I wish the massive financial bailout money could be used to build and improve infrastructure. There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.
If only there were some precedent we could look to where huge numbers of people were out of work and the government killed two birds with one stone by employing a lot of them on major infrastructure projects. And what if those infrastructure projects, like improvements to roads, bridges and national parks, were largely outside and thus relatively safe even in today's climate of Covid-19.
It seems like we might go into a depression... if only that had happened before and we could draw on those experiences instead of dithering and arguing while people can't pay their bills.
> The Public Works Administration program and housing was primarily designed to provide housing to white middle-class/lower-middle class families. The progressive aspect of it was that some projects were built for African-Americans as well. But it was explicitly segregated. And in many cases, it segregated neighborhoods that had never known segregation before. So this went on throughout the country. Of the...
> ROTHSTEIN: The second major one was the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, the year after the Public Works Administration. And the Federal Housing Administration is well known today by many people as an agency that would not insure mortgages for African-Americans. It redlined communities. That was a minor part of what the federal government - what the FHA did in order to segregate metropolitan areas.
Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.
Did government bureaucrats micro-managing the economy stop being racist in that time?
> Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.
Redlining was invented by the government! The term refers to markings on FHA maps. The FHA massively distorted the mortgage market by insuring mortgages, but refusing to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. That made such mortgages vastly riskier for private sector lenders.
Okay, call me naive but would we rather the government have done nothing? I understand racism still exists but you can't act like we haven't made any progress. Could you imagine the protests if segregation or something akin to it started now? I understand horrific actions have been made in the past, I understand there are still bad people in the government. Should we let that prevent us from doing anything to help people? What about people who die of hunger or homelessness? Millions and millions of Americans are in extremely difficult positions right now, my parents included. Should we tell those people we don't even want to try because we're scared of something that happened 90 years ago? Can't we progress? Can't we be better? We certainly can't if we never even give ourselves the chance.
Sure, there were absolutely problems (though bear in mind you're addressing one program - there was also the TVA, CCC, and a bunch of others I could've told you off the top of my head when I was in US history in high school), but the point is it put unemployed people to work and helped stem the damage to the economy.
It's the best precedent we have for the situation we're in today, and it's silly to act as though it's not useful to draw on it now because it had problems. They're problems that are easily fixable, after all - it's very possible for us to create programs today that have similar positive effects on employment and the economy and just do them without the racism.
It's very easy to find fault with anything in history, but if that's all you try to do, you're going to miss out on a lot of really useful information.
> They're problems that are easily fixable, after all - it's very possible for us to create programs today that have similar positive effects on employment and the economy and just do them without the racism.
I disagree. The racism was a manifestation of the problems critics of the New Deal have with it: when you put government bureaucrats in charge of building things and running the economy, they inject their own biases and shortsightedness into the projects. We wouldn’t be building overtly racially segregated public housing today, but our bureaucrats still have plenty of biases to inject into their projects. (Listen to the podcast “Nice White Parents” for a good primer on how things like special language programs in schools become a way for wealthy, liberal, white parents to secure special resources in public schools for their kids specifically. Those are the same people that would be in charge of these New Deal 2.0 programs. E.g. you spend money for transit, and you have college educated white people spend billions building heavy rail through neighborhoods low income people can’t afford to live in, instead of shoring up the bus systems the overwhelming number of needy people actually use.)
The New Deal isn’t the only precedent we have. Look around at the world: everyone is doing basically the same thing we are. Bailing out airlines, providing increased unemployment benefits or payroll protection funds, etc. Instead of big, centrally planned projects, you inject money into the economy in a broad-based way with minimal bureaucratic discretion.
We've been injecting money into the economy in a broad-based way through PPP. It didn't turn out especially well, a lot of it went to large companies that didn't need it, and small businesses (largely restaurants) are going bankrupt in enormous numbers because it didn't help them sufficiently.
You're arguing that a New Deal-esque program is going to be problematic because it's inherently going to have issues in execution, but you're suggesting a solution that there's absolutely no reason to believe won't have issues in execution.
Problem is most unemployed people don't have the specialized skill set to contribute to these projects and those that do aren't unemployed. The unskilled labor these projects require has mostly been automated over the last 100 years by robotic tools like excavators.
Basically every problem we used to be able to throw manpower at now has similar automation and the same sorts of projects would now be done by far fewer people. Any modern new deal would have to look very different to the old one.
I won't even pretend to know enough about construction/infrastructure to know what's required to work on it, but there have got to be jobs that can be created that don't require technical skills. I've been reading that lots of people are now going to national parks because other stuff is closed, and they're leaving lots of trash - hire people to pick it up. Roads have potholes, and I can't believe that fixing those requires that specialized of a skill set.
And even for some of the things that are most efficiently solved with specialized skills and equipment, if there's a way to do them less efficiently by unskilled people, that's fine, since overspending on labor is totally fine if not desirable in this context.
> I can't believe that fixing those requires that specialized of a skill set.
No but it does require manual labor and a lot of people consider it beneath them these days to do that. Couple it with many people getting paid more to be on unemployment than they made while working and its a recipe for laziness.
Of course there's no single bridge building machine, but most of the work in bridge building is done by a collection of machines, usually with human specialists operating them. It's not the 1920's and most digging is done by an excavator instead of a human with a shovel, most cement is delivered by a truck humans mixing it onsite. As much as possible will also be prefab.
> There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.
Well, at the federal level, there are two chambers of Congress and the Executive. Given that there's an election coming up in November, you may wish to do vote for the folks that you best think will change the situation.
> at the federal level, there are two chambers of Congress and the Executive.
Changing anything for the benefit of the masses through electoral politics may never happen again or will be too slow. The last time two times the US had aligned executive and legislative branches were the first two years of the Obama and Trump regimes. So much changes between elections that there's no way we can fix it through electoral politics, and we must find another way.
We cannot vote our way out of the immediacy of a pandemic or a constitutional crisis or an environmental disaster. Voting is just too slow help the masses.
There was an episode of Monty Python I remember. The premise was that in the late 1960s Hitler and his cronies, under assumed identities, were staying at an English boarding house in Minehead, Somerset planning "to get the band back together" via some local election. The TV audience could see through the ruse, but the other residents of the hotel were oblivious. The scene I remember was Mr Hilter ranting from a balcony to a few scattered locals. The bunting was red, don’t remember was the insignia was. As a local yokel was staring up blankly at Mr Hilter’s Germanic rant about the sovereignty of Taunton, Hilter’s crony, Ron Vibbentrop, sidled up to the yokel and, as an aside, told the yokel "He’s right, do you know that?"
Don’t know why, but that just popped into my head...
> The last time two times the US had aligned executive and legislative branches were the first two years of the Obama and Trump regimes.
And Obama managed to pass healthcare reform (ACA, "Obamacare", national Romneycare).
If Binden gets in, and the Democrats can control Congress (the Senate is if-y), then I would hope they do something about climate change (carbon pricing?) as it is an existential threat.
There's also the need about dealing from all the COVID fallout, but that a lot there could be done via the competent running of the government. Infrastructure needs spending and that would entail Congress, so that may be a #3 priority.
> And Obama managed to pass healthcare reform (ACA, "Obamacare", national Romneycare).
If the best that the Democrats could do while controlling the executive and legislative was pass a Republican health insurance plan, we're in deep trouble. It should be clear by now that neither party passes anything that will materially better the working class and the toiling masses.
> There's also the need about dealing from all the COVID fallout, but that a lot there could be done via the competent running of the government. Infrastructure needs spending and that would entail Congress, so that may be a #3 priority.
All this presumes that the problem is competency. The problem is that none of these things are profitable. In a system that runs on profitablity, there is no room for services that lose money.
If you look through the lens of profit, I argue that the people who are running the government are competent in enriching themselves and those corporations that prop them. Both parties oversee the direct transfer of wealth from the masses to the few. For as much (or little) we pay in taxes, the masses do not benefit as much as the überwealthy do: we do not have a significant safety net, we have no housing, no healthcare, no security. Everything that is required to live costs money. This affects the masses more than it affects the wealthy, because the wealthy can afford anything. I would like to add that Obamacare is insurance and not healthcare, so it still costs the poor a significant portion of the little wealth they have.
This is because one of our two political parties doesn’t believe that government spending should exist, and is iffy about the concept of government overall. Because of that, the only body able to respond to crises is the Federal Reserve, and the only lever they have is the money supply.
We’ve had multiple trillion dollars worth of infrastructure repairs we need to do and nearly sub-zero borrowing rates for the last decade, but the GOP has effectively blocked any efforts to enact any kind of actual fiscal policy. If any business out there’s leadership refused to take sub-zero rate loans to perform critical maintenance on their capital stock, they’d rightly be fired and probably sued.
Spending on infrastructure is Keynesian - genuinely Keynesian, not the faux-Keynesian of bailouts, which are often labelled Keynesian with various degrees of good/bad faith.
Keynesianism is absolutely taboo in a plutocratic neoliberal economy - possibly because it's a credible reason for increasing taxation. And there's nothing a plutocracy hates more than having to pay more tax.
As you point out, in rational terms this is self-harming nonsense. Countries need repairs and they also need physical infrastructure investment. The 50s saw the Interstate system, the 60s saw generous funding for computer and IT R&D as well as other basic science, but since Reagan public spending for the public good has become unacceptable - largely because it "costs money."
As if creating jobs and valuable physical infrastructure is somehow an unreasonable expense and not basic common sense.
> The GOP has no power in California, though, and that’s been true for over a decade.
The GOP could still block tax increases (including any tax rearrangement that included an increase in some aspect), because of the supermajority requirement, until the Senate class elected in 2018, which was significantly less than a decade ago.
More to the point, California (both Constitutionally, and practically because of the market effect of being the issuer of the debt-denominating currency) borrow as freely and cheaply as the federal government.
They've been doing this by me. LA Metro actually finished digging up the street for a subway station about 7 months ahead of schedule (which I think is practically unheard of)
California has gotten a windfall in sales taxes from Amazon and Ebay in recent years when sales tax collection was forced. The money is always poorly spent.
I don't know in detail what California's budget is like (other than they've been in the whole lately?) But I personally view a lot of the issues with local and state government spending as being associated with bidding processes and the cost of e.g., infrastructure. I think California generally has the right priorities (roughly, education, healthcare, safety (although this could perhaps be reshuffled, see zeitgeist), and infrastructure). If anything I think they probably need to work to reduce costs in higher education especially and spend more on infrastructure (or reduce costs, but I think that'll be harder than in ed).
Much of the bailouts you're speaking of are loans, not grants. The very large exception is the Paycheck Protection Program, which will in most cases become grants to small businesses.
Given the need to institute social distancing, this is the only thing which is keeping hundreds of thousands of small businesses alive. Without the PPP, and other loans to large businesses, we would be seeing tens of millions of permanent job losses.
Much of this money was not spent, it was loaned. And without it the lasting economic effects would have been catastrophic.
I too would like to see additional spending on infrastructure, and I think we can afford it, but I find myself frustrated to see it framed as bailout vs. infrastructure. These financial lifelines are meant to keep our economy treading water while we necessarily social distance. They're not to save corporations from excessive speculation.
Speaking as a socal Californian, infrastructure isn't the problem it's that most of the state hates confronting reality. We'd rather raise minimum wage arbitrarily than admit we have a CoL problem, we invest in bike lane expansions while leaving buses to fight cars for space in most parts of our cities because "omg bikes are so eco friendly and Europe does it", and for some reason we hate high density housing even though rent is on the rise everywhere. We were supposed to have expanded our energy infrastructure already to make more use of natural gas which might have alleviated the need for rolling blackouts but instead we of course chased green energy projects that let people in the politically connected affluent regions pat themselves in the back.
Worth noting: This does not affect many of the major municipal utilities, including SMUD in Sacramento, LADWP in LA, and Silicon Valley Power in Santa Clara because many have their own generating capacity and are also in alternate distribution arrangements. The investor-owned utilities don't have much direct generating capacity anymore and rely on CAISO, and well, that has its limits. Also pretty sure that customers of the municipal utilities pay less than PGE/ SCE customers. For example, this is why Santa Clara has so many data centers (municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power).
Really unclear what value investor-owned utilities provide us - the municipal utilities in general seem way better.
I’m guessing it shields local government from lawsuits. You’re right though, better alternatives to an investor owned utility would be a co-op or non-profit.
We're going to need lots of power grid upgrades over the next few decades, for all the new air conditioning (climate change), and the electrification of heat and transportation (trying to avoid climate change.)
Are these upgrades even in the planning phase? People will be hesitant to migrate away from fossil fuels if they can't trust the alternative.
In a word, yes. There are plenty of smart people thinking about distribution management systems to control loads, manage local generation (household PV) and even use electric vehicles as an energy store to power the during periods of peak demand.
Supply authorities in my corner of the world (Australia) are planning this shift, but I can’t speak to the situation in other regions.
Air conditioning should be powered on site when possible.
In a different timeline we would have programs for zero interest loans for solar power installations with payments managed through the power company (trading paying for power to paying for the loan to generate the power).
We been having load shedding for a few years now in South Africa due to tender corruption , aging and badly maintained coal fired fleet and the late commissioning of new power stations.
Outages are at least planned and last about 2 and half hours every day for each area so we learned to cope plan our lives around it.
Solar power hot water/gas cooking appliance/DC battery backup system for the Fibre OTN box and Wireless router and wireless AP and I can continue to work.
Strange reporting that people were "believed" to have been blacked out. We lost power yesterday in Sunnyvale from 5-9pm. Very interested in more info on the "hundreds of thousands" because it seems like the cuts were fairly limited. There was enough power to keep the fridge running but thats about it.
PG&E isn't going to notify you because they aren't making the call. If you want notifications, install the CAISO mobile app, "ISO Today" on iOS. I got notifications from that app yesterday hours in advance of the outage.
I find it strange that a town with multiple high-tech fortune 500's can't power itself. This begs several questions on adequate management of taxation at the local level, and corporate interest in their own community's ability to support them.
It depends on how your system is hooked up. Some will cut out when the line power drops off, as a way of protecting line workers who might be working on what they think is a unenergized line, so they aren't surprised by the power your system puts on the line.
Others are designed with an automatic shunt that will still allow you to draw power as long as you are generating it.
The article doesn't give a lot of details. The grid shed ~1000 MW of load and delivered ~46000 MW, so the outage was in proportion about 2%. Not great but it puts events in perspective.
If you're concerned about this, don't charge your Tesla before 10pm.
If you had one, your individual choice would not prevent your particular electric service from going out, so no big deal.
It would be neat if the utilities had the ability to selectively shed car chargers, clothes dryers, and suchlike loads. I imagine they have to make the choice at a much more coarse level, like at a distribution substation.
Maybe because I'm in Texas rather than California, but AC is the absolute last thing I'd want turned off. It doesn't make sense to try to convince people to reduce AC on the hottest days compared to something like charging a car, running a water heater, etc., even though this is probably the largest demand in such a case. What percentage of consumers have signed up for this program?
Residential air conditioners are usually the largest "peaky" electrical demand and most utilities have a program where they'll give you discounts in exchange for being able to remotely turn off your air conditioner occasionally.
As with other impacts of shutdown and quarantine, shifts in demand and consumption patterns can mean that infrastructure isn't able to supply electricity to where it's specifically needed. It's been pointed out that electricity is not storable --- it's less an energy store as with fuel and far more energy distribution as with a transmission or driveshaft, but with far more connections. Not only must the Grid make power available when it is needed, but it must do so where.
Peak daytime demands in urban cores, offices, and factories is different from peak demands in residential exurbs, purely on distribution, even if quantity is comparable.
Your comment is completely correct in general, but I'll add that based on the information released by CAISO for this incident, it appears to have been caused by insufficient generation capacity to meet demand at the state level, not constraints on specific transmission or distribution circuits.
CAISO declared insufficient operating reserve (the generation capacity that is available to quickly ramp up or down to match load and generation), which forced them to drop load to get back within safe operating margins. It's better to do this than let the system get into an insecure state where a forced outage may cause cascading failures.
The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and
requests Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources.
Maximum conservation efforts are requested.
Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below
minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until
such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.
Residential solar once posed the opposite problem: generating power during the day in suburbs where it wasn't being consumed nor could it be transported to areas of high demand.
If our current problem is higher daytime residential demand, maybe power companies can stop fighting residential solar initiatives now?
As I understand it, the problem was evening demand, not daytime and that's probably also the real reason why all the empty office buildings aren't helping - most people would probably be out of the office and back home by them. If anything, residential solar makes this problem worse both by making non-solar generation less financially viable and causing a sharp increase in demand for it during the evening as the sun goes down.
There's a heat wave up and down the entire western US. Everyone from San Diego to Seattle is at home running their A/C if they're lucky enough to have one.
I wonder if the climate control units in office buildings have even been switched off when not in use.
I know that nobody turned off the one in our office when we were away from it for 6 weeks during the NZ lockdown.
It’s not remotely managed and we are not allowed to touch it so someone from the company that owns the building would have had to go and do that, and then come back later to turn it on again. And maybe some of the other businesses in the building are essential and have workers? No idea.
Most office climate control systems are still running, although perhaps at a reduced setting. Shutting them off could cause mold growth and equipment damage.
> I wonder if the climate control units in office buildings have even been switched off when not in use.
even if they're on, there'll be much less for them to do. fewer people opening doors, fewer bodies producing heat, less non-HVAC electrical demand (much of which ends up as heat).
I live in a suburb of the Bay Area where temperatures are usually in 70s and 80s. Suddenly it is going to be 100 for 5 day straight. I have never seen anything like this
How long have you lived in the Bay Area? I just checked the forecast, and it's not Pacifica your talking about (thank goodness, that would be really awful). Inland from the ocean such heat waves do occur.
And what's worse is that all the buildings are built assuming highs in the 80s that were typical 40 years ago, and zoning and permitting makes them uneconomical to replace.
100 for this long ? Last year the highest we got was 90s for a couple of days. I have never experienced 100 degree weather here on 12 years of living here. And that too for days
Which part of the bay? We lived in Los Altos for 6 years and when we first arrived old-timers said the heat was unusual. Every summer after had crazy heatwaves. A couple were so bad I was concerned about my infant, in our old house with no central air and terrible insulation.
Build some nuclear power stations and you'll fix both. While you're at it build a breeder reactor and feed it with stored nuclear waste to both produce new fuel for other stations and reduce the amount of radioactive waste which needs to be stored as well as the period for which it needs to be stored.
The grid is slowly being decentralized using grid-agnostic solar and storage. (I.e., solar power that stays going even when the grid drops off.) A computer network -- not a large infrastructure project -- is likely to be the solution.
The only solution is having enough generation and storage capacity for p999 or p9999 events. The grid ends up being beneficial because you can pool resources rather than balkanizing them.
Your Tesla Powerwall can probably keep your AC running for a couple of hours, but it costs $7,600. We're better off using economies of scale to our advantage.
The (small) silver lining is that these blackouts are happening in the evening which suggests that solar is holding up the grid during the day when air conditioners are at max. In the evening though AC is still on but solar is absent. Tesla's megapack batteries might have found a niche market.
The power grid must not only have sufficient generation capacity to match load, it needs some extra - called spinning or operating reserve. This ensures security - the characteristic where the grid is resilient to any single failure. Because load is not normally controlled (i.e. people can turn loads on and off without permission from the system operator), the system needs to be able to respond to that as well as contingencies like a line or generator trip.
Imagine, for instance, that you're fully maxed out on generation with no reserve, and one generator trips offline. You will now need to trigger emergency load shedding very, very rapidly (within seconds) to arrest frequency decline and a cascading, wide-area outage.
So you carry a margin of operating or spinning reserve, essentially generation that is available to very quickly ramp its output up or down in response to system conditions. When that margin starts to get eaten away by lack of capacity, you can do controlled load shedding, where you remove loads that have been already marked as low-priority to get some of your margin back. By doing this, you can avoid uncontrolled load shedding, which would have worse consequences.
The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and
requests Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources.
Maximum conservation efforts are requested.
Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below
minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until
such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.
Infrastructure is 50+ year investment and everywhere in the country has been slacking in development. Given the growth of the bay area and the increase in hot weather due to global climate change the system gets exacerbated because it's going out of spec.
The fact that it has been as robust (in delivery, not hazard) as it has for the last 20 years is a testament to its strength.
The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(
That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's.
And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).
And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.
Go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s and you can actually see things change. California voters put the brakes on infrastructure projects starting in the late 1950s, for example, like the 1959 anti-freeway San Francisco Supervisors vote. It all made sense to me once I learned about the Second Great Migration, a topic that strangely wasn’t taught to me at all by American public school curriculum.
>Go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s and you can actually see things change.
The time just after World War II was kind of an economic anomaly for the U.S. Our population of about 4% of the world generated something like 50% of the worlds GDP, most other industrial economies were still rebuilding.
It might not be accurate to consider that period as a baseline for purposes of economic comparison.
That was a counterpoint to the OPs concern about corruption today in an attempt to convey that it’s not all that different now, not to argue it’s better now.
Has any other President - Republican or Democrat - actively tried to make it less effective? Why are we pretending that the current administration is normal?
This isn’t a difference on the margins about whether you believe in supply side or demand side economics.
If you look back on Presidents or politicians on either side of the aisle. We have never seen anything like this during my lifetime (born in 74).
I didn’t agree with all of the policies or proposed policies of Republican or Democratic candidates on either side. But it was more like seeing your favorite sports team win or lose. I didn’t feel like they would or did do long term harm to the country (except for the deficit).
I would say the same about any of the other candidates in 2016. If they had won it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
The orange one has done his share of awful things (like every president), but if this virus hadn't appeared we would very much still be in the "sports team" situation.
We will certainly destroy ourselves by other means before "the deficit" affects us in the least. It never stopped us from buying more weaponry; now that there is obviously something else on which to spend money suddenly we should worry about it?
Who cares about inequality — poverty is down: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26532. The difference between the rich and the poor is less important than making sure that the poor are rich enough.
And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck[1], and 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense[2]. For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.
Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.
In the past 15 years, the largest growing population of homeless people are entire families, and the most common reasons for homelessness are lack of affordable housing, insufficient income, or loss of income.
From what I have both seen and read, housing costs are the #1 cause of this. They have exploded in the last 25 years.
The thing that blows my mind is that the COVID recession shows no sign of slowing down house price growth, though it has tempered rents in expensive markets.
If housing still rises even now, something is totally insane.
Yet the Federal Reserve study whence the "$400 emergency expense" claim was sourced states that 75% of adults are doing okay financially or living comfortably. The question about a $400 expense was about how people would pay for an unexpected $400 expense, not if they could pay for it. Only 12% could not pay for a $400 expense. The news media always tries to paint a dire narrative.
Per the US government, the median household in the US has $1000/month left over after all ordinary expenses. At the 78%, this is around $3500/month. As this strongly suggests, the statistics you are referring to do not actually assert what is often claimed of them. The underlying studies paint a more consistent, and less dire, picture.
> 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense
This is an often cited statistic that's been essentially debunked for being flawed and misleading[1][2].
> And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
Again, not a particularly useful statistic because 1. real consumption per capita has been increasing[3], and 2. the US has the 2nd highest household consumption[4] in the world.
"Living paycheck to paycheck" includes people that are destitute, but also people that just consume more than they should, and also people that are unable to save money due to increasing housing costs (not due to inequality, but due to zoning regulations). Of those who claim to be living "paycheck to paycheck", you don't know which are destitute.
> For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.
Sure, this has nothing to do with inequality. If you gave everyone health insurance in America today, inequality would hardly change. And inequality is NOT the root cause of America's healthcare system, the root cause is a series of policies passed in the 20th century that resulted in 1) healthcare being tied to employment, 2) a lack of any form of price transparency, 3) supply constraints on medical professionals that have resulted in the highest PPP adjusted salaries for medical practitioners in the developed world.
> Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.
We’ve always had mega-rich families. The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is not that "normal people" are competing with the super-rich, it's that they are competing with the upper-middle class. Where I live (Brooklyn), The rents aren’t driven up because I’m in a bidding war with Jeff Bezos; they’re driven up because I’m in a bidding war with other high earning millennial white collar workers. The “middle class” worker doesn’t stand a chance in our neighborhood.
Also the cost of living isn't up uniformly across the US, it's only up in most big cities where the root cause is attributable almost entirely to poor zoning regulations, not "inequality". You can see the salary one must earn to purchase the median house in every city[5] and outside SF/NY/Seattle, it's around the median household income.
That’s just not true, in practice, though. Laws are written by legislators who ultimately need to win the confidence of their constituents. No amount of money will install a representative who cannot win a democratic election.
We’ve seen this play out time and time again.
Jeff Bezos’ own district in Washington State is represented by a socialist.
Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.
In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).
Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.
Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both.
Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.
Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.
Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more).
Decades of research[1] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[2] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[3]. Even the studies[4] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins.
In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.
Yes, money helps you broadcast your message. If your message resonates, you can even win elections (what a concept). But money alone isn't persuasive.
> Healthcare costs are up, but you don’t have to worry about dying from a scraped knee.
As an American, you just need to worry about dying from incredibly common and treatable diseases like cancer, heart disease or diabetes due to lack of treatment. If you show up to an emergency room without insurance or ability to pay and expect chemo or a supply of insulin or blood pressure medication, you're out of luck.
My grandfather who fought in foxholes in South Pacific jungles didn't have to worry about dying from a scraped knee, either.
Segregation was rarely government mandated in the north during that time period, but it was often formal; many sports teams, property covenants, and unions prohibited black membership.
> The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals.
Americans have been saying this about their own country for decades. Many people see the worst in their own. And if anything I think the outlook was more pessimistic than now in the 80s, and even more than that in the 70s.
Realistically, for all its faults, the US is still where I'd aspire to live for best opportunity and quality of life if I couldn't live in my home country for some reason.
> if I couldn't live in my home country for some reason.
Which is why America is populated by extremes.
Almost everyone here was either kicked out of or lacked consensus with the prevailing, fairly benign version of whatever was practiced where they came from.
Starting? Either that was an attempt to not bruise the egos of patriots, or you just haven't been paying attention.
Here is how these conversations go:
Someone will make comparisons to the worst countries in the world to rationalize why America is number 1 in a race nobody even entered into. Instead of comparing it to 21st century developed nations. Rinse, repeat.
Follow by:
Could those developed countries have made those advances without the US subsidizing and helping de-risk the cost of their defense? Shrug
Does it makes sense for the US to allocate budget towards said defense while its domestic infrastructure flails? Shrug
Does the structure of the US contribute to this separation of foreign policy and domestic policy? With the broke states responsible for and failing at handling their own affairs, with the well funded Federal Government maintaining consensus by not getting into state affairs, forcing it to use its budget abroad on pet projects? Shrug
Does an actual budget really matter when the world has an infinite demand for dollars meaning that the US really could fund any domestic project and its external hegemony? Shrug
Are those developed countries' taxes really that high in comparison to what everyone in the US pays for anyway? Which country specifically? In many cases where high populations of Americans actually live, no it is very equivalent and Americans get the short end of the stick. Shrug.
People like to dismiss this by pointing to the shiny parts of America, but every city in the world has good and bad neighborhoods. The surprising thing about corrupt countries is the wealth inequality -- the political class is full of grifters who pocket the contracting fees and the citizens who are supposed to be recipients of government services are wondering why the highway has been under construction for the last 5 years. Or the bullet train in California. Billions of dollars are disappearing with barely a track bed to show for it. I'll quote this NYT piece.
"“Approximately two dozen other countries have found H.S.R. feasible, including Uzbekistan,” she said, referring to high-speed rail. “And there is no reason it can’t be done here.”"
The government collects and spends trillions of dollars, and most of that is wealth transfer to contractors, much less value reaches the ground, where much of the country is dotted with emptied out farm towns and improvised shelters. If you don't believe America looks the way some see it, take a cross country train, you go through everybody's back yard that way.
Funnily enough, the biggest obstacle to HSR in the US is all the restrictions we've put in place to protect people from corrupt or otherwise authoritarian officials. Uzbekistan doesn't have to worry about environmental impact reports or people complaining that the rail line will hurt their property values...
I would highly encourage you to reassess where you are getting your information about the world if you genuinely believe this.
I’m seeing this sentiment expressed more and more, and it seriously concerns me. If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.
This isn’t blind patriotism. Seriously if you are feeling like the US is becoming a “3rd world country” see if you can quantify it in some way. What is deteriorating, and how does that compare to other places in the world?
> I would highly encourage you to reassess where you are getting your information about the world if you genuinely believe this.
I have traveled extensively throughout the world and my assessment was based on my personal experience. But...
> If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.
Not so.
The U.S. is a peer to Serbia in infant mortality [1]. It is behind India and Lithuania in terms political freedom and civil liberties (as rated by freedomhouse [2] [3]) and a peer to Chile in terms of economic freedom [4] and government corruption [5]. The U.S. ranks 38th in math and 24th in science education.
And an anecdotal but IMHO significant data point: I have lived in the U.S. for fifty years. I have NEVER had a piece of U.S. mail go missing, until this year, when I have had THREE checks vanish into the cosmic void. (The fact that paper checks are even still a thing here is a testament to how far behind we have fallen.)
Amusingly, the Freedom House analysis breaks out India and Indian Kashmir separately. If the USA could move its worst behavior into a separate line item, then it would probably do better too. Your corruption index puts the UAE, a federation of absolute monarchies, ahead of the United States. Hong Kong scores at the top of your economic freedom index, even as billionaires disappear from its streets because they displeased Beijing.
Rankings that use a metric complicated enough to give the compiler heavy discretion on the order (like your 2-5) are compiled by people promoting certain ideals. Major powers rarely score at the top, regardless of whether they "deserve" to, because that defeats the political purpose--if you're trying to promote X, then telling the world's most powerful country that they're also the most X has little benefit, just encouragement for them to get complacent and backslide.
In objective rankings, the USA's health care system is indefensible, unless you're both wealthy and in genuine need of unusually high-tech care; but that infant mortality is still just 1.3x Canada's. The American education system seems to be well above average; per your link the USA ranked 8/48 and 11/48 for science and math respectively, out of 48 countries that themselves are mostly well above the global average.
It's reasonable to hold the USA to a higher standard than other countries, given its outsize influence and resources. Indeed, the impulse among both Americans and others to criticize America's real faults, sometimes in hyperbolic terms, is probably one of the major forces pushing to correct them. Anyone who net believes the American standard of living--especially for rich Americans, but for poor Americans too--isn't spectacularly above the global average is dangerously mistaken, though.
(You might be able to pick slightly better ranking based on your choice of source, but yeah, we are no where near the top. If you filter for developed economies we are near the bottom or have already slipped through the floor)
With specific regard to electrical infrastructure, World Bank data ranks the US in 25 place globally. Notably, the US is behind Canada (which faces very similar geographic and climactic issues with its infrastructure), the UK, France, and Japan. The only major developed democracies to score worse are Germany, Italy, and Australia.
Maybe it's just ignorance then. Quality of life in Northern Europe is far better than it ever was in California, which in retrospect looks like a joke.
What is quality of life? Sounds pretty subjective. One person may rank weather at the top, so Northern Europe sucks. Another may rank parental leave at the top, so the US sucks.
Probably the most objective way is to measure how people vote with their feet.
I think it’s an interesting point. The USA always gets compared to Europe, especially Western Europe with this so called “Quality of Life” statistic. However there are far more Western Europeans moving to the USA than the other way.
I don’t know, my siblings and I do better than our parents who put time in to raise us. We didn’t have much except each other. We weren’t without but we never had a vacation or went out to eat. Went to public schools, etc. But my parents respected each other and sacrificed a bit to raise us. I’d say my family has moved from working class into middle class and upper middle class for some of us.
Our quality of life seems pretty nice. It’s weird because when I moved to nyc many of the people that complained a lot were from well to do families and they clearly weren’t doing better. They were being recycled downwards and they seemed to resent successful people because of it. They make a lot of noise but my friends back home, many of which are doing better than their folks, don’t go on social media talking about.
> However there are far more Western Europeans moving to the USA than the other way
Yeah, you have a “engineer” bias: people move to the US when they make top 10% income because it’s the only way your life is better than in a Western European country. You don’t see Europeans making median wage in the US because that would be quite stupid.
My parents combined make maybe 15-20% of my income in the US, they still go on more vacation than me, don’t have to worry about figuring out how healthcare work (yup gotta make sure you don’t go to a out of network hospital by accident otherwise hello 300000$ debt), and sent their kids to university for almost free.
> What is quality of life? Sounds pretty subjective.
I guess it would sound like that if you don't know anything about it and don't bother to look into it and don't realize people, including the OECD, thoroughly study it. [1][2] Furthermore, it's pretty idiotic to ignore subjectivity since it's the only thing that really matters in the end. If people in Europe rate their life better then Americans do then clearly Europeans are better off.
The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.
also Maternity/Paternity Leave, Paid Sick Time, and Paid Vacation
In many of those areas (incarceration rate, rate of homicides) the US is doing vastly worse than other OECD countries.
You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.
1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?
> You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.
Do you have some numbers for that? The only load shedding I remember in Europe was done through turning off large consumers and they would typically do this on their side.
I'm only picking the first Google result for each year. I could keep going but I hope the point is made: Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year. It reacted comparatively slowly because it's so infrequent there was no recovery plan. The political impact of the outage was huge, the country's attitude was that everything is collapsing - and by "collapsing", they mean "like America is all the time."
> Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year.
The Berlin power outage linked above was over thirty hours, and the SF outages you linked were a few hours. To bury that in "(not always duration)" seems misleading to me. That said, the 2019 power cuts were indeed approaching third-world duration and frequency, to the point that homeowners who could afford it applied the usual third-world workarounds (gas generators, etc.). That was mostly outside the biggest cities, but huge numbers of people were affected.
And how did we get from SF to "most American cities"? California's grid reliability is notoriously and distinctively bad, and a huge political topic here too (though with little progress after many years). The World Bank[1] puts the overall USA's quality of electricity supply solidly in the middle of high-income countries though, slightly ahead of Germany.
We also seem to be mixing load shedding (i.e., the utility realizes they can't safely supply all their customers and therefore deliberately cuts power to some) with accidental outages. They look the same to the customer, but perhaps imply different kinds of bad planning by the utility.
I don’t know what you are comparing. A power outage due to an accident, affecting a limited population is very different than blackouts. Such emergency outages happen every day
The subject and question was specifically rolling blackouts and neither of those were rolling blackouts, so no, try again.
Of course failures happen, for example when I was living in Mountain View we had a blackout because a squirrel committed suicide by chewing through a high voltage cable. Or when I was living in Detroit, we were without power and heating for 3 days due to an ice storm. It was a pretty large (and long) outage, and we had freezing temperatures inside the house. Generators were sold out for 500 miles.
> Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?
I don't know, California, how about you start by spending the billions you need to make sure people just baseline don't burn to death, and then we'll see what delivery reliability looks like?
Didn’t PG&E also have to shut off a bunch of people’s power last summer to try to avoid burning down any more cities? I recall there was talk about this happening for an entire decade. So really at this point it seems like summer blackouts might be happening every summer in California for the foreseeable future.
"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.
"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
The Indian reservation part is true. Most Americans have never set foot in one. If you want to see what it's like, I recommend driving through the South Dakota reservations. But be prepared for a shock of sadness. They feel like different countries entirely.
It has been great to see the support in recent months for equality among all races in the US. But I wish we would also see more explicit support for Native Americans, for their suffering and their genocide. They are a group that has been exploited, victimized, and stolen from as much as any other group in America.
Maybe it just isn't possible with such a large population. On the other hand, US gives you the opportunity to become filthy rich and it probably helps that you have such a large population to use to your advantage (whether it be labor or customers).
Indian reservations are truly in horrific condition. I have spent many days in Navajo nation during my time in Arizona and it reminds of developing countries
America as an ideal has failed and anyone who wants to come here should think twice.
Every country has their problems, but years of neglect and backwards thinking on social, civic, and cultural “brick work” has led to this.
The civil rights movement was never carried through. The Cold War mentality of military spending on the ever present “boggieman” wasted tens of trillions of dollars of GDP. The vilification of taxes, civic and social programs while also the decades long trend of funneling money to the top. The dirty politics of special interests, limited access, lobbying and un-checked money in politics. The widening wealth gap in both fiscal and quality of living. The gutting and simplification of the educational system to focus on math and sciences instead of raising well-rounded emotionally intelligent young humans. The belief that shoehorning everyone into a college education and the crippling debt that comes with it. The complete lack of national infrastructural investment since the 1950s.
All of this leads to disillusionment. Especially when generations have grown up being fed this believe of “not in america”. Disillusionment leads to desperation, leads to anger, and hate, and scapegoating, to fake “christian” mega churches were people are scamed out of not only their money but the last tatters of their divinity.
Technology like the internet mixed with stunted critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and compassion form into a deadly cocktail that breeds and spreads conspiracy theories and delusions fed to us by our enemies directly into our living rooms, on cable television, on our computers, and into our cellphones. Very little of it vetted or touched by anyone. To be shared and re-shared on Facebook in fear to our friends.
And all of this wasted human potential at the cost of the only thing we all share. The Earth.
The issue here isn't that the California power grid has deteriorated, but that there's an extraordinary heat wave. I don't think it's fair to tie this into a grand decline narrative.
A robust infrastructure should be able to handle surge loads. This isn't an extraordinary heat wave after some other natural disaster has directly damaged the power grid; it's that the grid as designed and built can't handle this load.
It's hardly conclusive for a "grand decline" narrative, of course, since this is just one anecdote for an entire society.
Thanks to climate change, this is probably not going to continue to be a 1 in 20 year load. Expect this to be more and more frequent over the coming years. Might be an every year and/or multiple times a year thing within the next decade or two.
I've read some predictions that suggest these heat waves becoming a regular thing could happen within the next five years, but I'm sticking with more conservative predictions.
Do you really need to pay for house wiring that can handle a once every 20 year load? Pretty sure you would change your tune when the wiring melts in one of your walls.
The problem is not lack of grid capacity. California is capable of importing upwards of 11 GW[0] but there was only around 8 GW[1] available yesterday because it's hot in neighboring states like Oregon too.
The load shedding occurred around 8-10pm after the sun has gone down (but while it's still quite hot) so more solar wouldn't help much.
I think you're misunderstanding how power grids work. There's no way to stockpile large supplies of power like you can with food and water; to first order, all electricity that's produced today has to be consumed today. So it's an impossible task to have enough capacity available for arbitrary demand surges. It's not just a matter of shoveling coal in the furnaces twice as fast or drawing down the local power reservoirs.
The more terrifying fact is that the scenario described in the novel has already partially happened in the real world.
* New Clues Show How Russia’s Grid Hackers Aimed for Physical Destruction
> Russian hackers planted a unique specimen of malware in the network of Ukraine's national grid operator, Ukrenergo. Just before midnight, they used it to open every circuit breaker in a transmission station north of Kyiv. The result was one of the most dramatic attacks in Russia's years-long cyberwar against its western neighbor.
I read that book, it is good, there is a good presentation about how difficult it would be to do that in reality, based on the same source that the book used:
Texas generates more power than it needs (which is good because I seem to recall they also aren't tied to grids of neighboring states?). California doesn't. California banks on the probability that it can import power from Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona, and that all those states won't have one big correlated, synchronized demand peak, which of course is just stochastic. Sometimes you get the worst case.
And despite whatever stereotypes you might have about Texas, it produces more power from renewable sources (beside hydro) than any other state in America, by a pretty fair margin.
Texas seems to get hate for some reason but everyone I know that lives there (and many have moved from California) love it. I’ve been many times and I haven’t found much to dislike other than I prefer the structure of East Coast cities and towns, which is a personal preference.
Texas is affordable, welcoming, and plays to its strengths. It seems like the land of opportunity today and it makes sense it is growing so fast. It seems like I hear jealousy about it in terms of it being a moderate to slightly conservative state overall.
This is just a guess. Most housing built after 2000 have AC units but our weather tends to be mild so people don't run it normally. Heatwave is causing everyone to flip on their ACs. Also in the middle summer, hydropower i would guess is at its lowest output. Also noticed a lack of a breeze at the beach today which would be affecting wind power if there wasn't significant air movement.
I think California in general has an identity crisis right now - a victim of its own success.
It is probably the most unequal place in America in terms of wealth and income. But yet it is almost in denial about that.
It is a huge polluter but refuses to really take action outside of token policies. Nuclear reactors might be a bit too much risk considering the seismic activity - but thorium reactors could be safely deployed. Regardless, sprawl is everywhere and it’s all cars with almost no viable public transit. If you take California public transit it’s almost never by choice.
It wants to punitively tax the wealthy and even those with some good fortune in a successful startup,(new wealth tax proposal is evidence) but these are the biggest revenue sources and they are leaving, like NYC to escape the taxes. The new proposal would tax you even AFTER you leave - good luck!
They keep looking for tax revenue to prop up their pretty bad public school system but yet have the most regressive property tax law in the nation. NIMBY and “I was here first” mentality is rampant for such an inclusionary place.
I think the issue with property tax policy in California is that it is nativist. You essentially lock-in a price and if you don’t move, over time you’ll be paying peanuts compared to people buying a home for the first time. This starved communities of revenues so they keep jacking income tax on workers while people sit in or rent their homes that have appreciated to millions of dollars and pay almost nothing to the community. You can also pass the property down to kids who will continue to pay very little tax on it and be able to rent it for profit.
I have my own issues with property tax in that it penalizes improving a property (should be primarily based only on land value, not what is built on it for redudebtial) However it’s a tax that should be better at ensuring funds stay more local than a state tax. This means the schools and public resources can be funded by the community as they see fit. It’s a local tax abd I think local policies and power are best left to localities. It’s easier and more practical for citizens to participate in local government and it effects us most. Much better than sending all the tax revenue to a centralized government that shreds it apart like hyenas.
States like Texas get it right imo. No income tax and higher property taxes which the localities set mainly. With a portion going to the state to run and to distribute to communities that need a bit of help.
