Good, quick primer.
...We wrote about the slipperiness of often-conflated terms like "antifa," "antifascism," and "black bloc." On college campuses, those terms — and the differences among them — matter. (Consider the amount of money colleges spend on security for an appearance by a far-right speaker: They expect antifascist activists to show up, and they worry about the prospect of black-bloc violence.)
So we asked several scholars, including Mr. Bray, for their definitions.
...It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation and it was willing—eager—to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.
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When more than a dozen women stepped forward and accused Leon Wieseltier of a serial and decades-long pattern of workplace sexual harassment, he said, “I will not waste this reckoning.” It was textbook Wieseltier: the insincere promise and the perfectly chosen word. The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his stunning string of progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its central principles. The party was on the wrong side of history and there are consequences for that. Yet expedience is not the only reason to make this public accounting. If it is possible for politics and moral behavior to coexist, then this grave wrong needs to be acknowledged. If Weinstein and Mark Halperin and Louis C.K. and all the rest can be held accountable, so can our former president and so can his party, which so many Americans so desperately need to rise again.
But university research is in trouble, and so is an economy more dependent on it than many people understand. Federal funding for basic research—more than half of it conducted on university campuses like this one—has effectively declined since 2008, failing to keep pace with inflation. This is before taking into account Trump administration proposals to slash the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars more.
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While private institutions are better shielded from funding cuts by huge endowments, Midwestern public universities have much thinner buffers. The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion...
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These universities have served as bulwarks against a decades-long trend of economic activity fleeing smaller cities and the center of the country for the coasts. Since the 1980s, deregulation and corporate consolidation have led to a drastic hollowing out of the local industries that once sustained heartland cities. But a university can’t just be picked up and moved from Madison to New York in the way a bank, an insurance company, or even a factory can be.
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Meanwhile, global economic rivals have continued to approach and even surpass the level of American research output. The U.S. share of all research and development funding worldwide dropped from more than a third to barely a quarter from 2003 to 2013, the most recent period for which the figures are available. China could catch up by 2030 based on current trends. Last year, Chinese researchers for the first time filed more patents applications in the life sciences than their U.S. counterparts. The historical global leader in science and technology, the United States is now ninth among the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the proportion of gross domestic product spent on research.
Because basic science can take decades to translate into new drugs or products, the consequences of this won’t be immediately visible. That makes it hard to argue for renewed investment in research in a political system that doesn’t prioritize long-term thinking. Nor does private industry always want to invest in the years of research it can take to translate fundamental discoveries into the kind of marketable commodities that drive the American economy—and that often originate at universities.
Trump’s personalization of foreign policy makes credible commitment next to impossible. If Trump is the only spokesperson, then his idiotic tweets matter, no matter how much his chief of staff, John Kelly, pretends they don’t. Trump wants to rally all of Asia around him to confront North Korea to coax Pyongyang into negotiations. It is extremely difficult to make that sale, however, if the sole person who matters keeps speaking erratically on the subject (or any subject). It also makes it next to impossible for North Korea to entertain negotiating with Trump.
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There is a reason every time Trump tries to flesh out his grand strategy, he fails miserably. His mixture of erratic security pledges, mercantilist economic policy and transactional values is less appetizing to the rest of the world than he realizes.
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As always, the primary success of Trump’s overseas trip is that he did not start World War III. Beyond that, anyone who is describing his Pacific Rim trip as a success is relying on the soft bigotry of low expectations.
The exposure of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca’s work helping the global elite hide money from the tax man, and the more recent leak of the “Paradise Papers” from firms Appleby and Estera in Bermuda, have prompted outrage and interest in corporate secrecy. In the US, it also should provide occasion for introspection, because anything Panama does, Delaware, South Dakota, and Nevada can do just as well.
In fact, the US is one of the largest recipients of illicit financial flows from developing countries—money often smuggled out by corrupt politicians, drug dealers, or everyday criminals.
The key reason is corporate secrecy. When individuals or companies want to hide their assets, they transfer them to shell companies that hide the true owners behind nominee directors who act as the custodian of the firm. Often, and especially in tax havens, the directors of the company are not required to disclose, to the tax authorities or anyone else, who the true owners are.
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Just as small countries tend to breed the political culture that allows corporate secrecy, sparsely populated US states have competed in a race to the bottom to attract corporate investment through lax disclosure requirements. The tiny state of Delaware, called an “on-shore tax haven” by critics, garners more than a quarter of its public revenue—just over a $1 billion—from its business registry.
This probably factors into the World Bank’s assessment of the US as one of the worst offenders (pdf) when it comes to corporate secrecy. In fact, a 2012 academic study reports that it is easier to form a shell company(pdf) in the US than it is in Panama—or indeed, anywhere else but Kenya. At the top of their list? Delaware and Nevada.
A big question:
“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”
Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.”
He said the “$1bn question” was how society would react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few.
Anger at so-called robber barron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s.
“Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?,” Stadler asked. “Will the second age end or will it proceed?”
But Brown has waded through much of the science around brains and gender, concluding that the sex we are assigned at birth has little to do with who we are as people. While there is no consensus within the scientific community, many studies assert that there is no male or female brain (one study calls them “intersex”), no inherent desire for cleats or ballet shoes tied to gender, no special skill sets or ingrained behavior. “There are very, very few differences in cognition and behavior,” between young boys and girls,” says Brown.
There are, of course, physical differences wrought by hormones — muscle mass, fat, and, of course, the development of sexual characteristics. Some studies also assert that there is an inherent preference for toys with wheels among boys, perhaps due to differences in the development of fine versus gross motor skills. (One study found this to be true even in monkeys.)
But it’s possible that many of the differences between young boys and girls come from the way we approach child rearing, and the messages kids get about how boys and girls should look and behave: the cultural stereotypes we impose on them that become self-fulfilling prophesies of sorts. “It’s almost entirely cultural,” Brown says. Natal sex, in other words, is less predictive of who your children will be than of how you will treat them.
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So rather than asking if a pregnant woman is having a boy or girl — or hoping for one or the other ourselves — why don’t we focus on raising our children free of gender-based expectations, to help them grow into their authentic selves? This doesn’t mean that we should ignore gender, or that biology or gender identity are irrelevant. It means that we shouldn’t define our children’s experiences because of those things.
The truth is, our children will always be different than who we imagined them to be. Indeed, the demure children in the girly outfits I envisioned those years ago aren’t the daughters I have. But that’s OK. Being sweet or courageous or patient or driven are good things. We just shouldn’t think they apply to kids based on gender.
And when most temporary jobs don't come with pension and benefits...
Survey research conducted by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that from 2005 to 2015, the proportion of Americans workers engaged in what they refer to as “alternative work” jumped from 10.7% to 15.8%. Alternative work is characterized by being temporary or unsteady—such as work as an independent contractor or through a temporary help agency.
“We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” In other words, nearly all of the 10 million jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were not traditional nine-to-five employment.