Heading into election day, at least 30 million workers are being hurt by the coronavirus recession [feedly]

Heading into election day, at least 30 million workers are being hurt by the coronavirus recession
https://www.epi.org/blog/heading-into-election-day-at-least-30-million-workers-are-being-hurt-by-the-coronavirus-recession/

One of the most frequent questions I've gotten in the last few months is, "How many workers are being hurt by the coronavirus recession?" There is a huge amount of confusion about this because two major, completely separate, government data sets that address this question are reporting very different numbers. Specifically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the official number of unemployed workers in September, from the Current Population Survey, was 12.6 million (September is the latest data available; October numbers will be released this Friday). But during the reference week for the September monthly unemployment figure—the week ending September 12—the Department of Labor (DOL) reported that there were a total of 26.5 million people claiming unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. The UI number is compiled by DOL from reports it receives from state unemployment insurance agencies.

What is going on? In a nutshell: The BLS official number of unemployed workers vastly understates the number of workers who have faced the negative consequences of the coronavirus recession, and DOL's UI number overstates the number of workers receiving unemployment benefits.

Let's first look at UI. An important way the numbers coming out of DOL are overstating the number of people receiving UI benefits right now has to do with delays in the processing of applications (delays caused by the overwhelming number of applications UI agencies have received during the COVID-19 crisis). When a worker's benefits are delayed, they are paid retroactively. This is as it should be, but it causes reporting problems. Say a worker claims UI benefits not just for their most recent week of unemployment, but also for the six prior weeks. That worker will show up in the data not as one person who claimed seven weeks of benefits, but as seven claims. Nobody knows how extensive that problem is, but this New York Timesarticle has good information on it. Another issue is that state UI agencies have been the target of fraud—not individuals filing one or two fraudulent claims, but sophisticated cyberattacksinvolving extensive identity theft and the overriding of security systems. Note: None of this negates the fact that the expansions of unemployment insurance in the CARES Act were an enormous success! These expansions have been a lifeline to millions and a crucial boost to the economy.

It is worth noting that both of the issues described above (double-counting of claims and vulnerability to fraud) are problems precisely because we have profoundly disinvested in our UI systems for decades, and agencies are often working on computer systems that are decades old. We entered this recession with a rickety system that was nowhere near agile enough nor sound enough to handle what has been expected of it during this time, and we are now paying the price. We must not make this mistake again; we must shore up our systems so that we enter the next recession with the world-class system U.S. workers deserve.

Given the problems with the UI data, I estimate the number of workers affected by the coronavirus recession using the monthly unemployment data from BLS. As mentioned above, the official number of unemployed in September—12.6 million—is a vast undercount of the number of workers being harmed. Here are the missing factors:

• Some workers are being misclassified as "employed, not at work" instead of unemployed. BLS has discussed at length that there have been many workers who have been misclassified as "employed, not at work" during this pandemic who should be classified as "temporarily unemployed." In August, there were 0.8 million such workers. (Wonky note: Some of these workers may not have had the option of being classified as "temporarily unemployed," meaning they weren't technically misclassified, but all of them were out at work because of the virus.)
• Some workers who are out of work as a result of the virus are being counted as having dropped out of the labor force instead of as unemployed. In order for a person without a job to be counted as unemployed, they must be available to work and actively seeking work. However, during the COVID-19 crisis, many people who are out of work as a result of the crisis do not meet those criteria. For example, many workers are out of work because of care responsibilities as a result of COVID-19 (e.g., a young child's school being remote, or an elderly parent's day care closing). These workers would not be counted as officially unemployed but are nevertheless out of work because of the virus. To calculate how many there are, I simply calculate what the labor force level would be if the labor force participation rate had not dropped since February—the month before the pandemic hit the U.S. labor market—by multiplying the February labor force participation rate by the August population level. I then subtract this "counterfactual" labor force from the actual labor force. This yields an additional 5.1 million people out of the labor force as a result of the virus.
• The number of officially unemployed is undercounted, even in normal times (and is probably worse now).Rigorous research that addresses issues like the fact that survey nonresponse is nonrandom—and that missing individuals are more likely than the general population to be unemployed—find that the official unemployment rate was understating the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points at the start of 2020. Accounting for that undercount yields an additional 2.5 million unemployed workers. (This is conservative, given that there is good evidence that this problem is likely substantially worse in the coronavirus era.)
• Millions of employed workers have seen a drop in hours and pay because of the pandemic. BLS reports that 9.1 million people who were working in August had been unable to work at some point in the last four weeks because their employer closed or lost business due to the coronavirus pandemic, and they did not receive pay for the hours they didn't work. These workers have clearly been hurt by the coronavirus recession. (It's worth noting that these workers represent a portion of the gap between the official unemployment numbers and the UI claims numbers, since many workers who are employed but have seen a drop in hours and pay are eligible for partial UI benefits but are not unemployed.)

Adding up all but the last one, that is 12.6 million + 0.8 million + 5.1 million + 2.5 million = 21.0 million workers who are either officially unemployed or otherwise out of the labor force as a result of the virus. Also adding in the 9.1 million who are employed but have seen a drop in hours and pay because of the pandemic brings the number of workers directly harmed in September by the coronavirus downturn to 30.1 million.

This means that even though I noted above that the number of workers that DOL reported were on UI during the reference week—26.5 million—is an overstatement, it is nevertheless substantially lower than the number of workers being harmed by the coronavirus downturn. That is due to the fact that not everyone who is officially unemployed, otherwise out of work as a result of the virus, or has had their hours and pay cut as a result of the virus, applies for UI.

Finally, even the 30.1 million is an undercount. For one, it doesn't count those who lost a job or hours earlier in the pandemic but are back to work now. The cumulative impact would be much higher. But perhaps more importantly, the 30.1 million is a drastic undercount because it ignores the fact that even workers who have remained employed and have not seen a cut in hours are being hurt by the recession. How? Essentially the only source of power nonunionized workers have vis-à-vis their employers is the implicit threat that they could quit their job and take another job elsewhere. Case in point: One of the most common ways nonunionized workers get a wage increase is by getting another job offer for higher pay—they either accept the job, or their current employer gives them a raise in response to their outside offer. When job openings are scarce, as they are now, workers' leverage dissolves. Employers simply don't have to pay as well when they know workers don't have outside options.

All this means that stimulating the economy to create jobs is crucial—both to the 30.1 million workers who are being directly harmed by the recession because they are either out of work or have had their hours and pay cut, and to the millions more who saw their bargaining power disappear as the recession took hold. This is a preventable disaster for the workers of this country. Extending the unemployment insurance provisions of the CARES Act and providing fiscal aid to state and local governments could alone create or save millions of jobs over the next year (see here and here). It is both cruel and terrible economics that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate last Tuesday with no COVID relief. Let's hope that the 117th Congress does better—the working people of this country are depending on it.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Bloomberg: Here’s What Economists Are Saying About China’s New 5-Year Plan - Bloomberg

Here's What Economists Are Saying About China's New 5-Year Plan

by Enda Curran

Economists zeroed in on China's focus on quality economic growth and its technology ambitions in the 14th five-year plan released Thursday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-30/here-s-what-economists-are-saying-about-china-s-new-5-year-plan?sref=woWS9Szx

Economists zeroed in on China's focus on quality economic growth and its technology ambitions in the 14th five-year plan released Thursday.

A communique released after a four-day meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee gave a broad outline of the plan as well as sketching out a vision for the economy as far as 2035.

Five Year Plans

China's economy has experienced much upheaval since the first plan started in 1953

Source: Data compiled by Bloomberg

Here's a look at what economists are saying about the plan:

Quality Growth

The communique implied an aggressive path of economic expansion without mentioning the pace of gross domestic product growth explicitly. The previous five-year plan in 2015 had outlined a goal for medium-to-high growth.

Thursday's statement "said that China's GDP per capita should match the level in moderately developed countries by 2035," economists at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, led by Raymond Yeung, wrote in a note. "Although no specific figures or names were mentioned, a reasonable expectation is that China will aim to reach GDP per capita levels similar to that of South Korea, Israel, or Spain over the next 15 years. The GDP per capita of these countries are $35,000-40,000 in today's prices, compared with China's $10,261 in 2019."

What Bloomberg Economics Says...

Though the plan doesn't mention a numerical growth target, "it requires significant enhancement in the quality of the economy, reflected in innovation, more advanced industrial fundamentals and a more modern economic system. To achieve these, it emphasized tech innovation, supply-side structural reform, dual cycle."

-- David Qu, China economist

Innovation Push

UBS Group AG said the focus on technology and innovation will accelerate an industrial upgrading.

"We think China may target a higher spending in R&D (possibly 3% of GDP by 2025) and education in the new five year plan," UBS economists Wang Tao and Ning Zhang, wrote in a note. "In light of tech restrictions, China may allocate more resources to fundamental and frontier research, and technology bottleneck areas."

On its digitalization plans, "we think China will invest more in its "new infrastructure" including 5G networks, AI and data centers in the new five year plan," the economists said.

Opening Up

China pledged to continue opening up its economy and to take it to a "higher level."

"The fifth Plenum called for international collaboration through high-level opening up," Barclays Plc economists led by Chang Jian in Hong Kong wrote in a note. "The communique called for promoting trade and investment liberalization, advancing the "Belt and Road" high-quality development, and actively participating in the reform of the global economic governance system."

The commitments are in line with recent comments from President Xi Jinping, who says China must actively cooperate with all countries, regions and enterprises, including with those in the U.S., the economists wrote.

Domestic Demand

China's focus of raising domestic demand to achieve more sustainable growth means "boosting total factor productivity and rebalancing economic development across sectors/regions," economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. wrote in a note.

"Although the Chinese government has been calling for a transition in the development model for a number of years, given that the broad external and domestic environment has changed, we think the government is likely to accelerate the pace of relevant reforms in the next five years, to achieve sustainable, balanced and high quality growth and enter the high income group from the upper middle income group."

Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro Plot to Get Brazilians Killed [feedly]

Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro Plot to Get Brazilians Killed
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/beat_the_press/~3/MuLxrP8ws1M/

It's not normal for a president of the United States to make plans with the president of an allied country, that is likely to get tens of thousands of people in that country killed. But we're not talking about ordinary presidents; we're talking about Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.

The goal of the Trump-Bolsonaro plot was to keep Brazil from getting access to a vaccine developed in China. China is apparently somewhat ahead of the United States in developing an effective vaccine. While the pharmaceutical companies in the United States have approached a vaccine by developing a new RNA method, the leading Chinese companies have pursued an old-fashioned dead virus approach.

This allowed these companies to move more quickly with their testing and get to the final Phase 3 stage of clinical trials before the U.S. companies. They also went the route of picking countries with high infection rates, like Brazil, to conduct their trials. A high infection rate makes it easier to determine how effective a vaccine is in preventing infections.

Now that Sinovac, one of the leading Chinese companies, is concluding its trials, it is negotiating large sales of the vaccine to Brazil. Joao Doria, the governor of Sao Paulo, had negotiated a major purchase for the people in his state. Bolsonaro, has sought to nix the deal.

According to a press account, Bolsonaro made this decision after meeting with Trump's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien. Trump apparently would consider it a setback in his contest with China for global stature, if Brazil were to adopt a vaccine developed by a Chinese company.

Brazil ranks second to the United States in total deaths from the pandemic and is seeing close to 400 deaths a day. This means a delay in getting a vaccine of even a month can mean over 10,000 additional deaths. If the delay is longer, as seems likely, the number of needless deaths would increase accordingly.

Bolsonaro's claim is that he doesn't want his country to be "anyone's guinea pig." But this is hardly the issue. Large-scale purchases of the Sinovac vaccine would come only after Brazil's regulatory authority had determined that the vaccine was safe and effective. Bolsonaro's move was purely an effort to satisfy his friend Donald Trump. He apparently has no more respect for the lives of the people in Brazil than Trump does for people in the United States.  

The post Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro Plot to Get Brazilians Killedappeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Michael Roberts: China’s growth challenge [feedly]

It appears Xi Jinping has won comrade Michael over.  A devoted defender of Marx's theory of value, I admit shunning him, perhaps more often than I  should, for what sometimes appears as an intellectual fetish combined with screwball politics. But -- he is a good economist and a good researcher, too.  He does a great job below distinguishing between two methods of defining and calculating GDP -- which boils down to whether China's GDP is 10 or 8% per annum -- in either case orders of magnitude better than any other large or medium economy. The distinctions include what basket of goods to include in what is measured, and what weights to assign to different goods in the basket to be measured: Productive vs not productive, service vs mfg, public vs private, intangible vs tangible, etc.

China's growth challenge
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/10/28/chinas-growth-challenge/

 Michael Roberts

This week the 5^th plenum of the Chinese Communist Party central committee is taking place.  The plenum is to discuss the progress of the Chinese economy and to decide on real GDP growth and other targets for the new 2021-25 five-year economic plan for China.  The plenum will also discuss a broad plan for the next 15 years, with goals that are likely to endure for at least the rest of 67-year-old President Xi Jinping's rule. This year's meeting comes as the deadline for meeting the previous overarching goal of achieving a "moderately prosperous society", is due to expire in 2021, the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist party.

Beijing has hinted it would broaden out its focus on economic growth to include targets for environmental protection, innovation and self-sufficient development — such as in food, energy, and in chips.  This is all part of the strategy of developing a "dual circulation" economy in which China will develop domestic demand and self-sufficiency while the rest of the world remains stalled by coronavirus.

Beijing has set an average annual GDP growth-rate target in every Five-Year Plan since 1986. But this year, as the economy was pummelled by the Covid-19 pandemic, China for the first time did not define a target. The new GDP target is likely to be lowered from the 6.5% a year set in the current plan to 5% or so in the next.

There is much to discuss about China: how it dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and how quickly it is recovering economically.  Then there is how the 'cold war' between China and the US will pan out and what it means for the world economy.  And perhaps most important of all: will China be able to continue to grow at a fast-enough pace to reduce poverty and raise living standards as it has done so successfully over the last 40 years.  I shall come back to these questions in future posts, but in this post, I want to discuss China's growth, as measured by the mainstream economics measure, gross domestic product (GDP).

The reason for doing that is because the official statistics for China's GDP and its annual growth since the 1949 revolution have been disputed by 'Western' economists and even Chinese ones.  The dispute ranges from just arguing that the Chinese authorities just blatantly lie and make their figures up to a more reasoned view that official calculations are faulty. That China just makes up its figures has been pretty conclusively rejected by those who have studied them closely. "The findings are that the supposed evidence for GDP data falsification is not compelling, that the National Bureau of Statistics has much institutional scope for falsifying GDP data, and that certain manipulations of nominal and real data would be virtually undetectable. Official GDP data, however, exhibit few statistical anomalies and the National Bureau of Statistics thus either makes no significant use of its scope to falsify data, or is aware of statistical data regularities when it falsifies data."

However, there is a large body of analysis that argues that conceptual and statistical frailties in China's statistical work has led to an exaggeration of China's real GDP growth since the 1949 revolution and especially since the 'market reform' period initiated by Deng started after 1978.  The main source of this view comes the US Conference Board, a mine of statistical information on the GDP, GDP per head, productivity and employment for most countries of the world.  The Conference Board has adjusted China's real GDP growth rate going back to the 1950s to produce a much lower rate of growth than the official data.

The CB finds that, while the official data reckon that real GDP growth in China from 1949 to 2019 was 8.5% a year, it was really only 5.9% a year, some 30% slower.  The gap is even greater in the post-Mao period up to 2000, with China's official real GDP growing at 9.7% a year while the CB finds it grew at 6.3% a year or 35% slower.  After that, the gap between the two measures narrows somewhat.  With real GDP per capita growth (taking into account population growth), the gap between the official data and the CB data is even greater.

GDP growth	1953-19	1953-78	1979-2000	00-19	08-19
Official	8.5	6.7	9.7	9.5	8.5
CB	5.9	4.4	6.3	7.3	6.0
GDP per capita growth
	1953-19	1953-78	1979-2000	00-19	08-19
Official	7.1	4.5	8.4	8.9	8.0
CB	4.5	2.3	5.0	6.8	5.5

How does the CB reach different results from the official data?  The CB bases its results on the work of Harry Wu from the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo.  Wu has worked with the great world growth economist, Angus Maddison and is the adviser to the CB on China's stats.  Wu finds conceptual and technical flaws in the official data which when adjusted produce much lower growth rates in productivity and thus in GDP and GDP per capita.

There are many faults that Wu claims to find in the official data, but there are two that deliver the largest reduction to the official growth rate.  One is conceptual and one is technical.  The first conceptual one is that the Chinese stats exclude any 'non-material services'.  These are financial services, business consultancy, real estate agencies etc – in other words, non-productive services. This was done in China from the beginning so that GDP reflected more the productive sectors of the economy.  Of course, this is anathema to mainstream economics based on GDP conceived by Simon Kuznets to measure the progress of a capitalist economy.  When Wu adds in his own estimates of these sectors to China's GDP, this raises the total value of GDP and leads to a different scale of growth.  It knocks off from China's official growth rate 0.4% pts a year for the Mao period and 0.7% pts a year for the post-Mao period.

The second main adjustment is to the prices of produced goods. Many goods disappear over time and are replaced by new goods with different prices.  So the value of the basket of goods in GDP will change accordingly.  Wu adjusts GDP according to his own calculations for this, which knocks off another 1.7% pts a year in the post-Mao period.  These two adjustments account for most of the difference between the official growth figures and the CB ones.

I think there is much to dispute with Wu's adjustments.  First, the official stats provide a better guide to the strength of the key productive sectors of the economy than the mainstream GDP data.  Second, the Wu commodity price adjustments seem arbitrary and open to dispute.  Wu's adjustments lead not only to significantly different results for GDP growth but also to productivity growth, and to that neoclassical measure of 'innovation', total factor productivity (TFP).

As Wu concludes: "We have confined the present study to the well-known neoclassical growth accounting framework adopted in most of the existing studies, explicitly or implicitly. As stated at the beginning of the paper, the purpose of this study is to discover how and to what extent data problems may affect the estimated TFP growth, rather than building up a new theoretical framework to explain China's TFP performance. For this purpose, I have maintained the same approach and the same theoretical framework. Nevertheless, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the neoclassical framework used in this study is questionable."

Nevertheless, Wu's adjustments to the official GDP growth rates for China have become widely accepted.  The Penn World Tables, a major database for much world economy analysis, now uses the CB estimates for China's real GDP.  So let us accept for now, the CB adjusted data for Chinese economic growth.  What does it mean in gauging the past success of the Chinese economy and the likely projection for GDP, productivity and investment growth ahead?

The New York Federal Reserve has published just this week a brand, new in-depth analysis of Chinese economics growth using the Penn World Tables (and thus the CB estimates). According to the NY Fed, Chinese real GDP growth has averaged 6.9% since 1978, more than 2 percentage points below the official figure.  The estimated overstatement of growth varies considerably over time, from more than 3 percentage points for much of the 1990s to less than 1 percentage point until recently.  So the Wu adjustment effect is disappearing.

But even if you accept the lower rate of growth, as the NY Fed says "China's growth performance remains remarkable. For our sample of 124 economies, China has come in above the 90th percentile of the global growth distribution more than half the time since 1982, and above the 75th percentile until just last year. China's growth over the past 20 years (7.5 percent) somewhat lags that of the high-income Pacific Rim during the periods in which they rose to China's current per capita income level, but stands in the middle of the pack in per capita terms (6.9 percent)." And what the Fed does not mention is that China is a giant compared to the city states of Singapore and Hong Kong and is also immensely larger in GDP and population than Taiwan, Korea and even Japan. To achieve high annual growth in such a large economy in the last two decades to 2018 is truly historic.

One of the results of this huge growth in per capital income has been a staggering rise in life expectancy.  From life expectancy at birth in 1960 of just 44 years, China's average life expectancy is now 77 years. It is catching up with the US, where there has been a fall since the end of the Great Recession.  And China has outstripped all the other so-called large emerging economies.

High life expectancy and falling birth rates have meant that China has an ageing population.  Indeed, the working-age (20-64) population began shrinking in 2017.

Up to now, the key to China's economic growth has been the huge expansion of investment in machinery and technique as China moved from the labour-intensive economy of the Mao period to a hi-tech manufacturing export economy now. Of the 8.7% annual real GDP growth in the two decades before 2007, 4.7% pts came from investment (55%) – and over one-third from 'innovation' (TFP).  Labour inputs contributed less than 15%.

The NY Fed admits that if China keeps up this pace of expansion, it "is well on track to high-income status… After all, per capita income growth has averaged 6.2 percent over the last five years, implying a doubling roughly every eleven years, and per capita income is already close to 30 percent of the U.S. level."

But NY Fed economists along with most Western economists reckon that this will not happen. China's growth rate will slow down because it cannot expand capital investment any more than it has and its technical prowess will not rise sufficiently to compensate. Moreover, unless it drops state-led and directed investment and allows 'the market' and 'the consumer' to become king, it cannot achieve high income status and will be locked into the 'middle -income trap' as so many other 'emerging' capitalist economies have.

The NY Fed offers three growth scenarios for the next two decades. The 'humdrum' scenario projects that China will fail badly in reaching the living standards of the mature capitalist economies. Even under its 'pretty good' scenario it will fall short of the success of Japan and other East Asian states. Only the 'golden' scenario will do the trick.

But in the golden scenario, real per capita income growth must average a very rapid 4.9 percent from 2018 to 2028, slowing to a still strong 2.6 percent over 2028-38 (based on CB growth figures). This leaves real incomes up by 111 percent from their level in 2018, a performance comparable to what the Asian Tigers achieved over a similar period. China then achieves high-income status, with real incomes at slightly above 60 percent of the current US level, or exactly 50 percent of the assumed future US level.

The NY Fed reckons China's growth rate will slow because investment growth will slow and productivity enhancement from innovation will not be enough to compensate for falling employment as China ages."There is good reason to doubt that China could sustain rapid TFP growth with such a production mix, especially given already pressing concerns about the efficiency of new investment spending."

The NY Fed reckons that it would be "pretty extraordinary – and historically unprecedented" for Chinese growth rates to be sustained at 5% a year for the next 20 years.  Beijing-based Keynesian economist Michael Pettis echoes the Fed's view: "China's working population is expected to be 7% lower in 15 years than it is today. In that case 4.7% GDP growth requires as great an increase in worker productivity as 5.2% GDP growth for an economy with a steady working population."

But is that growth target really so impossible?  Given that China has achieved 7% annual growth (CB figures) over the last 20 years with labour inputs contributing only 15%, it does not seem impossible that even with a zero contribution from labour (and that won't be the case) and no change in the investment rate, that China could not manage around 5% a year economic growth by achieving a moderate 1-2% a year TFP increase . Much will depend on whether the technology upgrade that China is engaged in can deliver.  And even the NY Fed admits that "China can grow rapidly for a long time before it approaches the technological frontier. There is plenty of upside, just no guarantee that it will be exploited."  Moreover, even if China does not sustain 5% annual growth over the next two decades, it will close the gap with the mature economies because growth rates there will be lucky to get above 1-2% a year (and that's assuming no crises of capitalist production up to 2040!).

The reason that the NY Fed as well as many Keynesian and other critics of the Chinese 'miracle' are so sceptical is that they are seeped in a different economic model for growth.  They are convinced that China can only be 'successful' (like the economies of the G7!) if its economy depends on profitable investment by privately-owned companies in a 'free market' where consumption rules over investment.  And yet the evidence of the last 40 and even 70 years is that a state-led, planning economic model that is China's has been way more successful than its 'market economy' peers such as India, Brazil or Russia.

The NY Fed admits that "China (could) prove a unique case, attaining high-income status while retaining governance features unlike those of all current high-income economies."  However, the "Chinese authorities have been clear about their plans to proceed with market-oriented reforms. But authorities have been equally clear that the Communist Party will retain control over the commanding heights of the economy and over political life. And in this connection, policy is currently moving in the wrong direction, toward greater state and party control of the economy."  According to the critics, this is the 'wrong direction'; but what will the CP plenum conclude?

In future posts, I shall look at the challenges facing the Chinese economy, apart from growth, including: rising debt; climate change and the environment; inequality; the Belt and Road project; and the intensifying 'cold war' with the US.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

an AOC ad -- she gets it.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1321236661309755393

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

Socialist Economics

Facebook

Facebook’s Tech Chief: How We Built It and Where We’re Going [feedly]

Facebook's Tech Chief: How We Built It and Where We're Going
http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/~r/harvardbusiness/~3/FB7F681WFv8/facebooks-tech-chief-how-we-built-it-and-where-were-going

I would recommend this as a must listen for socialists. A clearly brilliant engineer, CTO of Facebook, is in charge of teaching (or being taught by) Facebook-scaled AI software how to recognize "hate speech" in 100 languages and among 2.1 billion users. That's just one item in a rich discussion. Another is the potential shift in human experience from enhanced virtual reality platforms that are in advanced research stages. At the end, however, a very big question is left unanswered. Facebook may be considered to be under public pressure due to its dominance for this time -- but it's still an ad-driven private biz for profit, assuming the role of global censor. If there must be global censors, I prefer elected governments to giant corporations.  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Black, Hispanic, and young workers have been left behind by policymakers, but will they vote? [feedly]

Black, Hispanic, and young workers have been left behind by policymakers, but will they vote?
https://www.epi.org/blog/black-hispanic-and-young-workers-have-been-left-behind-by-policymakers-but-will-they-vote/

EPI research finds that Black, Hispanic, and young workers are among those hit hardest by the COVID-19 recession—facing unemployment rates far beyond what white workers and older workers are facing. The resulting economic challenges—including food insecurity and the threat of eviction, among others—will compound if additional relief doesn't come soon. In addition to economic threats, the health threats of the coronavirus pandemic have affected communities of color far worse than white communities.

Young adults and Black and Hispanic citizens have also been historically underrepresented at the polls, for a variety of reasons that we explore below. But could that change in 2020?

Historical voting trends among the Black, Hispanic, and young adult populations

Black voters have faced a 150-year struggle against voter intimidation and suppression tactics and the multilayered legacies of slavery. Black Americans are also disproportionately disenfranchised by state laws that ban convicted felons from voting—even, in some states, after they have served their full sentence. Given the U.S.'s high incarceration rate and systemic racism in the criminal justice system, this is just one more way the Black vote is suppressed.

Black voter registration and participation rose after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; while Black voting rates would continue to lag behind white voting rates, the gap had narrowed significantly—particularly in the South. In 2008, the gap essentially closed, and in 2012, Black voting rates exceeded white voting rates (Figure A). However, Black voting rates dipped below white voting rates in the 2016 presidential election, as reports of voter suppression and intimidationincreased relative to previous elections.

Hispanic voter turnout has been persistently lower than both Black and white voter turnout: In the 2016 presidential election, Hispanic turnout was reported by the Census Bureau at 47.6%, compared with 65.3% for non-Hispanic white voters and 59.4% for Black voters (Figure A). The reasons for low Hispanic turnout are not necessarily easy to determine and often get told one story at a time. Like Black voters, Hispanic voters have been hampered by voter suppression efforts and face disproportionate disenfranchisement due to felony convictions. Many face language barriers. The Hispanic population is also much younger (with a median age of 30 in 2018) than the white population (with a median age of 44)—and, as discussed below, younger adults are less likely to vote.1

Figure A

It is well known that voter engagement rises with age (Figure B). Census data show that in the 2016 presidential election, voter turnout among the youngest voters (ages 18–24) was 43.0%, compared with 70.9% for the oldest voters (ages 65 and older). Voting rates for the two cohorts were similar in 2012, at 41.2% and 72.0%, respectively. Young adults face the hurdle of voting for the first time and learning to navigate the voting system in their state. They may also lack confidence that they will be able to make good voting decisions.

Figure B

How might these trends shift in 2020?

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 63% of Black registered voters are extremely motivated to vote in the 2020 presidential election. Nationwide, Black eligible voters now make up 12.5% of the U.S. electorate, up from 11.5% in 2000. For many years, Black voters were the largest nonwhite racial or ethnic segment of the country's electorate, but for the first time in a presidential election they will be outnumbered by Hispanic eligible voters, at 32 million.

According to FiveThirtyEight, Hispanic voters are the most likely group to vote by mail in 2020. This may be partially due to the fact that almost half the country's Hispanic population live in states that entirely vote by mail or have high rates of mail balloting. Additionally, states with large Hispanic populations like Arizona, California, and Florida have greatly expanded access to voting by mail in recent years.

The 2018 midterms saw a spike in voter turnout among all age cohorts and racial/ethnic groups, but especially among the youngest voters (ages 18–29 in the reported data), whose voting rates rose from 19.9% in 2014 to 35.6% in 2018, and among Hispanic voters, whose rates jumped from 27.0% to 40.4%. Will this trend continue in 2020? We hope so.

The policymakers we elect in 2020 will heavily influence how we as a nation navigate the coronavirus crisis going forward. Those who have been most harmed by current policies have a chance to have their voices heard by the very policymakers who have left them behind during the COVID-19 pandemic.

View EPI's voter resource guide.

EPI research on how workers are faring in the COVID-19 economy

Black workers face two of the most lethal preexisting conditions for coronavirus—racism and economic inequality

Racial and economic inequality have left many black workers with few good options for protecting both their health and economic well-being during the coronavirus pandemic. Persistent racial disparities in health status, access to health care, wealth, employment, wages, housing, income, and poverty all contribute to greater susceptibility to the virus—both economically and physically. While policy responses to the crisis have been broad-reaching, they have nevertheless yielded uneven results because of differential access to resources.

Latinx workers—particularly women—face devastating job losses in the COVID-19 recession

Latinx workers have suffered greater economic distress than their white counterparts since COVID-19 began spreading in the United States. These outcomes have been driven by the fact that Latinx workers already had lower pre-pandemic wages, income, and wealth, as well as less access to health care and other important job-related benefits. As the pandemic has spread, another symptom of this labor market disempowerment—inadequate workplace safety—has loomed particularly large. In the midst of this crisis, some policies that appear to be neutral have disproportionately harmed certain populations.

Young workers face high unemployment and an uncertain future

Young workers have been hardest hit by the COVID-19 economic shock. These workers—defined as ages 16–24—are the most likely to be unemployed or underemployed, least likely to be able to work from home, and more likely to work in industries and occupations with the largest job losses in the coronavirus-driven recession. Absent a much more effective policy response than was undertaken following the Great Recession, today's young workers may experience serious and long-term labor market repercussions.

Note

1. The Black population, too, is relatively young, with a median age of 34; despite this, Black voting rates overall have been relatively high in recent years, as discussed above. Unusually high turnout among young Black voters (ages 16–24) in 2008 and 2012—exceeding young white voter turnout by at least 6 points in each of those elections—may have partially mitigated the usual effects of youth on voting rates. (Data on voter turnout are from U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey data from the Voting Historical Time Series, Table A-1.)

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