Nearly a third (32%) of employers are bumping up education requirements for new hires. According to a new survey from CareerBuilder, 27% are recruiting those who hold master’s degrees for positions that used to only require four-year degrees, and 37% are hiring college grads for positions that had been primarily held by those with high school diplomas.
CareerBuilder conducted a nationwide online survey that culled responses from over 2,300 hiring and human resource managers across different industries in the private sector.
Their responses revealed that employers pushing their education requirements toward higher degrees are doing so across all levels of their companies. The majority of employers (61%) say they are looking for more educated candidates at the mid-level skill level, but 46% are looking to hire better educated candidates at entry level and 43% think the same for higher levels.
This comes at a time when the cost of a four-year college degree is out of reach for the average American family. But employers argue that a tight job market and evolving need for different skills are making it necessary. For example, 60% of employers who were satisfied with hiring high school graduates in the past claimed their work requires the skills held by those who have completed higher education.
But why?
Employers told CareerBuilder that higher education not only increases an applicant’s chance of getting hired, but it helps boost the chance they’ll be promoted down the road. Thirty-six percent of employers reported that they would be unlikely to promote someone who doesn’t have a college degree.
That’s because employers have seen education make a positive impact across the board, from employees’ ability to produce better quality work, to productivity and the ability to boost customer loyalty.
This is likely why a “recent Pew Research study found that high school graduates earn about 62% of what those with four-year degrees earn. That’s evolved since 1979, when people with only high school educations earned 77% of what college graduates made.” But not all is lost:
The good news for current and future workers is that some companies are taking responsibility to bridge the skills gap and overcome the talent shortage. Over a third of employers (35%) said they trained low-skill workers and hired them for high-skill jobs in 2015, and 33% said they’ll do the same this year. A full 64% of employers said they plan to hire people who have the majority of skills they require and provide training for the rest. They’ll do this by paying for training and certifications offered outside the company or sending them back to school. Twenty-three percent said they would fund an advanced degree partially, and 12% would foot the entire bill.
Fast Companyrecently reported that a small, but growing number of companies are offering employees assistance to pay back their student loans.
This could be an example of business leaders compensating for what they see as a lack of preparation among new college graduates. Furthermore, it may be an argument in favor of greater collaboration between higher education institutions and businesses.
Jason Furman, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama and now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, argues that “both microeconomic and macroeconomic evidence” point to declining competition:
On the micro level, most industries today have fewer players than before. Just think about hospitals or cellphone service providers or beer companies. Throughout our economy you see larger companies, older companies, and, in any given industry, fewer companies. Growth in international trade has been a counterweight — but only within the tradable sector. Most of our economy is not tradable, and so for most of our economy, international trade isn’t a factor.
On the macro level, companies’ rate of return on capital has stayed the same or risen, while the safe rate of return on bonds has fallen precipitously. If there were really vigorous competition, you wouldn’t see increases in return on invested capital. In addition, we see an increase in the share of national income going to capital — that is, to investors — rather than to wages. That income shift has been larger in industries that have seen bigger reductions in competition.
He believes that this lack of competition plays a role in the increasing income inequality within the United States:
Wages aren’t determined strictly by supply and demand; they also depend on institutional arrangements and bargaining power. And with greater industry concentration, the bargaining power of employers rises. If there are four hospitals in your town and you’re a nurse at one of them, you can threaten to leave and go work at another one as a way to get a raise. If there’s only one hospital, it’s a lot harder to advocate for a raise.
[O]ne problem with American capitalism has been overlooked: a corrosive lack of competition. The naughty secret of American firms is that life at home is much easier: their returns on equity are 40% higher in the United States than they are abroad. Aggregate domestic profits are at near-record levels relative to GDP. America is meant to be a temple of free enterprise. It isn’t.
…You might think that voters would be happy that their employers are thriving. But if they are not reinvested, or spent by shareholders, high profits can dampen demand. The excess cash generated domestically by American firms beyond their investment budgets is running at $800 billion a year, or 4% of GDP. The tax system encourages them to park foreign profits abroad. Abnormally high profits can worsen inequality if they are the result of persistently high prices or depressed wages. Were America’s firms to cut prices so that their profits were at historically normal levels, consumers’ bills might be 2% lower. If steep earnings are not luring in new entrants, that may mean that firms are abusing monopoly positions, or using lobbying to stifle competition. The game may indeed be rigged.
…Unfortunately the signs are that incumbent firms are becoming more entrenched, not less…A $10 trillion wave of mergers since 2008 has raised levels of concentration further…Having limited working capital and fewer resources, small companies struggle with all the forms, lobbying and red tape. This is one reason why the rate of small-company creation in America has been running at its lowest levels since the 1970s. The ability of large firms to enter new markets and take on lazy incumbents has been muted by an orthodoxy among institutional investors that companies should focus on one activity and keep margins high. Warren Buffett, an investor, says he likes companies with “moats” that protect them from competition. America Inc has dug a giant defensive ditch around itself.
What can be done?:
The first step is to take aim at cosseted incumbents. Modernising the antitrust apparatus would help. Mergers that lead to high market share and too much pricing power still need to be policed. But firms can extract rents in many ways. Copyright and patent laws should be loosened to prevent incumbents milking old discoveries. Big tech platforms such as Google and Facebook need to be watched closely: they might not be rent-extracting monopolies yet, but investors value them as if they will be one day. The role of giant fund managers with crossholdings in rival firms needs careful examination, too.
The second step is to make life easier for startups and small firms. Concerns about the expansion of red tape and of the regulatory state must be recognised as a problem, not dismissed as the mad rambling of anti-government Tea Partiers. The burden placed on small firms by laws like Obamacare has been material. The rules shackling banks have led them to cut back on serving less profitable smaller customers. The pernicious spread of occupational licensing has stifled startups. Some 29% of professions, including hairstylists and most medical workers, require permits, up from 5% in the 1950s.
A blast of competition would mean more disruption for some: firms in the S&P 500 employ about one in ten Americans. But it would create new jobs, encourage more investment and help lower prices. Above all, it would bring about a fairer kind of capitalism. That would lift Americans’ spirits as well as their economy.
Let me add, as a second point, that the issue of unequal treatment of women is very much alive today, and affects many women, especially those working in male-dominated sectors like engineering and computer science. We’ll come back to that at the end.[ref]I added this paragraph on 2017-April-01 after a Facebook discussion with a woman in one of these sectors. I hadn’t added it before then because I thought it was obvious.[/ref]
The mini-debate that has been ongoing on about Pence’s policy has been quite interesting. At least one friend on Facebook compared it to The Great Dress Debacle of 2015: conservatives found Pence’s stance perfectly normal while liberals were split between ridiculing him and accusing him of practicing Sharia. Lest you think I’m joking, here’s one example cadged from The Federalist:
Sincere question. How is this different from extreme repressive interpretations of Islam ("Sharia Law!") mocked by people like Mike Pence
First, some folks seem to be missing the primary point of a rule like this. It is not, as the mockers deride, because Mr. Pence’s self-control is so flimsy he is afraid that merely sitting next to a woman in a restaurant without supervision would place him in danger of fornicating right there on the spot.
This isn’t a minor confusion. It’s a fundamental misapprehension of an ancient worldview that Christians still adhere to. In religious language: we’re all weak, vulnerable, and prone to sin. In modern, secular language: we’re irrational and often behave in ways that counter our own best interests and/or confound the values and goals we think we have. Doesn’t matter if you call it “fallen nature” or “cognitive bias”, in this context we’re talking about the same thing.
So how does this play out? The most common way that Christians (or other social conservatives) might try to explain a rule like Pence’s goes something like this: Anyone who goes on a diet will start by throwing out all the tempting food in their house.
The problem is that this analogy is very easy to misunderstand. One interpretation–the wrong one–is that cheating on your wife is the same kind of momentary lapse as cheating on your diet. It’s as though absent-mindedly chomping down on a Krispy Kreme you forgot to throw out is equivalent to absent-mindedly wandering into a hotel room with a woman you’re not married too. Lots of folks get as far as this (silly) interpretation and stop there.
The actual interpretation of the metaphor is quite different. It is saying that good behavior is not just about making the right decisions in the moment. It’s about manipulating your environment to make it conducive to the kind of behavior that you want in your life. Social conservatives understand that because we’re irrational creatures with amazing abilities to rationalize our ways into following short-term desires part of being virtuous isn’t just saying no to temptation in the moment, but avoiding it altogether.
Pence’s rule doesn’t draw the line at the moment when he’s tempted to be sexually unfaithful to his wife. It draws the line much, much earlier and so prevents the first seeds of infidelity from ever having a chance to take root in the first place.
I don’t follow Pence’s rule. I think it’s overkill. I’m not interested in trying to convince anyone that his particular rule should be some kind of universal standard for everyone. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous or absurd either. After all–in addition to the concerns about compromising marital fidelity out of an initially innocent friendship–there’s also legitimate concerns about being taken advantage of. Politicians are powerful and that also makes them vulnerable. Just ask the KGB (the FSB, these days) which has employed agents to try and seduce traveling politicians and officials for decades and decades in order to blackmail their targets into betraying state secrets. This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the CIA, FBI, and many other agencies are fond of hiring Mormons.[ref]Catch up here, if that is news to you.[/ref] Not only are we extremely family-focused (I know lots of Mormons who follow Pence’s rules), but we also don’t drink. Taken together, this means observant Mormons are less likely to be compromised in this way than the average population.
In the wake of the Republicans failing to pass the AHCA, there was a nauseating avalanche of cutesy Facebook posts from liberal fans of Hamilton. Here’s one:
If you missed the reference, it’s from Cabinet Battle #1, when Madison and Jefferson taunt Hamilton. Other favorites included “Winning was easy… Governing’s harder” and “Do you know how hard it is to lead?”
The funny thing is, if Alexander Hamilton had followed a rule like Mike Pence’s, he could have avoided his part in America’s first political sex-scandal, saved his family a lot of agony, and spared Lin-Manuel Miranda a song or two.[ref]Die-hard Hamilton fans are probably not persuaded by that last one, of course.[/ref]
And that brings me to my second point. Just as liberals are happy to take very selective lessons from Hamilton, there’s an awful weird dichotomy in a town where liberals practice all kinds of non-judgmentalism for open marriages but are more than happy to ridicule and deride someone for trying to keep their marriage closed. That’s the point Jonah Goldberg made at the National Review:
Last summer, when Bill Clinton spoke about his wife at the Democratic convention (“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl . . . ”), liberals gushed at the “love story,” and the rule of the day was that marriage is complicated and the Clintons’ ability to stay married (though practically separated) was admirable. Besides, “Who are we to judge?” — no doubt Bill Clinton’s favorite maxim.
It’s a very strange place we’ve found ourselves in when elites say we have no right to judge adultery, but we have every right to judge couples who take steps to avoid it.[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref]
He’s not wrong, you know.
I do think there are some legitimate concerns. The most important being that if you’re, say, a business executive who follows these rules, does it mean that you’re creating an environment where you give preferential treatment to men? If a young, up-and-coming male executive could ask you out to lunch to seek your advice, but a young, up-and-coming female executive cannot, then we do have a legitimate problem. It’s also possible to simply take this stance too far. I don’t recall conservatives having a problem with forcing Muslim boys to shake hands with their (female) teachers in Switzerland, for example.[ref]Unsurprisingly, liberals have a double standard that cuts against traditionalist Christians while social conservatives have a double standard that cuts against traditionalist Muslims.[/ref]
So I’m not saying that it’s impossible to have questions and concerns about a position like Pence’s. But the degree of hostility and deliberate (or at least, lazy) misunderstanding of the rules that the Pences have agreed on for their own marriage are at least as concerning as the rules themselves.
It’s hard to find a good reason to wag your finger disapprovingly at Elon Musk’s idealistic crusade to take us in to outer space, but wherever a talented individual is working hard to make the world a materially better place you will find a contrarian academic with an axe to grind and rhetorical snake oil to peddle. After all, that’s really the inevitable consequence of the ideological homogenization of American academia.[ref]See Walker’s post.[/ref] In a world where professors have substantially divergent views, there’s room for substantive arguments. But in a world where professors are all cut from the same ideological mold, the drive to differentiate oneself from the herd leads to increasingly bizarre and extreme signalling. Novelty supplants ingenuity, provocation supplants integrity, and the next thing you know space travel is racist.
That, essentially, is the point of Andrew Russell’s piece at Aeon: Whitey on Mars.[ref]You thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you?[/ref] The motivating question can be summarized this way: why throw away money on science that’s of no benefit to anyone while we’ve got real problems to solve down here on Earth?
Like much that passes for serious conversation today, the question is sheer Bulverism. Russell isn’t sincere. He doesn’t want to talk about the relative trade offs of money spent on space exploration vs. money spent fighting poverty. Nope, that would be much too old-fashioned. In the 21st century, we never make the argument we say we’re making. We just assume conclusions and skip straight to psycho-analyzing, the better to virtue-signal. Here, I’ll let C. S. Lewis explain:
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
I know Russell isn’t interested in an argument on the actual merits, but I’m going to pretend that he is. Why? Because I don’t really know of any other way to respond to Bulverism, for one thing. And because the subject is actually pretty interesting, for the second. So: why should we seriously consider spending a lot of money on space travel while things are so desperately out of whack down here on Earth? I present two arguments.
The first begins with a video game analogy. Most modern multiplayer games come int two flavors: PvE and PvP. The first stands for “Player vs Environment” and the second for “Player vs. Player.” In PvP game modes, the primary action comes from players trying to kill each other. Of course, cooperation is possible. In fact, cooperation is often essential in these games. This is an age-old truth of human biology: we cooperate in order to become better at competition. As the old proverb goes: “Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the stranger.”
In the alternative PvE mode, combat between human players is impossible. Cooperation is still usually required, because the the environment becomes the enemy. Players have to work together to overcome computer-controlled bad guys (in the most common arrangement) or other constraints and challenges.
My contention is that the PvE and PvP paradigms are the only two major paradigms through which human beings can confront the universe. We define ourselves in contrast to something else. In the short run, at least, that much is inevitable. Waiting around for an age of enlightenment when conflict and oppositions disappear is–at best–a kind of foolish utopianism. If you want to deal with humanity as it exists today you have to accept that these are basically you’re only oppositions. It’s either us-vs-them (PvP) or us-vs-it (PvE) where “it” is the challenge, danger, risk, and opportunity of hazardous exploration.
I do not believe that a robust space program that captivated the popular imagination would in a single stroke obviate all the political tensions dividing Americans let alone the older and deeper ethnic and national hatreds separating so many people around the globe. But I do believe there is nothing wrong with moving a little bit along the spectrum away from PvP and towards PvE. More than that, I believe it would help–in a small but meaningful way–to give Americans and humans something to root for, some opposition entity that enabled an us without relying on an otherized them. I can think of no program more amenable to this goal than a program of exploration and really our only choices in this regard are space or the ocean. Since space is both more romantic (for most people) and less hazardous to our own ecosystem, the choice seems clear.
So let’s get to the second major reason that space exploration is a worthwhile investment: survival. The reality is that as long as the human race lives exclusively on Earth, we’re literally keeping all our eggs in one basket. This is a recipe for extinction. The most likely source of this extinction will be from asteroid impact. Small rocks routinely impact the Earth, most frequently burning up in orbit and doing no harm. Here’s a map of small asteroids (1-20 meters in diameter) hitting the Earth between 1993 and 2014.
Map from NASA/Planetary Science. Click for more information. (Public Domain)
These little rocks are no threat, but they illustrate that asteroids hitting the Earth are not some kind of rare event. It’s very, very common. The question is just: when are we going to get hit with a really big one? By studying impact craters on the Moon, it’s possible to come up with some basic estimates, which Wikipedia summarizes:
Asteroids with a 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike Earth every 500,000 years on average. Large collisions – with 5 km (3 mi) objects – happen approximately once every twenty million years. The last known impact of an object of 10 km (6 mi) or more in diameter was at the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.
So, these are very rare events. But they are also–over a long enough period of time–inevitable. We’re a sitting duck, and one day another one of those really big space rocks is going to come hurtling our way. With no extra-terrestrial humans and no active defenses whatsoever, that would spell the end of human civilization and possibly the end of the human species. It probably won’t happen. Not in our lifetime, not in our nation’s lifetime, maybe not in our species’ lifetime. Then again, it might.
These are the two simplest reasons I believe we shouldn’t wait to turn Earth into an egalitarian utopia before we turn our eyes to the stars. There are a couple more that I will only skim over. One is that research into space exploration has already led to lots of benefits for life on Earth. Another is just the general problem with trying to solve the world’s problems in serial instead of parallel. This is a ludicrously bad model for tackling the problems we face for the simple reason that we couldn’t all coordinate on attacking just one problem at a time even if we wanted to, and even if we agreed on what problem that would be. It makes more sense for different people and institutions to work on the problems that they are–by temperament and opportunity–most able to address. In other words: we don’t have to pick either/or. It’s always going to be “yes, and…” Let’s embrace that.
Final thought: NASA’s budget has been slowly climbing towards $20billion for the last few year, but it’s relative share of the federal budget has fallen from about 1% in the early 19990s to 0.5% today. This is significantly down from the all-time high of 3-4% in the mid 1960s when the Space Race was at its height. Throwing a few more billion NASA’s way seems like a small investment in a critically endangered resource: social unity. Of course, the most striking thing about Russell’s article is that he’s attacking Elon Musk’s privately funded space exploration efforts. It’s very, very hard to understand how one man’s quest to bring a widely-shared human dream to reality and make the world a better, safe place for humanity could draw condemnation as racism, but these are the times we live in.
How important have high-skilled immigrants been to innovation in US history? According to a recent study,
Medical inventions (e.g. surgical sutures) accounted for the largest share of immigrants, but this category produced just 1% of all US patents. However, immigrants were also active in chemicals and electricity – two sectors that had a particularly large effect on US economic growth, accounting for 13.9% and 12.6% of all US patents, respectively. Noticeably, immigrants accounted for at least 16% of patents in every area. This evidence suggests that their impact on inventive activity was widespread.
[The graph below] also shows that the majority of immigrant inventors originated from European countries, with Germans playing a particularly prominent role. This is consistent with the findings of Moser et al. (2014) who show that German-Jewish émigrés who fled the Nazi regime boosted innovation in the US chemicals industry by around 30%. Today the closest analogue to these high-impact individuals would be inventors of Indian and Chinese ethnic origin who make substantial contributions to the development of innovation clusters in areas like Silicon Valley (Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle 2010, Kerr and Lincoln 2010).
The researchers
constructed a measure of foreign-born expertise, which multiplies the share of each country’s patents granted in a given technology area between 1880 and 1940 (as a measure of proficiency) by the number of immigrants from that country in the 1940 Census (as a measure of how intensely that proficiency diffuses to the host country).
We find that technology areas with higher levels of foreign-born expertise experienced much faster patent growth between 1940 and 2000, in terms of both quality and quantity, than otherwise equivalent technology areas. Although we do not identify a causal relationship, our quantitative evidence can be used alongside qualitative evidence to highlight two areas where immigrant inventors may have acted as catalysts to economic growth: through their own inventive activity and through externalities affecting domestic inventors.
Immigrant inventors were responsible for some of the most fundamental technologies in the history of US innovation, which still influence our lives today. For example, Nikola Tesla, who was born in Serbia, worked in America on alternating current electrical systems; the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell was instrumental to the development of the telephone from a workshop in Boston; Swedish inventor David Lindquist, while living in Yonkers, New York, assigned his patents relating to the electric elevator to the Otis Elevator Company located in Jersey City, New Jersey; and Herman Frasch, a German-born chemist, worked in Philadelphia and Cleveland on techniques which are analogous to modern fracking.
In short, the evidence suggests that “immigrant inventors were of central importance to American innovation during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although the migration of high-skilled inventors to the US involved some costs, immigrant inventors contributed heavily to new idea creation, through both their own work and collaboration with domestic inventors. Our evidence aligns with the view that growth in an economy is determined by its ablest innovators, regardless of national origin. The movement of high-skilled individuals across national borders therefore appears to have aided the development of the United States as an innovation hub.”
[Trump’s] nationalistic view reminds me, of course, of [Juan] Peron, in some regards.
– Sebastion Edwards
Financial Times‘s Cardiff Garcia has an incredibly enlightening interview with UCLA economist Sebastian Edwards on the economics of populism.
Garcia: …Americans have been taken off-guard by some of the phrasings of Donald Trump and what he says is part of his agenda. But that if you’re from Latin America, you’ve seen how a lot of this movie plays out before.
Edwards: That is correct. You’ve seen it before. The modus operandi is very similar. And it’s very ironic. You have Donald Trump, and the way he approaches many of these issues is not too different to what Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela. And that’s exactly what makes this whole story quite fascinating.
How is “populism” defined? Edwards elaborates,
Rudi Dornbusch and I defined the economics of populism as an economic programme, a package of policies, that disregarded good, solid received wisdom on economics. And in the case of Latin America, which is going to be interesting when we compare it to Donald Trump, disregarded all budget and monetary constraints – and violated all those constraints, as the populists do, in a way that generates euphoria in the immediate short run, but ultimately results in a very deep crisis that affects, in particular, those that were supposed to be benefited by the whole programme. So populist economics is an economic policy package that disregards budget constraints, macroeconomic constraints, good solid productivity constraints, and generates short run benefits at the cost of crisis in the future.
…So those are the policies, what I described. And what the populist leader does then is that in a rhetoric that is quite extreme, and where he or she divides the population between “us, the people” and “them” – and it’s a vague “them”…In that rhetoric, the populist leader takes the discourse directly to the people through big rallies, a referendum, plebiscites. I’m talking about Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump, who continues to be, although he’s now the president, in campaign mode. And in doing this [he] skips the institutions. For instance, they tend to dislike the central bank because it is an institution that tends to maintain sound policies in most countries. First thing that Hugo Chavez did was fire Ruth de Krivoy, the Governor of the central bank of Venezuela, right. So they disregard the institutions, both economic and political.
Garcia notes “that the majority of the populist leaders [Edwards] studied have been left wing. A lot of Marxists.” But as Edwards explains,
In some ways, [Juan] Peron, who had great sympathy for the fascist movements – he was a great admirer of Benito Mussolini – was right wing in many respects. 3 So there is no reason why we cannot have corporatist right-wing populist leaders that favour specific groups in their rhetoric and in their policies and again, very clearly blame, in quotation marks, “the other” for the suffering of “us, the people”. And in the case of Latin America, often “the other” was related to some foreign force – the multinationals, international speculators and, of course, the International Monetary Fund. And what is very ironic is that in the case of Donald Trump, foreigners also are blamed for the plight of the people and, in this case, they are immigrants, the Chinese and international terrorists.
Edwards then lays out the conditions for a populist leader to emerge:
[T]he first phase is a deep public dissatisfaction and discontent. And this dissatisfaction and discontent is of two types. Sometimes it’s quite abrupt. And in Latin America, usually that abrupt crisis has been associated historically with a very large devaluation of the currency…In other cases, the crisis develops much more slowly and it’s a simmering crisis. And that is what we can see in the United States where there is a simmering dissatisfaction, in particular among white, blue collar workers. So first phase, great dissatisfaction. And you can see it in country after country after country…The second phase is the emergence of this populist leader, very charismatic, who operates outside of the political institutions…So this leader that comes out is extremely forceful, very articulate, and in rallies and in direct appeal to the people, provides this very nationalistic rhetoric and gets the people to approve this particular political programme that disregards all sorts of constraints of good, solid economic management.
What does this begin to look like in practice?:
And what we see in many of these populist extremisms in Latin America is that the authority starts picking up on specific companies, firms, conglomerates. And the strong man or the strong woman (Cristina in Argentina) would call the CEO or the controlling figure of that company and would threaten him or her personally or would denounce that company in public rallies, and would direct the mobs to riot and to maybe even break into those stores. And then they are called in and they are told, you have to reduce your prices, or you have to do this, or you have to do that, and you have to raise wages by 50% while, at the same time, you cannot increase the prices of your product. Which, of course, is a variant of what Trump is doing with companies that want to invest and start plans in other parts of the world. So the rule of law, and in particular, the impersonal treatment – equal treatment of everyone in front of the regulators, and so on and so forth – starts to disappear.
A 2016 Mercatus working paper argues that “certificate-of-need (CON) laws restrict healthcare institutions from expanding, offering a new service, or purchasing certain pieces of equipment without first gaining approval from regulators.” Drawing on data from the Standard Analytic Files and the American Health Planning Association, the authors review the 21 states with CON requirements “for at least one of three regulated imaging services: MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners, CT (computed tomography) scanners, and PET (positron emission tomography) scanners. Medicare claims provide an estimate of the utilization of these different services and allow their utilization and accessibility to be compared between CON and non-CON states.”
The results?:
CON Regulations Have a Negative Effect on Nonhospital Providers
The association of a CON regulation with nonhospital providers is substantial, ranging from −34 percent to −65 percent utilization for MRI, CT, and PET scans. Nonhospital providers in CON states experience significant decreases in the utilization of imaging services compared to hospital providers.
CON Regulations Have No Effect on Hospitals, Thus Increasing Their Market Share
CON regulation has no measurable effect on hospitals’ utilization of imaging services. The volume of services provided in hospitals is not affected by CON regulation. This may explain why hospital providers have a stronger market presence in CON states than in non-CON states.
Consumers Are Driven to Seek Imaging Services in Non-CON States
The researchers conclude,
CON laws act as barriers to entry for nonhospital providers and favor hospitals over other providers. In consequence, consumers of MRI, CT, and PET scanning services are driven to seek these services either out of state or in hospitals. More research is needed to determine whether additional costs and barriers in the healthcare industry restrict specific market providers and affect where procedures occur.
“Roughly a quarter of the world’s people—some 1.8 billion—have turned 15 but not yet reached 30,” reports The Economist.
In many ways, they are the luckiest group of young adults ever to have existed. They are richer than any previous generation, and live in a world without smallpox or Mao Zedong. They are the best-educated generation ever—Haitians today spend longer in school than Italians did in 1960. Thanks to all that extra learning and to better nutrition, they are also more intelligent than their elders. If they are female or gay, they enjoy greater freedom in more countries than their predecessors would have thought possible. And they can look forward to improvements in technology that will, say, enable many of them to live well past 100.
So how can these youngsters be described as “oppressed”?
Many of their woes can be blamed on policies favouring the old over the young. Consider employment. In many countries, labour laws require firms to offer copious benefits and make it hard to lay workers off. That suits those with jobs, who tend to be older, but it makes firms reluctant to hire new staff. The losers are the young. In most regions they are at least twice as likely as their elders to be unemployed. The early years of any career are the worst time to be idle, because these are when the work habits of a lifetime become ingrained. Those unemployed in their 20s typically still feel the “scarring” effects of lower income, as well as unhappiness, in their 50s.
Housing, too, is often rigged against the young. Homeowners dominate the bodies that decide whether new houses may be built. They often say no, so as not to spoil the view and reduce the value of their own property. Over-regulation has doubled the cost of a typical home in Britain. Its effects are even worse in many of the big cities around the world where young people most want to live. Rents and home prices in such places have far outpaced incomes. The youngsters of Kuala Lumpur are known as the “homeless generation”. Young American women are more likely to live with their parents or other relatives than at any time since the second world war.
Young people are often footloose. With the whole world to explore and nothing to tie them down, they move around more often than their elders. This makes them more productive, especially if they migrate from a poor country to a rich one…[And yet,] many governments discourage not only cross-border migration but also the domestic sort. China’s hukou system treats rural folk who move to cities as second-class citizens. India makes it hard for those who move from one state to another to obtain public services. A UN study found that 80% of countries had policies to reduce rural-urban migration, although much of human progress has come from people putting down their hoes and finding better jobs in the big smoke. All these barriers to free movement especially harm the young, because they most want to move.
…[M]any governments favour the old: an ever greater share of public spending goes on pensions and health care for them. This is partly the natural result of societies ageing, but it is also because the elderly ensure that policies work in their favour. By one calculation, the net flow of resources (public plus private) is now from young to old in at least five countries, including Germany and Hungary. This is unprecedented and unjust—the old are much richer.
…The young are an oppressed minority—albeit an unusual one—in the straightforward sense that governments are systematically preventing them from reaching their potential. That is a cruel waste of talent. Today’s under-30s will one day dominate the labour force. If their skills are not developed, they will be less productive than they could be…What is more, oppressing youngsters is dangerous. Countries with lots of jobless, disaffected young men tend to be more violent and unstable, as millions of refugees from the Middle East and Africa can attest.
We tend to forget that “the poor” often means “the young.”
Developing the ability to focus may actually increase your capacity to care,[ref]”Caring behaviors toward themselves might include asking for help, taking care of their body (with sleep, diet, or exercise), engaging in nourishing, soothing activities (e.g., cooking, gardening, taking a bath, massage). Caring behaviors toward others might include letting someone go ahead of them at the checkout, smiling at a stranger, picking up a piece of trash in the street, or mindfully listening to a friend.”[/ref] according to a 2016 study. Sampling from 51 participants at a 9-week compassion meditation program, the researchers found
that a wandering mind can be less caring. Specifically, mind-wandering to unpleasant or neutral topics (rather than pleasant topics) predicted less caring behavior toward oneself and others on a given day. Meanwhile, mind-wandering to pleasant topics actually predicted more caring behavior toward oneself and others.
Given prior research suggesting that when our minds wander we’re unhappy, it’s possible that mind-wandering to negative events produces negative emotions that narrow our attention and lead us to miss opportunities for caring. In contrast, when our minds wander to positive events, we may experience positive feelings that broaden our attention and allow us to more fully engage in the present moment and the potential for caring. Past research is a bit mixed on whether people are actually happier when thinking about pleasant topics rather than engaging in the present, so additional studies are needed to explicitly investigate this.
Fortunately, our research suggests that training in compassion may be able to alter the habitual patterns of mind-wandering. Prior to the compassion program, participants’ minds were wandering about 59.1 percent of the time, a higher rate than earlier studies have reported (46.9 percent). At the end of the nine-week program, however, their overall mind-wandering had decreased to 54.5 percent of the time, including a slight increase in mind-wandering to pleasant topics.
More importantly, when participants reported engaging in compassion meditation practices on a given day, they also reported less mind-wandering to unpleasant topics and more mind-wandering to pleasant topics. Thus, regular compassion practice may have the dual effect of increasing and decreasing different types of mind-wandering.
Focus is not only important for reasons of well-being and productivity, but morality as well.
To distill the finding, a team of researchers based out of Tel-Aviv University first developed an algorithm to model wealth inequality in the United States between 1930 and 2010. Primarily based on income from wages, income from wealth (profits, rents, dividends, etc.), and changes in capital value (property, shares, etc.) the resulting model correlated closely (p=.96) with historical data on wealth inequality.
The researchers then used their model to predict the future. What would happen, they wondered, if income inequality was varied? In their model, income inequality was tied to a metric called the Gini index, a statistical measure of inequality used for decades. They found that altering income inequality to a Gini index of 0.1 (very low inequality) resulted in the top 10% controlling 78.6% of wealth in 2030, while raising income inequality to a Gini index of 0.9 (very high inequality) resulted in the top 10% controlling 79.3% of wealth in 2030, hardly a significant difference.
The article continues,
According to the researchers, the lack of effect isn’t actually surprising.
“When income tax is increased, the top earners, who are not necessarily the wealthiest individuals in the population, have a larger difficulty of accumulating wealth, with respect to the wealthiest. On the other hand, it barely affects the wealthiest individuals. Therefore, such an increase might even deepen the wealth gap.”
“Progressive taxation, which might have a significant effect on the distribution of income, will have a small effect on wealth inequality,” they add.
The team behind the current study is not the only group to return such a result. Just last year, experts at the Brookings Institute created their own model and found that increasing the top tax rate from 39.6% to 50% wouldn’t even dent income inequality, let alone wealth inequality.
Fortunately, our research suggests that training in compassion may be able to alter the habitual patterns of mind-wandering. Prior to the compassion program, participants’ minds were wandering about 59.1 percent of the time, a higher rate than 