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Strategies & Market Trends : The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (3787)	10/28/2019 3:00:16 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13800

Climate Stalinism Today’s radical green movement demands submission to an elite governing class—and its views are entering the mainstream The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty. Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream. “Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.” Today’s working and middle classes are skeptical about policies that undermine their livelihoods in the promise of distant policy goals. Even now, after a decade-long barrage of fear-mongering, a majority of Americans, Australians, and even Europeans doubt that climate change will affect their lives substantially. A recent UN survey of 10 million people found that climate change ranked 16th in concerns; most people in the developing world, notes environmental economist Bjorn Lonborg, “care about their kids not dying from easily curable diseases, getting a decent education, not starving to death.” Like other people in high-income countries, most Americans want to improve the environment and many, if not most, are concerned about the potential impact of climate change. But they still rank climate as only their 11th leading concern, behind not just health care and the economy but also immigration, guns, women’s rights, the Supreme Court, taxes, income, and trade. A recent Harris-Harvard poll found that three-fifths of Americans reject the portfolio of Green New Deal policies, including a third of Democrats and half of people under 25. Simply put, once the current green agenda is understood in terms of its impact on jobs and energy prices, it does not play well. In recent Australian elections, voters soundly rejected a progressive agenda that targeted suburban residents and the country’s large fossil-fuel industry. Opposition was particularly strong in primarily blue-collar areas like Australia’s Queensland. The results in Australia led local celebrities and pundits to brand their fellow citizens as unremittingly “ dumb.” Areas dependent on energy and manufacturing—such as Appalachia, Ontario, Alberta, the U.S. Midwest, and the British midlands, have pushed back against the prospective green regime. Even Germany has seen mounting opposition to green policies, which have sent the country’s powerful industrial base reeling from the associated high energy costs. But it’s not just miners, oil-riggers, and factory hands resisting the greens. French residents trying to make a living outside central Paris, and their counterparts in normally placid places like Norway and the Netherlands, have taken to the streets, sometimes violently. Imagine what will happen if a President Elizabeth Warren bans fracking in places like Texas, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; in Texas alone, by some estimates, 1 million jobs would be lost. Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full ban would cost 14 million jobs—far more than the 8 million lost in the Great Recession. And the environment itself would be somewhat of a loser in this game— natural gas has done more to reduce emissions than all the greens’ efforts. Across the world, green-backed policies have hurt the working class far more than the affluent rich who most enthusiastically embrace them. The militant Extinction Rebellion—which the online magazine Spiked has described as “an upper-middle-class death cult”—has tried to disrupt commuters in Britain in their drive to “save the planet” but has earned more angry contempt than support from harried workers. Though cast by the media as heroic outsiders, greens have historically clustered in elite academic, nonprofit, media, and corporate sectors. The influential Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by the Club of Rome, was backed by major corporate interests, led by Fiat’s Aurelio Peccei. The authors’ long-term vision, based on the notion that the planet was running out of resources at a rapid rate, was to create “a carefully controlled balance” that would restrict growth, particularly in advanced countries. Whatever its failings, twentieth-century socialism was growth-oriented and in principle devoted to expanding working-class wealth. In contrast, the green version of socialism consciously seeks to depress the average family’s prospects, since prosperity will generate more greenhouse gases. Some zealots, such as the Guardian’s George Monbiot, argue in favor of economic recession as a way to reduce carbon emissions, even if it causes people to lose their jobs and homes. Draconian climate austerity does not threaten the jobs of the so-called “clean rich,” who may benefit as investors in solar and wind energy, the trading of carbon offsets, and other activities of the “ climate industrial complex.” Some old-style leftists, like British Marxist historian James Heartfield, see the emergence of “green capitalism” as a new ruse for the upper classes to suppress the lower by creating artificial scarcity in everything from energy to housing and food. Greens seek to restrict air travel for the masses, but climate activists like Prince Charles, Richard Branson, Leonardo di Caprio, the rapper Drake, and Al Gore continue to fly in private jets, even to climate-crisis summits. They enjoy, and develop, luxury resorts far from population centers, and consume prodigiously while imploring the rest of us to curb our more modest habits. For most families, the policies of climate radicals promise only a degraded quality of life, including calls for restrictions on having children due to their “carbon legacy,” a proposal endorsed by climate researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Oregon State University. Some scientists even suggest that we shift from eating hamburgers to low-resource-intensity “maggot sausages.” A Swedish economist recently suggested that we recycle ourselves and discover the refinements of cannibalism. Not surprisingly, the advocates find democratic politics increasingly inconvenient. Climate scientist Roger Pielke’s 2010 notion of “the iron law of climate policy”—that support for reducing greenhouse emissions is limited by the amount of sacrifice demanded—determines people’s willingness to cut back on their carbon output. “People will pay some amount for climate goals,” he suggests “but only so much.” At a cost of $80 a year per household, he suggested, most people, polls found, would support climate measures—but raise it to $770 annually, and support drops below 10 percent. Given this reality, it’s likely that a future president will not be able to get a majority of both houses to embrace extreme policies inimical to middle-class life. This will force the chief executive, following the model established by President Obama (and reversed by President Trump), to impose the climate agenda through executive orders and the administrative state. The idea of a top-down approach—handing over power to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the United Nations—has been advanced by influential progressives like former Obama budget advisor Peter Orszag and journalist Thomas Friedman. Climate activists increasingly embrace these post-democratic notions. Some, including former California governor Jerry Brown, seem to prefer China’s authoritarian approach to addressing climate issues, despite that country’s largest-in-the-world and still-expanding carbon footprint. Brown has helped launch a “California-China Climate Institute” that embraces the Chinese model. He even embraces “ brainwashing” the population to get support for draconian climate measures, along the lines of Chinese thought control. Once respectable and mainstream, the climate movement now resembles something inspired by religious fervor. Instead of debate, there’s enforced ideological conformity. Climate skeptics of any kind—even those who agree that climate change poses a serious challenge—have been all but banned, with rare exceptions, from the mainstream media. Others, including those in the fossil fuel industry, face court challenges that portray them as so-called “climate criminals.” Such movements don’t tolerate infidels and have little patience with constitutional limits and procedures. Social Democrat Wolfgang Thierse, former president of the German Bundestag, recently told Die Welt that green militants display an “anti-democratic affection.” A German television reporter covering climate protesters described a movement dismissive of “our understanding of freedom and responsibility” that “borders on a collective psychosis, paired with wild fear and demands. Ever shriller, ever louder, ever faster.” Demands to “decarbonize” the planet at once draw inspiration from scaremongering as much as from science. Ever since the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the 1972 Club of Rome report, environmentalists have predicted massive shortages of natural resources, the end of economic growth, and widespread starvation, claims generally accepted without skepticism in media, academic, and even political circles. Yet energy and food are more plentiful than ever, as the world has experienced the largest growth in affluence in its history. Being proved wrong has failed to get greens to rethink their doomsday assumptions. Instead, every decade sees predictions that planet has five or ten years left if extreme measures are not taken immediately. After the election of President Obama in 2009, NASA’s James Hansen, an icon of the climate-change movement, announced that the new chief executive had four years to save the earth. Many phenomena ascribed to climate change— hurricanes and droughts, for example—turn out to have multiple and more complex causes. In the case of California’s wildfires, some of the problem can be traced back to green policies that prevent the thinning of the state’s forests. Similarly, the now-ended drought was made much worse by environmentalist opposition to new water infrastructure. Activists even blame the recent power outages on climate, though the primary cause was lack of investment and maintenance by local electrical utilities. Today’s aggressive green policies have little chance of making an impact on the climate. California, the hotbed of climate radicalism, has reduced its greenhouse gases between 2007 and 2016 at rate that places it 40th, per capita, among the states. Similar failures can be seen in Germany, where much-heralded energiewende have led to soaring costs but disappointing results in terms of emissions declines. Even if the U.S. adopted the Green New Deal, the impact on climate, note some recent studies, would be almost infinitesimal. What we do in the West is increasingly irrelevant when virtually all the growth in emissions comes from developing countries, led by China, where hundreds of millions still live in near poverty. Globally, over 1 billion people lack reliable electricity. Leaders in countries such as India tend to be more concerned with access to power than with avoiding greenhouse-gas emissions. Long-time environmentalist and author Ted Nordhaus suggests that, to make headway with the public, the green movement should give up “utopian fantasies” and “make its peace with modernity and technology.” Green virtue-signaling needs to be replaced by a practical program that could win public support, including focusing on resiliency against expected change and expanding production of hydroelectric, nuclear, and increasingly abundant natural gas rather than ruinously expensive renewables. In contrast, the Green New Deal’s pledge to abandon fossil fuels by 2030, notes former Obama energy secretary Ernest Moritz, presents “impractical targets” that may “lose a lot of key constituencies who we need to bring along to have a real low-carbon solution.” The fundamentalist green approach now being adopted represents a political dead-end that requires authoritarian means while saving the planet at the expense of upward mobility for the vast majority. Rejecting the middle ground that exists in properly functioning democracies, green extremists are doing a profound disservice, both to our constitutional order and to the sustainability of our society—and planet. Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. His book on the return to feudalism will be released next year. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (3787)	11/4/2019 5:30:44 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13800

The Global Fertility Crash As birthrates fall, countries will be forced to adapt or fall behind. October 31, 2019, 7:00 AM By Andre Tartar, Hannah Recht, and Yue Qiu At least two children per woman—that’s what’s needed to ensure a stable population from generation to generation. In the 1960s, the fertility rate was five live births per woman. By 2017 it had fallen to 2.43, close to that critical threshold. Population growth is vital for the world economy. It means more workers to build homes and produce goods, more consumers to buy things and spark innovation, and more citizens to pay taxes and attract trade. While the world is expected to add more than 3 billion people by 2100, according to the United Nations, that’ll likely be the high point. Falling fertility rates and aging populations will mean serious challenges that will be felt more acutely in some places than others. While the global average fertility rate was still above the rate of replacement—technically 2.1 children per woman—in 2017, about half of all countries had already fallen below it, up from 1 in 20 just half a century ago. For places such as the U.S. and parts of Western Europe, which historically are attractive to migrants, loosening immigration policies could make up for low birthrates. In other places, more drastic policy interventions may be called for. Most of the available options place a high burden on women, who’ll be relied upon not only to bear children but also to help fill widening gaps in the workforce. Each of the following indicators tells a part of the global fertility story: not just how many babies women have on average, but also how well women are integrated into the workforce, what slice of the income pie they receive, and their level of educational attainment. Overall: Government attempts to manage population growth are nothing new—consider the generous paid maternal leave of the Scandinavian countries or China’s recently rescinded one-child policy, each relatively effective in achieving its stated goal—but a new sense of urgency and even desperation is creeping into the search for ways to reverse the current trends. That said, achieving robust population growth is by no means the only contributor to economic growth—in some countries too-high fertility may actually be a drag on GDP, because of higher costs. But as these indicators suggest, it can be an important tailwind. To explore these demographic and economic shifts, Bloomberg analyzed fertility data for 200 countries and picked four that were outliers in some respect. Local reporters then interviewed one woman in each place about her economic and cultural forces that shaped her choice to have children—or not. France Women in France may have won suffrage only in 1945, but they’ve rapidly acquired rights and status. They’re now close to parity with men in income and are highly educated on average. This is due partly to generous benefits such as public day cares, called crèches, that accept babies as young as 3 months. Celine Grislain works at the Ministry of Health in Paris, where she manages a seven-person team. She and her husband have three children, ages 5, 3, and 1. The older two attend state-run nursery school, while the youngest stays home with a nanny. “When I became pregnant [with my first child], I had already done a job interview for a new post, so I had to tell my future employer that I’d arrive four months later than planned, but it didn’t set me back. For my second child, I had applied for a post managing a bigger team. I told my employer, but they said that didn’t affect their decision. And for the third, nobody said anything either when I told them. “Having children forces you to be more efficient. Before having children, I would often stay late in the evenings. I find that when you manage a team, being a boss that doesn’t stay too late removes some pressure from people—it’s a routine that is quite healthy for everyone. After my third child, I went down to 80% [time, working four days a week]. As a civil servant, you have the right to part-time work when you have a child under 3, so 80% is pretty common. People try to adapt, to organize themselves, so that I don’t have too many meetings on Wednesdays [my day off], and I make an effort to compensate. I don’t hesitate to work in the evenings, I don’t hesitate to look at my emails on a Wednesday. I think everyone tries to make an effort, and that’s why it works. “With our first child, we didn’t get a place in a nursery, but we had friends who were moving so [they] didn’t need their nanny anymore. We have kept her ever since because we’ve become very close. I get a small amount of financial support for working at 80%—it’s not much, around €140 ($155) a month. There are family benefits, but they change depending on your income, and I don’t get much. There is what we call a supplement for child care, and there’s also a tax credit that helped us a lot when we were sharing a nanny. But the credit is capped, and having a nanny to ourselves makes for a big extra cost. “It’s mainly me that does the shopping, the doctor appointments, but I’ve also got a husband who knows how to cook. I think I do a little more than him, but he does more than my dad did, and he did more than my granddad, so there’s been an improvement with each generation. And my husband supports me with my career. That counts for a lot.” —Interviewed by William Horobin, translated from French Saudi Arabia Women in the culturally restrictive oil-rich kingdom have among the world’s lowest rates of labor force participation and wield little economic power. As the country has gotten richer, a phenomenon that tends to lead to longer life expectancies and smaller families, the fertility rate has dipped down close to the rate of replacement. Lubna Alkhaldi, 34, is a fashion designer and an anchor at her local TV station in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. She’s single and makes $102,400 a year. “In other societies, husbands may take on roles that help the wife not be a full-time [caretaker], like helping out when she’s out at work. I don’t want to be unfair to everyone—there may be exceptions—but in general it’s not the case [in Saudi Arabia]. “I am not married. It’s not an easy decision to take, not at all. Motherhood is a beautiful thing. I have moments where I wish I had a baby I could hold and play with. But I want to make and build my own family, under my conditions. I wanted to choose my husband myself, out of love. When I was at an appropriate age for marriage, this option was not available. Sometimes people said things like ‘Lubna is not beautiful enough, which is why she’s saying no,’ or ‘She’s not good enough, and she says no so she won’t be embarrassed.’ “I have a B.A. in nutrition, but I didn’t like that field. I wanted to major in media, but my dad refused to let me travel abroad to study—there were no universities here that offered that specialization at the time. I own my house, a villa. I was among the first women to drive; I bought my own car. I live alone. My neighbors don’t interfere in what I do—still, I don’t make it obvious I am alone. “My immediate family, my mom and my four sisters, are very proud of me and very supportive. But I get calls sometimes from people who are not happy. They tell me, for instance, to cover my face. My face is my identity. I did one program once for Saudi TV on women and the economy. Now I have a program on social issues. Today, I’m filming an episode on customs and traditions. “I work long hours every day, including today, Saturday. I am very proud of the decisions I have taken. I am very happy with myself. In our Saudi society, I am no longer at a suitable age for marriage, but I don’t consider age as an impediment. I know that when I find the right man we will accept each other, no matter what the challenges and defects—if you consider age a defect—are.” —Interviewed by Donna Abu-Nasr, translated from Arabic China Decades of limits on family size and a culture of women working have led to a steep decline in China’s fertility rate. A recent crackdown on gender discrimination forbids employers from asking female applicants’ marital or maternity status, a step toward keeping women in jobs as the population ages. “I was 34 years old, working for a startup tech company as the head of the marketing team, when I found out I was pregnant. It came to me as a surprise, and my first thought was: What about my job? “Before the baby, I was a typical career woman: working late hours, leading a team, tackling difficult issues, and always delivering at work. Shortly after leaving the doctor, I sent a group message to the company’s CEO and vice president, who are both female, telling them honestly about this. They congratulated me, but just one day later the CEO told me to go on a business trip for several days. I raised the concern that my physical condition may not be fit for traveling long hours, but the CEO said, ‘Overcome it.’ “The first day back from the trip, I found the company put out a recruitment notice online with the same title and job description as mine. My health was unstable during my pregnancy, so I applied for sick leave. The company agreed, but then the human resources supervisor asked me to submit previous medical records for sick leaves, including those that I already took. I didn’t keep the records, as that was the first time they brought up such demands. Days later they sent an email informing me they would suspend my salary because I failed to provide the required documents. “By that time, I was roughly three months pregnant. It was so hard to believe a company that I worked so diligently for would treat me this way, so I filed an arbitration suit seeking compensation for my overtime work since joining the company. Right after that, the company shut me out, suspending my work email and removing me from a work communication group, but they never dismissed me officially. By the time I wanted to quit the job, human resources refused to proceed unless I agreed not to ‘claim any fees or hurt the company’s reputation.’ I refused, so they wouldn’t let me take my belongings and refused to issue a resignation certificate, a required document in China’s job market. “I became one of the first people to act on [China’s new anti-employment discrimination measures] and filed a lawsuit against my previous company. I see women are helpless when facing workplace discrimination. With the new [rules], women’s rights can be upheld. It also sent a signal to the companies not to infringe female employees’ rights. “The whole incident has taken a toll on my personal life. I was a confident career woman, and financially independent, too. But now my confidence has been chipped away. I suffered from postpartum depression, and sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night crying. I blame myself for not taking good care of my child, and the regret will accompany me for my entire life.” —Interviewed by Bloomberg News, translated from Mandarin Nigeria With their high fertility rates, Nigeria and its sub-Saharan neighbors are expected to contribute much of the world’s net population gain over the coming decades. Feeding, educating, and employing these growing numbers will be difficult, and a gender and equal opportunity bill has been stalled in the Nigerian senate since it was introduced in 2010 Abosede George-Ogan, 36, lives in Lagos, where she has a director-level role at the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund. She and her husband have three children: a 4-year-old girl and 2-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. George-Ogan’s annual salary is about $27,700. “My dad was in the air force, my mom was a teacher. As a matter of fact, my mom didn’t just work, she had every type of business you can [have]. Apart from her day job, my mom sold ice blocks in the house. She sold popcorn, she had a salon, she had a garment-making fashion design place. She had a computer business at some point. She used to travel to China, Dubai, Senegal to buy stuff. Of course, Daddy works, because he wears a uniform every day and he goes out. But I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, mommy must be so rich, because she does all of these things. She’s selling that or selling this, you know? “I got married at 31. I graduated university at 20, so for 11 years, somebody was asking every day, ‘What is going on?’ Something must be wrong if you’re not married at a certain age, you know? People worry about fertility—‘the clock is ticking’ is a popular term that you hear around here—and there’s the economic side to it. People feel, especially if you’re focused on your career and you’re thriving, are you going to buy yourself the house and the car and the, you know, lifestyle? What will your husband do? My mom got married young, and I definitely think it was her expectation for her girls. “You would definitely have low moments. It gets to a point where, for example, if you were a person who used to go to the club, you don’t fit in there anymore. And then you start to say, Where do I fit in? Where am I going to meet this person? Should I be going outside of my normal comfort zone? “By the time I got married, it was my decision. Yes, I was conscious of the fact that I was getting older, but it wasn’t as a result of pressure or urgency. I always wanted to have kids, no question. To be honest, now I wouldn’t change anything. Maybe the days where I felt like, Really, why am I not married? I feel like there is some good in getting married a little later—what our society calls late—because you are very clear about what marriage is. I feel like really and truly, if you were single for 10 years, you could accelerate your career to a point where when you got married, there’s no stopping you anymore.” —Interviewed by Tope Alake The Big Picture Population dynamics can’t be ignored, but they’re also not economic destiny. A study last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that, for most major economies, rising productivity was a more important driver of gross domestic product growth between 2000 and 2017 on average than population growth or change in the employment rate. More than 90% of China’s potential growth in 2017 came from productivity increases, the most of any country and a few rungs ahead of the U.S. For Saudi Arabia, however, 62% came from population growth alone—and Nigeria is even more reliant than the Arab kingdom on the sheer size of its potential labor and consumer pool. France stands out for balancing increased productivity and population with higher employment, likely boosted by a healthy influx of working-age immigrants and its generous labor benefits. Population is just one of three factors influencing national economies. Productivity gains can make up some of the gaps as populations taper off and begin to shrink, but it's a much more challenging way to grow an economy and may not be sustainable over time: For most of the countries in the OECD’s study, the relative contribution of productivity to growth has fallen over time. Ultimately, no country will be left untouched by demographic decline. Governments will have to think creatively about ways to manage population, whether through state-sponsored benefits or family-planning edicts or discrimination protections, or else find their own path to sustainable economic growth with ever fewer native-born workers, consumers, and entrepreneurs. Editor: Jillian Goodman Design Direction: Alexander Shoukas Sources and methodology: Below are the individual sources for the various charts in this story. ? Fertility rate: 2017 data compiled by the World Bank from various sources, including the United Nations, Eurostat, U.S. Census Bureau, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and various national statistical offices. Total fertility rate represents the average number of children that women in a given country will have over their lifetimes. The replacement rate is roughly 2.1 children per woman, but may differ slightly based on a country’s mortality rate. Labor force participation rate: 2018 data from the International Labour Organization compiled by the World Bank. ? Aggregate income ratio: World Economic Forum calculations of 2017 total income earned by women as a share of what men earned, estimated using data on the ratio of working women and men, their relative wages, and overall GDP by country. ? Literacy rate: 2014 Unesco data compiled by the World Economic Forum. The four country case studies were identified from among the world’s 25 largest economies—based on the International Monetary Fund’s purchasing power parity (PPP) measure of 2017 GDP—after reviewing the above four indicators, plus available data on educational attainment, wage equality, and statutory protections, including paid maternity leave and post-maternity job guarantees. The OECD provided Bloomberg with its analysis of the contributions to GDP growth for 18 economies, including three of the case studies in this story: China, France, and Saudi Arabia. Respective contributions for Nigeria were calculated based on instructions provided by OECD, using the latest available data on real GDP, total employment and working-age population. Terms of Service Trademarks Privacy Policy ©2019 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Contact Us Help