#There have been so many complaints at work about the ways in which poorer laborers specifically (for example hotel workers)

[ask-joeydrewstudios]

Similarly Spiteful, Chapter 19

@disneyphantomlover: ((AND HERE IT IS. The final chapter. …Unless I feel like playing around more, but honestly, this is the end of Similarly Spiteful. It’s been fun, it’s been heartwrenching, and it’s been so, so fun. I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed this, it’s been a blast writing this.

And yes, two canon things for Sammy Wes is 1) the fact he chose “Lawrence” and “Samuel” for his name (He was only given the name Wes as an orphan), and 2) is the fact his birthday is January 31st, 1917.))

It’d been a month. One whole month since Joey Drew had pulled one of the weirder occult stunts Sammy had ever seen and brought over his double.

Sammy Wes Lawrence had only been in the studio for two days, but the impression he left… It was hard to forget. He tried focusing on the shared smoking breaks, the bickering, the music… And not about the last he’d seen of Sammy Wes. That look of confusion and pain before Joey had hurriedly pushed him and Susie out of the room, the ink on his shirt that looked so omnious…. Susie tried to fight the door down, and Sammy had finally leaned in and pressed his ear against the door to listen in. He’d heard bits and pieces of Joey and someone else talking, but practically none of it made sense to him. He’d quietly cursed under his breath at Joey bringing someone else in, but that notion was quickly disproven when he heard Joey’s “snuck in” followed by the stranger’s “you’re correct”.

Hairs on the back of his neck started to rise as he listened to the second voice, and he’d jumped back when he heard the stranger come to the door and saw the door knob jiggle. He’d held an arm in front of Susie, hoping that whoever -or whatever- came out wasn’t going to be violent.

But nothing came out.

Five minutes, and still nothing came out.

Susie had finally stepped around him and opened the door, unafraid by what might happen or pop out. Sammy was hesitant, but figured if Susie was going in gung-ho, he’d be by her side regardless. Both of them were greeted by easily the most unsettling sight to date: Joey Drew, sitting in his chair, staring at the remains of an ink puddle, looking honest-to-God terrified. Sammy immediately regretted stepping into the office. His boss was always smiles, even in the worse circumstances. To see him like this was… It was a testament to how bad something was. And what had happened to his double. To…Well. His brother? Something like that…

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. But he could recall small events in the day that were notable. He’d stolen Wally’s mop from a nearby closet and cleaned the ink off the floor in Joey’s office himself. Only Susie and Joey knew what he did, and he planned to keep it that way. It was… It was wrong for anyone else to clean up the ink on the floor. Just this time. He’d found Susie talking with the trio of toons a little later, and Joey hurriedly drawing a few scenes with the animators, Henry directly to his left. When Sammy and his Susie-bell had left that night, Joey was practically smothered with the toons in one of the armchairs. The older man was holding Boris rather tightly, which struck Sammy as odd at the time. But he didn’t think too hard on it. It was bad enough that Sammy Wes was gone.

Joey had refused to talk about it for a few days. That was just fine with Sammy; he didn’t want to know right away what occurred to upset Joey so badly. And even when Joey finally calmed down and talked to him in private, Sammy still wasn’t sure he wanted the knowledge of what had happened. … Still.

It was a little thing, but Joey telling him he’d been right was something he’d hang onto forever.

It was bittersweet, but he’d be okay with that.

He’d lost a rare thing on that day, which more angered than upset him. A month later, and he still thought about that tall blond that had his name. He’d… He’d been good. And he wished that he’d been able to stay longer. He could’ve stayed longer. He could’ve stayed and maybe have a life here. Maybe he would have had a better life knowing so much in advance. So many what-ifs bouncing in his head, giving him a now physical headache. He shook his head, deciding to take a short walk to the store. He needed more cigarettes, and the fresh air would help him. Shrugging on his coat and wrapping a thick scarf on his neck, he patted his pocket to make sure his wallet was still in place before he made the trek down the stairs and to the street. He’d made the two lefts and one right to the small mom and pop store he liked frequenting. He’d almost walked straight in, but the sight he saw outside made him freeze in his tracks. Well, the sound he heard was more accurate.

A standalone piano had been pulled out of a nearby store, and a young blond man was playing on it. At least, a blond man who looked much younger than he did, with some of the rattiest overalls Sammy had seen in his life and thin arms that made him balk. The man was pale except for large bruises and scrapes on his arms and face, with a crooked nose that seemed to have been broken at one point. All these physical aspects, and the damn man was playing a familiar rag on the old piano. Bobbing his head to the beat and leaning into the keys as he played Pine Apple Rag. A damningly familiar song for a damningly familiar looking man.

It was Sammy Wes. Younger -if he had to guess- by five years.

He really was a street urchin… All thin limbs and ratty clothes, dirty and scruffy… But the music that the blond made out of a used piano still tugged at his chest. He was part of the music he played; happy and playful.

Sammy had stayed rooted to the spot, listening as the blond played through a collection of rag time songs. Then he was working through some classical melodies. He didn’t play those long, with some in the audience jeering about the old-fashioned songs. The Music Director was tempted to bark at them, but the blond was more compliant to the wants of his audience, and started to play a rather vibrant version of “Sing, Sing, Sing”. That song got a few coins tossed into an upturned hat. The Music Director decided to sneak into the store, keeping his ear out for the piano player. He bought his carton of cigarettes, and asked to borrow a piece of paper and a pen from the register.

When he walked out, the blond was still playing more popular tunes from the piano. He’d walked up, dropping a five dollar bill and a note into the hat.

———————————————————————–

Joey had had a bit of a rough month. The whole situation with Sammy Wes Lawrence and Murray Hill…. It twisted his stomach even now. He’d mostly recovered, and was able to put a smile on his face each day. It was enough to convince a bunch of people he was back to normal, and he was slowly starting to believe it himself. He may have had a little scare when Boris fell asleep in a puddle, and he had snapped at the wolf unintentionally. But Boris was always quick to forgive, and Joey learned to settle his own nerves.

It wasn’t easy to explain to others what had happened to “Sammy Wes” or “the blond laborer in the Music Department”, but he’d managed to keep a straight face and answer simply. “He went back home” was the default answer now.

It’s all he could really say.

Sitting in his office, he was reading over a few story boards when there was a knock at the door. He’d called out a quick “Come in!” and braced himself for whoever came in. Maybe it was one of the strangers who liked asking questions, or one of the employees with a complaint. He hadn’t counted on a familiar blond man walking through the door, clutching a piece of paper in his hand.

“Can I help you?” He’d managed to keep a nervous quiver out of his voice, but he’d accidentally snapped instead.

The blond flinched a little, but looked calmly to Joey. “…Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Drew. But I got this note earlier… And it says to see you.” He held out the paper scrap, walking a little closer to set it on the desk. Joey had marvel at the voice the man had. While it was still similar to Sammy, it was a different voice altogether now. A little deeper, a little less raspy…. Once the man was within arm-reach, Joey had snatched the paper, reading over it carefully.

“Good playing today. You’re actually really talented, you could do a lot more than play on the corners. Come to Joey Drew Studios. Tell Joey that Sammy Lawrence sent you, and see if he’s willing to offer you a job.”

He had to read over that twice. Setting the paper down, he looked over the blond once more. He hadn’t been aware that Sammy’s double was from a poorer background… Not that he was unimpressed, but he’d just…assumed the two Sammy’s had a similar upbringing. That was apparently not the case. The blond was scruffy as ever, but so thin. And the overalls he wore were well-used and worn.

Maybe… Maybe this was his rare second chance? A chance to do something right now that he knew better?

He let out a short laugh, standing up to his full height. “Well… Color me impressed. Sammy Lawrence is not easy to impress or get a compliment out of. …What’s your name?”

The blond seemed to relax a little under the praise, and chanced a smile as he answered. “Wes.”

….Just Wes? That was perculiar… “Just Wes?” He rose an eyebrow for emphasis to his confusion.

“Well… Wes McKinney, sir.”

Somehow, Joey doubted he came up with that on his own. He had a few records on the desk with “McKinney’s Cotton Pickers” on the cover. He couldn’t help wandering then….. Had Sammy Wes chosen his name? Was he only “Wes” for so long? Maybe that was why he responded to the whole name and not always just “Sammy”?

“How old are you?”

“I turn 21 in a few weeks, sir.”

He must’ve been contemplating that a little too long, given the look on the blond’s face turning to one of concern. But, he was ever the showman. He stepped around his desk, grabbed one of Wes’s hands in his own, and gave a firm shake. “Enough of this ‘sir’ thing. Just call me ‘Mr. Drew’, or better yet, 'Joey’. And welcome on board to Joey Drew Studios.”

((ohh man that ending. that is… that is the best ending. im actually tearing up. Welcome To The Happy Ending AU Kiddo, you deserve it :’D

this fic has honestly been a blessing, it’s so beautifully written and every word was a joy to read. I’ve probably said it already, but I’m gonna miss it. Good news, though - nothing’s stopping me from reading it all over again :P once again, thank you so much for the fic!! <3))

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | part six | part seven| part eight | part nine | part ten | part ten and a half | part eleven | part twelve | part thirteen | part fourteen | part fifteen | part sixteen | part seventeen | part eighteen

[dailynewswebsite]

Poll workers on Election Day will be younger – and probably more diverse – due to COVID-19

With its largely white and older staff, this Portland, Oregon ballot web site is typical of ballot websites throughout the U.S. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland Portland Press Herald by way of Getty Pictures

Election officers are busily attempting to recruit youthful volunteers to employees america’ roughly 230,000 polling websites on Election Day in November.

Lots of the nation’s ballot staff are reluctant to work through the pandemic as a result of they’re, overwhelmingly, older and at excessive threat of extreme COVID-19 an infection.

Ballot staff are the gatekeepers of democracy. They examine folks in, confirm their id and decide their eligibility to vote. If voters don’t seem on the rolls, ballot staff trouble-shoot the issue or supply a provisional poll. Ballot staff additionally clarify how the machines work, reply questions in regards to the poll and discipline complaints about lengthy traces.

For all this, they’re paid modestly – US$12 an hour in Portland, Maine, or as much as $280 a day in New York Metropolis. So native election officers are used to going through shortages of ballot staff.

However COVID-19 makes the staffing problem better than ever.

Who’re ballot staff

There isn’t a lot analysis on the cadre of aged volunteers that run American elections.

Essentially the most complete research of native election directors, printed in 2019 by the Democracy Fund, finds that ballot employee recruitment is a continuing problem for election officers. Nearly all of ballot staff are 61 or older. Most are retirees, who arguably have extra free time on their arms. Additionally they have a robust sense of civic responsibility and patriotism, in accordance with tutorial analysis and media interviews with volunteers.

As soon as folks have labored the polls, they’re more likely to do it once more, normally on the identical polling location. That is partly civic responsibility but additionally as a result of election officers – who’ve restricted time and assets for recruitment and coaching – are likely to recruit dependable previous staff for the job.

The small, largely white and older candidate pool means sure individuals are much less more likely to function ballot staff – specifically folks of shade and younger folks.

This issues as a result of ballot staff, the human dimension of an election, affect voter expertise in numerous methods. As my analysis has documented, they’ve vital discretion on points like verifying eligibility and providing provisional ballots – the ballots used when there are questions on a given voter’s eligibility that have to be resolved earlier than the vote can depend.

Voters have been wrongly turned away or denied a provisional poll due to ballot employee error, although the 2002 Assist America Vote Act requires that provisional ballots be supplied to all voters. White ballot staff have additionally proven biases towards nonwhite voters, questioning them extra intensely.

Ballot staff may even invalidate an individual’s vote in the event that they decide that the signature on their mail-in or absentee poll doesn’t match the one on their voter registration report.

In comparison with older voters, younger folks usually give their ballot staff poorer evaluations, particularly once they vote for the primary time. And minority voters report extra optimistic experiences once they work together with ballot staff who seem like them. Each are teams which might be already extra more likely to really feel or be politically excluded.

Voters of shade could have a greater voting expertise if their ballot employee seems like them. Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe by way of Getty Pictures

In the meantime, older voters could view younger ballot staff with skepticism. In Mississippi’s 2018 midterm election, a lot of my college students signed as much as be first-time ballot staff. Some older voters, anticipating a extra senior ballot employee, requested to cope with the “ballot supervisor.”

Younger folks save the day?

With so many veteran ballot staff refusing to work through the pandemic resulting from well being issues, some polling websites could not open on Nov. three and lots of others may have lengthy traces. In Georgia’s disastrous June 9 main, many individuals waited for hours to vote; some had been despatched house with out voting when polling websites closed.

Throughout the nation, ballot staff who reported for main responsibility mentioned it was “overwhelming” to take care of COVID-19 security protocols and nonetheless service voters who had been anxious to solid their vote and go away.

To assist treatment the state of affairs in November, the federal Election Help Fee declared Sept. 1, 2020 to be “Nationwide Ballot Employee Recruitment Day.” Organizations like Energy the Polls pushed this initiative exhausting with youthful Individuals. Information shops reported that 350,000 new ballot staff signed up.

For perspective, 917,694 ballot staff labored the 2016 presidential election.

Extra volunteers are an excellent signal for November’s election, and it might enhance the voting expertise in sure methods. Younger individuals are usually extra tech savvy. And if this crowd is extra numerous than the veteran ballot staff, they might enhance the widely low election confidence of first-time voters and voters of shade.

A form of socially distanced line to vote in Atlanta, June 9, 2020. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Pictures

Expertise issues

The inexperience of the brand new ballot staff, nevertheless, will current challenges. Lengthy-time ballot staff develop a familiarity with the election course of and with common voters. This will make elections run extra easily.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Take the contentious concern of signature validation, for instance. Particular person ballot staff could interpret state election legal guidelines otherwise and obtain completely different ranges of coaching on this matter.

In Mississippi’s 2018 midterm election, a lot of my pupil first-time ballot staff reported that absentee ballots coming from retirement communities had signatures that didn’t match those on the report and will due to this fact be rejected. Older ballot staff, then again, argued that they’d recognized these voters for many years and that the votes ought to depend. Analysis reveals one’s signature could be very more likely to change over time.

Election officers present coaching to new recruits, both in individual or on-line, however it’s no match for years on the job. Regardless, the nation wants extra ballot staff, veteran or in any other case.

Positions are nonetheless huge open, nationwide.

Thessalia Merivaki's analysis on election administration has obtained funding from the MIT Elections Lab.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/poll-workers-on-election-day-will-be-younger-and-probably-more-diverse-due-to-covid-19/ via https://growthnews.in

[faithfulnews]

Are feminists right to think that gender-neutral marriage makes women happier?

Male and female happiness throughout America’s adoption of radical feminism

I was reading this article by a feminist fiction writer on Vox, where she explains that although feminists have gotten what they wanted (careers, contraceptives, promiscuity, abortion, no-fault-divorce, daycare, etc. it hasn’t made them happier. So, what does this feminist fiction writer think would make feminists happier?

She gives two reasons why women women are still unhappy after feminism has been adopted by our society:

men don’t do enough housework

women are not as successful as men because they are discriminated against, the so-called “glass ceiling”

I think those complaints are pretty popular among feminists. Let’s take a look at some studies to see if her opinions are supported by peer-reviewed studies.

First study:

COUPLES who share housework duties run a higher risk of divorce than couples where the woman does most of the chores, a study has found.

The divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

“The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled Equality in the Home, said.

Second study:

Researchers at the University of Illinois examined data on nearly 1,500 men and 1,800 women, aged between 52 and 60. Their well-being was evaluated through surveys.

The researchers first found that men’s well-being decreased once they had exited the workforce to become home-makers.

Meanwhile, the inverse was not so for women: Women’s psychological well-being was not affected by leaving their jobs to become stay-at-home mothers.

Third study:

A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.

Regarding the pay gap, that is entirely caused by women’s own choices. E.g. – the choice to study creative writing instead of petroleum engineering, the choice to work 35 hour weeks instead of 70 hour weeks, etc.

Fourth study:  (summarized by AEI economist)

When the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] reports that women working full-time in 2018 earned 81.4% of what men earned working full-time, that is very much different from saying that women earned 81.4% of what men earned for doing exactly the same work while working the exact same number of hours in the same occupation, with exactly the same educational background and exactly the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and with exactly the same marital and family (e.g., number of children) status. As shown above, once we start controlling individually for the many relevant factors that affect earnings, e.g., hours worked, age, marital status, and having children, most of the raw earnings differential disappears.

Fifth study:

This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

I think that women are entitled to make their own decisions, but they aren’t allowed to force the rest of us to subsidize their failures and celebrate their destructive outcomes.

I could go on, but I think enough has been said to show that research is very much at odds with feminist rhetoric. They feel they know what will make them happy and we gave them everything they asked for. They eliminated shaming of promiscuity with sex education. They get preferential treatment in the schools in a female-dominated education system.They are hired because of affirmative action quotas. They get expensive daycare, government schools, welfare and other programs. Taxes are raised to equalize outcomes for divorced women who choose men for feelings, and then nuke their own marriage enterprise. We have been on a long experiment of giving feminists everything they felt they wanted, at the expense of men’s rights and children’s rights, and it hasn’t even produced the results that feminists felt it would.

The social costs of feelings-based decision-making

Let’s look at two examples of policies that feminists asked for in the past, which didn’t work out the way they wanted.

I can understand why feminists would introduce sex education. They felt that “if everyone is having sex, then I won’t be the only one chasing attention from hot no-commitment bad boys by giving them recreational sex before marriage”.  They wanted to eliminate the standards of chastity and marriage-focused dating and normalize fun-focused drunken promiscuity. And they got that. But since they didn’t consult any research and evidence about how that would affect their future marriage stability and marriage happiness, they are even more unhappy than before.

How about no-fault divorce? No-fault divorce was brought in by a coalition of feminists, Marxists and trial lawyers. The Marxists want to destroy the family in order to increase dependence on the state. The trial lawyers wanted to make money. And the feminists thought that the standard approach to courting and marriage was just too much work. They didn’t want to be chaste. They didn’t want to be sober. They didn’t want to evaluate a man for traditional husband and father roles. The no-fault divorce laws gave them an escape from the messes caused by their own feelings-driven choices. But divorce just makes makes men and women much poorer, and passes the costs of supporting single mothers onto taxpayers.

And the costs of the failures of feminism are passed onto taxpayers.

Consider this study:

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

We are already $22 trillion in debt, partly because of feminism’s replacement of husbands and families with higher taxes and big government. Every time we transfer money from tax-paying men to feminists to fix their mistakes, it leaves less money in the hands of the men who actually want to get married. The declining value of marriage after feminism for men explains why marriage is being delayed, and why marriage rates are plunging.

The Christian view of marriage

In other places, I have written about the evidence for a Christian worldview:

The cosmological argument and the Big Bang cosmology

The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities

The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life

The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information

The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion

Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones

Irreducible complexity in molecular machines

The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation

Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason

Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason

William Lane Craig’s moral argument

The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

Six reasons why you should believe in non-physical minds

William Lane Craig’s case for the resurrection of Jesus

If Christianity is true, then we have inherited a design for marriage and family which includes male and female roles.

Here is what Jesus says about marriage and divorce in Matthew 19:4:

4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Jesus does not approve of no-fault divorce.

And here’s what Jesus said about premarital sex (“fornication”) in Mark 7:20-23:

20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.

Jesus does not approve of premarital sex.

Christians should not show even a hint of sexual immorality, (premarital sex and no-fault divorce), nor should they partner with those who approve of sexual immorality and no-fault divorce, according to Ephesians 5:

3 But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. 4 Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. 5 For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.[a] 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. 7 Therefore do not be partners with them.

Christians should not partner with feminists.

And this is one of the most famous passages on male and female roles in the Bible, also from Ephesians 5:

22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing[b] her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Christians do not approve of egalitarian marriage which erases sex differences in husband and wife roles.

Most women in the church, and most of their “conservative” pastors, don’t believe that Jesus is an authority about chastity, marriage and male headship. They agree with feminists about premarital sex and no-fault divorce and egalitarian marriage. But the feminist design for women isn’t working out for women – that’s undeniable. Should we really be surprised that feminist’s feelings were not better for women than the Creator’s own design?

Go to the article

[khalilhumam]

Building Back Better: Creating Resilience in Critical Supply Chains While Supporting Global Development

Register at https://mignation.com The Only Social Network for Migrants. #Immigration, #Migration, #Mignation ---

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/building-back-better-creating-resilience-in-critical-supply-chains-while-supporting-global-development/

Building Back Better: Creating Resilience in Critical Supply Chains While Supporting Global Development

In April, Governor Andrew Cuomo made a common complaint about the global search for personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers in New York: “We are all shopping China to try to get these materials and we're all competing against each other." A month later, the BBC warned of a global shortage of food, quoting the National Union of Farmers in Wales’s call for “safeguarding domestic food security” and suggesting that food supply chains “need a rethink.” COVID-19 has helped to elevate the structure and performance of global supply chains, from a relatively niche status to a matter of public debate and intense political interest. This is underscored by the fact that a Presidential candidate has made a supply chain plan part of his campaign. Many countries have faced difficulties in securing essential goods at various stages of the pandemic, and this has made the development of resilient and reliable supply chains for goods with national security implications a central policymaking concern, likely to feature in the UK’s Integrated Review and the subject of congressional hearings in the US. Political leaders around the world have made calls for “national” supply chains with the intent to force companies to re-think their global production networks and bring them on shore. Policy forged at pace and during extreme circumstances will often leave something wanting. We want more resilient supply chains, but we shouldn’t sacrifice the benefits that existing supply chains have created, nor should we needlessly penalize developing countries in the race for resilience. In addition to stockpiling and regulation we propose the deployment of development capital to build global excess capacity in the production of essential items as preferable routes to resilience.

How resilient? To what? And at what (efficiency?) cost?

The concept of resilience is not new to supply chains. A core element of supply chain success has always been its ability to successfully confront unforeseen disruptions.  However, it’s difficult to assess resilience until stress is applied. COVID-19 has brought enormous stress to bear on supply chains of both essential (e.g. PPE) and non-essential (e.g. haircuts) goods and services; hence nurses without visors, and the epidemic of “lockdown hair.” It has also brought the spectre of even more costly shortages: of glass vials for vaccines or soap bark tree for medicine production. These three examples illustrate three kinds of desirable resilience:

Resilience to production disruption: haircuts have been difficult to obtain because the model for the production of haircuts took a long time to respond and adapt to the requirements of the virus. More generally, as some countries went into lockdown, products that play a key role in making became more difficult to source. Key pharmaceutical ingredients produced in China and India is one example.

Resilience to sudden demand spikes (production capacity): PPE is being produced in vast quantities. The problem is that the pace at which demand has increased has far outpaced the ability of existing suppliers and supply chains to make it.

Resilience to sourcing scarce raw material: If and when a vaccine for COVID-19 is developed, we may be limited by the available quantity of natural resources—the bark of soap bark tree for example. Without alternatives, demand may outstrip the supply response, resulting in either price rises or rationing—both of which will likely lead to inequitable outcomes.

It is possible to take action to increase resilience on all three of these dimensions, at a cost. Firms could invest in excess manufacturing capacity; or in supply chain redundancy to try and diversify production sources in a way that is uncorrelated to risk; and they may invest in research and development to find alternatives to scarce sources. However, they have not done so sufficiently to date. Understanding why is necessary before we can develop a policy response.

Efficiency is king: the evolution of supply chains to date

If resilience is so clearly a good thing, why is it not a default feature of production arrangements? Some companies and products do individually plan for some aspects of resilience in their business model: Pepsico sources coconut water from multiple suppliers, and builds in excess capacity to protect against the risk of disruptive typhoons, common in some coconut growing regions. Consumer electronics firms such as Apple also routinely build such supply redundancy in their supplier networks. They do this because the return to reliability exceeds the efficiency cost of maintaining redundant supplier contracts. These counter-examples suggest one reason why most firms don’t do this: most lack either the market power or a clientele with the willingness to pay for private investments in substantial supply chain resilience. As a result, their incentive is to pursue maximum efficiency in production in normal times even if this comes at the cost of resilience to end-times. The pursuit of efficiency naturally leads to concentration—not simply because of labour costs (there are many places in the world with cheap labour)—but because of talent, know-how, and capital, all of which are costly to establish and confer a cost-advantage to early movers, thereby making it difficult to establish competing clusters. It may be the case that powerful consumers, with some level of monopsony power, can compel investments in resilience, and share the costs with the firm. This could be the case when governments centrally purchase PPE from a few providers (and it is a traditional argument for divvying up large contracts in the US defense industry). However, resilience is a public good across all consumers, and individual purchasers in a more competitive market are likely to be unwilling to pay more for resilient supply without a mechanism ensuring they will disproportionately reap the benefits of resilience. Again, resilience is a form of insurance, and individuals and institutions often under-invest in insurance without additional incentives. A similar problem arises when it comes to finding alternatives to scarce resources/input materials for products with highly uncertain demand. Investing in research to create a product that may only be in demand in rare and unpredictable circumstances is not an attractive proposition, especially because any patent protections might well be ignored or weakened on the grounds of the emergency situation. As a result, there will be systematic underinvestment in such research.

What can governments do?

Building resilience, then, has many of the hallmarks of a classic public good/positive externality problem. Resilience is costly, and the benefits to building resilience are imperfectly captured by any single firm or investor. A number of approaches can be taken to resolve this issue, but all have costs. We argue, however, that some of the costs are better-borne than others.

Reshoring

Reshoring production has been a popular proposal to counter supply-chain breakdowns. The logic of the proposal is that ‘if a product is produced in my country, I can institute an export ban when necessary, and guarantee my supply—to the extent that an export ban doesn’t disincentivize production.’ We argue that this is a loser on three grounds:

First, by reshoring, we lose all the benefits in terms of cost that firms have accrued by locating production in places with cheaper labour and better production networks. And while we’ll make production more expensive, we won’t make it shock-proof. The reason New York faced shortages was that demand spiked. Imagine if Gov. Cuomo had built a bunch of factories outside Albany to produce enough PPE for New York’s usual needs. It would have produced more expensive PPE in normal times because labour, factory space, and the like cost more in Albany than Albania; and the state still would have faced shortages, because its needs increased far above that usual level. And note that demand for the components needed to make PPE also spiked worldwide. So, unless New York State invested in production capacity far outstripping normal demand all the way back through the supply chain to raw materials, the state would still have faced PPE shortages, despite higher prices in non-crisis times.

Second, by reshoring, we correlate the risks we face: if an outbreak of a disease in the US or UK increases demand for medical equipment that is produced in the same country, it is likely that production will be disrupted. Again, the Welsh National Union of Farmers may think COVID-19 is a good reason to reshore agricultural production, but COVID-19 suggested why this can increase our vulnerability: UK farming relies on migrant labor that has been kept out of the country during the crisis. And attempts to get UK citizens to replace those workers were an utter flop. Thank goodness for food imports. The diverse production and supply chains of globalized trade are part of a risk reduction strategy.

Thirdly, reshoring works against development, by penalizing poorer countries’ economies, when better policies (from a developed country perspective) can protect or bolster them.

Accelerating the pace of automation via R&D is another approach that has been explored. This has often been connected to reshoring, but needn’t be. But automation addresses only one kind of risk: the risk to production processes that are dependent on population-dense production facilities (think garment workshops, meat-packing plants). It does nothing about shortages of key inputs, or (in itself) capacity to scale up production; and in the extreme, wherever the automated factory is located it may still find itself unable to move products to meet consumers depending on the transport and movement restrictions in place there.

Stockpiles

Perhaps the simplest response to concerns over shortages is to stockpile supplies. The US has a Strategic National Stockpile, sadly run down in advance of the COVIC-19 epidemic, which had stores of PPE amongst other medical supplies. Similarly, the country has a strategic petroleum reserve. Well managed, stockpiling can be a reasonably low-cost mechanism to build slack into tight supply chains and allow rapid response to surging demand or dips in supply, although costs and complexity increase with supplies that have a short usable lifetime. The purchasing power created by a stockpile mechanism would also give governments the influence to demand more resilient supply as part of purchase agreements. This may also be an area for international cooperation: the UN Humanitarian Response Depot stockpiles emergency relief items, so perhaps an expanded set of well-managed global and regional stockpiles could ensure a greater range of supplies.

Regulation and monitoring

An additional option is to place key supply chains under regulation and monitoring for resilience. Certain regulated products, given “essential” designation might carry the requirement that they were sourced from suppliers who maintain excess capacity, or source each input of production from multiple, geographically dispersed suppliers. Potentially, there could be coordinated global agreement on these regulations which could be monitored by an international body to assess and score the resilience of key products. These proposals come with two major drawbacks. First, regulatory requirements to keep excess capacity and redundancy in the supply chain at the level of the individual firm will be anti-competitive. They will increase the fixed costs of production, and build into the market structure an incumbency advantage, with firms sitting on excess capacity that can be deployed to temporarily lower the price of products under threat of entry by new firms. This means that the cost of regulatory-induced resilience will be slightly higher prices most of the time. The second drawback is the ability to genuinely measure resilience. While academic scholars have highlighted how such supply chain “stress tests” could be conducted, there is limited empirical evidence that they would work in practice. One striking feature of the current pandemic is how countries that scored exceptionally well on measures of pandemic preparedness do not appear to have performed better in terms of controlling COVID-19. This is a widespread problem with measures of regulatory quality: take for example the weakness of the World Bank’s Doing Business Survey in measuring actual, rather than stated, practices.

Concessional investment to build resilience

An additional approach to address both geographical and production risk would be to use development finance institutions (DFIs) such as the UK’s CDC, the International Finance Corporation, and the US Development Finance Corporation. As colleagues have argued, they could invest in production capacity for (inputs to) essential items in places where there is currently little such production to diversify and expand sourcing. Concessional investment and patient capital will be necessary: even with cheap labour, a great deal of investment will be necessary to build the requisite knowledge networks and infrastructure for adequate production, and it is highly likely that efficiency in producing required-standard products will be lower to begin with. Such investments could create jobs, building new production capacities and knowledge, and allow countries to enter new parts of the product space, with likely knock on benefits for economic development. These will be pioneer firms, of the type that DFIs are meant to support. Finally, it is worth noting that the best way to limit shortages is to control crises before they escalate. Countries that rapidly put in place distancing, masking, testing and tracing have not seen ventilator shortages or medical PPE shortages—because their hospitals have not been overwhelmed. Blaming global value chains may be a useful political strategy to shift blame and attention, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem—and will make future crises even worse.  Again, autarky is a worse-than-useless tool to reduce vulnerability to shocks. We should build in better resilience, however. That is likely to be difficult; and there will need to be multiple strategies pursued. But aid can both contribute to the strengthening of global supply chains and the development of poorer countries. It’s time to start. The order of authors on this blog post was randomized by a list randomizer tool.