’s chamber,” is a sea of noncompetition. Out of 435 seats up for election this year, just 25 are considered tossups by The Cook Political Report. In 2014, 82 percent of House races were decided by at least 15 percentage points, including 17 percent that were not contested by one of the two major parties.
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While gerrymandering may explain some of the noncompetitiveness of House races, it can’t explain the Senate or the Electoral College. No amount of nonpartisan redistricting can overcome the fundamental disconnect between place-based, winner-take-all elections and polarized, geographically separated parties.