[T]he methods we use to measure our economies are becoming increasingly out of date. The statistical conventions on which we base our estimates were adopted a half-century ago, at a time when the economy was producing relatively similar physical goods. Today's economy is radically different and changing rapidly - the result of technological innovation, the rising value of intangible, knowledge-based assets, and the internationalization of economic activity.In light of these challenges, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne asked me ten months ago to assess the United Kingdom's current and future statistical needs. While my research focused on the UK, the challenges of producing relevant, high-quality economic statistics are the same in many countries.Recent technological advances have radically altered the way people conduct their lives, both at work and at play. The advances in computing power underpinning the digital revolution have led not only to rapid quality improvements and product innovation, but also to new, connectivity-driven ways of exchanging and providing services.One particular challenge for economic measurement stems from the fact that an increasing share of consumption comprises digital products delivered at a zero price or funded through alternative means, such as advertising. While free virtual goods clearly have value to consumers, they are entirely excluded from GDP, in accordance with internationally accepted statistical standards. As a result, our measurements may not be capturing a growing share of economic activity.
Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer, causing at least 250,000 deaths every year, according to an analysis out Tuesday indicating that patient safety efforts fall far short."People don't just die from heart attacks and bacteria, they die from system-wide failings and poorly coordinated care," says the study's lead author, Dr. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "It's medical care gone awry."
To win the White House, candidates in the presidential race will need to change minds. Bernie Sanders may try converting Hillary Clinton's superdelegates to gain the Democratic nomination while Ted Cruz and John Kasich plan to woo delegates during a contested Republican convention. If frontrunners Clinton and Donald Trump clinch their parties' nominations, then in the general election they will need to win over reluctant voters who supported their competitors.And to change opinions, candidates will have to contend with neurobiology. Scientists say there's a tension in the brain between responding to new information and resisting overwhelming amounts of conflicting data--and the latter can prevent opinion change. Altering opinion depends on using different psychological methods tailored to different types of belief, according to research. "There's not much convincing people," even when the beliefs in question are purely false, says psychiatrist Philip Corlett of Yale University School of Medicine.
[I]f politics are now being dominated by big cities along the coasts, the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data suggests that when it comes to their own lives, Americans are moving increasingly elsewhere, largely to generally Republican-leaning suburbs and Sunbelt states. In other words, politics and power are headed one way, demographics the other.Perhaps no American president has been less sympathetic to suburbs than Barack Obama. Shaun Donovan, Obama's first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, proclaimed the suburbs' were "over" as people were "voting with their feet" and moving to dense, transit-oriented urban centers. More recently, Donovan's successor, Julian Castro, has targeted suburbs by proposing to force them to densify and take more poor people into their communities. Other Democrats, notably California's Jerry Brown, have sought to use concerns over climate change to make future suburban development all but impossible.This divergence between politics and how people choose to live has never been greater. As economist Jed Kolko has observed, the perceived "historic" shift back to the inner city has turned out to be a relatively brief phenomena. Since 2012, suburbs and exurbs, which have seven times as many people, again are growing faster than core cities.This is not likely to be a short-lived phenomena. Generally speaking, Kolko notes that an aging population tends to make the country more suburban. The overwhelming trend among seniors is not to move "back to the city" but to stay in or move out to suburban or exurban areas. Between 2000 and 2012, notes demographer Wendell Cox, 99.6 percent of the senior population increase in major metropolitan areas was in the suburbs, a gain of 4.3 million compared to the gain of 17,000 in the urban core.There is also the well-demonstrated tendency for people entering their 30s, prime child-bearing age, to move to suburban locations for safety, space and better schools. Here's the basic score: Core counties last year lost a net 185,000 domestic migrants, while the suburban counties gained 187,000. Rather than a reversal of suburbanizing trends, we see something of an acceleration.Primarily Republican-leaning areas may be losing their political power for now, but their demographic growth is relentless. Like the suburbs, the sprawling Sunbelt metros were widely predicted by urban pundits to be heading toward an inevitable extinction.
This brings me to Trump's plan to put together a "deportation force" to remove the 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, an idea he justifies by reference to a somewhat similar program called "Operation Wetback" carried out in the mid-50s.Perhaps the best way to begin to grasp what a horror this would be is to consider the sheer logistics of such an operation. First, one has to find the unauthorized population -- no small task, as such people are understandably not keen on being rounded up and deported, and doubly so given the wide adoption of cell phones and internet service.Though there isn't a complete database for unauthorized immigrants, demographic estimates find that over 70 percent are from Mexico and Central America. That means a titanic amount of law enforcement rooting around in mostly poor Latino communities -- probably starting with checkpoints demanding immigration papers from every brown person stopped along highways in states with high Latino populations, dragnet electronic surveillance, and huge pressure on employers. Absent a brutal secret police, it would be nigh-impossible.But suppose the Trump Troopers manage to root out every unauthorized immigrant, with a mere few thousand U.S. citizens caught up by mistake. Then they would need to transport them back to their places of origin. Even if we assume that he wouldn't bother to figure out where people came from, even just dumping them in Mexico (1.5 million Asians and all) would be extraordinarily complicated and expensive. Forcibly packing up 1.3 times the population of New York City, holding them while they're processed through some sort of legal bureaucracy, and moving them thousands of miles would take thousands of trains, trucks, planes, or ships.Any method would cost billions in fuel, food, and logistics, and grotesque abuse would be an iron certainty.
One group that stands to benefit are glaucoma patients, who experience high eye pressure that can lead to irreversible blindness. Right now, such patients -- there are nearly 3 million in the U.S. alone -- get their eye pressure measured three to four times every year. But electronic sensors in contact lenses would measure pressure continuously, giving doctors more data points to determine how to proceed with treatment and dosages. Eventually, pressure-measuring contact lenses will also be able to administer medicine, eliminating the high potential for human error associated with daily eye drops. The makers of Sensimed, a contact lens that measures users' eye pressure, have already secured marketing approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and other similar lenses are in development."It's potentially revolutionary," said Andrew Iwach, a glaucoma specialist and American Academy of Ophthalmology spokesman based in San Francisco.In addition to measuring eye pressure, contact lenses of the future may be able to gauge glucose levels, replacing the finger prick method of blood sugar testing for people with diabetes. Google secured a patent for such a product in 2015.Auto-focusing lenses like the ones Jiang is developing are another exciting area in ophthalmology. Like pressure-measuring lenses, they're still years away from being widely available. But they stand to help people who, as a natural function of aging, have trouble shifting their focus between near and far distances -- people who now wear bifocals, trifocals, or special contact lenses. The lenses could also give users better night vision."I think it's very exciting, and I think as a lot of people sit down and think harder about it, there are going to be more potential applications that we could come up with," said Jiang.
Overall, the Feb. 26 vote gave Reformists and moderates 83 out of parliament's 290 seats, while the Principlists got 64 and independents won 55. In many cities other than Tehran, elections went to a second round as a number of candidates failed to gain the necessary 25% quorum of votes. The runoff, which was held April 29, was over the 68 remaining seats -- lesser in number than the first round, but nevertheless momentous since it determines whether one side will have a majority.The results of the runoff have baffled the hard-liners as much as the outcome of the first round. Based on the results published by Iranian media, 38 of the contested 68 seats were won by supporters of President Hassan Rouhani.Overall, the Reformists and the moderates are now considered the biggest faction, with 121 seats in parliament. The Principlists and independents have meanwhile won 83 and 81 seats, respectively.The independent members of parliament will play a major role in the decisions of the next parliament. It is still not fully known which side they favor. However, a number of moderates ran as independents. Iranian political analyst Hossein Kanani Moghaddam told Al-Monitor, "[The independent parliamentarians] are mostly close to [incumbent Speaker] Ali Larijani." He added, "I think the independent members of parliament will form an alliance with the Reformists and will support Rouhani's policies."
[A] streak of anti-Semitism has always tainted the left as well. Stalin was of course notorious for persecuting Jews, or "rootless cosmopolitans" as he called them, whom he regarded as natural agents of capitalism and traitors to the Soviet Union. But well before Stalin, Karl Marx himself, although Jewish by birth, set the tone for a vicious type of anti-Semitism that infected the left, especially in France.It was Marx who wrote, "Money is the jealous God of Israel," and that Hebrew was "the muse of stock exchange quotations." Marx was not oblivious to the dangers of anti-Semitism. He simply thought they would go away once the worker's paradise had been established. In this, he was clearly mistaken.When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the Soviet Union and leftists in general were quite sympathetic. For several decades, socialists of Russian and Polish extraction dominated Israeli politics. Zionism was not yet regarded as a noxious form of racism, along with apartheid in South Africa. There was no need to "hate the Jews in Israel."Things began to change in the early 1970s, after the occupation of the West Bank and other Arab territories. Two intifadas later, the Israeli left finally lost its grip, and the right took over. Israel became increasingly associated with the very things leftists had always opposed: colonialism, oppression of a minority, militarism, and chauvinism. For some people, it was perhaps a relief that they could hate Jews again, this time under the guise of high-minded principles.At the same time, and for much the same reasons, Israel became popular on the right. People who might have been fervent anti-Semites not so long ago are now great champions of Israel. They applaud the Israeli government's tough line with the Palestinians.Israel, in a common right-wing view, is a bastion of "Judeo-Christian civilization" in the "war against Islam." As the Dutch demagogue Geert Wilders once put it: "When the flag of Israel no longer flies over the walls of Jerusalem, the West will no longer be free."It is remarkable how often the old anti-Semitic tropes turn up in the rhetoric of these cheerleaders for Israel. But this time it is Muslims, not Jews, who are the target. Muslims in the West, we are repeatedly told, can never be loyal citizens. They always stick to their own kind. They will lie to people outside their faith. They are naturally treacherous, a fifth column, bent on world domination. Their religion is incompatible with Western values. And so forth.
The corporate bond market has some good news for us. The economy is set to continue growing.It's a message that is in stark contrast to the bearish sentiment that emanated from Wall Street during the first few weeks of the year, and it has implications for the type of stocks and other securities which will do well going forward.The smart way to read the bond market is to look at credit spreads. They measure the amount of interest a borrower must pay over and above what the government pays to borrow. That extra is to compensate lenders for the risks of default, or nonpayment of the loan. The government can't really default - if it runs out of cash it can always print more money.In the case of corporate bonds, investors are seeing lower risks ahead in the economy because the size of the spread between what the government and what corporations pay in interest has dropped dramatically since mid-February.
[F]ew have noticed another side of Trump's supporters. A surprising number of Americans feel dismissive about such core features of democratic government as deliberation, compromise and decision-making by elected, accountable officials. They believe that governing is (or should be) simple, and best undertaken by a few smart, capable people who are not overtly self-interested and can solve challenging issues without boring discussions and unsatisfying compromises.Because that's just what Trump promises, his candidacy is attracting those who think someone should just walk in and get it done. His message is that our country's problems are straightforward. All we need is to get "great people, really great people" to solve them. No muss, no fuss, no need to hear or take seriously opposing viewpoints. Trump's straight-talking, unfiltered, shoot-from-the-hip style promises a leader who will take action - instead of working toward a consensus among competing interests. That sounds perfect to the millions of Americans who are just as impatient with standard democratic procedures.
The United States is hosting the Copa América soccer tournament for the first time in June, and an Argentine television station decided to have a little fun with that fact.The station's advertisement for coverage of the event is set to one of Donald Trump's "I'm going to build a wall" speeches in which he blasts "dangerous" South Americans for coming over the border. "These are total killers," Trump rants. "These are not the nice, sweet little people that you think, okay?"
Hillary Clinton raked in $2.4 million over the course of three days from selling "Women's Cards," the Clinton campaign said Monday. The haul is nearly a tenth of her fundraising total for April. [...]The Clinton campaign launched the cards in response to Donald Trump's assertion Tuesday that people only vote for Clinton because she is a woman.