The care theory of value
Economist Nancy Folbre explains why care workers – people who care for the ill, the disabled, children, the elderly – are chronically underpaid:
To bolster my care theory of value, I invoke the words of Warren Buffett, Sage of Omaha, referring to investment strategies. “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”
He just doesn’t have the pronouns quite right for care workers on the front lines today: Value is what you get, but price is what they pay.
Read more on her Care Talk blog, here.
Resilience and sustainability
As the coronavirus pandemic lays bare the fragility of global supply chains, the need for building more resilient and sustainable economies becomes ever more evident. It’s not just about medical supplies. In his new book, Feeding Britain, food policy expert Tim Lang dissects the nation’s perilous dependence on just-in-time supply chains in which eight mega-corporations control 90% of the retail market. From an interview in the Guardian:
What’s Lang’s solution? It’s detailed and includes the introduction of a food resilience and sustainability act, complete with legally binding targets. National nutritional guidelines should become the basis for food procurement contracts, both public and private. There should be an audit of food production in the UK and the budget for public health should be doubled from £2.5bn of the £130bn health budget to £5bn. It also proposes the creation of no fewer than nine bodies or institutions, including a royal commission to map a new set of “multi-criteria principles for the UK food system”, a food resilience and sustainability council and a network of urban and rural food and farming colleges.
Read more here.
Eat your credit card
Oops – you just did!
Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year, Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!”
Read here about the campaign by Big Oil and Big Soda to bring the plastic horror show to your neighborhood – and stomach.
Killer fuels
Every year, poisonous air pollution from fossil fuels kills millions worldwide. Here’s the take-home from a new study in Cardiovascular Research: “Without fossil fuel emissions, the global mean life expectancy would increase by 1.1 years.”
Maybe that’s the health crisis we really ought to be freaking out about. Econ4’s James Boyce ponders the political implications of killer fuels:
Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now.
Read more here.
Paying the Price
The economics profession is starting to wake up to the terrible price of obsession with distribution-blind “efficiency”:
The AEA [American Economic Association] meetings took place against the backdrop of the publication of Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s remarkable and poignant book Deaths of Despair, which was presented during a special panel. Case and Deaton’s research shows how a particular set of economic ideas privileging the “free market,” along with an obsession with material indicators such as aggregate productivity and GDP, have fueled an epidemic of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism among America’s working class. Capitalism is no longer delivering, and economics is, at the very least, complicit.
Read more here.
Predation 101. Part 2: The Enablers
A remarkable new report from South Africa illuminates the role of international banks, accountancy firms, and lawyers in enabling state capture and corruption at home and abroad:
Read the report here. And see here for an eloquent interview with one of its authors.
Inequality 101
A new five-part video series from the Institute for New Economic Thinking:
For more, see here.
“Shocked and disappointed”
The Luanda Leaks reveal the complicity of international enablers in the looting of Africa. The head of one of the world’s top accounting firms is “shocked”:
Accounting giant PwC launched an internal investigation into its dealings with Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos, and a major Portuguese bank cut ties with her, as fallout from an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists examination of the source of her wealth continued.
Bob Moritz, the chairman of PwC, told ICIJ reporting partner The Guardian that he was “shocked and disappointed” by revelations that his firm advised companies owned by dos Santos.
Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, Mortiz said that PwC will investigate its work with dos Santos and that employees may be docked pay or dismissed if they behaved inappropriately. From a reputational perspective, the dos Santos story was the worst thing to have happened to PwC on his watch.
We’ve seen this movie before:
How to become part of the climate solution
Environmental writer Emma Marris offers a five-step plan to stop freaking out and be part of the solution. Step 1: Ditch the shame.
The first step is the key to all the rest. Yes, our daily lives are undoubtedly contributing to climate change. But that’s because the rich and powerful have constructed systems that make it nearly impossible to live lightly on the earth. Our economic systems require most adults to work, and many of us must commute to work in or to cities intentionally designed to favor the automobile. Unsustainable food, clothes and other goods remain cheaper than sustainable alternatives.
And yet we blame ourselves for not being green enough. As the climate essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar writes, “The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous.” It turns eco-saints against eco-sinners, who are really just fellow victims. It misleads us into thinking that we have agency only by dint of our consumption habits — that buying correctly is the only way we can fight climate change.As long as we are competing for the title of “greener than thou,” or are paralyzed by shame, we aren’t fighting the powerful companies and governments that are the real problem. And that’s exactly the way they like it.
Check out the other steps here.
Neither complacency nor despair
Between complacency and despair, there is an intermediate terrain where both sanity and social responsibility lie. Those of us who are painfully attuned to the world’s urgent problems and needless suffering sometimes veer onto the side of despair. To get a grip, consider:
Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.
Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent….
As recently as 1981, 42 percent of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10 percent of the world’s population now. Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline “Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday”….
It can seem tasteless, misleading or counterproductive to hail progress when there is still so much wrong with the world. I get that. In addition, the numbers are subject to debate and the 2019 figures are based on extrapolation. But I worry that deep pessimism about the state of the world is paralyzing rather than empowering; excessive pessimism can leave people feeling not just hopeless but also helpless.
Extracted from an end-of-the-year piece by Nicholas Kristof.
To explore the roots of apocalyptic anxiety in American politics, see Betsy Hartmann’s book (just out in paperback), The America Syndrome: War, Apocalypse, and Our Call to Greatness.
