Search Results for: Economist

It Turns Out No One’s in Kansas Anymore

Farmer Robert Bacon empties wheat into a grain cart outside of Hutchinson, Kansas. (AP Photo/The Hutchinson News, Cavin Mattheis)

No one lives in rural Kansas any more — many counties have fewer than 10 people per square mile — and the state ranks first for 25- to 29-year-olds who leave. Why? Wheat. For The New Food Economy, Kansan Corie Brown drove across Kansas, all 1,800 miles of it, to see how Kansas has become a victim of its own farming success.

Everywhere, I felt the absence—of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it.

That image—abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape—sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.

Why? The costs of growth.

Since 1980, the average Kansas farm has expanded in size from 640 to 770 acres—and yield increased, too, thanks to investments in machinery and chemicals. Between 2003 and 2016, Kansas’s farmers improved their wheat yields from 48 bushels/acre to 57 bushels/acre and enjoyed some record harvests, according to Mykel Taylor, a K-State agricultural economist.

But those extra bushels per acre likely required exorbitant financial investment. During those same years, Kansas’s average annual expenses per farm more than doubled, rising from $130,000 in 2003 to a whopping $300,000 in 2016, according to Taylor. And now, commodity crop prices have fallen off a cliff. Commodity wheat, for instance, fell to $3.37 per bushel in 2016 after averaging $6.50 per bushel across the previous eight years.

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Hoffnung um jeden Preis

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | Longreadsmärz 2018 | 23 Minuten (5,717 wörter)

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Kurz nachdem Kate Colgans Mutter, Janet, im vergangenen Sommer in einem Krankenhaus in der Nähe von Manchester, Großbritannien, aus der Narkose aufwachte, hatte sie eine einfache Bitte: “Bring mich nach Deutschland.”

Also hat Kate, 25, die Familien-Limousine mit einem Dachträger ausgestattet und mit Gepäck beladen. Sie verfügte die Entlassung ihrer Mutter aus dem Krankenhaus gegen ärztliche Anordnung und hob sie vorsichtig vom Rollstuhl auf den Beifahrersitz. Kates damaliger Verlobter Chad fuhr sie dann zusammen mit der kleinen Tochter des Paares 16 Stunden am Stück in eine Privatklinik am Rande von Dornstetten, einer ruhigen mittelalterlichen Stadt zwischen Stuttgart und Freiburg.

Bei Janet wurde im September 2016 metastasierender Magenkrebs diagnostiziert. Ärzte des National Health Service gaben ihr höchstens ein Jahr zu leben und boten nur eine palliative Chemotherapie an.

Eine palliative Therapie zu wählen erschien Kate wie das Eingeständnis eines Aufgebens. Sie durchsuchte das Internet nach anderen Möglichkeiten, und stieß auf die Hallwang Private Onkologische Klinik, eine Einrichtung die außerhalb des streng regulierten deutschen Krankenhauswesens operiert. Die Hallwang Klinik hat sich in den letzten Jahren inmitten einer Schar von Krebskliniken, die in Deutschland Fuß gefasst haben, profiliert, und vermarktet sich als eine Art Luxus-Spa mit maßgeschneiderten Behandlungen, einer idyllischen Lage im Schwarzwald, und delikaten Mahlzeiten, die in einem Esszimmer eingenommen werden.

Die Online-Testimonials der Klinik sahen vielversprechend aus, und so erkundigten sich die Colgans nach der Behandlung. Nach Durchsicht von Janets Krankenakte sagte ein Arzt der Hallwang-Klinik den Colgans, dass mit Hilfe eines experimentellen Medikamenten-Cocktails, der anderswo nicht ohne weiteres zu haben sei, Janet eine Remission ihrer Krankheit erreichen könne. Aber der Preis sei enorm: mehr als 100.000 Euro. Die Klinik rechnet nicht über Krankenversicherungen ab und verlangt in der Regel eine Anzahlung von 80 Prozent, bevor mit der Behandlung begonnen wird.

Eine Chance auf Remission schien einen Versuch wert zu sein — um jeden Preis.

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The Last Resort

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 23 minutes (5,754 words)

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Soon after Kate Colgan’s mother, Janet, awoke from surgery in a hospital near Manchester, U.K., last summer, she made a simple request of her daughter: “Get me to Germany.”

So Kate, then 25, fitted the family sedan with a roof rack and piled it with luggage. She arranged for her mother’s voluntary discharge from the hospital, against doctors’ wishes, and eased her from a wheelchair into the car’s passenger seat. Kate’s then-fiancé Chad drove them, along with the couple’s infant daughter, some 16 hours straight to a private treatment clinic on the outskirts of Dornstetten, a quiet medieval town in southern Germany.

Janet was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer in September 2016, when she was 54 years old. British doctors with the National Health Service gave her up to a year to live and offered only palliative care with chemotherapy.

Choosing palliative care felt to Kate like giving up. She scoured the web for other options for her mother, and came across the Hallwang Private Oncology Clinic, a for-profit institution that operates outside of the strictly regulated German hospital system. The Hallwang Clinic has emerged in recent years as the highest profile of a bevy of cancer clinics to gain traction in Germany. It markets itself as a luxury spa of sorts, touting its individualized treatments, pastoral setting in southern Germany’s Black Forest, and delicately plated dining-room meals.

The clinic’s online testimonials looked promising, so the Colgans inquired about treatment. After reviewing Janet’s medical records, a Hallwang Clinic doctor told the Colgans a cocktail of experimental drugs not widely available elsewhere could mean eventual remission for Janet. But the price would be staggering — more than $120,000. The clinic does not accept insurance and typically requires an 80% deposit before treatment can begin.

A chance at remission seemed worth a try — at any cost.

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Looking Back On the Last Housing Bubble From the Precipice of the Next One

(Getty)

I could have used a trigger warning for Ryan Dezember’s recent Wall Street Journal essay commemorating the 10th anniversary of the bursting of the housing bubble.

Dezember writes about getting stuck for more than a decade with a deeply devalued house he’d bought on the Alabama Gulf Coast at a speculator’s price during the market’s peak in 2005.

My husband and I had a similar experience. Around the same time, we paid asking price for a house in Rosendale, New York, a depressed town in the Hudson Valley, after our lower offer was rejected. “Rosendale is really coming up now,” the owner argued. Two years later, the bubble burst, and Chase cut off the home equity line of credit we’d been using to renovate, saying we were now under water. In their opinion, our house was worth about 30 percent less than what we owed on it.

Due to the recession, we had less work, our incomes dropped, and the price of oil soared, making it hard for us to heat the house and pay the mortgage. We tried taking in a tenant, but for a variety of reasons, that was only workable for a month. We looked into ways to convert the house into a two-family so it would bring in income, but that would have meant borrowing money on credit cards to hopefully, maybe make some money. Eventually, we rented the whole place out and moved to an apartment in nearby Kingston.

Dezember’s experience was much more dramatic and painful than ours: His marriage fell apart, ours is intact; his renters used the place as a drug depot, while ours are actually about to buy our house (we close next Thursday!). And our home’s value has healthily rebounded to the point that we’re not losing too much of what we put into the place.

Now we find ourselves looking for a new home to buy in suddenly-chic Kingston, where we’ve been renting for four years, and where prices have quickly come to feel artificially inflated. We worry we’re about to buy into yet another housing bubble. How long before this one bursts? Dezember writes:

At a staff meeting last summer, my editors at the Journal put out a call for stories to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the housing crash. One colleague pitched a story about young Wall Street types who viewed the crisis as a historical event. Such a story would have never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, the housing crisis had ended just a few weeks earlier.

About 2.5 million American homes are still worth less than their mortgage debt, according to estimates by CoreLogic . That is about double what it should be in an otherwise healthy market, said Frank Nothaft, CoreLogic’s chief economist.

Those of us who have emerged from underwater missed the chance to buy low. Home prices in many markets now exceed their 2006 peaks.

Investors such as Mr. Schwarzman who amassed thousands of houses to rent have bet more than $40 billion wagering that the crisis was so traumatic for people like me, and so destructive to our finances, that we’ll be renters forever. They may be right.

At a wedding I attended recently, I met a real-estate broker who touted the riches to be made by buying units in the glassy residential towers popping up along the waterfront in Brooklyn, where I live. No matter how slapdash the construction, she said, prices have only one direction to go.

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The Stock Market Doesn’t Matter

peaceful lake
Time to go outside. (Photo: Getty Images)

You’d have to be hiding deep under a rock, with the president of the United States’ Twitter account on mute, not to know that the stock market had some good days at the end of last year and beginning of this one.

“Stock Market just hit another record high! Jobs looking very good,” he tweeted in October. “Stock Market hits new Record High. Confidence and enthusiasm abound,” he gushed in November. “Things are going really well for our economy,” he enthused in December. “Stock Market hit another RECORD HIGH, unemployment is now at a 17 year low and companies are coming back to the USA. Really good news, and much more to come!”

“All signs are that business is looking really good for next year,” he predicted the day before Christmas. “Will be a great year for Companies and JOBS! Stock Market is poised for another year of SUCCESS!”

At first, it seemed his market forecast was right — and as it soared in the first month of 2018, so did his tweets. “Yesterday was a big day for the stock market,” Trump tweeted in mid-January. “American business is hot again!” He took credit for the stock market at least 25 times last month. Read more…

The Mutilated and the Disappeared

Kidnappers on the migrant trail murdered his two brothers, but Miguel Ángel Rápalo Piñeda, 20, survived. The two bullet entry scars on his back are still visible, and the bullets remain inside him. (Cambria Harkey)

Alice Driver | Longreads | January 2018 | 21 minutes (5,284 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“It is very easy to disappear people.” — Aracy Matus Sánchez, director of Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, the only shelter in Mexico for migrants who have been mutilated along the migrant trail

* * *

Through the fist-sized security opening, a mouth appeared, then an eye, surveying. The migrant, his body shaking, stood there, eyes wide, holding his arm, whimpering. “What do you want?” asked the voice behind the metal door. “I … I … Somebody beat me up,” said the migrant, who was maybe 25 and all folded into himself as if being compact could protect him.

The door closed with a click, and the migrant swayed from side to side, then crumpled neatly toward the ground. He kept his body just rigid enough at the last second to sit down, teetering on the cement steps. He held his left arm, which had a visible protrusion below the elbow, and although he took jerky breaths, his eyes remained dry. After several minutes, he got up again and went over to a second door on the side of the building and knocked timidly. Again, he waited, holding his arm, his eyes glassed over, and leaned against the door. He began to hyperventilate, his breath seemingly caught in his birdlike chest and desperately needing to escape. Still the door remained closed. He looked down at his muddy feet, toes spilling over thin flip-flops.

When the door opened a crack, the voice once again dispassionately asked him why he was there. As the door eventually opened wider, the migrant stumbled into an office and fell onto the nearest couch. The man who had been guarding the door disappeared and was replaced by a woman who looked at the migrant and said, “Are you hungry? You can go join the others at breakfast.” She didn’t seem to notice that he was in a state of shock. After a few seconds, a stuttered “Ye— yee— sss” escaped his mouth, and she pointed him in the direction of the dining room at the migrant shelter Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, the only shelter in Mexico for migrants who have been mutilated along the migrant trail. Read more…

Los mutilados y los desaparecidos

Secuestradores en el camino migratorio asesinaron a sus dos hermanos, pero Miguel Ángel Rápalo Piñeda, de 20 años, sobrevivió. Las dos cicatrices de bala en su espalda aún son visibles, y las balas permanecen dentro de él. (Cambria Harkey)

Alice Driver | Longreads | Enero ​​2018 | 21 minutos (5,284 palabras)

AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

“Es muy fácil desaparecer gente.” — Aracy Matus Sánchez, directora de Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, el único albergue en México para migrantes que han sufrido mutilaciones a lo largo de la ruta del migrante.

* * *

Una boca apareció del otro lado de la rendija de seguridad que era del ancho de un puño; le siguieron unos ojos vigilantes. El migrante, cuyo cuerpo temblaba, permaneció de pie con los ojos bien abiertos y se agarraba el brazo gimiendo de dolor. ¿Qué quieres?, preguntó la voz detrás de la puerta metálica. “Yo… yo… alguien me golpeó” dijo el migrante, que parecía tener unos 25 años y se inclinaba sobre sus muslos, como si esa posición compacta lo hiciera estar más protegido.

La puerta se cerró con un sonido sútil, mientras que el migrante se balanceaba de un lado a otro para luego desplomarse estruendosamente en el suelo. El muchacho permaneció lo suficientemente rígido como para poder sentarse, aún vacilante, sobre unos escalones de cemento. Sostenía su brazo izquierdo, el cual tenía una protuberancia debajo del codo, y aunque su respiración estaba entrecortada, no derramó ni una sola lágrima. Después de varios minutos se levantó de nuevo, se dirigió a la segunda puerta que estaba a un costado del edificio y tocó tímidamente. Una vez más esperó mientras agarraba su brazo, se recargó contra la puerta, sus ojos no tenían expresión alguna. Empezó a hiperventilarse, parecía como si su respiración estuviera atrapada dentro de su pecho de ave y luchara desesperadamente por escapar. La puerta seguía cerrada. El muchacho dirigió su mirada a sus pies llenos de lodo, sus dedos se desbordaban sobre un par de chancletas muy delgadas.

La puerta se abrió brevemente y otra vez se pudo escuchar a aquella voz indiferente preguntar al muchacho por qué estaba ahí. Finalmente, cuando la puerta se abrió lo suficiente, el migrante entró en una oficina y se tumbó sobre el sillón más cercano. El hombre que cuidaba la puerta desapareció, y en su lugar apareció una mujer que miró al muchacho y le preguntó: “¿Tienes hambre? Puedes ir con los demás a desayunar” La mujer no parecía notar el estado de shock en el que el joven se encontraba. Después de unos segundos él respondió con un tartamudeo “S..ss..ssí”, y ella señaló el camino hacia el comedor del albergue para migrantes Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante, el único albergue en México para migrantes que han sufrido mutilaciones a lo largo de la ruta del migrante. Read more…

Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now

Cover of program for the National American Women's Suffrage Association procession. (Getty Images)

Lynne Segal | Verso | November 2017 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

The utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.

It is sometimes said that the twentieth century began with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia, as those alternative futures once envisioned seemed by then almost entirely discredited. However, it was never quite so straightforward. The challenge to envisage how to live differently, in ways that seem better than the present, never entirely disappears.

The most prominent American utopian studies scholar, Lyman Tower Sargent, notes that dystopian scenarios increasingly dominated the speculative literary form as the twentieth century progressed. In the UK, the equally eminent utopian studies scholar Ruth Levitas concurs, pointing out, for instance, that as sociology became institutionalized in the academy, it became ‘consistently hostile’ to any utopian content.

What stands out in speculative fantasies of the future arising towards the end of the twentieth century are their darkly dystopic leanings, whether in books, cinema, comics or elsewhere. The best known would include the mass surveillance depicted in the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satirical novel We (1921).

Set in the future, it describes a scientifically managed totalitarian state, known as One State, governed by logic and reason, where people live in glass buildings, march in step, and are known by their numbers. England’s Aldous Huxley called his dystopic science fiction Brave New World (1932), where again all individuality has been conditioned out in the pursuit of happiness. Bleaker still was George Orwell’s terrifyingly totalitarian 1984 (1945): ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

These imaginings serve primarily as warnings against futures that are often read, as with Zamyatin and Orwell, as condemnations of Soviet society. The happiness expressed in Huxley’s ‘utopic’ universe depicts a deformed or sinister version of the route where all utopias end up, as totalitarian regimes, in which free will is crushed. As the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman later noted: ‘From a means of winning people over to the ideal of socialism, the utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.’

Post-1945, public intellectuals for the most part broadcast the view that democracy and utopic thinking were opposed, the latter declared both impossible and dangerous. The influential émigré and British philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in his classic essay ‘Utopia and Violence’ (1947) that while ‘Utopia’ may look desirable, all too desirable, it was in practice a ‘dangerous and pernicious’ idea, one that is ‘self‐defeating’ and ‘leads to violence’. There is no way of deciding rationally between competing utopian ideals, he suggested, since we cannot (contra Marxism) scientifically predict the future, which means our statements are not open to falsification and hence fail his test for any sort of reliability.

Indeed, accusations of ‘totalitarian’ thinking were the chief weapon of the Cold War, used by Western propaganda to see off any talk of communism. In the USA it was employed to undermine any left or labour movement affiliations, as through the fear and financial ruin inflicted upon hundreds of Americans hauled before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s – over half of them Jewish Americans. Read more…

The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy

(Arno Masse/Getty)

Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (3,090 words)

Last year I worked undercover at a temp agency in Los Angeles. While I took the assignment for an article I was working on, I’d also been unemployed for over a year. It seemed I was in that middling space of over-qualified for entry-level jobs, under-qualified for the jobs I most desired, and aged out or irrelevant as a labor union organizer, where I’d gained the bulk of my work experience.

One altered resume later I joined a temp agency and became the biggest ghost of them all, a member of America’s invisible workforce: people who ship goods for big box stores like Wal-Mart or Marshalls, sort recyclables for Waste Management, fulfill online orders for Nike, bottle rum for Bacardi. I’d found my squad, a cadre of screw-ups, felons, floozies, single moms, the differently abled, students, immigrants, the homeless and hungry, the overqualified and under-qualified, all of us ghosted by the traditional marketplace.

***

There is a story about an invisible hand that guides the free market. There is a story about ghosts. There is a story about a ghost economy. The distance between the main employer, the company that hires the temp agency, and the worker who fulfills these gigs, allows for the same type of casual cruelty that is exchanged between people who meet on online dating apps.

***

Temp jobs began after the second world war, offering work at companies like Kelly Girl, a billion-dollar staffing company based in Michigan, on a short-term basis. Today, the temporary or “on-demand” industry employs over 2.9 million people, over 2 percent of America’s total workforce. As temping has grown, the quality of jobs has deteriorated, and temps now earn 20 to 25 percent less an hour than those who work as direct hires, according to government statistics.

I joined a temp agency and became a member of America’s invisible workforce: people who ship goods for big box stores like Wal-Mart or Marshalls, sort recyclables for Waste Management, fulfill online orders for Nike, bottle rum for Bacardi.

To think of The Ghosted is to think of injustice, a cataloging of fist-fights, tuberculosis, detention centers, scabies, crabs, lice, roaches, hot plates, Section 8 housing, laborers hiding under blankets in the backs of trucks, children lying stiff against the tops of trains, assembly lines in windowless heat-filled rooms — a type of economic violence many consumers try to close their minds to. We do not want to think of them because of what it says about us.

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Unreal Estate: A Reading List About Our Shifting Vision of Home

Does anyone still remember Unhappy Hipsters, a Tumblr blog born in 2010, just months after the Great Recession officially ended? The concept was simple and irresistible. Each post contained a photo of a domestic interior from a Dwell-like magazine (or, just as often, from Dwell itself), and the photo had to include a person: a teenager lounging with a book on a nordic-looking wooden bed, a couple having a silent breakfast in a vast, concrete-floor kitchen. A caption accompanied each image, projecting a mix of smugness and existential angst onto the people occupying these impossibly streamlined spaces (“So focused on erecting a structure that would be impervious to atmospheric whims, he’d forgotten the obvious: an exit,” read a caption below an image of a man standing on a balcony of a glass-and-steel stilt house).

There’s nothing new about wanting to catch a glimpse of other people’s (nicer-than-yours) houses; what Unhappy Hipsters deftly added was an extra layer of vindictiveness to an otherwise common, aspirational voyeurism. Revisiting some of these old posts today, they feel at once naive and prophetic. In the intervening years, owning a house and designing one’s own space haven’t lost their allure as class markers and so-called #lifegoals. But they’ve also acquired a tinge of bitterness: you either can’t afford it (millennials, meet avocado toast!), can’t do it right (unlike everyone on Pinterest, Instagram, et al.), or risk trying too hard (at which point: surprise! You’re the Unhappy Hipster — in 2017, when both “unhappiness” and “hipsterism” have lost just about all meaning).

The way we organize and reshape our living quarters has always reflected, in some way, desires, hopes, and anxieties that transcended individuals. It was true when married couples started sharing the same bedroom and outhouses began to disappear in favor of indoor plumbing; it’s true today when we buy a vintage lamp or encounter a luxury bathroom almost the size of the bedroom it adjoins. Where does the current unease around the spaces we inhabit come from? What is unique about our attitude toward a supposedly universal concept like “home”? Here are four recent reads that try to address these questions.

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