Marc Morano, The Great Reset

At Amazon, Marc Morano, The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown. 

'Quiet Quitting'? This Is Not Good

Young people are generally inclined towards slacking anyways, but post-lockdown/pandemic, the lackadaisical sloth cohort is downright indolent. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "If Your Co-Workers Are ‘Quiet Quitting,’ Here’s What That Means":

Not taking your job too seriously has a new name: quiet quitting.

The phrase is generating millions of views on TikTok as some young professionals reject the idea of going above and beyond in their careers, labeling their lesser enthusiasm a form of “quitting.” It isn’t about getting off the company payroll, these employees say. In fact, the idea is to stay on it—but focus your time on the things you do outside of the office.

The videos range from sincere ruminations on work-life balance to snarky jokes. Some set firm boundaries against overtime in favor of family. Others advocate coasting from 9-to-5, doing just enough to get by. Many want to untether their careers from their identities.

Of course, every generation enters the workforce and quickly realizes that having a job isn’t all fun and games. Navigating contemptible bosses and the petty indignities that have always been inflicted on the ranks of working stiffs has never been easy. And many people who say, when they’re young, that they don’t care about climbing the corporate ladder end up changing their minds.

The difference now is that this group has TikTok and hashtags to emote. And these 20-somethings joined the working world during the Covid-19 pandemic, with all of its dislocating effects, including blurred boundaries between work and life. Many workers say they feel they have power to push back in the current strong labor market. Recent data from Gallup shows employee engagement is declining.

Clayton Farris, 41 years old, said that when he recently heard about the new term circulating on social media he realized he’d already been doing it by refusing to let work worries rule over him the way they used to.

“The most interesting part about it is nothing’s changed,” he said in his TikTok video. “I still work just as hard. I still get just as much accomplished. I just don’t stress and internally rip myself to shreds.”

Across generations, U.S. employee engagement is falling, according to survey data from Gallup, but Gen Z and younger millennials, born in 1989 and after, reported the lowest engagement of all during the first quarter at 31%.

Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup’s workplace and well-being research, said workers’ descriptions of “quiet quitting” align with a large group of survey respondents that he classifies as “not engaged”—those who will show up to work and do the minimum required but not much else. More than half of workers surveyed by Gallup who were born after 1989—54%—fall into this category.

One factor Gallup uses to measure engagement is whether people feel their work has purpose. Younger employees report that they don’t feel that way, the data show. These are the people who are more likely to work passively and look out for themselves over their employers, Dr. Harter said.

Paige West, 24, said she stopped overextending herself at a former position as a transportation analyst in Washington, D.C., less than a year into the job. Work stress had gotten so intense that, she said, her hair was falling out and she couldn’t sleep. While looking for a new role, she no longer worked beyond 40 hours each week, didn’t sign up for extra training and stopped trying to socialize with colleagues.

“I took a step back and said, ‘I’m just going to work the hours I’m supposed to work, that I’m really getting paid to work,’” she said. “Besides that, I’m not going to go extra.”

Ms. West said that she found herself more engaged during meetings once she stopped trying so hard, and she received more positive feedback. She left the job last year and is now a full-time freelance virtual assistant making about 75% of her previous salary. She adjusted by moving back to her home state of Florida.

Zaid Khan, a 24-year-old engineer in New York, posted a quiet quitting video that has racked up three million views in two weeks. In his viral TikTok, Mr. Khan explained the concept this way: “You’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”

“You’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life,” he said.

Mr. Khan says he and many of his peers reject the idea that productivity trumps all; they don’t see the payoff.

Some online commenters pledged to relax on social media when they had downtime at work. Others say they will follow their job descriptions to the letter, instead of asking for additional assignments.

A new crop of quiet-quitting videos is starting to pop up, denouncing the move as a cop-out, not a cure-all for burnout or discontentment at work.

People who coast have been fixtures of the office for decades, but many of today’s less-invested employees have been able to skate by thanks to remote work, said Elise Freedman, a senior client partner at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

If the economy sours, Ms. Freedman said, less-engaged workers may be more at risk of layoffs. “It’s perfectly appropriate that we expect our employees to give their all,” she said...

Workers showing up and doing the *absolute* minimum fucks up everyone else on the job. Lowering stress is fine, but if people are just skating all day for a paycheck, being personal totally checked out and completely disengaged from their required tasks, that's no good.

My son notes, on top of that, there's not enough workers on the job in the first place. Nobody wants to work anymore, or barely so. Employers can't find enough employees. Those who do want to do well have no support and end up schlupping extra hard for the same base pay. 

Fuck this youth generation. We're doomed.

Gallup: Poor Life Ratings Reach Record High

We're in a Carteresque malaise.

The chart below tells a lot. 

Life evaluations dropped to 46.4 of Americans as "thriving" during the Great (Crash) Recession of November 2008, and during late 2020, during a coronavirus pandemic, in December of that year.

See, "In U.S., Poor Life Ratings Reach Record High":

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The percentage of Americans who evaluate their lives poorly enough to be considered "suffering" on Gallup's Life Evaluation Index was 5.6% in July, the highest since the index's inception in 2008. This exceeds the previous high of 4.8% measured in April and is statistically higher than all prior estimates in the COVID-19 era. Across extensive measurement since January 2008, the suffering percentage has reached 4.5% or higher on a handful of occasions.

The most recent results, obtained July 26 to Aug. 2, 2022, are based on web surveys of 3,649 U.S. adults as a part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based, non-opt-in panel of about 115,000 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

For its Life Evaluation Index, Gallup classifies Americans as "thriving," "struggling" or "suffering," according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale with steps numbered from 0 to 10, based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. Those who rate both their current and future lives a 4 or lower are classified as suffering. Those who rate their current life a 7 or higher and their anticipated life in five years an 8 or higher are classified as thriving.

The percentage of U.S. adults estimated to be thriving has steadily declined since it reached a record high of 59.2% in June 2021. The latest estimate of 51.2% is an 18-month low. The lowest recorded thriving rate of 46.4% was measured twice -- first, in November 2008 amid the Great Recession, and second, in late April 2020, during the initial economic shutdown associated with the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S...

 People are stressing. It's sad. 

Still more.

J. David McSwane, Pandemic, Inc.

At Amazon, J. David McSwane, Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick.

Anthony Fauci Won't Serve in Government Past 2024

See, at Pajamas, "Best. News. Ever. About Dr. Fauci." 

School Mask Mandates Are Coming Back

I dread this, as mentioned previously. If my college imposes a mask mandate again this fall I'll be teaching completely online once again. Arghh! 

At Time, "Mask Mandates Are Returning to Schools as COVID-19 Cases Surge":

On April 11, public schools in Providence, R.I, made face masks optional instead of mandatory for students and teachers—celebrating the move as a “positive milestone” brought about by declining COVID-19 cases among students and community support for a more lenient policy.

Just over a month later, Providence is one of several school districts requiring masks again in response to rising COVID-19 cases, part of a nationwide spike attributed to the highly contagious Omicron subvariants.

The Providence school district tracked about 60 COVID-19 cases per day last week among staff and students—a dramatic increase from a low of about 10 cases per day in March and early April, according to district data.

“The additional mitigation layer of masking will help us manage this new COVID surge and keep more students in the classroom where they learn best,” Javier Montañez, superintendent of Providence schools, said in a statement on Monday.

Philadelphia schools also resumed a mask mandate “to help protect everyone’s health and well-being as COVID-19 case counts continue to rise in the Philadelphia area,” superintendent William Hite said in a statement. And Brookline, Mass. reinstated an indoor mask mandate in all town-owned buildings, including public schools. The decision came after public health officials compared COVID-19 cases in Brookline public schools to cases in other Massachusetts school districts that had maintained mask requirements and concluded that “a temporary reinstatement would be an important mitigation measure to limit disease spread and reduce disruptions due to student and staff absenteeism.”

Boston public schools, for example, have maintained a mask requirement. City health officials said they would recommend lifting the school mask mandate once daily COVID-19 cases in the city fall to 10 new cases per 100,000 residents. The positivity rate currently stands at 54.5 new cases per 100,000 residents.

But overall, a small percentage of schools have reinstated mask requirements thus far...

Good. Let's hope it stays that way.

 

California 'Under Rising Pressure' From New Coronavirus Surge

According to this mornings WSJ newsletter, "The latest Covid surge expands beyond the Northeast":

Places from the Midwest to Florida and California are under rising pressure. The most recent weekly update of a CDC metric that uses case and hospitalization data to determine community levels of Covid-19 ranked 137 counties as “high,” up from 79 a week earlier and 14 in mid-April.

Of course this isn't good news, but it's especially troubling in my case because as long as mask mandates continue, I'll still be teaching online --- with my hearing, I need to see a student's face. So, I told my administration that I'm not coming back to teach on campus until all mandates are lifted. That's supposed to be next semester, but if the state, LA. County, or the City of Long Beach maintains indoor masking, I'm toast.

And let's be honest, while the grading for online classes is not just burdensome and heavy, it's even more so a long, monotonous grind. In an "asynchronous" class there's really no direct, face-to-face contact with students, unless on of them requests virtual office hours by Zoom, which is rare.

Well see, in any case. Meanwhile, at the Journal, "Latest Covid-19 Wave Expands to More of U.S.":

Rising cases prompt more calls for precautions but not mandates in hot spots like New York City.

The latest Covid-19 case surge is expanding beyond the Northeast, with places from the Midwest to Florida and California under rising pressure.

Fueled by highly contagious versions of the Omicron variant, the tide is posing a test of how much new infections matter in a changing pandemic. Though built-up immunity in the population has kept more people out of hospitals, federal health officials on Wednesday urged people in hot spots to take precautions, from booster shots to pre-gathering tests and masks, to limit the virus’ spread.

“We’ve got to do what we can to prevent infections,” said Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator. “We’ve got to do what we can to ensure that infections don’t turn into severe illness.”

The seven-day moving average of new Covid-19 cases recently topped 94,000 a day, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show, nearly four times lows reached in late March. The true number of new cases is likely significantly higher, epidemiologists say, because so many people are self-testing at home or not testing at all.

The rise in cases hasn’t translated thus far into major surges in severe illness. The seven-day average of confirmed cases in hospitalized patients reached about 18,550 on Wednesday, up from lows near 10,000 in mid-April, but far below a record peak above 150,000 in January. The numbers include people who test positive on routine screening after getting hospitalized for other reasons. The daily average of reported deaths has slipped under 300 a day, the lowest point since last summer.

But new cases still cause disruptions and carry risks including the possibility of developing long-lasting and sometimes debilitating symptoms, epidemiologists and public-health experts say. The more an outbreak spreads, the more likely it will reach the most vulnerable including elderly people and others with compromised immune systems, the experts say, and the more likely the virus will continue to mutate.

“Vaccines are very effective for reducing severe disease and death but don’t eliminate severe disease and death, and so reducing spread, reducing cases is also important,” said Julia Raifman, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told the WSJ Future of Everything Festival that scientists have yet to determine whether certain variants of the virus are more likely to lead to long-term symptoms.

The latest upswing in cases began in late March in the Northeast, the early hot spot for the Omicron BA.2 subvariant. Virus experts believe spread was muted at first by a mix of immunity-boosting factors: timing, right after a major winter surge, and a similarity to the version of Omicron behind that surge...

Still more.

I'll keep you posted. I'm scheduled for three classes on campus for fall, but that could change.

'Broad Decline' in Enrollment at Nation's Public Schools

As I was saying at my previous entry, man it's amazing what change the pandemic has wrought.

More at the New York Times, "With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools":

The pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation’s public school system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed. ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula.

In the suburbs of Orange County, Calif., where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California’s rolls since 2019.

And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland — are now considering combining classrooms, laying off teachers or shutting down entire schools.

All together, America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey. State enrollment figures show no sign of a rebound to the previous national levels any time soon.

A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen, particularly in cities. But the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed.

No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.

A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen, particularly in cities. But the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed.

No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.

Now educators and school officials are confronting a potentially harsh future of lasting setbacks in learning, hardened inequities in education and smaller budgets accompanying smaller student populations.

“This has been a seismic hit to public education,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “Student outcomes are low. Habits have been broken. School finances are really shaken. We shouldn’t think that this is going to be like a rubber band that bounces back to where it was before.”

There are roughly 50 million students in the United States public school system.

In large urban districts, the drop-off has been particularly acute. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s noncharter schools lost some 43,000 students over the past two school years. Enrollment in the Chicago schools has dropped by about 25,000 in that time frame.

But suburban and rural schools have not been immune.

In the suburbs of Kansas City, the school district of Olathe, Kan., lost more than 1,000 of its 33,000 or so students in 2020, as families relocated and shifted to private schools or home-schooling; only about half of them came back this school year.

In rural Woodbury County, Iowa, south of Sioux City, enrollment in the Westwood Community School District fell by more than 5 percent during the last two years, to 522 students from 552, in spite of a small influx from cities during the pandemic, the superintendent, Jay Lutt, said. Now, in addition to demographic trends that have long eroded the size of rural Iowa’s school populations, diminishing funding, the district is grappling with inflation as the price of fuel for school buses has soared, Mr. Lutt said.

In some states where schools eschewed remote instruction — Florida, for instance — enrollment has not only rebounded, but remains robust...

Ah, Florida. That oughta tell you something about what's going on. Public schools can work, but not so well in teachers' union-led blue states, like California.  

Still more.

Biden's Incoming Press Secretary Laughs When Asked Who Is Handling Baby Formula Crisis

From Katie Pavlich, at Townhall, "Incoming White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked onboard Air Force One Wednesday afternoon about the ongoing baby formula shortage rattling American parents."

"The shelves are wiped out," CBS News' @CHueyBurns says on the baby formula shortage in the U.S., calling it an "urgent need for families right now."

"You're starting to see pressure applied in terms of government accountability...A lot of questions about the supply chain." pic.twitter.com/hTju1wJbLS

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 9, 2022

New York Times Reporter: Studies Show That School Closings Seriously Harmed Children -- And Were Driven By Partisan Democrat Politics

At AoSHQ, "We knew both of these. It's a bit shocking that the second is being admitted.... by the New York Times, of all partisan propaganda mills."

Washington's 'Forever Flu' Fleeced Americans (VIDEO)

I don't say this kind of thing often, but this man is fucking brilliant. 

Bill Maher last night on "Real Time":

Adam Tooze, Shutdown

At Amazon, Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy.

Oh Brother, Here We Go: Los Angeles Coronavirus Cases Up 40 Percent in One Week

L.A. County kept its mask mandate in place longer than just about everywhere else in the state, and in fact, when the O.C. dropped its mandate, L.A. reimposed theirs (which was ridiculous; they wouldn't even sell me a book at the Burbank Barnes and Noble last summer, unless I masked up; so stupid).

And the City of Long Beach is also muthaf***ing strict, so my college keeps the indoor mask mandate right now. Oh brother. I can see yet another fall semester coming with all the students in face coverings. If you cannot see each others faces, it's much harder to learn. Everyone knows this. It's gotta be about power at this point, and that's shameful.

At LAT, "L.A. coronavirus cases up 40% in one week; hospitalizations rising, too":

Coronavirus cases in Los Angeles County rose by 40% over the past week and hospitalizations have started to creep up as well, underscoring how important it is for people to be up-to-date on their vaccines and boosters, as well as wear masks in indoor public settings, officials said.

Although neither the number of infections nor the patient census are setting off alarm bells just yet, the trendlines illustrate that the county is contending with reinvigorated coronavirus transmission. And for county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, who called the increase in cases “pretty significant,” they reinforce the importance of taking individual actions to thwart the spread.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve all had to make choices about how to best protect ourselves and others from COVID-19,” she told reporters Thursday. “With cases on the rise, the potential for more contagious variants and lots of opportunities to be exposed, this is a great time to make a choice to get vaccinated or boosted and to wear a mask or respirator when you’re indoors and around others.”

Over the last week, L.A. County has reported an average of about 1,764 new coronavirus cases per day — up from 1,261 a week ago.

The latest number is double the 879 cases a day L.A. County was reporting in early April.

On a per capita basis, the county’s case rate has risen to 122 cases a week for every 100,000 residents. L.A. County’s case rate exceeded 100 over the weekend, meaning the nation’s most populous county is again experiencing a high rate of transmission for the first time since early March.

Perhaps more concerningly, the number of coronavirus-positive patients hospitalized countywide has also risen this week following months of steady decline.

On Wednesday, 249 such individuals were hospitalized countywide. Five days earlier, on Friday, the count was 209: the lowest single-day total for the county since the pandemic began, state data show.

Since the emergence of the highly infectious Omicron variant of the coronavirus in December, officials have noted that many infections have tended to result in relatively mild illness — forging an environment where case counts were sky high, but the share of people being hospitalized with COVID-19 was lower than in the pandemic’s previous waves.

For instance, during the peak of the winter Omicron wave, 1.2% of coronavirus cases in L.A. County were hospitalized; by contrast, during last summer’s Delta wave, 5.6% of cases were hospitalized.

Nevertheless, the sheer infectivity of Omicron stretched some hospitals throughout the state to their limit. And in the months since the last surge subsided, new even-more-contagious subvariants of Omicron have emerged — including BA.2 and, more recently, BA.2.12.1.

BA.2 is the primary culprit behind the uptick in cases in L.A. County, accounting for at least 88% of cases here, officials say.

BA.2.12.1 has spawned similar increases elsewhere in the U.S., and accounts for a majority of coronavirus cases in New York and New Jersey. California officials have projected that BA.2.12.1 will also account for a majority of coronavirus cases in California within a few days, according to Ferrer.

BA.2.12.1 is estimated to be 25% more contagious than BA.2. “With that growth advantage, it could quickly become the dominant strain across the United States,” Ferrer said...

Barbara Ferrar, pfft. She's like a Soviet psychiatrist locking everyone up for "mental defects," i.e., wrong think. 

I guess the upside is that even in California people are over it and even lefty voters will be bringing the hammer when they hit the polls. I really can't wait until November.

Still more.

COVID-19 Policies Wrecked Public School Enrollment and Student Outcomes

See Matt Welch, at Reason, "The kids never came back to big-city public schools, and now districts face budgetary 'Armageddon'."

Americans Are Over the Pandemic, Despite the ("Coming") Omicron 2 Wave

I'm over it, but I went to the Book Barn the other day, and the store heavily "recommended" masks and all staff members were masked-up to the hilt. I felt like it was April 2020.

And mind you, this included young people, including a woman at the sales counter who looked like a college student (and thus at extremely low risk of infection).

One good thing I'm noticing is fewer and fewer workers at restaurants --- especially hosts and servers --- are wearing masks. I think things are getting back to normal, and if Democrat states continue mask mandates --- or reimpose them over the summer, when the new "wave" is supposedly expected --- they'll be toying with political death.

At the Wall Street Journal, "BA.2 Proves the Pandemic Isn’t Over, but People Are Over It":

Two years of dealing with Covid-19 have made people tired of taking precautions, getting tested and asking about other people’s status.

BA.2 is spreading in the U.S., although few want to talk about it.

The Omicron subvariant is contributing to school and work absences, yet two years of dealing with Covid-19 have made people tired of taking precautions, getting tested and asking about other people’s status, say physicians, psychologists and behavioral scientists.

If this is a pandemic wave, then many have decided the best response is a weary shrug.

Part of that reaction comes from the fact that while cases are ticking up in some areas, hospitalizations remain low. Research has so far shown most people who are up-to-date with Covid-19 vaccines face little risk of landing in the hospital with BA.2, and prior infection with another variant also bolsters the body’s defenses.

In addition, people in many places got on with their lives long ago and are unwilling to return to a pandemic crouch.

Psychologists say it can be difficult to discern how seriously to take BA.2, given shifting guidance and sometimes difficult-to-parse public-health messaging. That anxiety and uncertainty can result in avoidance, says Dr. Bethany Teachman, a psychologist and director of clinical training at the University of Virginia. Avoidance takes various forms, she says, including refraining from asking friends about Covid exposures to avoid answers people may not want to hear.

Some people say they won’t worry about BA.2 unless it is absolutely clear they need to. Nearly three-quarters of Americans polled by Monmouth University in mid-March agreed that Covid is here to stay, and people should get on with their lives.

Kristin Green, 55 years old, a high-school English teacher in Orange County, N.Y., says when she heard about the BA.2 variant, it felt like the wind was sucked out of her.

“It was like, oh, not again. Come on. We’re finally out together, seeing each other, and I don’t want to have to go back to that,” says Ms. Green. She hopes not to have to don her mask during the school day again.

“If they require it at work, obviously, I will,” she says. “Otherwise, no.”

Some patients are opting out of testing to avoid the financial and social implications of testing positive and missing work or long-awaited travel and events, says Shantanu Nundy, a primary-care physician and chief medical officer at digital healthcare firm Accolade. And some patients who do test positive for Covid-19 don’t want to keep testing until they get a negative result.

“I got a lot of those phone calls when people say, ‘Hey, I’m having a weird cough. It’s probably allergies, right?’ or ‘I’m positive, but it’s been four days and I really don’t have any symptoms. Like I’m sure I’m fine to go on XYZ trip,” he says.

Figures from the Department of Health and Human Services show testing peaked at 7.74 tests per 1,000 people on Jan. 9 and has since declined to 1.91 tests per 1,000 people, according to an analysis from researchers at the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data. These data only account for PCR tests, said researchers, which are lab-reported and easier to track than at-home rapid tests, which have boomed in popularity.

The shift to home testing along with shutdowns in testing sites have made public-health experts concerned that official case tallies are a significant undercount. Natasha Bhuyan, a family physician at One Medical in Phoenix, says some of her patients are unaware how prevalent the virus remains and are surprised when they test positive.

“They come in and they’re like, ‘I think my allergies are acting up, or I have a headache, I’m dehydrated, or I probably have a stomach bug,’ and when I suggest getting a Covid test, people are like, ‘Oh, I don’t think I have Covid,’” says Dr. Bhuyan.

People who do test positive are often confused about whom they should tell and what they should do, as contact-tracing efforts have faded and mandatory precautions have dropped.

When Zach Ruh, 26, a treasury analyst for a tech company in New York City, woke up more fatigued than usual late last month, he chalked it up to jet lag from a recent skiing trip to New Mexico. He happened to pass a pop-up testing site on a grocery-shopping excursion several days later and decided to take a PCR just in case, he says. Two days later, he received a surprising text: He had tested positive...

 

Several Million U.S. Workers Seen Staying Out of Labor Force Indefinitely

Well that's no good, sheesh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Survey shows many labor-force dropouts plan to maintain social distancing after pandemic, raising implications for economy":

Several million workers who dropped out of the U.S. workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic plan to stay out indefinitely because of persistent illness fears or physical impairments, potentially exacerbating the labor shortage for years, new research shows.

About three million workforce dropouts say they don’t plan to return to pre-Covid activities—whether that includes going to work, shopping in person or dining out—even after the pandemic ends, according to a monthly survey conducted over the past year by a team of researchers. The workforce dropouts tend to be women, lack a college degree and have worked in low-paying fields.

The research team has named this phenomenon “long social distancing” and believes it will be one of the lasting scars of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our evidence is the labor force isn’t going to magically bounce back,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who oversees the survey along with José María Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago. “We still don’t see any change in these long social distancing numbers, which suggests this drop in labor-force participation may be quite enduring.”

Should the researchers’ predictions turn out to be true—that the labor force will be depressed for potentially years after the pandemic recedes—the implications for the world’s largest economy and the Federal Reserve are substantial. A sharp drop in the labor force at the pandemic’s start led to shortages of workers and products that have frustrated households, restrained economic growth and helped push inflation to a 40-year high.

The labor force has recovered significant ground since March and April 2020, when the pandemic put about 22 million people out of work and the labor force—consisting of both employed workers and job seekers age 16 or older—fell by 8.2 million workers, or 5%.

The ranks of employed workers as of this March were 1.2 million shy of their prepandemic level, recovering faster than economists predicted two years ago. The labor force grew to 164.4 million workers, down just 174,000 from its prepandemic level. The rebound has been particularly sharp in recent months as the winter outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 faded.

Even with those gains, the U.S. is still missing about 3.5 million workers, by the team’s calculations. That figure represents the difference between the number of workers in March and how many there would be if the labor force had continued to grow at the pace it did from 2015 to 2019, absent the pandemic.

And their research suggests progress could soon stall. If so, the labor force would remain depressed for longer than the Fed anticipates, potentially helping to keep inflation high.

Chuck Lage, 63 years old, is among those who lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic in spring 2020. The Landenberg, Pa., resident was laid off from his position as a director of business planning for a nonprofit professional association.

Mr. Lage has common variable immunodeficiency, or CVID, a genetic condition that prevents his body from producing antibodies to fight illnesses. Worried about getting sick, he retired early and has avoided almost all of his prepandemic activities such as going out to eat and socializing. He plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

Through a Facebook group for people with his condition, he learned that there are many people like him. One recent member posted a picture of a zebra—an animal that people with CVID have adopted as a sort of mascot—sitting in a car looking out the window.

“The world is moving on,” Mr. Lage said. “We’re not able to yet.”

The fate of people such as Mr. Lage is at the heart of one of the economy’s biggest puzzles: whether certain adults will re-enter the labor market as the pandemic fades. Employers have struggled to find workers to meet strong consumer demand and have bid up workers’ wages as a result, one of several factors that pushed inflation to a four-decade high of 8.5% in March.

For each month over the past year, the team has anonymously surveyed 5,000 people—not always the same ones—age 20 to 64 who earned at least $10,000 in the prior year. The survey asked whether they plan a full, partial or no return to normal activities after the pandemic. Consistently, 1 in 10 have said they plan no return. In the early months of this year, when the Omicron variant was surging, that share rose to 13%.

After controlling for work status—some of those people were working remotely—and other variables such as age and gender, the team concluded that roughly three million people are staying out of the workforce to remain socially distant. The team didn’t ask health details such as whether those people have “long Covid,” to avoid health-privacy concerns.

Other data suggest that fear of Covid remains an issue for some workers but has fallen from higher levels earlier in the pandemic.

The Census Bureau has surveyed adults throughout the pandemic, asking among other questions whether they didn’t work in the past week because they were afraid of getting Covid or spreading it.

That figure peaked at above six million early in the pandemic, fell sharply a year ago after vaccines became widely available and remained around three million for much of 2021. In mid-March 2022, the figure fell to 2.3 million from three million in February....

 Very sad, actually.

Shanghai Crackdown on Omicron Shows Brutality of China's 'Zero Covid' Policy (VIDEO)

CONTENT WARNING!

There's video (HERE) of the massive state crackdown in Shanghai. To say it's troubling would be an extreme understatement. THIS is why the Chinese Communist Party controls all communication and information --- the regime cannot allow the outside world to see the brutal inhumanity of the "Middle Kingdom's" totalitarian system.

At the Financial Times, "Shanghai lockdown tests the limits of Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy":

In late March, as Shanghai residents began to worry that rising coronavirus infections would lead the city into its first mass lockdown, authorities turned to social media to calm the situation.

“Please do not believe or spread rumours,” the city government wrote on China’s Weibo platform on March 23, where posts warning that people would imminently be confined to their homes had already spurred panic buying of food.

Just days later, the outline of the rumours — if not the fine details — turned out to be true. In response to thousands of cases, China’s largest city last Sunday unveiled the most significant lockdown measures in the country since the sealing off of Wuhan when Covid-19 first emerged more than two years ago...

Citizens are jumping off high-rise building in mass, and people are hanging themselves in groves of trees.

The police are killing ALL cats and dogs in the city.

 

9-Year-Old Ohio Boy Denied Kidney Transplant Because Father Is Unvaccinated

At Instapundit, "EXTORTION:

“They tried explaining to the clinic that Dane Donaldson had recovered from COVID-19 and therefore has natural immunity—even presenting results from a T Detect test, which measures the T cell immune response to SARS-CoV-2—but their rationale fell on deaf ears.”

 

Chinese President Vows to Control Covid Outbreak With Smallest Cost

Well, Xi must have gotten some blowback for welding his population in apartment blocks to stop the spread.

At WSJ, "Xi Jinping says leaders must ‘minimize the impact of the Covid situation on economic and social development’":

Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to reduce the impact of Covid-control measures on the economy and people’s lives, a first acknowledgment from the Chinese leadership of the costs of the government’s stringent policies to rein in outbreaks.

As other countries have moved away from lockdowns and social distancing, Beijing has touted the success of its draconian measures in keeping the number of cases low, despite a mounting toll on its people and economy.

However, Chinese officials have scrambled to boost confidence in the Chinese economy as the more contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus has prompted a surge in cases. The costs of fighting outbreaks add to recent headwinds, as Mr. Xi’s campaign of regulatory tightening last year has slowed economic momentum more than expected. The geopolitical crisis over the war in Ukraine, and the potential costs to China of its recent alignment with Russia, have also rattled investors’ nerves.

In a Thursday meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, Mr. Xi asked officials to minimize the impact on the Chinese economy and people’s lives from Covid-19 control measures, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

China is facing the biggest wave of Covid-19 infections since Wuhan became the original center of the pandemic in early 2020. Several local governments have resorted to the same playbook used over the past two years to stamp out new outbreaks by ordering large-scale shutdowns and mass testing.

Mr. Xi still urged officials to curb the spread of infection as soon as possible and said the central government would hold local officials accountable if they fail to respond to outbreaks promptly, Xinhua reported. Several officials in Jilin province in China’s northeast, where most of the recent cases have been reported, have been removed from their positions.

However, Mr. Xi said China must “strive to achieve the biggest prevention and control effect with the smallest cost, and minimize the impact of the Covid situation on economic and social development,” Xinhua reported.

Over the past two days, the rise in cases appears to have abated slightly. On Thursday, China reported 2,432 cases, including both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections. Of those, 1,157 were in Jilin.

Mr. Xi’s remarks came a day after senior officials moved to reassure investors rattled by the prospect of widespread factory closures and trade disruptions...

 

Poll: Biden's Handling of Russia-Ukraine Crisis Hasn't Boosted His Public Approval Ratings

Evan at 42 percent, I'm surprised he's getting as much support as he is. The poll was conducted March 2nd to March 7th, and thus doesn't capture changing public sentiment over the this last week's rapid rise in gas prices. 

Entire lives and livehoods are being turned upside down by this oil crisis. It's obviously the Democrats' case for full decolonization of the economy has collapse and will burn them in the November elections. This is religion to these folks. Reason cannot break thought. We're about a fanatical adherence to faith doctrines. disconfirming evidence is whisked away with a condescending hand.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Biden, Democrats Lose Ground on Key Issues, WSJ Poll Finds":

WASHINGTON—President Biden and his fellow Democrats have lost ground to Republicans on several of the issues most important to voters, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, a troubling sign for the party seeking to extend its controlling majority of Congress for another two years.

The new survey showed that 57% of voters remained unhappy with Mr. Biden’s job performance, despite favorable marks for the president’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a recent State of the Union speech, which provided him an opportunity to directly speak to millions of Americans. Just 42% said they approved of Mr. Biden’s performance in office, which was virtually unchanged from the previous Journal poll in mid-November.

Meanwhile, Democratic advantages narrowed over Republicans on issues related to improving education and the Covid-19 response. A 16-percentage-point Democratic edge on which party would best handle the pandemic was down to 11 points, while a 9-percentage-point lead on education issues was down to 5 points.

When asked about which party was best able to protect middle-class families, the 5-point advantage for Democrats four months ago evaporated and left the parties essentially tied on the question.

Voters also gave Democrats poor marks for handling inflation and the economy, which 50% cited as the top issue they want the federal government to address. The Ukraine conflict was No. 2, with 25% of voters saying it was most important. A majority of voters, 63%, said they disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of rising costs, the president’s worst rating on six policy issues surveyed in the poll. Meanwhile, 47% of voters said Republicans were better able to handle inflation, compared with 30% who preferred Democrats.

Underscoring the political problem for Democrats: More voters said that Republicans had a better plan to improve the economy, 45% to 37%, even though Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the party’s leaders in each chamber, have advanced few specific economic-policy proposals they would pursue if they controlled Congress.

Since the last Journal poll, Americans have been confronted with a spike in Covid-19 cases from the highly contagious Omicron variant, bottlenecks in supply chains that left gaps in store shelves in January and surges in gasoline and other consumer prices that have driven inflation to a 40-year high.

“The mood of the country hasn’t gotten any better since the last poll. In fact, it’s gotten a little worse,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, who was the lead pollster for Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and whose company conducted the Journal survey along with the firm of Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio.

Still, the challenges for Democrats haven’t significantly changed how voters said they expect to vote this year: 46% of voters said they would back a Republican candidate for Congress if the election were today, compared with 41% who favored a Democrat, with Republicans gaining support among Black and Hispanic voters since the last Journal poll...