Corporate Profits Are Not a Main Cause of the 2021-22 U.S. Inflation Spike

There are many reasons being floated around for why inflation has spiked in 2021 and 2022. I have  blogged on the possibilities of unemployment benefits and expansionary monetary policy, as well as the supply chain crisis. There is another theory making its rounds in political discourse: corporate greed.

During a House of Representatives hearing last Wednesday, Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) grilled macroeconomist Michael Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute. Part of Porter's tirade was pulling out an enlarged chart from the Left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. According to this chart (see below), corporate profits are responsible for about half of the inflation spike. A day later, Whoopi Goldberg chided the media for not reporting on the supposed cause of inflation: corporate profits. 

The reason why this theory of "greedflation" is becoming more popular is because a) corporate profits have reached a 70-year high (Federal Reserve), and b) corporate profit margins have not been this high since the 1950s (see below; also see Bureau of Economic Analysis data). 

The high level of profit margin presents a "chicken versus egg" debate. The New York Federal Reserve Bank found a relationship between the producer price index and profit margin, which suggests correlation. Interestingly enough, the Bank points out that "the relationship between inflation and profit growth is not unusual in the historical context."

 

Even with correlation, you need to ascribe a causal mechanism in order to explain the correlation. Did the inflation come first and the corporations raise their prices in response? Or did the corporate profit margins trigger the inflation? If the former is correct, that would mean corporations were responding to market forces. If it is the latter, that would suggest "greedflation." While the Federal Reserve Bank of New York remained agnostic as to the correlation mentioned in the previous paragraph, I have some reasons to question the theory that corporate profits caused inflation.

1) Let's get at the intuition of the price-gouging behind the "greedflation" because it does not make sense. To pose the rhetorical question presented by the Mises Institute:

Why, then, has inflation only recently exploded after 40 years of calm, now clipping at better than four times the Federal Reserve's target annual rate of two percent?

It is not as if people were naturally benevolent throughout history and the pandemic magically turned people greedy. People have always been self-interested creatures; it is a natural part of the human condition. Part of the theory of the firm, which is a part of numerous economic schools of theory, states that the main reason a [for-profit] firm primarily exists and make decisions to seek profit. Firms are greedy in the sense that they exist to maximize their own profit. To quote Adam Smith from the Wealth of Nations, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." 

Standard microeconomic theory teaches that firms cannot charge whatever they want. If they charge too much, fewer people will buy their goods or services, and they will incur losses. For firms, profit maximization is finding that sweet spot between charging as much as they can while still brining in the optimal amount of revenue. As political commentator Hannah Cox brings up, what is problematic with the mainstream Left is that "these people have no idea how markets work or what conditions actually create prosperity." I know there are some on the Left that still recognize such economic realities as markets or prices, but the political rhetoric that is permeating more on the Left shows that such individuals become fewer as the mainstream Left embraces class warfare more and more.  

2) The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures production costs for businesses, has been on average higher than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). How can producer prices increase more than consumer prices? The Mises Institute rightfully distinguishes between corporations and businesses. According to a 2019 report from the Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses account for 44 percent of the GDP. Small businesses have a harder time bearing the cost of external events than corporations. Rather than being motivated by avarice, small businesses are increasing their costs because they are responding to market forces.  

3) Professors from Brandeis University and New York University published a CNN article showing why it is not "greedflation." They found a more plausible factor contributing to the high level of inflation: the labor shortage. Not only is unemployment under 4 percent, but there are nearly two vacancies for each person searching for a job. Wages and salaries increased to bring in more workers. On top of that, firms were still hiring workers. Since labor compensation is typically the largest cost for a firm, it eats away at profit. If the labor market tightness continues, we will continue to see labor cost inflation.

4) If greed causes inflation, then it would stand to reason that greedier countries would have higher rates of inflation. The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) does something interesting. AIER takes 2021 data to compare the inflation rates of multiple countries with their rankings on the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) World Giving Index. As you can see with the chart below, there is a lack of correlation between inflation and the CAF's metric of measuring greed. 

5) To quote Wharton School Professor Z. John Zhang, who is a Director at the premier business school: "If there is any truth to greedflation, it's that businesses are eager to pass along their increased cost to consumers because consumers are more receptive right now to price hikes...but that doesn't mean that firms are manipulating the markets through collusion." 

I would ask why consumers are more receptive to price increases. Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post brought up many points that I did in September 2021 that point to significantly more plausible culprits to the unusually high levels of inflation in the United States. 

• The Federal Reserve maintained low interest rates while increasing money supply by 40 percent since the beginning of 2020 (Federal Reserve). Having more dollars chase the same amount of goods and services increases prices.
• Expansionary monetary policy was combined with expansionary fiscal policy in the form of stimulus payments that boosted consumer demand, thereby increasing consumer prices. 
• In the meantime, labor shortages, supply shocks, and COVID-related disruptions limited the supply, which also drives up prices. 
• Companies cannot produce fast enough and the government has induced people to want to consume more, which means consumers are willing to pay more. 

The list above is a brief summary of how the United States Congress and the Federal Reserve contributed to rising prices without getting into other such plausible causes of inflation as China's COVID-related restrictions, how the war in Ukraine affected inflation in 2022, or any other market-specific trends that arose as a result of the pandemic. What I hope to discuss in further detail in a future post is how the government played its role in unusually high inflation rates. What I will say in the meantime is this: It might be a convenient scapegoat during an election season, but there is not much basis that corporations are the cause, let alone a primary cause, of the rising inflation.

11-7-2022 Addendum: A good colleague of mine read this piece and asked what was wrong with the EPI's chart I posted at the beginning. My short answer was that there was not a correlative impact on inflation. Below is data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) on the corporate profits after tax as a percentage of GDP. See the more variable nature of the chart. 

Here is the Bureau of Labor of Statistics data for the CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). This is a much more gradual increase, with 2021-22 being a notable exception. If corporate profits were historically responsible for major spikes in inflation, we would have seen more inflation spikes since 1950. Since this is not the case, corporate profits do not have a correlative impact, never mind a causal impact. 

Is Climate Change Affecting Species Extinction? Is There Any Reason for Some Optimism on the Theme of Species Extinction?

Last week, a good friend of mine read my blog entry on hurricanes and how climate change is not making hurricanes more frequent or intense. He thought it was well-researched and agreed with the ultimate conclusion. Part of his reply was that hurricanes are only a part of the potential impact of climate change. He specifically asked about whether climate change is exacerbating the extinction of animals. He pointed me to an article from the Guardian that linked a report from the World Wide Fund for Nature. The WWF report found that the global animal population has declined 69 percent in the past 50 years (see below for regional breakdown). Four years ago, that figure was at 60 percent. 

I already feel some skepticism not simply because it is in my nature to be skeptical, but also because there historically has been alarmism from environmentalists. On the theme of climate change, climatologists like to use highly improbable, worst-case modeling to make their point. This is not to say that global temperatures are getting warmer or humanity has not contributed in any respect, but there have been environmentalist doomsday predictions about climate change for decades that never came to be. Thomas Malthus predicted mass starvation due to a growing population when he turned out to be wrong. Rachel Carson did not fare much better with Silent Spring. There were also the scares of acid rain and nuclear winter that did not pan out.

It is due to this historic alarmism that I want to see if species extinction is as bad as it sounds. First, I would like to point out that some species extinctions are bound to happen. The background rate of extinction, which is the pre-human rate that would occur naturally, is about 0.1-1 per 10,000 species per 100 years (Ceballos et al., 2015). Also, 99.9 percent of species have already gone extinct. There have been five extinction events, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous era about 66 million years ago.

Pointing out that species extinction is naturally occurring is not to say that humans have not had an impact on the environment. As the Royal Society points out, human effects on global diversity date back 60,000 years. The year 1500 was when human-induced extinction kicked in and increased the extinction rates (see above), and that has only seems to have worsened since the Industrial Revolution. A study shows that some species would have survived an extra 800 to 10,000 years if it were not for human activity (Ceballos et al., 2015).

This conversation gets further blurred with the idea of speciation, which is the creation of new species. There might be more species in net due to human speciation, although this article from The Atlantic shows that it could come with a cost to biodiversity. The Royal Society discusses how speciation works along side of species extinction. 

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has a Red List with number of endangered species. The Red List has identified more than 41,000 species that are threatened with extinction, although that is likely an underestimation of the actual number. That sounds like a lot of species at first glance. However, we need to answer an even more important question: how many species are on the planet? It makes sense to answer this question to contextualize the species extinction. What is the answer to that question? 

As of 2019, we have identified 1.6 million species. One renowned study estimated that the total count was 8.3 million species (Mora et al., 2011). Scientists have estimated that the range could be from anywhere between 5 million and 1 trillion. This wide range of uncertainty makes it difficult to pinpoint the magnitude of the problem, although we have at least a low-bound estimate. Even if the number is low, it does not stretch the imagination as to how the extinction of certain species can have a ripple effect on various ecosystems. At the same time, multiple species have been wiped out of existence and the planet lives on. 

To play Devil's Advocate, here is an article from the Washington Post in which George Washington University biology professor R. Alexander Pyron argues how preserving biodiversity should not be an ends unto itself, in no small part because species extinction is inevitable. Pyron's solution is moderation:

While we should feel no remorse about altering out environment, there is no need to clear-cut forests for McMansions off 15-acre plots of crabgrass-blanketed land. We should save whatever species and habitats can be easily rescued, refrain from polluting waterways, limit consumption of fossil fuels, and rely more on low-impact renewable energy sources. 

So far, we discover that there is a naturally occurring extinction rate, human activity accelerates said rate, and the number of species on the planet is unknown. Given the political climate (pun intended), it seems convenient to blame anthropogenic climate change. However, the main driver is not climate change. According to a 2018 WWF report, "the main drivers of biodiversity decline continue to be the overexploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion."

While there are some discouraging trends in terms of species extinction, there is also some reason for optimism on the theme of species extinction when looking to the future: 

• The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) shows that land use for agricultural purposes per capita is about half of what it was in 1961. This leaves room to use the land for other uses, such as forestation. Oxford also points out that we have already reached and passed peak agricultural land use.
• A study using NASA data shows that the Earth has gotten greener during the first 15 years of the 21st century (Chen et al., 2020). A greener earth will not only cool down global temperatures, but it will help with maintaining biodiversity and helping species to rebuild. 
• Since 2010, protected areas covering 21 million square kilometers (or the size of the Russian Federation) have been added to the global network of protected ares (Protected Planet).
• Dematerialization seems to be manifesting. As Co-Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy Andrew McAfee explained on a podcast, many developed nations are learning to reduce its usage of timber, metals, and fertilizer. This article from 2015 uses data to show how dematerialization takes place. Such dematerialization can take some pressure off of ecosystems.
• In his book Inheritors of the Earth, University of York conservation biologist Chris Thomas argues that humans have been enriching local diversity by "moving around and introducing species to areas where they were previously absent." 

We need to weigh the costs and benefits of keeping species alive, much like we do with any other policy. We also do not need to choose between the economy and the environment. As one optimistic paper in BioScience arguing about how we will regain conservationism this century, "the only sensible path for conservation is to continue its efforts to protect biodiversity while engaging in cities to build the foundations for a lasting recovery of nature (Sanderson et al, 2018)." Rather than give into despair, there is reason to be optimistic. A combination of technological development, urbanization, and economic advancement will likely result in the freeing up land for conservation and development of biodiversity, thereby evading most, if not all, the catastrophic predictions about species extinction.

Pfizer Director on COVID Vaccines & Transmission: Another Reason Why Vaccine Mandates & Passports Were Unnecessary

A European Parliament hearing from October 10, 2022 is making the news.  While it might seem to be normal parliamentary business, the testimony provided was quite revelatory. The testimony included representatives from Pfizer and Curevac to discuss manufacturing and distributing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. The quote that was most notable was when European Parliamentary member Rob Roos of the Netherlands asked if the vaccines were tested to see if they can prevent COVID transmission. Pfizer Director Janine Small testified that the vaccines were not tested for prevention of COVID transmission (see Roos' tweet below).

🚨 BREAKING:

In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission.

"Get vaccinated for others" was always a lie.

The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated.

The world needs to know. Share this video! ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/su1WqgB4dO

— Rob Roos MEP 🇳🇱 (@Rob_Roos) October 11, 2022

The fact-checkers at AP News found this to be misleading since "Pfizer never claimed to have studied the issue before the vaccine market's release." In a similar vein, Reuters' fact-checkers wrote about how preventing transmission was "not required, not promised." Let's forget for a moment that the Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on the Today Show in September 2020 that "their decision will not only affect their lives...but will affect the lives of others. If they don't vaccinate, they will become the weak link that will allow this virus to replicate."

While purporting to fight misinformation, the fact-checkers at AP News and Reuters hope you do not notice the slight-of-hand with their semantics or what the Pfizer CEO said on live television. The FDA did not require transmission to be tested. That much is true, but that is beside the point. The fact that the vaccines would stop COVID transmission was a repeated talking point from government officials:

• In May 2021, Biden said "if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other vaccinated people around them" and said in a CNN town hall in July 2021 that "you're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations." 
• When pushing for his vaccine mandate in September 2021, Biden reiterated that getting people vaccinated is "about protecting yourself and those around you." 
• Dr. Anthony Fauci said in May 2021 that vaccinated people become "dead ends" for coronavirus. 
• April 2021: CDC Director Rochelle Walensky that "Our data from the CDC suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus" and that they are unlikely to spread it to others.
• French government official Jean-Michel Blanquer similarly stated that being vaccinated does not risk contaminating others. 
• In 2021, Austria had a lockdown on the unvaccinated to prevent them from transmitting the virus. 

I can list more examples, but I think you get the idea by now. Multiple countries mandated that people get vaccinated. There were plenty of jurisdictions that required COVID passports to go to restaurants or shopping, not to mention COVID passports to enter countries in 2021 and the beginning of 2022. The primary underlying rationale of COVID vaccine mandates and COVID vaccine passports was to protect others from getting infected with COVID. 

When I criticized Biden's failed attempt at a vaccine mandate in September 2021, I listed 10 reasons why it was faulty. One of those reasons was the following: if the vaccine is what protects the vaccinated (as opposed to making sure everyone is vaccinated), why force the unvaccinated to take it? 

Plus, it was anything but clear in 2021 that the vaccines prevented transmission. I went through the data in December 2021 to find that while vaccines helped with severe cases of COVID, they did little to nothing to prevent transmission. I wrote that piece while the Delta variant was the predominant strain. Since Omicron is even more transmissible than Delta, it stands to reason there are similar issues with COVID transmission. After all, the CDC found that in February 2022, 64 percent of adults and 75 of children had been infected by the Omicron variant of COVID.

Here is my main line of questioning for today:

If Pfizer didn't know, what inside information did Biden, Fauci, or any other government official have to justify their push for vaccine mandates? 

How could your vaccine mandate-loving neighbor who yelled at the unvaccinated because their choice to not get vaccinated "could kill grandma" possibly have known more about vaccines and transmission than the companies manufacturing and distributing the vaccines? 

To answer these questions non-rhetorically, they did not know. Government officials did not have adequate information, clinical data, or other inside information regarding vaccines' effect on transmission before thrusting vaccine mandates or vaccine passports onto the populace. Not only did they not know, there was evidence showing that the vaccines did not prevent transmission. 

Just so we are clear, this is not to say that COVID vaccines are useless. Quite the opposite! I have written on multiple occasions that the vaccines are effective because they prevent severe COVID, COVID-related hospitalizations, and COVID deaths (see here, here, and here). A September 2022 paper from the Lancet shows how the COVID vaccines saved anywhere between 14.4 to 19.8 millions within the first year of vaccination (Watson et al., 2022). To throw more nuance into the mix, the Danish government does not recommend that people under 50 get their booster shot. The main success of the COVID vaccines is individual protection of one's health, not societal protection.

The efficacy of vaccines based on certain metrics does not negate that the vaccines were not particularly helpful when it came to COVID transmission. It certainly does not excuse government officials using faulty rationale to pass problematic policy or various media outlets going along with it. 

What happened in the EU parliamentary meeting is another example of how governments around the world ignored the science to force onerous COVID regulations on the people, whether it was harmful lockdowns, counterproductive school closures, all-but-useless mask mandates, or ineffective travel bans. Neither the media nor various governments want us to pay attention to these finer points because they would rather deflect the harm the suffering they caused with putting fear-mongering over actual science. 

While Biden declared the pandemic is over, what we the people need to do now is make sure that the lockdown lovers, Covidians, and indeed everyone who was responsible for wreaking such havoc on our institutions and way of life do not get to write a revisionist, bastardized version of history to make them look vindicated. We need to hold a light to what was inflicted upon this generation so future generations do not suffer.

The Dangerous Bait-and-Switch That Is Critical Race Theory

A proper education is one of the most important gifts that we can bestow upon children. It is not simply because a proper education is one of the main factors in high wellbeing. It is because it gives us critical thinking skills, helps us make correct decisions, makes us less susceptible to the influence of others, and improves our understanding of the world. A proper education in history is specifically important because it helps us learn from past mistakes, as well as successes. It becomes problematic when something as paramount as an education in history is politicized because it distorts truth. 

Nonetheless, that is what is happening in the U.S. education system. I am sure that by now, many have heard the term "critical race theory", or CRT for short. You can read the analysis I wrote last year on CRT for more background, but let me summarize the debate as follows. 

CRT is a theory "about how socially constructed racial identities are intertwined throughout all our legal and social structures to create and reinforce a system of white supremacy." Proponents of CRT claim that CRT is simply a way for us to better understand how racism shaped the United States. Opponents of CRT see it is a radical ideology that is dead-set on creating division based on race and is not interested in teaching an objective view of history. 

If CRT were solely about teaching history accurately and making sure that the less-than-ideal parts of U.S. history are not whitewashed, I would be all for CRT. Children should not be learning a watered-down or bastardized version of U.S. history. By the time children have completed high school, they should know all about U.S. history: the good, the bad, and the ugly. As reading a recently released article from The Federalist entitled "No, Critical Race Theory Isn't About Teaching 'Slavery Is Real'" reminded me, CRT is actually a bait-and-switch that we should all find to be disturbing. 

CRT attempts to do away with rational thought and objectivity. This is not something that CRT advocates exactly hide. Stephen Sawchuk, who is the Associate Editor of Education Week, pointed out in his article praising CRT that CRT is a subset of critical theory that emerged from postmodernist thought and is meant to question and criticize "universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and [classical] liberalism." This is not only problematic because these are values I hold dear. It is because it means rejecting such phenomena as critical thinking, the scientific method, or the sort of objectivity that reminds us that 2 + 2 = 4. I think CRT needs to be postmodern because it would not survive scrutiny under logic or critical thinking. CRT puts activism ahead of finding the truth, which makes it that much more difficult to find solutions to the problems that CRT advocates purport to care about. After all, how can you fix a problem if you cannot accurately diagnose it? 

The idea of accurate diagnosis gets into another issue with CRT, which is that CRT lobs unfalsifiable accusations of racism. When I say unfalsifiable, what I mean here is that CRT advocates assume a conclusion about something (e.g., the pervasiveness of systemic nature of racism in society) or someone (e.g., whether all white people are racist) without having to provide any evidence for their claim. To apply that to CRT, it does not first prove whether racism took place. It simply assumes that racism is there and jumps straight to asking "How was this situation racist?" For CRT advocates, you do not have to prove something or someone was racist. It is a belief, an axiom to be held as sacrosanct. As this article from the Foundation of Economic Education points out:

The problem with this [assumption of racism] is that human interactions are inherently messy and subjective. We treat each other all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. In this type of environment, if you look for a phenomenon in an interaction you will find evidence for it; even if the phenomenon doesn't actually exist in that interaction...A scholar will look at complicated interactions and will weigh the evidence in search of the truth. An activist will dig for anything that supports their pre-existing dogma. 

None of this is a surprise since CRT rejects critical thinking and is unkind towards teaching students how to think. Rejecting reason not only comes with the price of halting progress, but it comes with a warped sense of priorities and problem-solving. While I would argue that lockdowns played a major role in the increase in of riots and "mostly peaceful protests," I would also argue that CRT contributed to the tension quietly in the background. After all, if the problem is systemic racism and the system is so "rotten to its core" that it oppresses colored people and keeps them down, then the only solution is to fight fire with fire and use violence to tear it down. 

Ibram X. Kendi, who is one of the most brazen advocates of CRT, openly admitted that "the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." I don't think Kendi even realizes the irony of such a solution, but what the CRT mentality does is continue a perpetual cycle of discrimination instead of finding a solution to put an end to the discrimination. 

As much as I would like to have a world without racism, having the intent of making the world a more racially just and equal place does not give CRT advocates the moral high ground. As Milton Friedman famously said: One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

When taken to its logical conclusion, obsessively focusing on race like CRT does is destructive and divisive. In the event what I wrote today was not compelling enough, I will direct you once again to the analysis I wrote on CRT last year to supplement today's analysis. I discussed how it lowers morale for students of color and how it can create resentment and/or lower self-esteem for white students. I also described how it will worsen race relations and make society more racist, which is contrary to the supposed goals of CRT advocates.  

I am not here to say that racism is gone or that race relations were or are perfect because none of that is true. I explained that concept when I argued last year why we should all celebrate Juneteenth. At the same time, CRT advocates react to racial relations in the U.S. as if Jim Crow were alive and well or if we were living in the antebellum South. Progress has been made since then and we should use that progress to bring us closer to giving all U.S. citizens the opportunity to live the American Dream. In case it has not been abundantly clear by now, there are a myriad of legitimate reasons to criticize CRT and to want it removed from the classroom. I would accuse CRT advocates as being intellectually lazy when they call anyone who is opposed to CRT a racist, but they don't care about objective truth, remember?

"Latinx" Is an Exclusionary Term: Another Reason to Do Away With It

Labels can be used to confine or limit, but they can also be used to describe someone or something. Finding a term to describe those of Spanish or Latin American descent has been quite the bumpy road. The terms Hispanic and Latin took some time in the 20th century to get used accustomed to, but it was not easy. Although used interchangeably in everyday speech, the words Hispanic and Latino refer to two different types of people. A Latino is someone who comes from a part in the western hemisphere that a) was formally colonized by Spain or Portugal, and b) where a Romance language, whether Spanish, Portuguese, or French, is predominantly spoken. Hispanic refers to someone from a Spanish-speaking country, whether that is Spain or a Spanish-speaking country in Latin America. So Latino is a geographical and ethnic designation, whereas Hispanic is more of a geographic and linguistic designation. 

If that did not make things murky enough, here comes the term Latinx. The premise behind the term "Latinx" was to create an inclusive option for non-binary and gender-neutral individuals of Latin or Hispanic origin. The term emerged in 2004 and was primarily used amongst academics and Left-leaning activists. The usage of the term started to increase in 2014 (Salinas et al., 2017) and became an entry in Webster's dictionary in 2018. 

There has been considerable pushback to the term "Latinx." Earlier this year, the mayor of Buenos Aires issued a public statement banning the use of "Latinx" or any other gender-neutral variant because it violates the rules of the Spanish language. The Uruguayan government released a similar memo in December 2020. In 2020, the Real Academia Española, which is the institution considered to be the gatekeeper of the Spanish language, called it alien to Spanish morphology. There have been initiatives in Peru and some states in Mexico to ban gender-neutral language in schools. 

While the term "Latinx" has been around for almost two decades, it still remains unpopular. In 2020, Pew Research pointed out how a quarter of Hispanics have heard of it, but only three percent use it. Earlier this year, Gallup estimated that 4 percent of Hispanics use it as an identifier. In December 2021, NBC pointed out a poll that shows that only 2 percent of those of Latin descent use the term "Latinx." Compare that to the 40 percent in the same poll that find the term "Latinx" offensive. 

It does not surprise me in the slightest. In 2019, I wrote a scathing piece where I took multiple issues with the term "Latinx." One of my main issues stemmed from the fact that the suffix "-x" does not grammatically or orally correspond with the Spanish language. Even if it were created strictly for a U.S.-based audience, it does not make sense to create the term "Latinx" because English has gender-neutral terms to describe this demographic: Hispanic and Latin. Also, after acquiring a major in Spanish, spending time in Spanish-speaking countries, using Spanish in a professional context, having multiple Spanish-speaking friends, and even having previously been engaged to a Hispanic, I can tell you that Spanish-speakers prefer their country of origin as a form of self-identification over a generic term such as Latino, Hispanic, or the obnoxious "Latinx." 

Last week, I read an article from The Conversation that was in Real Clear Policy. It was entitled "Stop using 'Latinx' if you really want to be inclusive." Not only do I have issues with the term "Latinx" because it is unnecessary, linguistically improper, or condescending. This article highlighted another reason to despise the term: its exclusive nature. Here were some gems I found in the article:

• If the term is truly inclusive, it gives equitable weight to vastly diverse experiences and knowledge; it is not meant to be a blanket identity. 
• Furthermore, if the goal is to be inclusive, the "-x" would be easily pronounceable and naturally applied to other parts of the Spanish language. 
• Individuals who self-identify as Latinx or are aware of the term are most likely to be U.S.-born, young adults from 18 to 29 years old. They are predominantly English speakers and have more college education. In other words, the most marginalized communities do not use Latinx (Pew Research). 

First of all, the term "Latinx" goes against the very concept of inclusivity. If you are going to use a term this broad to describe a group of people, it has to represent all of those individuals, not only some. More to the point, the inoperability of "Latinx" in the Spanish language excludes millions of Spanish speakers throughout the world. The suffix "-x" does not correspond to the Spanish language. Therefore, people cannot use the suffix in everyday conversation or written correspondence. By the way, the millions of Spanish-speaking individuals cannot use the suffix "-x" also includes the vast majority of the non-binary and gender-neutral individuals for whom "Latinx" was created. This would explain why the term "Latinx" is used by a small, elite subset of Latinos: the ones with a college education and high English proficiency. Part of why language evolves organically is because any modifications made over time would need to fit within the given language. The term "Latinx" fails at that spectacularly. In attempts to be more inclusive, the term "Latinx" ends up being significantly more exclusive. 

To quote Joaquin Blaya, who is a co-founder of the Spanish-speaking TV network Univision, in his objection to the term 'Latinx': "It's too weird. It's dumb. It's foreign. It's not Spanish." Blaya is correct on all fronts. The suffix "-x" is English-language speakers imposing an Anglophone norm onto the Spanish language, which is culturally and linguistically inconsiderate. The term "Latinx" is even clunky in English. Language is meant to be clear when communicated, which the term "Latinx" cannot accomplish in English; even more so in Spanish. In short, the term "Latinx" dishonors the Spanish language and its speakers while excluding way many more people than it includes. In case there were not enough reasons to relegate the term "Latinx" to the dustbin of history, the exclusiveness of the term is another one to add to the list of reasons why "Latinx" is a linguistic bastardization that needs to be discontinued. 

Media Continues to Exaggerate Threat of Climate Change: Hurricanes Are No Exception

At the end of last month, Hurricane Ian unleashed its Category 4 fury on multiple locations, including Cuba and Florida. This hurricane is likely to be the costliest since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. While people are recovering from the havoc, media outlets have decided that this disaster is a carte blanche to hype up the effects of climate change as it pertains to hurricanes: 

• Study finds that climate change added 10 percent to Ian's rainfall (AP News)
• Is Climate Change Making Hurricanes Worse? (Economist)
• How Climate Change Is Rapidly Fueling Super Hurricanes (Washington Post)

These are but a few examples of the media using clickbait to try to increase views during a natural disaster. Here is the question I would like to ask: are hurricanes actually more intense and frequent or are we hearing more about hurricanes and other natural disasters because the media decides to report on it more frequently and more intensely than it used to? 

Last November, I pointed out how using low-probability, worst-case assumptions from scary climate change modeling to drive environmental policy is ill-advised. A peer-reviewed study from Europe shows that economic losses and weather-related deaths have declined considerably since 1980 (Formetta and Feyen, 2019). If you notice the graph below from the aforementioned study, the declining trend also exists in costal flooding. 

A study from a University of Colorado professor also shows that the cost of natural disasters as a percent of global GDP has decreased from 0.3 percent of GDP to 0.25 percent between 1990 and 2017 (Pielke, 2018).

So what about hurricanes specifically? Are hurricanes killing more people? Do we see more havoc wreaked on the economy? The question about whether it harms the economy is more complicated because more people have been owning property in hurricane-prone areas. That is why using normalized cost trends is a way to make comparing hurricanes over time analogous, i.e., it becomes more of an apples-to-apples comparison. Essentially, the normalization process estimates costs from a historical storm if the same natural event were to take place in modern times. Using this normalization process, we can see that there has been no discernible trend in economic cost between 1900 and 2017 (Weinkle et al., 2018).

But at least there have been more hurricanes, right? Not so much. A report from the American Meteorological Society shows that the number of overall hurricanes and major hurricanes (i.e., Category 3-5) have been on the decline (Klotzbach et al., 2018). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that "there is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane history (IPCC, p. 1588)." 

Even better, we can consult the researchers over at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is the government entity responsible for such tasks as oceanic and atmospheric research. NOAA summarizes its findings in Global Warming and Hurricanes. Here were some of my favorite parts from the NOAA:

•  "There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricanes, there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity." 
• "After adjusting for a likely under-count of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era, there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane country. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s." 
• While the NOAA projects that the lifetime maximum intensity of Atlantic Hurricanes will increase by about 5% during the 21st century, NOAA also projects "substantial decrease (~25%) in the overall number of Atlantic and tropical storms." 
• "After adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive trend (not statistically significant) in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006." 
• "We conclude that historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." 

In other words, reputable studies and government findings conclude that anthropogenic climate change has not caused more frequent hurricanes, more intense hurricanes, or greater economic damage. Furthermore, the NOAA shows that the lower of frequency of projected hurricanes will offset the slightly higher intensity of projected hurricanes. Not only have hurricanes not gotten overall worse over time, but we have become more resilient because we have done a better job at weathering hurricanes, as well as natural disasters more generally. Instead of unleashing a storm of misinformation to make a quick buck, perhaps more media outlets should try reporting facts, even if they end up painting a less catastrophic picture than a climate change Armageddon.

A Yom Kippur Lesson on the Stoic Dichotomy of Control and How to Take the Reins for the New Year

We are currently in another year of the Jewish High Holiday period, which starts on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and ends after Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). It is within this ten-day period (עשרת ימי תשובה) that Jews traditionally lean into introspection, reconnection, and improving oneself. There are a sheer amount of services and prayers that take place during this holiday period. There is one liturgical poem (פיוט; piyut) that is read both on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that I want to focus on today: Unetaneh Tokef (ונתנה תקף).

The premise of this liturgical poem is that G-d is Judge and He is judging our actions. He has a Book of Life and a Book of Death. On Rosh Hashanah, it is written in which Book we will be inscribed. On Yom Kippur, the Books are sealed. As we see in the poem, the Books act as a metaphor of who is going to live and going to die in the upcoming year. When I analyzed this piyut nine years ago, the framework presented in Unetaneh Tokef is figurative because, well, this is a poem. As we will see, this poem has great insight, even though there are not literal Books. 

This is a poem that helps us to come to terms with our own mortality. One of the ways it inadvertently does so is by using the dichotomy of control. The dichotomy of control, which is most commonly associated with Stoicism, is the idea some things are in your control and others are not. This is true when you divide a task, goal, event, or occurrence into small enough pieces. The dichotomy of control framework has us categorize things into either being in our control or not. We are then to focus on what is within our control. This concept exists in the well-known Serenity Prayer:

G-d grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

This dichotomy plays out in Unetaneh Tokef. The piyut list a series of ways that people die, including by water, by fire, by hunger, by earthquake, and by plague, e.g., COVID-19. It also says that it will be determined who will be at ease and who will suffer, who will become poor and who will become rich, and who will be cast down and who will be raised high. We have no control of whether death comes from us. It is not a matter of if we will die, but how, when, and where. As for becoming poor or rich, that one is trickier. We can have control over our performance at work, but we cannot control whether economic conditions shut down our place of employment or certain other dynamics in the workplace. There are many external events over which we do not have control. After this list of events over which we have little to no control, the poem creates a "but" statement to counter a feeling of fatalism:

ותשובה ותפלה וצדקה מעהירין את רע הגזרה

But repentance, prayer, and charity avert the evil [severity] of the decree. 

While there are a myriad of events and actions outside of our control, Unetaneh Tokef reminds us that there are things we can do to help mitigate the circumstances, whether they are our fault or not. The poem provides us with three solutions. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe aptly illustrates, the English translations do not capture the profundity of what these options actually entail:

• Repentance (תשובה). What is interesting about the Jewish concept of teshuvah is that it has the same root as the verb "to return" (לשוב). Rather than become a new person, one is "returning" to one's original self. In Judaism, that original nature is deemed good. I have theological qualms believing everyone is good deep down. I think being human means that there is potential to be good, but that is not the same as being fundamentally good. Perhaps that is what we are returning to: actualizing our potential to be good in the world. In any case, I still like the concept of teshuvah. Whether it is Greek tragedies, Calvinist predestination, Marxism, Freudian thought, or genetic determinism, there has been many schools of thought that believe that we are puppets of fate. What is great about teshuvah is that with effort, discipline, and will, we have the ability and freedom to change for the better. 
• Prayer (תפלה). There is a separate verb that means "to pray, request, beseech" (לבקש). The word comes from the reflexive verb "to judge oneself" (התפלל). While there is an element of interacting with the Divine, there is a major aspect of self-evaluation and self-judgment. This is not about a process of asking for what we need. This is about developing the self-awareness to become better people. 
• Charity (צדקה). The idea of charity comes from the Latin word caritas, which means "from the heart." The closest Hebrew gets to this idea is the word חסד. In Judaism, the word צדקה comes from the root of צדק: justice. We give not because we feel warm-hearted, but because it is the right thing to do. It reminds us that we have a responsibility to help out other human beings. It also reminds us that nothing ultimately belongs to us. While the concept of צדקה is traditionally about how one gives money, I believe that giving one's time or effort, or even extending a kind word, is also an extension of the concept of צדקה. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler said that the extent to which we love is the extent to which we give. 

Through the actions of self-reflection, changing our behavior, and doing acts of kindness, Unetaneh Tokef teaches us that we turn abstract values into the fulfillment of what Jewish values are supposed to exemplify. By becoming better people through our thoughts, speech, and action, we can bring about a year of sweetness, joy, and abundance.