Overturning Roe V Wade - the One Year Anniversary of a Decision That Allows Religious Beliefs to Be Dictated (The Rise of Catholics on the Supreme Court)

One year ago, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a Supreme Court decision from 1973 that let a woman and her doctor choose whether to continue a pregnancy.

There are up to one billion sperm in a single ejaculation. Nobody - not even the wildest kook in your family - thinks that we should work to protect the lives of all these sperm in spite of the fact that they are human and they are alive. Similar (but less dramatic numbers) with the eggs that many women lose through regular periods. Sperm and eggs. Human. Alive. But not deserving of the respect we pay to human life.

A newborn baby is a little miracle. It is human life and nobody - not even the wildest kook in your family - thinks that it would be okay to end this new life.

Sperm and egg are garbage. Newborns are treasure.

Different people have different opinions about when the human waste of sperm and egg become precious human life. The pope and agreeable Catholics believe that the transformation from waste to treasure is at the moment of conception. Good on them. If the pope ever gets pregnant he will surely carry it to term regardless of what an awkward predicament pregnancy and raising a child in the Vatican would be for him. Others might think that 2 or 4 months into the pregnancy the human life within them is closer to the human life of sperm or egg than newborn. Good on them. They may decide to terminate the pregnancy before then and Roe v Wade quite simply said, "That's her decision."

Roe v Wade did not dictate that we should save all the sperm and eggs. It did not give license to kill newborns. It quite simply gave pregnant women the right to decide for themselves at what instant the miracle of transformation from waste to treasure takes place and act accordingly.

Because the first amendment gives us all the right to opine at length about what pregnant women should do, it is easy to confuse our right to dictate to strangers with their right to choose. Roe v Wade clarified the difference between our right to express our opinions about the most intimate, personal and - arguably - impactful decision a woman can make and the actual right to make that decision for her.

Sex can be one of the most wonderful acts one can engage in. Unless it is forced on you.
Pregnancy - for all its discomfort, stress and worry - can be one of the most wonderful states. Unless it is forced on you.

Galileo understood that the earth was orbiting the sun but given this contradicted the Bible (Joshua 10:13), the Catholic Church put him under house arrest and silenced him. The year he died, Newton was born and was to build on Galileo's insights to create calculus and physics and help to create the modern world. Descendants of the British, we Americans have kept religion a private affair rather than make it the basis for laws and science.

For centuries, the US Supreme Court had zero to one Catholics. In 2020, Amy Coney Barrett became the sixth Catholic to join the Supreme Court and shortly after, the Supreme Court overturned the decision that had made abortion a private choice rather than public law. We are back to the days of the pope's beliefs being the basis for public law.

Italy was the center of the Renaissance and lost that vibrant economic, scientific, artistic and cultural lead about the time the Church silenced Galileo. Northern Europe began the centuries long march to make religion a matter of private conviction rather than public law and leadership shifted from Italy to northern Europe. A year ago, American Catholics on the Supreme Court made a matter of private conviction again a matter of public law. History suggests that this moves us backwards, not forward.

The Economic Policies That Worked so Spectacularly in the 20th Century Are Failing Most Americans in the 21st Century

Between 1900 and 2000, a few related, wonderful things happened.

For one, the nature of work and what it meant to be a human changed. Machines provided force and humans provided knowledge. The portion of teenagers in school rose from 10% in 1900 to 90% by 2000. In 1900, the men and women who were used like machines died – on average – by 47. By 2000, men and women who used machines lived until 77. This gain of 30 years was as if every day Americans gained 7 more hours of life. For a century. Your little brother born 3 years after you could expect his life to be a year longer than yours.

Not only did people live longer but the workweek was shorter, dropping from about 60 to about 40 hours. The average American worked about 20 hours a week less but made 8 times as much. On top of that, they got to enjoy a fabulous invention that too rarely gets mentioned among the 20th century’s great breakthroughs: retirement. When you die at 47, you die working. FDR signed social security to begin providing retirement income at 65, which would give a person who lived to 77 a dozen years of retirement.

Intellectual and industrial capital – education and machinery – made Americans more productive. In 2000, incomes were about 8X what they were in 1900. So, every week 20 more hours of free time in 2000 than they’d had in 1900, each life with 12 years of retirement instead of zero and Americans made as much in one hour as they’d previously made in 8.

In no other century in history had life changed more for the average person. Ever. This was simply extraordinary.

The extraordinary policies of the 20th century seem less effective in this new, 21st century. At least for the majority of Americans.

Since 2000, this magic of more education translating into more income and more years of life continued. For the roughly one-third of Americans who got a BA. For the rest, incomes and life expectancy had begun to fall by about 1990.

Measuring expected years of life between 25 and 75, “by 2018, Americans with a BA could expect 48.2 years out of a possible 50, compared with 45.1 years for those without a BA.” At 25, Americans with a BA would probably enjoy 3 more years up to the age of 75. And while the data is less definitive beyond that, the gap seems to widen after 75. COVID seems to have widened it even further.

In the 20th century, everyone gained – particularly those with college degrees. In the 21st century, the gains mostly accrue to those with college degrees.

Angus Deaton and Anne Case have chronicled what they refer to as Deaths of Despair – lives shortened by suicides or drug and alcohol abuse. These deaths rise in regions where factories have closed and jobs have been lost to globalization and automation and where the workforce hasn’t a college degree to use to transition into new fields. But it is not just suicide that truncates life. People who lose jobs, who lose careers, report more pain, less vitality and – finally – die sooner.

As those without degrees experience lives more nasty, brutish and short than what they’d come to expect, it is little wonder that a man as perpetually outraged and aggrieved as Trump would sound to them like their voice, their president. It’s less remarkable that they might be ready to blow things up.

Our model of continued reliance upon a steady increase in knowledge workers and their knowledge is creating a new generation of haves and have nots.

For most Americans – specifically the two-thirds without a college degree – the positive trends of the last century have stagnated and reversed. An information economy that assumes perpetual increases in levels of education and gigabytes of information as a means to more prosperity and longer lives has seemed to hit its limits. Until we develop a new economy that finds a new way to put us back on a path of widespread, increasing prosperity, those who are missing out on the benefits of this information economy will only grow more bitter, resentful, and willing to blowup up a system that seems to ignore their reality rather than change it.

For a fascinating conversation between Chris Hayes, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, listen to Chris Hayes "Why is This Happening" podcast, the episode from 20 June 2023. They don't talk about the 20th century but they do explore these deaths of despair and how our economy is failing those without a BA.

A piece by Case and Deaton is here:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024777118?fbclid=IwAR1ZwVfadj-KnHs-Gls_c4ma0AHmRmAEzjGY89rmdsGLuFC2ZmP4uUQ8vMo

How a Tragic Gap of 6 Days Turned into 99 More Years of Injustice - the Story of 2 Johnsons, a Civil War and Civil Rights

Sunday, 9 April 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered, ending the Civil War.
Saturday, 15 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln died after being shot the night before.

Thursday, 2 July 1964 - 99 years after the Civil War ended and Lincoln was killed - LBJ signed Civil Rights legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

One of the biggest tragedies of the Civil War is that Lincoln got to win the war but not the peace that followed.

The Republican Abraham Lincoln had run for reelection on a unity ticket, naming Andrew Johnson - a Democrat - as his Vice President. Johnson had been a senator from Tennessee and was the only southern senator not to give up his seat when his state seceded.

When Lincoln's assassination made Johnson vice president, Johnson made a number of concessions to the south, among other things bringing them back into the union without protection for the rights of former slaves. Furious at his betrayal of Lincoln's and the Republican party's goals, the Republican-dominated Congress impeached Johnson. He was acquitted by the Senate by one vote, narrowly escaping removal from office.

The result of Johnson giving southern states what they wanted was that many Blacks throughout the south were betrayed, their right to own property and vote denied and their rights as workers often brutally ignored. For instance, Black orphans or indigent children could be made apprentices, even against their will, to an employer until age 21 for males and 18 for females. Masters (notice this doesn't say employer) had the right to inflict moderate punishment on their apprentices and to recapture runaways. This was not what hundreds of thousands of Americans had died to create.

The sins of the Johnson who was made president by Lincoln's assassination were finally undone by the Johnson who was made president by Kennedy's assassination.

Less than one week separated Lincoln's victory and assassination.
99 years separated the Civil War and Civil Rights. 

Lincoln's assassination was one of this country's greatest tragedies and one huge reason for it is that it added a century to the inhumane treatment of our fellow Americans.

#juneteenth

Americans Have Lost Faith in Crypto

Only 6% of people who've heard about cryptocurrency are very or extremely confident in it. 80% of women say they are not confident in it, as opposed to 71% of men.

[Details here:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/

]

Crypto is an odd post-Great Recession response. Why odd? The 2008 Great Recession was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Between 1933 and 1999, Glass Steagall helped to regulate financial markets while also slowing financial innovation that could so easily disrupt markets. Deregulated financial markets took less than a decade to produce the worst recession since 1929.

(And from this recession we got the most extreme elements of our current politics: the right-wing Tea Party that was anti-government and has morphed into MAGA boys and the left-wing Occupy Wall Street crowd.)

Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 - during this financial crisis - imagined that the problem was not deregulation but instead that deregulation hadn't gone far enough. With a deep distrust of fiat money, Nakamoto claimed that algorithms could create the monetary stability that had eluded Central Banks. He helped to invent bitcoin. And of course in the 15 years since, bitcoin has been more volatile than any currencies since the Confederate dollar, more subject to wild bouts of inflation and deflation than any fiat money.

It seems that Americans have learned that crypto is less - rather than more - trustworthy than the US dollar and are moving away from it. And good thing, too. There are so many legitimate investments we can make - from exciting startups that could transform or create new markets (urban air vehicles and mRNA still seem wonderfully promising) to public investments that could change future GDP growth rates by one-half to one and a half percent a year. (A rate that could accelerate the doubling of GDP by a decade.) Some "investments" actually have a shot at helping to create a new world and some simply divert it. As it turns out, crypto had about as much to do with investing in a new world as does sports betting.

This 2023 Job Market Defies Expectations - But No One Acts Surprised

The 2023 job market is incredible.

With upwards revisions to March and April, this May jobs report adds 432,000 new jobs to the 2023 total. The average for the first 5 months of 2023 is 314,000 jobs created.

How strong is the rate of 314,000 jobs per month? It is 3.6X what it averaged from 2000 through 2019. A year with a monthly average of 314,000 jobs created would fall into the top 10 for all the years since 1939, when records began.

Four variables make job creation at this rate absurd (in a good way).
1. We began 2023 with 3.4% unemployment - the lowest it had been in 54 years.
2. The Fed has been dramatically raising interest rates. 15 months ago, their overnight rates were 0.05%. That rate is now 5.05% - its highest in 16 years.
3. 10,000 baby boomers are hitting retirement age every single day.
4. 2021 and 2022 rank first and second all-time for job creation. 12 million jobs created in 2 years. That’s absurd and would suggest that the rate of job creation might “correct” to a lower rate.

Any one of these four variables would be a perfectly plausible explanation for a slow year of job creation in 2023. And yet the economy is creating jobs at a rate that would make headlines and create buzz during FDR, Reagan or Clinton’s presidencies. (FDR – like Biden - had 2 years with a more rapid rate of job creation than 2023. Reagan and Clinton each had only 1.)

Of course, we will find a way to dismiss this and move on to the next bit of handwringing to replace our fretting about the price of eggs. And the memes will be catchy - so much better than - yawn - data.