默默新聞08

2021年8月6日星期五

August 6, 2021

By Lauren Jackson

This week, our team talked to a lot of hesitant people. Today, we heard from those who were skeptical of getting vaccinated about their decision making. And for Tuesday's episode, we spoke with both employers and prospective employees across the country to get a better sense of why so many Americans are reluctant to return to work.

Both are extremely personal decisions with significant social ramifications. So in this newsletter, we wanted to take a closer look at the latter — digging into the context and proposed solutions for America's labor shortage. Then, we take a look behind the scenes at how our team is thinking about covering recent news related to race and identity.

Why Aren't People Going Back to Their Jobs?

A restaurant in St. Louis advertised positions for servers and bartenders. Whitney Curtis for The New York Times

Like many of us, the American labor market is "sick with the virus," with companies complaining about a shortage of workers that is slowing the country's economic recovery. The employers we spoke to for Tuesday's episode said that generous unemployment benefits, which have incentivized workers to stay home, are to blame (a sentiment echoed by Republican lawmakers).

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But the reality is more complicated. While many states are halting federal unemployment benefits, employees still aren't rushing back to work. Many experts have proposed solutions: They say increasing wages (which many companies have), ensuring workplaces are safe and building more flexible scheduling options will re-engage workers. But the workers we spoke to in our episode say that the problems run deeper, and that a fundamental reimagination of American work culture is necessary. So what could that look like?

Both companies and the federal government are scrambling to find an answer. The United States has historically ranked low in assessments of workplace protections, accused of a "systematic violation of rights" by the International Trade Union Confederation. Now, President Biden is declaring that this moment provides an opportunity for employees to "demand to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace."

For help envisioning a future of work that is both dignified and flexible, we asked economists and researchers to point to international comparisons that could help Americans imagine a new future.

Increased protection for gig economy workers

Fabian Stephany, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute studying the gig economy, believes that the pandemic is expediting the "platformization" of work, or the allocation and monitoring of labor via digital platforms. This business model pervades the growing, and increasingly precarious, gig economy.

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With more people working online, he believes we need to imagine new ways of ensuring that flexibility for employees and the efficient allocation of work for employers doesn't come at the cost of worker protections. He points to the world's first collective agreement for a platform company — between a Danish union and Hilfr, a company connecting clients to cleaning services — as one example in which workers were able to secure "holidays, sick pay, pension contributions and a minimum wage of  19 euros per hour."

This kind of bargaining relies on strong unionization. But in the U.S., many gig economy workers are classified as contractors, not employees, limiting opportunities for collective bargaining.

Dr. Stephany sees opportunities for governments to change federal policies to better support workers, such as the European Union's establishment of minimum rights for gig economy contractors. Dr. Stephany also points to Estonia, Lithuania and Sweden's facilitation of easier tax payments and income reporting for Uber drivers, a policy that eases friction in platform workers' access to social security benefits.

Creating re-entry support for working parents

American women are struggling to re-enter the workforce after many gave up their jobs in response to the disproportionate demands placed on them during the pandemic.

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Now, working mothers are facing brutally hard choices about whether to stay home or to search again for work. This decision has been made easier for many British women who, thanks to the country's furlough policy, stayed employed throughout the pandemic with the government choosing to pay partial salaries in the interest of avoiding mass unemployment. "This means it has been seamless to bring those employees back to work when demand picked up again," said Thomas Pope, deputy chief economist at the Institute for Government, based in London.

Still, new polling shows nearly a third of British parents are concerned their caring responsibilities will make them more vulnerable to layoffs when furlough ends. "I do not think that extending the furlough scheme, especially once the economy is 'back to normal', is the solution to potential problems for working parents," Pope said. "Instead, any solution will be related to flexible working, which we would expect many employers to adopt."

In both countries, Amanda Taub, our Interpreter columnist, points out that supporting flexible re-entry is essential to avoid long-term regression in gender equality. She points to Sweden, which heavily subsidizes day care and has one of the highest rates of female labor participation in the developed world, as one example of success. She also identifies the need for more predictive policymaking, including clarity around reopenings, and a functioning health care system as essential support for parents planning their return to work.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS, LISTEN TO OUR EPISODE:

Stories From the Great American Labor Shortage

We speak to businesses scrambling to find workers — and the former employees unwilling to return to those jobs.

By Asthaa Chaturvedi, Lynsea Garrison, Robert Jimison, Luke Vander Ploeg, Diana Nguyen, Clare Toeniskoetter, Sydney Harper, Michael Simon Johnson, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Dan Powell and Chris Wood

Here's What Else You Need to Know This Week

From our race stories team.

Compiled by Desiree Ibekwe

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

At the beginning of the year, the Daily producers and editors formed teams to dive deep into The Times's most urgent, important topics of 2021. Race, of course, was one of them.

Each week, a group of us meet multiple times to talk through stories that focus on issues of race as well as identity. A lot of our discussions have centered on where the racial reckoning that was unlocked by the murder of George Floyd has left us today. What does it actually feel, and sound, like for the entire country to be confronting its past, and debating its future? What has changed in the year since last summer's mass protests, and what hasn't?

Ultimately, in anything we're pursuing, we're always looking to figure out what the story helps us understand about this unprecedented moment that we're in. Like how the passage of reparations legislation in Evanston, Ill., reflects an important shift in what has long been a taboo conversation. Or, how the fierce debate around critical race theory illuminates Americans' deep divisions in how we understand racism and history. We have a lot of ground to cover. Stay tuned. — Anita Badejo, senior editor for The Daily

Here's what the team has been thinking about:

Zoning in Charlottesville: A look at how a hyperlocal zoning dispute in Charlottesville, Va., reveals something deeper about where we are in our national reckoning around race.

The Olympics Reliance on 'Black Girl Magic': A sharp analysis of all the ways in which this year's Olympics have laid bare the burdens that Black women face at the Games.

The Impact of Pandemic Aid: An explanation of how federal aid during the pandemic has slashed the poverty level that goes beyond policy, highlighting the impact on American families.

The Workers Who Kept New York Alive: A beautiful interactive that does in images what we've also spent a year and a half striving to do in sound: telling the stories of people who've carried the weight of the pandemic.

Nooses, Anger and No Answers: An examination of the racially charged events at a future Amazon distribution center in Connecticut that raises important questions about responsibilities that out-of-town employers have to the communities they enter.

On The Daily this week

Monday: What do breakthrough infections mean for the efforts to fight the pandemic?

Tuesday: We hear stories from the frontline of the great American labor shortage.

Wednesday: Tunisia was the darling of the Arab Spring. Now, its decade-long experiment with democracy is in peril.

Thursday: A report into sexual harassment by Gov. Andrew Cuomo was worse than many expected. Could it be his undoing?

Friday: Why not get vaccinated at this point in the pandemic? We hear from some of America's unvaccinated.

Plus: A special show for you. You may have heard that Antoinette Nwandu's "Pass Over" just made its Broadway debut, the first Broadway opening since theaters closed in March 2020 and the first since a coalition of theater artists of color demanded change from the historically white institution.

Nwandu spoke with Michael Paulson, our theater reporter, about the changes she's personally bringing to the theater, and her hopes for the industry — still grappling with the pandemic — as the curtains rise again.

LISTEN NOW:

The First Play Returning to Broadway Is Doing Things Differently

The playwright Antoinette Nwandu is making her Broadway debut with "Pass Over" — and trying to change long-held precedents in the process.

By Dodai Stewart, Michael Paulson, Anna Martin, Tracy Mumford, Theo Balcomb, Phyllis Fletcher, Wendy Dorr and Corey Schreppel

That's it for The Daily newsletter. See you next week.

Have thoughts about the show? Tell us what you think at thedaily@nytimes.com.

Were you forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox.

Love podcasts? Join The New York Times Podcast Club on Facebook.

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What vaccine supply tells us about international trade

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August 6, 2021

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

For many of us, Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics — a boutique think tank specializing in, duh, international economics — has become the go-to guy for current developments in trade policy. His work tracking the evolution of Donald Trump's trade war was invaluable.

Now he has a highly informative new paper with Thomas Bollyky on the vaccine supply chain. I won't lie: There's a lot of detail, and the paper is fairly heavy going. But it's full of useful details, and it also, I'd argue, tells us some interesting things about the nature of world trade in the 21st century.

One thing that caught my eye — probably not the most important thing, but one close to my heart — is that the story of global vaccine production demonstrates the continuing relevance of the so-called New Trade Theory, or as some now call it, the "old New Trade Theory."

Background: Here's a sample graphic from Bown and Bollyky, showing what's involved in the production of the Pfizer vaccine:

The shots made round the world.Peterson Institute for International Economic

Producing these vaccines is evidently a complicated process, involving facilities in many locations, presumably implying a lot of cross-border shipments of vaccine ingredients. Notably, in Pfizer's case all these facilities are in the United States and Western Europe, which is typical across pharma firms, although other companies have a few facilities in Brazil and India.

So where do vaccine supply chains fit into the theory of international trade?

If you've ever taken an economics course, you probably learned about the theory of comparative advantage, which says that countries trade to take advantage of their differences. The classic original example, from the early-19th-century economist David Ricardo, involved the exchange of English cloth for Portuguese wine.

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Comparative advantage is a powerful, illuminating theory — especially because it shows why countries export goods they're relatively good at producing even if they're less productive in those industries than potential competitors. Bangladesh is a low-productivity nation across the board (although it has been improving), but its productivity disadvantage is less pronounced in apparel than in other industries, so it has become a major clothing exporter.

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, a number of economists began suggesting that comparative advantage was an incomplete story. World trade had been growing over time, but much of that growth involved trade between countries that didn't seem very different — the United States and Canada, for example, or the nations of Western Europe. Furthermore, what these countries were selling to each other looked pretty similar: There was a lot of "intra-industry" trade like the large-scale, two-way trade in autos and related goods across the U.S.-Canada border.

What was going on? A few economists had long noted that comparative advantage wasn't the only possible reason for international trade. Countries might also trade because production of some goods involves increasing returns — there are advantages to large-scale production, which creates an incentive to concentrate production in a few countries and export those goods to other countries. Automotive trade between the United States and Canada was a classic example: After the countries established a free-trade agreement for autos in 1965, North American car companies achieved economies of scale by limiting the range of items produced in Canada, exporting these goods and importing other items from the United States.

But if trade reflected increasing returns rather than country characteristics, which countries would end up producing which goods? It might be largely random, the result of accidents of history.

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There was, however, remarkably little economic literature on increasing-returns trade until the late 1970s. Economists don't like to talk about stuff they find hard to model, and trade models with increasing returns tended to be messy and confusing. Eventually, however, some economists came up with clever ways to cut through the confusion, in papers like this 1980 piece in the American Economic Review:

Niftiness is necessary.American Economic Review

(I'll note, with all due immodesty, that the journal would later name this one of the 20 top papers published in its first century of operation.)

God, I was young!

Anyway, history has a sense of humor. No sooner had economists come up with nifty models of trade between similar countries, driven by economies of scale, than the world economy took a hard turn away from that kind of trade toward trade between dissimilar countries driven by things like large differences in wages.

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World trade exploded from the mid-1980s until around 2008, a process sometimes called hyperglobalization:

Globalization gets hyper.World Bank

And where trade growth in the '60s and '70s had largely involved advanced economies selling stuff to each other, hyperglobalization involved a surge in exports of manufactured goods from relatively low-wage developing countries:

Everything old was new again.World Bank

So we had a New Trade Theory, but the new trade we were actually getting was much better explained by, well, old trade theory.

So what does all this have to do with vaccine supply chains? Well, as I already noted, vaccine ingredients are mainly produced in advanced countries — countries that are very similar in their education levels, overall level of technological competence and more. So why wasn't each advanced country producing the whole ensemble of vaccine-related inputs? Here's what Bown and Bollyky say:

"The business model that much of the pharmaceutical industry had shifted toward over the previous 25 years involved fragmentation. As tariffs and other trade barriers had fallen globally, information and communications technology (ICT) developed, shipping and logistics efficiency increased, and protection of intellectual property rights steadily improved. The fact that trade could play a greater role in distributing pharmaceutical products globally meant that companies could operate fewer plants but at a larger scale." [Emphasis mine.]

Hey, it's New Trade Theory in action! And it sure looks as if there was a lot of random historical contingency determining national roles in the pattern of specialization. Europe was initially very dependent on Britain's exports of lipids — but I doubt that there's something about British culture that makes the country especially good at lipids. It's just one of those accidents that play a big role in economic geography.

Is there a moral to this story? There's been a lot of backlash against globalization over the past decade, to some extent justified: Advocates of free-trade agreements oversold their benefits and understated the disruptions they might cause. But the case of vaccine production illustrates a positive side of globalization we tend to forget. These miracle vaccines are incredibly complex products that would have been hard to develop and produce in any one country, even one as large as the United States. A global market made it possible to deliver all the specialized inputs that are saving thousands of lives as you read this.

Feedback If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week's newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at krugman-newsletter@nytimes.com.

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