Year: 2021

A very Omicron Christmas

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, personal , ,

Dec 26 JDN 2459575

Remember back in spring of 2020 when we thought that this pandemic would quickly get under control and life would go back to normal? How naive we were.

The newest Omicron strain seems to be the most infectious yet—even people who are fully vaccinated are catching it. The good news is that it also seems to be less deadly than most of the earlier strains. COVID is evolving to spread itself better, but not be as harmful to us—much as influenza and cold viruses evolved. While weekly cases are near an all-time peek, weekly deaths are well below the worst they had been.

Indeed, at this point, it’s looking like COVID will more or less be with us forever. In the most likely scenario, the virus will continue to evolve to be more infectious but less lethal, and then we will end up with another influenza on our hands: A virus that can’t be eradicated, gets huge numbers of people sick, but only kills a relatively small number. At some point we will decide that the risk of getting sick is low enough that it isn’t worth forcing people to work remotely or maybe even wear masks. And we’ll relax various restrictions and get back to normal with this new virus a regular part of our lives.


Merry Christmas?

But it’s not all bad news. The vaccination campaign has been staggeringly successful—now the total number of vaccine doses exceeds the world population, so the average human being has been vaccinated for COVID at least once.

And while 5.3 million deaths due to the virus over the last two years sounds terrible, it should be compared against the baseline rate of 15 million deaths during that same interval, and the fact that worldwide death rates have been rapidly declining. Had COVID not happened, 2021 would be like 2019, which had nearly the lowest death rate on record, at 7,579 deaths per million people per year. As it is, we’re looking at something more like 10,000 deaths per million people per year (1%), or roughly what we considered normal way back in the long-ago times of… the 1980s. To get even as bad as things were in the 1950s, we would have to double our current death rate.

Indeed, there’s something quite remarkable about the death rate we had in 2019, before the pandemic hit: 7,579 per million is only 0.76%. A being with a constant annual death rate of 0.76% would have a life expectancy of over 130 years. This very low death rate is partly due to demographics: The current world population is unusually young and healthy because the world recently went through huge surges in population growth. Due to demographic changes the UN forecasts that our death rate will start to climb again as fertility falls and the average age increases; but they are still predicting it will stabilize at about 11,200 per million per year, which would be a life expectancy of 90. And that estimate could well be too pessimistic, if medical technology continues advancing at anything like its current rate.

We call it Christmas, but it’s really a syncretized amalgamation of holidays: Yule, Saturnalia, various Solstice celebrations. (Indeed, there’s no particular reason to think Jesus was even born in December.) Most Northern-hemisphere civilizations have some sort of Solstice holiday, and we’ve greedily co-opted traditions from most of them. The common theme really seems to be this:

Now it is dark, but band together and have hope, for the light shall return.

Diurnal beings in northerly latitudes instinctively fear the winter, when it becomes dark and cold and life becomes more hazardous—but we have learned to overcome this fear together, and we remind ourselves that light and warmth will return by ritual celebrations.

The last two years have made those celebrations particularly difficult, as we have needed to isolate ourselves in order to keep ourselves and others safe. Humans are fundamentally social at a level most people—even most scientists—do not seem to grasp: We need contact with other human beings as deeply and vitally as we need food or sleep.

The Internet has allowed us to get some level of social contact while isolated, which has been a tremendous boon; but I think many of us underestimated how much we would miss real face-to-face contact. I think much of the vague sense of malaise we’ve all been feeling even when we aren’t sick and even when we’ve largely adapted our daily routine to working remotely comes from this: We just aren’t getting the chance to see people in person nearly as often as we want—as often as we hadn’t even realized we needed.

So, if you do travel to visit family this holiday season, I understand your need to do so. But be careful. Get vaccinated—three times, if you can. Don’t have any contact with others who are at high risk if you do have any reason to think you’re infected.

Let’s hope next Christmas is better.

The economics of interstellar travel

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, futurism , , , , , , ,

Dec 19 JDN 2459568

Since these are rather dark times—the Omicron strain means that COVID is still very much with us, after nearly two years—I thought we could all use something a bit more light-hearted and optimistic.

In 1978 Paul Krugman wrote a paper entitled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade”, which has what is surely one of the greatest abstracts of all time:

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

The rest of the paper is equally delightful, and well worth a read. Of particular note are these two sentences, which should give you a feel: “The rest of the paper is, will be, or has been, depending on the reader’s inertial frame, divided into three sections.” and “This extension is left as an exercise for interested readers because the author does not understand general relativity, and therefore cannot do it himself.”

As someone with training in both economics and relativistic physics, I can tell you that Krugman’s analysis is entirely valid, given its assumptions. (Really, this is unsurprising: He’s a Nobel Laureate. One could imagine he got his physics wrong, but he didn’t—and of course he didn’t get his economics wrong.) But, like much high-falutin economic theory, it relies upon assumptions that are unlikely to be true.

Set aside the assumptions of perfect competition and unlimited arbitrage that yield Krugman’s key result of equalized interest rates. These are indeed implausible, but they’re also so standard in economics as to be pedestrian.

No, what really concerns me is this: Why bother with interstellar trade at all?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of interstellar travel and interstellar colonization. I want humanity to expand and explore the galaxy (or rather, I want that to be done by whatever humanity becomes, likely some kind of cybernetically and biogenetically enhanced transhumans in endless varieties we can scarcely imagine). But once we’ve gone through all the effort to spread ourselves to distant stars, it’s not clear to me that we’d ever have much reason to trade across interstellar distances.

If we ever manage to invent efficient, reliable, affordable faster-than-light (FTL) travel ala Star Trek, sure. In that case, there’s no fundamental difference between interstellar trade and any other kind of trade. But that’s not what Krugman’s paper is about, as its key theorems are actually about interest rates and prices in different inertial reference frames, which is only relevant if you’re limited to relativistic—that is, slower-than-light—velocities.

Moreover, as far as we can tell, that’s impossible. Yes, there are still some vague slivers of hope left with the Alcubierre Drive, wormholes, etc.; but by far the most likely scenario is that FTL travel is simply impossible and always will be.

FTL communication is much more plausible, as it merely requires the exploitation of nonlocal quantum entanglement outside quantum equilibrium; if the Bohm Interpretation is correct (as I strongly believe it is), then this is a technological problem rather than a theoretical one. At best this might one day lead to some form of nonlocal teleportation—but definitely not FTL starships. Since our souls are made of software, sending information can, in principle, send a person; but we almost surely won’t be sending mass faster than light.

So let’s assume, as Krugman did, that we will be limited to travel close to, but less than, the speed of light. (I recently picked up a term for this from Ursula K. Le Guin: “NAFAL”, “nearly-as-fast-as-light”.)

This means that any transfer of material from one star system to another will take, at minimum, years. It could even be decades or centuries, depending on how close to the speed of light we are able to get.

Assuming we have abundant antimatter or some similarly extremely energy-dense propulsion, it would reasonable to expect that we could build interstellar spacecraft that would be capable of accelerating at approximately Earth gravity (i.e. 1 g) for several years at a time. This would be quite comfortable for the crew of the ship—it would just feel like standing on Earth. And it turns out that this is sufficient to attain velocities quite close to the speed of light over the distances to nearby stars.

I will spare you the complicated derivation, but there are well-known equations which allow us to convert from proper acceleration (the acceleration felt on a spacecraft, i.e. 1 g in this case) to maximum velocity and total travel time, and they imply that a vessel which was constantly accelerating at 1 g (speeding up for the first half, then slowing down for the second half) could reach most nearby stars within about 50 to 100 years Earth time, or as little as 10 to 20 years ship time.

With higher levels of acceleration, you can shorten the trip; but that would require designing ships (or engineering crews?) in such a way as to sustain these high levels of acceleration for years at a time. Humans can sustain 3 g’s for hours, but not for years.

Even with only 1-g acceleration, the fuel costs for such a trip are staggering: Even with antimatter fuel you need dozens or hundreds of times as much mass in fuel as you have in payload—and with anything less than antimatter it’s basically just not possible. Yet there is nothing in the laws of physics saying you can’t do it, and I believe that someday we will.

Yet I sincerely doubt we would want to make such trips often. It’s one thing to send occasional waves of colonists, perhaps one each generation. It’s quite another to establish real two-way trade in goods.

Imagine placing an order for something—anything—and not receiving it for another 50 years. Even if, as I hope and believe, our descendants have attained far longer lifespans than we have, asymptotically approaching immortality, it seems unlikely that they’d be willing to wait decades for their shipments to arrive. In the same amount of time you could establish an entire industry in your own star system, built from the ground up, fully scaled to service entire planets.

In order to justify such a transit, you need to be carrying something truly impossible to produce locally. And there just won’t be very many such things.

People, yes. Definitely in the first wave of colonization, but likely in later waves as well, people will want to move themselves and their families across star systems, and will be willing to wait (especially since the time they experience on the ship won’t be nearly as daunting).

And there will be knowledge and experiences that are unique to particular star systems—but we’ll be sending that by radio signal and it will only take as many years as there are light-years between us; or we may even manage to figure out FTL ansibles and send it even faster than that.

It’s difficult for me to imagine what sort of goods could ever be so precious, so irreplaceable, that it would actually make sense to trade them across an interstellar distance. All habitable planets are likely to be made of essentially the same elements, in approximately the same proportions; whatever you may want, it’s almost certainly going to be easier to get it locally than it would be to buy it from another star system.

This is also why I think alien invasion is unlikely: There’s nothing they would particularly want from us that they couldn’t get more easily. Their most likely reason for invading would be specifically to conquer and rule us.

Certainly if you want gold or neodymium or deuterium, it’ll be thousands of times easier to get it at home. But even if you want something hard to make, like antimatter, or something organic and unique, like oregano, building up the industry to manufacture a product or the agriculture to grow a living organism is almost certainly going to be faster and easier than buying it from another solar system.

This is why I believe that for the first generation of interstellar colonists, imports will be textbooks, blueprints, and schematics to help build, and films, games, and songs to stay entertained and tied to home; exports will consist of of scientific data about the new planet as well as artistic depictions of life on an alien world. For later generations, it won’t be so lopsided: The colonies will have new ideas in science and engineering as well as new art forms to share. Billions of people on Earth and thousands or millions on each colony world will await each new transmission of knowledge and art with bated breath.

Long-distance trade historically was mainly conducted via precious metals such as gold; but if interstellar travel is feasible, gold is going to be dirt cheap. Any civilization capable of even sending a small intrepid crew of colonists to Epsilon Eridani is going to consider mining asteroids an utterly trivial task.

Will such transactions involve money? Will we sell these ideas, or simply give them away? Unlike my previous post where I focused on the local economy, here I find myself agreeing with Star Trek: Money isn’t going to make sense for interstellar travel. Unless we have very fast communication, the time lag between paying money out and then seeing it circulate back will be so long that the money returned to you will be basically worthless. And that’s assuming you figure out a way to make transactions clear that doesn’t require real-time authentication—because you won’t have it.

Consider Epsilon Eridani, a plausible choice for one of the first star systems we will colonize. That’s 10.5 light-years away, so a round-trip signal will take 21 years. If inflation is a steady 2%, that means that $100 today will need to come back as $151 to have the same value by the time you hear back from your transaction. If you had the option to invest in a 5% bond instead, you’d have $279 by then. And this is a nearby star.

It would be much easier to simply trade data for data, maybe just gigabyte for gigabyte or maybe by some more sophisticated notion of relative prices. You don’t need to worry about what your dollar will be worth 20 years from now; you know how much effort went into designing that blueprint for an antimatter processor and you know how much you’ll appreciate seeing that VR documentary on the rings of Aegir. You may even have in mind how much it cost you to pay people to design prototypes and how much you can sell the documentary for; but those monetary transactions will be conducted within your own star system, independently of whatever monetary system prevails on other stars.

Indeed, it’s likely that we wouldn’t even bother trying to negotiate how much to send—because that itself would have such overhead and face the same time-lags—and would instead simply make a habit of sending everything we possibly can. Such interchanges could be managed by governments at each end, supported by public endowments. “This year’s content from Epsilon Eridani, brought to you by the Smithsonian Institution.”

We probably won’t ever have—or need, or want—huge freighter ships carrying containers of goods from star to star. But with any luck, we will one day have art and ideas from across the galaxy shared by all of the endless variety of beings humanity has become.

Economists aren’t that crazy

pnrj Uncategorized

Dec 12 JDN 2459561

I’ve been seeing this meme go around lately, and I felt a need to respond:

Economics: “Humans only value things monetarily.”

Sociology: “Uh, I don’t…”

Economics: “Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus.”

Sociology: “Uhhh, Psy, can you help?”

Psychology: “That’s not how humans…”

Economics: “ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!”

Physics: drops teacup

I have plenty of criticisms to make of neoclassical economics—but this is clearly unfair.

Economists aren’t that crazy.

Above all, economists don’t actually believe in exponential growth forever. I literally have never met one who does. The mainstream, uncontroversial (I daresay milquetoast)neoclassical growth model, the Solow-Swan model, predicts a long-run decline in the rate of economic growth. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find that long-run per-capita GDP growth is asymptotic, meaning that there is some standard of living that we can never expect the world to exceed. It’s simply a question of what that limit is, and it is most likely a good deal better than how we live even in First World countries.

It’s nothing more than a strawman of neoclassical economics to assert otherwise. Yes, economists do believe that current growth can and should continue for some time yet—though even among them it is controversial how long it will continue. But they absolutely do not believe that we can expect 3% annual growth in per-capita GDP for the next 1000 years. And indeed, it is precisely their mathematical sophistication that makes this so: They would be the first to recognize that this implies a 6.8 trillion-fold increase in standard of living, which is obviously ludicrous. A much more plausible figure for that timescale is something like 0.2%, which would be only a 7-fold increase over that same interval. And if you really want to extrapolate to millions of years, the only plausible long-run economic growth rate over that period is basically 0%. Yet billions of lives hinge upon whether it is actually 0.0001%, 0.0002%, or 0.0003%—if indeed human beings don’t go extinct long before then.

What about the other two claims? Well, neoclassical economists do have a habit of assuming greater rationality than human beings actually exhibit, and of trying to value everything in monetary terms. And economists are nothing if not arrogant in their relationship to other fields of social science. So here, at least, there is a kernel of truth.

Yet that makes this at best hyperbole for comedic effect—and at worst highly misleading as to what actual economists believe. You can find a few fringe economists who might seriously assent to the claim “humans are always rational”, and you can easily find plenty of amoral corporate shills who are paid to say such things on TV. (Krugman refers to them as “professionally conservative economists”.)

Moreover, I think the behavioral economics paradigm still hasn’t penetrated fully enough—most economists will give lip service to the idea of irrational behavior without being willing to seriously face up to how frequent it is or what this implies for policy. But no serious mainstream economist actually believes that all human beings are always rational.

And while there is surely a tendency to over-emphasize monetary costs and try to put everything in monetary terms, I don’t think I’ve ever met an economist who genuinely believes that all humans value everything monetarily. At most they might think that everyone should value everything monetarily—and even then the only ones who say things like this are weird fringe figures like that guy who hates Christmas.

Am I reading too much into a joke? Maybe. But given how poorly most people understand economics, this kind of joke can do real damage. It’s already a big problem that (aforementioned) corporate shills can present themselves as economic experts, but if popular culture is accustomed to dismissing the claims of actual economic experts, that makes matters much worse. And rather than the playful ribbing that neoclassical economists well deserve (like Jon Stewart gave them: “People are screwy.” “You’re just now figuring this out?”), this meme mocks economists aggressively enough that it seems to be trying to actively undermine their credibility.

If COVID taught us anything, it should be that expertise matters. Trusting experts more than we did would have saved thousands of lives—and trusting them less would have doomed even more.

So maybe a joke that will make people trust economic experts less isn’t so harmless after all?

Low-skill jobs

pnrj ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , ,

Dec 5 JDN 2459554

I’ve seen this claim going around social media for awhile now: “Low-skill jobs are a classist myth created to justify poverty wages.”

I can understand why people would say things like this. I even appreciate that many low-skill jobs are underpaid and unfairly stigmatized. But it’s going a bit too far to claim that there is no such thing as a low-skill job.

Suppose all the world’s physicists and all the world’s truckers suddenly had to trade jobs for a month. Who would have a harder time?

If a mathematician were asked to do the work of a janitor, they’d be annoyed. If a janitor were asked to do the work of a mathematician, they’d be completely nonplussed.

I could keep going: Compare robotics engineers to dockworkers or software developers to fruit pickers.

Higher pay does not automatically equate to higher skills: welders are clearly more skilled than stock traders. Give any welder a million-dollar account and a few days of training, and they could do just as well as the average stock trader (which is to say, worse than the S&P 500). Give any stock trader welding equipment and a similar amount of training, and they’d be lucky to not burn their fingers off, much less actually usefully weld anything.

This is not to say that any random person off the street could do just as well as a janitor or dockworker as someone who has years of experience at that job. It is simply to say that they could do better—and pick up the necessary skills faster—than a random person trying to work as a physicist or software developer.

Moreover, this does justify some difference in pay. If some jobs are easier than others, in the sense that more people are qualified to do them, then the harder jobs will need to pay more in order to attract good talent—if they didn’t, they’d risk their high-skill workers going and working at the low-skill jobs instead.

This is of course assuming all else equal, which is clearly not the case. No two jobs are the same, and there are plenty of other considerations that go into choosing someone’s wage: For one, not simply what skills are required, but also the effort and unpleasantness involved in doing the work. I’m entirely prepared to believe that being a dockworker is less fun than being a physicist, and this should reduce the differential in pay between them. Indeed, it may have: Dockworkers are paid relatively well as far as low-skill jobs go—though nowhere near what physicists are paid. Then again, productivity is also a vital consideration, and there is a general tendency that high-skill jobs tend to be objectively more productive: A handful of robotics engineers can do what was once the work of hundreds of factory laborers.

There are also ways for a worker to be profitable without being particularly productive—that is, to be very good at rent-seeking. This is arguably the case for lawyers and real estate agents, and undeniably the case for derivatives traders and stockbrokers. Corporate executives aren’t stupid; they wouldn’t pay these workers astronomical salaries if they weren’t making money doing so. But it’s quite possible to make lots of money without actually producing anything of particular value for human society.

But that doesn’t mean that wages are always fair. Indeed, I dare say they typically are not. One of the most important determinants of wages is bargaining power. Unions don’t increase skill and probably don’t increase productivity—but they certainly increase wages, because they increase bargaining power.

And this is also something that’s correlated with lower levels of skill, because the more people there are who know how to do what you do, the harder it is for you to make yourself irreplaceable. A mathematician who works on the frontiers of conformal geometry or Teichmueller theory may literally be one of ten people in the world who can do what they do (quite frankly, even the number of people who know what they do is considerably constrained, though probably still at least in the millions). A dockworker, even one who is particularly good at loading cargo skillfully and safely, is still competing with millions of other people with similar skills. The easier a worker is to replace, the less bargaining power they have—in much the same way that a monopoly has higher profits than an oligopoly, which has higher profits that a competitive market.

This is why I support unions. I’m also a fan of co-ops, and an ardent supporter of progressive taxation and safety regulations. So don’t get me wrong: Plenty of low-skill workers are mistreated and underpaid, and they deserve better.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a lot easier to be a janitor than a physicist.

Risk compensation is not a serious problem

pnrj development economics, ethics, mathematical models, public policy , , ,

Nov 28 JDN 2459547

Risk compensation. It’s one of those simple but counter-intuitive ideas that economists love, and it has been a major consideration in regulatory policy since the 1970s.

The idea is this: The risk we face in our actions is partly under our control. It requires effort to reduce risk, and effort is costly. So when an external source, such as a government regulation, reduces our risk, we will compensate by reducing the effort we expend, and thus our risk will decrease less, or maybe not at all. Indeed, perhaps we’ll even overcompensate and make our risk worse!

It’s often used as an argument against various kinds of safety efforts: Airbags will make people drive worse! Masks will make people go out and get infected!

The basic theory here is sound: Effort to reduce risk is costly, and people try to reduce costly things.

Indeed, it’s theoretically possible that risk compensation could yield the exact same risk, or even more risk than before—or at least, I wasn’t able to prove that for any possible risk profile and cost function it couldn’t happen.

But I wasn’t able to find any actual risk profiles or cost functions that would yield this result, even for a quite general form. Here, let me show you.

Let’s say there’s some possible harm H. There is also some probability that it will occur, which you can mitigate with some choice x. For simplicity let’s say that it’s one-to-one, so that your risk of H occurring is precisely 1-x. Since probabilities must be between 0 and 1, thus so must x.

Reducing that risk costs effort. I won’t say much about that cost, except to call it c(x) and assume the following:

(1) It is increasing: More effort reduces risk more and costs more than less effort.

(2) It is convex: Reducing risk from a high level to a low level (e.g. 0.9 to 0.8) costs less than reducing it from a low level to an even lower level (e.g. 0.2 to 0.1).

These both seem like eminently plausible—indeed, nigh-unassailable—assumptions. And they result in the following total expected cost (the opposite of your expected utility):

(1-x)H + c(x)

Now let’s suppose there’s some policy which will reduce your risk by a factor r, which must be between 0 and 1. Your cost then becomes:

r(1-x)H + c(x)

Minimizing this yields the following result:

rH = c'(x)

where c'(x) is the derivative of c(x). Since c(x) is increasing and convex, c'(x) is positive and increasing.

Thus, if I make r smaller—an external source of less risk—then I will reduce the optimal choice of x. This is risk compensation.

But have I reduced or increased the amount of risk?

The total risk is r(1-x); since r decreased and so did x, it’s not clear whether this went up or down. Indeed, it’s theoretically possible to have cost functions that would make it go up—but I’ve never seen one.

For instance, suppose we assume that c(x) = axb, where a and b are constants. This seems like a pretty general form, doesn’t it? To maintain the assumption that c(x) is increasing and convex, I need a > 0 and b > 1. (If 0 < b < 1, you get a function that’s increasing but concave. If b=1, you get a linear function and some weird corner solutions where you either expend no effort at all or all possible effort.)

Then I’m trying to minimize:

r(1-x)H + axb

This results in a closed-form solution for x:

x = (rH/ab)^(1/(b-1))

Since b>1, 1/(b-1) > 0.


Thus, the optimal choice of x is increasing in rH and decreasing in ab. That is, reducing the harm H or the overall risk r will make me put in less effort, while reducing the cost of effort (via either a or b) will make me put in more effort. These all make sense.

Can I ever increase the overall risk by reducing r? Let’s see.


My total risk r(1-x) is therefore:

r(1-x) = r[1-(rH/ab)^(1/(b-1))]

Can making r smaller ever make this larger?

Well, let’s compare it against the case when r=1. We want to see if there’s a case where it’s actually larger.

r[1-(rH/ab)^(1/(b-1))] > [1-(H/ab)^(1/(b-1))]

r – r^(1/(b-1)) (H/ab)^(1/(b-1)) > 1 – (H/ab)^(1/(b-1))

For this to be true, we would need r > 1, which would mean we didn’t reduce risk at all. Thus, reducing risk externally reduces total risk even after compensation.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t a fully general model. I had to assume some specific functional forms. But I didn’t assume much, did I?

Indeed, there is a fully general argument that externally reduced risk will never harm you. It’s quite simple.

There are three states to consider: In state A, you have your original level of risk and your original level of effort to reduce it. In state B, you have an externally reduced level of risk and your original level of effort. In state C, you have an externally reduced level of risk, and you compensate by reducing your effort.

Which states make you better off?

Well, clearly state B is better than state A: You get reduced risk at no cost to you.

Furthermore, state C must be better than state B: You voluntarily chose to risk-compensate precisely because it made you better off.

Therefore, as long as your preferences are rational, state C is better than state A.

Externally reduced risk will never make you worse off.

QED. That’s it. That’s the whole proof.

But I’m a behavioral economist, am I not? What if people aren’t being rational? Perhaps there’s some behavioral bias that causes people to overcompensate for reduced risks. That’s ultimately an empirical question.

So, what does the empirical data say? Risk compensation is almost never a serious problem in the real world. Measures designed to increase safety, lo and behold, actually increase safety. Removing safety regulations, astonishingly enough, makes people less safe and worse off.

If we ever do find a case where risk compensation is very large, then I guess we can remove that safety measure, or find some way to get people to stop overcompensating. But in the real world this has basically never happened.

It’s still a fair question whether any given safety measure is worth the cost: Implementing regulations can be expensive, after all. And while many people would like to think that “no amount of money is worth a human life”, nobody does—or should, or even can—act like that in the real world. You wouldn’t drive to work or get out of bed in the morning if you honestly believed that.

If it would cost $4 billion to save one expected life, it’s definitely not worth it. Indeed, you should still be able to see that even if you don’t think lives can be compared with other things—because $4 billion could save an awful lot of lives if you spent it more efficiently. (Probablyover a million, in fact, as current estimates of the marginal cost to save one life are about $2,300.) Inefficient safety interventions don’t just cost money—they prevent us from doing other, more efficient safety interventions.

And as for airbags and wearing masks to prevent COVID? Yes, definitely 100% worth it, as both interventions have already saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

How can we fix medical residency?

pnrj ethics, public policy, science and academia , , , , , ,

Nov 21 JDN 459540

Most medical residents work 60 or more hours per week, and nearly 20% work 80 or more hours. 66% of medical residents report sleeping 6 hours or less each night, and 20% report sleeping 5 hours or less.

It’s not as if sleep deprivation is a minor thing: Worldwide, across all jobs, nearly 750,000 deaths annually are attributable to long working hours, most of these due to sleep deprivation.


By some estimates, medical errors account for as many as 250,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Even the most conservative estimates say that at least 25,000 deaths per year in the US are attributable to medical errors. It seems quite likely that long working hours increase the rate of dangerous errors (though it has been difficult to determine precisely how much).

Indeed, the more we study stress and sleep deprivation, the more we learn how incredibly damaging they are to health and well-being. Yet we seem to have set up a system almost intentionally designed to maximize the stress and sleep deprivation of our medical professionals. Some of them simply burn out and leave the profession (about 18% of surgical residents quit); surely an even larger number of people never enter medicine in the first place because they know they would burn out.

Even once a doctor makes it through residency and has learned to cope with absurd hours, this most likely distorts their whole attitude toward stress and sleep deprivation. They are likely to not consider them “real problems”, because they were able to “tough it out”—and they are likely to assume that their patients can do the same. One of the primary functions of a doctor is to reduce pain and suffering, and by putting doctors through unnecessary pain and suffering as part of their training, we are teaching them that pain and suffering aren’t really so bad and you should just grin and bear it.

We are also systematically selecting against doctors who have disabilities that would make it difficult to work these double-time hours—which means that the doctors who are most likely to sympathize with disabled patients are being systematically excluded from the profession.

There have been some attempts to regulate the working hours of residents, but they have generally not been effective. I think this is for three reasons:

1. They weren’t actually trying hard enough. A cap of 80 hours per week is still 40 hours too high, and looks to me like you are trying to get better PR without fixing the actual problem.

2. Their enforcement mechanisms left too much opportunity to cheat the system, and in fact most medical residents simply became pressured to continue over-working and under-report their hours.

3. They don’t seem to have considered how to effect the transition in a way that won’t reduce the total number of resident-hours, and so residents got less training and hospitals were less served.

The solution to problem 1 is obvious: The cap needs to be lower. Much lower.

The solution to problem 2 is trickier: What sort of enforcement mechanism would prevent hospitals from gaming the system?

I believe the answer is very steep overtime pay requirements, coupled with regular and intensive auditing. Every hour a medical resident goes over their cap, they should have to be paid triple time. Audits should be performed frequently, randomly and without notice. And if a hospital is caught falsifying their records, they should be required to pay all missing hours to all medical residents at quintuple time. And Medicare and Medicaid should not be allowed to reimburse these additional payments—they must come directly out of the hospital’s budget.

Under the current system, the “punishment” is usually a threat of losing accreditation, which is too extreme and too harmful to the residents. Precisely because this is such a drastic measure, it almost never happens. The punishment needs to be small enough that we will actually enforce it; and it needs to hurt the hospital, not the residents—overtime pay would do precisely that.

That brings me to problem 3: How can we ensure that we don’t reduce the total number of resident-hours?

This is important for two reasons: Each resident needs a certain number of hours of training to become a skilled doctor, and residents provide a significant proportion of hospital services. Of the roughly 1 million doctors in the US, about 140,000 are medical residents.

The answer is threefold:

1. Increase the number of residency slots (we have a global doctor shortage anyway).

2. Extend the duration of residency so that each resident gets the same number of total work hours.

3. Gradually phase in so that neither increase needs to be too fast.

Currently a typical residency is about 4 years. 4 years of 80-hour weeks is equivalent to 8 years of 40-hour weeks. The goal is for each resident to get 320 hour-years of training.

With 140,000 current residents averaging 4 years, a typical cohort is about 35,000. So the goal is to each year have at least (35,000 residents per cohort)(4 cohorts)(80 hours per week) = 11 million resident-hours per week.

In cohort 1, we reduce the cap to 70 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 40,000. Residents in cohort 1 will continue their residency for 4 years, 7 months. This gives each one 321 hour-years of training.

In cohort 2, we reduce the cap to 60 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 46,000.

Residents in cohort 2 will continue their residency for 5 years, 4 months. This gives each one 320 hour-years of training.

In cohort 3, we reduce the cap to 55 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 50,000.

Residents in cohort 3 will continue their residency for 6 years. This gives each one 330 hour-years of training.

In cohort 4, we reduce the cap to 50 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 56,000. Residents in cohort 4 will continue their residency for 6 years, 6 months. This gives each one 325 hour-years of training.

In cohort 5, we reduce the cap to 45 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 60,000. Residents in cohort 5 will continue their residency for 7 years, 2 months. This gives each one 322 hour-years of training.

In cohort 6, we reduce the cap to 40 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 65,000. Residents in cohort 6 will continue their residency for 8 years. This gives each one 320 hour-years of training.

In cohort 7, we keep the cap to 40 hours, and increase the number of accepted residents to 70,000. This is now the new standard, with 8-year residencies with 40 hour weeks.

I’ve made a graph here of what this does to the available number of resident-hours each year. There is a brief 5% dip in year 4, but by the time we reach year 14 we’ve actually doubled the total number of available resident-hours at any given time—without increasing the total amount of work each resident does, simply keeping them longer and working them less intensively each year. Given that quality of work is reduced by working longer hours, it’s likely that even this brief reduction in hours would not result in any reduced quality of care for patients.

[residency_hours.png]

I have thus managed to increase the number of available resident-hours, ensure that each resident gets the same amount of training as before, and still radically reduce the work hours from 80 per week to 40 per week. The additional recruitment each year is never more than 6,000 new residents or 15% of the current number of residents.

It takes several years to effect this transition. This is unavoidable if we are trying to avoid massive increases in recruitment, though if we were prepared to simply double the number of admitted residents each year we could immediately transition to 40-hour work weeks in a single cohort and the available resident-hours would then strictly increase every year.

This plan is likely not the optimal one; I don’t know enough about the details of how costly it would be to admit more residents, and it’s possible that some residents might actually prefer a briefer, more intense residency rather than a longer, less stressful one. (Though it’s worth noting that most people greatly underestimate the harms of stress and sleep deprivation, and doctors don’t seem to be any better in this regard.)

But this plan does prove one thing: There are solutions to this problem. It can be done. If our medical system isn’t solving this problem, it is not because solutions do not exist—it is because they are choosing not to take them.

What’s wrong with police unions?

pnrj current events, education, politics, public policy , , , , , ,

Nov 14 JDN 2459531

In a previous post I talked about why unions, even though they are collusive, are generally a good thing. But there is one very important exception to this rule: Police unions are almost always harmful.

Most recently, police unions have been leading the charge to fight vaccine mandates. This despite the fact that COVID-19 now kills more police officers than any other cause. They threatened that huge numbers of officers would leave if the mandates were imposed—but it didn’t happen.

But there is a much broader pattern than this: Police unions systematically take the side of individual police offers over the interests of public safety. Even the most incompetent, negligent, or outright murderous behavior by police officers will typically be defended by police unions. (One encouraging development is that lately even some police unions have been reluctant to defend the most outrageous killings by police officers—but this very much the exception, not the rule.)

Police unions are also unusual among unions in their political ties. Conservatives generally oppose unions, but are much friendlier toward police unions. At the other end of the spectrum, socialists normally love unions, but have distanced themselves from police unions for a long time. (The argument in that article that this is because “no other job involves killing people” is a bit weird: Ostensibly, the circumstances in which police are allowed to kill people are not all that different from the circumstances in which private citizens are. Just like us, they’re only supposed to use deadly force to prevent death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or others. The main thing that police are allowed to do that we aren’t is imprison people. Killing isn’t supposed to be a major part of the job.)

Police union also have some other weird features. The total membership of all police unions exceeds the total number of police officers in the United States, because a single officer is often affiliated with multiple unions—normally not at all how unions work. Police unions are also especially powerful and well-organized among unions. They are especially well-funded, and their members are especially loyal.

If we were to adopt a categorical view that unions are always good or always bad—as many people seem to want to—it’s difficult to see why police unions should be different from teachers’ unions or factory workers’ unions. But my argument was very careful not to make such categorical statements. Unions aren’t always or inherently good; they are usually good, because of how they are correcting a power imbalance between workers and corporations.

But when it comes to police, the situation is quite different. Police unions give more bargaining power to government officers against… what? Public accountability? The democratic system? Corporate CEOs are accountable only to their shareholders, but the mayors and city councils who decide police policy are elected (in most of the UK, even police commissioners are directly elected). It’s not clear that there was an imbalance in bargaining power here we would want to correct.

A similar case could be made against all public-sector unions, and indeed that case often is extended to teachers’ unions. If we must sacrifice teachers’ unions in order to destroy police unions, I’d be prepared to bite that bullet. But there are vital differences here as well. Teachers are not responsible for imprisoning people, and bad teachers almost never kill people. (In the rare cases in which teachers have committed murder, they have been charged to the full extent of the law, just as they would be in any other profession.) There surely is some misconduct by teachers that some unions may be protecting, but the harm caused by that misconduct is far lower than the harm caused by police misconduct. Teacher unions also provide a layer of protection for teachers to exercise autonomy, promoting academic freedom.

The form of teacher misconduct I would be most concerned about is sexual abuse of students. And while I’ve seen many essays claiming that teacher unions protect sexual abusers, the only concrete evidence I could find on the subject was a teachers’ union publicly complaining that the government had failed to pass stricter laws against sexual abuse by teachers. The research on teacher misconduct mainly focuses on other casual factors aside from union representation.

Even this Fox News article cherry-picking the worst examples of unions protecting abusive teachers includes line after line like “he was ultimately fired”, “he was pressured to resign”, and “his license was suspended”. So their complaint seems to be that it wasn’t done fast enough? But a fair justice system is necessarily slow. False accusations are rare, but they do happen—we can’t just take someone’s word for it. Ensuring that you don’t get fired until the district mounts strong evidence of misconduct against you is exactly what unions should be doing.

Whether unions are good or bad in a particular industry is ultimately an empirical question. So let’s look at the data, shall we? Teacher unions are positively correlated with school performance. But police unions are positively correlated with increased violent misconduct. There you have it: Teacher unions are good, but police unions are bad.

Does power corrupt?

pnrj core principles, ethics, politics, public policy , , , , , ,

Nov 7 JDN 2459526

It’s a familiar saying, originally attributed to the Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are nearly always bad men.”

I think this saying is not only wrong, but in fact dangerous. We can all observe plenty of corrupt people in power, that much is true. But if it’s simply the power that corrupts them, and they started as good people, then there’s really nothing to be done. We may try to limit the amount of power any one person can have, but in any large, complex society there will be power, and so, if the saying is right, there will also be corruption.

How do I know that this saying is wrong?

First of all, note that corruption varies tremendously, and with very little correlation with most sensible notions of power.

Consider used car salespeople, stockbrokers, drug dealers, and pimps. All of these professions are rather well known for their high level of corruption. Yet are people in these professions powerful? Yes, any manager has some power over their employees; but there’s no particular reason to think that used car dealers have more power over their employees than grocery stores, and yet there’s a very clear sense in which used car dealers are more corrupt.

Even power on a national scale is not inherently tied to corruption. Consider the following individuals: Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.

These men were extremely powerful; each ruled an entire nation.Indeed, during his administration, FDR was probably the most powerful person in the world. And they certainly were not impeccable: Mandela was a good friend of Fidel Castro, Gandhi abused his wife, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and of course FDR ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans. Yet overall I think it’s pretty clear that these men were not especially corrupt and had a large positive impact on the world.

Say what you will about Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Idealistic? Surely. Naive? Perhaps. Unrealistic? Sometimes. Ineffective? Often. But they are equally as powerful as anyone else in the US Congress, and ‘corrupt’ is not a word I’d use to describe them. Mitch McConnell, on the other hand….

There does seem to be a positive correlation between a country’s level of corruption and its level of authoritarianism; the most democratic countries—Scandinavia—are also the least corrupt. Yet India is surely more democratic than China, but is widely rated as about the same level of corruption. Greece is not substantially less democratic than Chile, but it has considerably more corruption. So even at a national level, power is the not the only determinant of corruption.

I’ll even agree to the second clause: “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Were I somehow granted an absolute dictatorship over the world, one of my first orders of business would be to establish a new democratic world government to replace my dictatorial rule. (Would it be my first order of business, or would I implement some policy reforms first? Now that’s a tougher question. I think I’d want to implement some kind of income redistribution and anti-discrimination laws before I left office, at least.) And I believe that most good people think similarly: We wouldn’t want to have that kind of power over other people. We wouldn’t trust ourselves to never abuse it. Anyone who maintains absolute power is either already corrupt or likely to become so. And anyone who seeks absolute power is precisely the sort of person who should not be trusted with power at all.

It may also be that power is one determinant of corruption—that a given person will generally end up more corrupt if you give them more power. This might help explain why even the best ‘great men’ are still usually bad men. But clearly there are other determinants that are equally important.

And I would like to offer a different hypothesis to explain the correlation between power and corruption, which has profoundly different implications: The corrupt seek power.

Donald Trump didn’t start out a good man and become corrupt by becoming a billionaire or becoming President. Donald Trump was born a narcissistic idiot.

Josef Stalin wasn’t a good man who became corrupted by the unlimited power of ruling the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin was born a psychopath.

Indeed, when you look closely at how corrupt leaders get into power, it often involves manipulating and exploiting others on a grand scale. They are willing to compromise principles that good people wouldn’t. They aren’t corrupt because they got into power; they got into power because they are corrupt.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying we should compromise all of our principles in order to achieve power. If there is a route by which power corrupts, it is surely that. Rather, I am saying that we must maintain constant vigilance against anyone who seems so eager to attain power that they will compromise principles to do it—for those are precisely the people who are likely to be most dangerous if they should achieve their aims.

Moreover, I’m saying that “power corrupts” is actually a very dangerous message. It tells good people not to seek power, because they would be corrupted by it. But in fact what we actually need in order to get good people in power is more good people seeking power, more opportunities to out-compete the corrupt. If Congress were composed entirely of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then the left-wing agenda would no longer seem naive and unrealistic; it would simply be what gets done. (Who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t work out so well after all. But it definitely would get done.) Yet how many idealistic left-wing people have heard that phrase ‘power corrupts’ too many times, and decided they didn’t want to risk running for office?

Indeed, the notion that corruption is inherent to the exercise of power may well be the greatest tool we have ever given to those who are corrupt and seeking to hold onto power.

Are unions collusion?

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 31 JDN 2459519

The standard argument from center-right economists against labor unions is that they are a form of collusion: Producers are coordinating and intentionally holding back from what would be in their individual self-interest in order to gain a collective advantage. And this is basically true: In the broadest sense of the term, labor unions are are form of collusion. Since collusion is generally regarded as bad, therefore (this argument goes), unions are bad.

What this argument misses out on is why collusion is generally regarded as bad. The typical case for collusion is between large corporations, each of which already controls a large share of the market—collusion then allows them to act as if they control an even larger share, potentially even acting as a monopoly.

Labor unions are not like this. Literally no individual laborer controls a large segment of the market. (Some very specialized laborers, like professional athletes, or, say, economists, might control a not completely trivial segment of their particular job market—but we’re still talking something like 1% at most. Even Tiger Woods or Paul Krugman is not literally irreplaceable.) Moreover, even the largest unions can rarely achieve anything like a monopoly over a particular labor market.

Thus whereas typical collusion involves going from a large market share to an even larger—often even dominant—market share, labor unions involve going from a tiny market share to a moderate—and usually not dominant—market share.

But that, by itself, wouldn’t be enough to justify unions. While small family businesses banding together in collusion is surely less harmful than large corporations doing the same, it would probably still be a bad thing, insofar as it would raise prices and reduce the quantity or quality of products sold. It would just be less bad.

Yet unions differ from even this milder collusion in another important respect: They do not exist to increase bargaining power versus consumers. They exist to increase bargaining power versus corporations.

And corporations, it turns out, already have a great deal of bargaining power. While a labor union acts as something like a monopoly (or at least oligopoly), corporations act like the opposite: oligopsony or even monopsony.

While monopoly or monopsony on its own is highly unfair and inefficient, the combination of the two—bilateral monopoly—is actually relatively fair and efficient. Bilateral monopoly is probably not as good as a truly competitive market, but it is definitely better than either a monopoly or monopsony alone. Whereas a monopoly has too much bargaining power for the seller (resulting in prices that are too high), and a monopsony has too much bargaining power for the buyer (resulting in prices that are too low), a bilateral monopoly has relatively balanced bargaining power, and thus gets an outcome that’s not too much different from fair competition in a free market.

Thus, unions really exist as a correction mechanism for the excessive bargaining power of corporations. Most unions are between workers in large industries who work for a relatively small number of employers, such as miners, truckers, and factory workers. (Teachers are also an interesting example, because they work for the government, which effectively has a monopsony on public education services.) In isolation they may seem inefficient; but in context they really exist to compensate for other, worse inefficiencies.


We could imagine a world where this was not so: Say there is a market with many independent buyers who are unwilling or unable to reliably collude, and they are served by a small number of powerful unions that use their bargaining power to raise prices and reduce output.


We have some markets that already look a bit like that: Consider the licensing systems for doctors and lawyers. These are basically guilds, which are collusive in the same way as labor unions.

Note that unlike, say, miners, truckers, or factory workers, doctors and lawyers are not a large segment of the population; they are bargaining against consumers just as much as corporations; and they are extremely well-paid and very likely undersupplied. (Doctors are definitely undersupplied; with lawyers it’s a bit more complicated, but given how often corporations get away with terrible things and don’t get sued for it, I think it’s fair to say that in the current system, lawyers are undersupplied.) So I think it is fair to be concerned that the guild systems for doctors and lawyers are too powerful. We want some system for certifying the quality of doctors and lawyers, but the existing standards are so demanding that they result in a shortage of much-needed labor.

One way to tell that unions aren’t inefficient is to look at how unionization relates to unemployment. If unions were acting as a harmful monopoly on labor, unemployment should be higher in places with greater unionization rates. The empirical data suggests that if there is any such effect, it’s a small one. There are far more important determinants of unemployment than unionization. (Wages, on the other hand, show a strong positive link with unionization.) Much like the standard prediction that raising minimum wage would reduce employment, the prediction that unions raise unemployment has largely not been borne out by the data. And for much the same reason: We had ignored the bargaining power of employers, which minimum wage and unions both reduce.

Thus, the justifiability of unions isn’t something that we could infer a priori without looking at the actual structure of the labor market. Unions aren’t always or inherently good—but they are usually good in the system as it stands. (Actually there’s one particular class of unions that do not seem to be good, and that’s police unions: But this is a topic for another time.)

My ultimate conclusion? Yes, unions are a form of collusion. But to infer from that they must be bad is to commit a Noncentral Fallacy. Unions are the good kind of collusion.

Labor history in the making

pnrj current events, inequality, market failure, politics, public policy , , , , , ,

Oct 24 JDN 2459512

To say that these are not ordinary times would be a grave understatement. I don’t need to tell you all the ways that this interminable pandemic has changed the lives of people all around the world.

But one in particular is of notice to economists: Labor in the United States is fighting back.

Quit rates are at historic highs. Over 100,000 workers in a variety of industries are simultaneously on strike, ranging from farmworkers to nurses and freelance writers to university lecturers.

After decades of quiescence to ever-worsening working conditions, it seems that finally American workers are mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.

It’s about time, frankly. The real question is why it took this long. Working conditions in the US have been systematically worse than the rest of the First World since at least the 1980s. It was substantially easier to get the leave I needed to attend my own wedding—in the US—after starting work in the UK than it would have been at the same kind of job in the US, because UK law requires employers to grant leave from the day they start work, while US federal law and the law in many states doesn’t require leave at all for anyone—not even people who are sick or recently gave birth.

So, why did it happen now? What changed? The pandemic threw our lives into turmoil, that much is true. But it didn’t fundamentally change the power imbalance between workers and employers. Why was that enough?

I think I know why. The shock from the pandemic didn’t have to be enough to actually change people’s minds about striking—it merely had to be enough to convince people that others would show up. It wasn’t the first-order intention “I want to strike” that changed; it was the second-order belief “Other people want to strike too”.

For a labor strike is a coordination game par excellence. If 1 person strikes, they get fired and replaced. If 2 or 3 or 10 strike, most likely the same thing. But if 10,000 strike? If 100,000 strike? Suddenly corporations have no choice but to give in.

The most important question on your mind when you are deciding whether or not to strike is not, “Do I hate my job?” but “Will my co-workers have my back?”.

Coordination games exhibit a very fascinating—and still not well-understood—phenomenon known as Schelling points. People will typically latch onto certain seemingly-arbitrary features of their choices, and do so well enough that simply having such a focal point can radically increase the level of successful coordination.

I believe that the pandemic shock was just such a Schelling point. It didn’t change most people’s working conditions all that much: though I can see why nurses in particular would be upset, it’s not clear to me that being a university lecturer is much worse now than it was a year ago. But what the pandemic did do was change everyone’s working conditions, all at once. It was a sudden shock toward work dissatisfaction that applied to almost the entire workforce.

Thus, many people who were previously on the fence about striking were driven over the edge—and then this in turn made others willing to take the leap as well, suddenly confident that they would not be acting alone.

Another important feature of the pandemic shock was that it took away a lot of what people had left to lose. Consider the two following games.

Game A: You and 100 other people each separately, without communicating, decide to choose X or Y. If you all choose X, you each get $20. But if even one of you chooses Y, then everyone who chooses Y gets $1 but everyone who chooses X gets nothing.

Game B: Same as the above, except that if anyone chooses Y, everyone who chooses Y also gets nothing.

Game A is tricky, isn’t it? You want to choose X, and you’d be best off if everyone did. But can you really trust 100 other people to all choose X? Maybe you should take the safe bet and choose Y—but then, they’re thinking the same way.


Game B, on the other hand, is painfully easy: Choose X. Obviously choose X. There’s no downside, and potentially a big upside.

In terms of game theory, both games have the same two Nash equilibria: All-X and All-Y. But in the second game, I made all-X also a weak dominant strategy equilibrium, and that made all the difference.

We could run these games in the lab, and I’m pretty sure I know what we’d find: In game A, most people choose X, but some people don’t, and if you repeat the game more and more people choose Y. But in game B, almost everyone chooses X and keeps on choosing X. Maybe they don’t get unanimity every time, but they probably do get it most of the time—because why wouldn’t you choose X? (These are testable hypotheses! I could in fact run this experiment! Maybe I should?)

It’s hard to say at this point how effective these strikes will be. Surely there will be some concessions won—there are far too many workers striking for them all to get absolutely nothing. But it remains uncertain whether the concessions will be small, token changes just to break up the strikes, or serious, substantive restructuring of how work is done in the United States.

If the latter sounds overly optimistic, consider that this is basically what happened in the New Deal. Those massive—and massively successful—reforms were not generated out of nowhere; they were the result of the economic crisis of the Great Depression and substantial pressure by organized labor. We may yet see a second New Deal (a Green New Deal?) in the 2020s if labor organizations can continue putting the pressure on.

The most important thing in making such a grand effort possible is believing that it’s possible—only if enough people believe it can happen will enough people take the risk and put in the effort to make it happen. Apathy and cynicism are the most powerful weapons of the status quo.


We are witnessing history in the making. Let’s make it in the right direction.