Government Executive - Authors - Gwynn Guilford

Trump Appoints a 'Long-time Friend' of Xi Jinping’s to Be the U.S. Ambassador to China

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 15:48:58 -0500

Donald Trump gives China a lot of grief on Twitter and at his rallies. But he also just gave the Middle Kingdom a lot of face.

Earlier today, Trump named Terry Branstad, the Republican governor of Iowa, as the next US ambassador to China. The announcement makes China the first country to which the president-elect has named an ambassador. The move is an indication of the importance the new administration attaches to US-China relations. Or, at least, it would be if it hadn’t come five days after Trump hopped on the phone for anunprecedented chat with the president of Taiwan (over which which the People’s Republic of China claims sovereignty).

Much is being made of Branstad’s claim that president Xi Jinping is a “long-time friend.” Probably too much.

It’s true that, responding to news of the appointment, the Chinese government spokesman called Branstad an “old friend” of China. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the two are tight, says Scott Harold, associate director of Asia Policy at Rand.

“China is often portrayed as a place where relationships get you everything—that everything runs on guanxi (relationships),” he says. “But the Chinese Communist Party is very careful about not letting foreigners influence top Chinese leaders’ decisions…. Other than their having some familiarity with each other, I wouldn’t make too much of it.”

Plus, the two haven’t gotten the details of their bromance straight. Reports citing Branstad say the two first met in 1985, when Xi led an animal-feed delegation to Iowa. They have since spoken in person twice. However, a rigorously reported Wall Street Journal story from Xi’s perspective says the two first met in 1984, when Branstad visited a pig farming-heavy county in Hebei province where Xi served as Communist Party chief (paywall).

What they do have in common, however, is burgeoning agricultural trade between Iowa and China—something that Branstad has been instrumental in encouraging. (In fact, the governor just returned from an eight-day trade mission to China, his seventh.)

But that mutual appreciation puts Branstad at odds with Trump. One of the incoming president’s biggest campaign promises was to slap a 45% tariff on Chinese goods as punishment for currency manipulation. Branstad backs free trade, as well as a generally warmer approach to US-China relations. In fact, he’s openly differed with Trump on both.

“I know that Donald Trump thinks that the United States has not been very smart and not done a very good job in negotiating the trade deals and I’m sure that we can improve on that,” Branstad told IowaWatch in Jul. 2016. “But that should not mean that we reduce trade.”

As with so much about US politics these days, though, the symbolism probably outweighs those contradictions.

“The ‘friend of China’ as US Ambassador scenario is a comforting one for Beijing,” says Elizabeth Economy, Asia studies director for the Council on Foreign Relations. And after a year-plus of Trump’s China-bashing, this theme will be likely welcomed in Beijing.

“[I]n the eyes of the Chinese, this is perhaps the first indication that he has given them that he understands the importance of maintaining a positive overall relationship,” adds Economy.

That relationship may well need to weather far more taxing issues than currency manipulation—for instance, nuclear North Korea, China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, and escalating cyberwarfare, says Rand’s Harold. Let’s hope the bonds of trade and animal feed are made of tougher stuff.

(Image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore)

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Harvard Research Suggests That an Entire Global Generation Has Lost Faith in Democracy

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 15:56:10 -0500

People everywhere are down on democracy. Especially young people. In fact, so rampant is democratic indifference and disengagement among millennials that a shocking share of them are open to trying something new—like, say, government by military coup.

That’s according to research by Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University researcher, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne. The remit of their study, which the Journal of Democracy will publish in January, analyzes historical data on attitudes toward government that spans various generations in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. They find that, across the board, citizens of stable liberal democracies have grown jaded about their government, say Mounk and Foa—and worse.

(Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, “The Signs of Democratic Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy, via the New York Times)

“[T]hey have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy,” they write in a previous article on their research (pdf) published in Jul. 2016, “and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.”

And it’s among millennials that this “crisis of democratic legitimacy” is starkest. Young people today are more into political radicalism and exhibit less support for freedom of speech than previous generations, according to the July study. Consider some of the other data Mounk and Foa report:

Okay with autocracy: Many fewer millennials in both Europe and the US object outright to military coups than their elders.

Rights, schmights: Only around a third of US millennials see civil rights as “absolutely essential” in a democracy, compared with 41% among older Americans. In the European Union, it’s 39% and 45%, respectively.
Election optional: More than a quarter of US millennials dismiss the importance of free elections to democracy. (Though rates are overall lower in Europe, millennials also agree at higher rates than older generations.)

They’re just not that into it: Back in 1990, majorities of both young and older people reported being interested in politics. For millennials, that’s no longer true.

Couldn’t you chalk this up to time-honored tendencies of youth disaffection?

Not really. For instance, in 1995, only 16% of American youngsters—those in their late teens and early 20s—thought democracy was a “bad” political system for their nation. In 2011, nearly a quarter of millennials did. Though the increase among European youth was less marked, it was still significant, say the researchers.

(Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, “The Danger of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy)

It might be that since this particular generation of young people have grown up in highly stable democracies, they take democracy for granted. It would then stand to reason that, as Mounk and Foa found, millennials in the US and Europe are less likely to participate in conventional civic engagement.

But millennials aren’t doing much unconventional political action either. While one in 11 American baby-boomers had demonstrated in a political protest in the previous year, only one in 15 millennials had.

It’s not clear how this squares with real life. Sharp deteriorations in measures of democratic health presaged autocratic shifts in Poland and Venezuela, as the New York Times points out. But those were both much younger democracies than those in the US and Western Europe.

Still, recent events there aren’t exactly heartening. For instance, millennial Americans voted in far greater numbers for Hillary Clinton than her anti-democratic rival, Donald Trump. Then again, Clinton would have won in a landslide if Democratic-leaning millennials had voted. But too many of them simply didn’t.

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The FBI Confirms That Clinton’s Emails Are Totally Fine

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 19:33:20 -0500

The FBI has concluded for the second time in four months that Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of her emails should not be criminally prosecuted. James Comey, the bureau’s embattled director, informed Congress via letter today (Nov. 6) that “based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July,” when it said criminal prosecution was not warranted.

Comey’s letter comes a little more than a week after he hurled a giant curveball into the presidential race, announcing the fresh discovery of emails that “might be pertinent” to Clinton’s case. The emails were found in a separate investigation on a device that belonged to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of senior Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

Mind you, Comey’s re-clearing Clinton of a crime comes after 41 million Americans have already voted. The furor that followed his Oct. 28 announcement likely helped shrivel the robust lead Clinton held over Republican rival Donald Trump after their third and final debate. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver now gives Clinton only a two-in-three chance of winning; a few weeks ago, her chances of winning were closer to 80%.

Even if Clinton wins, it will be impossible to know how deeply the email drama has stained her reputation. More than half of voters wrongly believe Clinton has done something illegal, according to a recent McClatchy-Marist Poll.

It still isn’t clear why the email foofaraw got generated in the first place. Comey’s announcement of the investigation and his public briefing on its results are highly irregular. It’s against FBI policy to comment on ongoing investigations. It’s unusual for the FBI to publicly report a decision not to press criminal charges, and also arguably bizarre to have the FBI director publicly chide a presidential nominee—again, found guilty of no criminal activity—of “extremely careless” handling of classified information, as Comey did in his Jul. 5 press briefing.

Dianne Feinstein statement: DOJ "needs to take a look at its procedures to prevent similar actions that could influence future elections." pic.twitter.com/wLNHwXxxam
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 6, 2016

However questionable the FBI’s handling of Clinton’s bumbling IT policies from four years ago, the polls make its effect on the campaign distressingly clear. It’s also given Trump a chance to whip up conspiracy theories that undermine America’s democratic process.

On the campaign trail in Minnesota, Trump, who had hailed Comey’s eleventh-hour email re-investigation as definitive proof that Clinton is a criminal, cited the most recent determination as evidence of government corruption.

TRUMP in Minneapolis, MN just now: "You have to understand, it's a rigged system, and she's protected."
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 6, 2016

Of course, the FBI is only partially responsible for the email drama. The media has chattered relentlessly about it, even after Comey cleared Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing. Since the beginning of 2016, the nightly news programs of three major networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—devoted a combined 100 minutes to reporting on Clinton’s emails, and only 32 minutes to policy issues, according to a study by Media Matters.

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Trump’s Plans Would Increase America’s Debt By Trillions of Dollars

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 15:48:28 -0400

It turns out Donald Trump the presidential candidate loves debt as much as Trump the real estate developer.

If enacted, Trump’s fiscal policies would pile on $5.3 trillion to the US government debt by 2026, calculates the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in a new report. That’s more than 26 times higher than the amount the bipartisan budget watchdog group estimates that Hillary Clinton’s plans would increase the debt.

Right now, publicly held government debt is just over $14 trillion, equal to a little less than 77% of the US economy. Under Clinton’s plan, the debt-to-GDP ratio would rise to about 86% by 2026, says CFRB. Trump’s vision would result in the government owing the public a whopping 105% of GDP by 2026.

Why should anyone care? Well, when the government has to use huge sums of taxpayer dollars to pay interest, it’s wasting money that could go toward productivity-boosting investments. That will hamper growth. At one-fifteenth of government revenue in 2015, these costs aren’t a huge burden right now. But adding to the debt means adding to those interest payments.

Then again, a basic tenet of Keynesian macroeconomics is that governments should run deficits when the economy is weak, and tighten spending once it’s become strong again. Since the US economy isn’t very strong right now (GDP grew 1.1% in the second quarter), and interest rates are so low, it’s probably as good a time as any for the government to borrow.

That’s provided, however, that that borrowing funds things that make the economy stronger. Clinton’s plan would increase investments in education, health, and child wellbeing—things that should help improve the quality of the US labor force and make it easier for families to work. The plan proposes to offset some of that spending through tax increases on the wealthy and on businesses, as well as through enacting immigration reform. (Although the CFRB doesn’t touch on the subject, making it easier to employ immigrants would also help juice growth).

Trump’s plan is built on the opposite approach, the supply-side logic that cutting taxes on rich people and businesses will reduce the deficit by boosting growth. History has roundly proven that this idea does not work, and Trump’s plan is no exception.

Here’s CFRB’s breakdown of both candidates’ plans:

(Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)

Some of the plans these estimates are based on haven’t been fully fleshed out yet—which could change the calculation considerably. (For instance, taking into account “unspecified revenue” from Clinton’s business tax reform plan would mean that her plan would reduce deficits.)

They also don’t account for the impact of each candidates’ plans on economic growth. This would likely be a femur-sized bone of contention for the Trump camp, given his recent promise to boost average annual GDP growth for the next decade to 3.5%. (At other times, Trump says he’ll boost growth even higher).

The Trump campaign hadn’t responded to request for comment at time of publishing.

(Image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore)

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The Correct Criticism of Obama’s Vacation Habits is That He Should Take More, Not Less

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 16:34:51 -0400

What’s more befitting of the American president—being a chronic workaholic, or taking a couple weeks off to hit the links with Larry David and read The Girl on the Train?

That’s the contrast Donald Trump drew when criticizing president Barack Obama for declining to disrupt his vacation to visit flood-ravaged Louisiana. Trump’s attack came as he was touring the disaster areas. He and critical media outlets declined to note that Louisiana’s governor asked Obama to stay away in order to not to divert law enforcement resources. Trump ultimately prevailed; Obama is visiting Baton Rouge today.

We should all be glad he waited until his vacation was over, though.

Abstaining from vacation is a pretty excellent way to be a worse president. Research shows that working too much feeds stress and fatigue, which takes a toll on physical health. Mental health is even more of a concern, though. We have a finite amount of cognitive bandwidth. Overtaxing it makes us think less clearly—which is why taking lengthy vacation is crucial to boosting job performance. Those who refuse taking time off from work are more prone to making mistakes and find it harder to keep their cool under pressure.

This is a memo clearly didn’t make it to Trump Tower. Trump, you see, doesn’t take vacations, as his spokeswoman recently reiterated.

"Don't take vacations. What's the point? If you're not enjoying your work, you're in the wrong job." -- Think Like A Billionaire
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2012

Vacationgate boils down to a problem that Trump perfectly embodies: America’s tortured relationship with work. Despite the research on the importance of vacations, more than two-fifths didn’t take any vacation in 2014, according to CBS News. That’s only in part because the US is the only advanced economy that doesn’t require paid vacations (nearly a quarter of its workers don’t get paid vacations or holidays). Of those who do take time off, nearly a third spend their vacation glued to their mobile device.

That said, Obama isn’t exactly the paragon of work-life balance either. Obama has taken far less vacation than his predecessor, George W. Bush, says Matthew Dickinson, political science professor at Middlebury College, in a blog post about presidential vacation habits. Plus, no president truly gets to truly unwind; he still receives daily intelligence and security briefings.

Despite inevitable interruptions, one of the better exemplars of presidential unplugging is Harry Truman, who headed to Key West to de-stress. As Dickinson recounts, Truman spent his days lounging on the beach while his staff played volleyball in between meetings. At night he played small-stakes poker. Not a bad way to unwind from high-stakes politics.

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The Battle Between Clinton and Trump is a Modern Morality Play

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:04:36 -0400

It’s a cliche of US elections that candidates appeal to more extreme flanks of their bases to win their parties’ primaries and then hastily sand down the edges of their positions to please the center’s undecided voters. Yet, like so much else in 2016, the received wisdom has been flung out the window.

Pundits were surprised by the progressive, populist-tinged vim of Hillary Clinton’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday. Just as many—Quartz included—were astonished by Donald Trump’s refusal to moderate his authoritarian tone at the Republican convention address a week earlier. It was perhaps their single-biggest chance of the election to make their messages expansive enough to win over undecided moderates. Neither seemed to care.

Hunkered down in their ideological corners, Clinton and Trump could have been talking about two wholly different countries.

And in a way, they were. Their convention themes described visions of the American moral order that light up the brains of different types of voters, appealing to discrete layers of the US electorate. Both candidates went for intensity over breadth. However, of the two, Trump exhibited a much deeper and more strategic understanding of human nature, as he had throughout the primaries.

A moral political order

Jonathan Haidt, a moral political psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, offers important insights into the mechanisms at play here. In his book, Righteous Mind, Haidt shows how our responses to political debate are almost pure intuition; quick-firing moral reflexes that our brains overlay with rationales after the fact.

The other vital insight involves what Haidt describes as six types of intuitions—or, as he calls them, moral foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/tyranny, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. These combine to form the unconscious attitudes that animate each of us, to form our sense of morality.

This doesn’t tend to happen in a vacuum; different swaths of American society construct morality with radically different proportions of these. Urban liberal communities that thrive on commerce tend to respond strongly to only the first two of these, care/harm and fairness/cheating (and, to some extent, liberts/tyranny). Democratic voters, therefore, generally prioritize openness and tolerance and tend to be suspicious of authority. Conservative morality, which stems more from agrarian roots, typically engages all of the moral foundations, but with a heavy emphasis on the latter three of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.

The Democratic national convention, replete with themes like “A lifetime of fighting for women and families” and “Stronger together,” clearly played heavily to the classic liberal moral foundations.

In her speech, Clinton absorbed the economic justice agenda of her primaries competitor, Bernie Sanders, as though he were less a vanquished rival than a vanishing twin. She championed equality—protecting people’s “rights” got 12 specific mentions—pushing down hard on the “fairness” moral foundation.

“I believe that our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should,” she said. “It’s wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other.”

Given her background working with children and the disadvantaged, it probably won’t surprise anyone that Clinton also played to the other biggie of liberal morality, caring for the suffering, oppressed, and downtrodden. What was more remarkable was Clinton’s restraint in delving into policy specifics, focusing instead on whipping up traditional liberal moral righteousness. That said, her convention performance hinted that she understands the need to broaden her moral message. She showed a deference to authority in praising the military, the president and vice president, and police officers. (Convention speakers like Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim US solider, bolstered this theme even more.)

Banking on outrage

Trump is a little less stereotypically conservative than Clinton is liberal. Throughout the primaries, Donald Trump eschewed the richer palette of morality typical of conservatives. His supporters respond strongly to loyalty and authority (and, to some degree, sanctity).

In his conception of moral order, America is diseased by chaos, violence and economic torpor. Clinton and, to a lesser extent, president Barack Obama are responsible. They have shredded the rule of law, sold out workers to big business, China and Mexico, and created ISIL—betraying faithful, law-abiding American people, in short.

Though pundits largely expected Trump to use the convention to broaden his appeal to voters, the event was instead a sweeping tableau of America’s descent into immorality. Each night was themed around Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America great again” (subbing in “safe,” “work,” “first,” and “one” for “great”). Throughout the convention, Trump proxies railed against Clinton’s supposed betrayal of America in her handling of the Benghazi embassy attack, while the tragic deaths of people killed by unauthorized immigrants was cited to illustrate the mortal threats citizens now face. Another pet theme was how the undermining of police by subversive groups (the implication, usually, being Black Lives Matter activists) is letting crime and chaos flourish. Meanwhile, political correctness forbids reasonable people from criticizing the ethnic and religious groups who are killing Americans. Tolerance has made America unsafe, unpatriotic, and (obviously) un-great.

In his convention speech, Trump cranked up the authoritarianism and stoked anxiety about being betrayed and abandoned by liberals.

“I am the Law and Order candidate,” said Trump (he capitalized it in his written speech (pdf)). Clinton’s legacy, he said, is “death, destruction, terrorism and weakness.”

Thanks to his understanding of the US governmental system that is “rigged against our citizens,” he “alone can fix it,” Trump said. He mentioned “law” or “lawlessness” 18 times; while “terror/terrorism” got 14 mentions, “fail” got nine. Trump said “taxes”—a standard Republican hobbyhorse—only six times.

Trump’s choice to stay the course he set during the primaries makes sense. Had he diluted his rhetoric to appeal to a broader base, he would have risked losing the moral outrage that drives his supporters—the people who wear “Hillary for prison shirts” and enjoy chanting “lock her up!”

As many have observed, the facts backing up Trump’s narratives are pretty thin on the ground. However, to people whose sense of morality is grounded heavily in respect for authority and loyalty to a certain in-group, Trump’s diagnosis makes intuitive sense. Anyone baffled that Trump’s supporters ignore the spuriousness of his arguments are very likely people whose moral configurations don’t incline them to favor authority and loyalty much in the first place.

This is probably part of why the media—which, lets be honest, is staffed disproportionately by liberals—keeps being surprised by Trump’s electoral triumphs or is prone to dismissing Trump’s rhetoric as fear-mongering (Quartz included).

It is that, but it’s more than that too. What looks to liberals like scare tactics are also affirmations of a construction of morality that is hugely important to many tens of millions of Americans. There might be more factually coherent ways of appealing to that morality, but right now, Trump’s the only show in town.

Who wins?

Trump obviously has a deep-seated knack for playing to people’s moral intuition and plans to exploit this skill all the way to the White House. The question remains: does Clinton?

Haidt sees several paths she and the Democrats could take. In an interview with Thomas Edsall, Haidt said that, for one, they should appeal to people’s moral sense of fairness by repeatedly characterizing him as a cheater and a con man. While Clinton’s speech hit this theme for a few moments, Haidt recommended a must more aggressive approach—for instance, a “long parade” of “former customers and partners” who were shafted by Trump. Another tactic would be to contrast Trump’s crassness with the sacredness Americans attach to their civic symbols, such as the Constitution and the founding fathers. While the section of Clinton’s speech describing the nation’s founding seems obliquely to condemn Trump, the critique—if it is one—is far too subtle. Finally, Haidt proposes focusing on how Trump’s enthusiasm for Putin brings shame on the country. Again, Clinton didn’t take this on directly.

If Haidt is right, Clinton missed a valuable prime-time opportunity to mount a moral—and not, as Democrats prefer to do, factual—assault on Trump. Still, her speech’s pinnacle was when she challenged his authority:

“Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” said Clinton, going on to imply he was a “little man” motivated by fear and pride.

Maybe her attack on Trump’s moral character and her emphasis on progressive values, as opposed to dry policies, signal Clinton’s grasp of the moral psychology underlying the challenge she faces. Then again, in the art of masterminding human nature, Trump already has a decades-long head start.

(Image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore)

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Here's What a Trump Presidency Would Actually Look Like

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 15:39:50 -0500

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: Donald J. Trump doesn’t just have fans, he has voters—and there are a lot of them. In the wake of his commanding victory in the New Hampshire primary, it’s time to take Trump a little more seriously than when he was just the antihero of a reality TV show (the GOP presidential race, that is, not “The Apprentice”).

So now a new question: What would it really look like with Trump at America’s helm?

In a word, chaos. In two, expensive chaos. That probably won’t surprise many Trump-haters out there. But here’s the surprise: While most of his proposals are sheer lunacy, some of his economic proposals are grounded in a surprisingly well-developed worldview—one that could arguably help American workers, though not without enormous disruption.

Deporting 11 million people isn’t easy

Maximum chaos first, though, which brings us to the Trump immigration plan. His most ambitious headline policy—deporting 11 million undocumented US residents within two years—faces some big practical, political, fiscal, and moral hurdles. It would be wildly expensive, for one.

“There’s no conceivable way in which it’s possible to immediately deport 11 million people,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has previously advised Trump’s rival, Jeb Bush. “About the maximum you could deport is 400,000 a year. So you’re talking about a massive increase in budget and manpower to do this over some fairly quick period of time, like three years.”

Trump says he will triple the number of immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) employees by eliminating a tax credit that helps temporary resident families—most of which are poor and Latino—financially support their children. Republican lawmakers have failed time and again to turn that proposal into law.

Even finding those 11 million people is trickier than it might sound—at least if Trump wants to keep constitutional democracy intact, says Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) at New York University. People who are deported are generally caught in one of two ways: immediately after crossing the border or after coming into contact with local law enforcement. But how would Trump find the rest?

“Even if you decide to send troops to neighborhoods, you’d never know where the undocumented are living. You would have to go to every single house and workplace and ask everyone for documentation,” says Chishti. “If you ask people [whether they’re undocumented] only based on perception, it’s a direct constitutional violation because you’re doing it on the basis of race.” Plus, each person still has the right to be heard in a US immigration court—and the current case backlog is already four to five years. (Trump dismisses this concern because they’re here illegally.)

Tearing apart families

Trump’s plan would also fray the social fabric of communities everywhere. Many of these 11 million are already married to legal residents; under US law, their status makes them ineligible for a spousal green card (this is one reason why the “path to citizenship” that’s so hotly debated among Republican candidates is so important).

Under current law, those deported can’t return for 10 years. This means deporting America’s undocumented population would therefore irrevocably break up families. Worse, some 5.1 million children live in households in which at least one parent is undocumented—and 4 million of those children are US-born, says Chishti. “So the decision these families would have to make is whether the children would live here without their parents,” he says. For his part, Trump says he wants to keep families together, “but they have to go.” He also plans to eliminate birthright citizenship. However, that wouldn’t change the existing legal status of those 4 million children. And while he plans to expedite the process of allowing deportees to return, he doesn’t say how.

A blow to the US economy

Then there’s the economic impact of mass deportations.

“Of the 11 million, we know for sure that between 7 million and 7.5 million are working. These are people working on various sides of our economy—from construction, to hospitality to elder care to childcare to restaurants—you name it. It’s across all of our occupations, especially in the low-wage sector,” says Chishti, adding that Trump must have many thousands working in his own hotels. “We don’t have a ready supply of US workers to take those jobs. So you would have a huge dent in the labor market.”

Trump says that the “really good and outstanding” workers can come back in through legal channels. But again, unless he changes the law, they’ll first have to wait 10 years before they can apply to legally reenter the US.

That will also hit US consumption. After all, America wouldn’t merely be shedding 3.5 percent its consumers; millions of other families who remain will lose their breadwinners. Seventy percent of the US GDP comes from consumer spending.

A new chapter in religious discrimination

Another of Trump’s policies, the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US,” as his press release puts it, is similarly thorny. It’s unclear how the government would determine an applicant’s religion. “To the best of my knowledge, almost no passport says you’re Muslim,” says MPI’s Chishti. “So how would you do it? Are you going to ask people? Are you then going to make decisions based on self-definition or your definition?”

However Trump plans to achieve this, it would be unprecedented, says CFR’s Alden. Though the US has barred immigration on the basis of national origin—e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act—it has never done so based strictly on religious grounds.

“That would be an outrageous violation of American history, tradition, and principles,” Alden says.

The great wall from China

Then we have Trump’s plan to build a wall that extends the 2,000 or so miles (3,220 kilometers) of border that the US shares with Mexico. Logistical and ecological problems abound. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is the cost of building it, which would range from $15 billion to $25 billion, according to MPI estimates, plus the cost of maintenance and patrols.

Trump says that Mexico will pay for the wall through a combination of customs duties, impounded remittances of illegal worker wages and higher fees on visas for Mexican CEOs, diplomats, NAFTA workers. Even assuming the legality of those measures, however, it’s not clear that those measures will cover the expense.

This plan isn’t sitting too well with Mexican leaders. “We are not going to pay any single cent for such a stupid wall!” said former Mexican president Felipe Calderon earlier this week. “And it’s going to be completely useless.”

Ironically, this plan could benefit one of Trump’s other big bugbears, China—that’s where most of steel that makes up the existing US-Mexico border fence is produced, according to Alden. Though Trump would likely argue that the wall should be made with US steel, that would probably be tough to do; American steel manufacturers have long since shifted to high-end steel products. However, if the US buys Chinese steel, that could widen the US’s already gaping trade deficit with China.

“Winning” against Beijing

This brings us to perhaps the biggest pillar of Trump’s vision: taking jobs back from the People’s Republic. Many of his supporters, analysts say, are drawn from the white, middle-class Americans who have lost their low-skilled factory employment as those jobs have rapidly moved to low-cost labor markets like China’s over the last few decades.

Though his rhetoric might sound like a China-bashing ploy to rile up his base, Trump’s onto something. China’s currency manipulation and state subsidies have helped make its exports cheaper than its competitors, driving American manufacturers out of business or forcing them offshore. Steel, as it happens, is a good example of a sector that’s benefited from state largesse, allowing Chinese steelmakers to widen their share of the global market.

Of course, many other countries embrace similar trade policies. But thanks to its size, China hurts American workers the most. Between 2001 and 2013, the US’s goods trade deficit with China displaced some 3.2 million jobs, three quarters of which were in manufacturing—according to recent research by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

(Screenshot of DonaldJTrump.com)

It’s notable that instead of simply titling his position something general, like “fair trade,” he has labeled it “Reforming the US-China trade relationship to make America great again.”

But what would “winning” against China actually mean?

Trump laid out his boldest proposal—a 45% tariff on Chinese imports—in an interview with the New York Times that he later tried to deny.

Trump’s Chinese import tariff probably isn’t legal under the World Trade Organization. However, he could still impose it for a while, says CFR’s Alden. “There are ways under trade rules where [a president] can declare an emergency of one sort or another… without the approval of Congress,” he says. “It would certainly be challenged in the WTO, but the WTO process is pretty slow.”

Aside from his tariff idea, Trump also wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade pacts that disadvantage US workers, as well as penalize countries that deliberately weaken their own currencies.

Another Great Depression in the making?

Trump’s tariff might stop China from winning—but in the short term, it would throw the global economy and financial markets into a tailspin, says Robert Scott, economist at EPI.

For one thing, it could cause a big contraction in the US economy. The US no longer makes most of the stuff it buys from China, and Apple’s Steve Jobs famously concluded that those jobs are never coming back—not just because of cost, but because China now has the world’s most sophisticated manufacturing infrastructure.

Even assuming Trump finds some way to change that dynamic, it would take a long time to build those US factories and retrain workers. In the meantime, consumers would have to swallow much higher costs on the goods they buy from China, leaving them with less money to spend on everything else.

“For instance, we don’t make iPhones in the US,” says Scott. “The price of iPhones will increase from $600 to maybe $900 in a way that might suck more money out of the economy as it reduces spending power.”

It’s not just the US that would suffer. Because Americans buy goods from all over, the US is the main engine of global growth. A sudden spate of US penny-pinching could plunge the world economy into a downturn, or worse. And of course, the sudden shrinking of American demand would hurt China’s economy too, prompting mass layoffs as foreign companies pulled out and domestic firms shuttered factories—likely forcing that “hard landing” that its leaders have been so keen to avoid.

The end result could include a stock market crash as investors bail on Apple, Walmart, and other companies that sell China-made goods in the US. Stock prices of companies that depend on Chinese consumption would nosedive too.

China could retaliate with its own tariffs on US goods. However, if it did so, it would merely be shooting itself in the foot, says Scott. Most of what China imports from the US goes into making goods that it then ships back to America—things like scrap paper and steel, basic chemicals, raw plastic, and microchips. That means tariffs on US imports would up increasing the costs paid by its own manufacturers.

What Trump gets (sort of) right

This all sounds pretty chaotic. However, after the tumult subsided, Trump’s Chinese import tariff would benefit the US economy, says EPI’s Scott, emphasizing that he’s not endorsing Trump, just giving a dispassionate economic analysis of his policies.

“In the long run, if we could substantially reduce the trade deficit with China we would create millions of jobs in the US, and that would be very good for our economy,” he says. “It would reduce the federal budget deficit and stimulate the economy at no cost to the federal government other than the minor cost of sending lawyers to the WTO.”

Many economists and lawmakers blanch at this pro-tariff approach, labeling it either protectionism or dangerous geopolitical brinkmanship. But this free market consensus among the US political establishment is precisely what Trump and his Democratic counterpart Bernie Sanders have had so much success in opposing. Their worry is that pro-free trade policies championed by every president since Ronald Reagan have opened up American markets without extracting equal concessions from trade partners. That lets other countries subsidize their own exports, putting Americans out of jobs.

Though Trump’s philosophy usually sounds wantonly pro-America, it’s hard to argue with the fact that a more balanced US economy would help force other countries to boost their own consumption too. Over time, that would lessen the now rampant risk of world-rattling banking crises and sovereign debt defaults. This would also shift wealth to middle-class consumers everywhere, creating new locomotives of global growth.

The problem with Trump’s vision is, it’s not clear when the benefits would smooth out the chaos caused. “As Keynes said, ‘In the long run, we are all dead,'” says Scott. “So we have to hope that we would still be around to enjoy the benefits of what Trump is proposing to do.”

(Top image via Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com )

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Trump and Sanders Are Doing Well Because They Tap Into the Same Anxious Feelings

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 11:00:00 -0500

Last summer, as America fawned over Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the media dismissed them as unelectable—reasonable-seeming bets given Sanders’s socialism and Trump’s chronic offense-giving. But after both took second place in the Iowa caucuses, Sanders and Trump are now on track to win the New Hampshire primaries for their respective parties (or so say the polls). The men have something else in common too: outrage at trade policies that have hurt America’s middle class.

Of course, populist upstarts like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader have flared up in past elections—but they ran as third-party candidates. Sanders and Trump are seriously challenging their parties’ mainstream contenders. It’s an imperfect measure, but if you combine their vote shares in the Iowa caucuses and in the average of the New Hampshire polls, the Sanders-Trump populist bloc beats out the aggregate share of establishment candidates (namely, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush) and conservaties (Ted Cruz and Ben Carson).

It’s probably no coincidence that both campaigns are resonating with voters in a way they haven’t in the recent past. Over the course of the last decade or so, changes in the US economy have crept from hurting primarily working-class households to undermining middle-class households too, says John Russo, visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University.

The share of the US families occupying America’s middle class (meaning, three-person households earning $42,000-126,000, in 2014 dollars) has withered rapidly, according Pew Research Center. In absolute terms, more people have slid into society’s poorest class than have graduated to the upper-class tier.

There’s now a “critical mass” of households suffering economic insecurity that now includes both income groups, Russo told Quartz.

“The way it’s talked about [by both candidates] is not terribly dissimilar. Sanders has a lot to say about trade; you hear the same thing coming from Trump,” he says. “There’s a similarity in terms of two types of populism that are out there now and I think it stems from the politics of resentment and the decline in the American dream.”

Russo isn’t the only one to notice that shared emphasis on “fair trade.” A few days ago, Trump told CNN that he and Sanders “very much agree” on trade. Both men argue that the US’s knee-jerk promotion of free trade and corporate investment overseas has shifted decently paying jobs abroad.

And those are hardly the only eerie commonalities. Both want to offeruniversal healthcare, expand social security, and increase infrastructure investment. They reject receiving corporate campaign donations and openly scorn the media.

Of course, there are also gaping differences in how Trump and Sanders address growing middle-class resentment. For example, Trump’s bête noire is immigrants who are (supposedly) taking American jobs. Sanders, meanwhile, whips up outrage at the banks for squandering wealth and at the rich for not paying enough taxes. But the fieriness of rhetoric? Plenty similar.

(Image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore)

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Men Are Freezing Women Coworkers Out of the Workplace – Literally

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 07:00:00 -0400

It may be the dead of summer in the northern hemisphere right now, but the must-have clothing item for white collar women isn’t a breezy blouse and matching culottes. It’s a desk blanket. Female office workers around the world brace for hot weather by bundling up—even as their male colleagues type away in shirtsleeves.

There’s a simple reason: Office temperatures are designed for men.

A new study confirms that women’s body temperatures are much lower than the standard used to set air-conditioning levels, making women much more prone to feeling uncomfortably cold. The study was published online in Nature Climate Change (paywall).

Though the new research is based on a small sample size of 16 women, it replicates previous findings. One study found that the standard metabolic rate used to set office temperatures is as much as 35% higherthan the average female metabolic rate.

Others have shown that women feel comfortable with room temperatures of around 77°F, compared with men’s preference for less than 72°F. For comparison, the US government recommends office temperatures be between 69 °F and 73°F (20.5°C to 22.8°C).

The discrepancy dates back to the 1960s and ’70s, when scientists and regulators set workplace indoor climate standards based on the metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man weighing 70 kilograms (154 pounds). Women, however, tend to have lower metabolic rates. That means the steady blast of Arctic air conditioning that keeps the average guy comfortable is likely to send women swaddling themselves in cardigans and thermal socks.

Ending the AC double standard would also have other benefits. Homes and offices generate as much as 30% of total carbon dioxide emissions, say the authors of the new study, Boris Kingma and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Adjusting cooling levels to account for women’s comfort could dramatically slash energy consumption. (It should be noted that the study was funded by advocates for renewable energy.)

Thawing out women office workers, in other words, might keep the planet from warming quite so quickly.

(Image via Anna Tutak/Shutterstock.com)

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35,000 Walruses Have Mobbed the Alaskan Coast—Because There’s No Sea Ice Left to Rest On

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 17:15:01 -0400

It’s exhausting, being a walrus. Seals can swim indefinitely. Not walruses. After a day cruising Arctic water for food, they like to plant their tusks onto an ice floe, haul their blubbery selves up, and have a snooze. But it’s been hard to find a comfy chunk of sea ice this summer. So walruses are opting for the next best thing: Alaska .

Pacific walrus looking for places to rest in the absence of sea ice are coming to the shore in records numbers this year, NOAA found by shooting aerial photography of Alaska. - NOAA/AP

An estimated 35,000 have overrun the coast north of Point Lay, in northwest Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Walruses in the Bering Sea use ice floes as floating home bases between dives to the sea bottom, where they snack on clams and other mollusks. In the winter, that’s no problem. And until recently, it wasn’t an issue in summer, either. Normally, female walruses and their young follow the sea ice north into the relatively shallow Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait, where diving to the bottom is easy. But as summer temperatures rise, the Arctic sea ice has shrunk , receding further and further north, and pulling the ice mass into swaths of the Arctic Ocean as many as two miles deep.

Since walruses can’t hunt easily in those waters, they have to find a new home base for summer foraging, scientists suspect—and that’s why the animals are heading to Alaska. This isn’t the first time walruses have been found summering there; they’ve also shown up in large numbers in 2007, 2009, and 2011, when some 30,000 of them camped out on a 1-kilometer stretch of Point Lay.

As it happens, the chunk of sea ice that caps the Arctic was, this year, the sixth-smallest on record .

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There’s a Huge Hidden Downside to Standing Desks That No One Told Me About

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 10:00:00 -0400

It wasn’t fear of cancer, heart attacks, diabetes or even early death that did it. The reason I switched to a standing desk was, simply, to find a reprieve from pain. Since I graduated from college, back pain and its cruel confederates—neck, shoulder, and hip pain—have been unshakable facts of life. I’m not talking about the odd lumbar throbbing after a late night at the office; low-grade agony was pretty much a given, flaring into something more blinding a few times a month. Workday, weekend, vacation—it didn’t really matter, nor did the number of treadmill miles or chaturangas I’d banked that month.

Then in May, I read about how a standing desk helped allay a blogger’s chronic back woe. I was sold. I set my iMac on top of a small table on my home desk and put in a request for a standing desk at work. Vindication was almost instant. Within a week, my back pain started receding; a month on, and I’d almost forgotten about it. Aside from a weird hip glitch in August, the back pain is still mostly gone.

But in its place came something new. Fetching a dropped pen one day, I noticed bulbs of pinkish flesh ballooning out over my shoes, which, when removed, revealed swelling wider in girth than my feet and lower legs. Cankles , in other words.

For those who don’t know, this portmanteau of “calf” and “ankle” is a slur for shaming women out of wearing capri pants and into surgery if their ankles are any heftier than a ballerina’s. It’s a nasty term. But as a description of my new standing-desk malady, “cankles” was irresistibly apt. And it turned out I needed a casual, efficient term to field the questions that followed after propping my feet on a chair at after-work drinks, or to explain that, no, I didn’t need crutches for those sprains.

Going into this whole standing desk thing, I knew to expect foot pain. That’s why I splurged on squishy pads called “anti-fatigue mats.” Grotesquely distended ankles, though—nobody had mentioned that. I started wearing two sets of insoles while standing on two anti-fatigue mats. But by late afternoon each workday, there were my cankles, peeking out from my pants-cuffs.

A bit of googling, however, clarified that I’m not the only standing-desk convert to suffer sudden-onset cankles. And the medical explanation is really pretty obvious. Unsurprisingly, it’s a very common affliction among nurses, waitresses, and anyone else who spends the whole day on their feet. “Blood pooling while standing is common if the legs aren’t periodically moving,” Dr. Todd Manini of the University of Florida told me, though he noted that neither the positive nor negative effects of standing desk use have been well researched.

They’re now a lot less swollen, thanks to a regimen that includes marching in place and leaning on stools. What keeps nagging me, though, is why I had never heard of this problem—and what else people don’t tell you about the standing-at-work craze.

I have a few ideas:

1. Switching from sitting all day to standing all day is a radical physical transition.

The media barrage about sitting’s lethalness makes it easy to assume that the sooner you ditch a chair, the healthier you’ll become. Not true.

The shift is a big enough deal that, when a law clerk friend got a standing desk, someone from her HR department coached her through her transition. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. As Chris Blattman, a Columbia University professor whose blog post on standing desks inspired my conversion, observes, you spend most of the 24 hours in a day either at your desk or on your bed.

That’s a lot of time. I’d been propping myself against a few pieces of furniture in the exact same way for more than a decade. Yet I only spent about two weeks standing in the morning—at home—and sitting in the afternoon before I switched over completely. Suddenly standing most of the day was perhaps the biggest shakeup of that routine since I started working on a computer every day. In my rush to abandon sitting, that hadn’t occur to me, though—nor had the fact that when I gave my body so little time to adjust, things were liable to swell.

2. Many people at “standing desks” are actually using “sit-stand desks”—meaning they’re still spending plenty of time seated.

In an unscientific survey of friends, colleagues, colleagues’ friends, and online reviews, there was really only one consistent finding: almost everyone who’s talking about their “standing desk” is actually using what’s called a “sit-stand desk” (or, less often but more confusingly, a “stand-up desk”). And once I knew to look for it, I realized that almost every article with “standing desk” in the headline was actually talking about sit-stand desks.

The sit-stand distinction gets drowned out by all the pro-standing, anti-sitting mania. But it’s still a critical one.

These desks allow you to adjust the height of your computer, either electronically or manually. This feature is appealing because many people seem to like doing email or talking on the phone while standing, but struggle to write or do more focused tasks unless they’re sitting.

Of course, these preferences vary by person, occupation, and day, making it hard to generalize how much time the average sit-stand desk user is spending in a chair. But if one of the leading studies of sit-stand desk habits is representative, people using sit-stand desks spend two hours a day, on average, standing in lieu of sitting. Not that much, in other words.

If these happy sit-standers were, like me, spending around 12 hours rooted in front of their computers, disrupted only by snacking and bathroom breaks, maybe more people would know about the cankle problem.

3. Certain workplace barriers make sit-stand desks way more common.

Standing desk models like the one I have at work (see photo) are a heck of a lot cheaper than sit-stand desks (usually a couple hundred bucks versus $1,000 to $4,000 for a sit-stand desk ). So why are proper standing desk users in the minority?

When workplaces like Google, Facebook , Boeing, Intel, Apple , or GlaxoSmithKline get a critical mass of requests, it makes sense to do an office-wide overhaul. They’ve got deep pockets and, in addition to slashing the bureaucracy of managing different desk requests, they’re probably ordering in enough bulk to command a big discount. Plus, if you’re going to pay for moving fees, you might as well invest in top-of-the-line product.

But it’s harder to request a $3,000 desk when everyone else in your office is content with sitting. Not only does it mean asking for an expensive perk, it’s also likely means disrupting the whole office infrastructure. And for HR, there’s also the precedent to consider. So great is the standing-desk mystique, once one person gets a desk, lots of other employees either want one too—which can get expensive fast—or resent the person who got the special treatment (the Wall Street Journal calls this “ standing desk envy “).

That’s less of a barrier if you’re high enough up in the company to justify a big expense budget and have your own office. I suspect that most people with the office clout to request a fancy new desk in the first place are able to justify the purchase of a sit-stand desk.

4. Many of the people singing the praises of standing desks are men—who can get away with comfy shoes at work more easily than women.

Men’s dress shoes aren’t known for being comfortable. But compared with women’s, at least men’s tend to be flatter and, often, cushier. This means that for women working in all but the most casual offices, looking professional means strolling through the workday on rigid, unforgiving soles —a recipe for cankle-causing blood-pooling. Unsurprisingly, shoe strategy came up quickly in nearly all of the conversations I had with female standing-desk converts. Those with standing-only desks have invested in office Crocs or other comfy footwear to don at their standing desks on days when it’s appropriate; the sit-stand crew said they avoided standing on days where they had to look spiffy. Perhaps those strategies are enough to promote blood flow. Anecdotally, the biggest take-up of standing desks is in Silicon Valley , where less than a quarter the workers are women.

5. I assumed the general zeal for “standing desks” meant it was okay to stand all day. I was wrong.

“Your experience is not too surprising,” said Dr. Hidde van der Ploeg, an expert on occupational health at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, when I asked him about my cankles. Though sitting too much is harmful, long periods of standing are not particularly healthy either. “[S]tanding all day is not the solution,” said van der Ploeg, “but finding a comfortable balance between sitting, standing and moving around.”

This was news to me. I’d assumed that all the people who love their standing desks spent most of their time actually, you know, standing. And they’re not. It might be better, on balance, to stand instead rather than sit all day (or it might not). But if you sit like a statue, it turns out, you’re going to stand like one too—creating a host of new health problems.

Dr. van der Ploeg’s assessment was also hard for a borderline workaholic to hear. I could blame my standing-related pain on not having a sit-stand desk (the sit-stand models colleagues have gotten aren’t sturdy enough to support an iMac). Or I could request a pricier model and see what happens. But the truth is I have cankles for the same reason I had back problems: I work too many hours.

To sit or stand?

My jerry-built home standing desk.Quartz

The hunch that the so-called standing desk craze is really a sit-stand desk craze for Hush Puppie-wearers with superior work-life balance is a little discouraging. But cankles or none, I’m still resisting the chair. Here’s why:

I find standing makes me tackle tasks more deliberately, slicing up work into “armchair breaks” (reading, writing outlines) and really only rooting myself in front of my desk when I need to write and handle email (which is still most of my time, alas).
Somehow, standing has made me way more aware of my posture than ever before, even when sitting.
I’m more focused, largely because I’m less stymied by the urge to multitask or goof around on the internet.
I also find myself leaving the office earlier. My standing desk is just awkward enough that I never want to stand around killing time. Instead of noodling around with an idea for endless hours, I now find myself identifying the endpoint of tasks, approaching work the same way I might go to the ATM, or give a speech.

Even when the cankles made it hard to put shoes on, I never considered going back to sitting. Marveling at their bloat, the most that ever occurred to me was that if they looked that gross, it was probably time to go home. And that’s something that in 15 years of stabbing, throbbing, and assorted excruciation that came with sitting, had never crossed my mind.

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The Economic Case For Paternity Leave

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:00:00 -0400

Suddenly last year, maternity leave got a makeover, courtesy of a most improbable source: Shinzo Abe.

Japan’s prime minister is synonymous with machismo-spiked nationalism (he famously denied that women forced into sexual servitude by Japanese soldiers in World War II were “coerced”). But when he unveiled his sweeping economic revival plan, it included longer leave for mothers. And this wasn’t the usual pastel-hued sop to women voters; the way Abe framed it, longer maternity leave was a shot in the arm of Japan’s moribund economy.

Though uncharacteristic, his reasoning made a certain sense.

Nearly two decades ago, Japan started running out of workers, dragging on economic growth. Making things worse is the fact that seven-tenths of Japanese women drop out of the workforce after having their first child. Getting them back to work could boost Japan’s GDP by as much as 15% (paywall), says Abe. And the way to do that was to make maternity leave longer.

The secret to keeping mothers in the workforce lies not in giving them more time off, but in getting more fathers to stay at home instead.

Japan is hardly the only country that would benefit from keeping more mothers in the labor force. If American women worked at the same rates men did, US GDP could grow 9% , say economists; France’s would pop by more than 11%; and Italy’s would see a whopping 23% boost, according to OECD calculations. The average across the OECD would total 12% .

There’s only one problem with Abe’s plan: It’s targeting the wrong people. More maternity leave might sound like a great idea, but as long as mothers are the only parents taking leave, longer stints at home actually worsens job discrimination against them and makes them less likely to pursue a career.

Rather, as the experiences of Sweden, Iceland, and a handful of other countries show, the secret to keeping mothers in the workforce lies not in giving them more time off, but in getting more fathers to stay at home instead. And that, it turns out, depends to a large extent on getting rid of the pay gap that exists between men and women almost everywhere.

Why “womenomics” works

There are lots of good arguments for adding more women to the workforce.

An economy grows when it adds more people to make things, or when the workers it has make things faster. Since upping productivity—as the latter option is called—is notoriously tricky, when an economy is stagnating it’s generally a good idea to scare up some new workers. Importing immigrants is one choice (that’s what the US favors). The other is simply getting more of your working-age population into jobs. And in most developed countries, the biggest base of unemployed workers is women.

The benefits of upping the share of women working come in fits and starts. At first, it tends to lower productivity, partly because some of this additional female labor is usually part-time, and partly because new people need training.

Over time, however, influxes of women make a workforce not just bigger but also more productive. Firms in the top quartile for female senior managers earn 56% more than companies with none, according to McKinsey & Company. This may be because management teams with an equal gender balance tend to innovate more, make more informed decisions, and take fewer big risks. The share prices of companies with one or more women on the board outperform those with none, Credit Suisse research shows (pdf, p.12). Although that’s not a causal relationship, Credit Suisse cites research suggesting that greater gender diversity in leadership improves communication and reduces corrosive competition among senior managers.
Women are “the ultimate agents of aggregate demand.”

There are other benefits to the economy too. Accounting for seven-tenths of global consumer spending , women are “the ultimate agents of aggregate demand,” says Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund. Companies that design and market their goods and services in ways that appeal to women will sell more effectively than those that don’t. Companies led by talented women are more likely to pull that off.

Women also tend to spend more on healthcare and education. These services are more labor-intensive than most sectors, so they generate more jobs. And when these “agents of aggregate demand” earn more, they’ll spend more too.

Finally, women tend to invest a larger chunk of their income than men on their children’s well-being—or as economists call it, “human capital.” In the long term, this trend should help create a smarter, heartier talent pool.

Of course, getting more women to work isn’t the only way to keep a country’s economy humming; you can also buy workers from other countries. The US prefers this approach, relying heavily on a temporary worker program to supplement its workforce. Immigrants are usually young and healthy, and therefore tend to contribute more taxes than they take in services from the state (even many illegal workers pay taxes). But the lack of employment protections or financial security means that they neither produce nor consume as much as they might. And the risk of a labor shortage always looms.

There’s one final reason to employ more women. Every major developed country is in the midst of an aging crisis . Women are having babies too slowly to replace the people bowing out of their workforces, causing an ever higher number of retirees to be supported by the taxes of an ever-shrinking number of workers.

Paradoxically, upping female employment levels appears to stave off this peril. Women in countries with higher female employment rates give birth to more children, on average, according to Goldman Sachs (pdf, p.9).

The problem with maternity leave

So the case for getting more women working is clear. How to make it happen?

The standard answer is maternity leave. All over the globe, paid maternity leave policies have proven vital in boosting the likelihood that a new mother will return to work, and will put in more hours after she returns. Along with tax reform, these policies powered the surge in Europe’s female labor-force participation in the 1980s and ’90s. The US, however, stagnated. Whereas in 1990 the US had the sixth-highest rate of female labor participation in the OECD in 1990, within two decades it had plunged to 17th place. The US’s lack of paid parental leave and flexible work policies were responsible for nearly three-tenths of that drop, according to an oft-cited study (pdf) by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn of Cornell University.

But on its own, paid maternity leave works only up to a point. Even in euro-zone countries and others that have boosted the share of women in the workforce by offering lavish maternity leave and cheap childcare, the gap between male and female labor participation still yawns.

For the vast majority of women who don’t return to work after giving birth, this is because the costs of returning—both financial and psychological—outweigh the benefits.

On its own, paid maternity leave works only up to a point.

Here are the factors they’re likely weighing. Since it’s assumed the mother will take a long maternal leave after giving birth, businesses systematically underpay women and skip them for promotions in favor of their male colleagues. Their husbands, therefore, likely have a much higher salary and aren’t eligible to take much more than a few weeks, at most, of paid childcare leave.

So women have little choice but to take many months off work to care for their newborn. Even in countries with robust maternal employment protections, low-skilled women in particular still face pressure to quit their jobs. Many who consider returning to work once their child is old enough for daycare struggle to find a job that pays well enough to cover childcare—or, with their skills now outdated, to find a job at all. Highly educated women, meanwhile, often find that taking a lengthy leave jolts them off the management track. And since this group tends to have wealthier husbands, without the professional motivation, there’s no point in returning.

Treating women’s work as less valuable than men’s is sexist. But so is paying mothers more money than fathers, and for much longer, to raise children. In fact, the two reinforce each other—something Japan’s dim history of female career advancement illustrates all too well.

Japan’s incredible shrinking workforce

Japan has the biggest aging crisis of any country in the world. This isn’t a new problem; its working-age population peaked in 1995 at just shy of 87 million. But though Japan reformed its maternity leave policies repeatedly throughout the 2000s, some 7 million women remain out of the workforce for good. And instead of encouraging more babies, the policy has led birth rates to fall; Japan is one of the few countries in the world where pet dogs and cats outnumber children (pdf, p.4).

The funny thing is, women in Japan don’t start out working any less than in most other rich countries. The chart below tracks female labor-force participation, a measure that includes both those with jobs and those looking for work. Roughly the same percentage of Japanese women enter the workforce in their 20s as Sweden and the UK. But once they hit their 30s, things change—forming a trough in the composition of the labor force that demographers call the “m-curve”:

It’s not that they lack the skills to return. The women of Japan are better-educated than those of nearly any other country on the planet—in fact, more Japanese women enter university now than men.

But upon graduation, most of that learning gets tossed aside. Women are hired into what economist Noah Smith calls an “economic underclass ,” with the majority in jobs with “low, stagnant salaries, few benefits, few guarantees and little if any possibility of promotion.” And as companies slot women into dead-end clerical jobs, they start grooming their male peers for promotion along the management track.

Though this two-track system smacks of sexism, from a human-resources perspective, it makes a crude kind of sense. That’s because government policy and Japanese culture make it hard for fathers to take leave, and unusually easy for mothers.

In 2012, only 1.9% of Japanese men who were eligible for childcare leave took it, down from 2.6% the previous year.

Japanese couples are currently allowed up to 12 months (pdf) of “childcare leave” to divide between them more or less as they see fit (and 14 months if the father takes at least two of them). The government pays the first six months at two-thirds of the parent’s salary, and the remaining months at 50%.

That might all seem very equitable. But in practice, maternal recovery and breastfeeding mean the mother is likely to take the earlier months—paid at two-thirds her wages. If the father takes the later months, he’ll get just half his wages. Since he on average makes 27% more than his wife, the more leave he takes, the more income the family loses. And this has the predictable result: As of 2012, the last year for which there are data, only 1.9% of men (paywall) who were eligible for childcare leave actually took it, down from 2.6% (pdf, p.5) the previous year.

With that kind of policy, it’s no wonder companies don’t invest in women’s careers. Even if a female employee returns to work after having a baby, cultural norms mean that she’s going to raise the kid—and that makes her less likely to be able to put in long hours at work.

A policy supposedly meant to help women ends up penalizing them…

The trend is self-reinforcing. Once passed over for a management-track position, a woman has less motivation to work hard to advance her career. Since she won’t have been exposed to the same range or depth of experience as her male colleagues, she’ll be less competitive next time she tries to find work. Even if she’s a candidate for a career-advancing job, her manager—who is most likely to be a man—doesn’t have an incentive to give her a flexible work schedule to fit around parenting, as he’ll have plenty of other male employees willing to put in the long hours.

Women in Japan are already paid only 73% of what men make for the equivalent jobs; the fact that this gap grows during childbearing years suggests what some call a “ motherhood pay penalty .” The work women can find after having a child is often part-time, and usually less well paid, so they have less incentive to go back to work. It’s telling that the better educated a woman is, the more likely she is to stay out of the workforce.

Oddly enough, men don’t have it so great either. In return for job security, companies expect their male employees to work grueling hours that end in booze-drenched after-hours bonding sessions, week after week for their entire career. Until very recently, to test their commitment companies would deliberately transfer male workers away from their families. This peer pressure is also part of why Japanese men seldom take vacation days .

This isn’t especially good for the economy. Chronic overwork doesn’t mean more work actually gets done; in fact it’s thought to be one of the factors driving down Japan’s productivity. (Another factor is likely part-time workers, who tend to be less productive .) But because it functions like a form of professional hazing—no one wants to risk looking lazy or uncommitted—it persists.

Men understandably get resentful about these extra hours, which is part of why the few men who do elect to take parental leave fear reprisals from both management and peers. “If a male worker announces that he is going to take paternity leave, people around him start to doubt his suitability for the job,” said Tetsuya Ando, who founded an support group for fathers called Fathering Japan in 2005.

That stigma can be overt, says Matthew Apple, a college professor who has lived and worked in Japan since 1999, and runs a blog called Taking Leave about his experiences raising a family there. Apple opted to take parental leave after he and his Japanese wife had a daughter. When he returned to work, some of his more conservative colleagues stopped talking to him and successfully lobbied for his workload to increase to make up for his absence. For women, though it is worse; one of his female colleagues was pressured to quit after taking maternity leave (she ultimately triumphed in keeping her job, though she made a lot of enemies in the process, says Apple).

…and the policy encouraging paternity leave is too weak

That culture is gradually starting to change, says Apple, particularly among younger men. To the government’s credit, in 2011 it launched the Ikumen Project (the word is a slangy play on ikemen, which means a “good-looking man,” and iku (育), which means “to raise”), an online community that 2011 encourages fathers to take a more active role in child-rearing.

Another cultural milestone occurred in Aug. 2014, when Masako Mori, the minister then in charge of the declining birthrate and gender equality , declared that she would promote men who take “paternity leave ,” by which she probably meant parental leave. Abe now says he wants the number of men taking leave to rise from 1.9% to 13% by 2020.

However, it’s not clear that this is much more than rhetoric. The salary gap between men and women means it still usually makes more economic sense for fathers to keep working, especially given that they’re likely to get only half their wages during parental leave.

So what the Japanese government ought to do is fix this disparity in how men’s and women’s time is valued. Instead, it’s considering making it worse, by extending maternity leave to three years. That would further entrench the traditional divide between men’s and women’s work, worsening Japan’s labor-supply problems and keeping GDP growth anemic at best.

Indeed, this makes it look as if Shinzo Abe’s agenda is less about jump-starting the economy than about trying to boost birth rates—despite the ample evidence that longer maternity leave will bring them down instead.

Japan’s dads aren’t the only ones stuck at the office

Governments can hardly expect businesses to value women’s time equally with men’s when their leave policies don’t pay fathers equally for providing childcare. Only when governments and companies value women’s and men’s work the same—in both the workplace and the nursery—will this handicap against women lift.

Japan is hardly alone in failing to grasp this, however. More than 100 countries now provide government-funded cash benefits for maternity leave; only 70 offer paid paternity leave. Even among OECD countries, only two-thirds offer paternity leave, and even those often for no more than a few weeks. Only three countries—Chile, Portugal, and Italy—make a few days of paternity leave compulsory.

For those that do offer longer leave, compensation is important. The lower the percentage of salary the government offers a stay-at-home parent, the bigger the penalty to the family if it’s the higher earner—usually, the father—who stays at home.

Another common worry about “family-friendly” European policies is that they encourage women to settle for part-time work and for mommy-track career paths. A study (pdf) by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn of Cornell University found that American women were more likely than those of the rest of the OECD to work full-time and to occupy managerial positions. Two major reasons, they note, are that “family-friendly” policies make it easier for less career-oriented women to stay in the workforce and for more ambitious women to shift into part-time work without sacrificing too much. In the US, by comparison, those two types of women are either dropping out, or forsaking babies for the corner office.

How Sweden finally revolutionized parenting

Though the Sweden of stereotype might be a machismo-free festival of gender neutrality, in the mid-1970s it wasn’t markedly different from today’s Japan. Hardly any dads took time off after the birth of a child.

That didn’t change even after Sweden scrapped maternity leave in 1974 and—like Japan today—replaced it with an overall allotment of paid parental leave that could be shared however the mother and father chose. Fathers who took time off were derisively nicknamedvelourman or velourpappa (“ velour men” or “velour dads “)—a reference to the fabric popular in unisex clothes at the time—and disdained for being unmanly. In the mid-1970s, only 562 dads claimed parental leave —about 0.5%.

Sweden really needed these policies to work. Like many countries today, it had succeeded in boosting female labor participation, but at the cost of a decline in births. The government took a distinctly Shinzo-Abe-like approach, upping the length of parental leave four times in two decades; by 1994, leave lasted 15 months.

That revived fertility somewhat. However, by the early 1990s, it began slipping again. Then things got even bleaker: Sweden was hit with a massive financial crisis, driving unemployment to 12.9% in Jan. 1995 (pdf) and straining family finances around the country. Female labor participation began falling, as did the birth rate. Meanwhile, the rate of fathers taking leave had only risen to about 6%.

Why wasn’t it working? It turned out that allowing parents to choose how to divvy up childcare time didn’t much change the existing incentives. As Bengt Westerberg, who was deputy prime minister in 1995, told the New York Times (paywall), Swedish women faced a vicious cycle. Since women’s pay was at that time typically much lower than their husbands’, couples typically opted for the mother to stay at home with the child. But that perpetuated the pay gap, as women continued to be “mommy-tracked,” penalized for the possibility that they’d bear a child. Companies entrenched this divide by looking down on fathers who did take parental leave. Again, this is exactly what’s going on in Japan today.

“Society is a mirror of the family,” Westerberg told the Times. “The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home. Getting fathers to share the parental leave is an essential part of that.”

So in 1995, the government rolled out “daddy leave.” It didn’t make paternity leave mandatory, but couples lost a month of subsidized leave if the father took less than a month off. That meant he could no longer transfer all of his leave to his wife. The new policy also compensated fathers and mothers at 90% of their wages, making it harder for fathers to turn down.

“Society is a mirror of the family. The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home.”

And it worked. Within a few years, more than four out of every five fathers stayed at home. And when the government added another month to “daddy leave” in 2002, the amount of time they took off more than doubled. The government also upped the reimbursement ceiling to make the package more attractive to high-earning men.

As it stands now, each parent gets a 60-day “daddy” and “mommy” quota (pdf, p.2) paid at 78% of earnings—all of which must be taken. After that, the couple has 270 days paid at 78% of earnings to split as they choose, followed by another 90 paid at a flat rate. Parents also get additional part-time leave and the right to flexible hours up until their child is eight years old.

Now nine in 10 Swedish fathers take leave, for an average of three to four months each, accounting for a quarter of total leave time taken, and smoothing the mother’s transition back to work.

One reason this works is that Sweden pays generous benefits for a relatively short period of leave. Instead of encouraging women to spend a long time out of the workforce, it institutionalizes a set time when they must return to work or lose their paychecks. The addition of daddy leave adds extra time that an infant can spend with its parents.

Good for children, good for parents, good for the economy

What happened as a result? The issue is still controversial, but it seems that the longer the leave for fathers, the less time women take out from the job market. A study by the Swedish Institute of Labor Market Policy Evaluation in 2010 found that a mother’s future earnings rose 7% (pdf, p.35), on average, for each month of parental leave her husband took. Sweden now has some of the highest rates of working mothers in the world, with around nine-tenths of mothers (pdf) returning to work after childbirth. While some economists have worried that Sweden’s generous leave benefits (in addition to daddy leave) would penalize women, that hasn’t happened (pdf). Research shows that younger female workers face virtually no discrimination .

This doesn’t mean Sweden doesn’t have farther to go. Thanks in part to the disproportionate number of male physicians and its robust finance industry, Sweden’s pay gap is still relatively high. And as with everywhere else in the developed world, women also work part-time at higher rates than men.

However, Sweden’s part-time work gender gap is much smaller than that of other countries. And unlike pretty much any other country, Swedish women who work part-time are paid at the same rate as those who work full-time, according to a 2008 study (pdf, p.58); some even enjoy a small pay premium.

Around nine-tenths of Swedish mothers return to work after childbirth.

The difference between Sweden and other countries, said the researchers, was that many of the Swedish women working part-time were still doing the same job they had in the past—and the same one to which they would return full-time after their children entered school. To put it another way, Sweden’s policies made it easier for parents to balance work and family responsibilities.

Other countries and states have won similar successes to Sweden’s. In the early 2000s, Iceland expanded parental leave to nine months, with a daddy quota of three months. Last year, Iceland granted each parent five months’ leave, with two months split however they choose. Though we’ll have to wait to see how that plays out, as of 2010, 95 fathers there took leave (pdf) for every 100 mothers that did. The fathers used roughly a third of the total parental leave taken, compared with just 3% in 2000 (pdf). In Quebec, too, a policy that split parental leave more fairly upped the likelihood that women returned to employment after leave.

Also worth noting is that Sweden and Iceland have put in place flexible-hours policies that apply for years after parental leave is over. In addition to upping the rate and duration at which new mothers breastfeed, these appear to have helped promote a more general workplace culture of flexibility that benefits all workers.

Uneven playing field, uneven pay

In summary, giving men an incentive to take paternity leave appears to do two things for women’s careers: It gets them back in the workforce quicker, and boosts their long-term earning potential.

The latter is an important factor in closing the pay gap. This isn’t just good for women, but good for the economy too. As we saw in the Japan example, a pay gap discourages highly-educated women in particular from returning to the workforce full-time after having children. It’s also lost income for the government in terms of the taxes it would collect on a full-time salary if the wage gap disappeared.

Of course, something has to foot the bill for slashing that wage gap. And that something is companies. But while you might assume that they’d secretly object to paying any employees more, it turns out losing workers to motherhood isn’t so great for the bottom line.

In California and New Jersey, companies reported that paid maternity leave policies caused either no change to their bottom line or in some cases cut training and turnover costs.

First off, it limits the return on investment in those lost workers’ training. It also means a hit to productivity, as companies must spend on replacing lost employees and then training those new workers. In a study in California (pdf) and another in New Jersey (pdf, p.2)—which, along with Rhode Island, are the only US states to provide paid parental leave—companies reported that the policies helped them retain workers and caused either no change to their bottom line, or in some cases cut training and turnover costs. New mothers in both California and New Jersey were much more likely to return to work.

If you want women to work, you have to pay for childcare

To be sure, one reason Scandinavia was able to pioneer all this is that its tax rates are already among the world’s steepest. Though Swedish-style policies will go into effect in the UK in 2015, passing such sweeping legislation will be harder in European countries under the yoke of austerity. As for the US, though several senators are pushing for new legislation on parental leave, financing it will be controversial; expect outrage from those whose knees jerk in chronic opposition to Nordic “wealth redistribution.”

Encouraging only women to specialize in the business of childcare will doom plans for a bigger workforce.

But looked at another way, increasing taxes to pay for daddy leave isn’t wealth redistribution, but simple market economics. If the state wants men to take time out of the workforce, it has to compete with the salaries they could earn by staying in the workforce. In other words, it has to pay them the market rate for work—the work of childcare—that it has long gotten much more cheaply from women.

This brings us back to the original point. Whether a country needs a bigger workforce now or down the road, encouraging only women to specialize in the business of childcare will doom those plans to failure. It’s hard for women to stay in the workforce when businesses undervalue their official work and governments undervalue their childcare. In the long run, countries that make sure parents, regardless of their gender, can wring the greatest possible value from their time and skills will be those whose economies and families thrive.

( Image via Kotin / Shutterstock.com )

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Lego’s Female Scientist Set Could Inspire a Generation of Girls

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 15:00:00 -0400

Even in Legoland, men have long dominated science . That’s about to change, though. The Danish company just launched Lego Research Institute, a $19.99 line featuring a paleontologist, astronomer and a chemist . Behold:

Lego

This trio of one-inch female scientists was created by Ellen Kooijman, a “real-life geoscientist,” and selected by vote among LEGO Ideas members. It was so popular, it beat out a set based on Sherlock . This is a big deal for “girl power,” as a male commenter from Canada noted.

The implications could be even bigger for the US and other economies. America desperately needs more workers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Part of the problem is that only 26% of STEM workers are women (pdf, p.5), despite the fact that they make up half of the overall workforce.

Clearly, encouraging women to work in STEM fields would be a big help. One huge hurdle, however, is keeping girls interested. Research shows that in kindergarten, boys and girls were equally interested in science (paywall); by the end of high school, though, the gap in interests rose twenty-fold.

What happens to derail that interest? Toys, for one thing. Not only do they spur cognitive and social development (pdf, p.632), they also shape children’s sense of gender.

An example of how that happens: In a 2014 study of girls between the ages of four and seven, those who played with a Barbie doll—even Doctor Barbie—said that fewer occupations were open (paywall) to them, compared with boys. The girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head, on the other hand, identified nearly as many future career options available to themselves as boys.

That doesn’t mean that playing with male figurines affects girls’ career planning. But even in the relatively progressive world of Legoland, girls haven’t had much of a choice, as Scientific American notes :

via Scientific American

Not only does Lego’s new line of female scientists invite girls to consider pursuing STEM subjects; it presents a reality in which they already are STEM workers. That validation may help build girls’ confidence in their abilities early on if it solidifies the notion that many women excel in math and science. Research has found that attitudes of boys being better at math heavily discourages girls’ interest in math and self-confidence in their abilities—especially among higher-achieving girls.

Shaping boys’ attitudes toward professional women helps. Good thing Lego Research Lab isn’t explicitly marketed toward girls. Neither is Lego’s “Scientist ,” who was released in Sept. 2013 in a bundle with other minifigures, named “Female Scientist.”

Lego

Then again, that Lego pack included “Pretzel Girl,” “Diner Waitress,” and “Grandma” (compared with male characters like “Constable,” “Mountain Climber,” and “Welder”).

Other companies that have tried their hand at girls’ STEM-themed figurines veer even more toward the ultra-feminine. Here’s Mattel’s computer software engineer Barbie from 2010:

Endgadget

In real life, at least, over-feminizing science can do more harm than good. One recent study found that, because they seemed “particularly unattainable,” super-feminine STEM role models actually deter middle-school girls (pdf) from studying math and science.

Of course, kids should play with pink-frilled princesses and Barbie Dream Houses if they want to. But they should have options that run a broader gamut of what “females” look like. Even among Legos, “female” minifigures tend to wear things like seashells, bodices, and a lot of pink, as you can see below. Thanks to the trio of Lego Research Lab, girls and boys can now find at least a few “female” Legos dressed to offer the world more than an hourglass shape.

( Top image via Flickr user pixbymaia )

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About to Ask For a Raise? Listen to These Three Songs First

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 12:00:00 -0400

“Auditory cheesecake” is how famed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker once described music. He called it an “exquisite confection crafted to tickle” the spots in the brain that leave us feeling happy and relaxed.

That rings true for music that’s akin to, say, Mozart—but what about Metallica? Lil’ Wayne? It’s harder to think of noisy, bass-heavy music as “cheesecake,” let alone accept that it’s tickling neurons.

Apparently it is. New research shows (pdf) that music with heavy bass makes people feel far more confident. Not only do they act more powerfully and decisively; that kind of music also improves their abstract thinking. The study’s findings suggest some big practical implications, says Derek Rucker, professor at Kellogg School of Management and one of the co-authors.

“Just as professional athletes might put on empowering music before they take the field to get them in a powerful state of mind,” Rucker told Kellogg Insight, “you might try [listening to bass-heavy music] in certain situations where you want to be empowered.”

The study, which was just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, was based on a series of experiments conducted as participants listened to a “high power” playlist—containing Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready for This” and 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”—and a “low-power” playlist featuring songs similar in style but with less bass (Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can,” Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out,” and Notorious BIG’s “Big Poppa”).

It turned out that those listening to the “high-power” playlist were much more focused on power and control. In a word-completion exercise, they came up with more power-related words (e.g. when presented with “p–er,” they tended to write “power” instead of “paper,” as the other group did).They also volunteered to go first in a debate twice as often as those who’d been tuned into the “low-power” mix (35% vs. 20%). In an experiment offering participants $5 for correctly predicting the outcome of a die roll, they were more likely to hog the die, instead of letting someone else do it, which the researchers took to indicate their “illusion of control.” They also messed up less often than the low-power crew in a categorization task that measured abstract thinking.

Bass was the critical factor, the researchers discovered. To figure this out, they conducted power-gauging experiments that stripped out the bassline from the high-power songs and, in another, conducted the word-completion test after playing bass-heavy and bass-light instrumental music for different study groups. Throughout the experiments, the researchers controlled for the influence of positive emotions—that “auditory cheesecake” thing—as well as lyrics.

So that’s the science. But what about how to use it?

Rucker suggests it could be useful prep before important client meetings, job interviews, negotiations or critical meetings with your boss.

“One thing we know from prior research is that people who feel powerful tend to make the first offer in negotiations. Essentially, power is a propensity to act, to take charge of the situation,” explains Rucker, who notes that retailers, managers and advertisers should probably also take note of what their music choices are doing to their target customers’ brains.

(Image via Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com)

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China Is Setting up Covert Spy Networks in US and Australian Universities

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 11:41:36 -0400

The ever-rising droves of Chinese people studying abroad is generally considered an all-around win. It’s good for Chinese students, who get a coveted credential, as well as for host universities and local communities, which benefit from the spending boost.

It’s also good, it turns out, for China’s Communist Party. The Chinese government is rolling out a sprawling spy network inside Australia’s top universities, reports John Garnaut, a veteran journalist covering China, in the Sydney Morning Herald .

This news comes on the heels of allegations made in February by a dissident Chinese professor about the visiting scholars China dispatches to US universities like Harvard and Stanford. “Every year among those top universities there are some visiting scholars, and among them I can definitely say there are some people who are actually spies,” Xia Yeliang, a former Peking University economics professor, who now works at the Cato Institute in Washington, told Reuters .

According to Garnaut’s report, students are the more likely spies, however. These agents report on the activities of other Chinese citizens—including both professors and Australia’s 150,000-plus (pdf) population of students from the Chinese mainland—helping Chinese intelligence officials police their overseas nationals for openness to ideas that run counter to Party ideology.

For example, one lecturer at a top Australian school said China’s main spy agency interrogated him repeatedly about comments he made at a seminar on democracy. He told the Herald that the agency had shown him the report by a woman who had informed on him.

Australia is now ramping up its counter-intelligence program. But one reason there are so many Chinese spies in Australian universities might be that the schools haven’t created welcoming communities for visiting international students, said the Herald report.

Both the US and Australia have benefited from the appeal of their universities to Chinese students. The US remains the top destination for Chinese students hoping to study overseas, though it’s become less popular recently, while the UK is in second place. Last year, Chinese students contributed $7.2 billion to the US economy . As for Australia, one-quarter of its international students are from China . That’s even though Australia is one of the world’s most expensive places to study :

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

( Image via hxdbzxy / Shutterstock.com )

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Uncle Sam Is Helping Illegal Pot Producers Destroy California's Water Supply

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 13:37:18 -0500

Heavy rains in California in recent days have partly alleviated the drought that parched the state in January. The dry spell is merely exacerbating a long-developing problem in northern California, however: The huge volumes of water used to grow marijuana, as well as the noxious fertilizers and pesticides gushing into streams, are pushing local watersheds to their breaking point.

“Marijuana cultivation has the potential to completely dewater and dry up streams in the areas where [cannabis farmers are] growing pretty extensively,” Scott Bauer, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), tells Quartz. He describes encountering waterless streambeds littered with dead fish.

Pot is not the only water-guzzling business that’s booming in the Emerald Triangle, as Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties are known. Wineries are too. The problem is that the government treats them differently, says Gary Graham Hughes, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit group.

The paradoxical status of marijuana in the US—it is legal to grow and sell in some states, but remains illegal under federal law—makes it hard to regulate. In theory, Californian state or local regulators should be able to set environmental standards for cannabis cultivation, the way they might with grapes or timber. But the federal government won’t let them. As a result, growers enjoy unregulated use of water, and the resulting easy profits have helped attract operations that are increasingly industrial in scale—and run by growers who are unrepentant about sucking the Emerald Triangle dry.

Pot is central to the local economy…

Pot is one heck of a valuable crop. The farm value of cannabis grown in California for local consumption is probably between $2.5 billion and $5 billion a year, according to Dale Gieringer, an economist at California Norml (CA Norml), a pro-legalization non-profit, assuming a price of $2,500 per pound. The out-of-state export market could be even larger, he says.

It’s especially valuable for the otherwise downtrodden Emerald Triangle economies. In Humboldt, occasionally called the Silicon Valley of weed, some 4,000 commercial growers generate at least $400 million in annual sales . That compares with the $66 million made by Humboldt’s timber industry in 2011 (pdf, p.3), the last year for which data was available.

…but the “green rush” is putting a strain on the land

It hasn’t always been a cash crop. The Emerald Triangle’s cannabis growing dates back to the 1970s, when a wave of liberal activists settled there, dropping out of society to go “back to the land.” They found the terrain unusually ideal for growing cannabis. But they grew it alongside other garden produce, seldom in any large scale—and rarely destructively (these hippies were some of the framers of the modern US conservation movement, after all).

California’s legalization of medical marijuana in 1996, as well as steadily rising prices, encouraged their offspring, some less ecologically conscientious than their parents, to enter the business. But it’s in the last few years that things have changed dramatically. From 2009 to 2012 the amount of land cultivated for pot in the Emerald Triangle nearly doubled, to 221 acres, according to the CDFW. An aerial view shows once-dense forests now pocked with “grows,” as pot farms are called. And they’re getting bigger and bigger, says Bauer, with industrial grows now raising 2,000-5,000 plants. Here’s a look at national forest land on Post Mountain, a rural area of Trinity county, in 2005:

Post Mountain, 2005. "Resource Impacts from Marijuana Cultivation in Northern California," California Fish & Wildlife

Here’s Post Mountain—which locals now call “ Pot Mountain “—in 2012:

Post Mountain, 2012. "Resource Impacts from Marijuana Cultivation in Northern California," California Fish & Wildlife

Many within the industry point to the expanding presence of outsiders: Everyone from Kentuckians to Bulgarians is flocking to the area. Some of this trend, which locals liken to the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, is due to a worry that the recent legalization of weed for recreational use in Washington and Colorado might drive down prices.

“People come to Humboldt to grow as much as they can to get that one last hit before it goes legal,” says Tony Silvaggio, an environmental sociologist at the Center for Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP). ”Every year it goes bigger and bigger.”

But another reason is simply that weed is incredibly profitable to grow. Its illegal status, says Silvaggo, inflates its price, and cannabis growers don’t have to pay taxes, rights to water and land use fees the way “legal” industries do.

The water cost is a biggie. A single plant of marijuana needs about six gallons (22.7 liters) of water per day to grow. That means industrial grows need between 12,000 and 30,000 gallons of water per day .

This has exacerbated the water crisis…

The dry summer months happen to be the peak of the April-October pot-growing season. Conscientious growers—typically, long-term residents—invest in tanks to gather and store water during the winter, when it rains more. Unethical growers irrigate by damming streams and using diesel pumps to suck water to their sites. They also tend to pump runoff fouled with dangerous fertilizers and pesticides back into the water supply.

Comparison of monthly streamflow in California, Aug. 2000 vs. Aug. 2013. United States Geological Service

Marijuana growing in four sub-areas of the Emerald Triangle’s watersheds is now consuming 20%-30% of the water in local streams, says the CDFW. That’s scuttling hopes for the recovery of northern California’s beleaguered Chinook salmon population, which the logging industry almost wiped out in the 1950s. Since 2008, water overuse has driven the number of salmon returning to the rivers to spawn to record lows.

To get a better sense of context, consider the case of the Outlet Creek basin , one of the headwaters of the Eel River and a habitat for Chinook and coho salmon. Outdoor cannabis cultivation in Mendocino’s Outlet Creek watershed consumes an Olympic-sized pool worth of water each week, on average. And that’s just for 160-square-mile (414 square kilometers) swatch of the total Eel River watershed , which spans nearly 4,000 square miles. That concentration of activity is happening all over the 8,800 square miles of Emerald Triangle watersheds . Here’s an analysis Silvaggio and Mother Jones did using Google Earth in early 2013:

… and the US government “is directly to blame”

Cannabis cultivation need not be so bad for the environment. Other local industries, like wineries and timber, have the potential to be worse. While state and local agencies have dozens of workers in northern California focused strictly on protecting the environment from vintners and loggers, no one’s doing that for cannabis growers.

But don’t point fingers at local regulators, says CA Norml’s Gieringer. The “US government is directly to blame for [ending] established efforts to regulate outdoor growth,” he says.

That’s seems like a pretty extreme statement—at least until you hear about what happened in Mendocino.

A sign posted in Mendocino county. Flickr user Julia Wolf (this image has been cropped)

The Feds cut short Mendocino’s experiment with cannabis regulation…

The story starts in 2010, when Tom Allman, Mendocino’s sheriff, began charging medically licensed marijuana growing collectives $1,050 for cultivation permits, monthly inspection fees of around $500, and $25 for a serial-numbered zip-tie that growers were to attach to each plant (pdf, p.5), certifying that the produce met environmental and public safety standards. The regulation also capped the number of plants per individual at 25, and per collective at 99.

In an interview with PBS in 2011, Allman explained that his motivation was remove the gray area around cultivation in order to honor what California voters had mandated when they legalized medical marijuana, and to free up his officers to focus on crime. “We’re taking money from people who want to follow the law, … and we are using that exact money to go after the people who are breaking the law,” said Allman. “[I]f we can remove the gray, if we can remove the inconsistencies, if we can have people not confused about the marijuana laws, then I have succeeded.”

He didn’t succeed immediately. Growers were initially suspicious that the police would rat them out to the Feds; in the first year, only 18 people signed up. But by the end of 2011, the program had enlisted nearly 100 growers , bringing in $663,000 in fees in 2011 —and important source of revenue for an office that normally relied on federal funds.

Those fees helped finance Allman’s aggressive campaign against illegal “trespass grows “—meaning those on public land—including some that were illegally damming streams and piping water for irrigation . Allman and his officers eradicated 642,000 illegal marijuana plants in Mendocino county 2011—more than one-third of what the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) typically eradicates each year in all of California. (For comparison, California is about 44 times bigger and 440 times more populous than Mendocino county.)

It helped consumers too, since they could purchase marijuana guaranteed not to contain scary pesticides. And licensed growers were able to ”reintegrate into the county and not feel like outlaws,” as county supervisor John McCowen put it .

But though Mendocino created clear categories of legal and illegal growers, the federal government didn’t see it that way. DEA agents raided farms of Mendocino’s most prominently law-abiding growers—a crackdown on “significant drug traffickers,”said US attorney Melinda Haag . Then 2012, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Mendocino’s records of all participants in the program, which the county’s lawyer said was a breach of medical privacy guarantees. This was a huge blow to the trust forged between growers and Mendocino police. The federal government insisted that Mendocino shut down the program, threatening to prosecute officials individually if they granted permits. In March 2012, Mendocino finally gave in.

“That,” explains CANorml’s Gieringer, ”put an end to the attempt to regulate outdoor cultivation in California.”

… and there’s a cynical theory about why

The federal government isn’t allowed to participate in anything that treats marijuana as legal. But nothing about Mendocino’s zip-tie program required federal involvement—so why did the Feds crack down?

Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the DEA, said he wasn’t familiar with Mendocino’s zip-tie program. However, he says that the DEA is almost exclusively focused on major operations. “You’ll rarely if ever see the DEA show up and bang on someone’s door if they have five plants,” Payne tells Quartz.

While Gieringer, Silvaggio and others who support legalization argue that Mendocino was a successful effort at bringing order to the market through legalization, Payne argues that such systems would paradoxically increase the market share of illegal growers.

“There are a lot of… myths that [marijuana is] safe, that’s it’s okay if it’s regulated. We think it’s dangerous, and one reason is that it’s proven to be a significant source of revenue for the most violent organizations in the world, [such as] the Mexican drug cartels,” he says. “Any time you have a regulated system, you’re going to have taxes and fees. We would see drug trafficking organizations undercut the so-called legal market to the extent that cartels were even more emboldened by dropping their prices because they’d be able to sell even more.”

If Payne’s theory is right, legalization would give the DEA even more illegal activity to crack down on. But what if it turned out, instead, that an expanding legal market enticed some growers out of the black market, thus driving down prices and pushing smaller illegal growers out of business—and at the same time, generating revenue for local police to go after trespass growers more aggressively, the way Sheriff Allman did?

To test those theories you’d need an experiment, and the run of Mendocino’s experiment was probably too short to tell either way. However, a cynical interpretation of the DEA’s attitude is that it fears widespread adoption of programs similar to Mendocino’s would harm the interests of federal agencies, like the DEA, that depend on the “War on Drugs” for funding.

Here’s the reasoning.

Around 60% of the $24.5 billion (pdf, p.19) the US federal government allocated in fiscal year 2013 for drug-control programs went toward disrupting the supply of illegal drugs. Two factors on which Congress evaluates the success of the DEA and its partner law-enforcement agencies are the number of plants eradicated (pdf, p.64-5)—or ”plant count,” as it’s known—and the number of organizations whose operations they disrupt, says Payne. Some 53% of the outdoor plants (pdf) the DEA eradicated in 2012 were in California. That isn’t particularly surprising, given that California grows between a quarter and two-thirds of the rest of the country’s pot, according to sources close to the industry.

Now, what if the whole of California adopted Mendocino’s zip-tie program, creating clear classes of law-abiding and illegal growers? The program would take smaller illegal growers out of business or turn them legal, which would likely bring down California prices. But because the export market would still pay a premium, the biggest trespass grows—which are mainly producing for export out of California—would stay in business, and as Payne says, those are what the DEA focuses on. The surviving operations would be the bigger and better-organized ones that are more dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming to raid. That would make it harder for federal agencies to eradicate the same number of plants and disrupt the same number of operations as they had in the past.

And eventually, legalization in California’s current export markets—meaning, other states—will cause local production capacity to expand and reduce the risk premium. Falling prices will close more and more of these Emerald Triangle trespass grows. When that happens, it will be harder for illegal growers to stay in business by undercutting legal ones in a market where consumers and retailers have gotten used to regulated, quality-controlled legal weed.

The Office of National Drug-Control Policy (ONDCP)—the White House office that coordinates federal anti-drug efforts, including the DEA—has a dual mandate, to reduce both the supply and demand of drugs. It’s being undermined on the demand side, as support for legalization is rising fast—especially for medical use, now legal in 15 states and the District of Columbia—and so are rates of marijuana use by teens . The mandate to eliminate supply is therefore crucial to being able to justify the ONDCP’s increasingly endangered budget, which shrank nearly 20% (pdf, p.232) in the latest fiscal year. As for the DEA, the Department of Justice, which oversees it, explicitly identifies legalization as a “ performance challenge ” (pdf, p. 21-2).

What this all boils down to, according to the cynical interpretation, is that successful local-level regulation in California would threaten to deprive federal anti-drug agencies of a large source of their income, and set an example for other states. That could further undermine federal policy, and the agencies’ budgets.

The War on Drugs is now supposedly about the environment…

If this reasoning seems too much like a conspiracy theory, consider that the federal government has long cited the threat to public safety posed by violent “ Mexican cartels ” (pdf, p.72) to justify its aggressive tactics and hefty budgets. Only last year did Tommy Lanier, director of the ONDCP’s National Marijuana Initiative, quietly admit , ”Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cellphone numbers and wiretaps, we haven’t been able to connect anyone to a major cartel.”

In the 2012 National Drug Control Strategy, which is published by ONDCP, the sole rationale given for eradicating marijuana cultivation in the US was to stop “ violent transnational criminal organizations ” (pdf, p.28).

The reference to Mendocino county refers to the campaign against trespass grows that Sheriff Tom Allman spearheaded. "National Drug Control Strategy, 2012"

In the 2013 strategy, that changed (pdf, p.45) to an emphasis on the environment:

"National Drug Control Strategy, 2013."

This, argue some, is of a piece with new federal government talking points emphasizing that cannabis crackdowns are needed to protect the environment. Dominic Corva, head of CASP, says this newfound passion for conservation is more about justifying the anti-marijuana policy in the face of growing public acceptance of marijuana. “Before it was ‘cannabis is bad,’” says Corva. “Now it’s ‘environmental degradation caused by cannabis is bad.’”

The DEA’s Payne says that his organization has long paid attention to environmental destruction by trespass growers. “The environmental impacts—those are obviously concerns for anyone [in regard to] what these drug trafficking organizations are doing to our public lands,” he says. But, he also says, “we’re not environmental experts—we go after drug traffickers.”

…but it isn’t exactly being fought that way

If the end result is that the DEA reduces the cannabis industry’s environmental abuse, does it matter if the way it goes about it is by treating the industry as something to be wiped out?

In all fairness to the DEA, it isn’t supposed to be regulating water pumps. Indeed, saddling an anti-drug agency with environmental policing seems a perverse way of doing things, especially when other federal agencies are refusing to do it. Take, for instance, the National Forest Service. Once focused on regulating (and promoting) economic development on forested land, the agency has shifted more recently toward protecting the environment (pdf, p.3), including watersheds. Part of its job is to research how commercial industries like logging affect the environment in forests. However, it has steadfastly rejected EPIC’s requests that it do the same for marijuana cultivation . “The best way to minimize impacts to affected resources is by discouraging this criminal activity through aggressive law enforcement,” says the US Forest Service (pdf).

Even if the DEA had the capacity to target the most egregious environmental abusers, it wouldn’t be sufficient, says EPIC’s Hughes. “These are really profound environmental harms that need more than just a bust to be dealt with,” he says. He argues that public land management should be prioritized over law enforcement.

CASP’s Silvaggio says that the DEA’s focus continues to be on destroying plants and arresting easy targets—low-level workers. That means it’s disrupting industrial grows basically by creating minor staffing headaches. And, if the growers subsequently replant, they end up using even more water.

On top of that, law-enforcement officers don’t generally know a lot about managing the environment, and lack the staff who does. That means they sometimes lean heavily on local volunteers to clean up pot-growing sites after a raid, says EPIC’s Hughes. Because that risks putting volunteers in harm’s way— one died on the job in Sep. 2013—law enforcement operations tend to stay away from the bigger, riskier grow sites in remote, hard-to-access areas, he adds, meaning those grows continue to do environmental damage.

Busting trespass grows, the main focus of the DEA’s work, also does nothing to limit damage to the water supply from growers on private residential land. Compared with public-land grows, those account for a majority of cannabis cultivation in the area, says CDFW (pdf, p.25) and others close to the industry.

Examples of marijuana cultivation in one Humboldt county watershed. (TPZ stands for “timber preserve zone,” preserves in which the state allows a limited amount of timber harvesting.) California Department of Fish and Wildlife

So what’s the future of the Emerald Triangle “green rush”?

There’s a glimmer of hope for northern California’s streams yet. The federal government recently showed signs of relaxing its “enforcement-only” position: It said it plans to scale back the practice of using legal marijuana businesses’ bank records to prosecute them. (That practice has forced many growers to use cash only, which encourages crime.)

And California’s new state budget proposal earmarks $3.3 million (pdf, p.108-119) to “improve the prevention” of destructive water use by marijuana cultivators and to protect endangered species. It’s not clear whether the budget, if approved, will be earmarked for enforcement only—meaning, to help state water and wildlife departments join the federal campaign against trespass grows that are polluting or overusing water, for example—or for education, community outreach and other types of programs, which might violate federal law.

Bauer of the CDFW, thinks the budget will finally give him the staff needed to educate growers on winter water storage and other best practices. Busts, he says, won’t be the priority. On the other hand, EPIC’s Hughes is skeptical that the new budget would fund anything besides the usual—enforcement. “The state and the counties I believe are still running scared… because of the threat that the Feds will come down and say that [they] are involved with an illegal activity.” In other words, he argues, northern California and its water supply “will continue to pay the environmental fallout of the Drug War.”

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

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Shutdown Could Hamper Inspections of Seafood Imports

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 15:33:50 -0400

This article has been corrected by Quartz. The text of the correction is below.

It’s almost a week into the government shutdown and imported food Americans are eating is passing through with little of the inspection it’s normally given.

Thanks to the shutdown, some food safety inspectors at the Food and Drug Administration, which monitors 80 percent of the U.S.’ food supply, are on furlough until the budget gets passed , as Food Safety News reports.

That means the FDA isn’t carrying out some of its most critical responsibilities. First is the FDA’s oversight of food imports.

One of the big ways the FDA protects consumers is by blocking shipments from companies with a history of tainted foods, monitoring them through what it calls ”red alerts.” These include categories like filthiness (meaning excrement), fruits covered in pesticides , drug-doped seafood , dairy products with melamine , dietary supplements that might have mad cow disease , e. coli -containing seafood and candy laced with lead .

The FDA blocks shipments from tens of thousands such violators. Now, however, there’s no one to stop those foods from finding their way onto American plates.

Take shrimp for example. Americans now eat 4.2 pounds (1.9 kg) a year, way more than any other type of seafood. Some 90% of that is imported, much of it from Thailand , Indonesia, India and Bangladesh:

"Exploitative Labor Practices in the Global Shrimp Industry," Accenture

So consistently has shrimp imported from those four countries arrived already decomposed, covered in filth or teeming with salmonella , that FDA flags all shipments as “red alerts” (companies are exempted only after demonstrating health standard compliance).

That means Americans might unknowingly be chowing down on red-alert shrimp. If that were to cause a nationwide outbreak of, say, salmonella, the FDA would normally step in to prevent people from eating more.

Not now. Though the FDA says it will continue to act on “ high-risk recalls ” (pdf), Caroline Smith DeWaal, the food safety director of a non-profit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, doubts that’s sufficient.

“I don’t have confidence that they have the capacity to recognize an emergency and respond to it,” DeWaal told the Christian Science Monitor .

Note that county health authorities are still managing local problems, such as the salmonella outbreak that’s killed one person in Kentucky so far.

But county officials can’t do much when the outbreak comes from shipped food, as opposed to shoddy hygiene. The food-related outbreaks cross borders too, such as the outbreak of a rare strain of Hepatitis A that sickened 162 people in 10 states across the US throughout the summer. The FDA traced the strain to a Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend sold at Costco, prompting a recall. After the FDA isolated the culprit, berries imported from Turkey, it placed the responsible company on red alert.

CORRECTION: (October 7): This article overstated the effect of the US government shutdown on inspections of imported food. We are still looking into the full extent of employee furloughs at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and how those are affecting inspections. Steven Immergut, an FDA spokesman, said the agency is continuing to review all food imports, but there “may be delays” in physical examinations due to the shutdown.

At the very least, the article should have noted that 578 FDA employees are still working “to inspect regulated products and manufacturers, conduct sample analysis on products, and review imports offered for entry into the US,” according to the government (pdf, pg. 8). We have asked the FDA how many people are normally employed to check food imports and are waiting to hear back.

Immergut did clarify that the agency is not currently able to add companies to the list of “import alerts”—referred to incorrectly in this article as “red alerts”—unless there is a life-threatening emergency.

We have changed the headline of this article, which was originally “Almost all of the shrimp Americans eat is now going uninspected.” We will update this correction as we learn more.

( Image via Goran Bogicevic / Shutterstock.com )

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Analysis: Why Obama’s pick for Interior Secretary is a shrewd move

Gwynn Guilford, Quartz — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:10:27 -0500

On the face of it, US President Barack Obama’s nomination of Sally Jewell to head up the Interior Department, which manages the country’s massive portfolio of public land use, is an unconventional one.

Jewell has worked exclusively in the private sector—she’s currently the CEO of REI, which sells sporting and outdoor goods—whereas interior secretaries are almost always politicians, like the outgoing incumbent, Ken Salazar. Jewell’s CV includes extensive experience in the oil and banking industries, suggesting a “pro-business” background that Republicans typically prize more than Democrats.

But Obama needs someone who can “get” business enough to make smart calls on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), but also share his policy priorities on conservation and renewable energy.

Read the rest at Quartz.

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