Michigan Medicaid Proposal Would Lead to Large Coverage Losses, Harm Low-Income Workers [feedly]

Michigan Medicaid Proposal Would Lead to Large Coverage Losses, Harm Low-Income Workers
https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/michigan-medicaid-proposal-would-lead-to-large-coverage-losses-harm-low-income

The Michigan Senate is voting on a bill today that would take coverage away from Medicaid enrollees who don't meet rigid work requirements;^[1] the House of Representatives will consider the bill next if it passes the Senate. The Senate is moving so rapidly — a new version of the bill was unveiled and passed out of its only committee of referral April 18 — that neither the legislature nor the state's Department of Health and Human Services has had time to produce a comprehensive estimate of the bill's impact on health coverage, access to health care, and the state's finances.

However, analyses of similar proposals from other states suggest that the Michigan bill would result in:

• Large coverage losses.  All states that have released projections of the impact of proposed work requirements forecast that they would lead to Medicaid coverage losses.  To provide a sense of magnitude, Kentucky estimates that its Medicaid waiver, whose centerpiece is a work requirement policy similar to (but in some ways less stringent than) Michigan's proposal, would eventually lead to a 15 percent drop in adult Medicaid enrollment.  A comparable coverage reduction in Michigan would be in the range of 150,000 people.  Coverage losses under Michigan's proposal would likely have especially harmful impacts on enrollees' health, because it would lock them out of coverage for a full year after failure to meet the work requirement.
• COUNTERINTUITIVELY, MANY OF THOSE LOSING COVERAGE WOULD LIKELY BE WORKERS.Coverage losses among workingMichiganders. Counterintuitively, many of those losing coverage would likely be workers.  Most Michigan Medicaid enrollees who would be subject to the new policy already work, but often in unstable jobs with fluctuating hours, in industries like retail, restaurant work, home health, or construction or in seasonal jobs such as in the state's tourism industry.  Nationally, we estimate that even among low-income workers who would meet Michigan's proposed 29-hour-per-week work requirement on average over the course of a year, 25 percent would be at risk of losing coverage because they don't meet the requirement every month.
• Added costs for the state and hospitals.  The Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency estimates it would cost the state between $20 million and $30 million a year to administer a work requirement.  And, by increasing the number of uninsured, the bill would also increase the amount of uncompensated care that hospitals provide, which could increase state costs for public hospitals.

Proponents claim the Michigan proposal is intended to support employment, but it provides no new money to expand existing workforce development programs or create a new work supports program.  If Michigan wants to do more to promote and support work, it should instead explore other strategies, like Montana's workforce promotion program ("HELP-Link"), which would support employment among Medicaid enrollees without endangering the state's progress in expanding coverage and improving health.  Since Michigan adopted Medicaid expansion, its uninsured rate has fallen by 45 percent, expansion enrollees report large improvements in access to care, and they say health coverage has helped them seek and maintain employment.^[2]

Proposal Could Affect up to 1 Million Beneficiaries

The Michigan legislation requires the state to submit a Medicaid waiver proposal to the Trump Administration by October 1 to impose a work requirement on up to 1 million non-elderly adult Medicaid beneficiaries.  This includes roughly 700,000 enrollees who have coverage because the state expanded Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and 300,000 extremely low-income parents who are covered under the state's pre-ACA eligibility guidelines.

The bill's centerpiece is a requirement that beneficiaries between ages 19 and 64 work or engage in other "qualifying" activities for 29 hours per week on average each month — equal to almost 125 hours a month — or lose their Medicaid coverage.^[3]  This exceeds the 80-hour-a-month requirement that the Trump Administration has approved in Arkansas and Kentucky, and the bill's list of qualifying work activities is more limited; in particular, other states count job search as a qualifying activity, whereas Michigan allows it only in counties with high unemployment rates.  The bill includes a list of narrow exemptions for people who, for example, meet the state's SNAP (food stamps) work requirement, have a long-term disability, are pregnant, medically frail, are a caretaker for a child under age 6 (although only one parent per child may be exempt), or are age 19 or 20 and were formerly in foster care.

Every month, beneficiaries would have to verify that they are meeting the requirements by the fifth of the month to maintain their coverage.  If they missed that deadline, they would be treated as not meeting the requirement even if they later showed they did meet it.  And anyone who lost coverage for failing to meet the requirements would not be able to regain coverage for a full year — a coverage "lockout" of unprecedented length in Medicaid.

Despite Lack of Comprehensive Analysis, Some of Bill's Harms Are Clear

The Michigan Senate is voting on the bill before its Fiscal Agency, the state's Department of Health and Human Services, or independent researchers have had a chance to conduct a comprehensive analysis of its impact on beneficiaries, the state's finances, and access to health care in the state.  Such an analysis would likely find the following:

Large Coverage Losses With Adverse Impacts on Low-Income People's Health

All states with work requirement proposals project that significant numbers of people will lose Medicaid as a result.  Kentucky, the first state in which the Trump Administration approved a Medicaid work requirement, projects that its waiver will ultimately cause 15 percent of adult enrollees to lose coverage.^[4] While Kentucky's waiver includes features not in the Michigan bill that would make it harder for people to maintain their coverage, its work requirement entails a lower hours-per-week threshold, more exemptions, and no lockout period.  In Michigan, a 15 percent coverage loss for adult enrollees would translate into about 150,000 enrollees in a typical month.^[5]

The coverage losses from the waiver would likely have severe adverse impacts on health.  In a 2016 state survey, 83 percent of enrollees in Michigan's Medicaid expansion (the Healthy Michigan Plan) agreed or strongly agreed that without Medicaid coverage they would not be able to go to the doctor.^[6]  That's consistent with a large and growing body of research finding that Medicaid expansion has significantly expanded access to preventive, primary, and other important health care services.^[7]

A study based on the same survey found that the large majority of Healthy Michigan enrollees — and 80 percent of enrollees not working at the time of the survey — have a chronic physical or mental health condition such as diabetes, hypertension, or depression.  (See Table 1.)  People with these conditions require regular access to medications and other treatment to maintain their health, so even brief interruptions in coverage and access to care can be harmful.  But under Michigan's proposal, enrollees who fail to meet the work requirement, including those with serious chronic conditions, would be locked out of coverage for a full year.

TABLE 1
Large Share of Healthy Michigan Enrollees Have Serious Health Needs Survey of 2016 Enrollees
	Share with Specified Condition
	All enrollees	Working at time of survey	Not working at time of survey
Any chronic condition	69%	62%	80%
Diabetes	11%	9%	15%
Hypertension	31%	25%	42%
Cardiovascular disease	10%	7%	14%
Asthma	17%	15%	19%
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease	11%	8%	15%
Cancer	4%	3%	5%
Any mental health condition	32%	25%	43%
Functional impairment (physical)	23%	13%	37%
Functional impairment (mental)	20%	12%	32%

Source: CBPP calculations from Tipirneni, Goold, and Ayania, "Employment Status and Health Characteristics of Adults with Expanded Medicaid Coverage in Michigan," Journal of the American Medical Association, 2017

 

Coverage Losses for Workers and People with Disabilities, Among Others

Sixty percent of Michigan Medicaid enrollees who could be subject to work requirements work; of those not working, most live in working families, and more than 80 percent are students or report that they are unable to work due to illness, disability, or caregiving responsibilities, according to Kaiser Family Foundation estimates.^[8]  (See Figure 1.)  While likely not the intended targets of the policy, people in these groups would be at significant risk of losing coverage:

 

FIGURE 1

 

• Low-income workers.  Analyzing national data on low-income adults who could be subject to work requirements, we find that most work substantial hours over the course of the year, but many do not work consistent hours from month to month as a work requirements policy like Michigan's proposal requires.  As a result, more than half of the low-income workers who could be subject to Medicaid work requirements would be at risk of losing coverage under a 29-hour-per-week requirement.  Even among those working at least 1,500 hours over the course of the year and thus meeting the 29-hour standard on average, 1 in 4 (25 percent) would be at risk of losing coverage because they do not meet the requirement every month.^[9](See Figure 2.)

  These findings reflect the reality of low-wage work.  The industries that commonly employ Medicaid enrollees — such as retail, restaurant/food services, home health, and construction — generally feature variable hours, above-average levels of involuntary part-time work and irregular scheduling, and minimal flexibility.  As a result, any illness, family emergency, or child care or transportation disruption can lead to job loss and a spell between jobs.  Under Michigan's policy, any such event could then lead to loss of health coverage for an entire year as well.

   

  FIGURE 2

  

   

•  People with disabilities, older people, and other vulnerable groups.  While the Michigan bill exempts people who are medically frail or have medical conditions that prevent them from working, some people with disabilities and serious illnesses would inevitably fall through the cracks and lose coverage.  This could occur because they don't meet the criteria for limited exemptions, don't understand that they do qualify for an exemption, or struggle to provide the documentation proving that they qualify.  Bearing out these concerns, studies of state SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs^[10] have found that people with disabilities, serious illnesses, and substance use disorders may be disproportionately likely to lose benefits due to work requirements, even when they should be exempt.^[11]

  Older enrollees also would likely be disproportionately affected.  Nationally, nearly two-thirds of Medicaid enrollees potentially subject to work requirements who are under age 50 work, but work rates fall for those over 50, who are more likely to have serious health conditions, and only a minority of 60- to 64-year-old enrollees work.^[12]  Because the Michigan proposal applies work requirements up to age 64, older adults, including people in their early 60s who decided to retire prior to age 65 because of their health, could lose their health coverage if unable to return to work for 29 hours per week.

• Michiganders enrolled in post-secondary education.  While the Michigan bill exempts full-time students who are emancipated minors or whose parents qualify for Medicaid, all other students would be subject to the work requirement.  Vocational and job training would count toward the 29-hour weekly requirement, as would other education if it is deemed directly related to employment.  Students whose education counts as a qualifying activity would have to go to school, work, and/or engage in other activities an average of 29 hours per week to maintain their health coverage — while other students would have to work 29 hours a week and go to school.  If state policymakers aim to promote economic mobility, forcing students to work this many hours to maintain their health coverage is counterproductive, making it less likely they will succeed in school and increase their earning potential.

Added Costs for Administration and Uncompensated Care

The Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency's analysis of the bill notes, "it is not possible to provide anything approaching a precise estimate of cost and savings. As a result, this fiscal analysis is vague."^[13]  But it does estimate that Michigan would incur between $20 million and $30 million in new administrative costs per year just to implement the new requirements.  

The Senate Fiscal Agency also notes that many people losing Medicaid coverage due to the bill would end up uninsured but would still seek care, mainly at hospitals.  This would reverse a trend of declining uncompensated care since Medicaid expansion took effect in April 2014: from 2013 to 2015, Michigan hospitals saw uncompensated care costs fall by more than half as a share of their budgets.^[14]  While the Senate Fiscal Agency does not attempt to quantify the impact on hospital or state uncompensated care costs, the effects could be large.  The drop in hospital uncompensated care costs since 2013 amounts to $571 million; reversing even 15 percent of that decline would cost hospitals $85 million annually.

Though the bill's supporters claim that its goal is to support work, it would not direct any new money to existing workforce development programs or create new work support programs.  Instead, it simply states that the "department must first direct recipients to existing resources for job training or other employment services."  This means the bill effectively requires the department to spend money on tracking, verification, and paperwork but not to provide anynew work supports to help beneficiaries maintain coverage.

Adding employment supports to the bill would raise its cost dramatically.  A fiscal analysis of a work requirement proposal in Virginia, which has a smaller Medicaid caseload than Michigan, found that case management costs would total $162 million a year and employment support services $50 million a year.^[15]  Importantly, the federal government would not provide matching funds for the cost of these services; they would be entirely state-funded.

Medicaid Coverage Has Boosted Employment in Michigan, Research Shows

FIGURE 3

Nearly 70 percent of employed Healthy Michigan beneficiaries said gaining Medicaid coverage helped them do better at work, and more than half of unemployed beneficiaries said having health coverage made it easier to look for work, according to surveys by University of Michigan researchers as part of the state's evaluation of the program.^[16]  (See Figure 3.)

 These findings are similar to those from a survey of Medicaid expansion beneficiaries in Ohio.  There, 75 percent of those who were unemployed and looking for work when they gained coverage said that Medicaid made the task easier; among those who were employed, half said that Medicaid made it easier to stay working.^[17]

As these findings show, health coverage is an important work support: having health care helps people work and look for work, and taking it away will likely make it harder for some to keep and find work, setting off a vicious cycle for some working enrollees.^[18]  Health problems are a common cause of job loss among low-wage workers, in part because (as discussed above) low-wage jobs often offer little flexibility to take time off due to illness.  In states with work requirements, some workers who lose their jobs due to health setbacks may then lose their health coverage and access to treatment as well, which would make it far harder for them to regain their health and their employment. Similarly, loss of coverage due to failure to document sufficient hours of work may lead to deteriorating health, causing job loss.

Montana's workforce promotion program ("HELP-Link"), which links Medicaid enrollees who are looking for work or better jobs with services such as career counseling, on-the-job training programs, and subsidized employment avoids these harmful and unintended consequences.^[19]  In its first two years, the program has shown promise and has generated strong voluntary take-up among enrollees, likely because the state has engaged in intensive outreach, offered meaningful services, and provided trainings to service providers and partners on meeting the needs of low-income Medicaid enrollees.

By investing in outreach and services for individuals who are able to work but have barriers to finding and holding a job, Montana targets state funds to services that could actually increase employment and income for low-income people.  In contrast, work requirements force states to spend taxpayer dollars on new systems to monitor and cut Medicaid coverage from many people who are not the target of the policy — those who are already working or may never be able to work — with deeply harmful consequences.

Moreover, research has generally found that work requirements in other programs have only modest and temporary effects on employment and neither increase long-term employment nor reduce poverty.^[20] Results in Medicaid are likely to be just as disappointing and could be worse, since state Medicaid programs generally are not well equipped to provide work support services, which are already oversubscribed in most states and for which Michigan's proposal provides no new resources.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Recovery Radio:Recovery Radio: The Playground ( Documentary)

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Recovery Radio
Post: Recovery Radio: The Playground ( Documentary)
Link: http://recovery.enlightenradio.org/2018/04/recovery-radio-playground-documentary.html

--
Powered by Blogger
https://www.blogger.com/

The AI Advantage of Nations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution [feedly]

The AI Advantage of Nations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/17/04/2018/ai-advantage-nations-fourth-industrial-revolution

Like revolutions in the past the on-going AI revolution will produce winners and losers. The first industrial revolution in the 18th century changed the world of production and paved the way for Britain's global leadership. Similarly, the current digital revolution is redefining the service sector and China's role in the world.

What is artificial intelligence and why it matters? AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence behavior by computer systems. These processes include learning (information acquisition and information rules), reasoning (reaching approximate or definite conclusions thanks to rules to), and self-correction. AI will impact our lives (both leisure and work) and all industries with the most common applications being expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision. 

AI will be most disruptive in the service sectors. In OECD countries service sector account for more than 60% of the total gross value added. As such the country which will lead the AI revolution will be shaping the world economy. Every technology revolution over the last three centuries has shaped the rise and decline of nations and firms.

Last year, the Chinese government unveiled a plan to become the world AI leader by 2030. Three out of the top 5 most valuable unicorns are in China: Ant Financial leading the top by far valued at $60 billion, Didi Chuxing (at $56 bn) and then Xiaomi ($45 bn). China's largest firms in terms of market capitalization are (No1) Tencent Holdings ($277.1bn), (No2) Alibaba ($264bn), No 3 ICBC $229.8bn, No 4 Petro China $204.dbn, Baidu ($59.9bn) and Netease ($36.8b).

While Former Industrial Revolutions Were Led By Western Economies...

Abundant cheap coal combined with a supportive institutional environment were critical conditions for advancements in mechanisation in the late 18th century. This together with financial reforms has led to the emergence of a stock market and joint stock companies and the first large factories, such as the Marshall Mill in Leeds.

The Second Industrial Revolution was increasingly led by the United States and characterised by mass production. This was facilitated by the invention of the combustion engine and access to electricity, telegraph, production lines and to the emergence of world re-known companies in the transport (e.g. Ford, Goodyear) and energy sector (e.g. Exxon Mobile, Edison International).

The Third Industrial revolution – mid-20th century – under the leadership of the US has been characterized by automatization and computerisation. Favourable conditions such as deep capital markets and property rights (creation of World Intellectual Property Organization in 1960s) facilitated the global expansion or creation of firms like IBM Microsoft, Apple and Google.

… The Forthcoming Artificial Intelligence Revolution May Look Chinese...

The lead of China is likely to persist and reinforce. A combination of cultural and social factors together with abundance of capital puts China in a pole position to lead the AI revolution. 

Machine learning, as an approach to achieve artificial intelligence, needs data. By definition, machine learning requires vast amount of data to learn from. The readily available data becomes a great advantage for Chinese technology firms to develop their artificial intelligence programs.

This is good news for Chinese technology firms. The lack of data privacy gives China's tech giants an advantage in developing AI programs, compared to their Western counterparts. This is evident in Alibaba's controversial attempt of collecting consumer data to construct a credit score system, which can potentially feed into Alibaba's lending practices via machine learning techniques.    

Key elements of the fourth industrial revolution (i.e. information and data) are related to the sensitive topics of privacy and individual rights. Non-Western countries' perceptions on individual freedoms and privacy often differ from those of Western liberal democracies. This situation produces a lot of AI Angst among Western policy makers and security experts. Seeing China as the leading country in AI does not mitigate this angst among Western countries, especially the US. Increasing number of experts and policy makers in the US consider restricting Chinese investments into strategic US AI firms.

 

 

Juergen Braunstein is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. 

Marion Laboure, former economist at the Luxembourg Central Bank, European Commission, and Barclays, is an associate of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Employment Breakeven Levels: They’re higher than most of us thought [feedly]

Employment Breakeven Levels: They're higher than most of us thought
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/employment-breakeven-levels-theyre-higher-than-most-of-us-thought/

Recent writings underscore an important hole in economists' knowledge base: we know neither the natural rate of unemployment nor the potential level of GDP. I mean, we've got estimates for days, but an honest confidence interval around them renders them useless as policy guidelines.

As Alan Blinder recently put it:

"For [the natural rate] to be useful you have to have at least a little confidence you know the number. You don't need to know it to two decimal places, but within a reasonable range. If your range is 2.5 to 7, that doesn't tell you anything."

This post is about a related number that we don't quite have right, either, one I wrote about a couple of years back: the jobs breakeven level (BL), or the monthly, net change in payroll employment that's consistent with a stable unemployment rate. Though not as big a deal as the "natural" rate of unemployment, to which it's closely related, the BL is an important piece of datum that provides insight into one of the most important questions in econ policy today: how much more room-to-run exists in the job market?

Back in mid-2016, when I was writing about this, economists thought the BL was roughly between 50,000-100,000 (note that this SF Fed analysis uses a natural rate of 5%, clearly too high, and one way to underestimate BLs). In fact, I wrote my piece to warn people not to be too worried if monthly payroll gains started coming in well below 200,000. Though I hedged my bet in a way I'll get to in a moment, the dominant argument was that gains of around 100,000 were consistent with stable unemployment in the mid-4's—the lowest rate thought to be consistent with stable inflation—along with labor force participation and working-age population growth around where they were back then.

This prediction now looks off. For the past six months, the jobless rate has held at 4.1% while payrolls are up an average of 211,000 per month, on net. Why hasn't faster job growth led to lower unemployment, as most economists would have predicted a few years back?

The answer must be that there's more labor market capacity than folks thought there was. Here's one, simple way to look at it.

PR=PR/EMP * EMP/LF * LF/Pop * Pop

…where PR is payrolls, EMP is employment from the Household Survey, LF is the labor force (so EMP/LF = 1 – unemp rate; because EMP/LF + UN/LF = 1), and Pop is the working-age population (LF/Pop is thus the participation rate). Cancel everything out and you're left with payrolls, which you can difference to get your monthly BLs.

If you think we're pretty much at capacity, then your BL is solely a function of your expectations about population growth. The first line of the table below shows those numbers in May 2016, when I wrote my post. These generated a BL of about 100K.

	PR/EMP	EMP/LF (or 1-un rate)	LF/Pop	Pop*
May-16	95.3%	95.3%	62.6%	0.80%
Mar-18	95.5%	95.9%	62.9%	0.84%

*Annualized population growth rates; the top number is what I plugged in; the bottom number is the pace of pop growth between these two dates.

But if you think the jobless rate might fall further or the labor force participation rate might rise, then you'd predict higher BLs. In one scenario we ran from the earlier post, we predicted BLs of 200,000, based on an unemployment rate of 4% and LFPR of 63.5%.

Before I pat myself on the back for that prescient forecast, recognize, that as the 2^nd line in the table above reveals, while the LFPR is up, it's still well below 63.5%. The population growth rate is a little faster, so that makes a difference, as does the first factor in the table, which is just a conversation factor to go from the HH survey numbers to the payroll ones.

But there's another important capacity change, unforeseen by many: the climbing of the prime-age (25-54) employment rate and LFPR. Neither are back to their pre-recession peaks, but especially the prime-age employment rate is clawing its way back. In fact, prime-agers have recovered 4.4 out of 5.5 percentage points, or 80%, of their decline over the course of the recession. Prime-age men, whose employment rates have suffered a longer-term decline, have made back 76% of their loss; women have done better, clawing back 90%.

So, economists need to update their BLs to accommodate some unknown degree of labor supply that we formerly discounted.

OK, caveat-time. As noted, while the cyclical part of the prime-age guys employment rate looks better than expected, the structural decline is real (see figure below). That said, I'm increasingly off the mindset that separating structural from cyclical is yet another area where economists are fuzzy (this great Yagan paper underscored that point for me). Be careful about writing people off; the reach of really strong labor demand may pull more people in than we tend to think.

Source: BLS

Also, while payrolls continue to chug along posting numbers that are about 2x of most economists BLs from a few years back, in percentage terms, their growth is decelerating, from around 2% back in 2015 to around 1.5% now, much as we'd expect as we close in on full employment, whatever that much-sought-after state looks like.

But the punchline remains: the fact that we've been adding an average of ~200K jobs a month, while unemployment sticks around 4%, along with, importantly, tame wage and price outcomes, means that we must not yet be at full employment.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Home Maintenance of Working-Class Identity After Deindustrialization [feedly]

The Home Maintenance of Working-Class Identity After Deindustrialization
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/the-home-maintenance-of-working-class-identity-after-deindustrialization/

Five years in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park

Then hospital maintenance and tech school just to memorize Frigidaire parts

But I got to missing your Mama and I got to missing you too

And I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that's what I'll always do

So don't try to change who you are boy, and don't try to be who you ain't

And don't let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man's paint

Don't call what your wearing an outfit, don't ever say your car is broke

Don't sing with a fake British accent, don't act like your family's a joke.

"Outfit"

This song, written by Jason Isbell when he was part of the band The Drive by Truckers, creates a story from life messages that his father passed to him. More than any academic account I have read, it encapsulates the lessons that the working-class men I interviewed about the ongoing impact of deindustrialisation on male work identity in the UK taught to their sons. To 'not call what you're wearing an outfit' is a variation of the southern American working-class value 'don't get above your raising'. While in Britain there is a similar phrase, 'don't get ideas above your station', I think the American expression is more useful as it makes a direct link to family judgement, while 'station' has a more open social meaning. In his book 'Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Bill C. Malone suggests that this expression 'is not an injunction against wealth as such, even though riches carry the potential for corruption. Instead, it is a rebuke to pretense and snobbery, and a plea for respect for and loyalty to ones roots'.

While this song reflects a loyalty to family and background, it also expresses a father's desire for his son to not repeat his hardship or employment, as the father warns his son to not repeat his work as a house painter by saying: 'don't let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man's paint'. This multifaceted narrative suggests the son should not repeat his journey but also should not forget the integrity of his working-class background. The tension of balancing individual and family identities is not new or an exclusive feature of working-class male familial relationships. However, deindustrialization made, and is still making, the negotiation of family background a more practical issue, as industries that for generations had been a staple resource for producing and reproducing working-class culture and identity have now closed or gone into rapid decline.

Shipwrights at Work, from the Kent History Forum

The generational sentiment: 'don't repeat my journey and don't forget the integrity of your working-class background' I heard from many of the fathers in my own study. These men had worked at the Chatham Royal Dockyard, a naval ship-building and maintenance yard officially established by Elizabeth I in 1567. This 400-year history meant that many workers could trace chains of their families working in this industry for hundreds of years. The dockyard closed in 1984, leaving most of its 7,000 employees having to search for new jobs, an event that inevitably created feelings of anger or despair. Twenty-seven years later, I wanted to explore the long-term effects of that closure on men who had worked in the 'dockyard', as well as on their sons and grandsons. The majority of British studies on deindustrialisation have focused on unskilled men, but I wanted to understand how deindustrialisation had affected skilled men.

When I asked 13 former Royal Dockyard skilled tradesmen and 14 of their sons and grandsons about their career choices, many said something like 'I did it to get on'. The phrase 'to get on' seemed short hand for making career decisions with an aim to achieve upward career mobility and better job security. For these men, the value of 'getting on' seemed to have a deep family history rooted in industrial society. The first generation, for example, discussed this desire for upward mobility as the reason they pursued a trade or craft apprenticeship. In fact, their parents saw a trade as offering a better and more secure job then they had been able to secure as unskilled workers. One of the men I interviewed, Francis Copper, for example, recalled telling his father he wanted to go in the navy. His parents persuaded him that this was not the best path. As his father said: 'You shouldn't do that, go in the Dockyard and do your apprenticeship and when you've got your indentures you can do what you like'. Although most sons suggested they did not passively follow their parents' advice, when the dockyard closed and they lost their jobs, the idea of 'getting on' motivated them to navigate their new jobs for the good of their family.  Jerry Naylor, another man I interviewed, discussed moving from being a network maintenance engineer into management at a national phone company: 'My second daughter being born pushed me to move up and get more money'. As parents themselves, these men also stressed the value of 'getting on' to their sons, encouraging them to go into secure white collar work instead of following them into a trade. As Francis's son Chris recalled, 'Dad thought I should go into a bank and be a manager'.

Since most of the men in my study actively pursued middle-class work for economic reasons, 'getting-on' as a value could be seen as a contradiction of 'not getting above your rising'. However, in moving into more middle-class paid work, men did not forget where they came from or lose their engagement with their background. Instead, they retained and continued their trade learning and hands-on work by developing unpaid DIY projects. For example, Darrel, a former shipwright, and his son Noel Carrin showed me the architectural drawings and the two-storey extension they had designed and built together. Similarly, Dominic Draper showed off his hand-carved bespoke wooden kitchen. These non-paid DIY projects seemed to allow men to sustain a story to their lives and a sense of integrity with their skilled working-class backgrounds. As Chris Copper reflected, 'We've always been a hands-on, practical people. If I didn't know how to do it, I'd ask dad'. Like Ben Steel, a former boiler maker, most men could not abide 'getting a man in to fix something'. Therefore, in spite of what these men now did to earn a living, they still defined themselves as 'practical people', not above or removed from the virtue of their backgrounds. Like Jason Isbell's father, these men were disciples of the philosophy 'don't ever say your car is broke'. DIY both allowed these men to continue their hands-on trade labour and was a powerful illustration of their commitment to male working-class identity.

Much like Isbell, the men in my study were encouraged to move away from working-class occupations. Moreover, due to the deindustrialization process, dockyard trade work ceased to be an option for them. We might assume that this would cause them to lose their engagement with their background and loyalty to working-class values. However, as these men navigated change, they consistently sought to embed these values in their family history. Collaborative domestic repair projects anchored their personal story in their manual trade backgrounds. These projects provided a practical demonstration that, although they had moved away from working-class employment, they had not "got above their rising" (or upbringing as we say in England). So even those who went into careers such as social work or school teaching saw these new spheres of work as relevant to their occupational or family background. These projects also allow them to transmit the value of working-class trade work to their own children, a practical manifestation of 'don't act like your family's a joke'.

George Karl Ackers

George Karl Ackers is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Portsmouth. His research centres on the sociology of deindustrialisation. To read more about this project, see "Rethinking deindustrialisation and male career crisis", British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 2014.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Rethinking the Twenty-First-Century Economy [feedly]

Rethinking the Twenty-First-Century Economy
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/taxing-value-in-the-digital-economy-by-margareta-drzeniek-hanouz-2018-04

With the rise of digital technologies and big data, the global economy is undergoing a fundamental transformation that poses significant challenges to governments and policymakers. Unless tools are developed to measure new sources of value in the real economy, current and future generations' wellbeing will be in jeopardy.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Branko Milanovic: When Autarky becomes the Only Solution [feedly]

When Autarky becomes the Only Solution

https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/16/04/2018/when-autarky-becomes-only-solution

The latest, and by far the most serious, round of US sanctions against Russia has shown two things very clearly—neither of which has received much publicity in the comments so far. The first is the extraordinary power of the modern state. The second is that when powerful states impose sanctions that limit one's access to markets, technology and capital, the only remaining option turns out to be autarky.

I will discuss the two points in turn.

Despite all the talk about the waning power of the state and the rising power of "foot-loose" large corporations what the sanctions do show is that the state is still the most powerful actor in contemporary global capitalism. Apple or Amazon could not impose sanctions and destroy Russia. Actually, no company in the world —even those who are Russia's major customers—could not destroy it. But a state can. Putin showed the power of the Russian state, at the time when it seemed weak and insignificant, when he overnight imprisoned Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia, and despoiled him of Yukos. Trump, or rather US treasury, shows the power of US state in destroying overnight the largest aluminum producer in the world

The second lesson is, to a large degree, for Russia the replay of the 1920s. It is today often wrongly asserted that the USSR chose a policy of economic autarky. On the contrary, all the 1920s, as soon as War Communism and foreign intervention ended, was spent by Russia in pursuit of foreign capital with which to rebuild its destroyed industry, and optimistically, to catch up with the West. But that capital was not forthcoming. The Western powers refused to recognize the Soviet government, and since the Soviets repudiated previous debt of the Tsarist Russia, their access to capital markets was shut both because of default on the debt and because of ideological reasons.

This created the situation in which Soviet development had to be conducted entirely based on domestic accumulation and technology. As is well known, the implications of that was first seized by Trotsky and Preobrazhensky:  it meant comprehensive planning  of the economy and extraction of the surplus from the only segment of the population that could generate it: the Soviet peasantry. Soviet industrialization thus took place on the "blood and toil" of Soviet (which essentially meant Ukrainian) peasantry. This policy, which by definition included collectivization, was then, beginning with the First Five-Year plan in 1928 conducted with characteristic brutality by Stalin. 

What current sanctions, and those that may yet come (as for example on Gazprom), show is that Russia is now at the same crossroads at which it was in the early 1920s. Its access to Western markets, technology and capital is all but cut off.  It is true that there are nowadays other sources for all three, including in China. But the breadth of sanctions is such that Chinese actors, if they themselves plan to do business or raise money in the United States, will too avoid doing business with Russian entities. So Russian industry will be left to grow, if it can, using only domestic resources, which compared to global resources, are small and inadequate (given how Russia's relative economic and population role in the world has declined). Autarky is thus preordained.

The questions is then whether such an economic choice will also entail, as it did in the 1920s, dictatorial domestic politics. This is quite possible because autarkic developments are hard to implement if there is no corresponding political pressure. Moreover, there would be for sure attempts from those who are affected by sanctions and all those who need access to global markets to reverse the policies that have led to the sanctions. Such attempts make them become direct political foes of the current government. The logic of political repression then becomes inescapable.

It would be wrong however to believe that the current impasse in which Russia finds itself can be overcome through different policies. It could have been done several years ago, but no longer. The reasons listed in the imposition of sanctions that cover everything from the annexation of Crimea to fake news are so comprehensive that no new post-Putin government of any conceivable kind can accept them all. They can be accepted only by a totally defeated country. In addition, US sanctions are notoriously difficult to overturn. The US sanctions against the Soviet Union started in 1948 and were practically never discontinued. The Jackson-Vanik amendment that linked trade to the freedom of Jewish emigration was on the books from 1974 until 2012, i.e. lasted more than a quarter century after the ostensible reason for its imposition ended. And it was repealed only to be replaced by another set of sanctions contained in the Magnitsky Act. The sanctions against Iran have been on, and despite the recent talk of their loosening, for almost 40 years. The sanctions on Cuba have lasted, and many still do, for more than half-century.  

Putin has thus, through a series of tactical successes, brought to Russia a comprehensive strategic defeat from which neither him, nor the governments that succeed him, will be able to extricate the country. There is moreover no ideology, short of extreme nationalism, on which the autarkic system can be built. Bolsheviks in the 1920s had an ideology which led them ultimately to accept autarky and to work within it. Such an ideology does not exist in today's capitalist Russia. Yet the industrialization debate of the 1920 may again become indispensable literature for economic policy-making.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed