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Politics and Economics
Why does this matter? Because longitudinal studies have found that students who performed worse in PISA at age 15 are less likely to attain higher levels of education by the age of 25, and are more likely to be out of the labor market entirely, ie, not in education, employment or training. For many, a lifetime of economic hardship and reliance on public services follows.
Part of this performance gap can be explained by socio-economic and language factors, e.g., poverty and lack of fluency in the language used on the tests. I imagine age at immigration matters as well: a person who immigrates as a teenager will likely find school harder in their new country than someone who arrived as a baby. Following this logic, I’d expect second-generation immigrants - born in a country to at least one foreign-born parent - would have little difficulty adapting to a country’s education system and so their PISA scores would reflect this.
Immigrant students often do worse on PISA assessments than non-immigrant students, especially in industrialized countries. However, the performance gap between immigrants and non-immigrants varies considerably across countries. For example…
“Does a person's perception of their place within the general socioeconomic order directly influence their physical and psychological well-being? Let's pretend that researchers find robust evidence that subjective social status does indeed predict various indicators of well-being, e.g., people who rate themselves lower in the pecking order are less healthy or happy than those with higher self-ratings. What can we learn from such evidence? Nothing much by itself. We'd have to dig deeper.” - Singh-Manoux, Adler, and Marmot (2003)
There is no hard-and-fast threshold for an acceptable clearance rate. That said, Oakland’s rate is abysmal. No wonder Oakland’s the most dangerous city in the US!
These posts will explore factors that are thought to influence violent crime rates, such as police response times, clearance rates, conviction rates, sentencing norms, and demographics. I will limit my exploration to the 10 safest and 10 most dangerous cities listed in the above chart, the better to reveal patterns of influence. Hopefully, these cities keep good records.
For comparison, as of 9/30/24, the Dow Jones average net profit margin was 2.46%; the Nasdaq average net profit margin was 16.09%. And according to a January 2024 analysis by NYU Stern School of Business, the average net profit margin for US corporations across 94 industries was 8.54%, based on a sample of 6481 firms.
Americans used to be fairly united on the need to protect the environment through stricter laws and regulations. That consensus took a nosedive in the 1990s and has never recovered…
The authors don’t tell us why Medicare and insurers are increasingly relying on prior authorization, nor do they address the prevalence of unnecessary or low-value medical care or the risks associated with such care. That’s a huge omission. Potential harms should be weighed against potential benefits, the better to find solutions that preserve benefits while reducing harm. As for the prevalence and risk of unnecessary and low-value care, evidence suggests that up to one-fifth of healthcare spending is wasted on such care and around 10% of patients are harmed in the process.
Around a quarter of healthcare spending in the US is wasted, much of it on unnecessary or low-value tests and procedures that do not improve patient outcomes. Here are a few ways countries and healthcare systems are tackling the problem…
“False consciousness [is] the notion that people are so misled about reality that they act against their own interests. What was once the preserve of Marxists, flummoxed that workers refused to lose their capitalist chains, is now the fall-back position for the modern [left], which worries that voters cannot accurately comprehend the world in which they live.” - Are voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks? The Economist, November 30, 2024.
Climate change and the environment were simply non-factors in this year’s election - no surprise, given that polls have repeatedly documented declining public concern about the environment. For example, in a recent Gallup poll “environmental quality” ranked 12th among issues that Americans worry about, after inflation, crime and violence, hunger and homelessness, the economy, healthcare affordability and availability, federal spending and the budget deficit, illegal immigration, drug use, the Social Security system, the possibility of terrorist attacks, and the availability and affordability of energy. That’s a lot of competition for scarce resources.
According the numerous economists and publications, the American economy is booming, yet most Americans polled disagree with that assessment and many say they were better off during the Trump years. What gives?
My progressive friends tend to dismiss these poll results, saying it’s mostly “low-information” Trump supporters who on down on the economy and their opinions don’t matter. That’s because Trump supporters are dumb, deluded and willfully ignorant - per my friends, not me!
Which got me wondering: how do Americans arrive at their opinions of the economy?
“Overall, our cross-country comparison for 10 [developed] countries concludes that the phenomenon of a discrepancy between [official economic indicators] and consumer sentiment is not unique to the United States but is prevalent across multiple countries.” - The Cost of Money is Part of the Cost of Living: New Evidence on the Consumer Sentiment (Bolhuis et al, 2024)
Harris Supporter (before the election): “[Trump’s] message is straight-up misogyny, transphobia, racism, xenophobia. This is the kind of President he is, and Trump voters must know this. If Trump wins, that means this is who America is also.”
Never-Trumper/Critic of the Left (before the election): “One of the reasons Trump is going to win so easily is the CONSTANT accusations of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism from progressives. Translation: ‘Shut up, you're not allowed to talk about things.’ “
Trump Supporter (after the Election): “This is where the war with reality has taken the Democratic Party…And reality always wins, sooner or later. More precisely, in this case, the people's common sense has spoken.”
“Russia has been plotting to place incendiary devices on cargo planes in Europe and even performed a test run this summer, setting off fires at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany,” the New York Times reported [November 5, 2024].
“The United States probably cannot break the link between China and Russia, especially in the near future while the Ukraine war continues. But it can attenuate that link, for example, by leveraging Beijing’s interest in maintaining a positive relationship with Europe and by adopting a balanced strategy toward Beijing itself. U.S. leaders should be cognizant that there is a connection between the degree of hostility Beijing perceives from Washington and its willingness to provide meaningful support to Moscow. It would therefore be dangerous for Washington to make the cooperation between these states a framing strategic concept.” - Cooperation Between China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia: Current and Potential Future Threats to America by Christopher S. Chivvis and Jack Keating/Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. October 8, 2024
“For the past few years, civilian life in northern Norway has been under constant, low-grade attack. Russian hackers have targeted small municipalities and ports with phishing scams, ransomware, and other forms of cyber warfare, and individuals travelling as tourists have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure.” - Ben Taub, Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic/The New Yorker, September 9, 2024
Ten years ago the Kremlin worked with America and Europe to counter Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programme. Such co-operation is now fanciful. “It is as if the Russians no longer feel they have a stake in preserving anything of the post-war international order,” says Mr Radchenko…Mr Putin embraces these ideas. “We are in for probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time most important decade since the end of World War II,” he said in late 2022. “To cite a classic,” he added, invoking an article by Vladimir Lenin in 1913, “this is a revolutionary situation.” - Vladimir Putin’s spies are plotting global chaos: Russia is enacting a revolutionary plan of sabotage, arson and assassination, The Economist, October 13, 2024.
Putin’s Worldview: Themes and Variations …
Anti-liberalism (liberalism = political and civil freedoms)
Orthodox Church: central to national and moral identity
Imperial nostalgia (Tsar Nicholas I – those were the days!)
Family values: “The main purpose of the family is to have children, about procreation, and thus, the perpetuation of our people and our centuries-old history”, per Putin, January 2024 (link)