Niccolo Soldo on Canada; Moses Sternstein describes the economy; Jonathan Haidt is everywhere; Erik Hoel on the essence of the online age; Brian Doherty on Jennifer Burns' biography of Milton Friedman
Thanks, Prof Kling! These were all fascinating (tho I read Nic regularly)
1. Re Nic on Canada. Sorry, the Canada Deep Staters are not going to read Gurri's book, and their fear will drive them in increasingly authoritarian directions, including stifling speech, until something (e.g. the economy) breaks. Then what happens? I have no idea.
2. Re Moses on National Nursing Home. Lacks historical perspective. I'm old enough to have cut my finance teeth when Prime was 20%, so to call current interest rates high is laughable. On the other hand, he's right about finance bros & ZIRP. ZIRP was a huge historical interest rate aberration that I hope will not be repeated (although it's so tempting for Government & Business to do so that I fear it will).
3. Clinton brings a much-needed historical perspective (if laden with too much front-end theorizing before he gets to the meat, although I was amused to see Behaviorism described as an "obscure psychological theory"--how the mighty have fallen). Also good to see someone cite McLuhan again! I lived through the '80s & '90s in the avant-garde cyber movement in Berkeley (via Mondo 2000, which he doesn't mention), so all the '90s references make perfect sense to me. That they are ignored is part of the larger problem of presentism that plagues our era.
4. This applies to the whole Haidt mobile phone discussion. Back in the '90s, the paranoid, helicopter, over-scheduled parenting style was already becoming the norm across the educated classes. Peter Gray https://substack.com/@petergray takes a wider view, that it's not just the phones but the decline of free play for children (I was lucky to grow up under free play) from the '50s through today. No point in taking away kid's phones just to subject them to more parental control & scheduling! Kids cannot learn freedom unless you let them be free & that seems to be anathema for most parents.
My gut wants to agree with Sternstein mostly due to BLS employment releases that frequently cite fast growth in the home health and personal care aides occupation, but I have doubts. Supporting Sternstein is a recent BLS employment projection report states:
“Healthcare support occupations are projected to grow the fastest of all occupational groups, at 15.4
percent from 2022 to 2032. In addition to growing rapidly, one occupation from this group, home health and personal care aides, is also projected to experience the largest increase in new jobs of any occupation over the 2022-32 projections period. Projected to gain 804,600 jobs, this occupation is projected to account for approximately 1 of every 6 new jobs, and by 2032, would represent the largest occupation in the economy. The growing elderly population, which typically has increased healthcare needs compared to younger groups, will in turn increase demand for caregiving and therapy services.”
And one can’t deny that the federal government seems to be borrowing at an unsustainable rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S Nor can one deny that there are “millions of newly minted quasi-americans” but how many millions? However, it seems that nobody really has a meaningful grasp of what the US population actually is within plus or minus 20 million, maybe even double that. US population figure estimates really out to be rounded to the nearest 10 million. Anything else seems like spurious specificity.
And as with everything else, there seems to be divergences in figures reported by different sources. I saw one source that claimed skilled nursing and elderly care employment peaked in 2019 and is down now 8% from then and declined 1% from 2022 to 2023. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/what-are-the-recent-trends-health-sector-employment/ Residential care is about 5% of the national health expenditure and home health care about 3%.
Data that might not support Sternstein’s argument, include the current balance status of the Disability Insurance and Medicaid trust funds and their receipts and outlays. The Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund is projected to be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits through at least 2097, the last year of this report's projection period. The The Supplemental Medical Insurance (SMI) Trust Fund is adequately financed into the indefinite future because, unlike the other trust funds, its main financing sources--premiums on enrolled beneficiaries and federal contributions from the Treasury--are automatically adjusted each year to cover costs for the upcoming year.
And let’s put this in a broader context as well and note that the national health expenditure as a share of GDP has declined recently as well, with health care spending as a share of GDP declining form 18.8% in 2020 to 17.4% in 2021 and then 16.6% in 2022
The number of facilities, the number of their residents, and the amount of healthcare delivered in them are all reported as declining significantly as well. https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/a-look-at-nursing-facility-characteristics/ And the number of residents is actually not all that great to begin with, estimated at about 1.2 million with the average annual cost for a resident at about $120,000, so multiplying those two numbers only gets you to 144 billion which is a big number but not so enormous when compared to the $6.3 trillion the central government spent in 2023.
Medicaid is the largest federal funder of eldercare but states pay up to 50% of the cost of the program.
Medicare, oft accused of being the root of all budgetary evil, accounts for about 10 percent of federal government outlays annually and its assisted living benefit is capped at 20 days, covering about 13% of the total population of facility residents. Both are funded out of the HI Trust Fund. The most recent Trustees Report for 2023 shows the HI Trust Fund started with end of year 2021 reserves of $142.7 billion and grew over the year by $43.9 billion ending the year with $196.6 billion, with 2022 income of $396.6 billion and costs of $342.7 billion. And again, this against total federal spending of $6.13 trillion in 2022.
And at least one source claims that, “A large majority of residential long-term care workers (80.9%) are women. This includes a disproportionate employment of Black women (who make up 22.4% of this industry compared with 6.5% of the overall workforce) and immigrant women (12.8%2 compared with 7.2% of the overall workforce)” and that “’Immigrant women’” includes both naturalized U.S. citizens (7.5%) and non-U.S. citizens (5.3%).
So, at least for me, the jury is still out on Sternstein's "Healthcare Domestic Product" model, but I suspect the truth is too nuanced and complex to have any reasonable expectation of being revealed in any US publication our outlet anyway.
One reason people don't like the economy is its jobs people don't like doing (butt wiping), provided to people who don't like receiving the service (sick old people), being done by people who maybe aren't even citizens.
---
I wonder if the “winner” of the November election is just going to wind up presiding over the chickens coming home to roost.
---
And the next election, and the next election after that, and the next election after that.
It's not like SS and Medicare are about to get any easier to deal with in 2028.
My son is 15, he has never had his own phone. He has a school provided laptop for classwork and access to a communal desktop at home for homework. He plays 2 sports and is a nearly straight A student (B+ in. Algebra). While I think our low digital approach will prove to be correct in the long run, I have some doubts. He is on the outside socially - his classmates' social lives are digitally mediated. It is difficult for him to make plans for engagement out of school. He does have a virtual phone number which he can access on the desktop, and he has a fairly robust "text life," but we do not allow snapchat or video games.
It is a struggle with my own doubts as much as it is with him asking for looser strictures.
I'm happy about Haidt's new book, and like Ignatov (not mentioned in the link subhead), I'm very happy to have him spearhead a social change to get kids off of their screens.
But the focus on interior, like introvert nerds, over the extraverted exterior, oriented was developing before the smartphone, and was a huge draw of the personal computer (I was never happy that IBM copyrighted the generic PC term; not just because I had a C-64).
Another significant issue was racism -- in 2008, the USA elected the Black American, Barack Obama, as President. Which was supposed to end racism. But it seemed to make it worse, especially among the elite and with their unfair, but effective, accusations of "racism" against most mental meritocratic institutions and virtually all Republicans..
Similarly, the exclusion and cancelling of almost all conservatives on college campuses, especially Ivy+, seems likely to have reached a tipping point of moral inferiority after Iraq & Abu Ghraib, followed by the housing bubble pop crisis of 2008.
Most hate speech is Free Speech -- one can't really stop hate speech without censorship. Especially when speaking the truth about Black IQs is called hate speech.
It's not just, nor even primarily, the smart phone causing the problems -- tho the smart phone does cause problems (and might be the single biggest cause). Cancelling smart phones in schools is a good start.
This is a related dialectic to that of The Mob vs. Sovereign Individual that Hoel talks about. But so also different as to require more thinking about it.
Pretty decent quote from Hoel’s article, looking at modern historical Hegelian dialectics: “Sure, capitalism arguably won more than communism did, but when zoomed to the metaphysical scale of Hegel a good deal of our political infighting looks like mere quibbling over the exact state of the capitalist/communist synthesis.”
The note on David Brin's "new ethic of politeness" recalls Voltaire's "il faut se communiquer avec politesse" (It is not enough to be gathered in a city, we must communicate with politeness; this communication softens the bitterness of life everywhere.)
It was announced this week that Texas' largest private employment sector is now "food services and accommodations", surpassing healthcare - so maybe we're importing those people in order to make tacos for one another, and for the grandchildren. Very old people don't mind opening nor eating a can of soup.
A curious crime story here a few weeks ago - a college student on the coast, vanished. What he was doing at the moment of his vanishing was perhaps equally mysterious to people not of his generation: he was fetching from his doorstep, a meal of some sort - from a nearby convenience store (?) - that he paid for "UberEats" to drop off. At 3 AM.
It's hard to take someone seriously when they say stuff like this:
"Uncle Sam borrows trillions of dollars from our grandchildren to pay millions of newly minted quasi-americans to provide healthcare to a steadily growing class of retirees."
Spending on Medicare is a shade less than a trillion/yr. Less than half of that comes from the general fund where it contributes to debt. Meanwhile the deficit in FY23 was 1.7T. It would seem we have bigger problems than healthcare spending for retirees.
Canada's political set owns a suite of luxury beliefs that are mostly less fussy than in American academia, but are more destructive because they are trendy and create huge uncertainty on investment stability.
Resource extraction isn't a significant problem in a country like Canada with a wide variety of primary and secondary industries. But, it becomes a problem with flavour of the year views on which extractive industries are acceptable (or at least ignored by the current regime) and which are not. The uncertainty of the investment climate is entirely owned by the federal (generally central Canadian supported) and provincial governments who use current luxury beliefs (carbon tax unalloyed good, traditional agriculture good, narrowly-interpreted first nations traditions best, urban density good, material progress bad, etc.) to stifle investment in resources and supporting infrastructure.
The RCMP report is probably overplayed, but does indicate the divide between people who create (including resource extraction) and the noisier ones with luxury beliefs who consistently get in the way. That the next federal election will look like the 80s Mulroney landslide, showing a rejection of the luxury beliefs of the 60s and 70s, is reasonably likely. A significant majority of Canadians are now negatively affected (cashflow-wise) by prevailing luxury beliefs.
What's quite cool - that it may be the kernel of a resurgence in acceptance of development - is the number of native bands who are rejecting the ultra-traditional view (significantly held by non-native progressives) that they should remain hunter/gatherers. There's the urban development plans in Squamish and rumours of a private hospital on Tsuut'ina land in Calgary, among others.
Thanks, Prof Kling! These were all fascinating (tho I read Nic regularly)
1. Re Nic on Canada. Sorry, the Canada Deep Staters are not going to read Gurri's book, and their fear will drive them in increasingly authoritarian directions, including stifling speech, until something (e.g. the economy) breaks. Then what happens? I have no idea.
2. Re Moses on National Nursing Home. Lacks historical perspective. I'm old enough to have cut my finance teeth when Prime was 20%, so to call current interest rates high is laughable. On the other hand, he's right about finance bros & ZIRP. ZIRP was a huge historical interest rate aberration that I hope will not be repeated (although it's so tempting for Government & Business to do so that I fear it will).
3. Clinton brings a much-needed historical perspective (if laden with too much front-end theorizing before he gets to the meat, although I was amused to see Behaviorism described as an "obscure psychological theory"--how the mighty have fallen). Also good to see someone cite McLuhan again! I lived through the '80s & '90s in the avant-garde cyber movement in Berkeley (via Mondo 2000, which he doesn't mention), so all the '90s references make perfect sense to me. That they are ignored is part of the larger problem of presentism that plagues our era.
4. This applies to the whole Haidt mobile phone discussion. Back in the '90s, the paranoid, helicopter, over-scheduled parenting style was already becoming the norm across the educated classes. Peter Gray https://substack.com/@petergray takes a wider view, that it's not just the phones but the decline of free play for children (I was lucky to grow up under free play) from the '50s through today. No point in taking away kid's phones just to subject them to more parental control & scheduling! Kids cannot learn freedom unless you let them be free & that seems to be anathema for most parents.
My gut wants to agree with Sternstein mostly due to BLS employment releases that frequently cite fast growth in the home health and personal care aides occupation, but I have doubts. Supporting Sternstein is a recent BLS employment projection report states:
“Healthcare support occupations are projected to grow the fastest of all occupational groups, at 15.4
percent from 2022 to 2032. In addition to growing rapidly, one occupation from this group, home health and personal care aides, is also projected to experience the largest increase in new jobs of any occupation over the 2022-32 projections period. Projected to gain 804,600 jobs, this occupation is projected to account for approximately 1 of every 6 new jobs, and by 2032, would represent the largest occupation in the economy. The growing elderly population, which typically has increased healthcare needs compared to younger groups, will in turn increase demand for caregiving and therapy services.”
(https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm “
And one can’t deny that the federal government seems to be borrowing at an unsustainable rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S Nor can one deny that there are “millions of newly minted quasi-americans” but how many millions? However, it seems that nobody really has a meaningful grasp of what the US population actually is within plus or minus 20 million, maybe even double that. US population figure estimates really out to be rounded to the nearest 10 million. Anything else seems like spurious specificity.
And as with everything else, there seems to be divergences in figures reported by different sources. I saw one source that claimed skilled nursing and elderly care employment peaked in 2019 and is down now 8% from then and declined 1% from 2022 to 2023. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/what-are-the-recent-trends-health-sector-employment/ Residential care is about 5% of the national health expenditure and home health care about 3%.
Data that might not support Sternstein’s argument, include the current balance status of the Disability Insurance and Medicaid trust funds and their receipts and outlays. The Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund is projected to be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits through at least 2097, the last year of this report's projection period. The The Supplemental Medical Insurance (SMI) Trust Fund is adequately financed into the indefinite future because, unlike the other trust funds, its main financing sources--premiums on enrolled beneficiaries and federal contributions from the Treasury--are automatically adjusted each year to cover costs for the upcoming year.
And let’s put this in a broader context as well and note that the national health expenditure as a share of GDP has declined recently as well, with health care spending as a share of GDP declining form 18.8% in 2020 to 17.4% in 2021 and then 16.6% in 2022
The number of facilities, the number of their residents, and the amount of healthcare delivered in them are all reported as declining significantly as well. https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/a-look-at-nursing-facility-characteristics/ And the number of residents is actually not all that great to begin with, estimated at about 1.2 million with the average annual cost for a resident at about $120,000, so multiplying those two numbers only gets you to 144 billion which is a big number but not so enormous when compared to the $6.3 trillion the central government spent in 2023.
Medicaid is the largest federal funder of eldercare but states pay up to 50% of the cost of the program.
Medicare, oft accused of being the root of all budgetary evil, accounts for about 10 percent of federal government outlays annually and its assisted living benefit is capped at 20 days, covering about 13% of the total population of facility residents. Both are funded out of the HI Trust Fund. The most recent Trustees Report for 2023 shows the HI Trust Fund started with end of year 2021 reserves of $142.7 billion and grew over the year by $43.9 billion ending the year with $196.6 billion, with 2022 income of $396.6 billion and costs of $342.7 billion. And again, this against total federal spending of $6.13 trillion in 2022.
And at least one source claims that, “A large majority of residential long-term care workers (80.9%) are women. This includes a disproportionate employment of Black women (who make up 22.4% of this industry compared with 6.5% of the overall workforce) and immigrant women (12.8%2 compared with 7.2% of the overall workforce)” and that “’Immigrant women’” includes both naturalized U.S. citizens (7.5%) and non-U.S. citizens (5.3%).
So, at least for me, the jury is still out on Sternstein's "Healthcare Domestic Product" model, but I suspect the truth is too nuanced and complex to have any reasonable expectation of being revealed in any US publication our outlet anyway.
I love Moses Sternstein. He's spot on.
One reason people don't like the economy is its jobs people don't like doing (butt wiping), provided to people who don't like receiving the service (sick old people), being done by people who maybe aren't even citizens.
---
I wonder if the “winner” of the November election is just going to wind up presiding over the chickens coming home to roost.
---
And the next election, and the next election after that, and the next election after that.
It's not like SS and Medicare are about to get any easier to deal with in 2028.
My son is 15, he has never had his own phone. He has a school provided laptop for classwork and access to a communal desktop at home for homework. He plays 2 sports and is a nearly straight A student (B+ in. Algebra). While I think our low digital approach will prove to be correct in the long run, I have some doubts. He is on the outside socially - his classmates' social lives are digitally mediated. It is difficult for him to make plans for engagement out of school. He does have a virtual phone number which he can access on the desktop, and he has a fairly robust "text life," but we do not allow snapchat or video games.
It is a struggle with my own doubts as much as it is with him asking for looser strictures.
I'm happy about Haidt's new book, and like Ignatov (not mentioned in the link subhead), I'm very happy to have him spearhead a social change to get kids off of their screens.
But the focus on interior, like introvert nerds, over the extraverted exterior, oriented was developing before the smartphone, and was a huge draw of the personal computer (I was never happy that IBM copyrighted the generic PC term; not just because I had a C-64).
Another significant issue was racism -- in 2008, the USA elected the Black American, Barack Obama, as President. Which was supposed to end racism. But it seemed to make it worse, especially among the elite and with their unfair, but effective, accusations of "racism" against most mental meritocratic institutions and virtually all Republicans..
Similarly, the exclusion and cancelling of almost all conservatives on college campuses, especially Ivy+, seems likely to have reached a tipping point of moral inferiority after Iraq & Abu Ghraib, followed by the housing bubble pop crisis of 2008.
Most hate speech is Free Speech -- one can't really stop hate speech without censorship. Especially when speaking the truth about Black IQs is called hate speech.
It's not just, nor even primarily, the smart phone causing the problems -- tho the smart phone does cause problems (and might be the single biggest cause). Cancelling smart phones in schools is a good start.
This is a related dialectic to that of The Mob vs. Sovereign Individual that Hoel talks about. But so also different as to require more thinking about it.
Pretty decent quote from Hoel’s article, looking at modern historical Hegelian dialectics: “Sure, capitalism arguably won more than communism did, but when zoomed to the metaphysical scale of Hegel a good deal of our political infighting looks like mere quibbling over the exact state of the capitalist/communist synthesis.”
The note on David Brin's "new ethic of politeness" recalls Voltaire's "il faut se communiquer avec politesse" (It is not enough to be gathered in a city, we must communicate with politeness; this communication softens the bitterness of life everywhere.)
It was announced this week that Texas' largest private employment sector is now "food services and accommodations", surpassing healthcare - so maybe we're importing those people in order to make tacos for one another, and for the grandchildren. Very old people don't mind opening nor eating a can of soup.
A curious crime story here a few weeks ago - a college student on the coast, vanished. What he was doing at the moment of his vanishing was perhaps equally mysterious to people not of his generation: he was fetching from his doorstep, a meal of some sort - from a nearby convenience store (?) - that he paid for "UberEats" to drop off. At 3 AM.
It's hard to take someone seriously when they say stuff like this:
"Uncle Sam borrows trillions of dollars from our grandchildren to pay millions of newly minted quasi-americans to provide healthcare to a steadily growing class of retirees."
Spending on Medicare is a shade less than a trillion/yr. Less than half of that comes from the general fund where it contributes to debt. Meanwhile the deficit in FY23 was 1.7T. It would seem we have bigger problems than healthcare spending for retirees.
Canada's political set owns a suite of luxury beliefs that are mostly less fussy than in American academia, but are more destructive because they are trendy and create huge uncertainty on investment stability.
Resource extraction isn't a significant problem in a country like Canada with a wide variety of primary and secondary industries. But, it becomes a problem with flavour of the year views on which extractive industries are acceptable (or at least ignored by the current regime) and which are not. The uncertainty of the investment climate is entirely owned by the federal (generally central Canadian supported) and provincial governments who use current luxury beliefs (carbon tax unalloyed good, traditional agriculture good, narrowly-interpreted first nations traditions best, urban density good, material progress bad, etc.) to stifle investment in resources and supporting infrastructure.
The RCMP report is probably overplayed, but does indicate the divide between people who create (including resource extraction) and the noisier ones with luxury beliefs who consistently get in the way. That the next federal election will look like the 80s Mulroney landslide, showing a rejection of the luxury beliefs of the 60s and 70s, is reasonably likely. A significant majority of Canadians are now negatively affected (cashflow-wise) by prevailing luxury beliefs.
What's quite cool - that it may be the kernel of a resurgence in acceptance of development - is the number of native bands who are rejecting the ultra-traditional view (significantly held by non-native progressives) that they should remain hunter/gatherers. There's the urban development plans in Squamish and rumours of a private hospital on Tsuut'ina land in Calgary, among others.