In comments my attention was called to this statistic: Find more statistics at Statista
The NYT took note of the same phenomenon, noting that no one understood why that was happening.
My reaction was this:
Both graphs address the same period; one shows that total costs are falling while the other illustrates that the average cost continues to rise. I’ll leave the interpretation of that to the interested reader.
All I ask is that any decline in total Medicare spending not be used as an argument for increasing Medicare reimbursement rates.
The graph above was sampled from a Washington Post editorial. I find it difficult to relate their thesis, that young Americans are eager to work, to that graph. Perhaps what they meant to say is that young Americans are more eager to work now than they were a few years ago. College enrollments are down, too, so that doesn’t explain what’s going on, either.
Things are certainly different from when I was a kid. I have filed a 1040 every year since I was 14.
Update
After looking at that graph again, it’s clear that graduating from high school used to be synonymous with working for 40-50% of the population and that was very consistent over a long period. That changed in the 1990s, coincident with the push for higher education. Whether that was cause, effect, or both I have no idea.
Labor Day is traditionally a celebration of and for organized labor. Let’s think about organized labor a bit. The demographics of the construction trades look like this:
All of these trades are composed almost entirely of men.
There are probably multiple reasons for the distribution including preference, history, and that in the trades you work your way up. You don’t enter as a master craftsman. You begin by doing menial work, then become an apprentice, a journeyman, and, finally, a master. If you’re not willing or able to do the menial work, you won’t become a master.
One more statistic to reflect on. The majority of union members in the American workforce are now government employees.
In her Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan wrote, like a middle schooler, about how she spent her summer vacation. She spent it reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Tolstoy’s masterwork is long (more than 1,000 pages) but his thoughts remain relevant.
I wanted to cite one passage from her column because it provides some direct quotes on Tolstoy’s assessment of the Germans, French, British, and Russian that are worth reflecting on:
I didn’t understand what good company Tolstoy is. The Russian general Pfuel, an ethnic German, is “self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth.†A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally as irresistibly attractive. “An Englishman is self-assured, as being of the best organized state of the world.†“A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.â€
I wonder what his assessment of today’s Americans would be?
I read War and Peace (1,200 pages), Anna Karenina (800 pages), and Resurrection (300 pages) along with other, shorter Tolstoy works in one 16 week period more than 50 years ago. I doubt I’ll read any of them again not because they’re not worth reading but because reading them is such a fulltime job.
As Kyiv’s counteroffensive stalls and a decisive Ukrainian victory looks increasingly unlikely, suggestions by some American experts that the United States should initiate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine may seem tempting. However these arguments are nothing but counterproductive in terms of ensuring a lasting peace in Europe and the world beyond.
The very statement that the U.S. should launch negotiations indicates that the author seeks to present the war as a purely regional conflict rooted in a land dispute between neighboring states. Such a reading is undoubtedly intended to reduce anxiety about the prospect of further escalations. Unfortunately, that understanding is far from the truth.
No matter how much Washington assures itself with the incantation that the U.S. is not a party in this conflict, Moscow assumes the opposite. For President Vladimir Putin, this war is the culmination of an epic and eternal confrontation between an independent Russia and its eternal enemy, the West led by the United States. In this context, Ukraine is not a sovereign actor, and Kyiv’s unilateral surrender is the only outcome Moscow will accept.
The Moscow Times is a dissident news web site in both Russian and English. Originally, its headquarters was in Moscow. Since the crackdown on coverage of the war in Ukraine, it has been in Amsterdam. Here’s the kernel of the post:
It is time for the U.S. to make a clear decision about whether it supports Ukraine and, by extension, Western democracy and rules-based order from violent revision. Or, on the other hand, whether it has made a mistake by agreeing to help Ukraine, in which case it should urgently make peace with Putin (neglecting the fact that the billions of dollars of the U.S. taxpayers spent on helping Kyiv have been actually wasted).
The goal of the war for Ukraine, and the West as a whole, should not just be a military victory in Ukraine. Rather, they need a global defeat of Putin’s regime and to banish it from the world stage.
To this end, the following steps would be required. The U.S. must abandon its half-hearted arms supply policy and provide Ukraine with all the necessary weapons as soon as possible. It must lift the ban on hitting military targets deep inside Russian territory and untie the hands of the Ukrainian military, given that the Russians do not restrict themselves in the same way. Finally, the U.S. has to clearly state that it is Putin himself who is the enemy of Ukraine and the West and to offer a vision of future relations without Putin – a vision potentially acceptable for both Putin’s own elite and Russian pro-democratic forces. Engaging with the Russian opposition movement could be instrumental in fleshing out such a vision.
I agree with Mr. Bondarev’s assertion that we should clearly identify our strategic objectives and pursue them. I don’t believe we agree on what those strategic objectives should be. I think he may be conflating his own objectives with the U. S. strategic objectives. Where I think we disagree most is that I think he’s wrong in attributing U. S. posture to “hesitancy” or half-heartedness. We don’t have the ability to supply Ukraine with arms at the rate they’re requesting. We abandoned that ability decades ago. We haven’t really begun rebuilding what we’ve been tearing down and it will take us a considerable amount of time to accomplish that. If we want to accomplish it which I do not believe is completely clear. I think we should want to rebuild our industrial capacity. What does the Biden Administration think?
In their zeal to return DC and by extension other big city workers back to the office, the editors of the Washington Post have produced a list of “carrots” to extend to lure workers back to their offices and reinvigorate downtowns:
Give out $10 lunch coupons in September.
Waive food truck fees through the end of the year.
Hire private security.
Offer free or reduced-price parking downtown on weekends.
Lower fees to open a small business through year-end.
Heavily promote events and eateries.
Get the second gentleman and other celebs out downtown.
Maybe some of those might have some incremental benefit but I suspect the editors will be frustrated by how little effect they will have.
IMO if they want to reinvigorate downtowns there are two sine qua non measures:
Reduce crime in the downtown shopping areas
Make public transport clean, safe, and efficient
As to office workers, I think there’s a question they need to ask themselves. If most of the people with whom you interact in the course of a day are not in the office, why should you be? That’s even more true when the people with whom you interact aren’t even in the same hemisphere as you are.
There’s another factor I think they should consider. Different age cohorts find different things motivating. When dealing with Baby Boomers telling them to come into the office might be enough but that is unlikely to be the case with Generation X, Millennials, or Generation Z.
Generation X invented the notion of “work-life balance”. They and subsequent cohorts find that motivating to various degrees. How do you achieve work-life balance while spending a couple of hours commuting and eight (or more) hours in the office? That’s a question. I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know if it’s possible.
Considering federal government workers only, most are either Baby Boomers or Generation X. With the right legislation they could be compelled to return to the office. I suspect an amazingly large percentage would choose to retire rather than return.
Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown who served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, goes further. “Fighting for every last inch of Ukrainian territory,†he told me, is “morally justified. It’s legally justified. But I’m not sure that it makes a lot of strategic sense from Ukraine’s perspective, or from our perspective, or from the perspective of the people in the Global South who are suffering food and energy shortages.†He said that the U.S. Administration needs to let the Ukrainian counter-offensive play out. But at the end of this year, or maybe early in 2024, it will have to talk with Zelensky about negotiations. “I wouldn’t say, ‘You do this or we’re going to turn off the spigot.’ But you sit down and you have a searching conversation about where the war is going and what’s in the best interest of Ukraine, and you see what comes out of that discussion.â€
During the rationing days of World War II, there was the weekly event called Meatless Tuesday. To save meat for the troops, civilians were asked to cut it from their diets one day each week. I don’t remember anyone complaining about it. It was considered an act of patriotism. Everyone, as far as I knew, went along with it.
With Meatless Tuesday in mind, I wonder if the country wouldn’t do well to declare Trumpless Thursday. This would entail an agreement on the part of all media—television, radio and print—not to run any items about Donald Trump, show his face on screen or in photographs on Thursday of every week. The country would be given a weekly 24-hour rest from Trump talk.
The editors of the Washington Post make a good point about Elon Musk’s StarLink satellites and service. They provide a lot of power for one individual to hold. Shouldn’t the federal government act?
What’s to be done? While a president theoretically has the legal option of nationalizing Starlink in a worst-case scenario, as Woodrow Wilson did with the country’s railroads during World War I, that would be neither politically popular nor prudent. A better solution might be for the United States to try to build satellites of its own. The $1.5 billion contract the Pentagon awarded last week to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to create a low-orbit satellite constellation is the start of such a strategy.
At least in theory the Outer Space Treaty allows the United States to regulate private use of space by its citizens but it is not self-enforcing. I think I would argue that U. S. contracts with SpaceX are de facto authorization of its actions. I’m not sure what the WaPo’s proposal would accomplish.
Furthermore, I question the relevance and legality of their other proposal—nationalizing StarLink. To the best of my knowledge Wilson’s nationalizing the railroads was never tested in court. Would nationalizing the railroads be constitutional? I can think of a number of grounds on which to challenge it. And there’s a big difference between railroads and StarLink: U. S. railroads ran entirely within U. S. territory.
The real problem is Mr. Musk’s ability to affect foreign policy. Every CEO of every large company does that every day. It’s a bit late to start worrying about it now.
