>As an institution of higher education, I believe that we should be evaluating all of our options and enacting what is equitable for our employees. Please note that 'equitable' does not mean everyone is treated the same. Some individuals have life circumstances out of their control during COVID. We are already working remotely, we know that it does work. Further, it gives those of us that need it the most the flexibility to protect our families, our students, and our programs without having to choose one over the other. It helps us do our jobs more efficiently and effectively simply because we do not have to choose between work or family. This should not have to be a choice at a place like [institution name]. In our leadership covenants, we sign onto a work-life balance, not work over life. Have we decided to simply eliminate this agreement in our covenants go to increase our (enrollment) profits for the college by having everyone back to work arbitrarily? I would desperately hope not. Was that necessarily the intention? Probably not, but it feels that way to me and probably to others.
This is what I sent the HR office. To follow to the President.
My company also rushed to reopen our home office today. I and most my team are not located there so we continue to work remotely. But many of my co-workers were puzzled by the rush to get people back in the office after 3 months of working remotely quite effectively. There was also some confusion over who was required to return to the office when.
After I found out masks were optional in the office late last week, I sent a message to the executive I report to this weekend outlining my concerns about this and a couple other things. Some policy adjustments were announced this morning! So sometimes the system does work.
I also made it very clear to my team that I was recommending they continue to work from home. I communicated to them that they were not going to impress me with their courage or dedication to the company if they went back into the office. They will impress me by continuing to do good work and remaining safe.
My last job was at a university so I know how things tend to operate in higher education. Best of luck. If I were working at your institution, I would be grateful to know people like you were speaking up.
Building on this. If you have the risk tolerance. Just stating that you have to work remotely (if its legitimate) at-risk health, child care, family care I'm sure there can't be a ton of pushback on an individual level. Otherwise it might be a GREAT signal to leave a company who in the midst of a pandemic is irrational.
Companies being willing to throw their employees into meat grinders has generally been rewarded by the market (which also tends towards the irrational).
This is absolutely true, and normally those companies will receive reduced profit/revenue if the move is truly detrimental, and the company will slowly die and accumulate debt and drop in share price.
Unless of course the Federal Reserve continues to pull a BOJ and prop up zombie firms with free money, thus completely destroying the "disruption" of an otherwise bad company's business model.
Everybody should be you, if possible. Having enough savings to be able not to worry about the nearest future is not just a perfect option, it's a necessity.
Unfortunately it's not a realistic option for most people. If we're talking about "shoulds", then we should have a welfare state that covers these scenarios rather than putting the burden on individuals, many of whom will not have the means to implement it even if they wanted to.
I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state. I know it seems to work in other places, but I'm not convinced that what works in Scandinavia (or wherever) will work in the US. It seems like the US has a lot of other problems that it needs to sort out in order to be in the same ballpark as these model countries with respect to successful government programs. Notably, our bureaucracy seems distinctly ineffective and incompetent, our body politic is highly divided, and our media apparatus optimizes for divisiveness and misinformation (maybe some or all of these are common problems among countries that have strong safety nets, I really don't know). This isn't to say we must sort out our government competence, etc before implementing a stronger social safety net, but I do wish we at least tried to solve for these problems in tandem with other policy issues.
> I'm inclined to agree, but I do wonder how we avoid people just adjusting their risk threshold to account for the welfare state.
Which direction are you picturing this going?
I would be a lot more flexible in what jobs I would take, what things I would consider doing with my life (starting my own company, taking time off and pursuing some sort of artistic side project...) if I had a good health care safety net.
So that adjustment to my risk tolerance would be good if you're pro-entrepreneurship or pro-arts, but bad if you're pro-giant-faceless-companies-that-can-treat-employees-like-crap.
I was specifically concerned that people would take unproductive risks. Worse business investments, having children outside of an unstable family situation more often, etc. But your point is a good one; my concern could be unfounded and maybe people would be more productive? I genuinely don't know. One question I would have about your model is how it stacks up against countries with strong social safety nets? Do they tend to be more entrepreneurial as your model predicts? If not, why not?
Note that while by certain measures, those countries tend to be less productive than the US, I don't necessarily think that comes down to welfare, and in either case I don't think it's an awful thing to be somewhat less productive. I would personally like to work less.
As I see it, the welfare state model has the benefit of moving towards maximizing the potential of each individual. If you have free education and a strong safety net, you can take a lot of risks in terms of career choice without even realizing it, and never be worse off for it.
The 'individual responsibility' model of states like the USA seems to be more based on blunt acceptance of the idea that someone needs to take out the trash and tend the lawns, and that gets too expensive if people have a choice in whether or not they want to do manual labour.
It’s not a scheme to make anyone do anything. Notably most Americans take out their own trash and tend their own lawns. It’s more to do with individualism and independence (quite the opposite of a scheme to force people to do manual labor)—the belief that the government has no right to take your money and redistribute it to others. That’s the philosophy, anyway.
In my view this hasn’t held up well in practice and we need to move toward a more socialized society, but we also need to reform our government agencies so they are competent to perform these social services.
Lastly I’ll say that manual labor isn’t stigmatized in the US as it is in the UK and other parts of the commonwealth). People are pretty proud of their humble roots (I’m from a working class family and I would never think to be embarrassed of that in most parts of the US). Further, many skilled labor jobs in the US pay comparably to engineering jobs in the UK. The highest figure I found for average software engineering salary in the UK is 48000 GBP which comes out to $60K, which is the average salary for a plumber (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...) or an electrician (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...) in the US. The average salary for a general contractor is $90K (https://www.indeed.com/career/general-contractor/salaries). For an HVAC repair technician, $70K (https://www1.salary.com/HVAC-Salary.html). Arguably these positions won’t have the same quality of health insurance and they’ll be working ~10% more than our UK SWE, but they’re not making bad money by UK standards even after adjusting for healthcare and hours worked, and they’re making great money by UK standards when you factor in cost of living differences.
Maybe if we had a functioning welfare state, the government would be encouraged to respond to a pandemic appropriately so as not to overwhelm its resources. Scandinavia seems to be doing better than the US at the moment.
As it stands, it looks like the US is using its lack of a social floor to force people back to work under unsafe conditions, regardless of whether that’s rational or necessary, which will result in masses of unnecessary injuries and deaths.
This is true in the same way that if a homeless person had a million dollars he might not be homeless. The trick is how to get a functioning welfare state when your government is fundamentally broken.
Note that the even the CDC failed spectacularly at its primary job; its literal raison d'etre. You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence.
[^1]: Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight (we knew from previous epidemics like SARS and MURS that the most likely epidemic would be respiratory in nature). Similarly, it's cheap enough to plan for standardized outbreak data collection and reporting (we should have known right away how many confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and tests we had in every locale). Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
I liked Obama and everything, but I don't think the federal government was meaningfully more capable of administering a significant welfare program then than it is now. As much as we like to pretend that Obamacare was a great success, I don't get the feeling that it dramatically improved circumstances on balance (premiums went up across the board but coverage for preexisting conditions is guaranteed so that's something I guess).
I'm sure we'll all talk about how this is all the Republicans' fault, and that may well be true; however, it doesn't excuse us from perpetuating the cycle of divisiveness at every opportunity; however, cathartic that may be. We need to work to understand and build bridges if we're to be more than Pyrrhic victors. Of course partisanship and tribalism will always be more popular until we've reached whatever low we're willing to accept.
Obamacare was huge for pre-existing conditions and the marketplace, you actually had options now, instead of zero. Also Obamacare was watered down to appease Republican interests at the time. There was no interest in building bridges during it's building, Republicans were laying out the dynamite, and spent a hell of a lot of wasted effort after Trump took office trying to trigger that dynamite.
It is hard to meet in they middle when both sides are extremely far apart, and each side has factions that are even further apart than ever before.
Really we need more than two parties dictating the agenda. It is getting harder for the far left to even want deal with Democrats, much less Republicans. The same is happening with the far/alt right.
Why? Naivety. He wanted it to be bipartisan. This is about as in the middle as you can get, and it wasn't good enough. It wasn't just watered down for the blue dogs or Lieberman.
I mean, ok. But, if Lieberman (the 60th vote) was willing to vote for something farther left (hypothetically), why not remove that stuff once you realize it won't get republican votes?
I'll agree that Lieberman played a large role in the death of the public option. That said it was eleventh hour and further changes to the bill would require more time to rectify, and Republicans were still involved down to the wire, even if they didn't vote for it.
> There was no interest in building bridges during it's building, Republicans were laying out the dynamite, and spent a hell of a lot of wasted effort after Trump took office trying to trigger that dynamite.
So what's the point? One could argue that Republicans were responding in kind. You would disagree (as would I, but that doesn't matter). This kind of endless litigation only polarizes us--we each permit our own extremists because we believe they are slightly less bad than the other side's extremists. I think a multi-party system would be helpful, but I think the problems run deeper (especially since we're seeing the same trends toward polarization in countries with multi-party systems).
I think at its core the problem is that our epistemological institutions are corrupted by extremists. We aren't having an actual debate because the "hosts" or "moderators" of the debate are only presenting one perspective and only the facts that support it. The other side isn't going to have their opinions changed because their questions aren't being addressed, only shouted down and maligned. I think this lack of real national discussion drives each side to be more entrenched and more extreme, and I think this is somewhat by design--the media in particular seems to be optimizing for it deliberately.
I think we need to build a collective awareness of the manipulation we're subject to. We need to understand that the folks on the other side of the party line aren't evil, but that we're being presented with a distorted perspective (although certainly many on each side really are bad). We need to start moderating ourselves as individuals and developing empathy for people on the other side of the party line while demanding better of our institutions. We won't start agreeing with each other on everything or indeed many things (and certainly not overnight), but we should be able to have productive debate and work gradually through issues. We need to start humanizing each other and finding common ground.
Obamacare didn't actually need Republican support, but Obama did try to reach out an olive branch to the right, and it was stomped on repeatedly.
It is very hard to empathize with conservative capitalists, libertarians or the alt right, when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy.
It's also kind of sad that rioting, protests and raw anger over recent social issues has been more effective at moving the needle than decades of political handwringing. I don't think this is going to help with any "see it from both sides and meet in the middle" arguments.
> Obamacare didn't actually need Republican support, but Obama did try to reach out an olive branch to the right, and it was stomped on repeatedly.
Right. He had the right idea. Of course things wouldn’t change over night. One man making positive gestures is important but insufficient to turn the ship on a dime. A lot of mistrust had been built up by that time and others were continuing to build that mistrust. I think he did a lot to stem the tide of divisiveness, especially given how quickly things fell apart in that regard after he left office.
Again, I don't buy the "meet in the middle" approach or the "both sides are at fault" theory. Only one side has a populist leader who's platform was to foment racism and pledged to destroy Obamacare, and basically no one is reigning him in. If anything, people are volunteering for their chance to be thrown under the bus. It's very hard to meet in the middle with the current situation. There is serious moral concern if meeting in the middle means "a moderate amount of racism is acceptable", and when reaching an olive branch on policies results in no cooperation and instead pledges of destruction down the road.
However even with Democrats, there are a lot of people who think Bernie was unfairly treated, and that Biden is in bed with corporations, while establishment democrats think you should vote "blue no matter who", and that Bernie supporters were loons. Again, hard to come to a middle ground even within each party.
I don’t know man. I don’t see how we’re going to go anywhere if we’re determined to only see the worst qualities in our opposition. Notably contrary to your point, lots of conservatives are Never Trumpers and are very unhappy about the populist turn things have taken. Anyway, if you’re interested in minimizing racism, “the middle” is where we should be. The poles are obsessed with their racial hierarchies. Moderates are committed to a post-racial egalitarian future, even if they don’t have all of the information or political power to push things over the line. But anyway, good luck; it feels like doubling down on polarization, division, intolerance, etc is a recipe for disaster, but I guess I hope I’m wrong since it seems like the direction we’re committing ourselves to as a country.
I have a hard time finding a middle ground that would have it be acceptable for people of color to be considered lesser, but this has been the status quo for decades after the civil rights act. There is no moderate position to take on the matter of racism, no meeting in the middle with those who want to uphold racist institutions or systems. Moderate behavior comes off as weak tea inaction in order to restore an unsatisfactory status quo. Both sides should have polarized views pointed towards anti-racism, it should not even be something on the table that needs to be bargained for, but that's not the case.
MLK Jr was not a moderate, and had problems with their ineffectiveness.
The article is 2 years old, what was done in those two years to help prevent the outcome we're seeing now? More black men got shot by police with little to no action done about it.
I think you’re mistaken. The moderate position minimizes for racism; moderate doesn’t mean “status quo” or “50% racism” or whatever you seem to think it means. Like everyone, moderates don’t know how to fix the cycles of poverty and violence in inner city communities that lead to disparate outcomes, but that doesn’t mean they are unwilling (note that there is broad support across the spectrum for police reform). And progressives haven’t articulated any policies apart from “abolish the police” (which is flatly rejected by 70% of black Americans)—otherwise they just kind of shout about “dismantling whiteness/white supremacy/systemic racism/systems of oppression/capitalism” but they can’t seem to define any of those terms concretely or coherently much less articulate policies. So it’s not like progressives are actually going to do anything about racism that moderates wouldn’t; the difference in my mind is that in their effort to eliminate racism they would succeed only in creating a hyper-racial society that doesn’t value free speech, due process, equality, or other human rights (not to mention widespread economic damage from “dismantling capitalism”).
Police are being charged with murder for things that would likely have been covered up and swept under the rug previously. Confederate monuments and those paying tribute to slavery and/or colonialism have been torn down from public display. Racist mascots are being retired. Conversations around hostile work environments and pay gap for POC are happening and being aired in the open. Why hasn't moderate action been effective enough to even get that done? It seems a few weeks of unrest has done more than decades of tepidness.
Treat people as equals doesn't exactly need a list of demands, but the discrimination has become so ingrained that some need it spelled out for them.
> when much of their policies seem to be based on a lack of empathy
This is a misunderstanding. The difference is not in the presence or absence of empathy, but rather in how that empathy is expressed: private interaction or government programs. The libertarians are not lacking in empathy; they just don't see it as a suitable justification for political action.
Of course, if you only discuss the problem from a political angle, and consider only political solutions, then it would indeed seem like they aren't interested in solving it at all, when in fact they are very interested in finding a solution—just one that doesn't involve force.
> Procuring masks and other PPE or even planning for a supply chain shortage is the cheapest, most impactful thing they could have done even without the benefit of hindsight
IIRC we did have a massive stockpile of masks, but it was only discovered at the start of the pandemic that they weren't being rotated out and most/all of them had degraded too far to be safe.
> You can criticize that the CDC lacked funding, but that is wrong[^1] and it misses the point: not being able to properly fund our agencies is itself evidence (if not proof) of government incompetence.
I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.
> Similarly, we should have also had plans for scaling out testing capability. We also shouldn't have rolled our own (fallible, time consuming) tests if we were cash strapped--we should have used the WHO tests. Planning is relatively cheap and by all appearances the CDC didn't do it at all.
We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
> I'm not sure how this works out, considering we have one party whose entire stated goal is to defund the government and reduce government size. They are also the ones pulling the levers right now and have admitted over and over again to slash-and-burn styles of governing. Our government is fundamentally broken because we elect people who break the government and then say it's broken, so we need less of it.
I agree with this assessment to the extent that we keep electing poor officials, but I don't think it's a "one party is amazing and the other is terrible". In particular, the CDC's issues were around a long time before the prior administration (again, SARS was in 2003 and we scarcely made preparations in the intervening years). To the extent that the problem is the officials we elect, I think that's partially true--I think the government is an emergent property of the health of our body politic, but our body politic is highly partisan (as evidenced by your comment). This is partly due to a divisive media but also probably to our two party system. We will keep electing worse officials because those officials can make a plausible argument that they are at least marginally better than the officials in the other party. The bar keeps getting lower; it's a race to the bottom.
> We had a pandemic response team and the previous admin did make plans in case of a future pandemic. Our current one decided to toss most of that out and downsize said response team. Additionally the US Government was literally seizing masks and undermining the CDC every step of the way.
The pandemic response team wasn't part of the CDC, but yes, disposing of that team was a bad idea in hindsight. It doesn't absolve the CDC; however, and it misses the point in the same way that the "but the government didn't properly fund the CDC!" argument misses the point.
Um, I'm not sure it's easy at all for people to live as precariously as they do in the US now with a decent safety net. Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way? You'd have to be pretty clever to emulate that.
> Imagine a UBI that pays a smidgen every 10 seconds: how does one emulate living "paycheck to paycheck" that way?
It's not that difficult. You just take out a big interest-only loan with payments exactly equal to your UBI. The process doesn't change significantly just because you're getting paid every 10 seconds rather than once per week: the money is already promised to someone else before you even receive it.
A welfare state isn't necessary if people save aggressively like in Singapore. People are actually required to save something like 35% of their income and their employers have to contribute an additional 15%. Some welfare exists but only for special circumstances like for the needy or disabled. Simply telling people to save more wouldn't cut it in America. If we end welfare like the Republicans want, I think we would need a government mandated savings rate or employment matching program similar to Singapore. We also need to go back to a gold standard and end inflationary fiat money - this is exactly why people dont have a rainy day fund / have no incentives to save in the first place. Its left the individual and the family vulnerable, fragile, and it has lowered our time horizons and corrupted our institutions and increased our dependence on the government.
I don't think anyone's in favor of rampant money supply expansion like we've seen over the past decade or so, but I think you have to ignore or disagree with some pretty basic conclusions to be in favor of returning to the gold standard. Despite the potential negative effects, printing money seems to be effective in staving off the most severe effects of economic downturns. Evidence from 2008 and the coronavirus stimulus seems clear - you can fairly effectively prop up employment and demand without driving up inflation too badly.
And yes, I'm aware that the way that official inflation is measured is bad - but is it really terrible? Technology is definitely under-measured but it's also still relatively cheap. You can get a decent laptop that will last a few years for a couple hundred bucks. You can get Netflix or other streaming service that's very arguably better than for $100 a year. Healthcare and real estate are super jacked up (and maybe education) are super jacked up, but that's arguably due more to terrible policy and a fundamentally limited supply (God isn't making more land in Manhattan).
In theory MMT[0] sounds like this shady conspiracy to force the working man to buy more Coca Cola and Ford Trucks but in practice it turns out that unemployment is very painful and inflation isn't.
You're basically replacing an insurance program that everyone pays into with safety guarantees with a savings account that each individual pays into with zero guarantees and each individual now has to know how to save enough for themselves, oh and the government will take some of your money if you don't save enough of it. I can't imagine anything more regressive.
The entire purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure our economy devalues our savings at about 5% a year. So every year those of us required to save are losing money to the people who have easy access to credit. And like every "plan" in this country it will be 100% based on W-2 income meaning the extremely rich won't ever be affected by it, just like they're not affected by insurance costs or social security insurance.
It might be nice to have a strong welfare state that covered all possible scenarios. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with the open-borders immigration that seems to be all the rage with some these days. Promise free money for nothing, and billions of third-worlders will be beating down your door. We might be able to afford something like that for all current citizens. We'll never be able to afford it for every single person who figures out a way to come to our shores.
This means that you have to choose one or the other. Both ways have people who lose, and it won't be pretty for them.
It's not "should" in the sense of some moral obligation, but rather your main aim in life: once it's realized, you can move on to realizing other aims.
Of sourse many people really can't do it. But there are many who can but choose short-term gratification instead. I'm telling them: you're making a big mistake.
There is no avoiding personal responsibility, we give power to bureaucrats to run some stuff for us but you can't solely rely on their judgment. Unless we are talking about the helpless and inept in our society, then I agree with you.
This is what I told my boss when these orders came down... they are still deciding what to do.
Edit: Be aware, I have enough emergency savings for around 3 years worth of fuck it. I'm not you and you should not be me.