Making News: A Special Edition

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Making News, economy, foreign policy, Walter Lippmann, The New York Times, globalism, Plastics News, Frank Esposito, Ronald Steel

I’m pleased to announce one item of special interest that appeared last week: The New York Times obituary for Ronald Steel – which contains a quote from a book of his I reviewed for The Times.

But I feel the need to provide some background here. Ron is probably best known for his literally magisterial 1980 biography of the influential twentieth century American philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann.

As noted in the review, however, for decades he was also a leading and indeed pioneering analyst of American foreign policy. More specifically, he was one of a handful of critics who departed from the globalist national leadership consensus that developed on Pearl Harbor Day, and that hardened into a rigid dogma soon afterwards. As such, he was a major influence on my own thinking and writing.

In that vein, I feel privileged that he also became a very supportive friend and mentor. So at least much as the nation will miss his insights (especially these days!), I will miss his never-ending kindness, generosity, and encouragement. And I know that anyone reading this post would profit from delving into his writings.

One correction: The Times obit said that when I wrote the review (the whole of which is linked,and that I sure enjoyed reading after many years), I worked with the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute. Well, that’s close. I’ve long respected that organization’s work, but I was then on the staff of the (also D.C.-based) Economic Strategy Institute.

In addition, it was great to be quoted on the confusing state of the American economy in Frank Esposito’s May 5 post here in the respected industry publication Plastics News.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: On Chinese Spying and Dual Loyalties

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academics, Biden administration, China, China Initiative, Chinese Americans, civil liberties, DOJ, dual loyalty, espionage, FBI, German-Americans, higher education, immigrants, Israel, Italian-Americans, Japanese internment, Japanese-Americans, Jews, Justice Department, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, profiling, spying, students, The New York Times, World War II, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

As an American Jew, I’m extremely aware of the dangers of accusing members of various U.S. identity groups with ancestry from or associated with foreign countries of “dual loyalties.” The worst example of the injustices that can result was the World War II-era internment policy – which punished legal immigrants and even American citizens simply based on the assumption that anyone of Japanese descent could be spying for a wartime enemy.

(German- and Italian-Americans came under suspicion, too, but were placed in camps much more selectively than Japanese-Americans.)

Especially in the U.S. context, the dual loyalty charges levelled against Jews has come from those who claim that when they lobby for or just favor pro-Israel policies, they’re prioritizing the interests of the Jewish State over those of the United States. (For some typical – and unusual – recent examples see here.)

More recently, individuals of Chinese descent living in America have come under the microscope due to concerns about wide-ranging spying campaigns conducted by the People’s Republic. And because the targets have ranged from U.S. citizens to legal immigrants to Chinese nationals resident here as students and on various academic exchange programs, critics have claimed that racial profiling and dual loyalty overreach have marked the responses of American law enforcement agencies.

Indeed, these charges – along with contentions that valuable scientific progress is at risk – have been so persuasive to the Biden administration that last February, it shut down a Justice Department program begun during the Trump years to cope with the alleged threat.

But as a New York Times Magazins article today has made clear, despite the dangers of broad-brush approaches, something like the Justice Department’s disbanded “China Initiative” is absolutely necessary to safeguard U.S. national security adequately.

As explained in this detailed Times report on the FBI’s China-related counter-espionage work (and it’s worth quoting in full):

“…China has sought to exploit the huge numbers of people of Chinese origin who have settled in the West. The Ministry of State Security, along with other Chinese government-backed organizations, spends considerable effort recruiting spies from this diaspora. Chinese students and faculty members at American universities are a major target, as are employees at American corporations. The Chinese leadership ‘made the declaration early on that all Chinese belong to China, no matter what country they were born or living’ in, James Gaylord, a retired counterintelligence agent with the F.B.I., told me. ‘They started making appeals to Chinese Americans saying there’s no conflict between you being American and sharing information with us. We’re not a threat. We just want to be able to compete and make the Chinese people proud. You’re Chinese, and therefore you must want to see the Chinese nation prosper.’

“Stripped of its context and underlying intent, that message can carry a powerful resonance for Chinese Americans and expatriates keen to contribute to nation-building back home. Not all can foresee that their willingness to help China could lead them to break American laws.”

Keep in mind, moreover, that Times reporter Yudjhijit Bhattacharjee is by no means unsympathetic to the profiling and dual loyalty issues, as he wrote in the very next sentence,

“An even more troubling consequence of China’s exploitation of people it regards as Chinese is that it can lead to the undue scrutiny of employees in American industry and academia, subjecting them to unfair suspicions of disloyalty toward the United States.”

But however – genuinely – troubling they are, if you’re worried about Chinese spying and national security, and you acknowledge that much of Beijing’s strategy is based on an attempt to blur the distinction between Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans, and that the latter can be all too susceptible to these appeals, what’s the alternative to casting a wide net? Pretending that there’s nothing to see here?

Which brings up another disturbing finding of Bhattacharjee’s: The claim of one FBI agent he interviewed that “When… agents go out to talk to companies and universities about the threat…skeptical listeners ask for the evidence that proves the theft of trade secrets is part of a campaign directed by China’s government.”

Given unmistakable evidence of decades of massive Chinese theft of U.S. and other foreign intellectual property, China’s systematic disregard for other long agreed-on global trade rules it’s promised to respect, and its increasingly hostile and expansionist foreign policies, what aside from willful ignorance – or on the part of universities, a naive faith that even a regime so repressive and belligerent would never dream of corrupting the global March of Science – could explain this skepticism?

Obviously no country with what I called yesterday a healthy sense of self-preservation could possibly base its China counter-espionage policies on such assumptions. Nor could any country with inevitably limited national security resources and a consequent need to set priorities.

So even though critics of the China Initiative were right in pointing out that some of those it had prosecuted have been acquitted, and even though that danger of overreach is always present, the Biden administration was seriously mistaken in not only closing down the China Initiative but sanctimoniously declaring that it’s completely scrapping any practices smacking of “standards based on race or ethnicity.”

And if China Initiative critics want to boost the odds of counter-espionage campaigns choosing their targets accurately, they might try getting their own heads out of the sand by helping the government less reluctantly and scrutinizing their own China ties with more realistically and vigiliantly.

Im-Politic: The New York Times’ DeSantis Hatchet Job Flunks Even the Competence Test

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demographics, Florida, Im-Politic, Immigration, journalism, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Mainstream Media, MSM, Regime Media, Ron DeSantis, The New York Times

Memo to New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro, her editors at the paper’s opinion section, and indeed all journalists: If you’re going to do a takedown piece on a major politician, or anyone, try to display at least minimal competence.

Had Garcia-Navarro and her editors followed this advice, they’d have never published a recent hatchet job on Ron DeSantis, the Florida Republican governor and possible 2024 presidential candidate, that’s a monument to factual cherry- picking and outright misinformation trafficking, and a disgrace even to the increasingly debased practice of opinion writing.

Garcia-Navarro concentrates on debunking the claims of DeSantis and his supporters that the governor “has overseen a growing economy” and that. “Florida now has the fastest-growing population in the country.” (I reported on the latter and related developments here.)

Actually, the author claims,

“Florida is not a model for the nation, unless the nation wants to become unaffordable for everyone except rich snowbirds.

“While my home state’s popularity might indeed seem like good news for a governor with presidential ambitions, a closer look shows that Florida is underwater demographically. Most of those flocking there are aging boomers with deep pockets, adding to the demographic imbalance for what is already one of the grayest populations in the nation. This means that Florida won’t have the younger workers needed to care for all those seniors. And while other places understand that immigrants, who often work in the service sector and agriculture, two of Florida’s main industries, are vital to replenishing aging populations, Mr. DeSantis and the state G.O.P. are not exactly immigrant-friendly, enacting legislation to limit the ability of people with uncertain legal status to work in the state.”

One obvious reason for doubting Garcia-Navarro’s arguments is the lack of documentation. That’s likely because had the author decided to present the principal facts, or had her editors insisted upon this, they ‘d have watched this indictment melt away.

A balanced picture of Florida’s demographics would have begun by noting that DeSantis has only occupied the state house in Tallahassee since the beginning of 2019. Anyone familiar with the Sunshine States knows that it’s been a popular retirement destination for decades.

It’s possible that DeSantis has had such a powerful impact on Florida’s demographics that these patterns have changed dramatically in the last four years? Well, yes. But the statistics surely have been distorted – like virtually all U.S. data – by the CCP Virus.

In any event, Florida’s own state government shows that the state’s (higher-than-the-U.S. Average) median age rose 0.71 percent between 2019-2021 (the latest figures available) while that of the nation as a whole increased by 0.52 percent. For comparison’s sake, during the two years before 2019, Florida’s median age advanced by 0.48 percent versus the 1.05 percent for the entire United States.

So these limited samples do show that Florida has been aging at a relatively fast pace under DeSantis, both versus its own pre-DeSantis pace and that of all of America. But the none of gaps or the changes between them is the least bit dramatic.

Between 2017 and 2019, Florida’s median age dipped from 110 percent of its total U.S. counterpart to 109.375 percent. By 2021, it bounced all the way back to …109.585 percent. In other words, big whoop.

As for Garcia-Navarro’s charge that DeSantis’ governorship has benefited only “rich snowbirds” economically, that’s hard to square with what the exit polls told us about his 2022 reelection results. Specifically, fully 41 percent of Floridians who voted last year lived in households that earned $50,000 annually or less. Thirty-eight percent of these voters’ households earned between $50,000 and $99,000 per year. And 21 percent earned more than $100,000 each year. So clearly, lots of DeSantis voters weren’t one percenters or five percenters or ten percenters or even close.

It’s true that DeSantis clobbered his Democratic opponent among voters aged 45 or older – by 63 percent to 36 percent. But that group includes lots of non-geezers. And among the 18-44-year olds, DeSantis trailed by just 50-48 percent. So clearly lots of DeSanti voters weren’t wealthy seniors, either. Either all these non-super-rich and young and midde aged Floridians are too stupid to vote in thei own economic self-interest, or they know something that Garcia-Navarro and her editors don’t.

And has DeSantis really shut off the flow of desperately needed immigrants into Florida? Despite his efforts to “limit the ability of people with uncertain legal status to work in the state” (love that latest euphemism for illegal aliens!), U.S. Census data show that the answer is emphatically “No.”

For example, from July, 2021 to July, 2022 (the latest official data available), slightly fewer immigrants moved into Florida on a net basis (125,629) than into California (125,715). And that’s even though California’s estimated population last year (39.03 million) was much larger than Florida’s (22.24 million), and even though California is a self-proclaimed sanctuary state. (See the the fourth xls table downloadable from this Census link.) 

These data don’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, but for the purposes of this post, who cares? Indeed, do the (not rocket science) math, and even if you believe that more immigrants (includin those with “uncertain legal status) are essential for adequate senior care, it turns out that Florida is in much better shape because it’s receiving nearly as many of the foreign born as California even though its population includes many fewer (4.69 million) seniors in absolute terms than California (5.93 million).

Moreover, these numbers are little changed in a relative sense from those of the last pre-DeSantis year.  In fact, the data in the fifth xls table available at this Census link show that from July, 2018 to July, 2019, more immigrants came to Florida (88,678) than to California (74,028) even though more seniors (just over six million) lived in the latter than in the former (4.54 million).  (Note:  this last data describes the situation as of April, 2020. These were the closest Census figures that seem to be available.)   

I was able to find all these highly relevant figures without undue difficulty. Why couldn’t Garcia-Navarro? Or her editors? No doubt because their intent was not to englighten but to smear. As a result, I feel better than ever about changing my nomenclature for such established news organizations from “Mainstream Media” to “Regime Media.”  

Those Stubborn Facts: Who’s Fetishizing AR-15s?

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AR-15, assault weapons, crime, gun control, gun violence, murders, Pew Research Center, rifles, The New York Times, Those Stubborn Facts

“States and the federal government should…pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15.”

– The New York Times, December 10, 2022

 

Share of U.S. guns in circulation that are “semiautomatic military-style rifles” like AR-15s: 6%

 

Share of U.S. gun-related murders due to rifles of all kinds, 2020*: 3%

*Latest available FBI data

 

“America’s Toxic Gun Culture,” The New York Times, December 10, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/opinion/america-gun-violence.html and “What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.,” by John Gramlich, Pew Research Center, February 3, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/)

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Will China Dupe Washington Again?

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Biden, China, energy, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Paracells, Russia, South China Sea, Spratlys, The New York Times, U.S. Navy, Ukraine, Xi JInPing

Well, that didn’t take long. Just two weeks after President Biden’s face-to-face meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Bali, Indonesia raised hopes of improved Sino-American relations, Beijing is acting like it’s determined to dash them.

Not that the expressed hopes were especially high. Mr. Biden himself said he aimed “to ensure that the competition between our countries does not veer into conflict, whether intended or unintended.  Just simple, straightforward competition. It seems to me we need to establish some commonsense guardrails” to “manage the competition responsibly” (as the White House put it in post-meeting statement).

But this morning EST, the Chinese military announced that it had “Organised sea and air forces to follow, monitor, warn and drive away” a U.S. warship that had sailed into waters Beijing claims near a group of islands in the South China Sea.

China’s claim has been rejected by international legal authorities, and the United States Navy regularly sends ships into the area to reflect its “continued commitment to….every nation’s right to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allow.” The Navy added that “At the conclusion of the operation,” the destroyer “exited [China’s] excessive claim area and continued operations in the South China Sea.”

The point here is that China’s reactions to what the United States calls “Freedom of Navigation Operations” represent exactly the kind of opportunity for a conflict-igniting accident or miscalculation that President Biden’s guard rails idea seeks to avoid – and that China isn’t especially interested.

Also today, China declared its readiness to “forge a closer partnership” on energy with Russia – surely a sign of Beijing’s continued defiance of U.S. and European efforts to deny Moscow resources for financing its invasion of Ukraine.

As also reported by the Associated Press, President Biden “has warned Xi of unspecified consequences if Beijing helps [Russia] evade sanctions,” but this announcement indicates that any “Spirit of Bali” doesn’t extend in Xi Jinping’s eyes to helping end this dangerous conflict. In fact, I suspect it reflects China’s ongoing happiness that Washington is tying up so many military resources to aid Ukraine’s resistance that it’s degrading America’s ability to counter China’s ambitions in Asia – and especially a possible invasion of Taiwan, the global leader in manufacturing the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

Early during the Cold War, then Chinese dictator Mao Zedong devised a strategy called “fight fight talk talk.” As explained by the New York Times,

“The idea was that even as you seek opportunities to make gains on the battlefield, to expand your territory and gain in strength, you keep on negotiating even though you have no interest in a compromise solution and intend to win complete victory. The talk-talk part of the strategy gives mediators the sense that they are doing something useful, while, by holding theoretically to the possibility of a negotiated solution, you deter great- power military intervention in support of your adversary.”

As Times reporter Richard Bernstein explained, when it came to U.S. efforts to negotiate a deal between China’s nationalist forces and the Communists, the strategy was “a brilliant success.” Here’s hoping that President Biden doesn’t ignore the new hints that China is following the same course today – and that Beijing isn’t interested in conducting a “responsible competition.” It’s interested in winning.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: And Now, Holiday Shopping Uncertainty

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Black Friday, CCP Virus, consumers, coronavirus, COVID 19, DeLoitte Insights, Federal Reserve, holiday shopping, inflation, Jeanna Smialek, stimulus, The New York Times, Vera Gibbons, Yahoo Finance, {What's Left of) Our Economy

So here I am watching the Michigan-Ohio State football game, not really planning to post anything today, but surfing around on the web anyway, and what do I come across? A Yahoo Finance report from yesterday presenting a decidedy upbeat picture of the new holiday shopping season – whose ultimate results will go pretty far toward influencing the final state of the U.S. economy during these inflationary times, and especially of lower-income consumers, who tend to get hit hardest by high inflation. (See, e.g., here.)

This post was noteworthy because it bucked that last piece of conventional wisdom. Indeed, veteran personal finance journalist Vera Gibbons emphasized the finding from one major consultancy that “We’re seeing greater participation among lower-income households (those who earn less than $50,000 per year).

They’ve “settled into the ‘new normal,’” this analyst from Deloitte Insights told her “and are feeling more stable — and hopeful — given wage growth.” “They’re going to jump in and spend,” he declared.

And he had some numbers to back up his prediction, saying that (in Gibbons words) “this group of shoppers plan to spend an average of $671 this holiday season. That’s 25% more than last year. On the flip side, high-income earners (those who make more than $100,000 per year) plan to cut back by 7%, bringing their spending down to an average of $2,438.”

But this assessment left my head spinning not just because of its clash with the conventional wisdom. It also drew exactly the opposite picture that appeared in a New York Times article from the very same day. The header should explain why: “This Holiday Season, the Poor Buckle Under Inflation as the Rich Spend.”

Specifically, correspondent Jeanna Smialek spotlighted Federal Reserve data (which I described more generally here) showing that

“after 18 months of rapid price inflation — some of which was driven by stimulus-fueled demand — the poor are depleting those cushions. American families were still sitting on about $1.7 trillion in excess savings — extra savings accumulated during the pandemic — by the middle of this year, based on Fed estimates, but about $1.35 trillion of it was held by the top half of earners and just $350 billion in the bottom half.”

Also showing that poorer Americans are feeling an especially tight inflationary squeeze:

“Credit card data from Bank of America suggest that high- and middle-income households have replaced lower-income households in driving consumption growth in recent months. Poorer shoppers contributed one-fifth of the growth in discretionary spending in October, compared with around two-fifths a year earlier.”

And don’t expect the confusing reports on holiday shopping or the low-income consumer to stop any time soon. As noted in this post, “preliminary Black Friday reports contain almost no useful information about the state of the economy” and “early Black Friday sales figures are at best unreliable and at worst completely useless [even] for predicting overall holiday sales.”

Keep in mind, moreover: That last post was written in 2015 – well before the CCP Virus pandemic, the sharp economic downturn and blazing recovery that followed, and gargantuan stimulus programs began turning the U.S. economy into a $20-some-odd trillion mass of conflicting signals and developments.  As a result, all that seems certain going forward about the economy is that along with peak inflation uncertainty and recession uncertainty, for the time being we’ll have to deal with holiday shopping season uncertainty as well. 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Two New Must-Read Reports on U.S. Trade Policy

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African Americans, Ana Swanson, China, Donald Trump, globalization, imports, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, intellectual property, ITIF, Jobs, manufacturing, mercantilism, minorities, non-market economy status, protectionism, Section 337, The New York Times, Trade, trade law, U.S. International Trade Commission, USITC, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Good things just came in twos on the U.S. trade policy front, in the form of two separate reports that spotlighted a major, vastly under-appreciated result of America’s approach to the international economy for many decades, and that proposed an excellent new idea for shielding U.S.-based workers and businesses from Chinese (and some other foreign) predatory trade practices.

The first study was released November 14 by the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) and alertly covered by Ana Swanson of The New York Times. The USITC researchers usefully reviewed the academic literature on trade policy’s impact on various U.S. population groups and found that overall, and came to two major conclusions. First, “in the face of trade shocks [like the soaring levels of imports from China that followed Washington’s decision in the 1990s to expand greatly bilateral economic ties], Black and other Nonwhite workers [fared] worse than their White counterparts.” Second, “import competition had a large and disproportionately negative effect on wages of minority workers.”

The reasons, the USITC stressed, were many and varied, and included discrimination in hiring and firing practices and the generally lower education levels of minority groups, which has tended to concentrate them in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors that have been vulnerable the longest to penny-wage competition from China and other developing countries. But one conclusion that shone through was the historic importance of manufacturing generally – including the kind of heavy manufacturing found in the Midwest, to minority prospects for economic progress.

And these conclusions will come as no surprise to RealityChek regulars, as the harm done to minority communities by a trade policy that I’ve long argued has been offshoring- and import-friendly has been the subject of two posts from several years back. (See here and here.) But as the X indicated, and the USITC report emphasized, too many gaps remain in the data currently available and too much of what can be accessed is too poorly structured to create a genuinely satisfactory picture. So how about USITC folks getting on the horn to their Census Bureau counterparts to get cracking?

One other point worth mentioning (which the USITC understandably didn’t include): The first recent President who tried at all to change the trade policies that apparently have hit U.S. minorities hardest was one Donald Trump – who’s still being widely pilloried as a white supremacist.

The second, more forward-looking report was released Monday by the Infomation Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and recommended a creative way to use U.S. trade law to shut out of the American market products whose competitiveness has benefited from “unfair trade practices in non-market, non-rule-of-law economies such as China.”

The trade law provision ITIF would employ is called Section 337. The reason? Unlike other U.S. trade law measures, rather than authorize the imposition of tariffs on imports that are sold to Americans at below-market prices (dumping) or enjoy certain kinds of subsidies, or profit from intellectual property theft (the main alleged trade crimes addressed by American trade law), in certain circumstances Section 337 authorizes completely banning U.S. imports from foreign entities shown to have profited from such practices.

ITIF proposes to increase greatly the number of these circumstances, especially for cases not involving intellectual property, for transgessions by China and other economic rogues.

Perhaps most important, in cases involving such outlier countries, it would eliminate the (already weakened) requirement that a plaintiff domestic company or industry has been injured by predatory trade practices. (In the U.S. trade law system, plaintiffs not only need to demonstrate that an outlawed practice exists, but that it has seriously harmed them.) As ITIF argues,

“It should be irrelevant if the domestic company is harmed in the here and now. The point is that the unfair practices should not be rewarded, period. The other point is that all too often, especially in technologically complex industries, by the time harm is determined it is too late: The company has suffered irreversible decline in its competitive position. Adjudicating blame becomes a coroner’s inquest over dead U.S. companies.”

Two other crucial ways ITIF would lower barriers to winning Section 337 cases involving non-market economies: First, it would spur U.S. trade law to cover foreign governments that provide predatory support for their entities, as well as specific foreign entities themselves. This improvement matters a lot because in so many instances (for example, in every single instance of Chinese transgressions), American businesses and workers are facing an entire national system aimed at creating advantages having nothing to do with free market forces. As a result, U.S. plaintiffs typically wind up facing a defendant with ultimately much deeper pockets, and the high costs of American trade lawyering and the uncertain chances of success deter many from going this route to begin with.

Second, current U.S. trade law implicitly assumes that the damage inflicted by foreign trade predation is limited to a plaintiff company or industry. But given all the linkages among industries nowadays, that view is way too narrow, and can leave the entire economy exposed to much wider-ranging and long-term damage.

To remedy both problems, ITIF would also entitle Washington to take up their causes by permitting any U.S. government agency to file a trade case against a non-market economy.

I’ve got a few bones to pick with these ITIF recommendations. For example, damaging trade predation is by no means confined to China. Many economies that it would let off the hook, especially in East Asia, operate national systems of protection and predation, too. At the same time, as the report suggests, this approach could induce the kind of international cooperation that would increase by orders of magnitude the price China – clearly a culpit in a class by itself – would pay for what ITIF rightly calls its “economic aggression.”

Moreover, the new trade law regime wouldn’t encompass “multinational firms operating in China.” That’s an awfully big loophole, not only because it’s these companies (including U.S.-owned companies) send stateside lots of products that benefit from China’s mercantilism, but because taking advantage of these predatory practices has been a prime reason for moving their factories to China to begin with (as well as lying behind their support for admitting China into the World Trade Organization, and thereby providing these exports with a vital layer of international legal protection against effective, unilateral responses from Washington).

But in the name of making sure the perfect doesn’t prevent the good, I can support this policy, too (at least as a start). And because ITIF’s proposals would go far toward adjusting the decades-old U.S. trade law system to recent global economic reality, I hope both major paties in Washington get behind it ASAP.

Im-Politic: Better U.S. Schools Will Require More Than Just Money

Tags

Department of Education, education, Im-Politic, math, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading, schools, students, teachers, The New York Times

Evidently The New York Times‘ opinion staff considered the following claim so obviously true that no one bothered to fact check it: “[T]he nation’s politicians [have] neglected and underfunded education for years….”

Made by a Times producer and a freelance collaborator who created a video op-ed purporting to explain “America’s Great Teacher Resignation,” the message intended for readers was obvious: If only those reckless, self-seeking American pols would start spending seriously on the primary and secondary schools, instead of focusing so tightly on scoring “cheap political points vilifying teachers,” American education wouldn’t be such a disaster area.

But actually, the under-funding claim deserved some major fact-checking, because compelling evidence has just emerged that the relationship between educational spending and student performance is difficult to see at best. And it came largely from the U.S. Department of Education in data contained in the latest edition of its National Assessement of Educational Progress (NAEP) – a large-scale Congressionally mandated evaluation that’s issued periodically and dubbed “The Nation’s Report Card.”

As in a previous post, I looked at the NAEP’s state-level reports showing whose fourth and eighth graders were testing above and below the national averages in math and reading. The year I examined was 2019 – the final school year before the CCP Virus struck – to make sure the findings weren’t affected by abnormalities like pandemic closings. And I then compared these results with figures on state-level spending on K-12 education from the USAFacts.org website and the Edunomics Lab, a Georgetown University-based research center. I concentrated on the ten states that spent the most per student on these schools, and those that spent the least.

For starters, here are the ten biggest education spending states plus the District of Columbia and their latest annual median expenditures per student:

New York: $25.4K

District of Columba: $22.2K

Connecticut: $20.7K

New Jersey: $20,2K

Alaska: $19.2K

New Hampshire: $18,6K

Rhode Island: $17,2K

Massachusetts: $17.1K

Wyoming: $17.0K)

Hawaii: $16.2K

Delaware: $15.4K

And here are the ten lowest spenders. (Actually, there are 13 of them because of some ties.)

Utah ($7.8K)

Idaho ($8.0K)

Arizona ($8.6K)

Mississippi; $9.3K

Oklahoma: $9.4K

Nevada: $9.5K

Florida: $9.7K

Texas: $9.8K

Tennessee: $9.8K

Arkansas: $10.1K

Indiana: $10.1K

Alabama: $10.1K

North Carolina: $10.2K

The spending disparities between the groups are pretty dramatic, with average annual median spending per student in those top states averaging $19, 100 and the counterpart for the group averaging just $9,400. So the latter’s outlays overall are less than half the former’s, a margin surely more than large enough to offset living costs differences. And the spread between the biggest and meagerest spending states (New York and Utah) are much greater: $25,400 versus $7,800, or more than 3.2 to one.

But the performance disparities are anything but dramatic. In fact, here are the widest:

>For eighth grade math, six of the eleven big-spending states recorded scores below the national average, versus nine of the 13 low-spending states.

>And in fourth grade reading, just four of the eleven big-spending states turned in below average scores, versus eight of the 13 low spenders.

But remember: These are groups of states that represent the extremes: States that best fit the description of “neglecting and under-funding education” and states that presumably are supporting students and teachers the most. Yet the performance metrics aren’t exactly like day and night.

And the differences in the two other grade and subject categories are positively infinitesimal where they even existed, and especially so given the spending gaps.

Specifically, in fourth grade math, six of the eleven big spenders generated scores below the national average, versus six of 13 of the meager spenders.

In eighth grade reading, five of the eleven big spending states scored below average versus seven of the 13 low spenders.

Also more than a little interesting: The biggest spending state, New York, registered below average scores in three of the four categories. The lowest spending state, Utah, turned in above average scores across the board.

The point here isn’t to oppose spending more money on the nation’s schools. Rather, it’s to emphasize – contrary to the narrative promoted by the Times video makers – that, as with happiness, money alone can’t buy educational effectiveness. In fact, maybe teachers themselves bear some responsibility for under-performing schools.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Apple Products Now Designed in China, Too

Tags

Apple, China, design, engineering, Federal Trade Commission, globalization, Made in America, manufacturing, offshoring, research and development, technology, The New York Times, Tripp Mickle, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Although Apple has long relied on factories in China to turn out its incredibly popular electronics products, the company has clearly sought to counter charges that it’s been a world champion outsourcer that’s contributed to U.S. industrial hollowing out and general economic weakening. How? By touting its products as “Designed by Apple in California.”

And that’s mattered in more than a public relations sense because it’s been that U.S.-located design – and engineering – that’s long comprised the vast majority of the value of Apple products. Even better, it’s also long been the case that almost none of the wealth generated by iPhones and iMacs and the rest have gone to China. Those factories in the People’s Republic, owned by contract manufacturers, have largely been snapping the sophisticated parts together according to Apple’s appealing designs and sophisticated blueprints.

Now, though, according to excellent reporting by The New York Times‘ Tripp Mickle, it’s clear that Apple’s going to have at least put a big asterisk on its slogan. He’s updated trends that I identified literally decades ago in my book The Race to the Bottom and have followed since (see, e.g., here) making clear that not only is much of the Apple’s most advanced manufacturing (of parts and components) now performed in China, but so is a large and surging share of that engineering and design.

According to Mickle’s sources,

“More than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries.”

Mickle continues: China’s “engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets.”

As a result, just as American leaders have belatedly been awakening to the dangers of heavy reliance on China for critical goods, both because of Beijing’s burgeoning power and challenges to U.S. global technological leadership and the national security created by this stature, Apple has been boosting its dependence on the People’s Republic – and helping to enrich and empower this hostile dictatorship. 

Some of Mickle’s specifics:

>”This year, Apple has posted 50 percent more [high wage] jobs in China than it did during all of 2020, according to GlobalData, which tracks hiring trends across tech.”

>”When China closed its borders in 2020, Apple was forced to overhaul its operations and abandon its practice of flying hordes of California-based engineers to China to design the assembly process for flagship iPhones. Instead of subjecting staff to lengthy quarantines, Apple began empowering and hiring more Chinese engineers in Shenzhen and Shanghai to lead critical design elements for its best-selling product….”

>In 2007, Chinese suppliers accounted for a mere 3.6 percent of an iPhone’s value. Now this figure is more than 25 percent.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has just begun to enforce new regulations aimed at ensuring that products labeled “Made in America” really are produced domestically.  It’s time for Washington to require Apple to start telling the truth about its operations, too.     

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Evidence That Stimulus-Bloated Demand is the Main U.S. Inflation Driver

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CCP Virus, China, consumer price index, consumers, coronavirus, COVID 19, Covid relief, CPI, demand, inflation, Jobs, population, retirement, stimulus, Sun Belt, supply, supply chains, The New York Times, Ukraine War, workers, Wuhan virus, Zero Covid, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The New York Times just provided some important evidence on the big role played by super-charged consumer demand in super-charging inflation – this article showing that the Sun Belt has been the U.S. region where prices have been rising fastest.

The finding matters because a debate has been raging among politicians and economists over the leading causes of multi-decade high inflation rates with which Americans have been struggling over the last year and a half or so.

On one side are those who claim that overly generous government stimulus spending is the main culprit, because it’s increased U.S. buying power much faster than the supply of goods and services has grown. On the other side are those who focus on the inadequate amount of goods and services that companies are turning out, stemming from supply chain disruptions rooted in the stop-and-go nature of the American economy from successive waves of pandemic downturns and slowdowns to the Ukraine war to China’s ridiculously draconian Zero Covid policies.

Clearly, all these developments deserve blame, but the regional disparities in inflation rates provide pretty convincing support for emphasizing bloated demand.

Here’s the latest annual disparity in the headline Consumer Price Index as presented in the Times article:

U.S. total:    8.5 percent

South:          9.4 percent

Midwest:     8.6 percent

West:          8.3 percent

Northeast:   7.3 percent

It correlates roughly, by the way, with the data in this report last spring from the Republican members of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.

And here’s a principal, demand-related reason: The Sun Belt states of the South and West have been the U.S. states that have gained the most population during the pandemic period. Indeed, according to the latest U.S. Census data, eight of the ten states with the fastest overall population growth between July, 2020 and July, 2021 was a southern or southwestern state, and the same holds for five of the ten states with the fastest population growth in percentage terms.

It’s true that population growth often increases supply, too – by boosting numbers of workers. The U.S. government doesn’t break out job creation along the above regional lines, but a look at individual state totals doesn’t conclusively brand the Sun Belt as an national employment leader. On average, relatively speaking, Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, and Texas have created more jobs from the pandemic-period bottom in April, 2020 through last month, as shown in this table:

U.S. total:    +16.87 percent

California:   +17.98 percent

Florida:        +21.05 percent

Texas:          +17.31 percent

Arizona:       +16.02 percent

Nevada:        +30.92 percent

But don’t forget – many of these states have outsized travel and tourism sectors, and you know what happened to those activities during the worst of the pandemic. So in part, their employment bounced back so quickly because they had plummeted so dramatically as the CCP Virus’ first wave spread.

Moreover, many of these states are big retirement destinations, too, and as their overall population increase makes clear, this trend has intensified since the pandemic arrived. Of course, the workers in any given state don’t only sell goods and services to that state’s population, and a given state’s residents don’t only buy goods and services from providers in that state. Yet it’s certainly noteworthy that the number of the Sun Belt states’ consumers rose faster relative to the national average than the number of Sun Belt workers.

And in this vein, Sun Belt inflation probably is also particularly hot partly because so many of the newcomers are wealthy. Indeed, one recent study found that, early in the pandemic, “Of the 10 states with the largest influx of high-earning households, nine are located in the Sun Belt, including the six-highest ranked states, starting with Florida.”

Because they bring so much spending power to their new home states, these wealthier Americans naturally tend to drive prices up unusually fast.

As the Times article notes, some prominent reasons for scorching Sun Belt inflation are unrelated to population-driven demand growth – notably much lower population densities that generate more gasoline-using driving.  But the impact of population movement and all the disproportionately high inflation it’s clearly creating is hard to ignore.  And if a consumption shock has spurred so much inflation in the Sun Belt, why wouldn’t it be affecting prices this way in the rest of the nation, too?