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Reasons to be hopeful about the Biden economy.
The next few months will be hell in terms of politics, epidemiology and economics. But at some point in 2021 things will start getting better. And there’s good reason to believe that once the good news starts, the improvement in our condition will be much faster and continue much longer than many people expect.
OK, one thing that probably won’t get better is the political scene. Day after day, Republicans — it’s not just Donald Trump — keep demonstrating that they’re worse than you could possibly have imagined, even when you tried to take into account the fact that they’re worse than you could possibly have imagined. One of our two major political parties no longer accepts the legitimacy of elections it loses, which bodes ill for the fate of the Republic.
But on other fronts there’s a clear case for optimism. Science has come to our rescue, big time, with the miraculously fast development of vaccines against the coronavirus. True, the United States is botching the initial rollout, which should surprise nobody. But this is probably just a temporary hitch, especially because in less than three weeks we’ll have a president actually interested in doing his job.
And once we’ve achieved widespread vaccination, the economy will bounce back. The question is, how big will the bounce be?
Our last economic crisis was followed by a sluggish recovery. Employment didn’t return to 2007 levels until 2014; real median household income didn’t regain the lost ground until 2016. And many observers expect a replay of that story, especially if Republicans retain control of the Senate and engage, once again, in economic sabotage under the pretense of being fiscally responsible.
But the crisis of 2020 was very different from the crisis of 2008, in ways that make our prospects look much better this time around.
The last economic crisis involved a Wile E. Coyote moment: The private sector suddenly looked down, realized that there was nothing supporting extravagant housing prices and extremely high levels of household debt, and plunged. The result was an extended period of depressed spending. The only way to have avoided multiple years of high unemployment would have been sustained, large-scale fiscal stimulus — and the G.O.P. prevented that.
This 2020 crisis, by contrast, was brought on by a headwind out of nowhere, in the form of the coronavirus. The private sector doesn’t seem to have been particularly overextended before the pandemic. And while we shouldn’t minimize the hardships faced by millions of families, on average Americans have been saving like crazy, and will emerge from the pandemic with stronger balance sheets than they had before.
So I’m in the camp that expects rapid growth once people feel safe going out and spending money. Mitch McConnell and company will, no doubt, do what they always do when a Democrat occupies the White House, and try to sabotage the recovery. But this time the economy won’t need support as badly as it did during the Obama years.
And I suspect, although with less confidence, that the boom will go on for a long time. Why? Because like a number of other people, I’m getting optimistic about the future of technology.
The years that followed the 2008 crisis weren’t just marked by sluggish job growth. They also coincided with a period of technological disappointment. As the entrepreneur Peter Thiel — whose politics I loathe, but who’s a good phrasemaker — put it, it was an era in which we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters instead. (It’s a mark of how trivial this stuff is that raising the limit to 280 characters seemed like a big deal.) That is, we were doing some flashy stuff pushing information around, but not making much progress in the material world, which is still where we mainly live.
Lately, however, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz around new physical technologies that reminds me of the buzz about information technology in the early 1990s, which presaged the productivity surge from 1995 to 2005. Biotechnology finally seems to be coming into its own — hence those miraculous vaccines. There has been incredible progress in renewable energy; I’m old enough to remember when solar power was considered a hippie fantasy, and now it’s cheaper than fossil fuels. There’s room for more skepticism about the near-term prospects for things like self-driving vehicles and lab-grown meat, but the fact that we’re even talking about such innovations is a good sign for the future.
This new wave of innovation doesn’t have much to do with policy, although progress in renewables can be partly attributed to the Obama administration’s promotion of green energy. But the Biden administration, unlike its predecessor, won’t be anti-science and won’t try desperately to preserve the coal-burning past. That will help us take advantage of progress.
I’m less confident in my techno-optimism than I am in my expectations for a rapid employment recovery once we’ve been vaccinated. But all in all, there’s a pretty good chance that Joe Biden will preside over an economy that surprises many people on the upside. Happy New Year.
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The work-sharing between humans and machines is a contentious issue. The discourse has been progressing, leading to some lamentable observations. In the face of rising low wage population, are we pushing too much technology? To create growing utility from depleting resources, increasing machine capability to take over roles from humans is indispensable, but is too much technological innovation failing to focus on more directly indigenous areas of agricultural or financial innovation, and should we focus even more on applying practices of innovation that any motivated citizen, factory worker, or local business owner can employ?
It is true that the prospect of labour reduction brings profit-making opportunities. For advanced economies, it has been a blessing to offset ageing population and creates high paying jobs for technology advancement and machine innovation. Thus, this trend appears to be unstoppable.
But what are the options for developing countries to address the negative aspects of automation? A common suggestion is to improve the skills of the factory workforce. Unfortunately, this does not work as rising automation increasingly demands only innate abilities from humans. In the past, human workers needed codified knowledge and skill to complement machines for performing productive activities. Human workers oversaw production, while machines provided supporting roles. Now, machines oversee production, leaving support roles, like fabric or work piece loading, to humans. For this reason, more than 3 million workers in the ready-made garment (RMG) factories in Bangladesh did not learn the needed skills to qualify for the jobs making products destined to the western world.
The shift to needing lower and lower skilled workers to run machines pushed factory jobs in advanced countries to the unskilled workers of less developed countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Wage differential was not the only factor for this migration. The most important factor was that automation reduced the knowledge and skill requirement. Mechanisation, as it has done throughout history, brought down the complexity to such a level that unskilled individuals in less developed countries qualified to produce outputs for export. Technology has been a blessing for less developed countries, but continued technology progression risks reversing the scenario.
How can this be? Machine designers of advanced countries are progressing to automate even those innate human capabilities. This trend will create innovative jobs in advanced countries, killing factory jobs in less developed ones. Over the next 30 years, the essential problem to be addressed is that developing countries will be suffering from industrial job loss, particularly for serving the export market.
To counter it, should developing countries intensify their policies, with: 1) more training and education for factory workers, 2) borrowing and investing in infrastructure for scaling up the past success, 3) protection for import substitution, 4) increased spending on diverse incentives for export, or 5) something else?
Taking these point by point, training is of little use as there will be decreasing need for codified knowledge and skill. Borrowing will only increase the debt burden with no foreseeable payback based on market capture or growth. Protectionism will likely make a few people rich at greater cost to the masses. Spending, like borrowing, risks betting that exports will remain marketable globally. Clearly, something else, an entirely different strategy and policy framework, is needed.
What are the recommended solutions for developing countries? To begin with: 1) sharpen innate abilities of the present and future workforce to reduce the economic benefit of automation -including building on innate human abilities, such as skills as empathy, love, affection, and care-giving; 2) make lateral entries into the innovation of existing industrial products, focusing on those being consumed locally, 3) reinvent products and upgrade indigenous products and services by taking the advantage of emerging technologies to leap over imports in quality and performance, 4) train and develop a future generation to join the global innovation race, and 5) export more innovative products, equip workers with innovative skills and better innovation techniques that make indigenous workers more creative. If the expansion of indigenous opportunities is critical to kick-starting an innovation economy, then perhaps a direct focus on agricultural, financial, environmental, or other forms of innovation would serve to bootstrap a developing nation with little more than what is at hand to seed the internal investment needed for larger exploits and reduce reliance on outside investment.
One reference business model can be shown to scale well for small, indigenous efforts at innovation. Developing countries could establish innovation think-tanks to integrate and trade ideas in the idea economy. For any country, starting small with the first innovation think-tanks in the most dominant national industries, domestic consumption and export, requires substantially less investment, but brings the greatest potential for a compounding payback in the least time.
To make the next-generation innovation economically viable, there is a need to leverage the benefit of a global economy of scale. Indeed, without a workforce of innovators, all countries run the risk of a slowdown of their own innovation engine.
As we know, economic value is created out of three major ingredients: 1) Natural resources, 2) Labour, and 3) Ideas. Thus far, developing countries have been in the role of supplying natural resources and labour. Increasingly, however, we see a scarcity of natural resources. At the same time, there is a growing over supply of human work hours. The solution is to increase the supply of product and service ideas, whether through continued design refinement, better organisation of functions, fusion of capabilities into common functional elements, or increasing the adaptability of systems to their environment or customer preferences. The supply of ideas for transforming and re-innovating products and services is truly endless.
Metaphorically, we stand on the ground where we live and work, walled in by the resources and labour we have available locally, but the ceiling of ideas above us can expand infinitely. Expanding the flow of ideas makes far better use of natural resources and available work hours for supporting the continued prosperity of the whole global population.
Visionary governments should act to bring about these policies and strategies of innovative growth. If it is left in the hands of profit-making firms, start-ups, VC fund managers, and bankers, it is likely to veer off its course toward private benefit and interests rather than lasting public good. Smart policy and regulatory interventions are needed to guide industrial transformation, the likes of which are envisioned by the 4th Industrial Revolution. Policies should focus on efforts that will grow economic value by blending human and machine capabilities creatively. Policies must not discourage the progression of technology but leverage the comparative advantage of machines. And finally, policies should reflect the need for indigenous development and innovation with lasting compound benefits.
As a species, we cannot leave the job of idea mining, refinement, development to only a few countries. The source of ideas is infinite and spreads across the globe. If carefully governed and managed, the entire human race has the chance to make every country better off by empowering them to participate in the global rising tide of wealth creation out of the supply of ideas, natural resources, and labour.
M Rokonuzzaman, PhD, is an academic and researcher on technology, innovation and policy. [email protected]
J McLaughlin, is an engineer and mathematician, Managing Director, CIE Advising, LLC. [email protected]
It is a disheartening fact that the racism, microaggressions and blatant injustice committed against Black and Latinx people in this country manifest in America’s classrooms, effectively permeating and diminishing these students’ innate greatness.
Denied the supportive school environment to allow this greatness to shine, Black and Latinx students face additional systemic barriers — economic immobility, geographic segregation and lack of access to job-training programs — that make a path to college and career success even more difficult.
The disregard for the future of Black and Latino boys begins in our K-12 schools. It’s a hard truth demonstrated by the number of Black and Latino boys suspended and expelled compared to white students who commit the same offenses and the overrepresentation of Black students in special education courses. Improving college access, and ultimately life outcomes, for young men of color will not be a quick fix — no class, no workshop or random task force will drive long-term change by itself.
These young men deserve access to college preparatory courses, teachers with high cultural competencies who are adept at working with them, and effective guidance counseling to support academic performance and college application processes. Unfortunately, college access programs and organizations primarily cater to students who have proven to be academically and emotionally prepared to excel in college instead of working with students who need additional support. This behavior symbolizes the lack of interest in Black and Latinx students’ development and success in American schools and in society.
The task of deconstructing racist and outdated systems and creating a healing culture to elevate the genius of all students of color is a multifaceted approach. As educators, mentors and community members, we must transform our public school systems’ structures and cultures. It is past time we create an education system where every student, particularly Black and Latino boys, is primed to succeed in college and beyond. To begin healing this fractured relationship, leaders organizing these initiatives must acknowledge that young men of color in public schools need more than empty promises and mediocre academic support.
Kingmakers of Oakland, a nonprofit supporting school districts around the country to improve Black and Latinx students’ educational and life outcomes, is leading this holistic healing by partnering with JP Morgan Chase’s The Fellowship Initiative to leverage resources to underserved high school students. Through Kings in the Making, Kingmakers provides professional development opportunities and connects students with strong mentors. Students will gain access to academic advising, tutoring, financial literacy and professional development through college tours and field trips to learn about different careers from experts in the field.
Through the Kings in the Making program, these young men will also access programs such as The Aspiring Professionals Program, which creates a pathway for young people to access work experiences at JP Morgan Chase, and The Fellowship Initiative’s newly revamped Opportunity Youth Program, which allows young men to develop skills and relationships with local community leaders. It is programs like those that salvage decades of maltreatment of students of color in classrooms.
The American school system is not working for students of color. By unapologetically focusing on Black and Latino boys and their college and career success, we are effectively improving the life trajectory of our Kings. As adults, it is our job, not theirs, to fix a broken system and finally level the playing field, making school and life more equitable for all students.
Obasi Davis is program coordinator at Kingmakers of Oakland. Black and Latino boys in the 10th grade interested in participating in the Kings in the Making program should visit KingmakersOfOakland.org.
Our current model of social change isn’t working.
This is the year that broke the truth. This is the year when millions of Americans — and not just your political opponents — seemed impervious to evidence, willing to believe the most outlandish things if it suited their biases, and eager to develop fervid animosities based on crude stereotypes.
Worse, this was the year that called into question the very processes by which our society supposedly makes progress.
So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education. We can teach each other to be more informed and make better decisions. We can study social injustices and change our behavior to fight them.
But this was the year that showed that our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed.
It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.
One of the most studied examples of this flawed model is racial diversity training. Over the last few decades, most large corporations and other institutions have begun racial diversity programs to combat the bias and racism pervasive in organizational life. The courses teach people about bias, they combat stereotypes and they encourage people to assume the perspectives of others in disadvantaged groups.
These programs are obviously well intended, and they often describe systemic racism accurately, but the bulk of the evidence, though not all of it, suggests they don’t reduce discrimination. Firms that use such courses see no increase in managerial diversity. Sometimes they see an increase — not a decrease — in minority employee turnover.
Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev offered a clear summary of the research in a 2018 essay in Anthropology Now. One meta-analysis of 985 studies of anti-bias interventions found little evidence that these programs reduced bias. Other studies sometimes do find a short-term change in attitudes, but very few find a widespread change in actual behavior.
Dobbin and Kalev offer a few reasons for why these programs generally don’t work as intended. First, “short-term educational interventions in general do not change people.” This is as true for worker safety courses as it is for efforts to combat racism. Second, some researchers argue that the training activates stereotypes in people’s minds rather than eliminating them. Third, training can make people complacent, thinking that because they went through the program they’ve solved the problem.
Fourth, the mandatory training makes many white participants feel left out, angry and resentful, actually decreasing their support for workplace diversity. Fifth, people don’t like to be told what to think, and may rebel if they feel that they’re being pressured to think a certain way.
These days a lot of the training is set up to combat implicit bias. This is based on research led by Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek, showing that most Americans, and especially most white Americans, have hidden biases that influence who gets hired, who gets promoted and how people are seen.
Implicit bias is absolutely real. The problem is that courses to reduce its effects don’t seem to work. As Greenwald told Knowable Magazine: “I see most implicit bias training as window dressing that looks good both internally to an organization and externally, as if you’re concerned and trying to do something. But it can be deployed without actually achieving anything, which makes it in fact counterproductive.”
Or, as Tiffany L. Green and Nao Hagiwara wrote in Scientific American this past August, “But to date, none of these interventions has been shown to result in permanent, long-term reductions of implicit bias scores or, more importantly, sustained and meaningful changes in behavior.”
Part of the problem is that a lot of discrimination is structural; not in people’s attitudes but in organizational practices and the way society is set up. Part of the problem, as Matt Martin writes in Fast Company, is: “There’s surprisingly little correlation between most people’s attitudes and behavior. And the correlation between bias and discrimination is weak.”
Finally, our training model of “teaching people to be good” is based on the illusion that you can change people’s minds and behaviors by presenting them with new information and new thoughts. If this were generally so, moral philosophers would behave better than the rest of us. They don’t.
People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan. Decades ago, the social psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us” and who is “them” come into being.
The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. That’s national service programs. That’s residential integration programs across all lines of difference. That’s workplace diversity, equity and inclusion — permanent physical integration, not training.
This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.
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George Floyd was killed while detained by Minneapolis police officers on May 25 and video of his death sparked an unprecedented national response, including here in Mesa County.
Just in the last decade, black men and women dying at the hands of police have prompted outcry and protests, but the outrage from Floyd’s death, as well as the death of 26-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor at the hands of Louisville police, carried from the spring to summer, and from fall into the winter.
A June meeting of the Grand Junction City Council, the first since Floyd’s death, drew hundreds to City Hall after rallies were organized and a march held through downtown. The meeting included a call for action from several members of the Black community who spoke about their experiences with racism in Mesa County.
Many spoke to issues in the wider community, including the use of slurs and bullying at District 51 schools, issues with athletes being punished for protesting at Colorado Mesa University and other racial issues.
One of the requests made during the meeting was for city leadership and police to march with the protesters at a future rally to show unity.
Among the first city officials to publicly acknowledge his outrage when he watched video of Floyd’s death was Grand Junction Chief of Police Doug Shoemaker, who sent a series of tweets out days after Floyd’s death.
“The death of George Floyd is shocking and absolutely could have been prevented,” Shoemaker said in the series of nine tweets. “We as a profession never should be treating anyone like this. The ex-officer involved should be treated like anyone else and the delay in the pursuit of justice is far beyond concerning and baffling to me.”
Throughout the late spring and summer, many in the Grand Junction community came together with candlelight vigils, rallies and marches, including one that went to the Grand Junction Police police station and others to City Council meetings.
That first City Council meeting in June would lead to controversy later on stemming from a City Council work session. At the end of a lengthy work session on other issues, council discussion grew tense when members began to relitigate the events of the June 3 meeting. The exchange culminated in Council Member Phillip Pe’a saying he was alarmed by the number of protesters at City Hall and “didn’t know whether to bring my Glock with me in the building or not.”
Pe’a would later apologize for the comments and the council would discuss civility during discussions.
Hundreds attended that first candlelight vigil, with more watching live on Facebook.
A new organization was started to bring attention to racial issues in the area. Right and Wrong (RAW), an anti-racism coalition based in Grand Junction, hosted a Juneteenth education and celebration event at Lincoln Park for more than two hours.
It was the start of a highly visible and progressive movement for RAW throughout the summer.
Racial tensions were similarly high at the June 18 City Council meetings where a back-and-forth between opposing groups culminated in heated and profane discourse and one man being escorted from the meeting after criticizing the activists.
In July, several billboards around the city gave thanks to four council members but left out the remaining members.
The billboard ads were purchased by Western Colorado Business Alliance.
A member of the alliance, Michael Anton, resigned from the organization after he made remarks criticizing RAW and Black Lives Matter at the Aug. 5 council meeting.
“This RAW. This BLM. They need to go away,” Anton said at the meeting. “They’re not Grand Junction and you need to send them down the road because, believe me, there’s a lot more of me here in this valley than there is of you. I guarantee it and it will not be a pretty day if that comes forth.”
Around the same time, Grand Junction and Colorado Mesa University were forced to grapple with the complicated history of one of its most lauded historical figures, Walter Walker, a man who has a statue on Main Street, but was also responsible for bringing the Ku Klux Klan to the city. Eventually he turned against the KKK, but his affiliation created a difficult situation with the growing racial tension.
Ultimately, CMU decided to remove Walker’s name from Walker Field — the college’s soccer and lacrosse field. That decision was made by the CMU Board of Trustees in June after holding discussions with a group of students, alumni and staff.
In fact, CMU campus leaders, including football coach Tremaine Jackson and Coordinator of Student Diversity Ky Oday, participated in the creation of the Turning the Corner on Racism task force, which is helping with the name change effort.
A similar task force was formed by the City of Grand Junction to address systemic bias in the Grand Valley with a focus on areas such as education and law enforcement. Representatives from more than 20 local organizations — from the Grand Junction City Council to the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office, as well as groups representing the homeless, faith communities, the Black and Hispanic populations and others — came together to form the task force.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser stopped by the Grand Valley over the summer and met with local law enforcement and students at Colorado Mesa University during this time and shared his thoughts on ways to address police training. He felt Grand Valley law enforcement had a good grasp on why there is so much anti-police sentiment.
By the end of June, the state passed a sweeping police reform bill, Senate Bill 20-217, which will require among other things for all Colorado law enforcement officers to wear body-worn cameras by July 1, 2023, with few exceptions.
One of the bills sponsors, Leslie Herod, D-Denver, said in a written response to the Daily Sentinel that while she was glad to hear Shoemaker’s response to what occurred in Minnesota on May 25, “the sad reality of this issue is that this behavior is not unique to Minnesota. Police misuse of force and abuse of power is an issue right here in our own state of Colorado.”
While many across Mesa County joined in the protests and rallies throughout the summer, there were some in the community that disagreed with the movement.
When members of RAW met with Gov. Jared Polis, anti-Polis protesters gathered outside the Mesa County Central Services where they got into a heated argument with activists. It would not be the last time the two sides would clash.
All through the rallies, protests, marches and counter-protests, and at times harsh words from both sides, there was never a time when the situation was out of control. The summer came and went peacefully with no incidents of violence.
Argentina has passed a law that legalizes abortions. The Senate vote represents a landmark decision in the country's history, says Veronica Marchiaro.
As of today, Argentina is a changed country. Reason has triumphed over religion. Argentina's decision to make abortions legal is based on facts.
This issue, after all, is not about ideology but about public health. This vote was about giving women a legal, safe and free way to terminate pregnancies, if they so choose. This is what the country's feminist movement aimed for when it initiated an unprecedented debate on the matter in Argentinian society.
Its efforts have paid off. On Wednesday morning, the Argentinian Senate adopted a law that legalizes abortion up to 14 weeks after conception.
This day will go down in history. The secular Argentinian state has taken a stand for civil rights and a more just society.
DW's Veronica Marchiaro
The new law puts an end to the dangerous practice of illegal abortions. These are very risky for young girls and women, especially those from poorer neighborhoods. According to Argentina's Health Ministry, between 350,000 and 500,000 unsafe abortions are carried out in the country each year. Over the past 40 years, more than 3,000 women have died after illegally terminating pregnancies.
The ban on and stigmatization of abortions did not lower the number of terminations in the country. And judging by the experience of western European countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, the number of abortions will rise only slightly now that the practice is legal.
This legalization is a victory for Argentinian democracy that transcends political camps. Male and female senators from across the political spectrum voted according to their conscience, many of them ignoring the party line — a first in Argentinian history. This, too, is a victory for Argentinian women.
Politicians made a deliberate effort to support a demand expressed by Argentinian society. Doing so brought lawmakers from opposing camps together. Hopefully, this move will lay the groundwork for further compromises in a country that has all too often found itself divided along firmly entrenched party lines.
Argentinian society has matured. Nevertheless, antidemocratic elements within the anti-abortion camp did become visible. Some Argentinian delegates received threats and suffered attempts to intimate them. Argentina's Catholic Church tried to influence the political decision-making process though clandestine negotiations and public sermons. And Argentinian-born Pope Francis even took to Twitter to criticize the proposed legalization.
The abortion law is also a victory for Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez, who had personally backed the bill. It comes as a relief to the government amid this crisis-ridden year of the pandemic.
The vote is a victory for Argentina, which today is a more just country. It is also a victory for democracy. Yet the biggest winners of all are Argentina's women, who took to the street to bring about this change. They have made history.
This article has been adapted from German
