Fidget kerfuffle
Russia’s government has launched an investigation into fidget spinners over concerns that the West is using the toys to corrupt its youth. State-run TV said in a recent news report that fidget spinners were an "instrument for zombifying" young people, and that the fast-whirling edges make them "susceptible to manipulation." It’s no coincidence, a presenter said, that the hypnotic toys are sold at Russia’s opposition rallies. The country’s consumer watchdog announced it would research the spinners’ "negative consequences" for mental health.
--The Week
How 'Made in America' could backfire
President Trump’s "Made in America" drive could hurt workers more than help them. As part of the initiative, the White House is considering whether to slap new tariffs on foreign steel. Many analysts agree that "artificially low prices" from overseas producers have damaged the U.S. steel industry, but they don’t agree that tariffs are the right response. The U.S. would face swift retaliation, not only from the Chinese exporters targeted by the tariffs, but also from importers in other countries forced to absorb a glut of steel no longer headed for America. The European Union is already preparing retaliatory levies on American whiskey, orange juice, and potatoes if steel tariffs are approved. The ensuing "tit-for-tat" trade war would damage the global economy without doing much to revive the Rust Belt. U.S. steelmakers would initially benefit from higher prices, but there are far more manufacturing workers in industries buying steel than selling it. About 200,000 people lost their manufacturing jobs when President George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs in 2002--more than were working in the entire steel industry. The worst job losses came in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In trying to punish China to help the heartland, Trump seems likely to hurt it.
--Annie Lowrey,TheAtlantic.com
Health-care markets can’t be free
If you want a free-market health-care system, you must be willing to let ome patients die. House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans who advocate giving people "the freedom" not to be covered in any way are promoting a big lie. In our society, health care is not an optional consumer good that people can choose to turn down. Every day, badly injured or dying patients arrive in my hospital who have no insurance; some are unconscious. Later, they sometimes express dismay that we saved them, because they know they’ve run up bills of tens of thousands of dollars. One man we saved from a brain bleed told me that he’d rather have died and left his family his life insurance payment than have burdened them with a massive medical bill and bankruptcy. Someone winds up paying for uncompensated care, whether it’s the hospitals legally obligated to provide it or the taxpayers who subsidize it. "Deep down inside, we all intuitively know that health care is not a free market." If you want true "freedom," you have to be willing to let uninsured people found "lying unconscious in the street remain there and die.
--Farzon Nahvi, emergency room physician, in the New York Times
Time to worry about a recession
If you drew up a list of preconditions for recession, it would include the following: a labor market at full strength, frothy asset prices, tightening central banks, and a pervasive sense of calm. In other words, a lot like what the economy looks like today. Our 4.3 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in 16 years, has more room to go up than down. The economy’s expansion is heading into its ninth year and will be the longest on record in two more. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is steadily raising interest rates; a tightening of monetary policy has preceded every recession. Ironically, our preternaturally calm market is also a source of concern, suggesting that traders aren’t worried enough about risks. "Implied volatility," which measures the cost of hedging against market shocks with options, is the lowest it’s been since mid-2007, just before the financial crisis. None of this means a market meltdown is guaranteed, but businesses and investors are acting like steady growth and low interest rates will last forever. Stocks are trading at a historically high 22 times the past year’s earnings, with companies borrowing heavily to fund buybacks and dividends. Once prices start to fall and credit dries up, those companies will feel the squeeze, making any correction much worse. Those of us who have lived through economic mayhem before feel our muscle memory twitch at times like this.
--Greg Ip, Wall Street Journal
What comes after the 30-second ad?
For years, the 30-second television spot has been the bread and butter of the advertising industry, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in value. But the traditional ad is in trouble. The format, created for breaks between shows, hasn’t translated online. Despite initially high hopes that online video would let advertisers target niche audiences, the reality is that irritated viewers skip past online ads at the first opportunity. And they are getting more help: By year’s end, Google will stop allowing 30-second ads to run on YouTube unless they can be skipped. Yet advertisers cling to the format because it’s familiar. They also make the mistake of assuming low production values will cut it online; advertisers spent seven times more creating video spots for TV last year than for online, even though digital advertising is now a bigger market. Or they go too far in the opposite direction. At this year’s Cannes Lions, the ad industry’s "annual festival of self-congratulation," one of the winners was a three-minute-long commercial for a Gillette razor designed for senior caregivers. It was "a delicately filmed and moving narrative," but who has time to watch three minutes on a razor? The traditional video ad needs a sturdy successor for the digital era. It was a perfect invention for its time; the creatives must create another.
--John Gapper, Financial Times
Climate change and what to do about it
--However alarmed you are about climate change, said
David Wallace-Wells in New York magazine, you are not alarmed enough. After years of attacks from climate skeptics, the scientific community has become overly cautious in its predictions of how climate change may impact life on Earth, and how quickly. Behind the climatologists’ public "reticence," however, there is growing evidence that unless we act now to dramatically cut carbon emissions, by the year 2100 the human race could be living, or rather dying, on an uninhabitable planet. Temperatures are already rising rapidly, particularly in polar regions, and within the next few decades warmer air could melt the Arctic permafrost, releasing 1.8 trillion tons of trapped carbon--twice as much as is currently in the atmosphere. This chain-reaction effect will greatly accelerate the rate of warming, rapidly raising global temperatures by more than 8 degrees. Baking heat and drought will quickly turn most of the planet’s agricultural regions into deserts. Seas will rise by as much as 10 feet, inundating coastlines. People all over the world will literally die of 110-degree heat and suffocating humidity. The worst can still be avoided, if this scenario shocks us out of our complacency, but right now, we’re on course to destroy our planet.
--What hysterical nonsense, said
Oren Cass in City-Journal.org. Many climate experts are discrediting Wallace-Wells’ dire predictions as "disconnected from reality." Predictably, however, liberal pundits have heaped praise on the hyperventilating article, in their fervent hope that "climate catastrophism" will help scare the public into supporting intrusive government efforts to restrict carbon emissions. The reality is that alarmism only creates a backlash, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. The public remembers past doomsday predictions about environmental catastrophes that didn’t happen, because they were either overblown or solved by human ingenuity. So it’s all too easy to laugh off a wild-eyed climate-change alarmist shouting, "The end is nigh!"
"Climate doomism," in fact, can be just as destructive as climate-change denial, said atmospheric scientist
Michael Mann in WashingtonPost.com. By painting an "overly bleak" picture, people like Wallace-Wells risk demoralizing the public into fatalistic passivity. If an overcooked Earth is all but inevitable, why should we change our way of life now? Actually, Wallace-Wells didn’t say the situation was hopeless, said
David Roberts in Vox.com. In laying out the worst-case scenario, he said explicitly that the planet could still be saved with prompt and concerted action. The fact is that "most people simply have no idea how scary climate change is."
The problem, said
Robinson Meyer in TheAtlantic.com, is that there are two equally true but conflicting narratives here. On one hand, our hotter planet is already experiencing more "mega-droughts," wildfires, and long-lasting heat waves, at the same time President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate-change agreement. On the other hand, a strategy for addressing climate change is coming together, with the plunging cost of solar and wind energy, the dawn of electric cars, and serious emissions-control efforts by most nations. To focus on the first story risks demoralizing the public, while to focus on the second risks sending the message that the problem is well in hand. The truth is that at this point in history, no one knows whether our efforts to head off disaster will be successful. Did Wallace-Wells exaggerate the threat to terrify his readers into action? No doubt. But a steadily warming climate is still the worst problem in the world, and terror is appropriate.
--The Week
What happened to pay raises?
U.S. companies have literally forgotten how to compete for employees. The demand for workers is so high right now that airlines have canceled flights, home builders have slowed down construction and farmers fret that crops will go unharvested--all for lack of qualified hands. There are currently 5.7 million job openings in the U.S., twice the level of eight years ago, and the unemployment rate is a very low 4.4 percent. Given these conditions, wages should be rising sharply. Yet pay has barely budged for most Americans. Employers don’t appear willing to increase wages to attract candidates, and employees either won’t or can’t demand more.
The reason for this puzzling state of affairs may be psychological--the pain of the financial crisis is still fresh in our minds. Just as the Great Depression left scars that influenced consumer and investor behavior for decades, the financial crisis and subsequent recession inflicted similarly deep wounds. Businesses went into survival mode, laying off workers and cutting back benefits for those they kept. Years later, that mentality has hardened into something like a permanent mindset and is baked into business models and projections. Meanwhile, workers traumatized by layoffs, foreclosures and pulverized savings learned to take any job they could get and hold on to it for dear life. The result is a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that leaves both sides dissatisfied.
--Daniel Gross, Slate.com
Fossil find
Jude Sparks was hiking with his family in the New Mexico desert when he tripped over a rocky outcrop--and came face-to-face with an extremely rare fossil. At first, the 10-year-old thought his discovery of two large fossilized teeth and a tusk was part of "a big, fat rotten cow." But when he sent photographs to a paleontology expert at New Mexico State University, Sparks was told he’d actually stumbled upon the skull of a stegomastodon--an ancient elephant relative estimated to be more than a million years old. "I didn’t know what it was," says Jude of his remarkable find. "I just knew it wasn’t usual."
--The Week
