#let alone the economics of childcare

[bananapancakewithcondensedmilk]

The World’s Desire to Boost Birth Rates: A Blind Spot in Understanding Why People Hesitate to Have Children

In recent years, governments and societies worldwide have grown increasingly alarmed by declining birth rates. From incentivizing childbirth through financial rewards to promoting family-friendly policies, there’s a mounting pressure to reverse the trend. Yet, despite these efforts, birth rates in many parts of the world remain stubbornly low.

Why? Because the conversation rarely addresses the systemic failures that have driven many to decide against parenthood. At its core, this isn’t just a question of personal choice but a reflection of a world struggling to provide the stability, equity, and security that raising children demands.

1. The Disconnect Between Policy and Reality

Incentives Miss the Mark

Governments often introduce policies aimed at encouraging parenthood, such as parental leave, tax breaks, and subsidized childcare. While these measures help some, they fail to address the deeper societal fractures driving people away from the idea of having children. For instance:

Economic Precarity: The rising cost of living, stagnant wages, and housing crises leave many wondering how they can afford the basics, let alone raise a child.

Climate Anxiety: With escalating environmental crises, many grapple with the ethics of bringing a child into a world facing potential collapse.

Social Safety Nets: Inadequate healthcare and minimal support for working parents make child-rearing daunting, especially for marginalized communities.

A Misplaced Focus

Instead of addressing these foundational issues, governments often revert to short-term fixes or even coercive measures, such as limiting access to abortion or reproductive healthcare. These policies ignore the nuanced realities behind people’s decisions and often exacerbate the very inequalities they claim to address.

2. The Unseen Emotional Toll

Grieving the Dream of Parenthood

Deciding not to have children isn’t always a simple or easy choice. Many who make this decision carry grief for the family they imagined, dreams they nurtured, and cultural expectations they may never fulfill.

This grief is compounded by societal judgment, which often frames childlessness as selfishness or failure. In reality, many who choose not to have children do so from a place of deep responsibility, recognizing the challenges and limitations the current system imposes.

3. The Complexities of Modern Parenthood

The Financial Burden

Raising a child today is an expensive undertaking. From housing to education, the costs have skyrocketed, while wages have remained stagnant. For many, the math simply doesn’t add up.

The Gender Disparity

Parenthood disproportionately affects women, who often bear the brunt of unpaid labor, career stagnation, and societal expectations. With reproductive rights under threat in many regions, the risks and sacrifices of becoming a parent have only grown.

Mental Health Challenges

The modern world is an increasingly stressful place. For those already navigating personal healing or mental health struggles, the thought of adding the immense responsibility of parenting can feel overwhelming.

4. Choosing Responsibility Over Obligation

Choosing not to have children isn’t a decision made lightly. For many, it reflects a clear-eyed assessment of the world and their own circumstances:

Breaking Cycles: By choosing to address personal trauma and systemic challenges, individuals can create a legacy of healing and awareness rather than perpetuating generational struggles.

Advocating for Change: Those who opt out of parenthood often channel their energy into activism, mentorship, and other avenues that create a positive impact.

Parenthood is not the only path to creating a meaningful life. Choosing not to bring a child into a broken system is a profound act of care and responsibility.

5. Why Systemic Change Is Essential

The world’s obsession with increasing birth rates reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Until we address the systemic issues that make parenting untenable for so many, no amount of policy tinkering will suffice.

What Needs to Change?

Affordable Housing: Ensuring everyone has access to stable, affordable housing is a cornerstone of family planning.

Universal Healthcare: Comprehensive healthcare, including mental health services, is vital for supporting both parents and children.

Work-Life Balance: Flexible work policies and better wages are essential to give families the stability they need.

Climate Action: Addressing the existential threat of climate change is critical for alleviating anxieties about the future.

6. Honoring Difficult Choices

For those grappling with the decision not to have children, it’s important to hold space for grief and self-compassion. This choice often comes from a place of wisdom, care, and responsibility, rather than fear or selfishness.

How to Move Forward

Celebrate Other Legacies: Whether through creative work, advocacy, or nurturing relationships, there are countless ways to leave a mark on the world.

Build Community: Supporting others—parents and non-parents alike—creates a network of care that transcends traditional family structures.

Advocate for Systemic Change: By addressing the larger issues, individuals can contribute to creating a world where parenthood feels like a viable, joyful option for more people.

Conclusion

The push to increase birth rates often ignores the realities that drive people away from parenthood. Financial instability, systemic inequality, and existential fears aren’t issues that can be solved with tax breaks or one-off incentives.

Addressing these challenges requires a radical reimagining of how societies support their people. Until then, the decision not to have children reflects not selfishness, but a deep understanding of the world’s limitations and an unwavering commitment to living responsibly and authentically.

For those navigating this decision, know that your choice is valid, your grief is real, and your contributions to the world—whether as a parent or not—are deeply valuable.

[balbharatidwarka]

SINGLE PARENTING CHALLENGES: COPING STRATEGIES FOR SINGLE PARENTS

Single parenting is an ever-increasing phenomenon in today's society. While single parents exhibit incredible strength and resilience, they also face a unique set of challenges. These challenges can be emotional, financial, and social, impacting both the parent and the child.

The essence of parenting lies in the delicate balance of holding on and letting go. It's the art of instilling values and providing a safe space for exploration while allowing children the freedom to find their own path. True parenting is about being present, offering love and wisdom, and trusting that they will soar. Navigating single parenting requires patience and support, transforming struggles into life lessons for both parent and child.

The journey of single parenting is marked by unique trials, yet it also reveals extraordinary courage. Balancing work, home, and personal needs require a delicate dance of planning and self-compassion. By fostering a strong support network and practicing effective time management, single parents not only survive but thrive, teaching their children the power of perseverance and love.

One of the most significant challenges single parents face is emotional strain. Raising a child alone can be overwhelming, leading to feelings of loneliness, stress, and anxiety. Single parents often carry the dual burden of being the primary caregiver and the sole breadwinner, which can be exhausting. They may also struggle with feelings of guilt or inadequacy, worrying whether they can provide the same level of care and support as a two-parent household. To manage this, it is crucial for single parents to build a strong support network. Friends, family, and support groups can offer emotional support and practical help. Additionally, seeking professional counseling can provide strategies for managing stress and maintaining mental health.

Financial strain is another major hurdle for single parents. With only one source of income, single-parent households often face economic hardships. Balancing the costs of childcare, education, housing, and daily expenses can be daunting. This financial pressure can limit opportunities for both the parent and the child, affecting their quality of life and future prospects. Budgeting and financial planning are essential tools for single parents. Accessing government assistance programs, scholarships, and community resources can also help alleviate financial burdens. Furthermore, pursuing additional education or training can improve job prospects and income potential over time.

Time management is a critical challenge for single parents, who must juggle work, childcare, and household responsibilities. With no one to share these duties, single parents often find themselves stretched thin, struggling to find time for self-care or personal interests. This constant juggling act can lead to burnout and decreased effectiveness in both parenting and professional roles. Effective time management strategies, such as prioritizing tasks, creating schedules, and setting realistic goals, can help single parents manage their responsibilities more efficiently. Enlisting the help of trusted family members or friends for childcare and household tasks can also provide much-needed relief.

Single parents may experience social isolation, feeling disconnected from friends and community due to their busy schedules and unique challenges. This isolation can exacerbate feelings of loneliness and stress, making it harder to cope with the demands of single parenting. To combat social isolation, single parents can seek out local support groups and online communities where they can connect with others facing similar challenges. Participating in community activities and events can also help build a sense of belonging and support.

Children in single-parent households may face their own set of challenges, including emotional and behavioral issues stemming from the absence of one parent. They may also experience feelings of loss, confusion, or anger, which can affect their academic performance and social relationships. Open communication between the parent and child is vital in addressing these issues. Encouraging children to express their feelings and providing reassurance and stability can help mitigate the negative impacts. Additionally, involving children in community activities and seeking professional support when needed can foster their emotional well-being.

While single parenting comes with its share of challenges, it also offers opportunities for growth and resilience. By building a strong support network, practicing effective time management, and prioritizing both financial and emotional well-being, single parents can navigate these challenges successfully. The journey may be demanding, but with perseverance and support, single parents can provide a nurturing and stable environment for their children, paving the way for a bright and hopeful future.

[plethoraworldatlas]

A leading labor advocate on Monday dismissed former U.S. President Donald Trump's pledge to eliminate taxes on tips as "pandering" to working people and said the promise doesn't address the fact that low-wage workers need a living base wage to afford necessities—but warned that the Republican's comments reveal a shortcoming in the Democratic Party's economic justice record.

As Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, told Common Dreams, Trump's pledge at a rally in Nevada on Sunday should be seen as "a call to Democrats who have yet to come out at any level, calling for what workers really do need this year: a living wage."

In Las Vegas on Sunday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told a crowd that the "first thing" he would do if elected to a second term would be ending taxation on tips, which the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) currently taxes as part of workers' regular income.

"For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you're going to be very happy," said Trump. "Because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips... It's been a point of contention for years and years and years."

Jayaraman said that while workers complain about taxed tips to her organization—which includes nearly 300,000 restaurant and service workers and advocates to end all subminimum wages in the U.S.—eliminating those taxes would not address the current affordability crisis, which has been reflected in numerous polls that have shown the top concerns among voters to be the cost of housing and other essentials.

"The restaurant industry has used tips for 150 years in place of what people need, which is a stable, base living wage with tips on top," Jayaraman told Common Dreams. "It is helpful, for sure, to not have your taxes tipped, but that is a red herring. That should be on top of what workers really need."

Jayaraman pointed out that the Republican Party does not "even believe in a minimum wage, let alone a livable wage."

Dean Baker, senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), suggested working-class voters should not be fooled by Trump's unserious comments.

"I realize that Trump doesn't believe in thinking, but exempting tips from taxes will just encourage more employers to expect workers to get more of their pay in tips," Baker said. "This is horrible for workers, since they need a regular paycheck. They shouldn't have to depend on customers feeling generous. But I'm sure this is too complicated for Donald Trump."

In Nevada, Trump's comments did not sway the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165 , which represents 60,000 workers in the battleground state, toward the former president, who was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on May 30.

"Relief is definitely needed for tip earners, but Nevada workers are smart enough to know the difference between real solutions and wild campaign promises from a convicted felon," said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for the culinary workers' union, in a statement.

...

Jayaraman warned that despite Biden's efforts to introduce more fairness into the tax code, voters have not heard enough from the federal government about working people's struggles to afford essentials like groceries, housing, childcare, and transportation.

"We've not seen most federal folks run on what people really are needing," said Jayaraman. "So if you look at the polls of youth and black voters and Latinx voters, every poll has the cost of living, economy, and jobs with living wages as the top issues. And... the response we're getting is, 'Well, the economy is great. Stock market's up, GDP is up, unemployment is down. People just must not understand the economy.' And I think who's not understanding is [elected officials] who look at those polls and don't understand that what workers are talking about is not the economy, but their economy, their ability to pay for eggs and gas and housing right now."

[sambargestuff]

I actually campaign for the NDP. Like, I knock on doors and talk to people about the election, the local candidate, the world. You know, stuff. I've been doing this for around 35 yrs (I started young and I'm old). My riding is traditionally NDP with the occasional red Liberal.

Let me tell you what I've seen in the last few elections.

Increasingly, working class people are turning to the Conservative Party. They aren't served by the current economic realities of Canada and they're looking for a party that will deliver them without actually making life too much different. See, they hate being screwed over themselves but they don't have any class loyalty and they're not really into changing the world. They just want a bigger piece of the pie. Social progress scares them and they like a party that confirms that they are right in what they believe about trans folk and indigenous people. They don't trust women and they don't trust people of colour. They don't know about Gaza and, this may be hard to accept, they don't care. Someone has been whispering in their ear about Trudeau. Online, I presume; where the stupid lie to each other, to keep each other perpetually angry.

Now, I don't support Trudeau/Liberals, so I can totally talk about that they've done wrong (don't even get me started on electoral reform) but I can't talk to these people because they live in a different reality from me. Their arguments usually go something like: Trudeau is a crook because of masks, vaccines, and the carbon tax. I mean, sure, he's a slimy trust fund baby but none of those things were criminal, actually. You can disagree with policy decisions but the vitriol is way out of proportion

Jagmeet Singh and the NDP have no chance with most of them because (1) he has brown skin and wears a turban (although they rarely say that part out loud, sometimes they do) and (2) he has supported the Liberal gov't in their minority. When you point out the progressive changes under the minority gov't prompted by the NDP, they don't care. I've talked to seniors who benefit from Pharmacare and young families that benefit from the national childcare program and they don't care.

Mostly, it's the men who don't care. And, like what just happened in the US, the white men are going to vote Conservative.

I don't know if ABC is the way to go. I'll vote NDP because they do have a good chance of winning here. But if I lived in a riding where they had no chance, I might plug my nose and vote Liberal to make sure the Cons have one fewer MP in Parliament. I'm just glad I don't have to make that choice.

Then, I'd spend the next 4 yrs developing the NDP in my riding, talking to people about what matters to them and how to achieve it, and calling my Liberal MP every time I feel like it to tell them what I think. I'd write letters to the editor and attend municipal townhalls to discuss local issues. I'd canvass door to door between elections to talk to people about legislative changes, etc. I'd join groups that interest me and make connections there too. When the next election comes around, I'd canvass for the candidate that I believed in.

Democracy doesn't happen on voting day alone. The rich know this and that's why they're paying bots to whisper in the ears of gullible, angry people.

I hate the idea of voting for the liberals strategically instead of the ndp but I am actually terrified of what would happen if pp won next year

~~~~

[robertreich]

Brace Yourself for Trump’s Great Recession

Trump and businesses demanded America "reopen" to revive the economy. But we’ve  reopened too soon, before Covid-19 is under control. So we're needing to close or partly close again, which will prolong the economic downturn and wreak even more havoc on millions of Americans’ livelihoods. It never should have been a contest between public health and the economy, anyway. The economy has always depended on getting public health right. And we still haven’t. Trump has downplayed the risks. He got in the way of governors trying to keep people safe. And now all of us are paying the price. Brace yourself. The wave of evictions and foreclosures in the next 2 months will be unlike anything America has experienced since the Great Depression. And unless Congress extends extra unemployment benefits beyond July 31, we’re also going to have unparalleled hunger. Eviction protections for federally subsidized properties run out at the end of July. In some states that enacted their own moratoria on evictions, renter protections are already running out. One study estimates that 19 to 23 million renters, or 1 in 5 people who live in renter households, are at risk of eviction by September 30th. The people most likely to be evicted are Black and Latinx people, single mothers, people with disabilities, formerly incarcerated people, and undocumented people. This is systemic racism playing out in real time. Meanwhile, delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March. Unemployment itself is different than what we saw back in March and April. Today’s layoffs are permanent, the result of businesses throwing in the towel or permanently slimming down. In the public sector, loss of state tax revenue is running up against state constitutions that bar deficits. This is putting vital public services on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – at a time when the public needs them more than ever. In April and May alone, states and localities furloughed or laid off some 1.5 million workers, about twice as many as in the entire aftermath of the Great Recession a decade ago. These cuts will be just the tip of the iceberg if the federal government doesn’t provide more fiscal aid for states and localities. Let me remind you: Expanded unemployment benefits are set to expire by July 31, leaving at least 21 million unemployed Americans with a 60% income reduction and no stimulus check to fall back on. 

To make matters worse, over 16.2 million households have lost employer-provided health insurance. The Census Household Pulse Survey shows large losses in income in coming months, along with high food and housing insecurity.

So what’s Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s response to this looming catastrophe?

Do nothing. 

Don’t extend supplemental unemployment benefits beyond July 31, when they’re due to expire. 

Don’t help states and cities. 

Reject the HEROES Act, passed by the House of Representatives to keep struggling families afloat and the economy from going into a tailspin.

Trump has even asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. If the Court agrees, 23 million Americans will lose their health insurance, and the richest 0.1 percent of households with annual incomes of over $3 million will receive tax cuts averaging about $198,000 per year.

This is lunacy. The priority must be getting control over this pandemic and helping Americans survive it physically and financially. Extra unemployment benefits must be extended. 

The HEROES Act must be signed into law. Moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures must be extended. If it’s necessary to go back to sheltering in place to contain this pandemic, we must be willing to do so.

This shouldn't be controversial. It's the bare minimum of what our government must do to prevent an even worse economic and human catastrophe. 

Anything less is indefensible.

[anyroads]

It's also often overlooked by this same kind of sexism that marriage in Austen's novels is an economic imperative for women. There's a frustrating misogyny in the way her works not only get dismissed as romance, but that the romance itself is dismissed when the imperative behind it is financial security and physical safety. Romantic themes are the only ones considered in works that often revolve around money and status, and then are dismissed as insubstantial and childish by men who have important, world-running business to attend to, without considering that women in Austen's time (and the Victorian era when Wilde wrote) had no access to that kind of power and the security it provided. Austen wrote her books in a time when a woman who was married at all, let alone one to a partner who loved and respected her, was extremely lucky.

Marriage was a business deal, and for women the ins and outs of making that deal was a complex navigation of social and power plays. While Austen's stories were specifically about upper middle and upper class women, most of the novels they're compared to - including Wilde in this case - are about men of the same status. The alternative was labor that required training and often apprenticeships, and frequently came with uncomfortable expectations and sexual harassment or abuse. The middle ground was working in childcare and/or education of the children of the wealthy, which made women extremely vulnerable and many of them had to withstand and accept sexual assault as part of the job. Which leads us straight to Charlotte Bronte and novels like Jane Eyre, also often dismissed as romances despite being primarily about the economic and social hardships of being a woman in Georgian England. The romantic fantasy here is that of a master who not only doesn't assault his governess but respects her enough that she can speak to him as an equal and take him to task when she feels the need to. Dismissing this as shallow and silly starts to seem insidious when you consider the implication of laughing off the fantasy of a man - ie. the person with power over the heroine - showing basic human decency, let alone affection.

It can be argued that the feminine fantasy of growing into such financial stability and contentment in this time period is comparable to stories of men's power struggles and coming of age - after all, aren't both about having control over one's life and economic status? If marriage in Austen's time is akin to a business deal, then not only are her novels comparable to those about men's power struggles and coming of age, but they're written awfully well exactly because all the social satire is really an insightful study of the social dynamics that determine the outcome of these deals. Meanwhile, coming of age stories of men like Tom Jones, or even comedies like Wilde's aren't deemed romances despite how much of the plot is driven by love, infatuation, or how many of them end with marriages.

Patriarchal power structures created a separate culture for women but their goals and struggles, at their core, as the same as men's. By labeling them as romances and dismissing romance as something frivolous and unimportant, the basic human desires and drives at the heart of these stories are ignored. In a world where said patriarchal power structure has decided that women are reliant on love and grace for their safety and any semblance of relative freedom, the men upholding that structure dismiss these factors as unimportant and irrelevant. There's something to be said for how much Austen's novels still speak to people today, not just because of their wit and social commentary that are still relevant, but because a measure of that power structure still exists, and the fantasy of the obliviously egotistical and condescending man in a position of power being dressed down and actually learning from it still speaks to a lot of contemporary readers.

ready to die on the hill of if jane austen was a man her books would be labeled as primarily satire. "dismissing romance as a genre is sexist" ok but not every story with a romance is a romance novel

[swamp-world]

God you know i actually fucking hate internet leftists??? like. jesus christ. get your head out of your “““theory”““ and step out of the fucking echo chamber for a minute. i get that liberals “aid fascism”, and i don’t put that in air quotes because i think it’s false, but because you need to do more than just SAY that. for the LOVE OF GOD PLEASE try interacting with people outside of your own political fucking bubbles. you are NOT going to “overthrow the government and replace it with unionism and a truly democratic system”, you are NOT going to “replace your boss with a coop workplace”--all of which are excellent ideas--if you just sit around going “LIBERALS ARE TERRIBLE”. like, holy FUCK, stop blaming people for being optimistic. no, I also don’t think that capitalism can be reformed, but you don’t fucking LEARN that overnight, you don’t just go from being a fascist bootlicker to being a tankie in the span of 24 hours and a single conversation, it takes TIME and building GENUINE POSITIVE FUCKING CONNECTIONS WITH PEOPLE. no, i’m not telling Black people or queer people or POC or disabled people to go out and debate their own humanity. you do not have to do that. i’m saying that you need to stop taking ““liberals”“ who are genuinely well-meaning and well-intentioned but simply do not have the experience and knowledge that you have, and YELL at them and talk about “hope they learned their lesson” and all of those “woman who voted for face-eating leopard party surprised when leopards eat her face” things because like. fuck. people are human and believe things, im SO sorry that you don’t realize that. were you birthed into this world holding Das Kapital? did you just fucking, pop out of the womb, and your first words were “workers of the world unite”? or did it take you years, possibly decades, to grasp even the basic concepts of this?? let alone actually dive into “the theory” and connect to communities that put that into practice?

stop telling liberals to “go read theory” because that’s useless. you’re not helping people. you’re telling strangers, new to the scene, to dive headfirst into what is genuinely dense political, economic, and philosophical work. i do that full time and it’s fucking draining, bro!! i wouldn’t know where to start if someone said “go read theory”, the only reason i had any idea was legitimately because a professor handed me a book that got me into modern center-left politics, and then a friend lent me Kropotkin, and then I hit the stacks and walked into the library and picked up a book called On Anarchism because it was the first book that I saw that was relevant. theory!! is!! exhausting!!! it’s hard to understand!! and if your first reaction is to go “haha liberal they got what they deserved” when they inevitably get fucked over by the people they believed in? if your first response to someone genuinely trying to get more information, genuinely reaching out and trying to learn? asking questions? is to say “go read theory”? your political position isn’t based on genuinely caring about people, it’s about superiority. you think that you’re SUCH a good person, that you’re SO MUCH BETTER than “those fucking liberal cucks” because you rEaD tHe ThEoRy when you turned 18. if your response is “they got fucked over, hope they learned their lesson” in a condescending way? yes, i understand that harm has been done. but for the love of fucking god, show some compassion. i don’t know what brand of leftist I am. i don’t sit down at my desk staring at seven different ideological streams of philosophy and communism or anarchism. i want people to have food. i want people to have healthcare and childcare. i don’t think people should have to work their asses off just to live and have a roof over their head or not freeze in winter. i think that we can’t trust the government in its current form, and that capitalism is bad, and that workers are exploited by their bosses, and that worker-owned cooperatives or housing cooperatives are great ideas. beyond that, I don’t know. because quite frankly, I don’t consider it my job to know.

listen to me--it’s not my job to have the answers to “what will we do when the glorious revolution comes about?”. What IS my job, is to talk to people. to listen to people. to reach out and help them. my job is to also learn from people, because i am not perfect. LEFTISTS: YOU ARE NOT PERFECT. if you go around thinking that you just need to convince everyone to “the way”, then you are not interested in learning from the people around you, you are interested in converting people without having to challenge your own beliefs, or without having to consider that ACTUALLY most of the world doesn’t understand the concepts of “alienated labour” and like, genuinely, how many people do you actually think understand in a way that can be applied terms like “proletariat”? of COURSE people are freaked out by leftists. of course when you say “Defund the police” white moderates get scared. i agree with MLK--that the white moderate is the biggest threat to justice and equality. but what are you going to do about it? a tyrrany of the (leftist) minority? eliminate the moderates? or are you going to actually reach out a hand and try to help?

[phroyd]

When I ask my European friends to describe us — Americans, Brits, who I’ll call Anglo-Americans in this essay — they shake their heads gently. And over and over, three themes emerge. They say we’re a little thoughtless. They say we’re selfish and arrogant. And they say that we’re cruel and brutal.

I can’t help but think there’s more than a grain of truth. That they’re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world.

The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them.

And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…wel…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots?

Let me pause to note that my European friends’ first criticism — that we’re thoughtless — is therefore accurate. We’re not even capable of noticing — much less understanding — our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening — that the English speaking world isn’t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union.

So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die.

(The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.)

Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it’s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set.

That brings me to arrogance. What’s astonishing about our elites is how…arrogant they are…and how ignorant they are…at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way…while they’ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don’t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close.

And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.” The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people.

That’s not some kind of jeremiad. It’s an objective, easily observed truth. Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it.

How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death. For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now — gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle — but the winnings.

People who are battling for self-preservation can’t take care of anyone else. If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society’s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn’t be simpler. People can’t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else — let alone everyone else?

The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can’t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else?

A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either.

What makes European societies — which are far, far more successful than ours — successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don’t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other — because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us.

We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest?

A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period.

That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead — now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this.

People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty — like ours have.

People who can’t make ends meet can’t even invest in themselves — let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones.

The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to?

Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish.

(Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other — and then hate each other. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food.

As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn’t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?)

That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to.

A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that.

You can see how a society dies — with horrific, brutal clarity — in the self-destruction of America and Britain. The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn’t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn’t they blame anyone and everyone they can — from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans — for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain’s collapse is nobody’s fault — nobody’s — but their own.

They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. They don’t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist.

And though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse.

Umair December 2019

Phroyd

[myjourneybysarah]

high school reminders

Just so you're aware, this is a rant. Proceed with caution, or be my guest and keep scrolling. Only you are in control of what you choose to do. Sometimes it's nice to get some things off your chest and maybe someone may be able to relate.

I truly do wonder what it would have been like to have a regular high school experience. I dont remember anything from like year 8 onwards. I dont have many life long friends from it and I never experienced the camps, or trips, or dances, or debs, high school parties or even graduation. Not saying that this is a bad thing, or that I was never given the opportunity, because I was and I rejected and refused every opportunity to be a sheep in a world of skinny blond girls who didn't know how to match their foundation to their actual skin tone, who had their scene phase but found that drinking and supplying alcohol to their friends was what boosted their popularity and if you didn't come through, you weren't gonna make it in high school.

Just funny how certain experiences and life events can change the whole course of your life.

I don't care much for my first high school, from what I remember I had 1 best friend who ended up moving away and then I was hanging out with the wrong people somehow, after that I had 3 friends and that didn't really pan out once I moved.

Once I moved to the next school, which is by far the best out of the three. I had 3 friends. Only friends with one of them now and acquaintances with a few others. I was traumatised by my science teaching not believing me when I told him I had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and when another teacher tried to stop me from fixing my hypo and having my dad go down to the school principal and have to educate the educators about a serious medical condition that could have caused me to die if I wasn't supported to treat it properly. Or this one time, in health class mind you, the teacher refusing to let me eat when I needed to because it might have made the other students want to eat too and we can't have disruption. Mind you, that same teacher saved my ass when it came down to more serious matters and for that I am forever grateful.

And as for the third school, I have my dearest friend who I will always cherish, but nothing else was very memorable about that school. Well apart from the fact that they highly focused on surfing, girls weren't allowed to wear pants or shorts and it was only until the end of my time there that they accommodated for diabetics at the school. It was always hot, their ants would have a field day if I ever sat on grass. On a good note though, I haven't done P.E since year 9 at Croydon. So fair to say I was lucky in that regard.

I am glad I didn't stay to do year 12 because I wasn't excelling very much in year 11, year 10 though, smashed it. I took the easy classes, I got a qualification in childcare and from then I haven't looked back. Came back to my home town, got a job and moved on with my life.

I thought I'd add too that to this day I will never understand the bus systems in Queensland, like the bus stop signs would say what road you are on, not where you are going, duper weird. Which is why I only took the bus twice and I wasn't alone in doing so. Oh and the fact your don't have local train stations and the fact that everything shuts at like 5pm is weird too.

But I still can't help but wonder how different things would have been if I didn't make a certain choice at the age of 13. Too young and dumb to know any better, being boy crazy, having fake friends and thinking they had your back.

But alas, I am almost 27, I am physically exhausted 80% of the time, I have multiple mental illnesses, I have a binge eating disorder, I am the heaviest I have ever been, I am constantly broke and if it weren't for people really close to me, I genuinely do not know what I would be doing right now.

Who ever said growing up is the best idea and your future holds so much potential, you're either right and have every and which way to make those things possible for yourself or you're lying. 9/10 people I know are in the same boat as me, but maybe that's just because of social economics or because we allow ourselves to feel like this way and allow things to get this bad. Who knows, I only speak for myself.

[kiralamouse]

I’d say that really depends on a number of factors. An awful lot of office/software engineering jobs can be done anywhere with a computer and an internet connection, and you don’t really lose anything thereby. I’ve been working from home since before the pandemic, and it’s not a big deal for my company to keep me there after everywhere else is safe. The benefit of working in-person is so slim that any risk tips the scales into “better work from home”. I’d work from home instead if there were a minor head cold going around.

My father is a lawyer working with involuntary commitments to mental institutions. He can work from home as long as the courts are still willing to work via Zoom and as long as he has a good phone setup with his clients, but it would really be nice if he could meet them in person, since a number of his clients believe that people on phones aren’t real. He wouldn’t avoid them for a minor head cold, but the fact that visiting in-person means visiting multiple hospitals (and therefore multiple possible places to pick up disease) means Dad was the first to drastically change his work habits when the pandemic struck, and will probably be one of the last to go back to in-person work.

My mother runs a private preschool. She strongly believes that the benefits of preschool hinge entirely on in-person interaction. (”Go play educational games online if you need distance learning! Small children can’t learn to socialize with each other and follow group norms via Zoom.”) She and the school struggled through the end of the last year on the grounds of finishing what they started, but that was after months of building up relationships and routines in-person. Full distancing here means shutting down. She and her staff are currently trying desperately to see if there’s any safe-enough way to stay open this year (masks, holding class outside, and other precautions are being considered). It’s just one preschool, and being attached to a church it’s probably easier to reopen if it shuts down for a year than if it were independent, but that’s still a year of children missing their friends, a year of staff being suddenly jobless (and therefore many seeking other employment, forcing Mom to rebuild almost from scratch at a point where she’s trying to leave a well-run machine to her successor when she retires). Still, at least it’s just a private preschool; no one’s going to be entirely broken if (worst case scenario) it disappears. Just a tiny, beloved institution evaporating.

What about grade schools? I am 100% behind the teachers and students threatening to strike if we try to force them back into a plague pit, don’t get me wrong. A pandemic makes many sacrifices necessary. But I see a lot of outsiders not realizing exactly how much will be sacrificed if we close in-person schools. For some students, this is effectively the same as closing schools entirely. When I taught public high school, I had students writing 10-page research papers on their phones, with research done over the school wifi when the school was open. Those students would be entirely locked out of livestream lectures and meetings, and would face astronomical obstacles to anything else. These were high schoolers who at least had their own smartphones; what about their three younger sibs who don’t even have their own devices, let alone an internet connection? What do we do when dinky single-class sets of textbooks can no longer be shared among half a dozen classes rotating through each day? What happens when they come back in a year or two, with classmates who’ve gotten custom tutoring to keep up, and they’re behind even where they were when they left off, because who remembers what they learned two years ago?

And that’s leaving aside the question of how effective it would be to close the schools by themselves. I know many parents who are so desperate for childcare that they’re planning on sending their children to various camps, actually INCREASING their children’s risk beyond what a well-run school would do. This wouldn’t be a problem if the state shut down all such activity externally, but as long as the state is keeping its hands off, the school has to consider what power it has by itself to improve matters by shutting down.

That’s the cusp. By the time you get to my friend who works in a medical lab, you’ve tipped over into “work that absolutely has to be done, and done on-site”. But we already know about essential workers. Too bad we haven’t also thought about how to ensure they have childcare and transportation when the systems they usually rely on are shut down for the pandemic.

All this to say: tech companies could decide to keep working from home forever at very little loss. Some workers are needed in the field daily to avoid catastrophe. And there are a HUGE range of possibilities in between. Go ahead and watch Google for when it’s worth the risk for Google to go back to work, but don’t assume they’d be making the same risk assessment if they were actually sacrificing something by telework.

[arcticdementor]

The fact that "childcare" is even a job, let alone something the government funds, is sufficient reason for tearing down the entire social, economic, and political system and replacing it with something that is authentically pro-family.

James Kirkpatrick

[dr-dean]

I have said for years (along with many economists) that one of the best things that government can spend it's money on is quality early childhood education! This has huge rippling effects in the community. It allows parents (especially single mothers) to find better employment opportunities because they have quality reliable childcare. And it increases the likelihood of that kid graduating high school (let alone go to college). It significantly reduces crime rates because it gives people a chance of better economic opportunities. Defund the police and spend some of that money on quality early childhood education and in 2040 everyone will be looking back saying that something good came of this. Its HARD to do this as the investment doesn't pay its dividends until 16+ years later, but it's so worth it. Doing this will improve the lives of the entire country, not just those kids who now get to go to preschool or the parents who now get childcare.

[bryanlane]

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[foreverlogical]

There’s a right way to reopen America’s schools. It requires a clear-eyed look at the data. It demands a balanced discussion of the benefits and costs — to students, parents and educators.

And it looks very little like the path America is on.

“We really run the risk of drowning out balance by having this be ‘the people who want to reopen’ vs. ‘the people who don’t want to reopen,’” says Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who has spent the past several months tracking coronavirus.

Oster, the author of two bestselling books taking a data-driven to parenting and pregnancy, counts herself among those in the “reopen the schools” camp. She worries that keeping schools closed will hurt kids’ education, hurt the economy, hurt parents—especially moms—and widen the inequities that the pandemic is already causing.

But when it comes to how we re-open, that’s another matter. “Florida has said its schools will open in the first weeks of August,” she says. “That’s three or four weeks from now. That’s crazy,” said Oster. “Based on where we are now, if Florida just opens the doors to schools and has everybody back in a normal way, just with a few masks, then a bunch of people are going to have Covid.”

“We’re telling places, ‘Open your schools! Open your schools!’ Like, with what money? Schools don’t have the money to do what they’re supposed to in a basic setting, let alone in this moment,” said Oster. “I look at the bills and run some of this stuff at Brown. I look at the money we’re going to spend on disinfecting wipes. And it’s millions of dollars — on wipes! I mean, this is expensive for a highly funded Ivy League university. Forget about it for a rural school.”

Since early May, Oster has been sorting through the data about coronavirus at Covid-Explained, a website she launched with other academics and medical experts to give normal people a clear reading of what we really do and don’t know about the virus. She concedes that there is a risk to reopening schools—there is a risk to keeping them closed, too. And she acknowledges the high stakes of that decision can seem daunting.

“One of the things I try to remind people is that we make those calculations all the time,” said Oster. We allow people to drive their cars and to have swimming pools and do all kinds of stuff we know to be risky, and which — in the case of driving cars — have risks to other people. As a society, we allow some of those tradeoffs, even though we might not be thinking about them in exactly this way.”

So, what would need to happen to safely reopen schools — and how far are we from making that happen? On Thursday, Oster spoke to POLITICO about all of this. A transcript of the conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.

Zack Stanton: Let’s start here: What is the case for reopening schools?

Emily Oster: The positive case for reopening schools is that kids learn better in school — quite a lot better. That’s one piece of it. In this experience, we’ve seen pretty large learning losses from kids not being in school. And those losses are disproportionately felt by lower-income students and students with fewer with fewer resources. So for the same reasons we worry about the “summer slump,” there’s now many months of summer slump, and the idea of a whole year of summer slump is pretty problematic. The second piece is that unless kids are at school, it’s difficult for parents to work, and that’s going to make it harder to reopen other aspects of the economy.

Stanton: You’re a professor of economics. From an economist’s viewpoint, how do you measure the costs and benefits of reopening schools?

Oster: It’s very, very hard. I just gave you the case for reopening, but I think there’s a case for staying closed, which is largely rooted in public health — and, in particular, concerns about health risks for staff, who are at a much higher risk than students — and the general sense that if schools open, there will be more movement around, and that may itself trigger more cases. That’s the cost side.

From an economist’s standpoint, we want to take this seriously. How large are the potential health risks? What does the evidence say? How large are the potential benefits in terms of, say, long-term impact on kids, as well as immediate impact on their parents and the economy? Think about how to weigh those things. Part of what makes this difficult — and part of why people find economists unpalatable in these discussions — is that ultimately all of those trade-offs are going to involve saying, “I’m willing to take this risk with someone’s health in order to have these other benefits.” That is a viscerally uncomfortable thing to say — and I also find that uncomfortable. I’m a person in addition to being an economist. But one of the things I try to remind people is that we make those calculations all the time. We allow people to drive their cars and to have swimming pools and do all kinds of stuff we know to be risky, and which — in the case of driving cars — have risks to other people. As a society, we allow some of those tradeoffs, even though we might not be thinking about them in exactly this way.

Stanton: You’ve written two books about data-based parenting. Part of your approach is being a parent and economist who’s willing to read the data and take calculated risks. But when it comes to reopening schools, it’s not just the risks for your child, it’s every child in town. Does that change the way you approach this conversation?

Oster: Yeah. So I think there’s actually two conversations we can have. One is the conversation policymakers are having. As they make choices, they are facing those tradeoffs, and ideally, they are thinking about those tradeoffs not from the standpoint of, “What is good for my kid,” but “What is good for the kids and the adults and the public health situation?” Absorbing all of those things. Some of what I’m saying here relies on the idea that we’re weighing those tradeoffs not just as parents.

Now, part of what’s odd is that I am also making all these choices as an individual. I’m thinking about what to do with my kid, both in terms of what is safe for them, but also what is safe for the broader world. It’s harder to think about than sleep-training [a baby], where either you sleep-train or you don’t, and the person experiencing that is you and all the people experiencing the repercussions are in your house.

Stanton: Now, it’s like you’re sleep-training a baby, but everyone in town is waking up throughout the night.

Oster: Exactly.

Stanton: Schools are the default childcare system for most kids ages 4–18. What does life in America look like come fall if schools don’t open up?

Oster: I’m not sure. I think it depends a lot on what we mean by “don’t open up.” The things I’ve seen districts talk about range from classes being totally online, to in-person two or three days a week, to “bring them all back and hope for the best.” New York City announced that kids are going to be in school between 1–3 days a week. For some families, those other days are going to be covered by parents. I think we’ll see more people, particularly women, slowing down their return to the labor force or moving to part-time. There will be some economy-wide implications around that, particularly for women. There are also families in which it is not an option to go part-time, whether financially or for some other reason. We’re going to see a bunch of kids who go to school, and then on the “off” days, go to home daycare or other childcare. There are very significant public health concerns around that. If your whole thing is, “I want the kids to be in a ‘pod’ in school, because that’s the safest thing,” and then on the other two or three days of the week, they’re in random other ‘pods’ of childcare or in a home daycare with an elderly caregiver and a bunch of kids rotating through, that’s actually substantially more risky. We haven’t really thought about what the alternatives are, and how those may be costly in the same kind of ways.

Stanton: You recently wrote a piece for the Atlantic on the quality of the data about the safety of schools reopening. How good is the data that we do have?

Oster: Terrible. Very bad. Let me caveat that: It is increasingly clear that the ways in which Covid impacts kids health-wise are fairly limited. Most kids don’t get especially sick. It’s not that they can’t get sick, but they tend to have mild infections and infection rates tend to be lower. That’s the piece where the data has come to some conclusion and has been reasonably good. But on the broader questions — When you open schools, how much transmission will there be? Will they be sources of infection? Are there going to be big clusters? — our data is very, very poor.

The data from Europe is pretty encouraging. They reopened schools. And, of course, they’ve seen cases of Covid, but for the most part, they haven’t seen schools as major vectors of infection. At the same time, the school situation in Europe is very different than in the U.S. They took many more precautions. The classrooms were socially distant. There was a lot of mask wearing. Also, Europe is a different place than America. So that data is helpful, but in a lot of ways, it’s hard to learn from. In the U.S., there are some settings we could learn from, like early childcare centers that have stayed open. I tried to collect a little bit of data about that, but actually our evidence is really poor. The way that states and official reports come out, it’s very difficult to use the data. Even the small amount of information they are putting out is actually not sufficient to make any decisions with, because it doesn't contain enough of the right pieces of data. It’s very bad.

Stanton: I imagine that there’ll be some concern about making policy decisions when the data we do have is questionable at best.

Oster: Yeah. What would be great is if states were doing a better job tracking childcare settings. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the importance of summer camps, too. Early childcare centers are good to track, but it’s not exactly the same age range. A lot of places have opened summer camps; that’s a place you could track. But again, it’s not enough to just say — I’ve seen some things in the media like, “There was an outbreak. There were some cases of this at a camp.” That’s good to know. But what we would like to understand is, say there are 40 cases, how many kids were there? What precautions were they taking? What is happening in all the other camps? We don't just want to report on the one case where this happened.

Stanton: Do you know which state is planning to reopen its schools first?

Oster: So, Florida has said its schools will open in the first weeks of August. That’s three or four weeks from now. That’s crazy.

Stanton: Florida’s done a pretty miserable job of managing coronavirus.

Oster: Very bad.

Stanton: Are you concerned with Florida as the test case here — that they’ll come back ahead of most other states, and if things go poorly, it’ll deter schools elsewhere from reopening?

Oster: Yeah. I think it could go in directions. But based on where we are now, if Florida just opens the doors to schools and has everybody back in a normal way, just with a few masks, then a bunch of people are going to have Covid. And just to be clear, that may have nothing to do with the fact that they were in school, it’s just that a lot of people have Covid in Florida, and there will be some spread in school because there’ll be some spread everywhere. We’re gonna see that.

It’s very irresponsible to do this in the middle of an enormous outbreak without appropriate precautions. And I am worried that then people will say, ‘Look, we can’t reopen schools safely anywhere.’ Here in Rhode Island, we’re doing the most testing in the nation. The share of people testing positive is about one percent. At the moment, we have like 35 people with Covid in hospitals in the whole state. To say that we’re going to look at Florida and say, “They reopened the schools and look what happened. We shouldn't reopen them at the end of August.” [pause] It’s bad. This whole thing is really — it’s like there’s so little oversight and leadership, and so few resources. And the other piece that’s really frustrating is we’re telling places, “Open your schools! Open your schools!” Like, with what money? Schools don’t have the money to do what they’re supposed to in a basic setting, let alone in this moment.

Stanton: Yeah, the School Superintendents Association estimated that an average school district — something like 3,600 students, eight buildings and 300-some staff — would need $1.8 million just to meet basic reopening needs, like PPE or deep cleaning or —

Oster: Hand sanitizer! We’re doing this at universities, and I look at the bills and run some of this stuff at Brown. I look at the money we’re going to spend on disinfecting wipes. And it’s millions of dollars — on wipes! I mean, this is expensive for a highly funded Ivy League university. Forget about it for a rural school.

Stanton: In thinking about reopening schools, when you break it down into the component parts that are required for that to happen, it’s difficult to imagine figuring out all the moving parts in time. Kids riding school buses: how does that work? Cafeterias and school lunches?

Oster: And recess.

Stanton: Music classes, with kids singing aloud or breathing hot air through instruments?

Oster: Yeah, no singing.

Stanton: Or gym class. Or water fountains. I could go on and on. How do you think through all of that — the component parts of reopening schools?

Oster: One of the things I’ve been emphasizing is a need to decide some big-picture things — what we’re going to do — and then try to tackle these individually. I think what’s very overwhelming for people in these discussions is that we are sort of simultaneously discussing the question of, “Should we reopen, and in what broad sense?” And questions like, “What about the buses?” Really, those questions need to be sequenced. You need to say, we’re going to open two days a week, five days a week, not at all — whatever it is. Make some decision there, and then move on to these individual things. Until you have a basic plan, it is very hard for all the individual pieces to come together. If I’m thinking about buses, that is dependent on whether there are five days of buses or two days of buses or no buses. You need a basic framework and then you’ve just gotta tick through these as much as we can.

Stanton: When it comes to things like students wearing masks, we’ve all seen these viral videos of adults having hissy fits in Costco or Wal-Mart —

Oster: Or Trader Joe's.

Stanton: — after being denied entry or service because they refused to wear a mask. It’s easy to imagine an amplified trend of that this fall if and when a student or parent is denied entry into a public school unless they wear a mask. Given that some people are refusing to do even the most basic things you'd want them to do to combat coronavirus, what makes you confident that we will be able to do the more complicated and nuanced aspects of this that are needed for schools to open?

Oster: I wouldn't say I’m confident. I’m not confident. [Laughs] The thing that schools have that is different from some of these other cases is the ability to enforce. Look at something like vaccines. I’ve done a little bit of work on vaccination compliance in California. California has a pretty significant anti-vax population. And the vaccination rates were going down, down, down. Schools basically said, ‘You should be vaccinated, but if you write down on a piece of paper that you don’t feel like it, we’ll let you out of it.’ That was the standard policy. And then after the [2014-2015] Disneyland measles outbreak, California passed a very stringent vaccination law, which said basically, ‘If you don’t have your vaccine, you either don’t go to school, or we’ll call up a doctor and schedule all of your vaccines.’ And vaccination compliance rates went up immediately. If you tell people you can't enter a public school unless you get vaccinated, yes, a few people are going to be the vaccination equivalent of the guy in Trader Joe’s who refuses to wear a mask to get his Brussels sprouts.

What’s potentially more problematic is individual school districts. People have written to me: “What do you suggest I do? The school superintendent in my district thinks the coronavirus is a hoax.” Well, if that’s the case, then I don't see how you’re going to get people to wear masks, because it’s not a problem with the people; it’s a problem with the leadership. That’s the piece I’m more worried about.

Stanton: So let’s say that schools are mostly safe to reopen, but not perfect. Who should be making the cost-benefit calculus as to whether a school or district reopens? Teachers? Parents? Districts? States? The Trump administration?

Oster: Not last one. At the end of the day, this decision is going to need to be made by probably some combination of the of the state and the school administration. But one of the pieces that’s really missing from a lot of the discussion at this point is input from teachers. There’s a lot of teachers’ groups — unions, yes, but not just unions — who feel like basically these choices are being made for them. And they’re very nervous. I do see the perspective of the administrators, which is, ‘We’re trying to think about everybody, and we don't have time to fight.’ But there is a point to listening and hearing people’s concerns, and also trying to make teachers and staff understand the ways in which, hopefully, we will be protecting them. I’ve been pushing for routine [coronavirus] testing for teachers. Spread among teachers in a school is probably more important than spread from kids to teachers, based on what we know.

Stanton: Within the last couple of days, there have been reports that the White House is planning to release its own guidelines for school reopenings —

Oster: God only knows what that will involve.

Stanton: — and saying the CDC’s guidelines are too restrictive. The CDC director said it was “not the intent of the CDC to be used as a rationale to keep schools closed.” What are the risks of school reopenings getting politicized?

Oster: As these things get politicized, the ability to have a balanced discussion about it deteriorates. I’ve found that even in the last couple of days. I am basically more pro-school reopening than some people, but I’m trying very hard to sort of take a balanced view. Yes, it’s important for kids and the economy, but we need to be very careful to do it safely.

But I’m finding myself being like, “Oh my God. The person agreeing with me is Donald Trump. That’s not a comfortable place.” And they’ve taken like a totally different, less-nuanced approach — like we have to just reopen at all costs.

We really run the risk of drowning out balance by having this be “the people who want to reopen” vs. “the people who don’t want to reopen.” I think we could all agree that schools are important. I think our question is, how are we balancing these risks and benefits? But that’s not the president’s question.

Stanton: How concerned are you about the way that this whole experience will imprint on kids for the long term?

Oster: My big concerns really revolve around kids who are in lower-income circumstances, who are going to experience learning losses and the sort of trauma associated with just how difficult some pieces of these last few months have been. And kids who lost family members — there’s a lot going on there. Certainly, there’s some increased anxiety in kids; I suspect that is manageable, and probably people are feeling it more now than they will in the long term. But I think if we don't open, if we don’t have good schooling next year, things are going to be worse.

Stanton: Final question: What’s your advice to a parent who wants their child to return to school, but is really nervous and unsure about all of this?

Oster: The main thing I would say is this: If your kid is healthy and not immunocompromised, then the risks to them are really quite low. And if you are healthy and not immunocompromised and relatively young, the risk to you is also pretty low. We really don't have a lot of examples where kids are the index case in a household. In that sense, the data is reassuring.

But the other thing I would tell people is that even within your family, you have to make a choice you’re comfortable with. And if you feel like you are not comfortable with your kid going back to school, and you think you can manage it at home, that is a totally legitimate choice and one you should feel comfortable making.

Part of what’s hard about this is everybody’s managing this for the first time, and it is sort of like this macrocosm of other parenting things. It’s like, “How could you make that choice? What are you, afraid of the coronavirus?” Yeah! I’m afraid of the coronavirus! It should be OK to say, “Yes, I am uncomfortable. This does not work for my family.” Just like some of us are going to say, “You know, I’ve thought about this, and I think the best thing for my family is for my kids to go back to school.” I think we have to try to be nice to each other. That’s my message: Try to be nice to each other.

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This is How a Society Dies America and Britain are Textbook Examples of a New, Gruesome Phenomeon: Rich Nations Self-Destructing Into Poor Failed States Umair Haque

When I ask my European friends to describe us — Americans, Brits, who I’ll call Anglo-Americans in this essay — they shake their heads gently. And over and over, three themes emerge. They say we’re a little thoughtless. They say we’re selfish and arrogant. And they say that we’re cruel and brutal. I can’t help but think there’s more than a grain of truth. That they’re being kind. Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world. The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them. And yet what’s even weirder and more grotesque than that is that…wel…nobody much seems to have noticed. There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on the joint self-destruction of the Anglo-American world. Nobody seems to have noticed: the only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain. It’s not one of history’s most improbable coincidences that America and Britain are collapsing in eerily similar ways, at precisely the same time. It’s a relationship. What connects the dots? Let me pause to note that my European friends’ first criticism — that we’re thoughtless — is therefore accurate. We’re not even capable of noticing — much less understanding — our twin collapse. Our entire thinking and leadership class seems not to have even noticed, like idiots grinning and dancing, setting their own house on fire. They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening — that the English speaking world isn’t fast becoming something very much like the new Soviet Union. So what caused this joint collapse? How did the English speaking world end up like the new Soviet Union? To understand that point, consider the fact that you yourself probably think that’s an overstatement. But it’s an empirical reality. The Soviet Union stagnated for thirty years. America’s stagnated for fifty, and Britain for twenty. The Soviet Union couldn’t provide basics for its citizens — hence the famous breadlines. In America, people beg each other for money to pay for insulin and antibiotics, decent food is unavailable in vast swathes of the country, and retirement and paying off one’s debt are impossibilities: just like in the Soviet Union, basics are becoming both unavailable and unaffordable. What happens? People…die. (The same is true in Britain. In both societies, upwards of 20% of children live in poverty, the middle class has imploded, and upward mobility has all but vanished. These are Soviet statistics — lethally real ones.) Politics, too, has become a sclerotic Soviet affair. Anglo-American societies aren’t really democracies in any sensible meaning of the word anymore. They’re run by and for a class of elites, who could care less, literally, whether the average person lives or dies. In America, that class is a bizarre coterie of Ivy Leaguers pretending to be aw-shucks-good-ole-boys on the one side, like Ted Cruz, and Ivy Leaguers pretending to be do-gooders on the other, like Zuck and Silicon Valley. In Britain, it’s the notorious public school boys, the Etonians and Oxbridge set. That brings me to arrogance. What’s astonishing about our elites is how…arrogant they are…and how ignorant they are…at precisely the same time. Finland just elected a 34 year old woman as a Prime Minister from the Social Democrats. Finland is a society that outperforms ours in every way — every way — imaginable. Finnish happiness is way, way higher — and so is life expectancy, mobility, savings, real incomes, trust, among others. And yet instead of learning a thing from a miracle like that, our elites profess to know a better way…while they’ve run our societies into the ground. What the? Hubris would be an understatement. I don’t think the English language has a word for this weird, fatal combination of arrogance amidst ignorance. Maybe cocksure stupidity comes close. And yet our elites have succeeded in one vital task — what an Emile Durkheim might have called “social reproduction.” They’ve managed to reproduce society in their image. What does the average Anglo-American aspire to be, do, have? To be rich, powerful, careless, selfish, and dumb, now, mostly. We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore. We shower millions on reality TV stars and billions on “investment bankers.” The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites — they’re not curious, empathetic, decent, humane, noble, kind, in pursuit of wisdom, truth, beauty, meaning, purpose. We’ve become cruel, indecent, obscene, comically shallow, and astonishingly foolish people. That’s not some kind of jeremiad. It’s an objective, easily observed truth. Who else in a rich society denies their neighbours healthcare and retirement? Nobody. Who else denies their own kids education? Nobody. Who else denies themselves childcare and elderly care? Nobody. Who else doesn’t want safety nets, opportunities, mobility, protection, savings, higher incomes? Nobody. Literally nobody on planet earth wants worse lives excepts us. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it. How did we become these people? How did we become tiny microcosms of our arrogant, ignorant, breathtakingly stupid elites? Because we are perpetually battling for self-preservation. Life has become a kind of brutal combat to the death. For jobs, for healthcare, for money, for the tiniest shreds of resources necessary to live. We wake up and fight one another for these things, over and over again. That is what our lives amount to now — gladiatorial combat. Meanwhile, elites and billionaires sit back and enjoy not just the spectacle — but the winnings. People who are battling for self-preservation can’t take care of anyone else. If I ask the average Brit or American to consider paying for their society’s healthcare, education, elderly care, childcare, increasingly, the answer is: LOL. In America, it always has been. Why is that? The reason couldn’t be simpler. People can’t even take care of themselves and their own. How can they take care of anyone else — let alone everyone else? The average person is living right at the edge. Not at the edge of the middle class dream and an even better one. But at the edge of poverty and destitution. They struggle to pay basic bills and never make ends meet. They can’t afford to educate their children, and retire, or retire and have healthcare, and so on. Let me say it again: the average person can’t take care of themselves and their own — so how can they take care of anyone else, let alone everyone else? A more technical, formal way to say that is: our societies have now become too poor to afford public goods and social systems. But public goods and social systems are what make a modern, rich society. What’s a society without decent healthcare, schools, universities, libraries, education, parks, transport, media — available to all, without life-crippling “debt”? It’s not a modern society at all. But more and more, it’s not America or Britain, either. What makes European societies — which are far, far more successful than ours — successful is that people are not battling for self-preservation, and so they are able to cooperate to better one another instead. At least not nearly so much and so lethally as we are. They are assured of survival. They therefore have resources to share with others. They don’t have to battle for the very things we take away from each other — because they simply give them to one another. That has kept them richer than us, too. The average American now lives in effective poverty — unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic bills. They must choose. The European doesn’t have to, precisely because they invested in one another — and those investment made them richer than us. We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest? A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period. That’s changing in Europe, to be sure. But that is because Europe is becoming Americanized, Anglicized. It has a generation of leaders foolish enough to follow our lead — now remember the greatest lesson of European history, which is one of the greatest lessons of history, full stop. That lesson goes like this. People who are made to live right at the edge must battle each other for self-preservation. But such people have nothing left to give one another. And that way, a society enters a death spiral of poverty — like ours have. People who can’t make ends meet can’t even invest in themselves — let alone anyone else. Such a society has to eat through whatever public goods and social systems it has, just to survive. It never develops or expands new ones. The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer. Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbor’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone. Why give everyone healthcare and education when you can’t even afford your own? How are you supposed to? Society melts down into a spiral of extremism and fascism, as ever increasing poverty brings hate, violence, fear, and rage with it. Trust erodes, democracy corrodes, social bonds are torn apart, and the only norms left are Darwinian-fascist ones: the strong survive, and the weak must perish. (Let me spend a second or two on that last point. As they become poorer, people begin to distrust each other — and then hate each other. Why wouldn’t they? After all, the grim reality is that they actually are fighting each other for existence, for the basic resources of life, like medicine, money, and food. As distrust becomes hate, people who have nothing to give anyways end up having no reason to even hope to give anything back to anyone else. Why give anything to those people you are fighting, every single day, for the most meagre resources necessary to live? Why give the very people who denied you healthcare and education anything? Isn’t the only real point of life to show that you beat them by having a bigger house, faster car, prettier wife or husband?) That is how a society dies. That is the death spiral of a rich society. In technical terms, it goes like this. A social surplus isn’t distributed equitably. That leaves the average person too poor to invest anything back in society. He’s just battling for self-preservation, and the stakes are life or death. But that battle itself only breeds even more poverty. Because without investment, nurturance, nourishment — nothing can grow. Having become poor, the average person only grows poorer — because he will never have decent public goods or social systems, let alone the rights and privileges and jobs and careers and trajectories they become and lead to. A society of people so poor they have nothing left over to invest in one another is dying. It goes from prosperity to poverty, from optimism to pessimism, from cohesion to distrust and hate, from peace to violence — at light speed, in the space of a generation. That’s America and Britain’s story today, just as it was the Soviet Union’s, yesterday, and Weimar Germany’s, before that. You can see how a society dies — with horrific, brutal clarity — in the self-destruction of America and Britain. The hate-filled vitriol of Trumpism, the barely-hidden hate of Brexit. Why wouldn’t people who have grown suddenly poor hate everyone else? Why wouldn’t they blame anyone and everyone they can — from Mexicans to Muslims to Europeans — for their own decline? The truth, as always, is harder. America and Britain’s collapse is nobody’s fault — nobody’s — but their own. They are in a death spiral now, but no opponent or adversary brought them there. It was their own fault, and yet they still go on choosing it. They don’t know any other way now. Their elites succeeded at making the average person truly, fervently believe that battling perpetually for self-preservation was the only way a society could exist. And though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope that the rest of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa, learns the lesson of the sad, gruesome, stupid, astonishing tragedy of self-inflicted collapse. Umair December 2019 Eudaimonia and Co.