Bill and Rachel managed to add a third fascinating hour-plus of material on containerization, looking at present-day supply chain vulnerabilities, the rise of container freeports, product waste, and Soviet container history.
Links and notes for ep. 428 (PDF): http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/AFD-Ep-428-Links-and-Notes-Containerization-Part-3-Bonus-on-Shipping-Containers.pdf
Theme music by Stunt Bird.
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A series on understanding the transition of the US economy in the Crisis of the 1970s: The episode on the 50th Anniversary of Panda Diplomacy and Nixon’s trip to China.
(A Bill solo episode recorded April 23, 2022.) Subscribe to our Patreon.
Links and notes (PDF): http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/That-70s-Woe_-The-Problem-with-Pandas-Episode-3.pdf
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Rachel and Bill discuss Agnes Smedley, an American journalist and activist who helped the Indian independence movement, Soviet intelligence, and the Chinese Communist forces.
Links and notes for Ep. 409 (PDF): http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/AFD-Ep-409-Links-and-Notes-Agnes-Smedley.pdf
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It’s going to be weird to see how ISIS incorporates China into their history-obsessed weirdness of Crusaders and Safavids.
Statistics and analysis compiled for and by The Globalist Research Center.
In the second quarter of 2015, the homeownership rate among U.S. households reached a new recent low of 63.4%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This was the lowest reported rate since 1967!
Homeownership in the United States had reached an all-time high of 69.2% in 2005, two years before the housing bubble burst in late 2007. Following the recession, prospective buyers shifted instead into renting. Growth in the rental market — approaching record occupancy levels in many areas of the country — is one of the factors driving down the share of homeowners in the overall pool of households.
At the same time, U.S. home buying and home prices have actually increased recently. But that demand has largely come from institutional investors, speculators, and foreign buyers. This makes it harder for ordinary homebuyers, especially in the youngest generation of would-be first-time buyers, to break into the market.
For comparison to some other major economies’ homeownership rates, about 53% of German households own their homes, 73% of Italian households own their homes, and 90% of Chinese households own their homes. The global average, however, is slightly below the latest U.S. homeownership rate.
But not all homeowners are created equal. In Romania, 95.6% of households own their own homes as of 2013 — the highest ownership rate of any EU country. And eight of the ten EU member countries with the highest rates of homeownership are all former Warsaw Pact or Soviet states. (Another is ex-Yugoslavian.) The ownership level is similar in Russia itself, where 84% of housing was owner-occupied as of 2010. All of this is at least partially related to rapid housing privatizations in the early 1990s. However, there are concerns that many of the homes in those countries, constructed in the suburbs and countryside during the Communist era, might not hold up much longer. Little new construction occurred in the decade after 1991. This could potentially put much of the housing stock in jeopardy and add major stress to those already relatively poor European nations.
Homeownership promotion has long been a goal of U.S. public policy — maybe because of its cultural association with early American colonists, homesteading pioneers, and the American Dream. Today its promoters seek to encourage building up equity and to ensure a steady need for jobs in the construction industry. The George W. Bush Administration, for example, promoted what it called an “ownership society.”
The general idea (in theory, at least) is that when people living in a home-owning household reach retirement age, the equity they have in their residence can provide a major source of funds to finance their retirement.
Home-owning households are generally wealthier, as least on paper, because a residence is often their largest asset. However, that asset is usually not a readily accessible source of cash.
Moreover, more than two-thirds of American homeowners in 2014 had mortgages on their homes. Homeownership is far less associated with debt in China, for example, than it is in the United States. Taking out a mortgage to buy a property is very uncommon in that country, barely reaching double-digits as a percentage share of homeowners in 2010.
Part 1: New Zealand, Australia, Massachusetts, the New Deal, and China: How governments took an active role initially, and how they balance economic variability now. || This original research was produced for The Globalist Research Center and Arsenal For Democracy.
More than 150 countries have set minimum wages by law, whether nationwide or by sector. Other countries have no legal minimum, or governments play a different role in wage setting processes.
In 1894, over 120 years ago, New Zealand became home to the first national law creating a government role for setting a minimum wage floor – although this may not have been the initial intention.
The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act established an arbitration court made up of both workers and employers. It was intended to resolve various industrial-labor relations disputes in a binding manner. The goal was to avoid all labor strikes.
The court was empowered to set wages for entire classifications of workers as part of these resolutions. It did not take long for this to evolve into a patchwork of rulings that effectively covered all workers.
Today, New Zealand’s hourly minimum wage is about equivalent in purchasing power parity (PPP-adjusted) terms to US$9.40.
In the 1890s, neighboring Australia was still a loose collection of self-governing British colonies, rather than one country. One colony, Victoria, was inspired by New Zealand to adopt a similar board with wage-setting powers. This occurred shortly before the Australian colonies federated together in 1901 to become one country.
In 1907, Australia pioneered what is now known as a “living” wage when the country’s new national arbitration court issued a ruling in favor of a nationwide minimum wage.
That court specified that it had to be high enough to fund a worker’s “cost of living as a civilised being.” While the ruling soon ran into legal trouble from the federation’s Supreme Court, it remained a crucial precedent in future labor cases.
To this day, Australia has a generous minimum wage. The current rate is about equal to US$11.20 in PPP-adjusted terms. This represents about 55% of median pay. However, New Zealand’s minimum wage is actually proportionally higher, at 60% of median pay.
N.B. Purchasing-power currency conversions are from 2012 local currency to 2012 international dollars rounded from UN data.
In the United States, a minimum wage mechanism was first introduced in 1912 at the state level — but specifically for female workers (and some child laborers) — in Massachusetts.
The state passed a law to create a “Minimum Wage Commission” empowered to research women’s labor conditions and pay rates, and then to set living wages by decree. For any occupation, the Commission could set up a “wage board” comprising representatives of female workers (or child workers), employers, and the public to recommend fair pay levels.
The Commission’s decreed wage had to “supply the necessary cost of living and to maintain the worker in health.”
1912, the year Massachusetts passed the law creating the commission, was part of a period of major reforms in the United States, which had become the world’s largest economy.
These changes gave government a more active legal role in economic policy. In 1913, the country adopted the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution, which made possible a federal progressive income tax. Also in 1913, the Federal Reserve System was created.
More than a dozen U.S. states followed Massachusetts within less than a decade. However, they had to contend with frequent battles before the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of government-set minimums. Read more
For the Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime blog, Russell Leigh Moses of the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, recently compiled various quotations published in Chinese state media from public officials convicted of corruption or embezzlement trying to explain and justify their actions, often pretty audaciously. Here are some of them…
A former vice-mayor in the city of Meishan in China’s southwest Sichuan province:
Declining to go with the flow, according to this official, “wouldn’t have been good for my work, and it would have rendered further promotion out of the question.”
Tan Xinsheng, former deputy mayor of Tongnan in the megacity of Chongqing:
“My motive wasn’t for the money itself, but because it’s normal job behavior to accept gifts and payments when offered them…”
A former deputy governor in Shandong province:
… the official declared that nearly all of the money he accepted [5.6 million yuan] had simply been set aside – and that he was in principle saving money for the country.
A vice mayor from Shanxi province:
…accepted 2 million yuan because he thought the person bribing him merely wanted to be close friends and that the money was a reflection of the two of them “hitting it off,”
Xu Jing, teacher, Beijing University for Industry:
She embezzled more than 9 million yuan, and used a third of that amount to fund her daughter studying abroad. […] Xu maintained that using the money to send her daughter overseas to study was compatible with “the national program to nurture talent for the country” and therefore shouldn’t be considered corruption.
Liu Tienan, former deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission:
…Liu said that he accepted bribes because he had anxiety about old age and was worried about where he would end up after he retired.
