Category: Economics

Side Gigs Can Lift Mood Enough to Improve Performance in Main Job

(p. R4) Contrary to the popular wisdom, moonlighting doesn’t leave people worn out and unproductive from 9 to 5. Instead, side gigs can make people feel more empowered—and thereby more productive at the office.

Dr. Sessions and his colleagues—whose results were recently published in the Academy of Management Journal—posted ads on large social-media networking groups, asking people to take a series of surveys about the nature of their supplementary work.  . . .

The study showed that supplementary work frequently enables side hustlers to feel empowered by taking ownership of self-directed work—which was especially true for those who were motivated beyond making money, says Dr. Sessions.

. . .

Side hustlers self-reported that they were preoccupied with their after-hours gigs the next morning, due to being deeply engaged in that work.

. . .

But that wasn’t the whole story: The moonlighters’ colleagues rated their co-workers’ performance significantly higher on those same days.

So, the uplift in mood had a statistically stronger positive effect on employee performance than the negative effect of being distracted—even if the moonlighters didn’t see things that way.

For the full story, see:

Heidi Mitchell. “When Two Jobs Can Be Better Than One.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021): R4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 1, 2021 , and has the title “How a Side Hustle Can Boost Performance at Your Regular Job.”)

The comprehensive review by Prof. Stephan mentioned above is:

Stephan, Ute. “Entrepreneurs’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Review and Research Agenda.” Academy of Management Perspectives 32, no. 3 (Aug. 2018): 290-322.

The recent study co-authored by Dr. Sessions mentioned above is:

Sessions, Hudson, Jennifer D. Nahrgang, Manuel J. Vaulont, Raseana Williams, and Amy L. Bartels. “Do the Hustle! Empowerment from Side-Hustles and Its Effects on Full-Time Work Performance.” Academy of Management Journal 64, no. 1 (Feb. 2021): 235-64.

Entrepreneurs Are Happier Because Autonomy and More Meaningful Work Matter More Than Stress and Workload

(p. R1) “If you look at the data, it turns out that entrepreneurs on average earn less money than a typical employed person, work 13 hours more a week and report that it’s a very stressful occupation,” says Boris Nikolaev, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “But despite that, there’s overwhelming evidence in the literature that entrepreneurs report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction.”

. . .

“Entrepreneurs are happier in terms of all indications (p. R4) of life satisfaction and work satisfaction,” says Ute Stephan, professor of entrepreneurship at King’s College London, who conducted a comprehensive review of more than 100 academic studies on entrepreneurship and well-being. “However, they might be more stressed than the rest of us, as well.”

This unusual mix of stress and happiness comes about, she says, because entrepreneurs tend to be deeply invested in their businesses, and their passion is a double-edged sword: It gives them a strong sense of purpose and autonomy, but it can also lead to worry, late nights, overwork and stress.

. . .

The stress and workload have a strong negative effect, as is evident in other studies, but the sense of doing something important and being their own boss is so gratifying that it outweighs all those negatives and leaves them happier overall.

“What they are doing is important to them, it’s part of who they are, it’s part of their identity, and that’s why it has such a positive impact on well-being,” says Prof. Stephan.

. . .

. . . in a recent study, Prof. Stephan discovered that autonomy alone isn’t enough. It’s important, to be sure—but what entrepreneurs need, above all, is meaning. She analyzed survey data from over 22,000 people in 16 European countries, comparing their feelings of happiness with the extent to which their work gives them a sense of meaning and autonomy.

. . .

She found that entrepreneurs experienced higher levels of happiness than wage-earning employees (4.37 vs. 4.28 on a scale of 1 to 6), as well as higher levels of meaning (4.56 vs. 4.25 on a scale of 1 to 5) and autonomy (2.66 vs. 1.95 on a scale of 0 to 3). Using regression analysis, she discovered that meaning was the decisive factor in entrepreneurial happiness.

“What we found is that much more important than decision-making freedom is the sense of doing something profoundly meaningful,” she says. “That really energizes you, and as an entrepreneur you really need that energy to be creative and to do the work that’s important to you.”

But finding meaning in work doesn’t have to be about changing the world. Framing work in terms of performing an important service can help even entrepreneurs in less glamorous industries find meaning and happiness—such as contractors who help people build a dream home, or accountants saving people from disastrous money problems.

For the full story, see:

Andrew Blackman. “Are Entrepreneurs Happier Than Other People?” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 04, 2021): R1 & R4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 3, 2021 , and has the title “Are Entrepreneurs Happier Than Everybody Else?”)

The comprehensive review by Prof. Stephan mentioned above is:

Stephan, Ute. “Entrepreneurs’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Review and Research Agenda.” Academy of Management Perspectives 32, no. 3 (Aug. 2018): 290-322.

The recent study by Prof. Stephan mentioned above is:

Stephan, Ute, Susana M. Tavares, Helena Carvalho, Joaquim J. S. Ramalho, Susana C. Santos, and Marc van Veldhoven. “Self-Employment and Eudaimonic Well-Being: Energized by Meaning, Enabled by Societal Legitimacy.” Journal of Business Venturing 35, no. 6 (Nov. 2020): DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2020.106047.

Could Amateur Investors Return the Walt Disney Company to the Principles of Walt Disney?

I wonder what amateur investors could do if they had more serious motives than hatred of elite short-sellers? What if they had the motive, for example, of returning the Walt Disney Company to the principles of Walt Disney? I do not endorse the ambiguity (how much fictional and how much nonfictional) of the book reviewed below. But the GameStop and AMC episodes are intriguing proofs-of-concept.

(p. A15) Until late last year, GameStop was a typical and not very successful corporation. The company sold videogames through a chain of retail outlets and lost money on every sale. But its stock caught the interest of small investors who traded on Robinhood, a mobile trading app, and the stock began to levitate.

From single digits in October 2020 the stock price doubled to 20 late last year. Then, over a few manic days in January, it vaulted “like a lid flying off a pot,” as Ben Mezrich puts it in “The Antisocial Network.” It went up to 77, then 148, then 348 and then an intraday high of 483—at which point GameStop was worth more than $30 billion. Briefly, it was the most heavily traded issue on the stock market.

The source of the mayhem was, to borrow from the book’s subtitle, “a ragtag group of amateur traders.” Few of the devotees who flocked to GameStop thought of themselves as even armchair security analysts. They were infected by crowd psychology and, in some cases, driven by the hope that the high price would punish well-to-do short sellers.

. . .

Even when the price hit the stratosphere, retail buyers professed not to be worried. They would “never” sell; they weren’t concerned with the possibility of losing money. “Oh im [sic] fully aware that I may end up a bagholder,” went one post. “But it’s worth being a bagholder to stick it to those Wall Street f—s who’ve gamed the system for so long at our expense.”

To Mr. Mezrich, such fulminations suggest that a revolution is a-coming. His thesis is vented in excited metaphors. The “pillars” of Wall Street are shaking; Melvin Capital faces an “existential moment” (which, actually, it survived); angry traders constitute a “millennial version of the French Revolution.”

A little of this gas comes from investors; most of it is supplied by Mr. Mezrich. “The Antisocial Network” is built on scenes that the author has re-created; quotation marks, in the main, are conveniently absent. He writes of one novice but gung-ho investor, who worked in a hair salon: “She believed something deeper was happening.” Did she say that? Is it a paraphrase? Is it what Mr. Mezrich thinks she believed?

For the full review, see:

Roger Lowenstein. “BOOKSHELF; Let Them Eat Shorts.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Sept. 07, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 6, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Antisocial Network’ Review: Let Them Eat Shorts.”)

The book under review is:

Mezrich, Ben. The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2021.

Humans Still Matter in Chess

(p. A14) Magnus Carlsen, of Norway, steamrolled Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi 7.5-3.5 in the best-of-14 series, capturing a decisive victory that solidified his legacy as the greatest in the history of the sport. He has been the world champion since 2013—this was his fifth win—and is the highest-rated player of all time.

What even his rivals marvel at is how Carlsen, 31, has weaponized the computer revolution against them. He does it not by overpowering opponents with calculation, but by harnessing that digital knowledge to turn games into more human battles.

“Magnus is proud of saying that he’s probably the top player who works the least with the computer and is the least influenced by the computer,” said Carlsen’s coach, Peter Heine Nielsen. “He wants to trust his own evaluation, his human touch and to keep that.”

. . .

. . . here’s the twist: the most lethal use of computer-based analysis isn’t to find something that only the machine can see. It’s figuring out what it sees and dismisses that might still be useful. The dream of any computer-savvy chess player is to discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor, yet taps into a line that their opponent hasn’t prepared.

“That’s the Holy Grail,” said grandmaster Cristian Chirila, who assisted world No. 4 Fabiano Caruana when he faced Carlsen for the world championship in 2018. “If you can get there, that’s a huge advantage.”

In any given situation, the engines might recommend any number of moves and suggest that they are all relatively equal. Those are the obvious ones to study. But by playing a more obscure move—perhaps even one that the computers suggest is disadvantageous—Carlsen thrives by throwing his opponents into that unfamiliar territory.

For the full story, see:

Joshua Robinson and Andrew Beaton. “Computers Revolutionized Chess. Magnus Carlsen Wins by Being Human.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, December 10, 2021): A14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 10, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Biden Daycare Proposal Would Act Like $27,000 Tax on Many Middle-Class Families

(p. A17) Child care is already a major expense for parents, and President Biden pledges to reduce its cost with his multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better bill. Yet while some of those who receive government subsidies may see reduced costs, millions of other working parents could see their child-care costs double. The new program would act like a $20,000 to $30,000 annual tax on middle-income families.

The bill’s latest draft proposes to reinvent child care with a trifecta of cost-increasing forces. First, it would remove much of the incentive to offer lower-cost care.

. . .

Second, providers would need extra staff to comprehend and comply with all the new statutes, certifications and agency rules.

. . .

Third, the bill imposes “living wage” regulations on staff pay.

. . .

. . ., Build Back Better could increase costs by more than 120%. For a family with an infant and a 4-year old, that would be an additional annual expense of up to $27,000 if they don’t qualify for subsidies. In 2022, when the subsidy is only available to those earning no more than their state’s median income, that would be half of families currently using child care. Even in 2024 when the subsidies would be more generous, more than a quarter of families using such child care would be paying more than double of what they do now.

For the full commentary, see:

Casey Mulligan. “Biden Would Make Daycare Even Pricier.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 10, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 9, 2021, and has the title “Biden Would Make Daycare Even More Expensive.”)

Price Controls Still Won’t Work Against Inflation

(p. A19) Asked about his plan for a dangerous opponent, boxer Mike Tyson once said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” President Biden has proposed various plans to deal with inflation.

Prices rise when goods become scarce or the money supply expands rapidly. Pandemic-induced holdups in the supply chain have caused scarcity; . . .

. . .

On the money-supply front, the Fed is making noises about backing off on aggressive expansion. But a CNBC report estimated that more than $5 trillion in cash is sitting in corporate coffers and bank accounts. Middle-class savers who have been holding cash will see its value eaten away—effectively a tax on the middle class, which progressives promised not to levy. Some of the rich will put their cash in real estate, heightening shortages of housing.

Whatever you think of Congress’s bipartisan infrastructure initiative, its timing is unfortunate. It will be sharply expansionary on the fiscal front, with new demands on labor markets straining to find workers. All that cash from Fed monetary expansion is out there ready to be spent. Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better plan would make these problems worse by injecting trillions into the economy.

Things aren’t yet so bad that a plan can’t make them worse. In a recent paper for the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, I evaluated one policy for managing prices—a top-down approach directed from Washington. I found that such plans are thwarted by information problems (officials don’t know enough to direct resources or decide prices) and incentive problems (the power to decide which prices will be allowed to increase, and which will be held down, will be corrupted by politics).

For the full commentary, see:

Michael C. Munger. “A Biden Plan For Prices? No Thanks.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Dec 15, 2021): A19.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 14, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Infrastructure Can Be Privately Provided

(p. B5) In less than a decade, four tech giants— Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon —have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%.

And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography.

By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica.

. . .

Undersea cables can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. Installing and maintaining them requires a small fleet of ships, from surveying vessels to specialized cable-laying ships that deploy all manner of rugged undersea technology to bury cables beneath the seabed. At times they must lay the relatively fragile cable—at some points as thin as a garden hose—at depths of up to 4 miles.

All of this must be done while maintaining the right amount of tension in the cables, and avoiding hazards as varied as undersea mountains, oil-and-gas pipelines, high-voltage transmission lines for offshore wind farms, and even shipwrecks and unexploded bombs, says Howard Kidorf, a managing partner at Pioneer Consulting, which helps companies engineer and build undersea fiber optic cable systems.

In the past, trans-oceanic cable-laying often required the resources of governments and their national telecom companies. That’s all but pocket change to today’s tech titans. Combined, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon poured more than $90 billion into capital expenditures in 2020 alone.

The four say they’re laying all this cable in order to increase bandwidth across the most developed parts of the world and to bring better connectivity to under-served regions like Africa and Southeast Asia.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “KEYWORDS: Tech Giants Weave a Web Of Power Under the Sea.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, January 15, 2022): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the same date as the print version, and has the title “KEYWORDS: Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Weave a Fiber-Optic Web of Power.”)

Silicon Valley Pioneer at Age 16 Survived on 5 Cents of Carrots a Day

(p. A23) Jay Last, a physicist who helped create the silicon chips that power the world’s computers, and who was among the eight entrepreneurs whose company laid the technical, financial and cultural foundation for Silicon Valley, died on Nov. 11 [2021] in Los Angeles.

. . .

Ultimately, he agreed to join the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory because it sat in the Northern California valley where he had spent a summer harvesting fruit after hitchhiking there from his home in Pennsylvania steel country.

But he and seven of his collaborators at the lab clashed with Dr. Shockley, who later became infamous for his theory that Black people were genetically inferior in intelligence to white people. They quickly left the lab to create their own transistor company. They later came to be called “the traitorous eight,” and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, is now seen as ground zero for what became known as Silicon Valley.

. . .

With the blessing of his parents — and carrying a letter from the local police chief saying he was not running away from home — he hitchhiked to San Jose, Calif., which was then a small farming town. He had planned on making a little money picking fruit, but he arrived before the harvest began.

Until it did, he lived, as he often recalled in later years, on a nickel’s worth of carrots a day. Whenever he faced a difficult situation, he said in an interview for the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in 2004, he told himself, “I got through that when I was 16, and this is not that bad a problem.”

. . .

Using materials like silicon and germanium, Dr. Shockley and two other scientists had shown how to build the tiny transistors that would one day be used to store and move information in the form of an electrical signal. The question was how to connect them together to form a larger machine.

After using chemical compounds to etch the transistors into a sheet of silicon, Dr. Last and his colleagues could have cut each one from the sheet and connected them with individual wires, much like any other electrical device. But this was enormously difficult, inefficient and expensive.

One of the founders of Fairchild, Robert Noyce, suggested an alternative method, and this was realized by a team Dr. Last oversaw. They developed a way of building both the transistors and the wires into the same sheet of silicon.

This method is still used to build silicon chips, whose transistors are now exponentially smaller than those manufactured in the 1960s, in accordance with Moore’s Law, the famous maxim laid down by another Fairchild founder, Gordon Moore.

For the full obituary, see:

Cade Metz. “Jay Last, 92, Physicist and a Pioneer of Silicon Valley.” The New York Times (Monday, November 22, 2021): A23.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 20, 2021, and has the title “Jay Last, One of the Rebels Who Founded Silicon Valley, Dies at 92.”)

Regulators Allow U.S. Carmakers to Offer Consumers the Same Safer Adaptive Driving Beam Headlights Already Allowed in Europe

(p. B5) I am driving in the California hills high above Malibu, in a deep-blue electric Audi E-tron, and I turn onto a pitch-black winding road. Instinctively, I reach to turn on the high beams. But before I have a chance to do so, the low beams automatically rise and spread out like a hand fan, filling the entire roadway with light and projecting it far into the distance.

A few seconds later, the headlights of an approaching vehicle set my headlights in motion; the high beams angle down as the light continually shape-shifts, changing patterns to avoid illuminating the oncoming car.

I had just experienced adaptive driving beam, or A.D.B., headlights, one of the most important advances in vehicle lighting technology in decades. With A.D.B. lighting, a vehicle’s headlights are essentially always on high beam, while cameras and software instruct them to constantly reshape the beam to avoid blinding oncoming drivers or shining in the rearview mirrors of those close ahead.

The bad news is that while widely used in Europe and Asia for over a decade, these smart headlights are illegal in the United States. On my demonstration drive, I was piloting a not-for-sale-here European model of the E-tron equipped with Audi’s futuristic digital matrix headlighting system.

The good news is that after years of unsuccessful attempts to allow the technology, A.D.B. lights will soon be on American cars and trucks, thanks to a section in the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that mandates their use.

According to the infrastructure act, adaptive beam headlights must be approved for U.S. use within two years.

. . .

The changeover to A.D.B.-capable headlamps could be swift for some drivers who own Audi, BMW or Mercedes models with deactivated units. Once the A.D.B. standard is approved, it’s possible that a simple software upgrade will activate them.

Some owners who could not wait for legalization say they have figured out how to activate their matrix headlights, and at least one aftermarket service dealer in Southern California will turn them on for $900.

For the full commentary, see:

Eric A. Taub. “WHEELS: Coming Soon: The Perfect Glow on the Road.” The New York Times (Friday, January 14, 2022): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Jan. 18, 2022, and has the title “WHEELS: Smart Headlights Are Finally on Their Way.”)

Charles Morris Uncovered “Tantalizing Nuggets” on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

In researching my Openness to Creative Destruction, I found two of Charles Morris’s books very useful, providing thought-provoking analysis and compelling examples. The two were The Dawn of Innovation and The Tycoons.

(p. A24) Charles R. Morris, a former government official, banker and self-taught historian of economics who as a prolific, iconoclastic author challenged conventional political and economic pieties, died on Monday [December 13, 2021] in Hampton, N.H.

. . .

Mr. Morris wrote his signature first book, “The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment” (1980), after serving as director of welfare programs under Mayor John V. Lindsay and as secretary of social and health services in Washington State.

The book was a trenchant Emperor’s New Clothes analysis of how the Lindsay administration’s unfettered investment in social welfare programs to ward off civil unrest had delivered the city to the brink of bankruptcy, and it pigeonholed Mr. Morris as a neoconservative.

But as a law school graduate with no formal training in economics, he defied facile labeling.

While his 15 nonfiction books often revisited well-trodden topics — including the Great Depression, the nation’s tycoons, the cost of health care, the Cold War arms race and the political evolution of the Roman Catholic church — he injected them with revealing details, provocative insights and fluid narratives.

“The Cost of Good Intentions” (1981) was less a screed about liberal profligacy as it was an expression of disappointment that benevolent officials had become wedded to programs that didn’t work. He concluded that the best and the brightest in the government, as well as complicit players on the outside, had figured that if a day of reckoning ever came, it would not be on their watch.

. . .

He would . . . belie Thomas Carlyle’s characterization of economics as “the dismal science” by injecting tantalizing nuggets.

Reviewing Mr. Morris’s “A Time of Passion: America 1960-1980” (1984) for The Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley wrote that “some of the most vivid moments in this book come when he stops the rush of history to describe incidents from his own time as a poverty-program and prison administrator.”

“He truly has been ‘mugged by reality,’ in Irving Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative,” Mr. Kinsley added, but concluded, “Overall, his book radiates a generosity and good will that set it apart from the typically sour neoconservative creed.”

. . .

“I think we’re heading for the mother of all crashes,” Mr. Morris wrote his publisher, Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs books, early in 2007, adding, “It will happen in summer of 2008, I think.”

Mr. Osnos recalled that after the book was published, “George Soros and Paul Volcker called me and asked, ‘Who is this Morris, and how did he get this so right, so early?’”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Charles R. Morris, Author Who Disputed Economic Dogma, Dies at 82.” The New York Times (Wednesday, December 15, 2021): A24.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Dec. 15, 2021, and has the title “Charles R. Morris, Iconoclastic Author on Economics, Dies at 82.”)

The books by Morris that I found especially useful were:

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2012.

Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. New York: Times Books, 2005.

Rational Environmentalism Takes Account of Costs of Climate Regulations

Source of graph: online version of WSJ article cited below, based on Nordhaus model.

(p. A19) The U.N. estimates that even if no country does anything to slow global warming, the annual damage by 2100 will be equivalent to a 2.6% cut in global gross domestic product. Given that the U.N. also expects the average person to be 450% as rich in 2100 as today, that figure falls only to 434% if the temperature rises unimpeded. This is a problem, but not the end of the world.

That means we don’t have to panic but instead can decide policy rationally. Economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for his work on effective climate solutions, and the chart nearby shows the outcome of his model to find the optimal climate policy. His crucial point is that the damage global warming inflicts aren’t the only costly part of climate change; climate policies also create significant economic harm. Since we have to pay both costs, his model aims to minimize their sum.

. . .

That model shows that the optimal policy mix would be one that slows the average temperature’s rise so that by 2100 it only reaches 6.3 degrees. That’s the option that minimizes the total damages from climate change and climate policies.

. . .

. . . carbon taxes aren’t the only smart way to ameliorate climate change. There are two other effective solutions.

The first is innovation. If research could drive the cost of one source of clean energy below that of fossil fuels, consumers would switch with no prompting.

. . .

The second is economic growth. Just about every problem, including the dangers of global warming, are easier to deal with when people are more prosperous.

For the full commentary, see:

Bjorn Lomborg. “A Reasonable Alternative to Preaching Climate Doom.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 11, 2021): A19.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated November 10, 2021, and has the title “A Reasonable Alternative to COP26 and Preaching Climate Doom.”)

The survey mentioned above is reported in detail in:

Association, American Psychological. “Stress in America™ 2021: Stress and Decision-Making During the Pandemic.” Washington, D.C., 2021.