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Policies and discourse in schools and the general rhetoric around education in the United States suggest that our society tends to value children and adolescents primarily for their economic potential. In itself, this amounts to a kind of violence toward young people. Further, as the previous chapters have argued, films about teenagers often feed on adult anxieties and moral panics about youth and, in turn, they reinforce the idea that youth need to be controlled and should be pushed into conformity. Movies in the third and fourth order of simulacra do this with hyperreal images, convincing simulations of youth as reckless and out-of- control, and Virtuality (e.g., found footage style cinematography). Films of the third and fourth order featuring teen characters have a relationship of reinforcement with the rhetoric and policies that result in violence toward young people and deepen the conflation of the systems of schooling and economics. Critical education scholars, critical pedagogues, and others are committed to highlighting and opposing the rhetorical violence and the more draconian school policies to which young people are subjected in schools. They also provide convincing arguments that demonstrate the ways in which the system operates in the service of capital. However, the responses to these phenomena that their work offers are, from a Baudrillardian view, inefficacious since they are rooted in an outmoded Marxist theory and lean on a commitment to emancipation and liberation through pedagogy. Here I argue, the critical education work that is rooted in the traditions of Marxism and critical theory, though it has been indispensable in terms of locating and critiquing violent discourse and practice with regard to education and youth, also promotes a cruel form of hope in educational institutions as central figures in the reversal of the lamentable current systemic trends. It argues that critical theory and pedagogy provide hope that systems, in particular, education, can be revolutionized. Critical theorists are right to see mainstream schooling as a generator of the affective liquidity leveraging neo-liberalism, but their suggestions for resistance and revolution are less than promising. Modernist projects of critical theory and pedagogy have proven to be mirages. In their place, I argue for a more viable, postmodern hope in the form of fatal theory, fatal strategies, and radical thought. These related ideas from the later portion of Baudrillard’s corpus are applied here to the troublesome discourse about youth that informs the systems in which they move, especially education, which again, is increasingly subservient to other systems (e.g., political, economic). To begin, it should be noted that referring to Baudrillardian concepts as contributing to forms of postmodern hope is a bit precarious given his rejection of the postmodern. Below I discuss, in some detail, Baudrillard’s complex relationship with postmodernity. I also specifically articulate why I have chosen to refer to my application of fatal theory and radical thought to youth and education as an effort toward postmodern hope. Before the full discussion of fatal theory in light of education and youth, I analyze the ways in which certain forms of resistance (which are often taken up by critical theorists in education) are inefficacious in the current state of the world, in late capitalism. Baudrillard’s ideas are central to that argument. Beyond this, I argue that there are two growing and particular kinds of critique in the age of ubiquitous social media that also fail to hit their mark. Snide remarks or “snark” as a reaction to offensive or anti-progressive rhetoric and policy has become an increasingly popular means of garnering online attention through displays of cleverness. Snark is, however, often associated with satire, which can be understood as having affiliation with fatal strategies. So, there is a complicated relationship between Baudrillard’s fatal theory and snark. I explore this relationship below and ultimately argue that snark falls into the category of a form of resistance or critique that gets absorbed into the code. Incredulity is another reaction by leftists and those associated with critical theory to right-wing bigotry, ignorance, and oppression. Again, examples of such reactions are not difficult to locate in social media. It has been an outlet for an accruing amount of ostensive shock, astonishment, and disbelief by progressives in the face of various expressions of anti-progressivism. Like snark, incredulity seems to be a preferred tool for responding to political and social rhetoric to which one is averse. And also like snark, the inherent critique in incredulous reactions is impotent in the late capitalist code. To be clear, when it comes to critical pedagogues and critical theorists with interests in youth and education, it is not the content of their concerns that I find wanting. This is also the case, as noted earlier, with regard to critical media literacy. Critical pedagogy, in general, and critical media literacy, specifically, locate and critique the same systemic violence as a Baudrillardian fatal theory of youth and education. Violent discourse and policies toward young people and their connection to institutions like schools is of deep concern to both critical and fatal theorists. But Baudrillard’s fatal theory focuses more on the level of form than critical theory. And, ultimately, radical thought provides possibilities for resistance that avoid being subsumed by the late capitalist code whereas, the responses of critical theory and critical pedagogy are vulnerable to being incorporated into the code and repackaged as a set of signs to be consumed. Fatal theory/strategies and radical thought are challenging notions within Baudrillard’s corpus and the intent in this chapter is to preserve their provocativeness in my analysis and application to matters of youth and education. In so doing, it is important to admit that this application work will not result in any policy or practice suggestions. Such is not the outcome of the pursuit of fatal strategies and its accompanying radical thought. Rather, their aim is well beyond the level of policy as they seek to push on the negative conditions of the system until it reverses course. Radical thought can be accompanied by what Baudrillard terms “theory fiction” as a way of rendering the world enigmatic, as a means of staying at the margins in order to anticipate the world and its events that he claimed critical thought was lagging behind. 1 Relevant systems with respect to youth and education are already given over to the late capitalist code. The system of schooling, for example, is constantly subject to externally imposed policy changes at both the macro and micro levels. Anecdotes abound in local American schools regarding the rapidity with which new programs are implemented, ostensibly in order to address a wide range of problems including English language learners, the so-called achievement gap, bullying, perceived deficiencies in “social-emotional learning,” childhood obesity. While some of these issues seem to have clear educational components, all of the programs that schools adopt in order to address them fall under the category of what David Labaree has called “the educationalization of social problems.”2 Baudrillard’s radical thought and fatal theory, when translated into this context of the system of schooling in the United States, reject the notion that making headway with these social issues involves the constant adoption of new, “better” programs, replacing last year’s model for ameliorating the achievement gap or creating healthier school lunches with a new “research based” approach. Ultimately the radical thought and postmodern hope that I am arguing for here dismisses altogether the educationalizing of social issues, though not out of insouciance. Rather, the fatal theorist in education understands that the only available options are radical thought and theory fiction, which do offer the hope of potentially flipping the very conditions that allow for the current functioning of the late capitalist system. Baudrillard’s work has been misread as nihilistic. As we saw above, Kellner is convinced of its unequivocal pessimism. "Baudrillard’s nihi- lism is without joy, without energy, without hope for a better future.”3 But Baudrillard himself insisted that fatal theory and radical thought are, indeed, hopeful. ”[O]ne must fight all charges of irresponsibility, nihilism or despair. Radical thought is never depressive. On this point there is a total misunderstanding.”4 In the context of education, there is some amount of hope already in disabusing ourselves of the notion that dialec- tical critique has efficacy within the late capitalist code. But also, hope with regard to youth and education might lie in taking the opposite tack of the critical theorists who react with incredulity to the system working as it is designed to work. The fatal theorist, by contrast, seeks to destabilize through hyperconformity to the system’s expectations. To choose the path of fatal theory and postmodern hope, though, will mean abandoning our projects, even our favored progressive ones, of educationalizing of social problems. As mentioned above, connecting Baudrillard with the notion of "post- modern hope” requires explanation. His connection with postmodemity is complex. His critics, namely Kellner, understood him as unequivocally postmodernist. For those critics, this label meant that he was nihilistic, that he in some sense celebrated the world he was describing. Kellner, who was clearly no admirer of Baudrillard’s centralization of the semiot- ic, went so far as to call him a “sign-fetishist.”5 But Mike Gane and others have demonstrated clearly that Kellner had misread Baudrillard. Indeed, Baudrillard specifically resisted the label “postmodernist.” He once said, "I have nothing to do with postmodernism.”6 On Gane’s reading, it is ironic that during the 19805, the rise of the postmodern counter-move- ment targeted Baudrillard as “the high priest of postmodernism” since Baudrillard’s "position is one of great hostility to the whole phenome- non.”7 But Gane later admitted that Baudrillard’s rejection of the post- modern label was done "not entirely consistently, since occasionally he has been willing to play with the opposition between the modern and the postmodern.”8 It should be noted that Gane’s admission was not a change of position on his reading of Baudrillard, rather, in the time be- tween the two assertions, Baudrillard had made new statements regard- ing modernity/postmodernity. Throughout the late 19805 and well into the 19905, Gane and Kellner argued over Baudrillard’s relationship with postmodernity. Gane, on the one side, asserted that Baudrillard’s project was to combat the postmod- ern (as is the case in Rex Butler’s claim that Baudrillard’s work is "in' defence of the real”).9 Kellner, on the other, alleged Cane was wrong and that Baudrillard’s project was surely “connected in intricate ways to the problematic of the postmodern.” 10 For his part, Gane was convinced that Kellner had "ulterior objectives” in his reading of Baudrillard. “Kellner has attempted a critique of Baudrillard that first sets up the modernity- postmodernity model and then claims that Baudrillard underestimates the potential for a Marxist appraisal of this shift and resistance to it," according to Gane, who, then went on to critique Kellner’s position saying, “The problem with this line of reading Baudrillard is that it launches the critique too soon at the wrong object: a critique of a phantom based on a crude and dogmatic appeal to a theory of capitalism and of revolutionary mass action and social transformation.” Gane eventually argued that, in the end, Baudrillard’s later writing seems to settle the issue since he neglects to use the term postmodern much and rarely employs the concept. That is, “it does not map on to either the third or fourth order simulacra categories,” and, beyond this, "By locating the emergence of the term in Baudrillard’s writing it does look as if its func- tion has been to specify one of the routes not to take within fourth order culture” (emphasis mine).12 Although I am much more sympathetic to Gane’s reading of Baudril- lard than Kellner’s, as has been clear throughout, here I am using the phrase “postmodern hope” to describe the result of replacing critical theory with fatal theory and radical thought in the efforts to resist violent rhetoric and policy regarding youth and education. I use the term postmodern with some amount of trepidation though, in the end, I find it necessary. Not only did Baudrillard reject[s] [postmodernism] it as a label, it also is a danger- ous word since it elicits rabid reactions from some who take issue with a broad set of arguments filed under postmodernism. It can also, for the same or similar reasons, trigger outright dismissal of any arguments that follow when it is mentioned. I am also well aware, on the other hand, that the term postmodernism can attract too quick and too eager agreement for those whom I would call celebratory postmodernists, who I take to be the inverse of the dismissive lot previously mentioned. In this case the content of the arguments that follow are less important than the moniker that precedes them. Celebratory postmodernists could also refer to those who find particular elements of the break with modernity to be welcome (e.g., the loss of the real, the onset of nihilism) developments. I do not count myself among this group; on the contrary, and it is the group into which Kellner mistakenly places Baudrillard. Because of these complica- tions around postmodernism, I want to be very clear about my use of the term. First, I am using postmodern to generally classify my descriptive arguments about the world. The primary animating ideas surrounding these arguments are taken from Baudrillard—the third (and eventually fourth) order of simulacra, simulations, and hyperreality, or, the loss of the real. Again, for Baudrillard, the loss of the real was a descriptive critique and his entire project was to defend the real through a description of a world in which the semiotic has colonized the symbolic, a world in which the trajectory of communications technology has substituted virtual non-communication for proximal human interaction, and the deluge of signs without referents—a world of simulations that have supplanted the dialectical relationship between illusion and the real. Baudrillard found all of this lamentable. In the context of critical scholars of education and youth, Baudrillard’s descriptive arguments are best referred to as postmodern since critical theorists tend to rely on Marxian notions that Bau- drillard came to reject.13 Beyond this, specifically in the field of philosophy of education the preponderance of arguments is based in classical (mostly Plato and Aristotle) or (mostly Dewey and critical theory) thought. There are numerous exceptions, to be clear. However, when philosophy is applied to education, it is generally the modern case that arguments favor what are understood as either classical or modern philosophical traditions. In my view, Baudrillard’s ideas fall into neither category and his particular descriptive arguments can be understood as more radical than those that rely on critical theory. Additionally, and perhaps more to the point, I am using the term postmodern to describe a lack of faith in Enlightenment projects and modern forms of dialectical critique. To the degree that this lack of faith is an indicator of postmodernism, a Baudrillardian form of hope is appropriately understood as postmodern. As he said, "All forms that tend to project a dazzling and miraculous liberty are only revolutionary homilies.” 14 For him the late capitalist code is adept at subsuming critique and offering it back as a set of signs to be consumed. The code actually encourages a certain level of critique. Pawlett says, “effective resistance cannot be dialectical because synthesis or resolution is the very dynamic of the capitalist system as it constantly revolutionises itself through the sign code. In other words critique is rapidly absorbed by simulation.”15 In my View, there is some amount of hope already in disabusing our- selves of the notion that dialectical critique has efficacy within the late capitalist code. Relatedly, postmodern hope can come in the form of locating and understanding various forms of false hope that stem from the various forms of what I have called modern descriptions of the world above. In addition to this initial postmodern hope that comes along with a separation from false hope, I also want to offer the idea that hope with regard to youth and education might lie in taking the opposite tack of the critical theorists or the kind of critique that begins with incredulity in the face of the system working precisely as it is designed. That is, the functioning of the system can be destabilized through a hyperconformity to its expectations. Although this notion will be taken up in more detail below, one of the ways in which it translates to the present study of youth and education is refusal to support the educationalizing social problems—not even the ones those of us who count ourselves as radicals or progressives like since the responses that educational institutions have with regard to social issues are precoded anyway. As mentioned above, David Labaree has made significant contribu— tions to the analysis of the educationalization of social problems. Schools in the United States continue to be the primary location for attempting to address social problems and yet, they are demonstrably unsuccessful in doing so. Labaree’s explanation is that, as a society, we are content with a formalized version of social reform that does not actually hit its target, since this gives us satisfaction with regard to social ills and at the same time does not violate the particular brand of liberalism in' the United States that emphasizes individualism. He says: We assign formal responsibility to education for solving our most pressing social problems 111' light of our highest social ideals, with the tacit understandm‘g that by educationalizing these problem—solving ef- forts we are seeking a solution that is more formal than substantive. We are saying that we are willing to accept what education can produce- new programs, new curricula, new ms'titutions, new degrees, new edu- cational opportunities—m place of solutions that might make real changes m' the ways in which we distribute social power, wealth, and honor.16 Below I discuss in detail how lack of support for the educationalizing of social problems is related to the fatal strategy of hyperconformity to the system. Before a full examination of fatal theory and radical thought as applied to education and youth, it is important to understand how some critical reactions to late capitalism end up reinforcing the rationality of the system. IN CREDULITY, SNARK, AND THE REIN SCRII’I'I ON OF CAPITALIST RATIONALITY Much of the response to specific incidences the sort of violence directed at young people generally and specifically in schools is often met with is a kind of disbelief or amazement by critical pedagogues and critical theory scholars concerned with the state of schooling or treatment of youth in the United States. This is not altogether different from the typical response of most progressives and leftists to any ignorant, bigoted, or otherwise offensive statement or act by conservative politicians and pundits, right-wing religious zealots, or social commentators. Social media’s rise to ubiquity has enabled a high level of visibility of these kinds of reactions. Both Facebook and Twitter (to use the most popular examples) are replete with incredulous responses to the most obstreperous racism and sexism and fundamental religion-based hatred. “Can you believe what [well-known political or social figure or commentator] just said?!” is a familiar Internet trope. Yet, this response of incredulity is curious. What do criticalists and leftists expect from right-wing or fundamentalist commentators? Should we continue to be shocked and amazed by the same rhetoric from the same talking heads? Should we expect that politicians with a track record of thinly veiled bigotry will eventually align them- selves with anti-racist or anti-sexist social movements? Through a Baudrillardian lens, it can be argued that these responses of incredulity end up reinforcing the rationality of the system. It seems as though the kinds of reactions analyzed above are akin to the response critical theorists and progressive educators have to anti- democratic school reform and continued evidence that school policies and rhetoric regarding youth are animated by market logic. On one pos- sible reading the response of incredulity is a form of dialectical critique. And insofar as late capitalism is the enemy of the aims of democratic education, this may be a problem since, according to Baudrillard, in late capitalism dialectic resistance is no longer possible. Therefore, any traditional critique of the system assumes and even reinforces the rationality of the system. In the end, the point is that what is responded to with incredulity should not be surprising or shocking. Valuing unfettered market logic is precisely the way the system works. Why are we surprised when late capitalism functions exactly the way it is supposed to? It is designed to stretch and create new markets (out of teenagers or public institutions such as schools) and manipulate them. And traditional forms of resistance, based in critical or emancipatory theories are only capable of producing signs of resistance. As William Pawlett puts it: According to Baudrillard there is no more dialectic of measuring, either in representation, the dialectic between the sign and reference, or in economics between supply and demand. The [late capitalist] code absorbs these through “predictive anticipation” and “planned socialisation,” which extends far beyond the production and consumption of goods and incorporates "needs, knowledge, culture, information, sexuality” as terms of the code. All that once had an "explosive force” is defused, deterred or contained; there may still be signs of the dialectic, but they are precisely that: only signs. Signs of revolt and liberation abound (Che Guevara t-shirts and gay couples on TV). But these are signs generated by the capitalist system and any “revolution” they generate is at the level of the sign. 17 My argument here is that to respond with incredulity is to create a Sign of revolt. This contemporary form of incredulity is a form of outmoded dialectical critique adorned with the accouterment of the social media age that ends up adding to a set of signs to be consumed. One of the ways in which this phenomenon articulates itself is in the tone and style that critical progressives often employ when responding incredulously to offensive policies, speech, and acts. That is, I think the kind of response referred to above that I find exemplified in social media Sometimes engenders the false hope of what I will call here, the Club of Snark. By this I mean that snark often becomes the extension of the in- Credulous response. Snark, combined with the development of (non) communications technology and social media, can result in a race to see who can generate the most cleverly constructed retort. In the case of progressive and critical educators, a virtual club is then formed around snarky riposte to the opponents of democratic/Deweyan-inspired ideas about schooling and school reform or to the bigoted and neoliberal opponents of critical pedagogues. No doubt, progressives and others on the Left are by no means the only groups participating in snark. I focus on progressives, the Left, critical theorists and pedagogues because those are the groups with which a fatal theorist in education is aligned in terms of sets of concerns about youth and education. My concern is that the pro- gressive Clubs of Snark are ineffective in terms of reversrnig conditions.

In a violent and contemporary period of history (let's say between the two world wars and the cold war), it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. It is the golden age of despotic and legendary resurrections. Myth, chased from the real by the violence of history, finds refuge in cinema. Today, it is history itself that invades the cinema according to the same scenario-the historical stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neutralization, which is dubbed peaceful coexistence on a global level, and pacified monotony on the quotidian level-this history exorcised by a slowly or brutally congealing society celebrates its resurrection in force on the screen, according to the same process that used to make lost myths live again. History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this "awareness of history on the part of cinema," as one congratulated oneself on the "entrance of politics into the university." Same misunderstanding, same mystification. The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or like social security in its time), that is, posthumous liberalization. The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations , and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values-it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk-a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro fascination. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the period immediately following the war-the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more perverse, denser, more confused essence). One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our "irreferential" era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro-a coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political; it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by retro). History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema, posthumously (the term historical has undergone the same fate: a "historical'' moment, monument, congress, figure are in this way designated as fossils). Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential. This does not signify that history has never appeared in cinema as a powerful moment, as a contemporary process, as insurrection and not as resurrection. In the "real" as in cinema, there was history but there isn't any anymore. Today, the history that is "given back" to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a "historical real'' than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fundamentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation. It is a question of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly. That is why they are so exact, so minute, frozen in the state in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. All, but not only, those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President's Men, etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or Mcluhanesque mosaic), oflarge photo-, kino-, historicosynthesis machines, etc., rather than one of veritable films. Let's understand each other: their quality is not in question. The problem is rather that in some sense we are left completely indifferent. Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. Most of what we see today (the best) is already of this order. Barry Lyndon is the best example: one never did better, one will never do better in ... in what? Not in evoking, not even in evoking, in simulating. All the toxic radiation has been filtered, all the ingredients are there, in precise doses, not a single error

First, function of natural resources in conflict is narrowly explained. Less research has been devoted to non-resource factors of conflicts and their connection with resources. Conflict is composed of multiple dimensions (political, economic, historical, cultural, ethnic and geographical etc.) rather than single factor. It is not clear how non-resource dimensions o1f conflict interact with natural resources, namely poor performance of state institutions or scarcity of state capacity One may understand how natural resources influence non-resource dimensions but one may not find how and whether non-resource dimensions affect scarcity or abundancy of natural resources. In this regard, it is not sufficient to simply propose scarcity or abundancy of natural resources as the fundamental reason for conflicts. Second, less research has scrutinized political and economic costs of resources wars, namely occupation cost, international cost and investment costs (e.g. Meierding, 2016). The existing works give a misleading impression that resource incomes can cover easily invasion, investment and international costs of wars.

While demand has been stronger than expected, supply in critical sectors coped better than expected. The predicted pandemic breakdowns in supply chains for food and medical supplies proved to be overstated. Surveys of logistical firms last year revealed that the pandemic had minimal effects on their operational capabilities. Even when it came to medicines and personal protective equipment, there were only minor disruptions after the initial shock in March 2020. Claims that the global supply chain in medical products rendered states vulnerable to weaponized interdependence proved to be wildly exaggerated. The pandemic affected service sectors such as tourism far more severely than any manufacturing sector. Indeed, Slate's Jordan Weissmann pointed out recently that "imports were up 5 percent year-over-year in September, and up 17 percent compared with the same time in 2019." This happened despite the decline in air passenger traffic, which restricted yet another means of shipping goods by air. Supply has increased—it's just that demand has surged even more.

The private sector is responding to market signals by ramping up production and ensuring multiple supply lines. Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are all spending tens of billions of dollars to build new chip foundries in the United States. Skyrocketing shipping prices are incentivizing additional construction of new container ships. The Wall Street Journal reports that in the first five months of 2021, there were nearly twice as many orders for new container ships as there were in all of 2019 and 2020 combined. To ensure holiday inventory, large retailers like Walmart and Home Depot have chartered their own container ships. Container shipping rates have already started to decline from September peaks.

The stock market crash story is getting boring and annoying to a large degree. Since 2009, there has been a constant drumbeat of the market is going to crash stories. In 2009, many experts felt that the market had rallied too strongly and that it needed to pull back sharply before moving higher up. They were calling for 15%-20% correction. Ten years later and most of them are still waiting for this so-called crash. A stock market crash is a possibility but the possibility is not the same thing as certainty, and this is what seems to elude most of the naysayers. One day they will get it right as even a broken clock is correct twice a day. In the interim waiting for this stock market crash has cost these experts a fortune, both in lost capital gains and actual booked losses if they shorted this market.

It’s 2017, and the markets are overbought, and we agree that they need to let out some steam, but as for a crash that will only occur when sentiment turns bullish. The crowd has not embraced this market and until they do corrections but not crashes is what we should expect. In fact, we penned an article titled “Dow Could Trade to 30K But not before This Happens”, where we discussed the possibility of the Dow trading to 30k before it crashes. The one factor that could alter this outlook would be for the masses to turn bullish suddenly.

Employment effects of fundamental health reform: gains in health care, losses in insurance and billing—with likely economywide net job gains from rising economic demand

Like all positive productivity gains, Medicare for All would be more likely to increase the total number of jobs in the U.S. economy, even as health reform leads to the redeployment of workers from some sectors and into others.

Health reform as labor market policy: Key effects for workers

Fundamental reforms like M4A could greatly aid labor market outcomes for U.S. workers. The most obvious benefits would be higher wages and salaries, increased availability of good jobs, reduced stress during spells of job loss, better “matches” between workers and employers, and greater opportunity to start small businesses.

A single-payer healthcare system would save money over time, likely even during the first year of operation, according to nearly two dozen analyses of national and statewide single payer proposals made over the past 30 years.

The study, published Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2020, in PLOS Medicine, comes as California Gov. Gavin Newsom has named a state commission to find ways to achieve universal coverage, possibly through a single-payer system, and as the Democratic presidential candidates are debating “Medicare for All” proposals on the national stage.

The decomposition of the five channels is similar in each of the five single-payer systems. In this section, we focus on Option 2, which has lower payment rates to providers, more cost sharing, and no LTSS benefit. To get a clearer picture of what is driving two aggregates, GDP and nonhealth consumption, we also look at the five channels’ contributions to the changes in 23 economywide productivity, the labor supply, the capital stock, and the after-tax wage rate in 2030.

In 2030, under Option 2, GDP is 1.4 percent higher than projected under current law. The effect can be decomposed into five channels (see Figure 11):

Brancaccio: One criticism — besides, perhaps, the cost of employing so many people as a matter of policy — one criticism is that, with the government offering the guaranteed job, private employers would have to raise what they pay, and that would make the U.S. less competitive when competing with countries that don’t do that.

Wong: See, I gotta say I think that’s a feature not a bug of this idea. We should be raising pay. It’s really important that workers who we now see are essential, grocery clerks and delivery workers and home health aides, they need to make a living wage — of course, to support their families, but also to support the whole economy. These folks need to be able to themselves pay for education, buy groceries, go on vacation. That stimulates the whole economy. And they can’t do that right now on the sub-minimum wages that they’re getting.

The first problem is the money. A truly universal payment of $10,000 to every citizen every year adds up to a new expense of about $3 trillion, well more than we spend on our social safety net now, and close to the entirety of the tax revenue currently collected by the federal government.

There is, however, widespread belief that any monetary intervention stimulates hyper-inflation of the form found in 1920s Germany, 1990s Argentina and 2000s Zimbabwe. This is because people believe that giving consumers more money to spend leads to businesses charging higher prices to take advantage of increased purchasing power, creating a cycle in which employees demand higher wages to buy commodities, increasing the cost of production, cancelling out any benefit from the monetary intervention and actually reducing the standard of living overall.

There is little evidence to support this view. UBI is no more or less inflationary than anything else that raises incomes – its impact would depend on whether the economy is at full employment, whether taxes are raised to pay for the scheme and various other factors.

Where hyperinflation has occurred, it has been because essential goods are scarce, raising their value overall, and debt has been held in foreign currencies and paid in currencies declining in value by virtue of countries’ domestic production being disrupted or declining. Our current levels of inflation are caused by similar pressures as those in the 1970s: war leading to an increase in the cost of fossil fuels.

If the logic behind objecting to a UBI on the basis of inflation were correct, then there ought to be absolutely no attempt to introduce new jobs or increase wages, as both increase purchasing power. If inflation is our sole concern, governments ought to slash wages and massively increase taxes. The point is that nobody wants either of those options because, even if they did reduce inflation, people would not want to have their wages reduced.

In a working paper released Feb. 12 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Assoc. Prof. Damon Jones of Harris Public Policy and Asst. Prof. Ioana Marinescu of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice (formerly of UChicago) examined the effect of unconditional cash transfers on labor markets using the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend—a payout from a diversified portfolio of invested oil reserve royalties, established in 1982. They concluded unconditional cash transfers had no significant effect on employment, yet it increased part-time work.

“It is reasonable to expect an unconditional cash transfer, such as a universal income, to decrease employment,” Jones said. “A key concern with a universal basic income is that it could discourage people from working, but our research shows that the possible reductions in employment seem to be offset by increases in spending that in turn increase the demand for more workers.”

Light ’21 [Jennifer; 01-22-2021; “Universal Basic Income’s Impact on Entrepreneurship”; The JR Executive; \\pairie]

Social entrepreneurship is the most crucial type of entrepreneurship, as it is startup companies that develop ideas and solutions to current social, cultural, and environmental issues, such as climate change. Unfortunately, entrepreneurship has been on the decline. According to the INC, “entrepreneurs have been in decline for 40 years due to fear of financial failure.” Furthermore, the Office of Advocacy explains that around one in twelve small businesses is doomed to close a year, most commonly due to low sales and restricted cash flow. To resolve the fear of failure and stimulate small businesses, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) of $1,000 a month should be implemented. Luckily, a UBI has the potential to stimulate entrepreneurship further and give businesses the push they need to start, and provide a safety net for companies.

Global geopolitical risks have soared since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Investors, market participants, and policymakers expect that the war will exert a drag on the global economy while pushing up inflation, with a sharp increase in uncertainty and risks of severe adverse outcomes.2 As an example of these concerns, the April 2022 edition of the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook contains more than 200 mentions of the word "war." Some economic effects are already materializing. The economies of Russia and Ukraine are contracting sharply as a direct result of the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia. Commodity markets are in turmoil and financial markets have been highly volatile since the start of the conflict. In light of these developments, a key question is: How much will geopolitical tensions weigh on economic activity in 2022 and beyond?

In this note, to answer this question, we first quantify the recent rise in geopolitical risks using two measures based on textual analysis: one focusing on newspapers articles, and another constructed from transcripts of firms' earnings calls. Armed with these numerical measures, we use an econometric model and recent data to provide empirical evidence on the global macroeconomic effects of movements in geopolitical risk.

A broad decline in energy prices contributed to the overall easing. Gasoline declined 5.6% in May, and natural gas and electricity also declined. But these prices are not likely to fall much further, and so will not be able to contribute to further inflation reductions.

Price pressures remain. Excluding food and energy, inflation is at 5.3% for the past twelve months and is likely to stay around a 5% rate for the rest of the year. Shelter prices, the biggest single component in the index, are still rising, with a 0.6% gain in May. These price gains are expected to slow the rest of the year, however. The prices of other services rose a moderate 0.3%. This is the so-called “core services” component that the Federal Reserve is focused on. Price increases at restaurants are still elevated, at 0.5%.

The prices of oil, transportation, food ingredients and other raw materials have fallen in recent months as the shocks stemming from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have faded. Yet many big businesses have continued raising prices at a rapid clip.

Some of the world’s biggest companies have said they do not plan to change course and will continue increasing prices or keep them at elevated levels for the foreseeable future.

Annual inflation in the United States slowed to 6.4% in January, easing for the seventh consecutive month. In Europe, inflation is running at 8.5% after peaking at 10.6% in October. In the United Kingdom, which faces weaker economic prospects than its peers, the rate of price increases is also falling: In January, annual inflation dipped to 10.1% from a recent high of 11.1% this past fall.

But inflation remains uncomfortably high and is many times pre-pandemic norms. More worryingly, beneath those headline figures are signs that the fight against steep price rises is far from won, fanning fears that elevated inflation could become embedded into parts of the economy where it’s hard to eradicate.

The Federal Reserve last night paused its most aggressive round of interest rate rises since the 1980s, but stopped short of declaring victory in the fight against inflation. The US central bank decided to hold its target steady at 5pc to 5.25pc rather than opting for an 11th straight increase to borrowing costs. Stronger growth expectations for the world’s largest economy prompted its rate-setters to suggest two more interest rate rises were still likely, taking markets by surprise. The Fed chairman Jerome Powell said: “Inflation has moderated somewhat since the middle of last year. “Nonetheless inflation pressures continue to run high, and the process of getting inflation back down to 2pc has a long way to go.” The Fed’s policymakers revised their interest rates expectations to 5.6pc for the end of the year from previous forecasts of 5.1pc. The central bank also doubled its forecasts for growth to 1pc in 2023 and 1.1pc the following year. Despite the hawkish tone, the decision to stop raising borrowing costs stands in stark contrast to the UK’s struggles to tame rampant inflation. The Bank of England is poised to lift rates by 0.25 percentage points to 4.75pc in its 13th consecutive hike next week amid persistently high price rises and red-hot wage growth. The Fed’s pause comes after a string of economic data released over the past two weeks pointed to higher borrowing costs starting to tame price pressures. Producer inflation, which measures prices charged by wholesalers, fell by more than expected from 2.3pc to 1.1pc in May, figures released on Wednesday showed. Consumer price inflation also dropped sharply in May to 4pc from 4.9pc, lifting expectations that the Fed’s job is close to being done. Mr Powell said however that the “extraordinary resilience” of the labour market had “surprised many, if not all analysts over the last couple of years”. The central bank now expects unemployment to reach 4.1pc at the end of the year rather than 4.5pc. Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, said the hawkish stance suggested the Fed was “ clearly trying to avoid a 1970s-style resurgence in inflation”. The Fed started its hiking cycle three months later than the Bank in March last year. However, it has been more forceful than Threadneedle Street, which has raised borrowing costs by 4.4 percentage points since December 2021. The European Central Bank is expected to raise rates by 0.25 percentage points tomorrow.