Category: Economics

Portland Feels “Unsafe” and “There’s Trash Everywhere”

(p. A3) PORTLAND, Ore.—Mark Rogers has made a list of things he misses about Portland—its vegan restaurants, Powell’s bookstore, public transit—and the things he doesn’t—having his things stolen, stepping in human excrement, extreme politics.

The 44-year-old artist moved across the country to Fort Wayne, Ind., last year.

“I don’t want to talk trash about my home city even though there’s trash everywhere,” Rogers said.

. . .

Andrea Lamprecht, 50, a cardiac nurse, said she was chased by a homeless man while out on a jog in her Alameda neighborhood on the east side of Portland, where the median home price hovers around $1 million.

She and her husband, Derek Lamprecht, an orthopedic surgeon, had raised their children in Portland. The chasing incident contributed to the couple’s decision to move to a quiet rural area about 10 miles outside the city in 2021. “It never felt unsafe before,” said Derek Lamprecht. “The character of the city changed.”

For the full story, see:

Zusha Elinson. “Disenchanted Portland Residents Leave the City.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 29, 2023): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2023, and has the title “Portland Is Losing Its Residents.”)

New 98% Reflective White Paint Can End Global Warming

(p. A1) In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside build-(p. A12)ings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

. . .

. . ., scientists have been urgently working to develop reflective materials, including different types of coatings and films, that could passively cool the Earth. The materials rely on principles of physics that allow thermal energy to travel from Earth along specific wavelengths through what’s known as the transparency or sky window in the atmosphere, and out into deep space.

Jeremy Munday, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, who researches clean technology, said this redirection would barely affect space. The sun already emits more than a billion times more heat than the Earth, he said, and this method merely reflects heat already generated by the sun. “It’d be like pouring a cup of regular water into the ocean,” Dr. Munday said.

He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.

. . .

While humans in such hot and picturesque places as Santorini and the aptly named Casablanca have long used white paint to cool dwellings, and municipalities are increasingly looking to paint rooftops white, Dr. Ruan said commercial white paints generally reflect 80 percent to 90 percent of sunlight. This means they still absorb 10 percent to 20 percent of the heat, which in turn warms surfaces and the ambient air. The Purdue paint, by comparison, absorbs so much less solar heat and radiates so much more heat into deep space that it cools surfaces to below-ambient temperatures.

For the full story, see:

Cara Buckley. “A Coat of Paint May Hold a Key To a Cool Planet.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 13, 2023): A1 & A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2023, and has the title “To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats.”)

Dem Celebrities and Politicians Cultivated Crony Ties to FTX Fraudster Bankman-Fried

(p. B1) About 10 months before he was arrested on fraud charges, the cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried posed for a photograph at the 2022 Super Bowl in Inglewood, Calif.

On one side of him were Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry, the celebrity couple. On the other was the actress Kate Hudson. Standing in the center, with his arm slung over Mr. Bankman-Fried’s shoulder, was a lesser-known figure: Michael Kives.

Mr. Kives, a Hollywood agent turned investor, played an unusual role in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s business empire: super connector. He and his business partner, Bryan Baum, helped the young founder cultivate relationships with Mr. Bloom, Ms. Perry and former President Bill Clinton, and offered introductions to a who’s who of celebrities and business leaders, from Leonardo DiCaprio to the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The relationship was mutually beneficial. Mr. Bankman-Fried invested $700 million in Mr. Kives’s venture-capital firm, court records show, an extraordinary level of support for a fund with a short track record of start-up investments. Mr. Kives, the founder and face of the firm, and Mr. Baum each received $125 million as part of the deal.

For the full story, see:

David Yaffe-Bellany and Erin Griffith. “The Celebrity Super Connector Who Brought Big Names to FTX.” The New York Times (Saturday, June 24, 2023): B1 & B4.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 23, 2023, and has the title “The Super Connector Who Built Sam Bankman-Fried’s Celebrity World.”)

With No New Transmission Lines, 80 Percent of Planned Biden Emissions Reduction May Not Happen

(p. A12) . . ., compare today’s renewable energy and transmission system to one estimate of what it would take to reach the Biden administration’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2035. Transmission capacity would need to more than double in just over a decade.

There are enormous challenges to building that much transmission, including convoluted permitting processes and potential opposition from local communities.

. . .

The climate stakes are high. Last year, Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars for solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and other technologies to tackle global warming. But if the United States can’t build new transmission at a faster pace, roughly 80 percent of the emissions reductions expected from that bill might not happen, researchers at the Princeton-led REPEAT Project found.

Already, a lack of transmission capacity means that thousands of proposed wind and solar projects are facing multiyear delays and rising costs to connect to the grid. In many parts of the country, existing power lines are often so clogged that they can’t deliver electricity from wind and solar projects to where it is needed most and demand is often met by more expensive fossil fuel plants closer to homes and businesses. This problem, known as congestion, costs the country billions of dollars per year and has been getting worse.

. . .

Utilities are sometimes wary of long-distance transmission lines that might undercut their local monopolies.

For the full story, see:

Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer. “Why America Is Not Ready for the Energy Transition.” The New York Times (Friday, June 16, 2023): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 12, 2023, and has the title “Why the U.S. Electric Grid Isn’t Ready for the Energy Transition.”)

Engerman, with Fogel, Courageously Asked Politically Incorrect Questions about Slavery

(p. D8) Stanley Engerman, one of the authors of a deeply researched book that, wading into the fraught history of American slavery, argued that it was a rational, viable economic system and that enslaved Black people were more efficient workers than free white people in the North, died on May 11 [2023] in Watertown, Mass.

. . .

In their two-volume “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery” (1974), Professor Engerman and Prof. Robert W. Fogel used data analysis to challenge what they called common characterizations of slavery, including that it was unprofitable, inefficient and pervasively abusive.

They said they were not defending slavery. “If any aspect of the American past evokes a sense of shame,” they wrote, it’s the system of slavery.” But much of the accepted wisdom about it, they said, was distorted, or just plain wrong.

“Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture,” they wrote. “Economies of large-scale operation, effective management and intensive utilization of labor made Southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the Northern system of family farming.”

They insisted that the typical slave “was not lazy, inept and unproductive” but rather “was harder working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” They contended that the destruction of the Black family through slave breeding and sexual exploitation was a myth, and that it was in the economic interest of plantation owners to encourage the stability of enslaved families.

They also wrote that some slaves received positive incentives, such as being elevated to overseers of work gangs, to increase their productivity.

The book attracted a lot of attention, including a rave review by the economist Peter Passell in The New York Times. “If a more important book about American history has been published in the last decade, I don’t know about it,” he wrote. He described the work as a corrective, “a jarring attack on the methods and conclusions of traditional scholarship” on slavery.

. . .

. . . the Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese, whose own book about slavery, “Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slave Made,” was also published in 1974, called “Time on the Cross” an “important work” that had “broken open a lot of questions about issues that were swept under the rug before.”

For the full obituary, see:

Richard Sandomir. “Stanley Engerman, 87, Scholar Who Disputed Views on Slavery, Dies.” The New York Times (Monday, May 29, 2023): D8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated May 30, 2023, and has the title “Stanley Engerman, Revisionist Scholar of Slavery, Dies at 87.”)

The book praised in the obituary quoted above is:

Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.

“Range Anxiety” Leads Chinese to Prefer Hybrids Over EVs

(p. B12) Don’t write off hybrid electric vehicles.

After Tesla, the most highly valued U.S.-listed EV company isn’t homegrown Rivian or Lucid but Li Auto, a Chinese manufacturer that went public in 2020 by listing American depositary receipts.

. . .

What is surprising is that Li has overtaken NIO to lead the new generation of Chinese startups. Li doesn’t make the purely electric vehicles that were popularized by Tesla and that have become the technological focus of other startups and most old-school car manufacturers. Instead, it specializes in extended-range EVs, which use a generator to power up the battery with gasoline if it runs out of juice.

. . .

The popularity of what is essentially a plug-in hybrid, albeit a cutting-edge one, is notable in the Chinese market, which has in many ways led the transition to EVs.

. . .

But Chinese charging infrastructure is patchy, leading to range anxiety. Brokerage Bernstein expects 65% growth in plug-in hybrid sales in China this year, versus 25% growth for pure EVs.

For the full commentary, see:

Stephen Wilmot. “Move Over EVs, Hybrids Are Hot in China.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023): B12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated February 27, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

“Evaluate an Argument on Its Own Merits, Not on the Race of the Person Making It”

(p. A22) In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.” When the professor, who was white, learned that Carter was Black, he withdrew the remark rather than defend his claim. It was a reminder to Carter that many people, especially among his fellow establishment elites, had certain expectations of him as a Black man.

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”

This was a book that refused to dance around its subject.

Weaving personal narrative with a broader discussion of affirmative action’s successes and limitations, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” offered a nuanced assessment. A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.

. . .

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”

. . .

At the same time, Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”

In an interview with The Times in 1991, Carter emphasized this point: “No weight is added to a position because somebody is Black. One has to evaluate an argument on its own merits, not on the race of the person making it.”

For the full commentary, see:

Pamela Paul. “A 1991 Book Was Stunningly Prescient About Affirmative Action.” The New York Times (Friday, May 26, 2023): A22.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 25, 2023, and has the title “This 1991 Book Was Stunningly Prescient About Affirmative Action.”)

The book praised in the commentary quoted above is:

Carter, Stephen L. Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

In “Hashing Things Out” to Save Lives Bateman “Could Be a Pit Bull”

(p. 20) Don Bateman, an engineer who invented a cockpit device that warns airplane pilots with colorful screen displays and dire audible alerts like “Caution Terrain!” and “Pull Up!” when they are in danger of crashing into mountains, buildings or water — an innovation that has likely saved thousands of lives — died on May 21 [2023] at his home in Bellevue, Wash.

. . .

Bob Champion, a former scientist at Honeywell who worked with Mr. Bateman, said in a telephone interview: “Don had a true passion for saving lives. He was a peach, but behind closed doors, when we were hashing things out, he could be a pit bull.”

. . .

“He never lost his childlike wonder about flying,” Ms. McCaslin said by phone. “He did a lot of his great work from his 40s on.”

. . .

Mr. Bateman told the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation in 2011 that in the late 1960s there were fatal accidents nearly every month, during which a pilot would “fly into something, like a mountain, or go in short on the runway.”

. . .

Determined to do something, Mr. Bateman developed — and in 1974 patented — his first ground proximity warning system: a small box that integrated data from within the aircraft, including the radar altimeter and airspeed indicator, and gave the pilot a 15-second warning of an approaching hazardous condition.

. . .

In the 1990s, the system improved exponentially. Engineers working with Mr. Bateman added GPS and critical terrain data, including topographical maps of Eastern Europe and China that had been charted by the Soviet Union as far back as the 1920s; they had been acquired in Russia at Mr. Bateman’s request.

“We knew, as engineers, that if we could get the terrain data, we could do an awful lot,” he told The Seattle Times.

For the full obituary, see:

Richard Sandomir. “Don Bateman, 91, Engineer And Pioneer Who Invented A Cockpit Warning System.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 4, 2023): 20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated June 8, 2023, and has the title “Don Bateman, Who Kept Airplanes From Crashing, Dies at 91.”)

Government Infrastructure Serves Elite More Than Ordinary Citizens

(p. A1) In a country where major industry and political fortunes alike are often tied to a vast, interwoven rail system, India has lavished public resources on new trains, but its purse strings have been much tighter when it comes to ensuring the safety of those already racing along its tracks.

Those decisions loomed large on Sunday [June 4, 2023] in the aftermath of a devastating train wreck that killed at least 275 people in eastern India.

. . .

Over the past years, India has been polishing its long-ramshackle infrastructure as never before, and its railways, which are at the heart of the world’s fifth-largest economy, have been a prime beneficiary. The government spent almost $30 billion on the rail system during the past fiscal year, up 15 percent from the year before.

But the amount spent on basic track maintenance and other safety measures has been falling. A report last year by India’s auditor general, an independent office, found that less money was being allocated for track renewal work and that officials had not even spent the full (p. A11) amount set aside.

. . .

. . . most of Mr. Modi’s initiatives have been aimed not at the basic steps needed to get trains from Point A to Point B without mishap, but at improving speed and comfort. He regularly extols higher-fare new electric Vande Bharat trains connecting bigger cities and has made an early priority of a Japanese-style bullet train, though it can do nothing to improve the lives of the country’s ordinary passengers.

For the full commentary, see:

Alex Travelli. “Rail Funding In India Put Upkeep Last.” The New York Times (Monday, June 5, 2023): A1 & A11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 18, 2023, and has the title “Money for Show Horses, Not Work Horses, on India’s Rails.”)

Xi Deflects Focus Away from Economic Stagnation by Telling Youth to “Eat Bitterness”

(p. B1) China’s young people are facing record-high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

Many young Chinese aren’t buying it. They argue that they studied hard to get a college or graduate school degree only to find a shrinking job market, falling pay scale and longer work hours. Now the government is telling them to put up with hardships. But for what?

“Asking us to eat bitterness is like a deception, a way of hoping that we will unconditionally dedicate ourselves and undertake tasks that they themselves are unwilling to do,” Ms. Li said.

. . .

(p. B4) A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the work force this year, and one in five young people is unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that grew up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality.

The youth unemployment rate is a statistic the Chinese Communist Party takes seriously because it believes that idle young people could threaten its rule. Mao Zedong sent more than 16 million urban youths, including Mr. Xi, to toil in the fields of the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The return of these jobless young people to cities after the Cultural Revolution, in part, forced the party to embrace self-employment, or jobs outside the state planned economy.

Today the party’s propaganda machine is spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, and fishing and farming. It’s a form of official gaslighting, trying to deflect accountability from the government for its economy-crushing policies like cracking down on the private sector, imposing unnecessarily harsh Covid restrictions and isolating China’s trading partners.

Many people are struggling emotionally. A young woman in Shanghai named Ms. Zhang, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in city planning, has sent out 130 résumés and secured no job offers and only a handful of interviews.

. . .

“To ask us to endure hardships is to try to shift focus from the anemic economic growth and the decreasing job opportunities,” said Ms. Zhang, who, like most people I interviewed for this column, wanted to be identified with only her family name because of safety concerns.

. . .

Mr. Xi “talks about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation all the time,” said Steven, who graduated from a top U.K. university with a master’s degree in interactive design and has yet to find a job. “But isn’t the rejuvenation about not everyone engaging in physical labor?” Because of the rapid development of robots and other technologies, he said, these jobs are easily replaceable.

. . .

Now after months of fruitless job hunting, he, like almost every young worker I interviewed for this column, sees no future for himself in China.

“My best way out,” he said, “is to persuade my parents to let me run away from China.”

For the full commentary, see:

Li Yuan. “THE NEW NEW WORLD; China’s Grads Struggle to Find Work. Xi Shrugs.” The New York Times (Friday, June 2, 2023): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated June 1, 2023, and has the title “THE NEW NEW WORLD; China’s Young People Can’t Find Jobs. Xi Jinping Says to ‘Eat Bitterness.’”)

Simple Beeping Pagers Tell Patients a Doctor’s Distraction Is Work-Related

(p. A10) Pagers, those pre-cellphone, one-way devices that alert the carrier that someone is trying to reach them, can seem like something out of a time capsule.

. . .

There are people who just refuse to let their pagers go, including some doctors and bird watchers. They say pagers allow them to separate parts of their life in a way phones don’t, and that the lower-tech one-way communication of a pager is less distracting than looking at a phone full of alerts and apps.

. . .

Another advantage of the pager? It’s easy for staff to throw one in frustration instead of turning on each other, according to Dr. Colm McCarthy, an orthopedic surgeon in Fall River, Mass.

Tired during a busy on-call night once, he chucked his pager in a closet where it broke.

He gave up his pager when he got his current job, and transitioned over to the apps on his phone. Now, though, when he gets a message on his phone, it’s awkward to answer it, he says. If he’s looking at the phone, he worries patients might wonder what he’s paying attention to while with a pager, it’s obvious it’s work.

He has multiple apps on his phone. Last year, his hospital adopted the fourth app that connects him to patients. When a patient wants to reach him, he gets a message with a phone number. He then has to call that number to get a message with the patient’s phone number.

The mute function on the apps is easily overridden by alerts, so to separate work from home life, he keeps his phone on silent altogether, he says. He often misses messages from family and friends because of that.

For the full story, see:

Ariana Perez-Castells. “What the Beep? Die-Hards Refuse to Let Go of Their Pagers.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, May 20, 2023): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 19, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)