Another sign of the deepening social crisis: The decline in US life expectancy [feedly]

Another sign of the deepening social crisis: The decline in US life expectancy
https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2020/01/02/another-sign-of-the-deepening-social-crisis-the-decline-in-us-life-expectancy/

US life expectancy is on the decline, falling from 2014 to 2017—the first years of decline in life expectancy in over twenty years.  And according to Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker, authors of the recently published "Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959-2017" in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "A major contributor has been an increase in mortality from specific causes (e.g., drug overdoses, suicides, organ system diseases) among young and middle-aged adults of all racial groups, with an onset as early as the 1990s and with the largest relative increases occurring in the Ohio Valley and New England."

Declining life expectancy

In 1960, the US had the highest life expectancy of any country in the world.  By 2017 US life expectancy significantly trailed that of other comparable countries, as illustrated below.

In 1980, the difference between average life expectancy in the US and that of comparable countries was not large–73.7 years versus 74.5 years.  However, as we can see in the next figure, the gap steadily grew over the following years.  The US gained 4.9 years in average life expectancy from 1980 to 2017; comparable countries gained 7.8 years on average.

As researchers for the Kaiser Family Foundation point out, "The U.S. and most comparable countries experienced a slight decline in life expectancy in 2015. By 2016, life expectancy for these comparable countries rebounded to pre-2015 numbers, but in the US, such a bounce back did not occur."  After averaging 78.9 years in 2014, averaged life expectancy in the US fell to 78.7 years in both 2015 and 2016, and then dropped again in 2017 to 78.6 years. These declines mark the first decreases in US life expectancy in more than 20 years.

Moreover, this growing gap and outright decline in average life expectancy holds for both US males and females, as we see from the following figure.

The growing social crisis

Woolf and Schoomaker drew upon 50 years' worth of data from the US Mortality Database and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database in an attempt to explain why US life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other wealthy countries and is now falling.  Their primary finding, as noted above, is that US life expectancy is being dragged down by "an increase in mortality from specific causes (eg, drug overdoses, suicides, organ system diseases) among young and middle-aged adults of all racial groups."

More specifically, while over the period 1999-2017, infant mortality, mortality rates among children and early adolescents (1-14 years of age), and age-adjusted mortality rates among adults 65-84 all declined, individuals aged 25-64 "experienced retrogression" beginning in 2010, as we can see in the following figures taken from their article.  Between 2010 and 2017, these midlife adults experienced a 6 percent total increase in mortality rate. This increase overwhelmed gains experienced by the other age cohorts, dragging down overall US average life expectancy.

Woolf and Schoomaker concluded that there were multiple causes for this rise in mortality rates among individuals 25-64.  However, they highlighted drug overdose, alcohol abuse and suicide as among the most important.  This age cohort experienced a nearly four-fold increase in fatal drug overdoses between 1999 and 2017.  Their suicide rates went up nearly 40 percent over the same period. The rate of alcohol-related disease deaths soared by almost 160 percent for those 25-34 years.

In an interview with BusinessInsider, Woolf wrestled with why the country is experiencing such a dramatic rise in mortality rates among young and middle aged adults. "It's a quandary of why this is happening when we spend so much on healthcare," Woolf said, adding: "But my betting money is on the economy."

That seems like a pretty safe answer.  It also raises the question: how do we help working people understand the increasingly toxic nature of the workings of the US economy and build the ties of solidarity necessary to advance the struggle for system transformation.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Decline of Global Value Chains [feedly]

This article is interesting in many ways, but I would change its conclusion, which reads: "Ultimately, the Chinese government must recognize that Sino-American tension is rooted in the differences in their political systems. Without some willingness on China's part to liberalize its authoritarian model, the transformation of the world economy is unlikely to be smooth."

I submit one must counter: "Without some willingness on the US part to modify its imperial model (e.g. "there shall be NO "socialism""), the transformation of the world economy is unlikely tobe smooth."

The Decline of Global Value Chains
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-trump-global-value-chains-by-erik-berglof-2020-01

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal [feedly]

there does not seem to be a market solution....

Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/opinion/climate-change-australia.html

text only:

The past week's images from Australia have been nightmarish: walls of flame, blood-red skies, residents huddled on beaches as they try to escape the inferno. The bush fires have been so intense that they have generated "fire tornadoes" powerful enough to flip over heavy trucks.

The thing is, Australia's summer of fire is only the latest in a string of catastrophic weather events over the past year: unprecedented flooding in the Midwest, a heat wave in India that sent temperatures to 123 degrees, another heat wave that brought unheard-of temperatures to much of Europe.

And all of these catastrophes were related to climate change.

Notice that I said "related to" rather than "caused by" climate change. This is a distinction that has flummoxed many people over the years. Any individual weather event has multiple causes, which was one reason news reports used to avoid mentioning the possible role of climate change in natural disasters.

In recent years, however, climate scientists have tried to cut through this confusion by engaging in "extreme event attribution," which focuses on probabilities: You can't necessarily say that climate change caused a particular heat wave, but you can ask how much difference global warming made to the probability of that heat wave happening. And the answer, typically, is a lot: Climate change makes the kinds of extreme weather events we've been seeing much more likely.

And while there's a lot of randomness in weather outcomes, that randomness actually makes climate change much more damaging in its early stages than most people realize. On our current trajectory, Florida as a whole will eventually be swallowed by the sea, but long before that happens, rising sea levels will make catastrophic storm surges commonplace. Much of India will eventually become uninhabitable, but killing heat waves and droughts will take a deadly toll well before that point is reached.

Put it this way: While it will take generations for the full consequences of climate change to play out, there will be many localized, temporary disasters along the way. Apocalypse will become the new normal — and that's happening right in front of our eyes.

The big question is whether the proliferation of climate-related disasters will finally be enough to break though the opposition to action.

There are some hopeful signs. One is that the news media has become much more willing to talk about the role of climate change in weather events.


Not long ago it was all too common to read articles about heat waves, floods and droughts that seemed to go to great lengths to avoid mentioning climate change. My sense is that reporters and editors have finally gotten over that block.

The public also seems to be paying attention, with concern about climate change growing substantially over the past few years.

The bad news is that growing climate awareness is mainly taking place among Democrats; the Republican base is largely unmoved.

And the anti-environmental extremism of conservative politicians has, if anything, become even more intense as their position has become intellectually untenable. The right used to pretend that there was a serious scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its sources. Now Republicans, and the Trump administration in particular, have simply become hostile to science in general. Hey, aren't scientists effectively part of the deep state?

Furthermore, this isn't just a U.S. problem. Even as Australia burns, its current government is reaffirming its commitment to coal and threatening to make boycotts of environmentally destructive businesses a crime.

The sick irony of the current situation is that anti-environmentalism is getting more extreme precisely at the moment when the prospects for decisive action should be better than ever.

On one side, the dangers of climate change are no longer predictions about the future: We can see the damage now, although it's only a small taste of the horrors that lie ahead.

On the other side, drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions now look remarkably easy to achieve, at least from an economic point of view. In particular, there has been so much technological progress in alternative energy that the Trump administration is trying desperately to prop up coal against competition from solar and wind.

So will environmental policy play a role in the 2020 campaign? Most Democrats seem disinclined to make it a major issue, and I understand why: Historically, the threat posed by right-wing environmental policy seemed abstract, distant and hard to run on compared with, say, Republican attempts to dismantle Obamacare.

But the wave of climate-related catastrophes may be changing the political calculus. I'm not a campaign expert, but it seems to me that campaigns might get some traction with ads showing recent fires and floods and pointing out that Donald Trump and his friends are doing everything they can to create more such disasters.

For the truth is that Trump's environmental policy is the worst thing he's doing to America and the world. And voters should know that.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 3, 2020, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal. Order Reprints | Today's

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dean Baker: Donald Trump’s Big Trade Deals: More Reality TV [feedly]

Donald Trump's Big Trade Deals: More Reality TV

Dean Baker

http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/donald-trump-s-big-trade-deals-more-reality-tv

As he faced impeachment, Donald Trump touted his trade deals as evidence of the great success of his presidency. Specifically, he touted his revised North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which the Democratic leadership agreed to, and a first-round trade agreement with China. In both cases, people are more likely to hear Trump's boasts than to see any economic benefit from these deals.

In the case of the new NAFTA (called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), it is essentially the old NAFTA, with some minor twists, both positive and negative. On the positive side, congressional Democrats forced Trump to include some serious language on labor rights in Mexico. While it remains to be seen how enforceable these will be, they are definitely stronger than the provisions in the original NAFTA.

It also helps that Mexico's current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is its most labor-friendly leader in more than half-century. In most cases, Obrador will likely be happy to improve labor standards in Mexico in accordance with the agreement.

While provisions that can improve the living standards of Mexican workers should be seen as good, this is unlikely to make much difference in terms of the number of manufacturing jobs going from the U.S. to Mexico. Even if the labor provisions of the deal are fully enforced, wages will still be far lower in Mexico than in the United States.

The one positive aspect of this picture for U.S. workers is that most of the jobs that are likely to be transferred to Mexico have already moved there. Some jobs are undoubtedly still threatened with being moved going forward, but for the most part, the big transfer of manufacturing jobs has already taken place.

A big plus, for which congressional Democrats deserve considerable credit, was the removal of provisions that would have lengthened patent protections for prescription drugs. This provision would not only raise drug prices in our trading partners, it would lock in high prices in the United States. Democrats insisted that the patent-lengthening provisions be removed as a condition of reaching an agreement.

The major downside of the revised NAFTA was that it left in place wording that will make it more difficult to regulate the internet. There is a whole range of internet concerns on issues such as privacy, ownership of data, and the spreading of false information that has been raised in the United States and elsewhere.

The revised NAFTA will make it more difficult to impose new regulations in any of these areas. Of special concern is that the deal locks in, and applies to our trading partners, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This protects internet intermediaries, like Facebook, from facing the same sort of liability for knowingly spreading false information that print and broadcast outlets face.

This means, for example, that if someone falsely alleges that a person committed a horrible crime, Facebook has no responsibility to remove the allegation, even if it can be shown to be false. Since the intention of the administration and Congress is to treat the revised NAFTA as a model for other trade deals, this special treatment of internet intermediaries is a very bad story.

It is harder to pass judgment on the "phase one" China deal, since we don't really know what is there. The Trump administration and the Chinese government are making different claims about what was agreed to.

One thing that we can be reasonably sure of is that the deal will not fundamentally alter the U.S. trading relationship with China. The U.S. is likely to continue to be a large net importer of manufactured goods from China.

China is also not about to restructure its entire economy in accordance with Donald Trump's vision. This fact was obvious to arithmetic fans everywhere. Our imports from China come to less than 4.0 percent of China's GDP. Much of the value added of these imports comes from other countries. For example, most of the value of an iPhone imported from China comes from the U.S. The value added of the items we import from China is almost certainly less than 3.0 percent of its GDP.

Even if Trump's tariffs reduced this by half (they have not come close), that is still only a hit of 1.5 percent of GDP. That would slow China's growth, but not be the sort of thing that would get it to restructure its economy. In fact, it likely would not even cause a recession. In short, Trump was fighting a trade war without any ammunition.

So, enjoy the celebration of Donald Trump's big trade deals, but don't expect to see any benefits for the economy. You won't find them.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Blaming Obama for Trump???

I have been thinking more about the recent spate of liberal articles blaming Obama for Trump. Including Paul Krugman. The argument goes that Obama failed to enact a second stimulus, using a belt-tightening argument which is spun as support for "austerity".

its true that a bigger stimulus would have brought the economy closer to full employment, faster. Trump's massive tax cut (a stimulus) has proved that.

However I have serious problems with the "its Obama's fault". analysis, both economically and politically. On the economic side, I think it is highly debatable whether a second stimulus was a better choice than the investment in expanded medicaid and Obamacare's struggle to advance universal health coverage. Especially if the realpolitik choice was one or the other, not both. I do not see, nor recall, any evidence that "both" were enactable.

When I evaluate "better" I try to do so from the standpoint of working people, especially the uninsured and underinsured, which amounted to over half of wage earners when Obama took office. A second stimulus, as the tax cut shows, would have got us to where we are now, employment-wise, but still doing next to nothing, just spit, about income inequality.

At the same time, I have personal experience about the lives and life savings of low wage families that expanded Medicaid has saved. And if Medicare for All has any chance in the future, it will owe a lot to both the wins, and shortcomings of Obamacare, which are now part of the US experience, not just an ideological dispute. I

t's also worth noting a feature/defect of Keynesian economics. Fiscal and monetary policy can counter (over time) the employment losses from recession or depression. But it is agnostic and indifferent to the inequality problem. For example, If all the new jobs are minimum.low wage, as most have been, Keynesian economics theory does not object.

On the political side, I do not believe Obama's pivot to health care was motivated by support for "austerity". Even with all the concessions (the public option, etc), the bill only passed with Democratic votes. Not a single Republican. So, the concessions denounced by the Fake Left, and now some liberals, were made just to keep all the Dems in line.

Further, the R blockade against Obama began immediately after the first stimulus -- which the moron Rs only supported because Bush did. The Fake Left of course asserts both the stimulus and single payer health care could just be 'commanded'. Any other outcome "must" be a result of a "neo-liberal" conspiracy.

Relationships of forces never have much impact on the anarchist (however manifest) mentality. But in real politics they are more than half of EVERY decision.

No "austerity" pol I know of ever worked to bring health care to low wage families -- ever.

I submit going after Obama hunting for the causes of Trump is a fool's errand, and, like some of the anti-globalization fetishes on the left, fertile sucker bait for the fascists and racists. Both the blockades against Obama reforms, and the rise of Trump, reflect, IMO, nothing less than --- a serious decay and unravelling of US capitalism in its current form. Its out of control. It paralyzing the political process. It's aggravated conflicts and contradictions are undermining civil society and democracy in nearly every dimension.

As Bernie Sanders has said: Its not really about the President -- the whole people, in multitudes, in its overwhelming majority, must be mobilized to defend against the grave threats. States of emergency are coming. But are there enough firemen? Australia is coming. There will not be a market solution.

  

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

Socialist Economics

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Chris Dillow: Wages vs social value [feedly]

Interesting and timely post on a matter of high importance to socialist theory and policy going forward....how to 'value' non-monetized 'value'.

Wages vs social value
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/01/wages-vs-social-value.html

Today is the 23^rd anniversary of the death of Townes Van Zandt, who is now universally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters ever.

And yet during his lifetime he made very little money. Even in his best years he got less than $100,000 from song-writing royalties, and for much of his life he might well have earned more from the oil drilling rights bequeathed by his rich family than from his music.

Which vindicates a recent tweet from Cameron Murray:

Actions that have social value only rarely coincide with actions that are monetarily compensated.

In Van Zandt's case, this was partly because his genius was not fully recognised during his lifetime. But there are other reasons why Cameron point is correct in many more cases – reasons which are in fact entirely consistent with mainstream economics. I'm thinking of three ideas here.

1. Externalities. Let's assume (heroically) that people are paid their marginal product. Even where this is the case, it is the private marginal product for which they are rewarded, not the social marginal product. The two differ because of externalities. A worker whose job generates huge carbon emissions or other pollution will have a wage greater than their social value.

There are other forms of pollution. There's also risk pollution. In the run-up to the financial crisis, bankers were paid more than their social value because the risks generated by their activities would fall upon others; they were externalities. I suspect this is still the case.

And then there's intellectual pollution. "Writers" such as Giles Coren or Toby Young have a highish marginal product for their employers, but their gibberings coarsen the public sphere. One baleful effect of Twitter is that this is brought to wider attention than previously and thus imposes a greater negative externality.

By the same token, there are also positive externalities, as when researchers' findings inspire further ones. William Nordhaus has famously shown that innovators have captured "only a miniscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances."

2. Compensating advantages. Adam Smith thought the rewards to work tended to be equal across all occupations, once we considered both financial and non-financial returns. And, he said:

Honour makes a great part of the reward of all honourable professions. In point of pecuniary gain, all things considered, they are generally under-recompensed.

So, for example, professions such as nursing carry low wages but these are offset by a sense of pride and honour. But professions where these are lacking must pay more to offset that lack.

In his wonderful Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber has revived this idea. Many businesses, he writes, "now feel that if there's work that's gratifying in any way at all, they really shouldn't have to pay for it." But the same bosses who begrudge paying writers, he says, "are willing to shell out handsome salaries for 'Vice Presidents for Creative Development' and the like, who do absolutely nothing." This is pure Smith: financial rewards offset the dissatisfaction that comes from doing a bullshit job, whilst enjoyable work pays less.

3. Bargaining. Your income does not depend upon how much social value you produce. It depends upon your power to extract that value. And Van Zandt was typical of musicians in being unable to do so. In Rockonomics, Alan Krueger wrote that "musicians are not rewarded fairly for their services" because they earn little compared to the countless hours of entertainment they deliver. He pointed out that the typical musician made only $100 in 2018 from streaming and that many artists have suffered from bad record deals: Paul McCartney, he says, made more money with Wings than he did with the Beatles. Jolie Holland, the Van Zandt of our era, has said:

I barely make a living. I think you have to be famous to make a living. I live out of a suitcase.

Although Econ101 tells fairy stories of how W=MP, bargaining (pdf)models are in fact mainstream economics: I recommend chapter 5 of Sam Bowles Microeconomics for a discussion of them.

Yes, we can and should supplement such models with analyses of how power relations (which of course include sexism and racism) also affect (pdf) wages and drive further wedges between social value and earnings. But we don't need to do so to see that Cameron is right. Mainstream economics alone shows that wages need not often coincide with social value.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed