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bibleteachingbyolga · 4 years ago

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His eyes became bright. Jonathan put his sugar-coated hand to his mouth and displayed the power of one of God’s good gifts in his created world. It’s a power we all have known, indeed tasted, and yet many of us have grown so accustomed to it as to hardly recognize it anymore.

At that moment, what the weary, hungry army of Israel needed was fast energy. They “had been hard pressed that day” as they pursued the fleeing enemy, but their king, Saul, Jonathan’s father, made a rash vow: “Cursed be the man who eats food until it is evening and I am avenged on my enemies” (1 Samuel 14:24). In hot pursuit of their foe, the men entered a forest and found themselves surrounded by God’s provision: “behold, there was honey on the ground” (1 Samuel 14:25). Golden, viscous, liquid sugar — like the manna, which tasted of honey, that covered the ground for God’s people each morning in the wilderness (Exodus 16:14). God had provided. But Saul had made his foolish oath.

Jonathan, however, had not heard his father’s words. So he walked into the forest, received the divine gift, and “his eyes became bright” (1 Samuel 14:27). Just the quick energy he needed to finish off the foe. Just what the whole army needed.

Saul’s army did catch the enemy, and overcome them, but because of Saul’s rash vow not to eat, “the people were very faint.” In victory, they lost self-control, and “pounced on the spoil and took sheep and oxen and calves and slaughtered them on the ground. And the people ate them with the blood” (1 Samuel 14:31–32). What pain and misery they would have been spared if only, like Jonathan, they had “tasted a little honey” (1 Samuel 14:29, 43) to brighten their eyes and revive their strength.

In the end, their victory is not without grave and unnecessary difficulties. The people do redeem Jonathan from falling victim to the vow, and he declares his father’s folly:

My father has troubled the land. See how my eyes have become bright because I tasted a little of this honey. How much better if the people had eaten freely today of the spoil of their enemies that they found. For now the defeat among the Philistines has not been great. (1 Samuel 14:29–30)

Twice Jonathan says “a little honey.” Just a little did the trick. Too much would have made him all the worse for war. Yet, here, in this seemingly minor episode in the history of Israel, we have what might be an unnerving peek into our modern world, where we are surrounded by honey and have great difficulty limiting ourselves to just a little.

Spoonfuls of Sugar

From a historical perspective, it is stunning how much sugar we consume today. What came in a golden, sticky ooze in biblical times comes to us today as refined, white, granulated table sugar, already baked and boiled in excessive proportions into many of the foods and drinks we commonly consume. According to Jay Richards, “In 1700, Westerners ate very little sugar — say, four pounds per year. Even in 1850, we averaged only a few pounds per person per year. Now, each of us, on average, eats well over one hundred pounds of sugar per year . . . much of it in processed foods that don’t even taste sweet to us” (Eat, Fast, Feast, 42–43).

Estimates do vary. “Americans consume as much as 77.1 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners per person per year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture data” — but still — “That’s nearly twice the limit the department recommends, based on a 2,000-calorie diet” (“The Barbaric History of Sugar in America”). But what no one questions is that objectively, demonstrably, and almost without exception, we consume far more sugar today than humans have throughout history, barring only the last century.

Obesity among Americans has grown nearly 30 percent in just the last three decades, while the rate of diabetes has almost tripled. It would be naïve to consider sugar the only cause. And perhaps just as naïve to not consider the overconsumption of sugar to have played a significant, if not the major, part. And of course, none of us wants to hear that, because it just tastes so good.

Heavier, Slower, More Unhealthy

For many readers, this is not news. For more than a generation, a growing chorus of voices has been suspecting that “we are consuming way more sugar than our bodies are equipped to handle” (“What’s Wrong with the Modern Diet?”). “Equipped” — don’t miss that. By whom?

When dealing with the human body, it’s difficult for even the most ardent of evolutionists to avoid words like “equipped,” “built,” and “designed.” The human body and brain, with its abilities to move and adapt, is the most impressive masterpiece in all of physical creation, the crowning jewel, and culminating creation, of those first six days (Genesis 1:26–31).

God’s good design comes equipped to handle sugar — both the slow-release of glucose as digestion breaks down complex carbohydrates and its fast release from simple carbohydrates (none faster, and more difficult to handle, than when we drink sugar-water — soft drinks and juices).

Glucose, from sugar, can be a source of needed energy to the muscles, but it is toxic in the bloodstream. Our brains summon insulin to the rescue to remove it from our blood, and when muscles, which have little storage, are already well supplied, the sugar is converted to fat and stored in a nice central location — the waste and hips. Despite the popular myth that eating fat makes our bodies fat, it is the overconsumption of sugar, for most of us on the modern diet, that contributes far more to our undesired fat stores.

Tragically, generation by generation, those commissioned to image God in his created world are becoming heavier, slower, lazier, and more unhealthy, while a growing train of maladies like obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and cancer shorten and encumber this vapor’s breath of our lives even more than they already are.

Little Theology of Honey

Many today might be surprised to find that the Scriptures have timeless truths to speak into our modern malaise about sugar.

Sugarcane was rare in the Middle East in biblical times, and may receive an obscure reference in one or two texts (“sweet cane” in Isaiah 43:24; Jeremiah 6:20). But what was not obscure, and is one of the great concentrated sources of glucose still, with the same essential sweetness as table sugar, is honey. There is “a little theology of honey” in the pages of Scripture — and those of us confused today about what to do, and not do, for ourselves and for our children, might get some fresh help and orientation from the biblical principles.

Good: Eat Honey

The Proverbs give us two key orienting words. The first is Proverbs 24:13:

My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.

Sugar, and its being “sweet to your taste,” is God’s idea and good design. Not only do we have the story of Jonathan’s eyes becoming bright — characterized as a good thing — but again and again, beginning at the burning bush (Exodus 3:8), God promises to give his people a land, he says, “flowing with milk and honey” — which is emphatically and manifestly a good gift.

Honey is identified with sweetness, pleasantness to the taste (Ezekiel 3:3; Revelation 10:9, 10), as a lion with strength (Judges 14:18). God provided not only nourishment for his people in the wilderness, but manna tasted good — “like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31).

God’s first-covenant people treated honey as a valuable product and resource: among the “choice fruits of the land” (Genesis 43:11), fit to give a king (2 Samuel 17:29) or prophet (1 Kings 14:3), or God himself as firstfruits in worship (2 Chronicles 31:5). Honey could be a mark of prosperity and abundance (Isaiah 7:15, 22), even royalty (Ezekiel 16:13). “Honey” even became an endearing name a husband and wife might co-opt for each other, as did the lovers in the Song of Songs (4:11; 5:1), and still today.

Not Good: Much Honey

However, honey is powerful enough to come with user warnings. This should be no surprise to Christians who have learned elsewhere — with marital intimacy, for instance — that God’s most precious, and sweetest, of gifts can be prime targets of our sinful world and flesh and the devil. Again, Proverbs sounds the orienting word:

It is not good to eat much honey, nor is it glorious to seek one’s own glory. A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls. (Proverbs 25:27–28)

Not good to each much honey. The pronounced good of honey calls for the virtue of self-control, the absence of which will soon destroy the benefit. So also, another warning proceeds it, earlier in the same chapter: “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it” (Proverbs 25:16).

Professor Slughorn’s warning to his Hogwarts students about “Liquid Luck” potion might just as well be applied to sugar: “Too much of a good thing, you know . . . highly toxic in large quantities. But when taken sparingly, and very occasionally . . .”

Sugar-Coated, Growing Fat

Just as Jonathan did well in the forest to have “a little honey,” and not much, so do we today, surrounded as we are by the forest of sugar that is modern life. As with sex and alcohol, we learn to take some of the greatest care with God’s greatest of gifts because they are so potent. Honey is good — so good that it’s not good to eat much of it.

Consider what that momentary sweetness in the mouth, whether honey or sugar, has come to represent in common speech. “Sugar-coated” is no compliment; sugar has become symbolic for “empty calories,” for a momentary pleasure with a “crash” soon to follow. Proverbs 5:3 even warns that “the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey.” There is a paradigm here: feeling good in the moment, with great regret and disgust to follow (Proverbs 9:17; 20:17; Job 20:12).

Even before God brought his people into that “land flowing with milk and honey,” he warned of what such luxuries would produce in them because of their sin — warnings we too should take seriously today. Over time, they would forget to handle his gifts with care:

When I have brought them into the land flowing with milk and honey, which I swore to give to their fathers, and they have eaten and are full and grown fat, they will turn to other gods and serve them, and despise me and break my covenant. (Deuteronomy 31:20)

In sin, God’s people came to presume his gifts and eventually forsake him. Even the “honey out of the rock” he provided to keep them alive in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 32:13; Psalm 81:16) they came to take lightly: “But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked; you grew fat, stout, and sleek; then he forsook God who made him and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation” (Deuteronomy 32:15).

What We Learn from Sugar

Honey is indeed a divine creation and gift. Sugar is a good to handle with care. A gift from God to delight our tastes — and teach us of himself. Taste honey, he says. See how good it is, and ponder how the one who made it is every bit that good, and far better.

Not only is our God one who provides honey for his people in the wilderness, sweetness in the midst of our grueling times, but his words are “sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). “How sweet are your words to my taste,” celebrates Psalm 119:103, “sweeter than honey to my mouth!”

And unlike honey and sugar, you cannot have too much of the sweetness of God. And our desire for more of him just might help with our penchant today to swing from overconsumption to overreaction and back.

A biblical theology of honey speaks a chastening word to both sides of today’s sugar divide. Apart from the guidance from God’s word, we are prone to gravitate to extremes: misusing God’s good gift through presumption and overconsumption, or misguided avoidance and overreaction, treating as evil, or simply toxic, what he has given as good.

Enjoy “a little honey” — it is good — so good that it’s not good to eat too much.

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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Are California blackouts the new normal for the state?

https://sciencespies.com/environment/are-california-blackouts-the-new-normal-for-the-state/

Are California blackouts the new normal for the state?

The sun rises over power lines along a smokey horizon during the Saddleridge Fire in Newhall, California on October 11, 2019

Millions of people lost electricity this week in California as the state’s utility giant PG&E sought to prevent catastrophic wildfires, leading many to question whether such power shutoffs will become the new normal.

The unprecedented outages plunged large swaths of Northern California in the dark, forcing the closure of schools and businesses and prompting backlash and questions on how this could happen in a state that boasts the world’s fifth largest economy.

“This can’t be, respectfully, the new normal,” fumed Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday as he spoke with reporters. “And it is a false choice to say it’s hardship or safety.”

PG&E, the state’s largest private utility company that services some 5.4 million customers in the northern and central part of the state, has defended the shutoffs that affected about two million people as necessary to prevent wildfires that could be sparked by lines downed in heavy winds.

Last November, PG&E’s faulty power lines were determined to have sparked the deadliest wildfire in the state’s modern history, which killed 86 and destroyed the town of Paradise.

Power lines were also behind devastating fires in 2017 in the Napa wine region.

PG&E, which filed for bankruptcy in January, has argued the outages this week were necessary for safety reasons and said it will take days before power is restored to all customers as employees beforehand must check the grid in person or electronically.

Traffic lights in the Sonoma area are out due to power outages

‘Not adequately prepared’

The beleaguered company also warned that such shutoffs could be ordered annually until its aging power grid and power lines can be updated to handle fire hazards.

Experts believe such an overhaul can take a decade to complete, especially as PG&E is undergoing a massive reorganization linked to the multi-billion dollar settlements it has had to pay victims of last year’s fire.

Bill Johnson, the company CEO, apologized at a news conference Thursday evening for the massive power cuts ordered this week and admitted the agency had poorly handled the issue.

“We were not adequately prepared,” he admitted, while defending the decision. “We faced a choice here between hardship on everyone and safety, and we chose safety.”

His argument, however, was dismissed by many, including the governor, who blasted PG&E for failing to invest enough in recent years to upgrade its power lines.

“It’s decisions that were not made that have led to this moment in PG&E’s history in the state of California,” Newsom told a news conference.

“This is not, from my perspective, a climate change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades,” he added. “Neglect, a desire to advance not public safety but profits.”

A helicopter drops water to help fight flames as the Saddleridge Fire in the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles, California on October 11, 2019

‘Lives disrupted’

Mikhael Chester, a professor of sustainable energy at Arizona State University, said even if billions of dollars were spent to upgrade utility grids, power shutdowns would continue to happen as infrastructure could not be expected to be “one hundred percent reliable.”

“We have pushed infrastructure to a point where we are going to have to recognize that reliability is going to become compromised more and more often,” he told Popular Science magazine.

As to suggestions that California bury its power lines underground to ward off wildfire, experts say such a solution comes down to cost and time.

It costs approximately $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build new overhead lines is approximately $150 per foot or $800,000 per mile, PG&E says on its website.

Severin Borenstein, a University of California Berkeley professor of business administration and public policy who specializes in energy, said given the state of affairs, Californians should brace for blackouts becoming regular occurrences.

“We’ve been pretty lucky in California that we have far fewer weather disruptions than in other parts of the country,” he told National Public Radio.

In coming years, however, he added that the state must seriously address the threat of wildfires “and do a lot more preparation and have our lives disrupted for a few days a year at least.”

Explore further

‘Unacceptable’ power cuts blasted as California fire risk spreads south

Citation: Are California blackouts the new normal for the state? (2019, October 12) retrieved 12 October 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-10-california-blackouts-state.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

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charlessizemore · 7 years ago

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What If It’s the 1990s All Over Again?

The 1990s were fun.

The internet was new, as was high-end coffee for most Americans.

You can say what you want about Starbucks, but do you even remember what pre-1990s canned Folgers tasted like? They wouldn’t serve that to prisoners on death row today. It would be inhumane!

The Cold War had just ended, gasoline was dirt cheap, and rock music was in the midst of its most creative decade since the 1960s.

The federal budget was balanced for the first (and last) time in decades. And, best of all, we had the turn of the millennium to look forward to.

So, yes, the 1990s were fun…

But the most fun of all was to be had in the stock market. It was the biggest stock bubble since the Roaring 1920s, and cheap online brokers made the market accessible to the masses. A lot of people got rich in the 1990s…

Let’s flash forward to today. After eight years of nearly uninterrupted bull market, it’s starting to feel a little like the late 1990s again.

To show you what I mean, let’s take a look at the Cyclically-Adjusted Price/Earnings Ratio (CAPE), or the Shiller P/E, named after Yale professor and economist Robert Shiller. The CAPE compares current S&P 500 stock prices to a 10-year average of companies’ earnings.

Today, the S&P 500 sits at a CAPE of just over 30, putting it at the level of 1929… right before the Great Crash. The CAPE has only been more expensive one time in the entire history of the stock market: the 1990s tech bubble, when it topped out at 44.

To put that in perspective, today’s CAPE is 83% higher than the long-term average…

Of course, before the CAPE hit 44 at the end of 1999, it had to pass through 30. That happened in mid-1997. So, for nearly two and a half more years, the market went from being “crazy expensive” to “even crazier expensive.”

I written for over two years now (see “Flat Returns for the Next 8 Years?”) that stocks are not priced to deliver good returns over the next decade. In fact, if history is any guide, they’re priced to lose money.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t go higher first.

So, what if…

What if we have a repeat of the 1990s and stocks just keep getting more expensive for another couple of years?

Sure, it would be irrational. But it was irrational back in the ‘90s too, and yet it still happened. And it would be just like Mr. Market to do what no one expects him to.

So, again… what if?

Should we just throw all caution to the wind, and buy and hold on for dear life?

Well, you could do that, but I wouldn’t recommend it. After all, we all know how the 1990s bubble ended. The tech bubble burst, and in the ensuing bear market the S&P 500 lost more than half its value.

My recommendation is to ride the market higher but keep your stops relatively tight. That’s the approach I’m taking in both Boom & Bust and Peak Income, and it’s working.

As I write, four positions in the former are sitting on double-digit gains, including one with over a 70% profit. In the latter four of our 22 income-generating positions have gained more than 19%, with six others in double-digits.

I’m talking about total returns, which include dividends, rather than just price returns. Whether the market goes up, down, or sideways from here, getting paid a regular stream of dividend income can help smooth out your returns.

And, perhaps most importantly in these market conditions, try taking a more nimble approach to your trading.

Adopt a strategy that can make money whether the market goes up, down or sideways, and gives you an opportunity to profit from any sudden changes. That’s where my friend Lance comes into play.

He’s got a solution to my “What if?” scenario, whether I’m right and it’s the 1990s all over again, or even if I’m wrong. Click here to sign up for his special event next week where he’ll explain all the details.

Charles Sizemore Editor, Peak Income

Get much more from Charles and the rest of the Dent Research team, right here at Economy & Markets!

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 5 years ago

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PostEverything

Perspective

Calm down, establishment Democrats. Bernie Sanders might be the safest choice.

“Moderate” candidates won’t be electable if they can’t speak to middle- and working-class frustrations.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) waves to his supporters during a Democratic presidential campaign event Sunday in Austin. (Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman/AP) (Nick Wagner/AP)

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By Robert B. Reich

Robert B. Reich is a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the forthcoming, "The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It."

Feb. 26, 2020 at 3:28 a.m. PST

Right after Sen. Bernie Sanders’s big win in last week’s Nevada caucuses, Joe Lockhart, President Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment in an op-ed for CNN: “I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”

Like much of the party establishment, he is viewing American politics through outmoded lenses of left versus right, with Sanders (I-Vt.) on the far left and President Trump on the far right. So-called moderates such as former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg supposedly occupy the political center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago, when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically disempowered and economically insecure. Today's main divide isn’t left versus right. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.

Some background: In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work for my book, “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It.” I spoke with many of the same people I had met two decades prior, when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of our system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they had been working hard and were frustrated that they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry — at their employers, the government and Wall Street; angry that they had not been able to save adequately for retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better. Several had lost jobs, savings or homes during the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed, but the jobs hardly paid any more than they had years before.

I heard the phrase “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of the banks, political payoffs, insider deals and out-of-control CEO pay. The resentments came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats and independents; white, black, Latino and Asian American; union households and non-union. The common thread was that everyone was either middle or working class.

Joe Walsh: I’m no fan of Bernie Sanders. But #NeverTrump means never Trump.

With the 2016 primaries on the horizon, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Democratic former secretary of state Hillary Clinton or former Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.”

The next year, Sanders — a Jewish, 74-year-old Vermonter and self-described Democratic socialist — barely lost to Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, beat her decisively in the New Hampshire primary, garnered 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada and ended up with 45 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump, then a 69-year-old egomaniacal maybe-billionaire and reality TV star who had never held office and never had any previous standing in the Republican Party, won the GOP primaries and then went on to beat Clinton (though not, of course, in the popular vote), one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America.

It was seismic, and it cannot be fully explained by Sanders’s or Trump’s appeal to their core base voters. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush started with all the advantages, but neither could credibly convince voters they were not part of the system.

A direct line connected decades of stagnant wages, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of the tea party and the occupy movement and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story: According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, according to Gallup, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.

Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “Five, 10 years from now — different party. You’re going to have a workers’ party,” he forecast. “A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who “took away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

We Danes aren’t living the ‘American Dream.’ And we still aren’t socialist.

Trump’s populist pose, of course, was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since his election he has given the denizens of C-suites and boardrooms almost everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically incorrect, in-your-face style continues to make many feel as if he’s taking on the system.

The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.

The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Sanders offers. For that reason, he has the best chance of generating the energy and enthusiasm needed to regain the White House.

He will need a coalition of young voters, people of color and the white working class. He seems on his way: In Nevada, according to entrance polls, he won with Latino voters and white voters, women and men, college and non-college graduates. He was the first choice of every age group except for over-65. Nationally, he is narrowing former vice president Joe Biden’s edge with African American voters.

In a general election, Republicans would surely do everything they can to tag Sanders with the “socialist” label. But that hasn’t hurt him so far, partly because it doesn’t come with the stigma it once did.

And worries about a Nixon-McGovern-like blowout in 2020 seem far-fetched. In 1972, the middle class was expanding, not contracting. Polls currently show Sanders tied with or beating Trump: A Quinnipiac poll released last week shows Sanders beating Trump head-to-head in Michigan and Pennsylvania (but shows Trump beating all Democrats head-to-head in Wisconsin). A CBS News-YouGov poll released this week has Sanders beating Trump nationally.

Instead of hand-wringing about Sanders’s electability, maybe establishment Democrats should worry that a “moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.

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purposefulfinance-blog · 6 years ago

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5 Things to Do In Response to Last Week’s Market Drop

How Not To Let The Recent Market Drops Ruin Your Financial Plan

The end of last week saw a stock market drop which has many spooked. Pundits, financial pop -media, and others who make their living off of scaring investors have been using words like ‘market crash’, ‘historic drop’, and ‘recession’. In fact, I’ve personally seen a number of social media posts from friends discussing how they have gone 100% to cash after the recent market turmoil.

Here are the 5 things you can do to keep the market downturn from ruining your financial plan.

1. Not A Damn Thing

The number one thing you can do to avoid ruining your financial plan is to ignore all of this turmoil and keep on track with your existing plan. Market downturns happen, and an investor is going to experience up to a dozen market downturns over their entire investing life. If you are not nearing or in retirement, don’t react to a market downturn which will honestly have zero impact on your overall investing plan.

And if you are in retirement, don’t react to a market downturn, the chance of which should have already been factored into your financial plan.

No matter how grave the situation may seem, don’t fall into the temptation of reacting to short-term market movement by changing a well-thought-out financial plan. Instead, stick with the plan and ride out these seemingly important but ultimately inconsequential market drops.

Even the 2008 credit crisis would have had no impact on an investor who stayed the course. In 2009 the SPY S&P 500 stock index lost 1/2 it’s value from it’s high in 2006; dropping from around $174 to around $70. Those that did nothing were rewarded over the next decade with a 300% gain from the low in 2009.

Doing Nothing Beats Market Timing

Those who are dialing back their investments in the stock market, or who are fully moving to cash, are practicing a method of investing called Market Timing. The idea is simple, you sell investments right before a market crash. The problem is, one would have to be incredibly arrogant or gullible to believe they (or anyone else) have accurate knowledge of the future.

When looking at the math of market timing, the math overwhelmingly favors those who ignore the news and do nothing with their investments. William Sharpe, a Nobel prize winning economist and a distinguished Professor of Economics at Stanford, conducted research on comparing the mathematics of market timing verses simply staying in the S&P 500 and doing nothing.

Sharpe found a market timing strategy had to be right 74% of the time in order to simply match the returns of an investor who did nothing. Meaning, unless you think you will accurately predict when the market will drop (in order to sell investments) and also accurately predict when the market will rise (in order to buy investments), then you will earn more money by doing nothing.

Those who actually do try to predict the direction of the market are wrong more often than they are right. Essential Advisor Research studied experts in technical analysis and market timing (those talking heads you see interviewed on the news). What they found was the experts were correct only 47% of the time.

2. Consider the Source

Be very careful of where you get your information from and whose advice you take. The media does very little to vet sources for long-term accuracy, and often the more outlandish and bold the expert’s predictions are, the more the media flocks to them. Simply because outlandish and bold predictions help attract an audience. These experts are simply the P.T. Barnums of the modern era.

Two of the experts often sought after and quoted by pop-media are Murrey Gunn and Peter Schiff. In fact, many of the posts from friends cited articles featuring these two men as the ‘economics experts’ who are predicting a market downturn. Both Gunn and Schiff are well-known known chicken littles who profit off of scaring people into buying Gunn's and Shiff's investment strategies to 'protect against market crashes.' In reality, their investment strategies actually do little more than make Murrey and Peter rich. On October 12, 2016 Gunn asserted “With the US stock market selling off aggressively on 11 October, we now issue a RED ALERT.” In the 2 years after that "RED ALERT" the S&P 500 went up 28% (14% return per year). Following Schiff would be just as bad, as he continually pushes the collapse of the economic system in order to make profit selling gold investments to the investing public. Schiff's amazing predictions include a 2012 prediction that Gold was going to rise to $5,000 by 2014. At the time gold was sitting around $1,700 an ounce. In reality, the price of gold crashed by 24% shortly after the prediction, and is currently down 30% since the prediction, sitting at $1,230 per ounce.

Don’t Believe Anyone’s Crystal Ball

Anyone who tells you they know what will happen in the market should be roundly ignored. And that includes me if I ever make such a stupid assertion. I'm not saying a market correction can't happen, but managing the risk of market corrections should be based on strategies rooted in academic research that create a consistent multi-decade plan. Not rooted in guesses of what will happen to the market over the next year or two.

3. Get Some Perspective

Last week’s market drop may seem like a huge deal, as SPY dropped from $288 to $274 in the matter of a couple days. The reality, however, is the last few days have not been crazy, or a plunge, or a crash. It's been a 5% drop.

While the market could fall further, don’t think the recent drop guarantees anything in the future. To put the drop into perspective, the stock market drops by 10% on average once every year (357 days). And drops by 5% much more often than that.

What this means is a 5% drop is not only normal, it’s incredibly mild considering the market usually drops by more than twice that amount once a year. In fact, the average market drop within a year is quite larger. According to Standard & Poor’s research, the average annual drop in the market (from peak to trough of a single year) is 14.2%.

Putting last week into the perspective of what is 'normal’ based on history, a 5% drop is quite meaningless.

4. Don’t Be So Short-Sighted

Finally, stop managing your money as though your plan is to die soon. Ultimately, market timing is an exercise which assumes you don’t have time to outlast whatever financial storm might come. Your investing success is determined not by what happens in the next few years, but by what happens in the next few decades. Even retirees have multiple decades of retirement to plan for.

The following two graphs will tell you everything you need to know about why the last week doesn’t matter to your final investing success.

How The Last Month Looked

When looking at the stock market returns over the past month, the drop of last week looks downright scary. The problem, of course, is the chart offers no perspective of history.

Instead of showing the history of the market, charts like this show a brief snippet in time. Often, showing a chart with such a short time frame is done to intentionally spin the truth into something else.

For you personally, looking at a chart like this will give you a misleading view of what is happening. A view which then might lead you to make mistakes with your investments.

How That Same Month Looks Within 15 Years

If we pull our timeline out to look at the last 15 years, however, the recent drop doesn’t look so bad. In fact, many will be hard pressed to actually see the little drop at the end of the stock market chart. But it is there.

Interestingly, this time perspective even includes the massive crash of 2008/2009. But from this perspective, that crash looks more like a blip than a catastrophe. Of course, if you decided to sell your investments in the stock market even before the market crash happened, you have lost out on a lot post-crash returns. Sadly, there are many who are still waiting for the right time to invest after the market crash of 2009.

5. Don’t Confuse a Bull Market with Brains

One of the worst things you can do as an investor is to assume the success of your investing strategy is due to your own intelligence. Over the past decade, the stock market has increased massively with very little volatility. This consistent growth has led many active investors to think it is their amazing analysis of buying and selling at the right time which caused the increases in their portfolio. In reality, however, they likely lowered their potential return due to minor mistiming and increased fees.

A researched-based investing strategy doesn’t involve timing your way into or out of the market. It involves setting a long-term asset allocation model that invests in broad asset classes with low correlations to each other. Not in guessing what the stock market (or any other asset class) might do tomorrow.

Joshua Escalante Troesh is a tenured professor of Business at El Camino College and the founder of Purposeful Finance. He is also the owner of Purposeful Strategic Partners, a fiduciary and fee-only financial planning firm and a Registered Investment Advisor. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]

#S&P 500 #Stocks #Market Crash #Bear Market #Stock Market #Investing strategy #Market Correction

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how2to18 · 7 years ago

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EARLY IN Half Gods, the debut story collection by Sri Lankan-American author Akil Kumarasamy, Muthu, a Sri Lankan refugee-patriarch, narrates the melancholic reality of surviving the Sri Lankan Civil War. As an exile, he engages in games of “word memory,” compulsively absorbing text as a coping mechanism, but he complains that his grandchildren have no interest in “safekeeping words.” The children have a quick reply: “Sometimes we need to forget something to make room for new memories.” Half Gods asks its readers to do much the same with history, memory, and mythology. As the title suggests, the collection conjures various forms of incompleteness, whether in a search for identity, for a place that could be called home, or for bonds that endure as family. In each of the 10 stories, half of which have been published in venues like Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review, home emerges as a distant and unwieldy concept that threatens to strand its characters in what Georg Lukács has dubbed the fundamental predicament of the novel form, that of “transcendental homelessness.”

The collection’s title also refers to the status of the Pandavas, who are the sons of Pandu, the king of Hastinapur in the Hindu epic Mahabharata — one of the most influential wellsprings of South Asian literary and popular narratives over the last four decades. From B. R. Chopra’s Indian television adaptation (1988) to Shashi Tharoor’s retelling of postcolonial Indian history in The Great Indian Novel (1989) to Ashok Banker’s ongoing Mahabharata book series (2011–present), a veritable cultural industry has found that the longest epic poem in the world makes for strong intellectual and cultural capital. Throughout these disparate projects, the Mahabharata has served as a crucial allegory of post-Independence as well as a spectacular event for the Indian popular imagination. Tharoor, in particular, doubled down on the epic’s allegorical resonance by mapping its narrative structure onto the founding of the nation in a tragicomic register that nonetheless gestures toward its monumental scale.

Kumarasamy takes a different approach to the epic tradition, embarking on a much quieter allusion to the Mahabharata to reflect on the magnitude of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which began in 1983 and lasted for 26 years. It was a conflict between the Sinhalese-controlled national army, the political party Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), and the globally vilified separatist insurgent group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ultimately ending with the Sri Lankan army declaring victory in 2009. While Sri Lankan authors have often invoked the other great Indian epic, the Ramayana, by restaging its Indian antagonist Ravana as a tragic hero, Kumarasamy’s turn to the Mahabharata gestures toward the unhomed, divided condition of diaspora. The collection’s imperative epigraph — “Man or god or demon, let him in!” — appears early in the Mahabharata, when Drona — a mentor to one of the most accomplished Pandavas, Arjuna — allows the enigmatic tragic hero Karna to enter a warrior demonstration. Karna, who happens to be Arjuna’s secret half-brother, surpasses Arjuna easily but will go on to join their losing cousins, the Kauravas, in the succession war for the Kuru dynasty. The Pandavas are exiled from Hastinapur after losing to their cousins in a game of dice, spending 12 years disguised as Brahmins in a forest and preparing for the eventual Kurukshetra War. The epigraphic utterance, a relatively minor moment of uncertainty, takes on a surprising resonance with the vulnerability of the refugee seeking sanctuary, thus suggesting a structural resonance between the Pandavas’ exile and that of Sri Lankan diaspora more broadly.

Half Gods unfolds in the form of a punctuated story cycle, wherein the narratives offer brief, nonlinear portraits of a Sri Lankan immigrant family in the United States and the other immigrant lives they encounter. Kumarasamy’s refugee tales bring into focus atrocities in South Asia that remain relatively underrepresented in literary fiction. Diasporic narratives of refugees and stateless persons have become a prominent feature of contemporary American and global fiction, and Kumarasamy joins established Sri Lankan authors like Shyam Selvadurai, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, and Shehan Karunatilaka in her return to the Sri Lankan Civil War. Half Gods straddles postcolonial pasts and American futures, asking whether it is indeed possible for its melancholy subjects of diaspora to remake their homes in a new land. Kumarasamy unsettles the Sri Lankan-American concept of home, not by gesturing explicitly to the conceptual similarity between the Pandavas’ exile and the Sri Lankan refugees but by meditating on the impossibility of making the allegory stick.

Instead, Kumarasamy casts Arjun and Karna, respectively, as the dutiful, good son and the unconventional, errant brother. Meanwhile, their mother, Nalini, finds herself in an affair with her husband’s brother and thinks of “ancient stories where men were married to many wives, and sisters agreed to wed the same man. She could not imagine Draupadi without the five Pandava brothers, all her beloved husbands.” Her father, Muthu, who is also the boys’ school janitor, smokes himself down to a single functional lung while secretly memorizing any book he can lay his hands on, perhaps an allusive reference to Vyasa, the purported author of the Mahabharata. While the focus holds on the experience of diaspora, Kumarasamy renders slow-moving pictures of both Sri Lankan-American and Sri Lankan grief that unspool over the course of the collection, weaving between nonlinear timelines that continuously revise the family narrative.

Signaling the resonances between family, community, and nation, Kumarasamy experiments with the use of the first-person plural “we” in her story “New World,” which narrates the bewilderment and confusion of Ceylon’s independence from Britain. Narrated by a chorus of women working on a tea estate, the story captures both the political eagerness of new freedom and the stark realities of infrastructural lack:

Our children clung to us tighter, fearful in their smallness, and we told them not to be afraid, because we had nothing to lose in the first place. We own none of this, we reminded them patiently, and their wide eyes looked over the imploded houses, the silver glint of metal, and they pointed at their buried things, waiting to retrieve what was lost.

The strength of “New World” is that its lyrical realism, though overwrought, conveys the fragility of South Asian post-Independence. At key moments, Kumarasamy references India to distinguish the uncertain position that Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka) occupies in the geopolitics of decolonization.

Another story, “The Birthplace of Sound,” uses the second-person perspective of “you” to place the reader inside the consciousness of an established character, Karna. Writers like Mohsin Hamid have used this technique to renovate the bildungsroman or redeploy the self-help genre as fiction. Kumarasamy contextualizes Karna’s marginality within the family by aligning his growth with that of other marginalized diasporic figures. The story begins with an interpellation that arrests the reader with an expansive immigrant cast:

You are a convenience store owner, a taxi driver, a doctor, a terrorist, an IT worker, an exchange student. An Egyptian, a Pakistani, a Trinidadian, an Indian. You wear your skin like it’s something borrowed, not owned. Like all those hand-me-downs that belonged to your brother your mother saved, so you were always five years behind the latest trends. Who you are right now is temporary, you tell yourself when you break out with acne and miss an audition.

The multitudes of Karna, a struggling actor, also imply the polarities of immigrant work within an American narrative of race, such as the upwardly mobile lawyer Arjun or his working-class refugee grandfather. Half Gods is interested in the latter: there are times when the author seems to be trying to create images reminiscent of the stark refugee fictions of Viet Thanh Nguyen — broken communities that gather in decrepit housing complexes or failing restaurants. However, the sheer number of perspectival shifts — first-person plural, direct address, second-person address, and more — prevents a proper sense of character development. Surprisingly, for example, the collection gives relatively little space to Nalini, whose untroubled infidelity makes her one of the more intriguing family members.

The collection also portrays the difficulty of Sri Lankans, who do not manage to make their way to the United States, Britain, or another reluctant sanctuary. One story, “The Office of Missing Persons,” stands out as a grim representation of the Sri Lanka’s government’s genocidal practices toward the Tamil people and the LTTE. It presents a Kafkaesque tale of a university professor, an entomologist, who mounts a nonviolent demonstration to protest the disappearance of Tamil people after his son vanishes without a trace. Deviating from the lyricism of the rest of the collection, Kumarasamy prefers an approach that walks the thin line between reportage and satire. The story also seems to pause its allusive structure to speak directly about state-sponsored violence:

War had seeped into the meaning of everything. Forty-seven students and one insect ex-professor sitting cross-legged and calling for the return of the disappeared were terrorists in training according to the reports from the central government. That week the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances also released a report ranking Sri Lanka as the country with the second highest number of disappearances.

In later stories like “Lifetimes in Flight,” the portraits differ in their exploration of both Sri Lankan-American family values and the experiences of other global South immigrants. While Kumarasamy gestures toward a resonance between the Sri Lankan diaspora and other immigrants (like Marlon, the eponymous character from Angola in “The Butcher”), the collection loses its conceptual clarity by deliberately blending the Sri Lankan family into the generalized frame of global immigration. After inhabiting the inner workings of all four family members, “The Butcher” is too self-consciously staged from the perspective of an outsider and ends up rehearsing familiar conventions of immigrant displacement. “Lifetimes in Flight” reveals the crisscrossing immigrant history of Selvakumar from the second story “New World,” but its transatlantic shift to Essex seems too removed from the story cycle to have a significant payoff. In this sense, the collection does not add anything especially new or startling about the particularity of Sri Lankan refugees.

The collection remains in the shadow of established protocols of postcolonial and diasporic representations. The opening story “Last Prayer” pauses briefly with the charged symbolism of the National Geographic to reverse the magazine’s carefully Orientalized images of the East to its Western audience. Instead of deliberating on its images, Arjun dreams of natural disasters stripping various parts of the United States. The fascination with the magazine appears in small but crucial ways, recalling a similar conceit in Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker Prize–winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. In “New World,” possibly the collection’s most well-wrought story, Kumarasamy reaches for an overused conceit that recalls another Booker Prize–winning novel, Arundhati Roy’s 1997 The God of Small Things. “Whatever was left of our girlhood survived in small things,” writes Kumarasamy:

[T]he stones our daughters carried in their pockets, and the shriek of a koel bird we had dreamed of eating for its voice. For the new world, we must all transform, shed our skin and rename everything. The flowers were stripped, the trees slanted with torn limbs, and we needed to make sense of it while the water shriveled us into old women and plowed through the land to bring new life.

Much like the perspectival shifts, its lyrical realism retreads a predictable style of narration that privileges preciousness in its presentation of melancholic truth, a style that certainly worked for Roy but one that she has abandoned with alacrity in her more recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Neither does the prose have the same restraint or aesthetic conviction that Michael Ondaatje conjures in Anil’s Ghost (2000), perhaps one of the most prominent novels about the Sri Lankan Civil War.

In Half Gods, the Mahabharata’s allegorical distance from Kumarasamy’s realism, though intriguing at first, falls short of providing a clear generic or scalar purpose; it is never quite clear why Kumarasamy chooses to treat the epic obliquely through realism. How might the Mahabharata provide an ironic sense of scale of the civil war for Sri Lankan diasporic communities, for example? The family’s story cycle is frustratingly cryptic on the precise mechanics of the epic throughout the collection, pointing to a larger problem with the use of mythology in contemporary Anglophone literature. If, indeed, the Mahabharata is being invoked as an abstract, affective mythology, one that relies on a constitutive forgetting, then it seems that Kumarasamy relies on a conceptual slipperiness to invoke the family as a fluid rendition of the epic. In other words, the family members move through a variety of mythic roles — scribes, warriors, gods, men — in what often reads as an arbitrary assignment. It is certainly compelling to reimagine the Kurukshetra War as the battle between the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic populations, but this too provides an unsatisfactory mapping: how might we account for Tamil lives — civilian, activist, or rebel — who have either perished or endured the war within the island nation in such an allegory?

Indeed, a return to magical realism as allegory, like Salman Rushdie’s much-debated reinterpretation of Islam’s origins in The Satanic Verses (1988) or Vikram Chandra’s satirical use of the Mahabharata in Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), will hardly sidestep the problem of inventiveness. But the collection highlights a tendency with contemporary Global South/diasporic writing to reach for epic traditions rooted in vernacular languages to renovate the diasporic as well as Anglophone realist narrative. What transpires in this instance is that the world is both saturated with mythic potential and curiously evacuated from its central conceit. In fact, what is most surprising is that Kumarasamy keeps her readers at a remove from the civil war, which features as a persistent but peripheral location, despite the war having ended as recently as 2009. While three stories, “Last Prayer,” “A Story of Happiness,” and “The Office of Missing Persons,” certainly describe the civilian population caught between the government and the LTTE, the author’s emphasis on Sri Lankan-American lives privileges the haunting of diaspora over contested realities on the island nation, which is perhaps only reasonable given the writer’s American nationality. This tactic also calls to mind Zadie Smith’s complaint about the cost of lyrical realism, that of an “authenticity fetish” that comes “embroidered in the fancy of times past.” The fault is not so much that of Kumarasamy’s as that of a global writing and publishing industry that orients itself toward an inevitable Westward horizon, even when it attempts to account for difference, in the process relegating the non-bourgeois non-Western subject as mere background for its target audience.

Notwithstanding its allusive opacity and predictable prose, Kumarasamy’s debut moves in the right direction, provoking serious questions about the writing of human rights and the ways in which literature bears the burden of representing unsolvable political problems. Writing about the innately interpretative nature of mythology, Indian poet A. K. Ramanujan defiantly opined that “no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling — and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time.” Kumarasamy adds Sri Lanka to this literary map by rescaling the grand narrative of the Mahabharata into a captivating story cycle.

Kalyan Nadiminti writes about 20th- and 21st-century Asian-American and global Anglophone literatures, law and immigration studies, and affect theory.

The post Melancholic Mythologies: “Half Gods” and the “Mahabharata” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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newstfionline · 7 years ago

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The global divide between those who dream and those who fear

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, September 7, 2017

When describing the deepening political polarization taking place in the United States, Indian American essayist and author Anand Giridharadas once put it this way: “America is fracturing into two distinct societies--a republic of dreams and a republic of fears.”

That line struck me in the wake of the Trump administration’s move to unwind an Obama-era program that gave legal rights and guarantees against deportation to nearly 800,000 undocumented people brought to the United States as children, often known--appropriately, for our purposes--as “dreamers.” These are people who know no real home other than the United States, who are productive members of the American workforce, sometimes serve in the U.S. military and abide by the nation’s laws.

As participants in Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, usually known as DACA, they entrusted their personal information to a government which may soon use that data to conduct mass arrests and deportations. Their fates--in many instances, those of their families--hang in the balance as the White House dangles red meat to its right-wing base. Dreams are turning into nightmares.

The Trump administration, led publicly in this effort by notoriously anti-immigrant Attorney General Jeff Sessions, argues that DACA takes jobs from American citizens and encouraged an influx of more child arrivals. Both these points, while parroted by far-right media, have little basis in fact.

Even from a cold, number-crunching perspective, ending DACA could cost the American economy anywhere from $280 billion to $433 billion over the next decade, setting employers back by $2 billion and the federal government by $60 billion. This is all aside from the moral argument against shattering the lives of close to a million people who see themselves as Americans, an act that former president Barack Obama called both “cruel” and “self-defeating” in a rare public statement Tuesday.

Of course, the United States is far from the only place where the emotive allure of nativism can overshadow the complex realities of immigration. In Britain this week, the Guardian published leaked Home Office documents that detail the government’s tentative plans to revamp Britain’s immigration system in the wake of its eventual departure from the European Union. The leaked proposals read “like a prison governor’s report, less concerned with the inmates than with the height of the perimeter fence,” Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins wrote. It has set off a panic among myriad European nationals living in Britain, who are alarmed by the severity of the proposed restrictions on their ability to remain and work in a country many consider home.

Questions over immigration and refugees have polarized Western politics for years, fueling the rise of far-right parties that built their movements on fear of foreigners and anger at the political establishments that let them in. These concerns have supplanted the more complicated challenge of reckoning with widening income inequality, which is largely not driven by demographic change. And, often, the fears of immigrants are overblown.

In Britain, for example, an Ipsos Mori survey conducted in 2016 found that voters thought, on average, that 15 percent of the population were E.U. nationals from outside the United Kingdom. Official figures at the time put the number closer to 5 percent, and later analysis has suggested the number may have been even smaller. A similar 2015 poll of supporters of the main party calling for Brexit found that they overestimated Britain’s immigration population by 100 percent. And a 2016 poll, conducted in the shadow of the U.S. election campaign, found that Americans thought the overall share of the Muslim population was 17 times its actual size.

These distorted views, sometimes stoked by sensationalist media and the echo chambers in which increasingly fragmented societies exist, are rather acute when it comes to refugees. A Pew survey this year, for example, measured what people with different ideologies considered major threats: “In all of the countries surveyed in Europe and North America, those on the political right are more concerned about the large number of refugees coming from the Middle East than those on the left,” Pew noted. “For example, in Germany, 51 percent on the right say that the movement of refugees is a major threat, versus only 14 percent who say this on the political left. A similar divide exists in the U.S. between self-described conservatives (60 percent say refugees are a major threat) and liberals (14 percent).”

On the political right, many seem to belong to a ‘republic of fear.’

“People in general tend to believe that things that they don’t like or are anxious about are more extensive than they actually are,” Rogers Smith, a political-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said last month to my colleague Catherine Rampell. “They think the crime rate is higher than it actually is, that we give more to foreign aid than we really do by a large margin.”

But given the extent of the backlash against Trump in the wake of his announcement about winding down DACA, not all is lost for the republic of dreams. A Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted in the past week found that 58 percent of Americans believed that dreamers should be allowed to stay in the country and become citizens if they meet certain criteria, while only 15 percent favored deportation. Even a 46 percent plurality of Republicans said DACA recipients should be permitted to remain in the United States.

And, as my colleague Aaron Blake reported Wednesday, other new polling from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows that the ultranationalist pillars upon which Trump built his political platform are wobbling. Sixty-four percent of Americans say that immigration strengthens the United States, a marked rise from 41 percent in 2015. Pro-immigration sentiment is up 10 points among Republicans, to 44 percent, compared with seven years ago. And for the first time in 20 years of polling, a majority of Americans think that globalization--Trump’s great bugbear--is “good” rather than “bad.”

Such numbers provide some hope that once people see fear at work, they’ll be willing to turn away from the nightmare.

#DACA #Dreamers #Trump administration

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vincentvelour · 8 years ago

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Global Glance: March 6, 2017

3/6/2017

A quick look at intriguing international stories

By John Bostwick, Managing Editor, Radius

Is Donald Trump Damaging the US Higher Ed Cash Cow?

Less than a week after US voters elected Donald Trump president, the Institute of International Education (IIE) published its annual Open Doors report, which collects information on international students in the United States. The report’s statistics show a growing international-student presence in the US higher-education system. Some professors, administrators and students worry, however, that a Trump White House is already reversing this trend.

Much of Trump’s rhetoric during and after his campaign has emphasized the importance tightening US immigration restrictions and, more generally, placing Americans’ interests above those of other citizens. The following passage from his inaugural address neatly captures his program: “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

The tone of that speech was bleak, with Trump citing (among other elements of what he called ongoing “American carnage”) that the US has “an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.”

The IIE Open Doors report speaks, perhaps, to a different reality as regards the US education system. US higher education is in fact a highly successful, attractive and significant element of the country’s economy. The IIE study indicates that last year the number of international students enrolled in US higher ed institutions exceeded one million for the first time ever, and represented a 7 percent rise over the previous academic year.

Last year’s numbers aren’t aberrations. The IIE report says that the 2015/16 academic year is the tenth consecutive year of growth for international students in the US and that “there are now 85 percent more international students studying at US colleges and universities than were reported a decade ago.”

While those numbers are significant, it’s worth noting that even at over one million people, international students make up only about 5 percent of the total number of students enrolled in US colleges and universities. In other words, international students don’t take up a major portion of slots that might otherwise go to US citizens.

Institutions are of course aware of the need to achieve geographically and culturally balanced student bodies. I happened to take a tour of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst last month, and the guide there noted without prompting that although UMass has a large, growing and valued population of international students, the university has not decreased the number of domestic students it lets in. (Obviously, total enrollment has increased to allow for this.) For its part, the IIE report notes that in previous years there has been only “a small decline in the number of American students enrolled in US higher education.”

International students here generally pay full freight, helping subsidize the educations of many US students.Tweet this

Recruiting prospects from other countries for their varied intellectual talents and cultural perspectives is all good, but there’s another significant reason US higher-ed institutions are welcoming more and more international students: their money. The IIE report explains that “international students contributed more than $35 billion to the US economy in 2015, according to the US Department of Commerce — a large increase over the previous year’s total of $31 billion.” It adds that “about 75 percent of all international students receive the majority of their funds from sources outside of the United States.” In other words, international students generally pay full freight, in effect helping subsidize the educations of many US students who receive scholarships and financial aid.

Numerous articles in the run-up to last November’s election noted that Trump’s campaign rhetoric troubled international students inside the US and prospective students abroad. A US News article, for example, cited a survey of 7,000 prospective international students who were asked about studying in the US after a (then-hypothetical) Trump victory. While about a third of the respondents from China and Russia said they’d be “more likely to consider studying in the US after the election,” three times as many respondents from the Middle East “said they were less likely to study in the US than more likely to.”

President Trump took swift action on immigration once in office, issuing an executive order in January banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Less than a week after the order, USA Today reported that some international students had “already been detained from re-entering the US.” That article notes that, based on Department of Homeland Security stats related to F1 and M1 student visas, “there are 23,763 international students studying in the US affected by the travel ban.” Over half of that total — nearly 15,000 students — come from Iran. Based on the Homeland Security numbers, lost revenue (i.e., lost tuition, fees and other expenses) from the ban could top $700 million dollars.

Those lost revenues only represent the possible direct costs to US institutions that could result from Trump’s travel ban. The ban, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and other measures (such as the proposed wall along the Mexico-US border) could dissuade international students from non-banned countries from staying in or enrolling in US institutions.

Such a scenario would not just affect the bottom lines of higher-education institutions. A Bloomberg article explains that university presidents fear a significant loss of international students could “disrupt the talent pipeline” in the US workforce and “curb economic growth.” A Seton Hall professor of higher education is quoted in the article as saying, “These are very financially desirable students. … These tend to be people who earn quite a bit of money, come up with new innovations, and they tend to pay a lot of taxes.”

Last Wednesday, the White House revised the January 27 executive order, lifting the travel ban on citizens from one of the countries (Iraq). The dropping of one country — which happens to be a US ally in the fight against global terrorism — is presumably a step in the right direction as far as international students are concerned. But The Washington Post reports that “when it is signed �� the order is still expected to include a host of significant changes,” further muddling the situation and presumably causing unease among the international-student community. Moreover, according to statistics from the USA Today article, students from Iraq make up less than 5 percent of the total students from the seven nations that appeared on the original executive order.

It would be a mistake to assume that prospective students outside the US are not paying attention to Trump’s policies and how they might affect their lives, not only as students but (perhaps more importantly) as potential US-based workers who will need visas. The Chicago Tribune interviewed Dayna Crabb, an international recruiter at a US junior college who visited Vietnam prior to the US election. Prospective students in the Asian nation grilled Crabb on which US candidate she supported. Crabb later told the Tribune: “That was alarming for us as recruitment professionals to see that it's impacting their decisions that much. ... These girls said they would race home after school to put on the news or watch what happened at the debates. I felt like these high school students in other countries probably were more in tune with what was going on than even our own local students.”

A Northwestern University student from China quoted by the Tribune confirms that “even the perception of being inhospitable to immigrants could make foreign applicants jittery.” According to IIE, China has over 300,000 citizens studying in US higher-ed institutions, by far the highest from any one nation, nearly twice as many as India, the next country on the list.

An article published in PRI.org last month quotes a former US Treasury official as saying, “There’s no question that higher education is one of the most important US exports to China.” Another expert quoted observes that, “If a real trade war did erupt, and things became very, very contentious, Chinese students could become a target of the Chinese government.” That article goes on to say that economists are predicting that “Trump’s trade rhetoric could convince foreign students to seek degrees in other English-speaking countries like Canada and Australia.”

Some experts quoted in the articles cited here are optimistic that the US higher education system will emerge more or less unscathed after Trump’s presidency. But there’s little doubt that the current White House has already started to diminish the global appeal of a highly profitable and respected sector of the US economy.

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