Issue 3
December 7, 2023
FLASH Taylor Swift Time Person of Year
1 American oil production hits all-time record
2 World’s first 4th generation nuclear reactor goes online in China
3 OPINION: The US is overusing economic sanctions
4 Social media harms boys, too
5 Rich country workers entering “Golden Age”
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FLASH Taylor Swift Time Person of Year
1 American oil production hits all-time record
American crude oil production reached a fresh all-time high of 13.2mn barrels a day in September, according to figures released last week, more than any other country and accounting for about one in eight barrels of global output. The added volumes have outpaced official forecasts and called into question claims of a US oil industry constricted by Wall Street or environmental regulations. They are causing difficulties for the Opec+ oil cartel, which last week agreed to deepen cuts to its members’ own volumes in a bid to prop up faltering prices. (FT)
2 World’s first 4th generation nuclear reactor goes online in China
China’s Shidaowan nuclear power plant, the world’s first fourth-generation reactor, has begun commercial operations, one of the companies behind its development said. The high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) went online following a week-long (168 hours) continuous operation test, state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said in announcing the feat on Wednesday. Fourth-generation nuclear reactors are designed to be successors for the existing, often water-cooled, nuclear reactors in operation around the world. A feature of the reactor’s design is “inherent safety”, as in the event of a sudden reactor failure or external disturbance, “the core will not melt,” a Tsinghua press release said. (South China Morning Post)
3 OPINION: The US is overusing economic sanctions
Most of the world’s fiber-optic cables, which carry data and messages around the planet, travel through the United States. And where these cables make U.S. landfall, Washington can and does monitor their traffic—basically making a record of every data packet that allows the National Security Agency to see the data. The United States can therefore easily spy on what almost every business, and every other country, is doing. It can determine when its competitors are threatening its interests and issue meaningful sanctions in response.
Washington’s spying and sanctioning is the subject of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. This revelatory book explains how Washington came to command such awesome power and the many ways it deploys this authority.
The authors also demonstrate how, in the name of security, the United States has created a system that is often abused. “To protect America, Washington has slowly but surely turned thriving economic networks into tools of domination,” Farrell and Newman write. And as their book makes clear, the United States’ efforts to dominate can cause tremendous damage. If Washington deploys its tools too often, it might prompt other countries to break up the current international order. The United States could push China to cut itself off from much of the world economy, slowing global growth. And Washington might use its authority to punish states and people that have done nothing wrong. Experts must therefore think about how to best constrain—if not quite contain—the United States’ empire. (Foreign Affairs)
4 Social media harms boys, too
One major correlational study found that girls who are heavy users of social media are three times more likely to be depressed than non-users, while for boys, there’s no sign of harm for light use, and heavy users are “only” twice as likely to be depressed as non-users.
But boys are doing very badly too, boys’ mental health is driven by different social and technological factors, compared to girls. The rate of reported depression for girls was up by 145%, while boys are up 161% since 2010. For boys and young men, the key change has been the retreat from the real world since the 1970s, when they began investing less effort in school, employment, dating, marriage, and parenting. (Jon Haidt)
5 Rich country workers entering “Golden Age”
Almost everyone agreed that the mid-2010s were a terrible time to be a worker. David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, coined the term “bullshit jobs” to describe purposeless work, which he argued was widespread. With the recovery from the global financial crisis of 2007-09 taking time, some 7% of the labour force in the oecd club of rich countries lacked work altogether. Wage growth was weak and income inequality seemed to be rising inexorably.
How things change. In the rich world, workers now face a golden age. As societies age, labour is becoming scarcer and better rewarded, especially manual activity that is hard to replace with technology. Governments are spending big and running economies hot, supporting demands for higher wages, and are likely to continue to do so. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (ai) is giving workers, particularly less skilled ones, a productivity boost, which could lead to higher wages, too. Some of these trends will reinforce the others: where labour is scarce, for instance, the use of advanced tech is more likely to increase pay. The result will be a transformation in how labour markets work. (Economist)
This day in history
1941: Pearl Harbor bombed
