#then we should probably stop listening to the economists full stop

[togglessymposium]

I notice that I’m confused. Adjusting for inflation and population, 75% of the 2023 Unites States GDP is… the economy in 2015 or 2016. From $76,000 per capita down to $57,000. Hardly the dark ages! This has pretty much always been true, right? At least in the modern era. If your entire economy is growing by a 4% a year, that compounds very quickly, and cutting a linear percentage off of that means going back in time a relatively modest amount. During the postwar boom, that would shrink down to only a couple years!

Going back in time to 2015 by making 3/4ths as much stuff (per capita) doesn’t even mean making 3/4ths of any given good; you can grow just as much food and offload the reduced production in to other stuff. In particular, you can trim down positional goods with a fairly minimal impact on quality of life, although I don’t know how much of the physical actually-real economy really is in that category. That seems like a difficult thing to measure, but I wouldn’t be enormously shocked to discover that some 15-20% of the actually-real economy gets thrown down the bottomless well of red-queen-race competitions; for example, shrinking the amount of wealth sunk in to advertising agencies would probably leave the relevant firms in basically the same relative position they are in now, with a slightly higher quality of life for the rest of us. And in a free market, allocation of resources should in theory take care of this ‘mostly automatically’, with the price of advertising rising faster than the price of food since demand for the latter is inelastic, perhaps helped along with some farm subsidies like we already have. So I don’t think that even necessarily puts you back the entire 25%, not in a way that matters!

Now, some of this may just be that economic growth numbers are basically fake, I suppose. Like, if the stock market goes up 10%, that doesn’t mean that the community has 10% more stuff to go around, it just means that a larger fraction of that stuff is controlled by the sort of people that own lots of stocks. But on paper it can look like the economy ‘grew’ for a bit, at least until inflation reaches its new equilibrium. But quite a lot of it is also real improvements in ‘worker productivity’, that is, in the force multiplier that technology offers to the typical man-hour in an aggregate of productive firms. And at least in principle, shrinking the overall labor-hour pool by 25% doesn’t seem like it would also tank the rate at which we reap these technological and capital gains; if we could grow at 4% per year in 2015 when the GDP per capita was $57,000, I don’t see why we couldn’t grow at 4% per year in 2023 if the GDP was $57,000 per capita. So we’d ‘keep pace’ in that sense, staying a fixed few years ‘behind schedule’, in exchange for workers getting an extra ten hours a week of leisure for their own use.

Now, this isn’t an argument that this plan is fine and we should just wave our magic wand and reduce full-time employment to 30 hours, because contra OP I do have a certain faith in the proposition that this stuff actually is complicated, even if robber barons do love to hide behind that complexity to justify their own evils. I’m not assuming this model is right. If nothing else, this would have to break as you cut back to really short work weeks like five hours. But I am saying that merely ‘making 25% less stuff’ doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it sounds, unless the GDP numbers are just wildly dissociated from the facts on the ground. For a 25% cut to be really scary, it seems like a great many other things have to be false, including most of what people point to to justify the current ordering of state power.

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

[royisms]

annekane asked: false god by taylor swift

so here’s a long ass thing i did that deiniftely doesn’t answer the question and nobody asked for but did that stop me? no.

Harvard University: Government Major

     -- Dated for five months in freshman year. Jason was in her Economy class and they didn’t talk until after the term was over. They met met at a bar near campus and it took her exactly those five months to realize that they wanted opposite things. He was looking for a long term girlfriend, and Amanda was already not about that life. She took the end of the year as an excuse and ended things before moving back home for the summer.

     -- Hookup in freshman year. Some guy on the debate team that beat her on the last round. It didn’t last long (in more than one way), but there was something about competition that was so exciting already. 

     -- Dated? in sophomore year: it’s been over twenty years and Amanda’s still utterly confused about this guy. She was certain they were only sleeping together, he apparently was sure that they were an item. It didn’t end well. Someone saw her flirting with some other guy and Bruno god stupid angry and it kind of looked like a scene out of a comedy series. They were having totally different conversations, but bottom line was she broke his heart.

     -- Hookup during the summer between sophomore and junior years: Amanda was as  vanilla as it got because she never ever had sex ed in school (shocking) and she hadn’t had enough partners and enough confidence to try things out. Xavier was her first experience with an older guy (she was 20, he was 28) and he taught her things about herself. They didn’t talk too much, he picked her up and dropped her off just around the corner of her house so her parents wouldn’t ask whose car it was. He was an incredible kisser and the fact that he paid her any attention at all made her feel all the more mature. He even paid for the morning after pill that one time. So sweet.

     -- Hookup in junior year: at that one party, her roommate and her were dared to kiss and Amanda was That Girl and was also way past tipsy and it kinda seemed like a good idea. Callie and her were in the same classes, too, and they both pretended it had never happened. To be fair, Amanda couldn’t even recall if the kiss had been good the next morning.

     -- Dated for four months: Phil. Kinda lame, but had an okay sense of humour and he sat through extremely lengthy conversations with her and Oliver about the undoubtable and unavoidable demise of humanity. Evidently, he did it because he thought she owed her after, and she wasn’t informed enough to know she didn’t, so she lay down for two and a half minutes, cleaned up after and said she was tired and she’d see him the next day because he was really weird to share a bed with. After using all the clichés she knew to say she didn’t want to see him anymore, he decided to ignore her not very subtle hints and kept calling and showing up with take out. Phil really is a boring name for a boring man who needed a smack on the head and a book on women’s rights. Also: https://royisms.tumblr.com/post/621230604961333248/i-wish-i-missed-my-ex-mahalia

      -- Fell for Marcus in junior year: this time, it was the other way around. She was completely enamoured by him (looking back, it was the fact that he had a full academic scholarship he didn’t need and him being a guy her age who wasn’t a complete waste of space). There were rumours but she decided to ignore them and they came back to bite her in the ass. If she remembers correctly, that was the first time Oliver held back an “I told you”, but maybe she just didn’t hear him because she was sobbing into her pillow and screaming about how men were all the same and how could she have been so stupid. Not only a borken heart, but Marcus also gave her an STD! Thanks babe!

Georgetown University: Masters in Public Policy 

     -- Hooked up with her first Grad professor: because she’s a dumb bitch who doesn’t learn. He was only five years older but being in a position where he was way more powerful gave her such a rush. They wouldn’t talk in class, but she’d look at him from across the room and give him a look because it earned her some rough loving when they were finally behind closed doors. He eventually stopped calling her when she passed his class and he found another student to sleep with. Anyway... That’s systemic misogyny for you.

     -- Dated for eight months in 2003 - 2004: Joshua. Maybe the first relationship she’d consider serious. She had her own room for the first time in years and so did he, and they spent most nights together. With working on top of studying and her lack of time-management skills, she didn’t spend too much time with friends and, instead, they became each other’s support system. In the end, they liked each other because they didn’t have others who’d stand by them while they got consumed in their textbooks and not because they had too much in common. He’s now probably a Republican mayor in some town and he’s balding so she calls this one a win for sure.

Started to work for her father’s consultancy to dip her toe into electoral strategy.

     -- Hooked up with: Frank. A lawyer who’d just joined the consultancy business. She met him at an event she was assisting in. He was also struggling to pay rent but he was much better at hiding it and his neat hair and grey tux (and her lack of human touch in months) earned him a willing young blonde eager to get out of her heels and into his bed. They were done by 12:13am and he kicked her out, didn’t even call her a cab. Definitely not what she’d pictured for her first month as an official adult.

Didn’t date anyone, finally decided to officially put her career first and not focus on men. Also, started going to a therapist for the first time! This was great. We love mental health. Started to think about leaving her dad’s business and work on something else. Consultancy was okay but she really wanted to make an impact on the world, have a legacy... Yada yada.  

     -- Hooked up with: Luke. Her friend stood her up at the bar because she met some dude and Amanda was forcefully introduced to the beauty of drinking alone. This guy used the classic ‘pretending to be your boyfriend when a stranger is hitting on you to get them off but then I ask for your number so you’re uncomfortable again but I win so who cares’ move. She was tipsy enough that she didn’t care he didn’t have a condom. Unfortunately, her bank account disagreed when she withdrew the cash necessary for Planned Parenthood. You know what, fuck you Luke.

She took on more responsibilities at the office and eventually gathered enough to have her own clients. Granted, she still worked for an office, but her dad was close to retiring and she was proud of her own accomplishments. People actually called in and requested her by this point! Amazing progress. She was never working on campaigns alone because Youth and also men were still in charge lmao let’s not forget!! But hey. It’s something.

     -- Hooked up with: Samuel. He wasn’t a client anymore and he was a little younger than her, actually. He was also a Republican. Something about him winning the election with her help and her getting praise over the work she’d done by her peers made her reach out in 2010. One glass of wine became two and three. She kicked him out in the morning, and as far as she’s concerned his wife never found out.

     --  Dated (on and off) for one year and a half 2011 - 2012: Doh. He was a rising journalist, he’d written a big piece on something sketchy that had happened in Congress and he’d scored an important job, and he still wasn’t as busy as Amanda made herself. It was one year full of half-fights because, as if on cue, her phone would always start ringing and she’d pick it up without hesitation. In the end, he was too tired to explain, and she didn’t really want to hear it. By this point, she’d already started shooting people an annoyed look when they asked when she’d finally have children.

Her dad retired and his partner bought his half of the business. Amanda decided to leave the company; with the connections she’d secured during her many years as an assistant, she was finally able to consult on her own. 

     -- Hooked up with: Paarush. What was supposed to be a night of unwinding and letting herself go ended in too tight of a grip and some deep bruises on her neck. She had to wear a scarf for days to avoid any inappropriate questions.

     -- Dated for two years: Peter. Professionally, she was getting places she’d never even dreamed of and, as it had happened before, she was putting her career before anything else. She started seeing Peter after a friend of a friend introduced them and he was sweet. He was an economist and he wasn’t as busy as her, but he seemed to understand. The first few months, he’d call her at night and listen to her rant about her day, he’d check in on the weekends and wouldn’t get mad when she forgot to return his call. A few months in, he asked for the spare key to her place and it made sense, because he’d get there so much earlier than her. She’d arrive and he would have made dinner because he knew she’d forget to eat otherwise. It started small: something about the clients she was working for, how she should just stay home, comments about how good of a mother she’d be even though she’d made it very clear she had no intention in having children. By the end, it was about her beliefs and her impossibility to be empathetic with him. Most of all, he repeated over and over how she was so innocent to believe she could make a change in the world. It was hard to part ways because it was so comfortable -- they’d fallen into a routine that had taken a lot of weight off her shoulders for a while, but when she changed the lock of her apartment and refused to talk to him, she really believed she was better off without him.

     -- Hooked up with: Hans. As far as she’s concerned, he definitely wasn’t the worst man she’d slept with. Need I say more?

Started working for Oliver as his Chief of Staff. A new job, new staff, new line of work altogether, it was… Big. Not too much time for dating but she deprived herself of sleep. 

     -- Hooked up with: Javier. Not a Republican, but a conservative Democrat. He was on his way to become Mayor of Louisville (thanks to her, mostly). Again, winning is exciting, and she’s a simple woman with needs.

     -- Dated for nine months: Charlie. They matched on Tinder and Amanda messaged them with a line she thought was funny and cheeky, it probably wasn’t but for whatever reason, Charlie messaged her back. They met at a bar and hit it off almost immediately, and - wow, sleeping with someone she didn’t hate was a welcomed change. They were the first (and, so far, only) person she dated who wasn’t a man. It was a little scary at first, to be honest -- she’s a feminist, she’s liberal, she’s progressive, and she’s nice, but it was a new experience and she didn’t want to say the wrong thing. In the end, they were both too busy to keep up with a relationship. Fun fact: they both decided to break up on the same night so they were dumper and dumpee all the same. Amanda was not amused at the time, she hadn’t been dumped in so long, but hey… They didn’t talk for a while, but then ran into each other at some event or the other, one thing led to another… They definitely hooked up a few times after breaking up, but both made sure there weren’t any romantic feelings left there. That would’ve been Awkward.

Election season started and, with that, her new position as Campaign Manager for Zafar 2020. Later, she’d become Deputy Campaign Manager for Berkeley-Zafar 2020. She’s working way more hours and definitely doesn’t have time for men. Or does she! You know what I’m talking about.

     -- Did not date for nine months: Silas. There are many things she could say about him, but she won’t because it never happened. Outside of her bedroom, and his (and… His office, and the restroom at that one bar), this never happened. She never sent him flowers, he never put on his cat to meow through the phone to her, they never shared a lazy Sunday morning with coffee in bed and books unrelated to work. And he’s definitely not the man who “I can't talk to you when you're like this, staring out the window like I'm not your favorite town” was written about.

[joons]

Why 'nihilistic' of all things to describe Neil DeGrasse Tyson? His season of Cosmos, probably his magnus opus, was the opposite, a diverse, touching and in-depth examination of the methods of science and history of the world. Utterly necessary then, as next year's 2nd season will be. Maybe it owes its triumph to Ann Druyan and others, but still. I bristle because it smacks of dismissiveness towards climate change scientists and atheists, and I hope that's not what you mean.

Tyson conveniently cloaks himself in the flag of ScienceTM for precisely this reason: Criticizing him is seen as an attack of science itself, as if science is an attitude instead of a process where we look at the probabilities of the observable world. Science, though, has little place in philosophy, politics, the social sciences, or art. When it does have a place there, it’s a piece of the whole, one of the support beams at your disposal. Tyson never acknowledges this. Science, to him, is a book you can open and shut to win the argument, whether your opinion is asked for or not. Science as Tyson wields it is a nice shortcut to a sense of certainty, satisfaction and self-righteousness–the, um, opposite of what skeptical scientists strive for. But Tyson considers science the pinnacle of all knowledge, and that assumption has its own faults: 

Earlier critics of scientism, like the economist Friedrich Hayek, looked at the way in which so-called “soft sciences” (i.e., the social or moral sciences) adopted the scientific method in order to acquire the patina of objectivity, as if things like human action, motivation and consciousness itself could be measured as quantifiably as an apple bonking someone on the head. The modern pop science preached by Tyson and others poses a similar threat: privileging the hard, the quantifiable, the unproblematically knowable at the expense of other disciplines. (X)

Basically, Tyson doesn’t know much about these other disciplines, and so he talks about them as if they’re kind of pointless. All that matters is what science has to say, and it’s always phrased in a really reductive way. Tyson’s idea of discussing stories or society or philosophy goes like this:

“Do you know we could get so much more done if we stopped caring about football?”

“Did you know New Year’s Day doesn’t really have any significance, astronomically speaking?”

“Did you know that BB-8 couldn’t really roll over sand?”

Well, no shit.

Now, he can say whatever he wants on his own blog. He’s probably trolling half the time. But his position as a scientist gets him in trouble because he makes mistakes all the time and never corrects himself. Whether he’s talking about sex, helicopters, or George Bush, he gets things wrong. And yet, he’s GOT to be right because … he IS Science (he actually capitalizes it omg).

Tyson’s problem is simply this: He cannot fathom a world where we talk to one another, exchanging subjective impressions of what matters, or plumbing the depths of human hearts, or caring about anything that doesn’t somehow push us forward into progress. He must interrupt–please, allow him–to gently, smugly remind us that we’d all better off leaving behind our little emotions. If anyone gets mad at him for being overly simplistic, they’re just too up in their feelings, really. And whether he means to or not, this flattens out the human experience.

Or, as this post puts it, it “squashes curiosity and wonder.”

The conversation must always turn to science–because that’s the only thing that’s important–and yes, that is a kind of nihilism. A subtle kind (maybe more deconstructionist than nihilist, if you like), but one that explains why I bristle at the way he talks. We are all just something. Sports are just what we do to past the time. Stories are just poorly designed experiments with no basis in physics. Bad Politics is just what happens when people don’t listen to Good Science. Birthdays are just arbitrary markers of the time you’ve spent on this speck of a planet. And then when people say he’s full of it, or that he should at least consider what other people have to say, all he has to do is blink and say, “Gee, don’t you care about Science?” 

Science is not just right to Tyson, it’s good. We’d be better off existing in a utopia like Rationalia, where all decisions are based on scientific evidence (X). Right? Of course it’s right. It’s Science.

Well, Neil. That’s how we get eugenics. Not that I would expect him to think about that, since his sense of history is all the fuck over the place.

Tyson doesn’t ask the questions that need to be asked to support his ideas. He doesn’t ask them because he’s oblivious to anything that doesn’t touch upon his area of expertise, and even when he has nothing to contribute to the conversation, well, he’ll make something up. And so he blunders into mistakes again and again, stampeding over people who actually know what they’re talking about. He’s not the best the scientific community has to offer, not even close, and he doesn’t bring any of the needed rigor to scientific problems, let alone moral/social/philosophical ones. 

[geeksfromfuture-blog]

Can Technology End Editors?

What is the future of the newspaper and magazine editor? As technology has progressed in the past few years, it seems that there are more jobs being created for those with an understanding of technology. For example, an editor at a newspaper, magazine or website who understands the Internet can probably expect to be employed as a website and web designer in the near future. Websites, like newspaper and magazine content editors, tend to be more dependent on information provided by the customer. There are even some websites that contain links to news articles and reviews that might not otherwise be discovered or downloaded. These websites are not necessarily higher in traffic because they can only reach a small percentage of their audience. Instead, these websites have become traffic boosters because they contain a lot of information about products and services that are of interest to readers. It is also possible that advertisers will pay these websites for their information. The relationship between advertiser and website is usually mutually beneficial. There is also likely to be a tight relationship between the web design company and the content editor, as they will be working together on a regular basis. It is also possible that the newspaper editor and the content editor may be merged into one individual. With fewer people needed to oversee multiple content departments, this would be a viable solution. Not only does this solve the problem of overcrowding but it could also save a great deal of money by reducing cost-per-copy costs for both advertising and circulation. Magazine editors are especially important in newspapers and magazines, as their role involves keeping the content of the magazine current and relevant. If magazines and newspapers are classified as newspapers, then it is clear that a magazine editor is somewhat a magazine editor. Therefore, as this point, it is also very important for technology to merge with the content editor to ensure that the people who are doing the work of an editor do not have to stop doing their jobs and start doing those of a computer. This may be a long-term solution, but it will solve the problem of having one editor instead of two editors, so the first step has been taken. It may be that within a few years or so, journalism and the media will be entirely computer-based. If this happens, content editors of the newspaper and magazine would then be redundant. It is possible that the newspaper or magazine editor will no longer be needed because their job will be transferred to a software program that actually knows what they want. From there, technology and content editors will be completely superfluous or irrelevant, because they have been replaced by a superior, computer-based version of themselves. Technology is coming along too fast for newspapers and magazines to keep up with it. Since so many news outlets rely on articles from other sites, it will be very difficult for these sources to provide more articles and videos than the website will have available. Newspapers and magazines will also continue to suffer from newspaper and magazine dearth in content, since even the competition from websites will not be able to fill this need. In any case, this is a good example of why technology is becoming an important part of every aspect of the media and how it can affect editorial jobs. Instead of relying on outdated manual systems, the computer can be used to make up for some of the tasks previously done by manual editors. However, at the same time, technological advancements will almost certainly replace manual editing by editors. It is likely that as more newspapers and magazines are forced to change their website design to accommodate Internet content, that they will cease to exist. Instead, a new magazine, newspaper or website design company will take over the job of an existing newspaper or magazine. This new design company will need content editors to give the new articles and photos a proper appearance, which is a new task for many editors.

Will Technology End Editors?

Are editors who edit newspapers and magazines doomed to exist for years in obscurity? Have the more lucrative features such as magazine and book editing made it too tempting to be satisfied with a career that doesn't provide any financial gain? One might think this, but one thing editors do not need is a job with a newspaper editor. Editors have traditionally been viewed as article writers, rather than as writers of content. An editorial job title should never be based on the fact that a newspaper editor provides content for publication. There are a large number of editorial jobs that are often very easy to obtain, and those that require a little more thought and attention. If one is to stay with an industry, an editor has the more important job of making sure the news is good for everyone, not just the publisher. Today's journalists can hardly be blamed for trying to make their products as interesting as possible. What's more, there are so many media outlets to choose from. This all means that the various editors have a great deal to do to ensure their websites, magazines and newspapers maintain their appeal. When I began my first job as a new editor for the Times in the late 1980s, it was a simple story about a family who had recently moved from London to Luton, Bedfordshire. The editor was also responsible for doing a regular feature on the BBC Radio 5 Live News. I have edited many different parts of a newspaper, including the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail and the Economist. My job as an editor was to make sure that I provided news for the readers, especially readers who were very interested in the Olympics. Nowadays it's just as simple to edit a magazine or even a newspaper as it is a newspaper or magazine. Most people who edit magazines and newspapers have edited a magazine before, and are very familiar with how it works. It's actually quite simple to work for a weekly magazine, as we all know by now. However, if you're thinking of doing this kind of editing, then perhaps you're interested in working in an editorial role at a smaller paper, such as the Sunday Sport and Sunday Express. Once upon a time, there were many more editorial positions available for writers and editors, as there were more old newspaper titles which were in need of editors and journalists. However, with technology doing away with newspaper jobs, it's certainly not inevitable that all editors will work in magazines and newspapers. It may well be that some people will be satisfied working in editorial jobs. They will likely benefit from regular pay, since they're most likely to be working on a contract basis rather than working for an editor who makes a lot of money. Editorial positions can be quite rewarding, especially in comparison to magazine jobs, which often pay little or nothing. Another fantastic thing about being an editor is that you get the benefit of dealing with the public at large. You can be sure that your ideas are taken on board, and that they'll be listened to if you say something particularly good. A final thought - do not ever think you can be an editor without having a degree. Many editors will tell you that it's an essential requirement for many publications. It doesn't matter if you never intend to do anything like this, it's still vital to understand that the people who will decide what your job description is are experts in their field.

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[jeroldlockettus]

The Future of Meat (Ep. 367)

Over 40 percent of the land in the contiguous U.S. is used for cow farming. Can scientists build a more sustainable burger? (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)

Global demand for beef, chicken, and pork continues to rise. So do concerns about environmental and other costs. Will reconciling these two forces be possible — or, even better, Impossible

?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Let’s begin with a few basic facts. Fact No. 1: a lot of people, all over the world, really like to eat meat — especially beef, pork, and chicken.

Jayson LUSK: If you add them all together, we’re actually higher than we’ve been in recent history.

That’s Jayson Lusk.

LUSK: I’m a professor and head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University. I study what we eat and why we eat it.

DUBNER: In terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the U.S., how do we rank worldwide?

LUSK: We’re the king of meat eaters. So, compared to almost any other country in the world, we eat more meat per capita.

DUBNER: Even Brazil, Argentina, yes?

LUSK: Yes, and part of that difference is income-based. So, if you took Argentina, Brazil, and adjusted for income, they would probably be consuming more than us, but we happen to be richer, so we eat a little more.

The average American consumes roughly 200 pounds of meat a year. That’s an average. So, let’s say you’re a meat eater and someone in your family is vegetarian: you might be putting away 400 pounds a year. But, in America at least, there aren’t that many vegetarians.

LUSK: I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know.

DUBNER: Really? Why?

LUSK: I’ve been doing a survey of U.S. food consumers every month for about five years, and one of the questions I ask is, “Are you a vegan or a vegetarian?” So, over five years’ time and about 1,000 people a month, I’ve got about 60,000 observations.

DUBNER: Wow. And is this a nationwide data survey?

LUSK: It is. Representative in terms of age and income and education. I’d say on average, you’re looking at about three to five percent of people say “yes” to that question. I’d say there’s a very slight uptick over the last five years.

So, again, a lot of meat-eating in America. What are some other countries that consume a lot of meat? Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Russia, most European countries. And, increasingly, China.

LUSK: One of the things we know is that when consumers get a little more income in their pocket, one of the first things they do is want to add high-value proteins to their diets.

DUBNER: What is the relationship generally between G.D.P. and meat consumption?

LUSK: Positive, although sort of diminishing returns, so as you get to really high income levels, it might even tail off a little bit. But certainly at the lower end of that spectrum, as a country grows and adds more G.D.P., you start to see some pretty rapid increases in meat consumption.

Meat consumption is of course driven by social and religious factors as well; by health concerns, and animal welfare: not everyone agrees that humans should be eating animals at all. That said, we should probably assume that the demand for meat will continue to rise as more of the world keeps getting richer. How’s the supply side doing with this increased demand? Quite well. The meat industry is massive and complicated — and often heavily subsidized. But, long story short, if you go by the availability of meat and especially what consumers pay, this is an economic success story.

LUSK: So prices of almost all of our meat products have declined pretty considerably over the last 60 to 100 years. And the reason is that we have become so much more productive at producing meat. If you look at most of the statistics, like the amount of pork produced per sow. And we’ve taken out a lot of the seasonal variation that we used to see, as these animals have been brought indoors. And you look at poultry production, broiler production: the amount of meat that’s produced per broiler has risen dramatically — almost doubled, say — over the last 50 to 100 years, while also consuming slightly less feed.

That’s due largely to selective breeding and other technologies. The same goes for beef production.

LUSK: We get a lot more meat per animal, for example, on a smaller amount of land.

As you can imagine, people concerned with animal welfare may not celebrate these efficiency improvements. And then there’s the argument that, despite these efficiency improvements, turning animals into food is wildly inefficient.

Pat BROWN: Because the cow didn’t evolve to be meat. That’s the thing.

Pat Brown is a long-time Stanford biomedical researcher who’s done groundbreaking work in genetics.

BROWN: The cow evolved to be a cow and make more cows and not to be eaten by humans. And it’s not very good at making meat.

Meaning: it takes an enormous amount of food and water and other resources to turn a cow or a pig into dinner — much more than plant-based foods. And as Pat Brown sees it, that is not even the worst of it.

BROWN: The most environmentally destructive technology on earth: using animals in food production. Nothing else even comes close.

Not everyone agrees that meat production is the environment’s biggest enemy. What’s not in dispute is that global demand for meat is high and rising. And that the production of meat is resource-intensive and, at the very least, an environmental challenge, with implications for climate change. Pat Brown thinks he has a solution to these problems. He’s started a company—

BROWN: —a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

The meat industry, as you can imagine, has other ideas:

Kelly FOGARTY: We want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: everything you always wanted to know about meat, about meatless meat, and where meat meets the future.

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What determines which food you put in your mouth every day? There are plainly a lot of factors: personal preference, tradition, geography, on and on.

LUSK: So, take something like horse consumption. It’s almost unheard of to even think about consuming a horse in the United States.

Jayson Lusk again, the agricultural economist.

LUSK: Whereas, you go to Belgium or France, it would be a commonly consumed dish.

But there’s another big factor that determines who eats what: technology. Technology related to how food is grown, preserved, transported. But also: technology that isn’t even related to the food itself. Consider the case of mutton. Mutton is the meat of an adult sheep. The meat of a young sheep is called lamb. I am willing to bet that you have not eaten mutton in the last six months, probably the last six years. Maybe never. But if we were talking 100 years ago? Different story.

LUSK: It’s certainly the case that back in the 1920’s and 30’s that mutton was a much more commonly consumed product.

Mutton was a staple of the American diet; one of the standard items shipped to soldiers during World War II was canned mutton. But shortly after the war, mutton started to disappear. What happened?

LUSK: A sheep is not just meat. These are multi-product species and they’re valuable not just for their meat but for their wool.

Oh yeah, wool. And unlike leather, which can be harvested only once from an animal, you can shear wool from one sheep many times, over many years.

LUSK: So anything that affects the demand for wool is also going to affect the underlying market for the rest of the underlying animal.

And what might affect the demand for wool? How about synthetic substitutes? Nylon, for instance, was created by DuPont in 1935, and became available to the public in 1940. A year later, polyester was invented.

LUSK: So, you know, any time you had new clothing technologies come along, that’s going to affect the underlying demand for sheep and make them less valuable than they would have been otherwise.

So an increase in synthetic fabrics led to a shrinking demand for wool — which meant that all those sheep that had been kept around for shearing no longer needed to be kept around. Also, wool subsidies were repealed. And America’s sheep flock drastically shrank: from a high of 56 million in 1942 to barely 5 million today.

LUSK: It is amazing. I’ve worked at several agricultural universities across the U.S. now, and often the largest sheep herds in those states are at the university research farms.

And fewer sheep meant less mutton for dinner. Is it possible Americans would have stopped eating mutton without the rise of synthetic fabrics? Absolutely: if you ask a room full of meat-eaters to name their favorite meat, I doubt one of them will say “mutton.” Still, this is just one example of how technology can have a big effect on the meat we eat. And if you talk to certain people, it’s easy to believe that we’re on the verge of a similar but much larger technological shift.

BROWN: My name is Pat Brown. I’m currently the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology.

Brown grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., as well as Paris and Taipei — his father worked for the C.I.A. He studied to be a pediatrician and in fact completed his medical residency, but he switched to biochemistry research.

BROWN: I had the best job in the world at Stanford. My job was basically to discover and invent things and follow my curiosity.

Brown did this for many years and was considered a world-class researcher. One of his breakthroughs was a new tool for genetic mapping; it’s called the D.N.A. microarray—

BROWN: —that lets you read all the words that the cell is using and effectively kind of start to learn the vocabulary, learn how the genome writes the life story of a cell, or something like that. It also has practical applications, because — what it’s doing, in a sort of a deterministic way, specifies the potential of that cell, or if it’s a cancer cell.

Some people think the DNA microarray will win Pat Brown a Nobel Prize. When I bring this up, he just shakes his head and smiles. It’s clear that his research was a deep passion.

BROWN: For me, this was the dream job, it was like in the Renaissance, having the Medicis as patrons or something like that.

But after many years, Brown wanted a change. He was in his mid-50’s; he took a sabbatical to figure out his next move.

BROWN: It started out with stepping back from the work I was doing and asking myself, “What’s the most important thing I could do? What could I do that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?” And looking at what are the biggest unsolved problems in the world? I came relatively quickly to the conclusion that the use of animals as a food-production technology, is by far. And I could give you endless reasons why that’s true, but it is absolutely true. By far the most environmentally destructive thing that humans do.

There is indeed a great deal of evidence for this argument across the entire environmental spectrum. The agricultural historian James McWilliams, in a book called Just Food, argues that “every environmental problem related to contemporary agriculture … ends up having its deepest roots in meat production: monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rain-forest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming — all these problems would be considerably less severe” if people ate meat “rarely, if ever.”

LUSK: You know, there’s no doubt that meat production has environmental consequences. To suggest that it’s the most damaging environmental thing we do is, I think, a pretty extreme overstatement.

But what about the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with raising meat — especially in the U.S., which is the world’s largest beef producer?

LUSK: Our own E.P.A. — Environmental Protection Agency — suggests that all of livestock contributes about 3 percent of our total greenhouse-gas emissions. So, I mean, 3 percent is not nothing, but it’s not the major contributor that we see. That number, I should say, is much higher in many other parts of the world. So the carbon impacts per pound produced are so much smaller here than a lot of the world that when you tell people, “the way to reduce carbon emissions is to intensify animal production,” that’s not a story a lot of people like to hear.

DUBNER: Because why not, it sounds like it’s against animal welfare?

LUSK: Well, two reasons: Exactly, one is there are concerns about animal welfare, particularly when you’re talking about broiler chickens, or hogs — less so about cattle — and the other one is, there are concerns about when you concentrate a lot of animals in one place you can get all this waste in a location, that you have to think about creative ways to deal with that don’t have some significant environmental problems.

DUBNER: So, the E.P.A. number, livestock contributing three percent, does that include the entire production chain, though? Because, some of the numbers that I see from environmental activists is much, much higher than that.

LUSK: The U.N. estimate that you often hear from — originally was created in this report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” is something around 19 percent. But that 19 percent, roughly, number, is a global number. Actually, there was a study that came out pointing out some flaws in that, so they reduced it somewhat.

In any case, there is a growing concern in many quarters over the externalities of meat production.

LUSK: Over the last 5–10 years, there’s been a lot of negative publicity — stories about environmental impacts, about carbon emissions, about animal welfare. And if you just look at the news stories, you would think, “Boy, people must be really cutting back, given the sort of frightful stories that you see on the front pages of the newspapers.” But if you look at the data itself, demand looks fairly stable. And that suggests to me it’s hard to change people’s preference on this.

There’s something about meat consumption. Some people would argue that we’re evolved to like meat, that it’s a protein-, vitamin-packed, tasty punch that we’ve grown to enjoy as a species. There are some people that even argue that it’s one of the reasons we became as smart as we did, the vitamins and nutrients that were in that meat allowed our brains to develop in certain ways that it might have not otherwise.

Pat Brown saw that same strong preference for meat when he decided that the number-one scientific problem to solve was replacing animals as food.

BROWN: And it’s a problem that nobody was working on in any serious way. Because everybody recognized that most people in the world, including most environmental scientists and people who care about this stuff, love the foods we get from animals so much that they can’t imagine giving those up.

Brown himself was a longtime vegan.

BROWN: I haven’t eaten meat for decades, and that’s just a personal choice that I made long before I realized the destructive impact of that industry. That was a choice I made for other reasons. And it wasn’t something that I felt like I was in a position to tell other people to do. And I still don’t feel like there’s any value in doing that.

Brown makes an interesting point here. Many of us, when we feel strongly about something — an environmental issue or a social or economic issue — we’re inclined to put forth a moral argument. A moral argument would appear to be persuasive evidence of the highest order: you should do this thing because it’s the right thing to do. But there’s a ton of research showing that moral arguments are generally ineffective; people may smile at you, and nod; but they won’t change their behavior. That’s what Brown realized about meat.

BROWN: The basic problem is that people are not going to stop wanting these foods. And the only way we’re going to solve it is not by asking them to meet you halfway and give them a substandard product that doesn’t deliver what they know they want from meat or fish or anything like that. The only way to do it is, you have to say, “We’re going to do the much harder thing,” which is we’re going to figure out how to make meat that’s not just as delicious as the meat we get from animals, it’s more delicious and better nutritionally and more affordable and so forth.

In other words: a marginal improvement on the standard veggie burger would not do.

BROWN: It’s been tried. It just doesn’t work. It’s a waste of effort.

So Brown start fooling around in his lab.

BROWN: Doing some kind of micro experiments just to convince myself in a way that this was doable.

Those early experiments were fairly encouraging.

BROWN: I felt like, okay, there’s a bunch of things I thought could be useful, and then I felt like I could just go in with a little bit more confidence to talk to the investors.

“The investors” meaning venture capitalists. Remember, Brown’s at Stanford, which is next door to the biggest pile of venture capital in the history of the world.

BROWN: And basically my pitch them was very naive from a fundraising standpoint, in the sense that basically I mostly just told them about how there’s this absolutely critical environmental disaster that needs to be solved and—

DUBNER: And they’re probably expecting to hear something now about carbon capture, or—

BROWN: Yeah, that’s the thing. And most people still are. So I just told these guys, “Look, this is an environmental disaster. No one’s doing anything about it. I’m going to solve it for you.”

So how does the almost-pediatrician-who-became-a-freewheeling-biochemist build a better meat from the ground up? That amazing story after the break:

BROWN: Okay, bingo, this is how we’re going to do it.

*      *      *

It’s estimated that more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all animal agriculture comes from cows.

LUSK: And that is due to the fact that beef are ruminant animals.

The Purdue economist Jayson Lusk again.

LUSK: Their stomachs produce methane. It comes out the front end, not the back, as a lot of people think. And as a consequence — we look at carbon consequences — it’s mainly beef that people focus on, not pork or chicken, because they don’t have the same kind of digestive systems.

There has been progress in this area. For instance, it turns out that adding seaweed to cattle feed drastically reduces their methane output. But the scientist Pat Brown is looking for a much bigger change to the animal-agriculture industry.

BROWN: If I could snap my fingers and make that industry disappear right now — which I would do, if I could, and it would be a great thing for the world.

It is very unlikely to disappear any time soon; it is a trillion-dollar global industry, supported in many places by government subsidies, selling a product that billions of people consume once, twice, even three times a day. Pat Brown’s desire would seem to be an impossible one; the company he founded is called Impossible Foods. It’s essentially a tech startup, and it’s raised nearly $400 million to date in venture capital.

BROWN: So, we’ve only been in existence for about seven years and we have about 300 people. We started by basically building a team of some of the best scientists in the world to study how meat works, basically. And by that, I mean to really understand at a basic level the way, in my previous life, when I was a biomedical scientist, we might be studying how, you know, a normal cell of this particular kind becomes a cancer cell, understanding the basic biochemical mechanisms.

In this case, what we wanted to understand was: what are the basic biochemical mechanisms that account for the unique flavor chemistry and the flavor behavior and aromas and textures and juiciness and all those qualities that consumers value in meat? And we spent about 2.5 years just doing basic research, trying to answer that question, before we really started working on a product. And then decided for strategic reasons that our first product would be raw ground beef made entirely from plants.

DUBNER: Because burger is what people want?

BROWN: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I think it was a good strategic choice: the largest single category of meat in the U.S., it’s probably the most iconic kind of meat in the U.S., it seemed like the ideal vehicle for communicating to consumers that delicious meat doesn’t have to come from animals, because it’s sort of the uber-meat for a lot of people.

DUBNER: Uber, lower-case “u.”

BROWN: With a lower-case, yes.

DUBNER: People are not hailing burgers, riding them around?

BROWN: No, thank God. And beef production is the most environmentally destructive segment of the animal agriculture industry. So, from an impact standpoint, it made sense as a choice.

So Pat Brown set about repurposing the scientific wisdom he’d accrued over a long, fruitful career in biomedicine. A career that may improve the health and well-being of countless millions. And now he got to work on a truly earth-shaking project: building a better burger. A burger that doesn’t come from a cow. An Impossible burger. So how did that work? What ingredients do you put in an Impossible burger?

BROWN: That’s an interesting aspect about the science, which is that we didn’t look for, “What are the precisely specific choices of ingredients that would work?” We studied, “What are the biochemical properties we need from the set of ingredients?” And then we did a survey of things available from the plant world that matched those biophysical properties of which there were choices.

So what are the main components of this burger?

BROWN: I can tell you what it’s made of right now. What it’s made of right now is different from how it was made two years ago, and that was different from how it was made two and half years ago and the next version we’re going to launch is a quite different set of ingredients.

We first interviewed Brown several months ago. The main ingredients at the time included:

BROWN: A protein from wheat; a protein from potatoes — not a starch from potatoes, but a protein from potatoes, it’s a byproduct of starch production. Coconut oil is the major fat source. And then we have a bunch of other small molecules, but they’re all familiar things: amino acids, vitamins, sugars. Nutrients.

But all these ingredients did not make Pat Brown’s plant-based hamburger meat taste or act or look like hamburger meat. It was still missing a critical component. A component called heme.

BROWN: Heme is found in essentially every living thing and heme in plants and human animals is the exact same molecule, okay? It’s just one of the most ubiquitous and fundamental molecules in life on Earth, period. The system that burns calories to produce energy uses heme as an essential component, and it’s what carries oxygen in your blood. And it’s what makes your blood red.

And none of this we discovered — this has been known for a long time and — so animals have a lot more heme than plants. And it’s that very high concentration of heme that accounts for the unique flavors of meat that you would recognize something as meat. It’s the overwhelmingly dominant factor in making the unique taste of meat and fish.

DUBNER: Is it involved in texture and mouthfeel and all that as well, or just taste?

BROWN: Just taste. Texture and mouthfeel are really important and there’s a whole other set of research around that. Super important — it kind of gets short shrift, because people think of the flavor as sort of the most dramatic thing about meat. But you have to get that other stuff right, too.

Brown and his team of scientists, after a couple years of research and experimentation, were getting a lot of that stuff right. But without heme — a lot of heme — their meatless meat would never resemble meat.

BROWN: So there is one component of a certain kind of plant that has a high concentration of heme, and that is in plants that fix nitrogen, that take nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertilizer. They have a structure called the root nodule, where the nitrogen fixation takes place and for reasons that are too complicated to explain right now they, that has a high concentration of heme and I just happened to know this from way back.

And if you slice open the root nodules of one of these plants:

BROWN: They have such a high concentration of heme that they look like a freshly cut steak, okay? And I did a calculation about the concentration of that stuff — soy leghemoglobin is the protein, which is virtually identical to the heme protein in muscle tissue, which is called myoglobin — that there was enough leghemoglobin in the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop to replace all the heme in all the meat consumed in the U.S. Okay? So, I thought, “Genius, okay. We’ll just go out and harvest all these root nodules from the U.S. soybean crop and we’ll get this stuff practically for free.” Well, so I raised money for the company and we spent half the money trying to figure out how to harvest these root nodules from soybean plants, only basically to finally convince ourselves it was a terrible idea.

But if you’re a veteran scientist like Brown, a little failure is not so off-putting.

BROWN: You know you’re going to be doing things that are pushing the limits and trying entirely new things and a lot of them are going to fail. And if you don’t have a high tolerance for that and realize that basically, the way you do really really important, cool stuff is by trying a lot of things and not punishing yourself for the failures, but just celebrating the successes, you know, you’re not going to accomplish as much.

And the idea of buying up all the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop wasn’t a complete failure.

BROWN: I mean, we got enough that we could do experiments to prove that it really was a magic ingredient for flavor. But then we had to start all over, and then what we did was: we said, ”Okay, we’re going to have to engineer a microorganism to produce gobs of this heme protein. Okay”? And since now we weren’t bound by any natural source, we looked at three dozen different heme proteins, everything from, you know, paramecium to barley to Hell’s Gate bacteria, which is like this —

DUBNER: That’s a plant? Hell’s Gate?

BROWN: It’s a bacteria that lives in deep sea vents near New Zealand that survive with temperatures above the boiling point of water that we mostly just looked at for fun, but funny thing about that, the reason we rejected it is that it’s so heat-stable that you can cook a burger to cooking temperature and it still stays bright red, because it doesn’t unfold. But anyway — and then we pick the best one, which turned out to be, just coincidentally, soy leghemoglobin, which is the one we were going after—

DUBNER: So your terrible idea was actually pretty good.

BROWN: It wasn’t really a brilliant idea, it accidentally turned out to be the right choice.

Through the magic of modern plant engineering, Pat Brown’s team began creating massive stocks of heme. And that heme would help catapult the Impossible burger well beyond the realm of the standard veggie burger — the mostly unloved veggie burger, we should say. The Impossible Burger looks like hamburger meat — when it’s raw and when it’s cooked. It behaves like hamburger meat. Most important, it tastes like hamburger meat.

Alison CRAIGLOW: I would like the American with an Impossible Burger.

WAITER: And how would you like that cooked?

CRAIGLOW: Oh, I didn’t realize — I’ll have it medium … medium. Is it pink in the middle when it’s … it is?

The Freakonomics Radio team recently ate some Impossible burgers in a restaurant near Times Square.

Zack LAPINSKI: I mean, I actually can’t taste the diff —

CRAIGLOW: It tastes like a burger

Ryan KELLY: Good day for the Impossible Burger

Greg RIPPIN: Yeah, approved by Freakonomics.

Their meal happened to coincide with the release of Impossible Burger 2.0 — an updated recipe that uses a soy protein instead of a wheat protein and has a few more tweaks: less salt, sunflower oil to cut the coconut oil, and no more xanthan gum and konjac gum. In my own tasting experience: Impossible Burger 1.0 was really good but a little slushy; 2.0 was burger-tastic.

These are of course our subjective observations. Here’s some actual evidence: Impossible Burgers are already being served in roughly 5,000 locations, primarily in the U.S. but also Hong Kong and Macau. These include very high-end restaurants in New York and California as well as fast-food chains like Umami Burger and even White Castle. This year, Impossible plans to start selling its burger meat in grocery stores.

BROWN: We’ve grown in terms of our sales and revenue about 30-fold in the past year. And our goal is to completely replace animal as a food technology by 2035. That means we have to approximately double in size and impact every year for the next 18 years.

DUBNER: Are we to understand that you are taking aim at pigs and chickens and fish as well?

BROWN: Yes, of course. So when we first started out, we were working on a technology platform and sort of the know-how about how meat works in general; we were working on understanding dairy products and cheeses and stuff like that. And then we decided, okay, we have to pick one product to launch with, and then we have to, from a commercialization standpoint, just go all in on it for a while.

DUBNER: As the scientist, or as a scientist, were you reluctant to kind of narrow yourself for that commercial interest, or did you appreciate that this is the way in this world things actually happen?

BROWN: Both. I mean, let’s put it this way: I would like to be able to pursue all these things in parallel, and if I had the resources I would. But if we launched another product right now, we’d just be competing against ourselves for resources for commercialization, so just doesn’t make any sense.

We put out an episode not long ago called “Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet.” It featured the science journalist Charles Mann.

MANN: How are we going to deal with climate change? There have been two ways that have been suggested, overarching ways, that represent, if you like, poles on a continuum. And they’ve been fighting with each other for decades.

The two poles are represented by what Mann calls, in his latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet. The prophet sees environmental destruction as a problem best addressed by restoring nature to its natural state. The wizard, meanwhile, believes that technology can address environmental dangers. This is, of course, a typology, a shorthand; a prophet doesn’t necessarily fear technology any more than a wizard fears nature. That said: if there were ever an embodiment of the wizard-prophet hybrid, a person driven by idealism and pragmatism in equal measure, I’d say it’s Pat Brown. Which means his invention has the capacity to upset people all across the spectrum.

The consumers and activists who might cheer a meatless meat are often the same sort of people who are anti-G.M.O. — genetically modified organisms. And the Impossible Burger would not have been possible without its genetically modified heme — which, by the way, the F.D.A. recently declared safe, after challenges from environmental groups like Friends of the Earth. Another group that might object to Impossible Foods? The meat industry. You know, the ones who use actual animals to raise food.

FOGARTY: My name is Kelly Fogarty and I serve as the executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association. And I am a fifth- generation beef cattle rancher here in Oakdale, California.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, as a woman, do you find yourself ever wishing the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association would change their name or are you okay with it?

FOGARTY: You know, it’s funny you mention that. There’s always a little bit of a notion there in the back of my mind of, you know, of course being in the industry for so long. I take it as representing all of the livestock industry. But you know, definitely having a special nod to all the female ranchers out there would be nice to have as well.

DUBNER: And what is the primary difference between the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association?

FOGARTY: As the United States Cattlemen’s Association, we are made up primarily of cattle producers. So your family ranches. You know, cow-calf operations run by producers and kind of for producers is what U.S.C.A. was built on. Whereas National Cattlemen’s Beef Association does include some more of packer influences as well as you know some of the processing facilities as well.

DUBNER: Can you just talk generally for a moment: how big of a threat does the beef industry see from alternative, “meat”?

FOGARTY: So from our end you know, in looking at the “meat” — and I appreciate you using those quotes around that term — from our end, we’re not so much seeing it as a threat to our product. What we are really looking at is not a limit on consumer choice or trying to back one product out of the market. It’s really to make sure that we’re keeping the information out there accurate and that what is available to consumers and what is being shown to consumers on labels is accurate to what the product actually is.

In 2018, Fogarty’s organization filed a petition with the U.S.D.A. to prevent products from being labeled as “beef” or “meat” unless they come from a cow.

DUBNER: Does that mean that your organization thinks that consumers are confused by labeling? Is that the primary objection?

FOGARTY: So the primary objection from the United Cattlemen’s Association is that we want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner. And so when we see the term “meat” being put on these products that is not derived from that definition, what our producers came to us and really wanted us to act on was what we saw happened in other industries, specifically when you look at the dairy industry and where the term “milk” has now been used.

“Almond milk,” for instance. Which comes from almonds, not animals. Which led the National Milk Producers Federation to argue that it should not be sold as “almond milk.” The FDA agreed; its commissioner pointed out that “an almond doesn’t lactate.” There are important differences between so-called “milk” that doesn’t come from animals and so-called “meat” that doesn’t come from animals. Almond milk has very different nutritional content than cow’s milk; the Impossible Burger, meanwhile, has a similar nutritional profile to hamburger — including the iron content, which vegans can have trouble getting enough of. That’s another reason why Kelly Fogarty and the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association might not want the Impossible Burger to be labeled “meat.”

DUBNER: I am just curious about the mental state of your industry because I was looking at your Facebook page and one post the other day led with the following: “Eat or be eaten. Be at the table or on the menu. Fight or be forgotten.” So that sounds — it would make me believe that the future of meat is one in which cattle ranchers feel a little bit like an endangered species or at least under assault.

FOGARTY: I think that speaks to a lot of misconceptions that are out there regarding the U.S. beef industry. Whether it be in terms of you know nutrition, environment, animal welfare. We’ve really been hit from a lot of different angles over the years.

DUBNER: Okay, well, according to some scientific research, meat production and/or cattle ranching are among the most environmentally damaging activities on earth, between the resource-intensiveness, land but especially water, and the externalities, the runoff of manure and chemicals into groundwater.

FOGARTY: I think one of the first points to make is that cattle are defined as what is termed as upcyclers, and cattle today, they’re turning plants that have little to no nutritional value just as-is into a high-quality and a high density protein. And so when you look at where cattle are grazing in the U.S., and then also across the world, a lot of the land that they are grazing on are land that is not suitable for crops or it would be you know kind of looking as a highly marginal type of land. And the ability of livestock to turn what is there into something that can feed the world is pretty remarkable.

Fogarty believes her industry has been unfairly maligned; that it’s come to be seen as a target for environmentalist groups and causes.

FOGARTY: I would absolutely say, the livestock industry and to that matter, the agriculture industry as a whole I think has really been at the brunt of a lot of disinformation campaigns.

Fogarty points to that U.N. report claiming that the global livestock industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions were shockingly high. A report that was found to be built on faulty calculations.

FOGARTY: So, it was really an inequitable and grossly inflated percentage that really turned a conversation.

The inflated percentage of around 18 percent was really around 14.5 percent — so, “grossly” inflated may be in the eye of the aggrieved. Fogarty says that even though the error was acknowledged, and a revised report was issued.

FOGARTY: Folks have not forgotten it as much as we wish. It’s still something that it’s hard to have folks kind of un-read or un-know something that they initially saw.

The fact is that the agricultural industry is massive and massively complex. Without question, it exacts costs on the environment; it also provides benefits that are literally the stuff of life: delicious, abundant, affordable food. As with any industry, there are tradeoffs and there is friction: activists tend to overstate their claims in order to encourage reform; industry defenders tend to paper over legitimate concerns.

But in the food industry especially, it’s clear that a revolution is underway — a revolution to have our food be not just delicious and abundant and affordable but sustainable too, with fewer negative externalities. Some startups, like Impossible Foods, focus on cleverly engineering plant matter to taste like the animal flesh so many people love. Other startups are working on what’s called lab-grown meat, using animal stem cells to grow food without animals. This is still quite young technology, but it’s very well-funded. I was curious to hear Kelly Fogarty’s view of this.

DUBNER: One of the investors in the lab “meat” company Memphis Meats is Cargill, which is a major constituent of the big meat industry. I mean, another investor, for what it’s worth, is Bill Gates. But I’m curious what’s your position on that. Because the way I think about this long-term, presumably a firm like Cargill can win the future with alternative “meat” in a way that a cattle rancher can’t. So I’m curious what the position is of ranchers on this kind of investment from a firm like Cargill or other firms that are sort of hedging their bets on the future of meat.

FOGARTY: You know it’s a really interesting point, and it’s been a bit of a tough pill for producers to swallow, the fact that some of the big three, some of these big processing plants that have been so obviously heavily focused and have been livestock-dominant are now kind of going into this alternative and sometimes the cell-cultured lab meats, alternative proteins. And it really has been a point of contention among a lot of producers who are kind of confused, unsure, feel a little bit — I don’t want to say betrayed by the industry, but a little bit so…

Others may soon feel betrayed as well. A company called Modern Meadows is using similar technology to grow leather in the lab, without the need for cattle. The Israeli company SuperMeat is focused on growing chicken. And then there’s a company called Finless Foods.

Mike SELDEN: Finless Foods is taking the seafood back to basics and creating real fish meat entirely without mercury, plastic, without the need for antibiotics or growth hormones, and also without the need for fishing or the killing of animals because we grow the fish directly from stem cells.

That’s Mike Selden, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless. He’s 27 years old; he started out as a cancer researcher. Like Pat Brown, you could call him a wizard-prophet hybrid. He does take issue with the idea of “lab-grown” food.

SELDEN: The reality is, labs are by definition experimental and are not scalable. So this won’t be grown in a lab at all. It’s prototyped in a lab in the same way that snacks are prototyped in a lab. Doritos are prototyped in a lab by material scientists looking at different dimensions of like crunch and torsion and all these other sort of mechanical properties. So what our facility will look like when we’re actually at production scale is something really a lot closer to a brewery. Big steel tanks that are sort of allowing these cells space in order to divide and grow into large quantities of themselves, while accessing all of the nutrients that we put inside of this nutritional broth.

The fishing industry, like the meat industry, exacts its share of environmental costs. But like Pat Brown, Mike Selden does not want his company to win on goodwill points.

SELDEN: So, the goal of Finless Foods is not to create something that competes on ethics or morals or environmental goals. It’s something that will compete on taste, price, and nutrition — the things that people actually care about.

Right now, everybody really loves whales and people hate when whales are killed. What changed? Because we used to kill whales for their blubber in order to light lamps. It wasn’t an ethical movement, it wasn’t that people woke up one day and decided, “Oh, killing whales is wrong.” It was that we ended up using kerosene instead. We found another technological solution, a supply-side change that didn’t play on people’s morals in order to win. We see ourselves as something like that. You know, why work with an animal at all if you don’t need to?

Indeed: you could imagine in the not-so-distant future a scenario in which you could instantly summon any food imaginable — new foods, new combinations, but also foods that long ago fell out of favor. How much fun would that be? I asked the agricultural economist Jayson Lusk about this.

DUBNER: If we had a 3D printer, and it, let’s say, had, just, we’ll be conservative, 100 buttons of different foods that it could make me. Does anyone press the mutton button?

LUSK: Well, you know, one of the great things about our food system is that it’s a food system that, yes, makes food affordable, but also has a whole awful lot of choice for people who are willing to pay it. And I bet there’s probably at least one or two people out there that will push that will mutton button.

I also asked Lusk for his economic views on the future of meat, especially the sort of projects that inventors like Mike Selden and Pat Brown are working on.

LUSK: I have no problems with what Dr. Brown is trying to do there, and indeed I think it’s very exciting, this technology. And I think ultimately it’ll come down to whether this lab-grown meat can compete on the merits. So, there’s no free lunch here. In fact, the Impossible Burger — I’ve seen it on menus — it’s almost always higher-priced than the traditional beef burger. Now as an economist, I look at that and say, “Those prices, to me, should be signaling something about resource use.” Maybe it’s imperfect; maybe there’s some externalities. But they should reflect all the resources that were used to go in to produce that product. It’s one of the reasons that beef is more expensive than, say, chicken — it takes more time, more inputs, to produce a pound of beef than a pound of chicken.

So, why is it that the Impossible Burger is more expensive than the regular burger? Now, it could be that this is just a startup, and they’re not working at scale; and once they really scale this thing up, it’ll really bring the price down. It could be they’re also marketing to a particular higher-income consumer who is willing to pay a little more. But I think if the claims about the Impossible Burger are true over time, one would expect these products to come down significantly in price and be much less expensive than beef production. You know, this is not going to make my beef friends happy, but if they can do that, good for them; and consumers want to pay for, this product, they like the way it tastes and it saves some money, which means it’s saving some resources; I think in that sense, it’s a great technology.

Whether or not you eat meat; whether or not you’re interested in eating these alternative meats, from plant matter or animal stem cells — it’s hard not to admire the creativity that someone like Pat Brown has exercised: the deep curiosity, the ability to come back from failure, the sheer cleverness of putting together disparate ideas into a coherent scientific plan.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Harry Huggins; we had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Pat Brown, founder and c.e.o. of Impossible Foods.

Kelly Fogarty, executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association.

Jayson Lusk, economist at Purdue University.

Mike Selden, co-founder and c.e.o. of Finless Foods.

RESOURCES

“Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock,”  Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (2013).

Just Food by James McWilliams (Little, Brown, 2009).

“Changes in the Sheep Industry in the United States,” The National Academies (2008).

EXTRA

“Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post The Future of Meat (Ep. 367) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/meat/

[openanonymity]

Facebook As A Political Podium

I think today has been a day where I'm just annoyed with everything. It started with a truck driver totally fucking up the flow of traffic downtown. He almost caused a car accident with his shitty driving. Then I looked over the Learned League questions for the day, which appeared to be relatively easy today, as I got three right for the second straight day. I made the foolish mistake of checking Facebook. There, I saw two posts put up by different people which I'm assuming voted for our Asshole In Chief. The first post was showing a video of workers at what I'd imagine is an oil refinery, or something similar. The men were doing some high risk labor, and the caption read something like "fast food employees are fighting for $15/hour; this is what $15/hour looks like". I was close to leaving an extensively long comment about hourly wages. I'm not an economist or a business expert, but I feel the need to chime in sometimes with what I believe, because from my perspective, they're saying that if you work fast food, you're not worthy of making an hourly wage that requires your fingers and toes on which to count. I totally agree that a fast food employee isn't on the same skill level as someone who works at an oil refinery. But there is this illusion that everyone believes about the fast food industry, is that it only consists of teenagers and "entitled millennials" who expect a handout. Here's the thing: NOT ALL MILLENNIALS ARE EXPECTING HANDOUTS. They're not like the billionaire "too big to fail" corporations that the politicians we're given no choice to vote for are helping bail out every time the economy shits a cinder block and collapses. So, as I was saying, not everyone who works in the fast food industry barely making minimum wage is a teenager. There are older people who work full time for the following reasons: -They dropped out of high school -They are working toward getting their GED -They are single moms or dads trying to provide for their families, just like those of us in white collar office jobs -They got laid off and this was the only place hiring -They retired and still didn't have enough money in their pension/401k -They just came into the country and this is the only place that would hire an immigrant These are the people who are fighting for that $15/hour pay, and to deny them that right because the job isn't skillful enough is a bullshit excuse. They put up with all of us and our shitty attitudes. They have some high risk factors in the workplace too, such as handling hot grease, avoiding wet spots on floors, and using proper safety procedures when handling sharp objects such as knives and whatnot. Those who work oil refineries I would imagine took on an apprenticeship or went to a trade school to learn the skill set required for the job. I'd also believe it's a unionized industry, much like electrical workers, pipe fitters, etc. They have the privilege to go on strike if their wages or working conditions aren't up to par, and they probably put in a ton of hours each week doing what they do. I have a hard time believing they make $15/hour. They should be making much more. But if they do indeed make $15/hour, the unions should be stepping up and pushing for higher wages. $15/hour isn't a hard goal to reach for fast food employees. Also, why is everyone so against wage increases? I'm sure the amount I'm making was the same amount a middle management employee was making 20+ years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you increase the minimum wage, doesn't everyone else's wages increase as well? When I worked at Wendy's, that was the case. They bumped me up an extra 30-40 cents hourly when the minimum wage went up. When you raise everyone's wages, it's good for the economy. People are more willing to spend their extra income, invest their money into more things such as a 401k, 529 plans, stocks, Roth IRAs, etc., and even purchase houses and cars. If you don't increase people's wages at the same rate that the cost of living increases, you put the workforce at risk of stressing out, being overworked just to make ends meet, and certain markets suffer greatly, such as the housing market. It's a chain reaction/domino effect. Increase fast food workers' wages to $15/hour (which I'm guessing would be a 30% increase), and increase everyone else's wages who make below $75k/year by that same percentage increase and you will see a much better economy. The only reason we are fighting about this is because the CEOs refuse to increase the wages, saying their profits will be hurt, while they give themselves ungodly pay raises and bonuses. The other thing I caught on Facebook was someone posting a picture of Colin Kaepernick with the caption "Colin Kaepernick is still a free agent". I know for a fact the person who posted this hated Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the national anthem. I know a lot of people hate him for doing that. But here's the thing. He is/was protesting the anthem for a good reason. We don't hear the full national anthem when it is sung. There are more verses, and one includes a line that glorifies the murdering of slaves, but he was also exercising his first amendment right to sit down because he can't salute the flag of a country that isn't truly free, when cops are killing innocent black men and women. According to him, this will truly be a free country once the police quit racially profiling minorities and open fire on them when they haven't done anything wrong. Being black, Latino, Muslim, LGBT, Jew, or anything that isn't white, male, heterosexual, or Christian subjects you to oppression, bullying, and even worse, your eventual death. Perhaps I'm sounding a bit extreme, but to many people, this is the case. Kaepernick was the quarterback of my favorite team, and I think with nobody signing him yet, it makes the NFL look bad. This is a League that allows rapists, murderers, and domestic violence/child abusers to roam freely throughout the league after serving punishment that is nothing more than a slap on the wrist, but if you prefer to deflate your footballs or sit during the national anthem, you're a disgrace to the country and the league. Fuck the NFL and fuck the person who put up that post. She's about to be unfriended. So, with all that said, I was doing my delivery this morning and one of the tech guys asked me if my coworker was taking the buyout. That's been the big talk at my 9-5. Apparently, this guy is taking it. Good for him. I told him if I was in my coworker's situation, I'd take the buyout and likely leave the country, especially with the current political climate. I should've known the guy voted for Asshole In Chief. We got into a long debate about politics and spoke about immigration, tax returns, etc., and he said nobody had given past presidents a tougher time. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!? Where were you the past 8 years when the Republicans had done EVERYTHING they could to block anything and everything Obama did, even going as far as to suggest he's not born in this country and a socialist or communist Muslim terrorist? I told this guy every candidate released their tax returns, how does orangeface get a free pass? I didn't say orangeface, but I was very close. At that point, I kind of stopped listening to him even when he said don't leave the country, I was like "it won't get any better under this administration, they're reversing everything that was good about this country. Then, on my way to the van, one of the cleaning guys gets on me about being parked at the loading dock. I sarcastically apologized, and when I left, I noticed the Pepsi truck was still parked at the other loading dock. So, my main complaint here is that this fucking troll knew the Pepsi truck was there, why not go to the fucking cafeteria and find that driver, tell him to move if he wasn't using the loading dock? He's not an employee of this company, but I am. I'm done with today. Can it be Saturday already?

[doctrinendonuts-blog]

Yes, Pennsylvania. You are a bigot.

Yes, Pennsylvania: you are a bigot. Dear Progressives: I understand that you’re in shock, because I am too. My Nasty Women Vote sticker is stuffed in my desk; I can’t bring myself to let it go even though I know that Nasty Women are outnumbered. As an American, I want to learn my lesson, so I can stop the internal and national bleeding. As a teacher, I know the difference between learning and making an unsupported argument (note to students—your final exams will reflect this). It feels like progressives are doing the latter. I’m hearing: Democrats focused too much on people of color and LGBT people (who apparently don’t work?) and not enough on the “working class.” “Working-class” anger, not racism and sexism, explains Trump’s win. The Democratic Party should simultaneously tack to the Left and stop focusing on progressive values such as reproductive choice and racial justice. “Identity politics” is dead, except if your identity is white, male, resident of a former manufacturing region. If you’re in mourning for America’s Unclean Coal, the Democratic Party should listen. If you’re concerned about your mom being deported, about becoming a mother against your will, or about being arrested for using a bathroom, then please take a seat. Your needs lost us one too many elections already. Yeah, no. First, can we please stop saying Trump won because steel and coal lost? The death of steel and coal predates NAFTA, according to economists, historians, and Billy Joel’s classic 1982 classic “Allentown.” Second, Trump voters weren’t poor and many voted against their economic interests. Knowing this, we have two choices: we can assume they’re stupid, or you can believe something other than steel motivated them. The road to 11/8/16 isn’t lined with shuttered steel mills, but with closed minds. The sooner progressives get used to saying this out loud, the better. Remember when we elected our first black president and many voters lost their collective minds? Trumpism in the form of birtherism was born of an explosive, racist rage among people who saw Michelle Obama as an ape and Trayvon Martin as a thug. Meanwhile—and this hurts, because we love our President– the Obama Administration allowed Republicans to falsely paint him as a divisive, my-way-or-the-highway partisan even when his compromises were enraging liberals. The stimulus bill was almost 1/3 tax cuts the GOP wanted. Had the White House crowed about this compromise, they could have painted the GOP into a corner and killed their message he was a divisive partisan before it could take root. Instead, like Lucy with the football, the GOP got everything they wanted, rejected the bill on party-line vote in the House (three GOP senators voted for it), and won the message battle. Lucy got the football back with health care. Instead of a single-payer system, we got a compromise bill based on a Heritage Foundation model. Again, the Administration failed to convey that this was a compromise bill or sell its own policy to the people who would benefit—the same Trump voters who are about to lose their health care. This enabled the 2010 electoral “shellacking” for which our President graciously accepted some responsibility, though the Democratic voters who stayed home bear just as much. Obamacare and infrastructure investments benefited the very people whom the pundits now claim the Dems forgot in our misguided insistence on insisting transgender people are human beings. The truth is, Obama did good things for working-class people, including millions of Trump voters who rely on Medicaid expansion and health care exchanges. But white America didn’t believe it, for some reason. When the incumbent president’s signature accomplishment is unpopular, you’re going to pay for it at the polls, and Hillary Clinton probably did. In spite of Obama Derangement Syndrome, Secretary Clinton left office with a 64% approval rating— 14 points higher than the President’s. The GOP resumes its war on Clinton, spending millions of tax dollars to wound her. They find no wrongdoing. Nonetheless, by the time Senator Sanders the presidential race on April 30, 2015, Clinton’s approval is down to about 46%. And that’s when it got really ugly. Any progressive who tangled with the Bernie Bros (and then got called a c--- for using the term Bernie Bros, and then got called a c--- again for calling out sexism) can tell you—that primary damaged her. Do you remember? Sanders, not Trump, introduced the rigged system into the election cycle. Sanders painted Clinton as an establishment hack owned by Goldman Sachs and unaccountable to real people. “Weak” candidate Clinton wins the primary anyway, and not because it was rigged. Sanders refuses to acknowledge the math and then claims that superdelegates he’d previously railed against as part of the rigged system should actually rig the system for him precisely because he was successful in weakening her. By the time AP declared Clinton the presumptive nominee on June 6, she was 17 points underwater. Although it’s true the email investigation remained active during this time, her decline among Democrats points to something else going on. Her trend line and Sanders’ go in opposite directions. Meanwhile, the GOP nominates a candidate who on a wave of racism, harnessing the rage of voters who have been seething since a black president was elected. America clutches its collective pearls. Nate Silver says oopsie but doesn’t mention racism because why mention racism? Thanks to pressure from Sanders and his energized base, the Democratic Party assembles its most progressive platform ever. But like Lucy with the football, his revolutionaries still don’t want to play for their own team. Sanders doesn’t do much to change that. After promising to rally his troops around Clinton and stop the bleeding from the primaries, Sanders retreats to Vermont, where he buys a third home, and tweets about billionaires while his disappointed supporters fall for former Lexington Town Meeting Representative Jill Stein, who claims that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump. Then Russia joins the Trump campaign and the FBI helps out (because why should Hillary be able to waltz into the presidency just by beating the GOP and the left wing of her own party?). Our nation holds the first presidential election since a right-wing Supreme Court gutted the Voting rights Act. North Carolina Republicans brag about suppressing black votes, and the results prove they were right to brag. In spite of Russia, the FBI, recalcitrant left wingers, Obama Derangement Syndrome, and the Roberts Court, Clinton still wins close to 3 million more votes than Trump, yet loses the presidency. (Breathe. I’ll wait). It doesn’t take long for the far left to blame Democrats for failing to see the electorate through a class-driven lens. Bernie Sanders takes a dig at Clinton and her supporters, saying “It is not good enough for someone to say I’m a woman, vote for me.” He does not consider that Clinton’s gender caused anyone not to vote for her. In stating that “The working class of this country is being decimated. That’s why Donald Trump won,” he does not account for all of the working class people of color who voted against Trump. Or that the majority of Trump supporters believe President Obama is a Muslim. Our class-first revolutionary says “Identity politics” is a game for middle-aged women. And look where that got us. But funny thing about identity politics is – white people play too, and Trump’s America is proof positive. We have a rash of hate crimes. White nationalists are celebrating with good reason. David Duke has praised Team Trump, including an attorney general designee who once prosecuted voting rights workers (ominously, Trump claims three million “illegals” voted in 2016, foreshadowing federal voter suppression efforts led by AG Sessions). But pay no attention to the chorus of “heil Trumps” behind the screen. With the threat of a Muslim registry, mass deportations, the end of Roe, and renewed assaults on LGBT rights, it’s astonishing—and frankly embarrassing—that so many Democrats believe it’s time to focus on (a) wooing the free college, anti-Establishment (white) youth voters who just weren’t feeling Clinton and (b) charming the working-class whites who were insufficiently alarmed by the "build the wall" and "lock her up" tendencies of Trumpism to reject them. Yes, we need to have a good long talk with those young progressive voters, nine percent of whom voted third party in the face of the Trump threat to progressive priorities. But let’s not apologize for failing to give them the candidate of their dreams. I’m a college teacher, and it’s my job to tell young people when they’re full of shit. Here’s an idea that’s full of shit: it’s a candidate’s job to earn your very special vote, and if she fails to do so, none of the consequences are on you. This idea is the civic equivalent of standing over a drowning person, dangling a life preserver just out of reach, and saying “you didn’t say please.” Saying Hillary Clinton didn’t deserve your vote misses the point. The point is, America deserved better than Trump, and you knew that, and you didn’t step up. Yes, we need to talk to white Trump voters. But let’s not reassure them we don’t think they’re racists just because they voted for a KKK-endorsed candidate who promised to build a wall, register Muslims, and promote stop-and-frisk. To paraphrase Chris Rock, what does a person have to do to earn the term racist—shoot Medgar Evers? The fact is, many voters are racist. Some who acknowledge Trump is racist support him anyway. We’re not going to make this racism go away by pretending white people have a right to be told it doesn’t exist. And so, my dear progressives: I ask you to remember how comfortable we were with saying (accurately) that many Americans rejected President Obama because of racism. Do you? Good. So do I. Now it’s time to acknowledge that Trump benefitted from racism. Now close your eyes and remember how, when only one third of Americans supported marriage equality, we committed to change voters' minds because the long-shot cause of equality was a moral imperative. Do you? Good. So do I. Well, 62.5 million Americans just voted for a KKK-endorsed presidential candidate. We must again commit to change voters' minds, because the long-shot cause of equality is a moral imperative. So say it with me: Yes, Pennsylvania. You are a bigot. Was that so hard?

[warninggraphiccontent]

8 May 2020

Perfect ten

We held our tenth Data Bites event this week, with fantastic presentations from Tom from Citizens Advice (this is pretty extraordinary), Eleanor from the Foreign Office, Glen from our sponsors Microsoft, and Terence from NHSX. It was another cracker - you can watch or listen to it here (now minus Terence's silent comedy routine).

The livestream chat was lively, too...

Previous events, and our report on the first eight, here.

In other news:

The lulled and dumbfound town I'm lucky enough to be an alumnus of the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre Company. This week, the Company released a special lockdown performance of the opening of Under Milk Wood. It's a powerful reminder of the importance of art at this time of crisis, and the benefits it can bring. (And it means I can claim I've acted with Michael Sheen.) Guardian story here, donate to help future generations enjoy the opportunities it provides here.

Orwell and good The Orwell Youth Prize, of which I'm a trustee, remains open for entries, and has loads of resources for young people and teachers. More here.

Data developments Noticed any key data- or transparency-related developments in the UK government's coronavirus response? Please add them to the spreadsheet here.

Digital government and coronavirus I'm working with some colleagues on a short report looking at the impact of coronavirus on digital government - how well have existing services/platforms have coped, and where has the crisis accelerated transformation? Let me know if there's something you think we should be looking at, particularly any new services.

Job opportunity You may remember me publicising a job working with me on Whitehall Monitor a few weeks ago. While we've unfortunately had to put that on hold given everything, the IfG is recruiting a new partnerships officer - apply here.

Charting conflict Today is VE Day, marking the end of the Second World War in Europe. Here are some maps from the Imperial War Museum, Our World in Data's collection of charts on war and peace, and an animated visualisation of the human cost of the conflict.

Enjoy the long weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Tips, tech, etc

Pandemic writing that's really stuck with me (Ed Yong)

Solitude has always been both a blessing and a curse* (The Economist)

Where are the photos of people dying of Covid?* (New York Times)

Remote Work At Scale (Beau Lebens, via Jukesie)

#CovidCreativesToolkit (Dr Kat Braybrooke)

The quest of turning an event from physical to digital (Elisa Valarani)

If you're running Zoom/Teams/Hangout meetings please spend 5 minutes reading this first ... (Geoff Mulgan)

Remote Recording for Podcasters (Nick Garnett)

DIGITAL TOOLS FOR PARTICIPATION: WHERE TO START? (Involve)

Digital Service In a Crisis Tip of the Day (Matt Edgar)

Work And Wellbeing In Times Of Crisis (Carnegie UK Trust)

Graphic content

Viral content: counting the cost

Coronavirus tracked: Has your country’s epidemic peaked? (FT)

Coronavirus tracked: the latest figures as countries fight to contain the pandemic (FT)

What we know, and what we don’t, about the true coronavirus death toll (Full Fact)

UK coronavirus death toll is over 55,000, new modelling suggests* (The Times)

U.S. curve isn't bending (Axios)

Deprived areas hit hardest in UK by pandemic* (FT)

Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by ethnic group, England and Wales: 2 March 2020 to 10 April 2020 (ONS)

Italy’s excess deaths (John Burn-Murdoch)

Five Ways to Follow the Coronavirus Outbreak for Any Metro Area in the U.S.* (The Upshot)

Covid-19 has become one of the biggest killers of 2020* (The Economist)

Case study in the ecological fallacy: Local authorities in England and Wales with more over-65s have LOWER #COVID19 death rates (Matt Singh)

Where The Latest COVID-19 Models Think We're Headed — And Why They Disagree (FiveThirtyEight)

Viral content: impact

Corona shock: Week III* (Tortoise)

The ABCs of the post-COVID economic recovery (Brookings)

Covid-19 has given most world leaders a temporary rise in popularity* (The Economist)

Tennis takes a swing at making players’ earnings fairer* (FT)

Factories Already in Depression Mode on Bloomberg Trade Tracker* (Bloomberg)

The iconic brands that could disappear because of coronavirus* (Washington Post)

Virus exposes gaping holes in Africa’s health systems (Reuters)

Viral content: everything else

What Happens Next? COVID-19 Futures, Explained With Playable Simulations (Marcel Salathé and Nicky Case, via David)

Exiting lockdowns: tracking governments’ changing coronavirus responses* (FT, via Alex)

Is It Safer to Visit a Coffee Shop or a Gym?* (New York Times)

Most States That Are Reopening Fail to Meet White House Guidelines* (New York Times)

Tests conducted vs confirmed cases (Our World in Data, via Marcus)

The race for coronavirus vaccines: a graphical guide (Nature)

Coronavirus coxcombs to waffles* (FT)

Anti-viral content: UK politics

Ministerial directions (IfG)

Elections... (me for IfG)

Conor Burns becomes the fifth minister to resign (outside a reshuffle) during Boris Johnson's premiership... (me for IfG)

UK prime ministers (me for IfG)

English devolution: combined authorities and metro mayors (IfG)

10 years since the 2010 general election... (me for IfG)

Anti-viral content: everything else

Flightera (via Marcus)

Demographics, economy and death tolls boost Biden in polls* (FT)

Data Visualization in Society (Martin Engebretsen and Helen Kennedy, eds.)

How generous are America’s rich?* (The Economist)

The 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer Spring Update (Edelman)

BEST OF THE VISUALISATION WEB… FEBRUARY 2020 (Visualising Data)

Mapping the Places (Commons Library)

Meta data

Viral content: first, contact

The security behind the NHS contact tracing app (National Cyber Security Centre)

COVID-19 Contact tracing: data protection expectations on app development (ICO)

No silver bullets and ‘bumps in the road’ likely but UK contact-tracing app development gathers pace (Computer Weekly)

Exclusive: ‘Wobbly’ tracing app ‘failed’ clinical safety and cyber security tests (HSJ)

Coronavirus (COVID-19): Using data to track the virus (Public Health England)

'Guinea pigs': Isle of Wight residents' give mixed welcome to contact tracing app (The Guardian)

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal (The Register)

NHS COVID-19 App (NHSX)

NHS tracing app in question as experts assess Google-Apple model* (FT)

UK government Covid tracking app: what you need to know! (Privacy International)

New opinion poll – UK contact-tracing app must take account of human rights (Open Knowledge)

Provisos for a Contact Tracing App (Ada Lovelace Institute)

Coronavirus: Hands on with NHS Covid-19 contact-tracing app (BBC News)

India makes contact-tracing app compulsory in viral hot zones despite most local phones not being smart (The Register)

How the NHS fares against Apple and Google: The pros and cons of contact-tracing apps* (Telegraph)

NHS app lacks privacy "due diligence" (Open Rights Group)

There's a gaping flaw in the UK's COVID-19 contact-tracing app — many security experts seem unsure that it will actually work (Business Insider)

Coronavirus (COVID-19): Test, Trace, Isolate, Support (Scottish Government)

New, updated thread of useful #ContactTracingApp resources (Ellen Judson)

Viral content: counting the cost

Improving evidence around the COVID-19 pandemic (Iain Bell)

PMQs: Starmer uses statistics to edge the win (Simon Briscoe)

Meeting the challenge of measuring the economy through the COVID-19 Pandemic (ONS)

For all those at home and abroad who think that small and densely populated Belgium has been worst hit by COVID19 on a per capita basis (Edward Roosens)

Reporting riddles — data quality and interpretation during pandemic times (Michael Head and Sam Chew)

More transparent scientific advice on coronavirus measures should help the government and the public (Jill for IfG)

What is the coronavirus R number and why is it so important?* (Wired)

Chief Statistician’s update: explaining COVID-19 mortality data sources for Wales (Welsh Government Digital and Data Blog)

ABS seeks alternative data to chart recovery (Australian Financial Review, via Sarah)

Viral content: everything else

Demand for NHS tech services rockets amid covid-19 crisis (HSJ, via Marcus)

Privacy in the Pandemic (Future Tense, Slate)

Vote Leave AI firm wins seven government contracts in 18 months (The Guardian)

Palantir’s NHS data project “may outlive coronavirus crisis” (New Statesman)

ADR UK data access: Covid-19 update (ADR UK)

Data to the people (Onward)

Data protection laws are great. Shame they are not being enforced (The Observer)

Government data: We’re all in beta now (Public Digital)

Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx are collecting more customer data than they appear to be (The Verge)

Rage Against Data Dominance: A New Hope (Privacy International)

Digital Identity and GOV.UK Verify Programme Update:Written statement (Cabinet Office)

Target practice

A coronavirus testing target is only valuable if it is part of a wider exit strategy (Nick and Sukh for IfG)

FIVE REASONS TARGETS ARE A TERRIBLE WAY TO DO GOVERNMENT (NLGN)

Stop obsessing over the 100,000 test target (UnHerd)

Anti-viral content

Terminology: it's not black and white (National Cyber Security Centre)

Government response fails to recognise that you can’t leave it to the individual to protect their own privacy in the digital age (Joint Committee on Human Rights)

Bye, Amazon (Tim Bray)

Facebook Names the 20 People Who Can Overrule Mark Zuckerberg* (Wired)

Public acceptability of data sharing for research: Trust, security and public interest (ADR UK)

Special Issue:Florence Nightingale (Significance)

Been struggling with small area UK geography for the last few days, so I've shared some resources to help (David Kane)

The Real One (Democracy Club)

Launch of the OpenOwnership Principles (Open Ownership)

Opportunities

JOB: Data Projects Editor (Telegraph)

INVITATION TO TENDER: Data access initiatives stimulus fund (ODI)

COMPETITION: Enter our 2020 writing competition for early-career statisticians and data scientists (Significance)

EVENT: Launch of People, Power and Technology: The 2020 Digital Attitudes Report (Doteveryone)

EVENT: How data is responding to COVID-19 (APPG on data analytics)

APPRENTICESHIPS in data science and data analysis – applications now open! (Government Statistical Service)

BOARD: Non-Executive Director (Parliamentary Digital Service, via Alice)

And finally...

Viral content

When US GDP falls so much that you decide to break it out of the chart... (Rosamund Pearce)

Did a graph of graphs. (Tom Forth)

Venn diagrams* (Tortoise, via Tim)

Anti-viral content

The end is near: what syllables do German towns and villages end with? (Tobias Kauer)

European population density renders (Alasdair Rae - blogpost here)

A (partial) list of vanity identifiers (Terence Eden)

How Fast Can You Put Georgia Back Together? (Slate)

Why is America’s best journalism published at the end of the year?* (The Economist)

Identifying Generational Gaps in Music (The Pudding)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND LOTS

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be a CS major to be a media company. If I had to do sales and customer support. It's already a successful language. Maybe they'll listen to one of the most successful investors are also the most upstanding. And that being so, revenues would continue to flow in, so you'd have security as well. Many of the mid-century oligopolies had been anointed by the federal government with policies and in wartime, large orders that kept out competitors. I've just described is an acquisition by a public company.1 Com of their name. Lisp that McCarthy described in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use them, rather than by compiler writers. You can never tell what will work.2 The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be if they said yes, and how much is outside of our control. At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way.3

Won't we just tell computers what we want them to do something again is a sign of how much programmers like to be able to convince; they just get tired at higher speeds. The writing is the familiar word salad: Gender is not like some of the most successful startups of all so often have young founders. Or rather, back to stay. 16% false positives.4 The emotional ups and downs were the biggest: This was the era of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs.5 I was in grad school, in the sense of making a single thing. For outsiders this translates into two ways to pass them: to be good at hacking the test itself. To free 0. The way to get rich and the other founders causes you to get lost. In particular, you now have to deal with employees, who often have different motivations: I knew the founder equation and had been focused on it since I knew I wanted to start a new company using Lisp. But the real advantage of individual filters is that they'll all be different. If this were a movie, ominous music would begin here.6

Why risk it? I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the acquirer would have been harmful. A startup's destination is to grow really big; ramen profitability is a trick for getting users to start talking to you. During this time you'll do little but work, because we didn't want them to do?7 I've noticed this too.8 But the better you do, the less you can predict how people will use it.9 Don't just think investors are stupid. What are the genuine advantages of being first to market are not so overwhelmingly great. When you see these ideas laid out like that, they'd find some surprises. Julian thought we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. Few will even notice.

Not recent ones; you wouldn't find a smoking statistical gun. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? And they each have. And then we'll waste our time trying to predict how the startups we've funded will do, because we're trying to learn how to pick winners. Good does not mean being a pushover.10 What's gross is a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to have a good guide from one to the other.11 I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. And yet he's a super nice guy. So it turns out to be widely applicable.

Once you acknowledge that, you stop believing there is nothing else you could be called. Just thinking about it afterward. In the calculus class, but I count them as false positives because I hadn't been deleting them as spams before. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of having the next.12 People just don't seem to have fully grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy.13 What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? The long hours? One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars, perhaps millions, just to figure out where. Economist J. It increases the work of being inconsistent. I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end. When I heard about after the Slashdot article was Bill Yerazunis' CRM114.

A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. No, you can't afford not to have to have practical applications to be interesting, the kinds of things people like in other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in the past there were multiple ways to do it now. Or will it be something that you do fairly late in the life of a program, when you think about people you know from college or grad school. Culturally we have ever less common ground.14 If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have gotten a lot more in common than this, of course, but educated people rarely did, because in the middle who see how important luck is. I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. If you look at it from the rich people's point of view, the picture is more encouraging.15 I feel bad after these days too, but it's not likely to have happened to any bigger than a cell. There are two questions VCs ask that you shouldn't answer: Who else are you talking to?

That's what board control means in practice. Pantel and Lin, and another by a group from Microsoft Research. Professors and bosses usually feel some sense of responsibility toward you; if you win an Olympic gold medal, you can work on projects with an intensity in both senses that few insiders can match. Once you cross into ramen profitable, everything changes. How hard it is to live in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. So the odds are against you.16 If you use a fixed number like this. The way a startup feels is at least a roller coaster and not drowning. And more specifically, is it worth it? We're trying to increase the number of such domains is so large.

It's not merely that they don't dress up. What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a valiant effort and fail, they'll cut you a break. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. The token Url optmails meaning optmails within a url occurs 1223 times. Probably the biggest danger is surprise. I'd have to read a few philosophy books.17 We often emphasize how rarely startups win simply because they hit on some magic idea. In the software business. Neither of the conventional stories about the distinction between wisdom and intelligence. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate. What people seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world.

Notes

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an absolute sense, if you aren't embarrassed by what one delivers, not just for her but for the future.

I wonder how much they can do it well enough to convince limited partners. Some, like storytellers, must have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because companies don't. We didn't let him off, either as an adult.

B get your employer to renounce, in which many people work with an online service.

They seem to be good. If you're dealing with the other becomes visible.

It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it. For example, you're going to create wealth with no deadline, you can use this technique, you'll be well on your product, just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have allotted for the founders enough autonomy that they discovered in the right choice in a more powerful sororities at your school sucks, and I don't think they'll be able to grow as big as a child, either, that you can't mess with the New Deal was a sort of things you want to believe this much. It should be specialists in startups tend to use them to.

We just tried to be clear and concise, because you have to deliver the lines meant for a 24 year old son, you'll be well on your board, consisting of two founders and one of the magazine they'd accepted it for you? I almost hesitate to raise the next round.

They thought most programming would be possible to have them soon.

Foster, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the company's expense by selling recordings.

Peter Norvig found that three quarters of them.

And since everyone involved is so pervasive how often the answer, and—new things start with their users. Spices are also exempt. And starting an outdoor portal. It's one of the more accurate metaphor would be on demand, and thus no form nor anyone to call those before a dream world.

But it turns out to be identified with you, what if they knew. A day job might actually be bad if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press hit, but we are at selling it. If they were offered were so bad that they don't yet have any of the things I find I never watch movies in theaters anymore.

At three months we can't improve a startup's prospects by 6.

What people who chose the wrong side of the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, and partly simple ignorance. Just use the standard edition of Aristotle's works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later.

This is a function of prep schools do, so the best in the sense of the iPhone SDK. I'm not against editing. Quoted in: Life seemed so much better that you never have left PARC. Siegel points out, they are.

But in a bar. They may not be able to raise more, the second phase is less than a VC means they'll look bad if the quality of production is not work too hard to erase from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. And that is actually from the CIA.

Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow.

CEOs in the middle class values; it has to grind. But the Wufoos are exceptionally disciplined.

[unicron-x]

[yourandyourbs] explains how economics have changed in the last 80 years, how economic objectives are the key (employment vs inflation targets), and why traditional orthodoxy will fail us all in modern world.

Now, I have to tell you Kennedy isn’t making these rules up. They did become orthodoxy in advanced-economy treasuries in the 1980s. They’re the reason John Kerin’s budget of 1991, delivered in the depths of "the recession we [didn’t] have to have" contained zero stimulus, meaning the stimulus, when it came in February 1992, came too late.

This view isn't wide enough and lacks all the details. The worlds entire global economy software was changed, not just ours, under the guidance of Milton Friedman.

1945-1980 - Computer software No.2:

After WW2, the world's economy would be restored with the USD. The policy target would be full employment as this was believed to stop the rise of fascists again (they need to look at this again). We had homogenous national economies, we all produced most of the same stuff, fridges, cars etc... There was restricted financial markets. Growth would be lead by wage growth, high taxes and transfers would be the government's steering mechanism for the economy, and the government kept much of the commanding heights of industry under democratic/national capital control - Telecom, Qantas etc - again a steering mechanism to make sure this form of capitalism worked. No one gave a shit who ran the central bank and no one knew their name.

A lot of this came from the ideas of economist John Maynard Keynes, and his ideas are credited for getting the world out of the great depression when the Friedmanite types wanted to do nothing (let the market fix itself, it's magic!)

I've posted this quote from Keynes' book - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - here before, but I'll do it again, as it's a good summarisation of the key concept behind the 1945-1980 era.

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."

As opposed to Milton Friedman's right wing capitalist fairy tale of the market will fix itself.

There is a bug in this post WW2 software, as is with all forms of capitalism (why people like Marx thought capitalism was always in a crisis), which led to the stagflation crisis - which led to the global software reboot. We are led to believe that creating money creates inflation. While this can be true in certain circumstances and if it is abused too far, it's not the key driver. During this post WW2 era, full employment and strong labour led to high wage growth. For capitalists to keep paying workers more and to see their ROI's, they needed advancements in productivity and they had to raise prices. Eventually, the bug hit and inflation rose so high they didn't want to invest - so they withheld their capital, a capital strike.

The stagflation crisis. During this post WW2 era, it was a debtors paradise. You'd borrow money for houses and whatever, and because of the inflation, it was easy to pay the money back. Boomers had banks eat half their mortgages in inflation. The problem arose when it went so high that capital didn't want to invest. Inflation can be a good thing, right now, we're in a private debt hole and inflation would help us get out of it. Inflation too low is as bad as too high. Today, it is too low. Money creation is not raising inflation, not even when many trillions were dumped into the global economy after 2008 - Milton Friedman and his laissez-faire hacks were wrong. Full employment and strong labour drove inflation, not money creation.

We see an immense amount of money creation today both through governments and through the financial system, and inflation is extremely low. I remember watching all the laissez-faire hacks screaming after the 2008 crisis that QE would bring hyper-inflation (and they urged you to buy their gold)... It of course never happened. Inflation didn't budge.

While something had to be done to fix the stagflation crisis, capital took advantage of the crisis and swung everything too far in their favour. We just needed to bring down inflation partially, not all the way. There's a few mechanisms for this and we didn't need to destroy labour in the process.

So we get to 1980-2008, computer software No.3:

The policy target changes from full employment to price stability. The value of capital is to be "restored". The mechanism is maximum global integration and deregulated financial markets. The price of money shoots through the roof to slow inflation. The welfare state is to be wound back. Labour markets would become "flexible". Growth would now be led by profits, not wage growth (any wonder why wages are going flat). The steering mechanism of democracy and national capital would be ended and this would be handed over to private capital. Suddenly, everyone knows who runs the central banks - because the price of money becomes so important.

There would be low taxes and low transfers (the redistribution). Inflation is brought to extremely low levels. Because wage growth no longer drove growth, it's now dependent on a credit bubble - and thus the bug of this Milton Friedman/neoliberal software hits. People can only borrow so much money, especially when their wages aren't rising and the low inflation isn't eating any of the debt. The extremely low inflation is a creditors paradise - until the debts can't be paid back. The whole thing blows up in 2008 and we're in a kind of limbo, transition phase.

It's near dead, but the capitalist class have put the system onto life support by dumping massive amounts of money into the world's economies (money that goes mostly to the top) while telling the plebs they need to live within their means.

This should all sound really familiar to people across the world. It wasn't something that was just done in Australia. For some reason, we're in a global economy and people still view the system through a national lens. Australia doesn't matter much to capitalist power, and we're just along for the ride. Just as in the past, we'll change our software when capitalist power changes theirs. We seem to be unable to deal with it democratically and nationally, with a neoliberal media filling heads with bad ideas.

From a capitalist perspective (I don't even consider myself a capitalist, I think the world has to do better for many reasons - especially environmental sustainability), we need to bring back some of the 1945-1980 software. We see fascism rising across the world today, and full employment is what deals with that, just as it did in the past. We need higher inflation and wage growth, just not too high. The problem is capitalism is near impossible, perhaps impossible to manage well. It always falls into a pile of shit. Albert Einstein did not call capitalism "economic anarchy" for no reason.

In a globalised world, it won't be possible to go back to completely homogenous national economies, but we can partially do this. The key is the policy target. Full employment and wage growth over price stability and profit growth. There is also another key. Stop listening to the cheerleaders of free-markets. They believe in 18th-century fairy tales about what capitalism is and what it can achieve. They are ideological and frankly, religious about markets. Their economic models have numbers that stack up on paper, but they don't reflect the reality of capitalism. They've never been taught anything critical about capitalism.

Professor Richard Wolff is an economist who has degrees from Harvard, Stanford and Yale, and he says it clearly - I was never taught anything critical about capitalism, just a big song and dance about how perfect it is. If you want to understand the flaws of capitalism, you need to hear its critics, not its cheerleaders. Some capitalists are rational... Business Insider recommends their viewership to read Karl Marx - so they can better understand the flaws of this system. They don't play a childish propaganda game that Marx was Satan himself.

I am by no means a Paul Krugman fan. Krugman's idiocy (and most of the economist class) is what led us down this hole. But I'll give him this. Eventually, he saw that his globalised, neoliberal capitalist fairy tales from the 90's were wrong.

“Economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” - Paul Krugman.

[cathrynstreich]

These Are the Biggest Mistakes People Make With Social Security

(TNS)—Navigating Social Security can be cumbersome, to say the least. Even basic questions such as when you should retire can come to take on an immense and sometimes desperate tone as you try to make a decision that doesn’t screw up your retirement beyond repair.

Bankrate spoke with some experts to get their take on some of the biggest mistakes you can make with Social Security. Here’s what you should try to avoid doing as you navigate Social Security’s labyrinth.

Stick to a One-Size-Fits-All Strategy The biggest mistake people make is “they do a quick Google search and take information that is meant to be very much at the macro level, and thus not individualized,” says Daniel Milan, managing partner of Cornerstone Financial Services. Often, they “fail to take into account their own household budget, financial needs and outside investment income.”

Since life situations can be different, it’s necessary to have a personalized approach that helps you optimize your retirement. And Social Security is not a “one-size-fits-all” experience. Social Security is complex. While that’s partly by design to help as many people as possible, it still creates a lot of headaches for those nearing retirement. While many retirees have a straightforward experience, others need and can receive specialized aid from the program.

“There are so many different strategies that exist when it comes to collecting benefits, and so many variables to consider, that listening to advice painted with a broad brush can prove to be detrimental,” says Cory Bittner, co-founder and COO of Falcon Wealth Advisors.

“Creating a financial plan and understanding the inner workings of it should be a prerequisite before making the decision to file to collect benefits,” says Bittner. He suggests people look for a financial adviser who is a fiduciary and is experienced at planning for retirement.

Misunderstanding How Much Money You’ll Receive If you’ve been working and contributing to the Social Security fund, then you’ve likely received a statement of benefits, an estimate of what you might likely receive in the future. But that figure can be misleading in several ways, and you need to understand what’s driving the estimate.

“People see their statements, the dollar amount that is listed on the front, and assume that’s what they will start receiving monthly whenever they begin filing for their benefits,” says Bittner.

“However, the amount reflected on the front page of a Social Security statement is typically the amount someone will receive if they wait until their full retirement age to begin collecting benefits, and it assumes they work until that age and contribute to Social Security,” he says.

So if you stop working immediately at the earliest age to collect your benefits and don’t wait, don’t expect the full amount. In addition, this dollar amount is pre-tax, so you’ll have to figure how much tax will be stripped from your monthly check before you actually receive it.

As you’re planning your retirement budget, you’ll need to carefully assess how much money will actually make its way into your pocket.

Assuming Social Security Will Fully Cover Your Expenses After a lifetime of working, many people assume that Social Security will meet their needs when they can no longer clock in. But unless your budget is minimal, that probably won’t be the case.

“The biggest mistake people make is thinking Social Security will be sufficient to retire on without also cutting one’s standard of living significantly,” says Ryan McMaken, economist and fellow at the Mises Institute, an economics think tank.

“If they try to fund their entire retirement on Social Security, they’re going to quickly find they’ll need to downsize in terms of housing and also in transportation and entertainment,” he says.

“Social Security is only designed to replace about 40 percent of your income,” says Tony Drake, a CFP and founder of Drake & Associates. “Most people will need at least 80 percent of their pre-retirement income to maintain the lifestyle they want in retirement.”

And with all that free time in retirement, you may be inclined to increase your spending well beyond that 80 percent level, Drake suggests. Healthcare is another expense that may consume a much larger portion of retirees’ budgets than they initially suspect.

So with the limited nature of Social Security, retirees who want to live large in their golden years must make sure that they have other sources of income. Many workers turn to their company’s 401(k) plan, but many other attractive options exist to fund retirement.

Not Making Extra Preparations, as a Woman For a variety of reasons, women need to be extra prepared when planning for retirement. Women typically earn less than men over their working careers, and studies have shown that women have longer lifespans on average compared to men, leaving many widows with substantial financial needs, for example.

“While Social Security benefits are neutral when it comes to gender, there are many factors that women need to consider with regard to their benefits,” says Mary Ann Ferreira, a certified financial planner at Viridian Advisors.

“Women who work outside the home typically miss an average of 11.5 years of employment due to childcare and care of elderly parents.” She also notes the substantial gender pay gap.

And those lower lifetime earnings carry on into retirement, with smaller retirement accounts and a lower Social Security payout.

She sees many women working longer and saving more in order to cope with the challenge. “Many women are considering retiring at 70 rather than the full retirement age of 66 or 67. In doing so, they may boost their Social Security benefits by as much as 24 percent,” she says.

In addition to spousal support benefits that surviving spouses may receive, divorcees may also receive benefits.

“I find that women typically forget that they are eligible for divorced spousal and survivor benefits if they were married for over 10 years,” says John Foxworthy, director of Financial Planning at Foxworthy Wealth Advisors. “If they have been divorced for more than two years, the ex-spouse doesn’t even need to file in order to receive the divorced spouse benefit.”

Foxworthy says that the ex-spouse is not notified of the benefits election, so “there is no need to worry about a long-lost ex-spouse finding out that you are taking benefits on their record.”

Taking Social Security at the Wrong Time And the question that keeps soon-to-be retirees up at night: When should they take their benefits? That depends heavily on their unique situation, but one of the biggest blunders is even simpler: failing to calculate what the best option is.

“The biggest mistake that I see most regularly is when people elect their benefits without doing the math first,” says Foxworthy. “There really isn’t a ‘do-over’ when it comes to Social Security, and the vast majority of people are leaving money on the table.”

Foxworthy details a situation involving a married couple, both of whom turned 62 years old and were planning on filing for benefits immediately. “We ran an analysis and uncovered a strategy to elect benefits that will get them $221,000 more over their lifetime,” he says. “That much money can have a significant impact on their retirement picture.”

Retirees who can go a few extra years without claiming their benefits can continue contributing to the program and increase their benefits at the same time.

“Claiming Social Security too soon is one of the most common mistakes we see,” says Drake. “Although 62 is the earliest and most popular age to claim your benefits, your monthly check will be permanently reduced by about 25 percent or more.”

To get your full benefit, you have to wait until full retirement age, between 66 and 67, he says.

But there’s potential for more. “There’s an added benefit to waiting to claim after you hit full retirement age. Your benefit increases by as much as 8 percent each year until you reach age 70.”

Bottom Line Because Social Security is so complex, it’s tough to navigate, maximize your benefits or even just figure out where to begin. Even if you don’t quite maximize your payouts, it’s beneficial to know the mistakes to avoid. Most notably, you’ll want to know how much money you’ll receive and develop personalized strategies—perhaps with a financial adviser—that best fit your needs. 

©2019 Bankrate.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

The post These Are the Biggest Mistakes People Make With Social Security appeared first on RISMedia.

These Are the Biggest Mistakes People Make With Social Security published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

[tortuga-aak]

Democrats need to stop whining about the deficit

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Democrats are opposing Republican tax cuts partly on the basis that they will expand the US budget deficit.

That's the wrong argument to make — not just now but in any low-inflation environment.

The right argument against the plan is that it's skewed toward the wealthy and includes changes that won't benefit the economy.

"There are better ways to invest in our economy," says Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee's Democratic staff. "Investing in our nation's infrastructure, education, and R&D would do more to boost future productivity than trickle-down tax cuts for the rich."

There are a few lines you can take to argue against tax cuts, including the idea that they benefit mostly huge companies and rich Americans.

Here's the wrong one: In the weeks leading up to Thursday's reveal of the Republican tax plan, Democrats have been harping on about higher budget deficits and a resulting "entitlement crisis" as a key justification for opposing President Donald Trump's tax plan.

It's enough that Ylan Mui of CNBC has taken to calling Democrats the "new deficit hawks."

For the Democrats to take this line against the tax cuts is a mistake for three reasons. First, it's hard for voters to understand, even when it's dumbed down into the old trope of "you wouldn't run your household like this."

Second, it's bad economics. Unlike households, governments can run big deficits, and they should be doing so especially when inflation is as low as it is today. Doing so can help spur economic growth, and the Democrats know this because it was a key lesson of the post-financial-crisis recovery.

Economists can and should argue over the best uses of that deficit — spending that boosts the economy versus tax cuts that line the pockets of the rich — but that's a tangential argument for those not currently in power.

Third, there are much better objections about the harm this tax plan could cause — such as leading to greater inequality and more struggles for the middle class — or the false promises (such as that it will lead to higher wages) it's being pitched with.

"The deficit is an abstraction that is pretty much meaningless to anyone other than an economist or budget wonk," says Dean Baker, an economist who is the codirector of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

"To my view, the issue is that the Republicans are looking to take money from programs people care about and need, like Medicare and Medicaid, and use it to give tax breaks to rich people. This is concrete and people can understand it.

"The deficit is not. And of course as an economic matter, it is not clear that a larger deficit would be a bad thing — although I do have to say, we are likely getting close to full employment, so we probably don't want too much larger of a deficit."

'It would explode' the deficit

Here's the kind of thing Democrats have been saying.

"The longer we wait to address the debt in a serious manner, the more the safety net frays, and the harder this crisis will be to address," Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said last month.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, wrote in a recent op-ed article that the proposal "helps the rich at the expense of the middle class, it would explode the deficit, and it hasn't gone through a thorough, bipartisan process."

At least he got two out of three right.

Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee's Democratic staff, laid out the case against these arguments nicely in a recent New York Times op-ed article.

"Are the proposed tax cuts a huge giveaway to the rich? Most definitely," wrote Kelton, a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University. "Will they, as advertised, create a booming economy with benefits that trickle down to everyone else? I don't think so. Trump's plan will widen the country's already dangerous wealth and income gaps, and because the gains go mostly to those at the very top, the tax cuts won't do much to promote broad-based consumer spending or overall job growth."

That, Kelton says, should be enough to reject the plan.

Getty Images

"But it would be unwise to oppose tax cuts, or any other federal legislation, simply because they add to the deficit," she warns.

Kelton and other economists of wide-ranging political stripes argue that the biggest mistake politicians make is comparing government spending and budgets to those of households. The analogy appears sound, but it's really apples and oranges. Unlike families, who may lack sufficient funds to pay their bills, governments that control their own currencies can always print money to meet their obligations.

Therefore a default is technically impossible. The only risk is inflation, if excessive bond issuance leads to rising prices. But the US economy has been suffering chronically from the opposite problem — and inflation rate that has consistently fallen short of the Federal Reserve's 2% target for five years, pointing to an economy that is still operating below potential and reflecting stagnant wage growth for much of the population.

Social Security can never run out of money — really

I asked Kelton why, given her counterintuitive argument that deficits don't really matter, Americans should take her word for it. Her reply: Don't. Instead, listen to what Alan Greenspan, the prominent Republican former Federal Reserve chairman who is a purported deficit hawk, had to say on the matter.

In March 2005, he was pressed by a young congressman named Paul Ryan about the need for privatizing Social Security because of the prospect of a looming "entitlements crisis." Greenspan replied rather bitingly that there was no such thing or even a remote possibility.

"I wouldn't say that the pay-as-you-go benefits are insecure in the sense that there's nothing to prevent the federal government to create as much money as it wants and pays it to somebody," Greenspan told an incredulous Ryan.

"The question is how do you set up a system that assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase. So it's not a question of security — it's a question of the structure of the financial system."

That's what Democrats should be saying, rather than regurgitating the old Republican rouse — which even the GOP is willing to abandon when it's convenient — about a looming government debt crisis that never comes.

Republican talking points

"Instead of repeating talking points that reinforce the idea that Social Security is somehow financially unsustainable, Democrats should play Greenspan's remarks on a loop. They should call attention to what Greenspan said — under oath — about the program's long-term sustainability," Kelton said.

"Instead of accepting the premise that Social Security is in trouble, Democrats should accept Greenspan's challenge — put forward an agenda that will do more to promote future growth than anything the Republicans are offering."

The financial crisis was instructive on this count. Many critics of both the federal government's fiscal stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s bond purchases worried that the country was getting so deep into debt that one of two things was bound to happen: a crisis in the Treasury market or a bout of runaway inflation. Nine years into the recovery, Treasury yields remain near historic lows and inflation is not only contained but remains worryingly low.

That last point is key: It's not that folks like Kelton and Baker believe there is no risk to government spending. They simply argue that the only risks are the misallocation of resources and inflation — not some amorphous "debt crisis" or default of the sort some politicians and market analysts have shouted about.

Unlike Greece, which actually did default on its debt because of a lack of control over its own currency, the US could default only by choice. Trump flirted with that choice once as a candidate — but quickly backed away from the threat after he realized the catastrophic market and economic consequences such a debacle would have.

Listen to the Oracle

In August 2011, after the US's credit rating was downgraded for the fist time following a prolonged impasse over the US debt ceiling, Greenspan was asked during a "Meet the Press" interview about the issue of "unfunded liabilities" and "entitlements."

His response again spoke volumes: "The United States can pay any debt it has because it can always print money to do that, so there is zero probability of default."

REUTERS

So what should Democrats be focused on if not deficits? On that count, Trump actually has the right idea: They should be focused on boosting economic growth. Unlike Trump, however, Democrats need to be concerned about other matters like distribution, wage growth, and the quality of social services necessary to underpin a sustainable economy. That includes everything from the wider availability of high-quality education and health, childcare, elderly care, and other key services that are neglected by a government more focused on external conflict than domestic strife.

"What if we choose policies that will help us to build a more productive economy? If we were having the right debate, we would be laser-focused on this challenge," Kelton said.

"I doubt very much that Trump's tax cuts — which are heavily skewed in favor of the very rich — would come out on top. There are better ways to invest in our economy. Investing in our nation's infrastructure, education, and R&D would do more to boost future productivity than trickle-down tax cuts for the rich."

NOW WATCH: 6 airline industry secrets that will help you fly like a pro

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[popofventi]

Mental Yoga Sunday / 5 Favorite Long Form Reads of the Week / Issue No. 12

"Life is a soldier's sojourn, a night at an inn."  -- Marcus Aurelius

Mental Yoga Sunday is a callback to those lazy mornings and afternoons spent reading the newspaper or finishing up a dog eared novel. Days lost in long shadow in a hidden corner full of nothing but quiet and weak wifi. Immerse yourself for a spell in something longer than a text string but shorter than a binge marathon. Here are my favorite long form reads this week.

1

High Pressure Parenting (1843 Magazine)

We invest far more time and money in raising our children than our parents did. Ryan Avent wonders whether we’re doing it in their best interests – or in ours

"In 1997, a few months into my first year at university, I was seized by the conviction that I had made a terrible mistake. I had gone to study engineering at the giant state university in my hometown, one of the many enormous, sturdy, low-cost public universities that helped make America’s middle class the largest, best-educated and richest in the world in the 20th century. I thought I should have done better. In exchanging emails with friends on other, more exclusive campuses I started to get the feeling that I had missed the exit onto the fast track, that at that early stage of adult life I had already doomed myself to anonymous mediocrity.

I don’t have too many regrets about my college education now. I’m an economics writer at The Economist and an author; my alma mater helped prepare me for the career. Yet my worries were not entirely unfounded. When I got into journalism in Washington, DC, I found myself surrounded by Ivy Leaguers, with training, connections and a world view very different from mine. When I moved to The Economist’s main office, in London, the air became more rarefied still. The upper echelons of British professional life are dominated by Oxbridge (elite code for Oxford and Cambridge). At times, competing in the professional world without a degree from one of these places can feel like scaling a sheer wall without a rope: it can be done, but sometimes it seems very hard.

In 2006 I married a graduate of another public university (a slightly snootier one, whose alums refer to it as a “public Ivy”). We have two children of early school age. Every so often we find ourselves talking about what we want for their future and what they might want for themselves, asking ourselves, in so many words: how badly do we want them to go to Harvard? I don’t know if either of my children will have the inclination or the résumé to do so; my position, as a parent, is that Harvard would be lucky to have them. I still have what I imagine must be the naive ideas of a parent of young children, that they will develop their own interests and passions as they grow older: that taking a drill-sergeant approach to learning and to homework would ultimately be counterproductive.

But there is nothing like a conversation with our friends about their own child-rearing habits to make me doubt this approach. My daughter is six. Some of her classmates are woken early by their parents to bone up on maths and reading. Many of them have full after-school schedules. They attend school in Arlington, Virginia, home to one of the best public-school systems in America. Yet many worry that is not enough, and plot their children’s route to Thomas Jefferson, Northern Virginia’s highly selective magnet high school, or to the region’s tony private schools: funnels to America’s top universities and elite society, attended by the offspring of the rich and powerful.

Listening to them I think our approach is the right one. But I also feel a tremor of panic, the smallest concern that my children may be missing the slip-road onto the highway of opportunity: an echo of the fear I felt in my sweltering freshman dorm room 19 years ago." - FULL ARTICLE

2

What If The Internet Stopped Working For A Day? (BBC Future)

"Jeff Hancock likes to give his Stanford University students weekend assignments that let them experience concepts discussed in class for themselves. Before 2008, he would sometimes challenge his students to stay off the internet for 48 hours and then discuss how it affected them. But when Hancock returned to work in 2009, after a year-long sabbatical, things had changed.

“When I tried to introduce the task, there was a class revolt,” says Hancock, who studies the psychological and social processes involved in online communication. “The students emphatically said the assignment was impossible and unfair.”

They argued that going offline even for a weekend would prevent them from completing work in other classes, ruin their social lives, and make their friends and family worry that something terrible had happened to them. Hancock had to concede and cancelled the activity – and he’s never attempted it again. “That was 2009, and now with mobile as present as it is, I don’t even know what students would do if I asked them to do that,” he says. “They’d probably report me to the university president." - FULL ARTICLE

3

‘The Jordan Rules’ Was the Mother of All Woj Bombs (The Ringer)

Remembering Sam Smith’s scandalous, detail-laced, seemingly impossible chronicle of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the early 1990s, 25 years later

"...Jordan seethes with embarrassment. “I hate when I have to read that in the papers the next day, that I couldn’t do something,” he tells another player. The next day, at practice in Seattle, Jordan shows up Jackson by refusing to take more than a shot or two. “Michael wouldn’t say a word to anyone,” Horace Grant says.

The same night — such is the granular depth of The Jordan Rules — Jordan goes to another nightclub and runs into a motormouth Sonics rookie named Gary Payton. “I’ve got my millions and I’m buying my Ferraris and Testarossas, too,” Payton brags.

“No problem,” Jordan replies. “I get them for free.” - FULL ARTICLE

4

Twelve Seconds of Gunfire (The Washington Post)

In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground

"Recess had finally started, so Ava Olsen picked up her chocolate cupcake, then headed outside toward the swings. And that’s when the 7-year-old saw the gun.

It was black and in the hand of someone the first-graders on the playground would later describe as a thin, towering figure with wispy blond hair and angry eyes. Dressed in dark clothes and a baseball cap, he had just driven up in a Dodge Ram, jumping out of the pickup as it rolled into the chain-link fence that surrounded the play area. It was 1:41 on a balmy, blue-sky afternoon in late September, and Ava’s class was just emerging from an open door directly in front of him to join the other kids already outside. At first, a few of them assumed he had come to help with something or say hello.

Then he pulled the trigger.

“I hate my life,” the children heard him scream in the same moment he added Townville Elementary to the long list of American schools redefined by a shooting." - FULL ARTICLE

5A

Mislabeled (Lapham's Quarterly)

Things discovered are not always things correctly named.

5B

No Bad Ideas (Lapham's Quarterly)

Patents from America’s past and present.

[rebeccahpedersen]

Liberal Government’s “16-Point Plan” Comes Up 14 1/2 Points Shy

TorontoRealtyBlog

I’ve had the weekend to digest the “Ontario Fair Housing Plan,” the title of which sounds eerily-similar to the “Ontario Fair Hydro Plan,” and I’ve come to the sad, yet somewhat expected conclusion, that the entire thing is just political rhetoric.

Save for a foreign buyer’s tax that might affect a couple people here and there, and rent controls, the rest of the “plan” is a list of vague, rambling, hollow, and incomplete “points” that don’t specify actual action to be taken, or a timeline, or a plan for implementation.

Mumbo-jumbo.  Gobbledygook.  Hocus-pocus.  Blather.

What else would you expect from Kathleen Wynne?

“You can’t tax your way into a cooler market.”

That’s what I’ve said all along.

From the moment the rumblings started about the government “taking steps to cool the market,” through the speculation about what measures they would take, right up to last week when their 16-point plan was announced, I’ve continued to reiterate that the government simply can’t tax their way to a cooler market.

It’s naive.  It’s novice.  And it’s insulting to the constituents of the province.

Taking money away from people is not going to help cool the real estate market.

The real estate market, like any market, is about two things: supply and demand.

I know, I know – I’ve said this before a thousand times.  And although that’s more of a metaphor, I think over the years, the times I have mentioned supply and demand may now actually add up to a thousand!

In any event, while I didn’t have high hopes for the Liberals’ measures to address the housing market, I did hope that they would do the simplest, easiest, most obvious thing possible and start their “plan” by looking at supply and demand.

Having read through their plan, it’s now clear that they did nothing of the sort.

Friday’s blog, for which I applaud each and every one of you who commented, probably had more meaningful, well-thought-out ideas than every meeting between the Liberal figureheads over the past few months.

Why can’t they see what’s staring them right in the face, and yet we simple folk can?

If you want to cool the market, you need to do one, or both, of the following:

Decrease Demand

Increase Supply

It’s not rocket science, and yet watching the Liberals try and figure this out is like watching monkeys try and put blocks into slots.

All the Liberals needed to do, that is, if they really wanted to attempt to cool the market (many think they weren’t interested in seriously implementing policy change, but rather wanted to hold a press conference and make announcements about nothing), is figure out how to decrease demand, or increase supply.  That’s it.  It’s that simple.

Instead, what we got last week were 16-nonsense-points, some of which had nothing to do with real estate (elevators???), or were vague, or referenced a future call to action.

Let’s start from the beginning here, and I’m working off the “16-Point Plan” which can be found HERE.

1) Foreign Buyer’s Tax

I’ve been saying all along, that if we want to cool the market – in this case, by decreasing demand, then we can do so rather easily by implementing a foreign ownership ban, that masquerades as a tax.

Because as I’ve said with Vancouver – nobody, I don’t care how rich they are, is going to pay a $300,000 fee to purchase a $2,000,000 property.

That tax in Vancouver is essentially a ban.

And while I can see why governments don’t want to enact “bans,” and thus they’ve implemented a tax that nobody is going to pay, I still can’t see why Ontario, or Toronto, didn’t implement the tax as Vancouver did.

Because make no mistake – our tax is not their tax.

Their tax is a 15% tax on foreign buyers.

Our tax is a 15% on foreign buyers, subject to a slew of exemptions and rebates.

Their tax will have a tangible effect, and already has.

Our tax will have virtually no effect.

The government really dropped the ball here, that is, if they wanted to actually decrease demand with this foreign buyer’s tax.

And personally, I was all for the tax, er, ban.

Canada is for Canadians, or at least it should be.  I see no reason why hard-working, tax-paying Canadians should be pushed to the back of the line, because people across the world, who’s currency renders ours Monopoly-money, are buying up our real estate like it’s going out of style.

I know there’s a counter-argument to be made here, and one upon a time, I would have made it.  Every country strives desperately for foreign investment, and some time ago, as will be the case in the future, Canadians will be starving for foreign investment.

But that time is not now.  Not with respect to real estate.

So while I personally would have supported measures similar to that of Australia, I think what the government did last week – telling constituents that they’re bringing in a tax, when the tax will have a fraction of the implied effect, is gutless.

2) Rent Controls

This is, quite possibly, the stupidest thing the Wynne government has ever done.

Thirty years from now, university students will be reading about this policy decision in text books.

I haven’t seen a single economist who thinks this is a good idea, in fact, every economist out there is saying it will have the complete opposite effect as what was intended.

And let’s not forget, that this whole issue came out of a CBC story that was, in my opinion, flawed journalism.

Back in February, Shannon Martin from the CBC wrote a story about how her rent was going up $1,000 per month, and that led to other stories about rents “doubling.”

As several commenters pointed out on Friday’s blog, this wasn’t about rents going up – it was about getting tenants out so that the landlord could sell the unit.

If you’re a landlord in this market, you know that not only do you need to sell your condo with vacant possession (ie. no tenant attached), but you also need the unit vacant for the sale process so you can clean, stage, and have unfettered access.

So through legal means, you can tell the tenant his or her rent is going up “one hundred billion dollars,” and that will cause them to walk away.

There was zero mention of this in the CBC story, nor was it explained in follow-up articles.

All the media was about how “prices for rentals are doubling,” and all the while I pulled my hair out and tried to find somebody to listen.

I must have told 5-6 media members, through interviews that they solicited, how misleading these stories were.

But nobody reported what was really going on.

And I felt like this:

How fitting that a Liberal policy change was based on flawed and misrepresented information.

3) Actions To Protect Tenants

The Liberal government is going to give us a “standardized lease,” which might be worthwhile, except that we already have one.

If you do a lease through MLS, you’re signing the standard OREA “Agreement to Lease,” which is subject to the clauses and conditions that the landlord and tenant agree to.

Those clauses and conditions must be variable.  They form part of the negotiation, just like the price, deposit, and closing date.

Who is going to create this standardized lease?  Who is going to enforce it?  How is it going to be implemented?  And what if a landlord doesn’t like it?

As it stands now, the “standard” OREA “Agreement of Purchase & Sale” doesn’t stop somebody from taking a ballpoint pen and striking out some of the “pre-printed text.”

What the hell do they mean with this standardized lease?

4) Leverage The Value Of Surplus Provincial Lands

Great idea.

But how long will it take to implement?

This will undoubtedly go through studies, committees, panels, reviews, and eventually fizzle out like most other proposals.

5% of the units will be “affordable ownership,” they say.  What does that mean?  Tax-payers subsidize the ownership of a handful of units for people who essentially win the lottery?

5) Vacant Land Tax

This is how the point reads: “Introducing legislation that would, if passed, empower the City of Toronto, and potentially other interested municipalities…”

“If passed.”

So the Liberals are taking credit for allowing Toronto City Council to potentially vote on something like this, at some point, maybe.

Classic politicking.

6) Property Tax For New Multi-Unit Residential

Hilarious!

This is a joke, right?

The Liberals think that point #6 still applies, despite point #2.

The point reads: “This will encourage developers to build more new purpose-built rental housing…”

Really?

But you completely discouraged them from building rentals when you brought in rent control!

Oh, Liberals!

7) Rebating a Portion Of Development Charges

$125 Million over 5 years.

Isn’t the GDP of Ontario about $800 Billion per year?

Who cares about $125M, especially when it’s “in those communities that are most in need of new purpose-built rental housing,” which essentially means they have no idea where they’re going to implement this yet.

Once upon a time, $125 Million over 5-years was significant.

Now it’s what Kyle Lowry is going to sign for this off-season…

Oh, and by the way – that $125 Million is being rebated to developers.  So the Liberals will have to replace it with…….more taxes on us?

8) This BS:

“Providing municipalities with the flexibility to use property tax tools to help unlock development opportunities….”

Seriously?

This is such politicking!

This doesn’t even MEAN anything!

It’s just words, strung together, sounding important!

Remember what I said about crazy pills???

9) Housing Supply Team

This makes me want to puke:

“Creating a new Housing Supply Team with dedicated provincial employees to identify barriers to specific housing development projects and work with developers and municipalities to find solutions.”

Great.  So they’re creating another wing of government, that will create more new and useless jobs, that taxpayers will foot the bill for.

And more nonsense/meaningless rhetoric: “…identify barriers to specific housing development projects….find solutions.”

It’s like in Grade One, when the teacher says, “Break into groups, and discuss.”

Except this isn’t Grade One – this is the adult world, and the Liberals want to create a wing of government, to……….break into groups, and discuss.

10) Paper Flipping

Once again, the point doesn’t lay out any action, but rather implies that maybe, at some point, something will happen:

“The province will work to understand and tackle practices that may be contributing to tax avoidance and excessive speculation in the housing market such as paper flipping.”

What is this crap?

“Work to understand,” they say.

How many panels, committees, groups, and boards will be created to address this topic?

11) Double-Ending

They want to end, double-ending?

The public doesn’t like it?

Well neither do I, and neither do most agents.

But the truth is, folks, if Realtor Bob wants to double-end his listing, and he can’t represent buyer and seller, he can always find some rookie in his office to submit the offer for his buyer, and pay a referral fee.

Agents will find a way around this, just as foreign buyers will find a way around the tax.

Sorry – but don’t shoot the messenger.

That aside, I do like the idea of a complete overhaul of the system that governs us.  REBBA 2002 was written in, well as you might guess, 2002.

I have no idea why this legislation is so out of date.

But wait…..wasn’t the Condominium Act written in 1998?

12 Housing Advisory Group

Great.  More government.

13) Educating Consumers

What?

When?

How?

Where?

These 16-points get worse and worse as we move to the bottom.

It’s just hollow, mindless drivel at this point.

14) Partnering With C.R.A.

I suppose if we all pay more tax, then somehow, magically, we’ll be able to afford real estate?

15) Some BS About Elevators?

Come on, Liberals!

You’re not even trying anymore!

You’re so desperate to flush out your 16-point plans that you put something in here about elevator repair!

16) Growth Plan

When I see words like “understanding” and phrases like “working with,” it just shows me, once again, that they’re not actually outlining any specific proposals, but rather are going to give us a long paragraph that we get tired of reading halfway through, and simply give up, and assume they’re doing……something.

Although the last part of this paragraph does specify that “nothing” will happen to the Green Belt, which, of course, is one of the most frequently-suggested solutions to our housing woes.

–

Phew.

And here I thought I might come off as being cynical for a change…

Look, I don’t want to turn this into a political debate, but at the same time you can all infer that I’m not a Liberal supporter.

Kathleen Wynne has set this province so far back with her actions over the last four years, and now she’s standing up in front of a podium, promising things she can’t deliver, with “policies” that have no teeth, and essentially taking credit for future successes at the municipal and provincial levels.

If the government wants to cool the market, they have to do one of the following:

Decrease Demand

Increase Supply

Aside from a foreign buyer’s tax that might take a handful of buyers out of the market, these policies do nothing to decrease demand, or increase supply.

And the only one of the 16-points that has any teeth – the rent controls, will ultimately lead to lower supply in the long term.

This is 16-points of bullshit, in my opinion.

The irony is – I haven’t found a real estate agent out there who thinks this “16 point plan” will have an effect on the market.  Nor do I have one single buyer who wants to change his or her plans.

Sure, sellers are asking, “What impact will this have?”

But the early results out there – from opinion pieces in the media, suggest that most people don’t think this 16-point plan does anything to address the “crisis” we’re in, let alone take steps to “cool the market.”

This will cease to be a story in two weeks.

I’m sick about this.  It makes me want to bury my head in the sand.

How did we get here?

Who voted for this woman?

And what else will she do in the next 13 months to try and win favour with the voting public?

I shudder to think…

  The post Liberal Government’s “16-Point Plan” Comes Up 14 1/2 Points Shy appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

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[athome-businessideas]

Mr. Spock Won’t Survive the Smart Machine Age…Will You? Why Human Emotions Will Fuel Thinking (and Success) in the Workforce of the Future

We are on the cusp of a new era, led by artificial intelligence and deep learning. This so-called Smart Machine Age will lead to technology and robots outperforming humans in many tasks. This is bad news on the job front. In fact, research from the University of Oxford states there is a high probability that 47 percent of jobs in the U.S. will be automated over the next fifteen years. Further, based on that research along with independent research, the chief economist of the Bank of England predicted that the United States could lose upward of 80 million jobs during that time frame.

Recreation Type Home-Based Businesses – Visit the Home Business EXPO

At first glance you might think the solution is for you to become more robot-like to fit into this brave new high-tech work world. But Ed Hess says don’t start channeling your inner Mr. Spock just yet. On the contrary, the key to staying employable in the Smart Machine Age is to further excel at what makes us unique as human beings—our real, not artificial, emotional and social intelligence.

“Mr. Spock valued logic above all else, and frowned upon human beings because of their emotions,” says Hess, coauthor along with Katherine Ludwig of Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, January 2017, ISBN: 978-1-626-56875-4, $27.95). “However, in the coming Smart Machine Age, our emotional intelligence will be the very factor that makes us unique and employable.”

Hess and Ludwig explain that our emotions fuel our imaginations and enable personal connections to others in ways that machines cannot replicate. When we use our emotions to serve and collaborate with each other, there are no limits to our thinking, creativity, and performance.

“In the Smart Machine Age, you do not want to behave like a machine,” says Ludwig. “As smart machines take over more jobs, the most successful people will be those who can leverage their emotions and the best of their humanness to think better and be more creative, innovative, and collaborative.”

According to Hess and Ludwig, three steps are key to mastering human emotions in order to be more successful in the Smart Machine Age: (1) Increase positivity, (2) Actively manage negative emotions, and (3) Embrace the power of “Otherness.”

Increase positivity. Positive emotions help us think and relate at our highest levels. Leading research by cognitive, social, and positive psychologists, including Barbara Fredrickson and Alice Isen, shows that positive emotions enable and enhance cognitive processing, innovation, and creativity and even lead to better judgment and decision making. By contrast research has shown that negative emotions like fear and anxiety have the opposite effect. These can manifest in many forms: fear of looking bad, making mistakes, losing your job, or not being liked.

The strategy is two-pronged: One, generate plenty of positive emotions, and, two, stop allowing negative emotions to control your behavior and thinking. (More on the second prong in a moment.) You can change the ratio of good and bad feelings in your head by a shift in focus. You can take more time to notice the beauty of nature and the smiles of a young child. You can reflect upon something joyous in your life. You can think more often about the people and pets you love, the times you felt good about your performance at work, the times you felt appreciated by others. Practicing gratitude also increases positive emotions.

“To stay positive, I keep a list on my desk with five daily reminders,” says Hess. “They are: One, be positive. Two, take time to exercise and meditate. Three, just smile. Four, slow down at every opportunity. Five, avoid ‘drainers,’ by which I mean negative people. By focusing on these five things, I have been able to make a significant difference in increasing my own positivity.”

Actively manage negative emotions. Examples of negative emotions are anger, fear, anxiety, dread, and cruelty. Emotions usually last only 90 seconds unless you let them overtake you. You can let negative emotions float through your mind without engaging them. That is what meditation can teach you. You are not your ideas, and you are not your emotions. You have a choice as to whether to engage with an emotion or not. And you have a choice as to whether you allow an emotion to be translated into a behavior. Hess says: “I was never taught that I had choices about my emotions. I had to learn that emotions don’t necessarily have to lead to behaviors. It is not automatic—we make the choice about whether that happens.”

“One way to recognize when negative emotions are taking hold is to be very sensitive to physical changes that often accompany them,” says Ludwig. “For example, your heart rate may increase. You may feel warmer. You may feel tightness in your stomach. You may notice your fists are clenched. Then you should try to identify and label the emotion you are feeling. You can learn to calm yourself by taking deep breaths and engaging your thinking to get to the root of the emotions and reflect on something more positive in your life.”

Embrace the power of Otherness. Otherness is the ability to rise above our self-absorbed, ego-driven emotional defensiveness in order to connect to and emotionally relate with others. That’s crucial because we all need others in order to flourish, say Hess and Ludwig. We can’t reach our potential by ourselves. We need other people who can help us see past our cognitive biases and open our minds to new perspectives in order to think more critically, creatively, and innovatively.

Otherness requires building positive, caring regard and trust with others. If we trust someone, then we feel psychologically safe with them, and we can have the vulnerable kinds of conversations that enable collaborative relationships and breakthrough thinking and learning. In the Smart Machine Age, humans will be needed to do the highest levels of problem solving, thinking, and emotionally engaging with other human beings—jobs that smart machines will not be able to do. Those skills are hard, and they are emotional. All involve or require caring about and establishing positive regard and trust with others.

To build positive, caring trust requires behaviors. One must take the time to connect and relate with others in ways that demonstrate that you care about them. That means actually attending to the other with your full self—give them your undivided attention in the moment by facing them, making eye contact, smiling, and not multi-tasking. And really listen to them with an open, non-judgmental mind that is fully focused on trying to understand what they are saying.

Hess calls that type of listening “reflective listening.” Good listeners do not interrupt people; good listeners do not formulate their answers while the other person is talking; good listeners do not immediately respond with their views but rather first ask questions to make sure they understand what was said. Really listening to another person says, I care about you and what you think and feel.

“Mr. Spock was wrong about what we humans really need in order to flourish,” concludes Hess. “Our emotions—when properly cultivated—can propel us to the highest levels of human thinking and learning and fuel our connections to others. To that end, smart technology may be smart indeed, but we should focus on being more emotionally and socially intelligent. Embrace positivity and excel at managing your emotions and Otherness, because that’s what will help you thrive in the Smart Machine Age.”

# # #

About the Authors: Ed Hess, Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in-Residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business, and Katherine Ludwig are the authors of the new book Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age(Berrett-Koehler, 2017), which puts forth a new model called NewSmart, designed to help humans thrive alongside technology in the Smart Machine Age.

For more information, please visit www.edhltd.com and http://ift.tt/2muh2Jz.

About the Book: Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, January 2017, ISBN: 978-1-626-56875-4, $27.95) is available at bookstores nationwide and from major online booksellers.

The post Mr. Spock Won’t Survive the Smart Machine Age…Will You? Why Human Emotions Will Fuel Thinking (and Success) in the Workforce of the Future appeared first on Home Business Magazine.

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[tortuga-aak]

Democrats need to stop whining about the deficit

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Democrats are opposing Republican tax cuts partly on the basis that they will expand the US budget deficit.

That's the wrong argument to make — not just now but in any low-inflation environment.

The right argument against the plan is that it's skewed toward the wealthy and includes changes that won't benefit the economy.

"There are better ways to invest in our economy," says Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee's Democratic staff. "Investing in our nation's infrastructure, education, and R&D would do more to boost future productivity than trickle-down tax cuts for the rich."

There are a few lines you can take to argue against tax cuts, including the idea that they benefit mostly huge companies and rich Americans.

Here's the wrong one: In the weeks leading up to Thursday's reveal of the Republican tax plan, Democrats have been harping on about higher budget deficits and a resulting "entitlement crisis" as a key justification for opposing President Donald Trump's tax plan.

It's enough that Ylan Mui of CNBC has taken to calling Democrats the "new deficit hawks."

For the Democrats to take this line against the tax cuts is a mistake for three reasons. First, it's hard for voters to understand, even when it's dumbed down into the old trope of "you wouldn't run your household like this."

Second, it's bad economics. Unlike households, governments can run big deficits, and they should be doing so especially when inflation is as low as it is today. Doing so can help spur economic growth, and the Democrats know this because it was a key lesson of the post-financial-crisis recovery.

Economists can and should argue over the best uses of that deficit — spending that boosts the economy versus tax cuts that line the pockets of the rich — but that's a tangential argument for those not currently in power.

Third, there are much better objections about the harm this tax plan could cause — such as leading to greater inequality and more struggles for the middle class — or the false promises (such as that it will lead to higher wages) it's being pitched with.

"The deficit is an abstraction that is pretty much meaningless to anyone other than an economist or budget wonk," says Dean Baker, an economist who is the codirector of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

"To my view, the issue is that the Republicans are looking to take money from programs people care about and need, like Medicare and Medicaid, and use it to give tax breaks to rich people. This is concrete and people can understand it.

"The deficit is not. And of course as an economic matter, it is not clear that a larger deficit would be a bad thing — although I do have to say, we are likely getting close to full employment, so we probably don't want too much larger of a deficit."

'It would explode' the deficit

Here's the kind of thing Democrats have been saying.

"The longer we wait to address the debt in a serious manner, the more the safety net frays, and the harder this crisis will be to address," Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said last month.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, wrote in a recent op-ed article that the proposal "helps the rich at the expense of the middle class, it would explode the deficit, and it hasn't gone through a thorough, bipartisan process."

At least he got two out of three right.

Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee's Democratic staff, laid out the case against these arguments nicely in a recent New York Times op-ed article.

"Are the proposed tax cuts a huge giveaway to the rich? Most definitely," wrote Kelton, a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University. "Will they, as advertised, create a booming economy with benefits that trickle down to everyone else? I don't think so. Trump's plan will widen the country's already dangerous wealth and income gaps, and because the gains go mostly to those at the very top, the tax cuts won't do much to promote broad-based consumer spending or overall job growth."

That, Kelton says, should be enough to reject the plan.

Getty Images

"But it would be unwise to oppose tax cuts, or any other federal legislation, simply because they add to the deficit," she warns.

Kelton and other economists of wide-ranging political stripes argue that the biggest mistake politicians make is comparing government spending and budgets to those of households. The analogy appears sound, but it's really apples and oranges. Unlike families, who may lack sufficient funds to pay their bills, governments that control their own currencies can always print money to meet their obligations.

Therefore a default is technically impossible. The only risk is inflation, if excessive bond issuance leads to rising prices. But the US economy has been suffering chronically from the opposite problem — and inflation rate that has consistently fallen short of the Federal Reserve's 2% target for five years, pointing to an economy that is still operating below potential and reflecting stagnant wage growth for much of the population.

Social Security can never run out of money — really

I asked Kelton why, given her counterintuitive argument that deficits don't really matter, Americans should take her word for it. Her reply: Don't. Instead, listen to what Alan Greenspan, the prominent Republican former Federal Reserve chairman who is a purported deficit hawk, had to say on the matter.

In March 2005, he was pressed by a young congressman named Paul Ryan about the need for privatizing Social Security because of the prospect of a looming "entitlements crisis." Greenspan replied rather bitingly that there was no such thing or even a remote possibility.

"I wouldn't say that the pay-as-you-go benefits are insecure in the sense that there's nothing to prevent the federal government to create as much money as it wants and pays it to somebody," Greenspan told an incredulous Ryan.

"The question is how do you set up a system that assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase. So it's not a question of security — it's a question of the structure of the financial system."

That's what Democrats should be saying, rather than regurgitating the old Republican rouse — which even the GOP is willing to abandon when it's convenient — about a looming government debt crisis that never comes.

Republican talking points

"Instead of repeating talking points that reinforce the idea that Social Security is somehow financially unsustainable, Democrats should play Greenspan's remarks on a loop. They should call attention to what Greenspan said — under oath — about the program's long-term sustainability," Kelton said.

"Instead of accepting the premise that Social Security is in trouble, Democrats should accept Greenspan's challenge — put forward an agenda that will do more to promote future growth than anything the Republicans are offering."

The financial crisis was instructive on this count. Many critics of both the federal government's fiscal stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s bond purchases worried that the country was getting so deep into debt that one of two things was bound to happen: a crisis in the Treasury market or a bout of runaway inflation. Nine years into the recovery, Treasury yields remain near historic lows and inflation is not only contained but remains worryingly low.

That last point is key: It's not that folks like Kelton and Baker believe there is no risk to government spending. They simply argue that the only risks are the misallocation of resources and inflation — not some amorphous "debt crisis" or default of the sort some politicians and market analysts have shouted about.

Unlike Greece, which actually did default on its debt because of a lack of control over its own currency, the US could default only by choice. Trump flirted with that choice once as a candidate — but quickly backed away from the threat after he realized the catastrophic market and economic consequences such a debacle would have.

Listen to the Oracle

In August 2011, after the US's credit rating was downgraded for the fist time following a prolonged impasse over the US debt ceiling, Greenspan was asked during a "Meet the Press" interview about the issue of "unfunded liabilities" and "entitlements."

His response again spoke volumes: "The United States can pay any debt it has because it can always print money to do that, so there is zero probability of default."

REUTERS

So what should Democrats be focused on if not deficits? On that count, Trump actually has the right idea: They should be focused on boosting economic growth. Unlike Trump, however, Democrats need to be concerned about other matters like distribution, wage growth, and the quality of social services necessary to underpin a sustainable economy. That includes everything from the wider availability of high-quality education and health, childcare, elderly care, and other key services that are neglected by a government more focused on external conflict than domestic strife.

"What if we choose policies that will help us to build a more productive economy? If we were having the right debate, we would be laser-focused on this challenge," Kelton said.

"I doubt very much that Trump's tax cuts — which are heavily skewed in favor of the very rich — would come out on top. There are better ways to invest in our economy. Investing in our nation's infrastructure, education, and R&D would do more to boost future productivity than trickle-down tax cuts for the rich."

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