Yves here. Somebody has to do the unpleasant but highly valuable duty of taking the latest bit of Larry Summers bad policy advice apart. A bit of stimulus, supply-chain issues (particularly related to cars) and some catch-up spending and suddenly everyone is freaked out about inflation. For what it’s worth, I’m not seeing it in my spending categories. Confirming that anecdata occasionally have merit, this post confirms that inflation is spotty, as in pronounced in some categories, like the afore-mentioned cars, mis-measured in others, and tame elsewhere.
Many experts expect these sector-specific bottlenecks to get sorted out and for the apparent inflation to abate. However, Covid in India is expected to cause additional supply chain stresses, so we may see price pressures in other areas.
COVID-19 has accelerated the growth in the digital economy through a dramatic increase in working from home, online shopping, digital entertainment, online services, among other areas. Ideas such as telemigration in which people from different parts of the world work in virtual offices might once have sounded outrageous. Today, many are already working from home through video streaming.
A completely virtual future is perhaps unlikely, but such shifts are a fundamental challenge to how we organise societies. Laws and regulations governing trade, taxation, labour, and social security, among other areas, are largely based on geographically-defined states that contain and regulate our economic and social activities.
On April 30 2021 Hauwei Technologies sponsored a program Great Minds Talk: How Far to Low-Carbon Living? The participants in this discussion were Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, Prof Steve Keen, Honorary Professor and Vice President Research, University College London, and Paul Scanlan, Chief Technology Officer, Huawei Carrier Business Group. The moderator is Rebecca Rice, Associate Director at BCW Global.
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Lord Turner chairs the Energy Transitions Commission, a global coalition of major power and industrial companies, investors, environmental NGOs and experts working out achievable pathways to limit global warming to well below 2˚C by 2040 while stimulating economic development and social progress.
Mass Incarceration Retards Racial Integration
The title of this post is the title of this recent working paper authored by Peter Temin for the Institute for New Economic
Thinking. Here is its abstract:
President Nixon replaced President Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs in 1971. This new drug war was expanded by President Reagan and others to create mass incarceration. The United States currently has a higher percentage of its citizens incarcerated than any other industrial country. Although Blacks are only 13 percent of the population, they are 40 percent of the incarcerated. The literatures on the causes and effects of mass incarceration are largely distinct, and I combine them to show the effects of mass incarceration on racial integration. Racial prejudice produced mass incarceration, and mass incarceration now retards racial integration.