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Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, records his video addresses in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023.
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life, which opened at London’s Serpentine South Gallery in June, explores how humans relate to spiders. It features installations of spider webs displayed and lit to be viewed as sculptures. There are also films: one made about Saraceno’s work with groups battling lithium mining in Argentina and another about spider diviners from Somié village in Cameroon.
That’s where I came in. Ŋgam dù (the Mambila term for spider divination) is one of many types of oracle or divination used by Mambila people in Cameroon. It is the most trusted form and – unlike other types which are sometimes dismissed as mere games – its results can be used as evidence in the country’s courts. Variants of this form of divination are found throughout southern Cameroon and the long history of the word ŋgam attests to the longevity of the practice.
I work as a social anthropologist in the Mambila village of Somié. I have visited almost every year since 1985, working on a variety of projects. Divination was the focus of a chapter in my PhD in 1990, but I never stopped working on the subject. As well as becoming an initiated diviner, I have continued to think about the wider implications of using divination or oracles.
Ngam dù is a form of divination in which binary (either/or) questions are asked of large spiders that live in holes in the ground. The options are linked to a stick and a stone then, using a set of leaf cards marked with symbols, the spider is left to make its choice.
The hole plus the stick, stone and cards are covered up. The spider emerges and will move the cards so the diviner can then interpret the pattern relative to the stick and stone. If cards are placed on the stick, then the option associated with that has been selected, and vice versa if the cards are placed on the stone.
Things get more interesting (at least to me and other diviners) if both options are selected, or neither. Sometimes a contradictory response is interpreted to mean that the question posed is not a good one. The diviner is thereby told to go and discuss the issue with the client and reframe the problem, posing a different question.
The process is “calibrated” regularly by asking test questions such as “Am I here alone?” or “Will I drink tonight?”. Spiders that fail these tests are discarded as liars and not used for future consultations. It’s also common to ask the same question in parallel to get a consistency check, so more than one spider can be used at the same time. Sometimes the stick and stone option are reversed to ensure that the spider isn’t just moving the cards always in the same direction.
Mambila diviners rely on these tests to justify the system, although they also say (as do many groups in Cameroon) that spiders are a source of wisdom since they live in the ground where the “village of the dead” is found.
As an anthropologist, I avoid questions about whether spider divination is true. For me the important question is: “Does it help?”
Sometimes the results of divination are considered, but rejected, and the advice is not followed. Even in these instances it can be helpful, however, since it enables people decide on a course of action.
People use the results as a tool to help them think through hard decisions such as who to marry, or where to go for treatment when a child is ill. The latter involves weighing up conflicting considerations about expense, the possibility an illness has been caused by witchcraft and the reputations for effective treatment of different traditional healers as well as of rival biomedical health centres.
I met the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno when he had an exhibit at the Venice Bienale in 2018. He was intrigued by the computer simulation of spider divination that my colleague Mike Fischer had made. He invited me to Venice to demonstrate the simulation and talk about spider divination in front of his “sculptures”, which are made in collaboration with spiders. They are patterns of spiderwebs displayed as art.
As we talked, I said that if one day he wanted to visit Cameroon I would be happy to introduce him to the diviners I worked with. In December 2019, he came with his friend, the filmmaker Maxi Laina. We visited Somié, where he worked with the diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios and the Mambila filmmaker Nguea Iréné.
Saraceno and Laina came with some questions to ask from their friends. This included “Who would win the 2020 US election?” This was the Trump v Biden election, the results of which Trump went on to question. The answer was that there would be a new president but it would not be straightforward!
Saraceno liked the idea that spiders could help humans resolve their personal problems. It gave an example of a different way in which human-spider relationships are expressed. Bollo liked the idea of opening the process up to questions from outside the village. He already has some clients from other places in Cameroon who call him, so working internationally is very doable.
He suggested that Saraceno could make his work accessible via the internet, which he has now done through a dedicated website. Some of the first results are included in the Serpentine exhibition along with film made by Nguea Iréné of Bollo in action. The film will also be shown in the village later in the summer.
Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life is on at London’s Serpentine South Gallery until 10 September.
David Zeitlyn has received funding from AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC
Steven Deller, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wendong Zhang, Cornell University
Chad Hart, Iowa State University
“Rural Economics”
By: PBS Iowa – June 23, 2023
“Arguably, the markets have already reacted to it. We've seen strong runups in corn and soybean prices over the past week, showing the concern that we have in the drought conditions not only here in Iowa but across the nation, especially as we look towards the Eastern Corn Belt. The challenge here is really that the drought we're seeing right now, while it doesn't look good, it's not necessarily impacting our agricultural production yet.”
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Read More On: PBS Iowa
Aaron Smith, University of California, Davis
Andrew Muhammad, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“UTIA instrumental in launch of Southern Ag Today”
By: Southern Ag Today – June 23, 2023
“The agriculture industry is facing numerous challenges, from commodity price volatility to rising input prices and ongoing supply chain issues.”
“The launch of this valuable resource demonstrates the commitment of Extension programs in the Southern land-grant system to assist our producers and policymakers and to bolster agricultural production in the South.”
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Read More On: Southern Ag Today
Steven Deller, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Median home sale price in Wisconsin rose 153 percent since 2012”
By: Wis Politics – June 23, 2023
For the homeowner, this represents a remarkable increase in wealth but for potential buyers, particularly first-time buyers, this increase creates financial stress. The supply of new housing in Wisconsin hasn’t kept up with growing demand over this period, driving up home prices for both owners and renters alike. While the affordable housing shortage often comes up in discussions of the state’s top economic challenges.”
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Shenggen Fan, China Agricultural University
“What Are The Future Trends to Watch Out For in China? 6 Experts Explain”
By: YiCai - June 26, 2023
“More sustainable and healthy diets could limit obesity, disease and environmental impact. Consumption, in particular dietary habits, is closely intertwined with health and the environment. One study found that over half of all Chinese adults are overweight and obese, and of those slightly more than 16% are obese. Consumption of refined cereals, oils, red meat, and highly processed foods has been excessive, while that of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and seafood has been insufficient.”
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Jennifer Ifft, Kansas State University
“Agricultural Land Is Becoming an Investment Vehicle for the Rich”
By: Jacobin – June 25, 2023
“The idea was that they would be pro-family farms, and address concerns about green space and urban sprawl. Whether use-value assessment has been effective at achieving either of these objectives is dubious.”
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Jayson Lusk, Purdue University
“Lusk Named Vice President, Dean of OSU Agriculture”
By: Morning Ag Clips – June 25, 2023
“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to come home to a place where I worked for 13 years and help build on the foundation in place to move the college and our state forward. It’s an opportunity to make an impact and to make a difference. It’s also a place where the students, faculty and staff are doing good things, and OSU Agriculture is well positioned with support of alumni and stakeholders to have an even bigger impact in Oklahoma and beyond.”
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Tom Hertel, Purdue University
“New Study Finds Investing In Nature Improves Equity, Boosts Economy”
By: Phys.org –June 26, 2023
"Traditional economic models of this kind almost completely neglect the fact that the economy relies on nature. This new study required a detailed understanding of how and where land use patterns change as a result of economic activity, with enough spatial detail to understand environmental consequences of these changes. It is a huge achievement."
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Read More On:Phys.org
Margaret Lippsmeyer, Purdue University
Michael Langemeier, Purdue University
James Mintert, Purdue University
Nathan Thompson, Purdue University
“Resilience to Strategic Risk”
By: Ag Fax – June 27, 2023
“Strategic risks stem from a multitude of factors including a shifting political or social environment, changes in government policy, and a growing or contracting macroeconomy. Industry dynamics involving input markets and product markets as well as competitive and technological uncertainties also present strategic risks to firms. To respond to strategic risks, businesses should reevaluate their long-run business plans.”
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Jay Akridge, Purdue University
“Jay Akridge Believes in Education, Extension”
By: Farm Progress – June 30, 2023
“My brother Paul still runs the business with two stores. I worked for Dr. Payne while attending Murray State University. Near the end of my undergraduate years, he asked if I had considered graduate school. I said no, I was planning to work in the business with Dad.”
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Read More On: Farm Progress
Picture this. Walking down 135th street in Harlem, you spot a park in the distance. As you walk closer, you hear a basketball bouncing and kids yelling. It’s a small, outdoor court, well-maintained with fresh paint and a sturdy chain-link fence surrounding it. The ball is constantly in motion, being passed, dribbled, and shot from all angles. As the game progresses, the excitement draws in more kids around the court.
New York City is synonymous with basketball. From Harlem to Brooklyn, basketball has been a part of the city’s culture for decades. But why has basketball become such a staple of African American culture in cities? The answer is complex, but the roots of its popularity among minority groups stem from discriminatory practices like redlining and segregation.
“Basketball was originally invented as a white man’s game”
– Micheal Novack, The Joy of Sports (1946)
Basketball was founded in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor seeking a way to keep his students active. By the early 1900s, it was being played in colleges and high schools across the nation. Colleges like Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Princeton began to play games against each other as early as 1901. The first professional basketball league, the National Basketball League (NBL), was founded in 1937. It was later merged with the Basketball Association of America (BAA) to form the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1949.
For the first 30 years, the majority of participants at the collegiate and professional level were white, as black participants were barred from playing. The first black collegiate player, George Gregory Jr, did not appear until 1928. In the 1949-1950 season Chuck Cooper, Nathaniel Clifton, and Earl Lloyd became the first black players to play professional basketball, breaking the color barrier. Basketball at this time was played mostly at community centers like YMCAs, where white owners refused membership to black people. If black people wanted to play basketball, they would need to build their own.
Redlining and other forms of economic discrimination depressed resources in minority neighborhoods. Redlining is an exclusionary practice that began in 1934 with the implementation of the National Housing Act (NHA). The NHA created government programs such as the Federal Housing Association (FHA) and the HomeOwner Loan Corporation (HOLC) with the intent to improve the housing market. It intended to promote homeownership by providing mortgage insurance to lenders, which would make it easier for people to obtain loans to buy homes. While the FHA improved housing conditions for White people, this support largely excluded black people.
The HOLC wrote dozens of reports to banks which categorized areas with large populations of black residents as “risky” for investors, driving down their property values and scaring off many potential investors. The FHA then used these maps to guide its lending policies, which meant refusing federally insured housing loans for minorities. In addition to this, as more black people began moving to white neighborhoods in northern cities in efforts to escape Jim Crow segregation, white people began to create suburbs outside the city to escape the influx of black people. As more white homeowners fled to the suburbs, the remaining ones agreed to sell their homes at deeper discounts, fearful of falling prices.
Economic inequality caused by redlining practices also created disparities in the types of sports played by the kids in poorer neighborhoods. Redlined neighborhoods have less green space and have smaller parks on average. According to an analysis by the Trust for Public Land, the average park size is 6.4 acres in poor neighborhoods, compared with 14 acres in wealthy neighborhoods in New York City.
In addition to available parks, minority children gravitated toward basketball because of the cost of entry barriers that other sports carried. In order to play baseball at a high level, you need money to pay for equipment and travel teams. Basketball did not carry this prerequisite. David C Ogden, a professor at the University of Nebraska who studied race and sport dynamics, wrote that the most common reasons for the lack of racial diversity were the paucity of baseball facilities in Black neighborhoods, and the cost of playing select baseball. As a result:
“More than two-thirds of the 27 coaches said that African-American youth prefer to spend their time on the basketball court rather than on the diamond”
Ogden (2003)
Basketball’s popularity among minority communities flourished because of the development of black YMCA’s. The Smart Set Athletic Club of Brooklyn would be the first fully independent Black basketball team in America in 1907. As more and more YMCA’s appeared in major cities, basketball spread in similar fashion.
Edwin Bancroft Henderson, an educator working in Washington D.C., introduced the game of basketball to the Black community. Henderson learned the game during summer sessions at Harvard University, and then introduced the game to young Black men in the Wash. D.C. area. Soon the game would be played across the east coast of the United States, mainly in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Basketball also became a means for economic upward mobility. The Harlem Globetrotters formed in 1926 and became the most renowned basketball team for black basketball players. For black basketball players, the globetrotters provided the best and only way to make a living while playing basketball.
Now, basketball is an important part of NYC culture, regardless of race. Black participation in basketball has soared in the decades after segregation, and has especially soared in NYC. Every summer, minority communities gather for basketball tournaments held in NYC parks, some that even draw national attention. Nike sponsored “NY vs NY” and Slam magazine’s Summer Classic feature the top ranked high school players and have thousands of fans watching every summer. They both have been held in Dyckman park in Manhattan for the past 5 years.
Significant changes have occurred in professional demographics as well. In contrast to 1950, 75 % of the NBA is black, with a bunch of black athletes playing abroad in leagues all over the world. Segregation and redlining stifled black participation in basketball in its early history, but the economic conditions it fostered helped basketball become an enduring staple of the community for generations.
Sharif Nelson ‘26 is a student at Hamilton College studying economics.
Additional Resources:
Aaronson, D., Faber, J., Hartley, D., Mazumder, B., & Sharkey, P. (2020). The Long-Run Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps on Place-Based Measures of Economic Opportunity and Socioeconomic Success. The Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps. https://doi.org/10.21033/wp-2020-33
Bowen, F. (2023, April 7). In its early years, NBA blocked black players. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/in-nbas-early-years-black-players-werent-welcome/2017/02/15/664aa92e-f1fc-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html
Centopani, P. (2020, February 24). The makings of basketball mecca: Why it will always be New York. FanSided. Retrieved May 1, 2023, from https://fansided.com/2020/02/24/makings-basketball-mecca-will-always-new-york/
Domke, M. (2011). Into the vertical: Basketball, urbanization, and African American … Into the Vertical: Basketball, Urbanization, and African American Culture in Early- Twentieth-Century America. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from http://www.aspeers.com/sites/default/files/pdf/domke.pdf
Gay, C. (2022, January 13). The black fives: A history of the era that led to the NBA’s racial integration. Sporting News Canada. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/nba/news/the-black-fives-a-history-of-the-era-that-led-to-the-nbas-racial-integration/8fennuvt00hl1odmregcrbbtj
Gorey, J. (2022, July 25). How “White flight” segregated American cities and Suburbs. Apartment Therapy. Retrieved April 30, 2023, from https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/white-flight-2-36805862
Hunt, M. (2022, October 11). What is the National Housing Act? Bankrate. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/the-national-housing-act/#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20National%20Housing%20Act%20(NHA)%3F,Loan%20Insurance%20Corporation%20(FSLIC).
Hu, W., & Schweber, N. (2020, July 15). New York City has 2,300 parks. but poor neighborhoods lose out. The New York Times. Retrieved April 21, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/nyregion/nyc-parks-access-governors-island.html
Ivy league regular season champions, by Year. Coaches Database. (2023, March 5). Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.coachesdatabase.com/ivy-league-regular-season-champions/
McIntosh, K., Moss, E., Nunn, R., & Shambaugh, J. (2022, March 9). Examining the black-white wealth gap. Brookings. Retrieved April 25, 2023, from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/
Ogden, D. C. ., & Hilt, M. L. . (2003). Collective Identity and Basketball: An Explanation for the Decreasing Number of African Americans on America’s Baseball Diamond. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/journals/jlr/2003/volume-35/jlr-volume-35-number-2-pp-213-227.pdf
Ortigas, R., Okorom-Achuonyne, B., & Jackson, S. (n.d.). What exactly is redlining? Inequality in NYC. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://rayortigas.github.io/cs171-inequality-in-nyc/
Pearson, S. (2022). Basketball origins, growth and history of the game. History of The Game Of Basketball Including The NBA and the NCAA. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/basketballhistory.html
Robertson, N. M. (1995). [Review of Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1946., by N. Mjagkij]. Contemporary Sociology, 24(2), 192–193. https://doi.org/10.2307/2076853
Townsley, J., Nowlin, M., & Andres, U. M. (2022, August 18). The lasting impacts of segregation and redlining. SAVI. Retrieved March 30, 2023, from https://www.savi.org/2021/06/24/lasting-impacts-of-segregation/
A long-term workforce plan for the NHS – which the UK government promised four and a half years ago – has finally been unveiled. Its arrival, days before the NHS turns 75, is welcomed.
The ambitious plan sets out a 15-year strategy to address the increasing demand for healthcare and decreasing supply of healthcare professionals in England. An investment of more than £2.4 billion has been agreed to fund a 27% increase in training places by 2028-29. The total NHS workforce would grow from 1.4 million in 2021-22 to around 2.3 million in 2036-37.
This investment targets the current shortfall of NHS staff, which has around 150,000 vacancies. This shortfall is forcast to grow to 260,000–360,000 staff vacancies by 2036-37 without any intervention.
The main emphasis of the 151-page plan is on training and increasing the number of healthcare professionals – not only doctors and nurses, but also allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, speech and language therapists and podiatrists, as well as pharmacists and healthcare scientists.
Existing apprenticeships for nurses and other healthcare professionals will be expanded, and a new apprenticeship scheme for doctors will be introduced to meet the required number of 12,000–15,000 medical school places by 2030-31.
New healthcare roles have been promised, including “enhanced practitioners”, who have specific knowledge and skills in a field of expertise, and the more senior “advanced practitioners”, who manage the whole episode of a patient’s care. These posts will combine with the more generalist roles that provide basic care across a range of patients and free up the time of those more specialist practitioners.
To mark the 75th anniversary of the launch of the NHS, we’ve commissioned a series of articles addressing the biggest challenges the service now faces. We want to understand not only what needs to change, but the knock-on effects on other parts of this extraordinarily complex health system.
Retention in the NHS is a considerable problem. The overall staff leaving rate increased from 9.6% in 2020 to 12.5% in 2022. The plan acknowledges the importance of retaining workers, offering them more flexibility, and improving the culture and leadership in the NHS. But details of how this will be achieved are limited in the current plan.
Reform and innovation are also part of the plan to improve productivity by including staff with a more varied mix of skills and expertise within multidisciplinary teams, combining generalists and specialists. For example, a dental practice might have only one dentist, but two dental therapists and two dental hygienists. The therapist and hygienist would do most of the basic dental care, with the dentist intervening when more specialist care is needed.
The plan also draws on the increased use of technological advances to enhance and transform healthcare, such as AI technology, which can decrease diagnostic screening times in radiology.
While the plan is certainly a positive step, it is only the first step in a longer trajectory, setting out clear markers for growth and improvement. Much more detail is needed on how the plan will be implemented and what measures will be used to judge its success.
The emphasis of the plan is on boosting the quantity of staff and services. However, aspects of quality of care, type and level of staffing required and overcoming obstacles to this expansion, need to be explored further, such as the feasibility of shortened medical degree programmes, medical apprenticeships and the student take-up of all the new university places.
The plan acknowledges that NHS staff are working in highly pressured environments and many are exhausted since the COVID pandemic. The recent nursing strikes are not only about pay but also poor working conditions and lack of support and leadership. To make this plan viable, a clearer blueprint on how to retain staff must be included.
Where will this expansion come from? Universities do not always fill their quota of places for some health courses, including nursing, midwifery and allied health professions. It is difficult to see where the students will come from to fill the government’s proposed 92% increase in adult nursing training places by 2031-32 if current places are not being filled.
During the pandemic, people saw the value of working in healthcare as they clapped weekly for those working in the NHS who they regarded as heroes. But this perception of feeling valued in society has not endured in the NHS workforce. More NHS staff are leaving – the overall number rising by more than 25% from 2019 to 2022.
Meanwhile, nurses, doctors and some allied health professionals are taking strike action. About 170,000 NHS workers left their jobs in 2022, more than 41,000 of whom were nurses, the highest rate for a decade.
Improving the culture, wellbeing and work environment of staff in the NHS will lead to people valuing NHS roles and seeing the opportunities they bring. This will encourage people into health and social care careers.
The availability of clinical placements during training is a major obstacle to this ambitious expansion plan, mainly due to the shortage of experienced staff to supervise students. All healthcare courses incorporate “practice-based hours” where students work in a variety of healthcare settings.
This shortage of experienced supervisory staff means that clinical placements are notoriously hard to find and universities are sometimes forced to cut target placement numbers, despite the need, because of a lack of capacity.
Partnership working is essential if the plan is to be successful. Close collaboration between training institutions and NHS trusts will ensure that the appropriate type and number of health courses are offered at the right time and with the right balance of skills.
A closer alliance between schools, colleges and universities will allow students to step on and step off at different points in their learning trajectory, depending on their abilities, experience and choice of occupation. Showcasing the benefits and opportunities of healthcare as an occupation both in primary and secondary school will lead to more people choosing to join the NHS and fill these newly released places.
If working conditions for NHS staff are improved, the current trend of people leaving can be reversed. This, in turn, can lead to a more positive image of working as a healthcare professional in the NHS.
And, combined with the development of more active and well-defined partnerships across education, health and social care, the hope is that more people will opt to enter the health and social care sector.
If all of the above issues are addressed, the ambitious expansion, retention and reform targets of the NHS long-term workforce plan are more likely to be achieved. And in 25 years, at the NHS’s 100th anniversary, the NHS workforce will hopefully meet the healthcare needs of the population.
Victoria Joffe is a professor of Speech and Language Therapy and Dean of the School of Health and Social Care, University of Essex. She has received research grants from the ESRC, The Nuffield Foundation and the NIHR.
The privatisation of water companies in England and Wales was supposed to bring efficiency and investment to a vital sector that had been starved of public funding. But since 1989, the industry has failed to invest sufficiently in replacing antiquated pipes and sewage treatment systems.
Rivers and seas have become increasingly polluted with raw sewage. Meanwhile, dividend payments, funded by water companies loading up on corporate debt, have soared.
The largest of those companies, Thames Water, has debts of almost £14 billion – roughly 80% of the value of the assets of the business. Rising inflation and interest rates mean this debt is increasingly expensive to service, let alone reduce.
If Thames Water collapses, the UK government is likely to step in and manage the company through a special form of business administration to ensure 15 million customers continue to receive their water and sewerage services. But state involvement would probably be temporary, with the aim of an eventual return to the private sector.
Many would see this as a missed opportunity to do things differently. There are already groups calling for Thames Water to be renationalised and brought into public ownership to remove the company’s profit motive and the pressure of paying dividends to shareholders. Instead, the theory goes that, as a local natural monopoly, Thames Water ought to be run as a publicly owned utility fully focused on providing a public service.
But doing this would be far from straightforward. To begin with, it would involve the transfer of corporate debt onto the government’s own balance sheet, which could dramatically constrain spending on other public services, such as the NHS and education.
Another complication comes from the fact that an administration process usually involves attempts to raise funds from the sale of company assets to pay off debts. But in the case of a water company, those assets are part of an integrated and complex infrastructure. It would not be practical to break up those assets if any new company was to go on providing water and sewage services to the public.
Renationalising Thames Water would therefore require the government to buy the assets. But the cost of doing so could be enormous, and the current shareholders would need to be adequately compensated. These include investors like pension funds, which the government would find politically hard to ignore.
And even though governments can generally borrow more cheaply than private sector companies (or even deal with its own debts by printing money), these options are not attractive. They could be inflationary, and would risk a negative response from the financial markets. Renationalistation could end up being seen as an expensive acquisition that brings no new money to improve the water industry.
An alternative would be to sell the assets to a new private company or investor. But existing water companies are unlikely to be considered suitable buyers on competition grounds (and many already face similar problems as Thames Water). Demands for significant future investment to meet tighter environmental standards are also likely to deter other investors.
A more attractive option might be to create a new kind of water provider – a bit like an unusual one that already exists in Wales.
Welsh Water has a unique corporate structure, with no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of its customers. It is commercially run, with professional managers held to account by 62 independent trustees. While not perfect, its performance in recent years compares favourably with that of the other privatised water companies.
Welsh Water’s decisions are made not in the interest of profit-seeking shareholders but in the interests of broader society. Any profits made are either reinvested or returned to its 3 million customers in the form of cheaper services.
Creating such an organisation would not be easy. But there is a precedent in the case of Network Rail, a similar trustee-governed organisation, which was created when its commercial predecessor Railtrack went bust. Railtrack’s debts were subsumed into Network Rail, which were underwritten by the government (while initially staying off the public sector balance sheet). This change in ownership structure led to significant improvements on Railtrack’s atrocious safety record and reduced the cost of rail operations too.
A move towards the Welsh Water model would be in line with recent calls to turn all water firms into democratically run companies focused on public benefit. If renationalisation is considered to be too tricky politically and not viable economically, other solutions are available.
And while it is true that these public-interest companies are funded by debt, a government debt guarantee helps keep the costs of servicing this debt down (while costing the government very little). By not renationalising, the UK economy would avoid many considerable challenges – and a hefty water bill.
J. Robert Branston has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and several other health related charitable organisations. He is a non-active member of the Liberal Democrats.
Phil Tomlinson receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an Interact project on UK co-working spaces and manufacturing.
In the evolving relationship between technology and society, humans have shown themselves to be incredibly adaptable. What once left us breathless, soon becomes integrated into our everyday lives.
The astonishing functionalities of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT were, just a few months ago, the epitome of cutting-edge AI. They are now on course to be mere add-ons and plugins to our text editors and search engines.
We’ll soon find ourselves relying on their capabilities, and seamlessly incorporating them into our routines.
Yet, this rapid acclimatisation leaves us with a lingering question: what’s next? As our expectations shift, we are left wondering about the next innovation that will capture our imagination.
People will try to achieve all kinds of smart – and not-so-smart – things with AI. Many ideas will fail, others will have a lasting impact.
Our crystal ball is not much better than yours, but we can try to think about what’s coming next in a structured way. For AI to have a lasting impact, it needs to be not only technologically feasible, but also economically viable, and normatively acceptable – in other words, it complies with the values that society demands we conform to.
There are some AI technologies waiting on the sidelines right now that hold promise. The four we think are waiting in the wings are next-level GPT, humanoid robots, AI lawyers, and AI-driven science. Our choices appear ready from a technological point of view, but whether they satisfy all three of the criteria we’ve mentioned is another matter. We chose these four because they were the ones that kept coming up in our investigations into progress in AI technologies.
The startup company DoNotPay claims to have built a legal chatbot – built on LLM technology – that can advise defendants in court.
The company recently said it would let its AI system help two defendants fight speeding tickets in real-time. Connected via an earpiece, the AI can listen to proceedings and whisper legal arguments into the ear of the defendant, who then repeats them out loud to the judge.
After criticism and a lawsuit for practising law without a license, the startup postponed the AI’s courtroom debut. The potential for the technology will thus not be decided by technological or economic constraints, but by the authority of the legal system.
Lawyers are well-paid professionals and the costs of litigation are high, so the economic potential for automation is huge. However, the US legal system currently seems to oppose robots representing humans in court.
Scientists are increasingly turning to AI for insights. Machine learning, where an AI system improves at what it does over time, is being employed to identify patterns in data. This enables the systems to propose novel scientific hypotheses – proposed explanations for phenomena in nature. These may even be capable of surpassing human assumptions and biases.
For example, researchers at the University of Liverpool used a machine learning system called a neural network to rank chemical combinations for battery materials, guiding their experiments and saving time.
The complexity of neural networks means that there are gaps in our understanding of how they actually make decisions – the so-called black box problem. Nevertheless, there are techniques that can shed light on the logic behind their answers and this can lead to unexpected discoveries.
While AI cannot currently formulate hypotheses independently, it can inspire scientists to approach problems from new perspectives.
We will soon see more new versions of AI chatbots based on the latest LLM technology, known as GPT-4. We’ll see AI that can handle different types of data, such as images and speech, as well as text. These are called multimodal systems.
But let’s gaze a little further into the future. Auto-GPT, an advanced AI tool released by Significant Gravitas, is already making waves in the tech industry.
Auto-GPT is given a general goal, such as planning a birthday party, and splits it into sub-tasks which it then completes by itself, without human input. This sets it apart from ChatGPT.
Auto-GPT incorporates AI agents, or systems, that make decisions based on predetermined rules and goals. Despite installation limitations, such an functionality problems when used with Windows, Auto-GPT shows great potential in various applications.
Humanoid robots – those that look and move like us – have significantly advanced since the first Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015, a contest where teams built robots to perform a series of complex tasks set by the organisers. These included getting out of a car, opening a door and drilling a hole in a wall. Many struggled to achieve the objectives.
However, startups are now developing “humanoids” capable of doing tasks like these and being used in warehouses and factories.
Advancements in AI fields such as computer vision, as well as in power-dense batteries which provide short bursts of high current, have enabled robots to navigate complex environments, maintaining balance dynamically – in real time. Figure AI, a company building humanoid robots for warehouse work, has already secured US$70 million (£55 million) in investment funding.
Other companies, including 1X, Apptronik and Tesla, are also investing in humanoid robots, which indicates that the field is maturing. Humanoid robots offer advantages over other robots in tasks requiring navigation, manoeuvrability, and adaptability because in part, they will be operating in environments that have been built around human needs.
The long term success of these four will depend on more than just computation power.
Humanoid robots could fail to gain traction if their production and maintenance costs outweigh their benefits. AI lawyers and chatbot assistants might possess remarkable efficiency. However, their adoption might be halted if their decision making conflicts with society’s “moral compass” or laws don’t agree with their use.
Striking a balance between cost-effectiveness and society’s values is crucial for ensuring these technologies can truly flourish.
Fabian Stephany receives funding as part of this lectureship via the Dieter-Schwarz-Foundation.
Johann Laux receives funding from the “The Emerging Laws of Oversight” project, supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.
What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted. Relocated not just to another club or another borough, but to a beachfront estate in East Hampton. Although Sundays at the Tunnel would endure for a few more years, nothing in hip-hop, or American culture, would ever be quite the same again.
It’s been 25 years since Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, hosted the first of what would become his annual White Party at his home in the Hamptons. The house was all white and so was the dress code: not a cream frock or beige stripe to be seen. Against the cultural landscape of late-’90s America, the simple fact of a Black music executive coming to the predominantly white Hamptons was presented as a spectacle. That summer, The New York Times reported, “the Harlem-born rap producer and performer had played host at the Bridgehampton polo matches, looking dapper in a seersucker suit and straw boater. The polo-playing swells had invited him and he had agreed, as long as the day could be a benefit for Daddy’s House, a foundation he runs that supports inner-city children.”
To be clear, hip-hop was already a global phenomenon whose booming sales were achieved through crossover appeal to white consumers. Plenty of them were out buying Dr. Dre and Nas CDs. Combs was well known to hip-hop aficionados as an ambitious music mogul—his story of going from a Howard University dropout turned wunderkind intern at Uptown Records to a mega-successful A&R executive there was the kind of thing that made you wonder why you were paying tuition. But to those young white Americans, in 1998, he was just the newest rap sensation to ascend the pop charts. When Combs’s single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the year before, it was only the tenth rap track to do so. The genre was still viewed as subversive—“Black music” or “urban music,” music that was made not for the polo-playing swells, but for the inner-city children whom their charity matches benefited.
Hip-hop was born at a birthday party in the Bronx, a neglected part of a neglected city. The music and culture that emerged were shaped by the unique mix of Black and Puerto Rican people pushed, together, to the margins of society. It was our music. I was a Nuyorican girl in Brooklyn in the ’80s and ’90s; hip-hop soundtracked my life. If Casey Kasem was the voice of America, on my radio, Angie Martinez was the voice of New York.
When I went to college in Providence, I realized all that I’d taken for granted. There was no Hot 97 to tune into. There were no car stereos blasting anything, much less the latest Mobb Deep. Hip-hop became a care package or a phone call to your best friend from home: a way to transcend time and space. It also became a way for the few students of color to create community.
You could find us, every Thursday, at Funk Night, dancing to Foxy Brown or Big Pun. Sundays, when the school’s alternative-rock station turned the airways over to what the industry termed “Black music” were a day of revelry. Kids who came back from a trip to New York with bootleg hip-hop mixtapes from Canal Street or off-the-radio recordings from Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia’s underground show were lauded like pirates returning home with a bounty. We knew that hip-hop was many things, but not static. We understood that it was going to evolve. What we weren’t perhaps ready for was for it to go truly mainstream—to belong to everyone.
The media were quick to anoint Combs a “modern-day Gatsby,” a moniker Combs himself seems to have relished. “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” he said to a reporter in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby.” It’s an obvious comparison—men of new money and sketchy pasts hosting their way into Long Island polite society—but a lazy one. Fitzgerald’s character used wealth to prove that he could fit into the old-money world. Combs’s White Party showcased his world; he invited his guests to step into his universe and play on his terms. And, in doing so, he shifted the larger culture.
Would frat boys ever have rapped along to Kanye West without the White Party? Would tech bros have bought $1,000 bottles of $40 liquor and drunkenly belted out the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind”? Would Drake have headlined worldwide tours? Would midwestern housewives be posting TikToks of themselves disinfecting countertops to Cardi B songs? It’s hard to imagine that a single party (featuring a Mister Softee truck) could redefine who gets to be a bona fide global pop star but, by all accounts, Puffy was no ordinary host.
The man had a vision. “I wanted to strip away everyone’s image,” Combs told Oprah Winfrey years after the first White Party, “and put us all in the same color, and on the same level.” That the level chosen was a playground for the white and wealthy was no accident. Upon closing a merger of his Bad Boy record label with BMG for a reported $40 million in 1998, he told Newsweek, “I’m trying to go where no young Black man has gone before.”
“It was about being a part of the movement that was a new lifestyle behind hip-hop,” Cheryl Fox told me. Now a photographer, she worked for Puffy’s publicist at the time of the first White Party. The Hamptons, the all-white attire: It was Puffy’s idea. But the white people, she said, were a publicity strategy. “He was doing clubs, and he was doing parties that did not have white people,” she told me. “I brought the worlds together, and then I was like, ‘You got to step out of the music. You can’t just do everything music.’” She meant that he should expand the guest list to include actors and designers and financiers—the kinds of people who were already flocking to the Hamptons.
In the end, “I had the craziest mix,” Combs told Oprah. “Some of my boys from Harlem; Leonardo DiCaprio, after he’d just finished Titanic. I had socialites there and relatives from down south.” Paris Hilton was there. Martha Stewart was there. “People wanted to be down with Puff,” Gwen Niles, a Bad Boy rep at the time, told me about that first party. “People were curious: Who is this rap guy?”
Hip-hop was already popular. The message the party sent was that hip-hop, and the people who made it, were also “safe.”
Rap music was for so long cast by white media as dangerous, the sonic embodiment of lawlessness and violence. This narrative was so sticky that it kept hip-hop confined to the margins of pop culture despite its commercial success.
Hip-hop didn’t always help itself out here. Artists screwed up in the ways artists in all genres do—with drug addictions, outbursts, arrests—but when it came to hip-hop, those transgressions were used to reinforce cultural stereotypes. Misogyny had been embedded in the lyrics of hip-hop nearly since its inception. A heartbreaking 2005 feature by Elizabeth Méndez Berry in Vibe exposed the real-world violence inflicted upon women by some of hip-hop’s most beloved artists, including Biggie Smalls and Big Pun. Homophobia in hip-hop perpetuated anti-queer attitudes, particularly in communities of color. And although lyrical battles have always been a thing, rhetorical fights never needed to become deadly physical ones.
This was the context in which Puffy headed to the Hamptons. Though only 28, he had baggage. While a young executive at Uptown in 1991, he had organized a celebrity basketball game at CUNY’s City College to raise money for AIDS charities. Tickets were oversold, and a stampede left nine people dead and many more injured. The tragedy stayed in the headlines for weeks. (Years later, Puffy would settle civil suits with victims.)
In 1993, Combs launched Bad Boy Records, with a roster of stars such as Biggie. The label met with immediate success, but also controversy, after a shooting involving the California rapper Tupac Shakur embroiled Bad Boy in a contentious battle between East and West. By the spring of 1997, Biggie and Tupac were dead—Biggie gunned down in Los Angeles in what appeared to be retribution for the killing of Tupac the year before. Biggie was shot while stopped at a red light; Combs was in another car in the entourage. (Neither murder has been solved.) That fall, Combs performed “I’ll Be Missing You,” his tribute to Biggie, live at MTV’s Video Music Awards. With a choir in the rafters, Combs danced through his grief. It was a moment of rebirth, of reinvention. Combs and the gospel singers wore white.
To be clear, most of what Puffy was making as an artist and producer in this era was accessible to a white, affluent fan base. These were the kind of tracks that sampled songs your parents would have danced to, spliced and sped up so that you wanted to dance to them now. Outside of “I’ll Be Missing You” and a few songs about heartbreak, many of the lyrics were about getting, having, and spending money.
But Puffy made possible the crossover explosion of more substantial artists such as Lauryn Hill and OutKast and Jay-Z, the first generation of hip-hop superstars.
You could also say that Puffy took a musical neighborhood—one that held history and heritage and layers of meaning—and gentrified it. Cleaned it up for whiter, wealthier patrons to enjoy, people who had no idea of what the “old ’hood” was about. Both things can be true.
The summer of 1998 was also the summer before my last year of college. Up in Providence, a local copycat to Hot 97 had cropped up and gained traction: WWKX, Hot 106, “the Rhythm of Southern New England.” Seemingly overnight, the frat houses added DMX to their rotation. A classmate—a white socialite from the Upper East Side—came back senior year with box braids describing herself as a real “hip-hop head.” Funk Night became a campus-wide phenomenon, and then it ceased to exist. Nobody needed a hip-hop night when every night was hip-hop night.
In rap, the feeling was “I’m keeping it real. I’m gonna stay on this block,” Jay-Z recounts of this era in the Bad Boy documentary, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. “And our feeling was like, Yeah? I’ll see you when I get back.” Emotions around this ran hot at the time—the idea that hip-hop had left its true fans behind. But in the end, more of us were happy to see hip-hop conquer the world than were grouching in the corner about the good ol’ days.
In 2009, Puffy, by then known as Diddy, relocated his White Party to Los Angeles; hip-hop’s new mecca was the land of celebrity. The vibe, according to people who were there, just wasn’t the same. But hip-hop itself was moving on to bigger and bigger arenas. In 2018, hip-hop dominated streaming, and accounted for more than 24 percent of record sales that year. That same year, Eminem headlined Coachella, Drake dominated the Billboard 100 for months, and Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize.
Then something shifted again. This year isn’t just the 25th anniversary of the first White Party. It’s the 50th anniversary of hip-hop itself. And although it’s come a long way since Kool Herc deejayed a Bronx basement dance party, the genre appears to be suffering a midlife slump.
For the first time in three decades, no hip-hop single has hit No. 1 yet this year. Record sales are down. According to one senior music executive I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous because she wasn’t authorized to speak, festivals have been reluctant to book rappers as headliners since 2021. That’s the year that eight people were crushed to death at the Astroworld Festival in Houston; two more died later of their injuries. The performer Travis Scott was accused (fairly or unfairly) of riling up the crowd. (Coachella hasn’t had a true hip-hop headliner since Eminem.)
But the other question is: Which headliners would they even book? Kendrick Lamar is winding down his 2022 tour. Nicki Minaj doesn’t have a new album coming out until the fall. Staple acts such as J. Cole probably won’t release an album this year at all. Megan Thee Stallion, who got shot a few years ago and has been feeling burned out by the industry, is taking a break from music. As the legendary artists Too $hort and E-40 wrote in this magazine, since 2018, hip-hop has seen at least one rapper’s life a year ended by violence. The careers of Gunna and Young Thug—two major acts on the rise—have stalled while they’ve been caught up in RICO charges in Atlanta. (Perhaps sensing an opportunity, Drake just announced that a new album and tour would be coming soon.)
Recently, The New York Times ran an article about how the Hamptons have lost their cool. Too affluent. Too old. Too out of touch. Maybe hip-hop, for the first time, is suffering from similar doldrums. But obituaries to the genre have been written before. It’s only a matter of time before a new Gatsby shows up, ready to throw a party.
The UK’s housing stock is old, energy inefficient and heavily reliant on fossil fuel heating systems – mainly gas boilers. With heating responsible for 17% of the UK’s carbon emissions, homes and their central heating must transform if the country is to achieve net zero by 2050.
While there isn’t a single solution that will suit every home, government advisers on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimate that 8 million heat pumps need to be installed in existing homes by 2035.
The CCC recently published a damning assessment of the UK’s progress towards its 2030 climate goals, saying annual emission reductions outside the power sector must nearly quadruple. Home heating is of particular concern, as heat pumps are being rolled out at one-ninth the rate they need to be by 2028, alongside falling rates of energy efficiency improvements.
Heat pumps extract heat either from the air, ground or nearby water and transfer it into a building, providing heating and hot water through pipes and radiators. Some heat pumps can even work in reverse to cool homes during the summer.
Heat pumps run on electricity and use energy three times more efficiently than gas boilers.
Better still, UK homeowners are becoming more comfortable with this technology. A survey of 2,500 households in May 2023 revealed that more than 80% that had installed a heat pump were satisfied.
Only 59,862 heat pumps were installed in the UK in 2022. Although this is an increase of 40% on 2021, it’s far from the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028. To fully replace all of its gas boilers, the UK would need to be installing 1.7 million heat pumps annually by 2036.
Heat pumps are being rolled out faster elsewhere. In Norway, 60% of buildings have heat pumps; in Sweden, over 40%. Meanwhile, less than 1% of UK buildings had a heat pump in 2021. And compare the UK’s 2022 record with other countries in Europe: France installed 462,672 heat pumps (up 20%), Germany 236,000 (up 53%) and the Netherlands 123,208 (up 80%).
European governments support heat pump installations in various ways. The Netherlands has gradually raised taxes on homes burning natural gas for heating and offered subsidies for heat pumps. France has combined a 30% tax credit on improvements to heating and home insulation costing up to €16,000 with a 0% interest loan of up to €30,000 for energy efficiency upgrades.
These measures address two things which prevent people from getting a heat pump: the upfront cost of installation and the renovations required to prepare a home. Heat pumps are becoming cheaper but they are still more expensive than gas boilers and many UK homes lack the double-glazed windows, insulated walls and lofts, and pipework and radiators that help them perform optimally.
Since 2012, government policy has failed to drastically improve home energy efficiency or encourage low-carbon heating.
The carbon emissions reduction target introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2008 required energy suppliers to cut emissions by helping customers make their homes more energy efficient. When it closed in 2012, it had beaten its target of saving 293 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. 41% of these savings came from installing insulation, in turn making homes more suitable for a heat pump.
The green deal followed in 2013 and the renewable heat incentive in 2014 under David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government.
Green deal loans for energy-efficiency upgrades attracted just 14,000 applicants as homeowners baulked at the relatively high cost of borrowing and were unconvinced by the projected energy savings. The scheme was scrapped in 2015.
The renewable heat incentive paid homeowners quarterly over seven years for installing a heat pump but asked them to fund the installation upfront. In 2018, the government blamed high upfront costs, poor awareness and complex installations for the poor uptake. The incentive ended in 2022.
Launched in 2022 under Boris Johnson, the boiler upgrade scheme offers homeowners a £5,000 grant to replace their gas boiler with an air-source heat pump (£6,000 for a ground-source heat pump) and aims to lower the cost difference between the two. Installing a new combi-boiler costs between £600 and £2,150 whereas a heat pump is £5,000 to £8,000 after the government subsidy.
The government also plans to implement a clean heat market mechanism that will ask boiler manufacturers to sell four heat pumps for every 100 gas boilers in 2024/25, or pay for the equivalent in heat pump credits if they can’t (one heat pump credit is worth £5,000).
These measures may improve on earlier failures if the rules for industry are clear and the incentives are generous enough for consumers to consider investing in a heat pump, as examples with other low-carbon technologies have shown.
For instance, evidence suggests carmarkers are already selling more battery-electric vehicles in anticipation of a law requiring them to sell a rising proportion of zero-emission vehicles each year from 2024. And the feed-in-tariff scheme requiring energy suppliers to buy electricity from homeowners at an agreed price for 10 to 25 years helped nearly a million households install solar panels.
Beyond targets for boiler manufacturers, the UK government will ban natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2025. While Germany’s governing coalition is implementing a ban on installing gas boilers in existing properties from 2028.
Before such a ban is tabled in the UK, there are policies that could raise the dismal heat pump installation rate. First, like the Dutch, the UK could gradually lower taxes on residential electricity and increase them on gas.
Second, the government could ensure energy performance certificates more accurately assess the energy efficiency of homes and their readiness for heat pumps. And third, the government should dismiss opposition from boiler manufacturers and implement the clean heat market mechanism.
Decarbonising heat and encouraging heat pumps is essential for achieving net zero. Tighter rules and targets for industry must sit alongside attractive incentives for consumers if the UK is to reach 600,000 installations a year in five years’ time.
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Ned Lamb is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council's Low Temperature Heat Recovery and Distribution Network Technologies (LoT-NET) programme.
An Islamic State-linked group in Uganda attacked a school in June, killing more than 40 people, mostly students, in what seems to be an escalating trend of terrorism against schools. The attackers set fire to school dormitories and used machetes to kill and maim students.
This was the latest in a cycle of shocking attacks on schools around the world. The Nigerian group Boko Haram infamously kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in 2014, and it has attacked other schools throughout the country.
Many more attacks have occurred since then. In Afghanistan, IS affiliate IS-K has repeatedly bombed educational institutions in recent years, often killing dozens of children or teens. In 2020 in Cameroon, sources suggest that separatists fighting for their own, independent state attacked a bilingual school, killing eight children.
Why would a group carry out such an attack, killing schoolchildren? These attacks are happening more frequently in recent years, and they also tend to be carried out by particular types of groups.
I recently co-wrote a book, Insurgent Terrorism: Intergroup Relations and the Killing of Civilians, with political scientists Victor Asal and R. Karl Rethemeyer, examining the use of terrorism (intentional civilian targeting) by rebel organisations in civil wars. We dedicated a chapter to understanding attacks on schools and discovered a few patterns.
First, attacks on schools are on the rise. In the years examined in our book, 1998-2012, we found a marked increase starting in the late 2000s during civil wars. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there fewer than 20 attacks per year on schools by rebel organisations. But between 2009 and 2012, there were more than 90 such attacks per year.
Examining more recent data on terrorism generally, and not only during civil wars, we see a similar increase starting in the late 2000s. The graphic below shows a massive increase in terrorist attacks on schools.
Terrorist attacks on schools, 1970-2020
The annual average number of terrorist attacks on schools in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Global Terrorism Database, was less than 60. In the 2000s, the average year saw nearly 80 school attacks. In the 2010s, there was an average of 250 terrorist attacks on schools per year. After the early 2010s peak, the number of attacks started to decrease, but numbers are still far above what they were in the 1990s or early 2000s.
The increase in terrorism against schools is in part because influential global networks such as al-Qaida and IS seem to encourage it, but also because groups learn from others that this is a good way to bring attention to their cause, to force a government to give in, or to intimidate a rival community.
Read more: Nigeria's new national security bosses: 5 burning issues they need to focus on
A second pattern we noticed was that the organisations that carry out these kinds of attacks tend to have a few attributes in common. Groups that attack schools tend to be in alliances with other rebel or terrorist organisations. These alliances provide extra resources to groups, which are essential for large-scale attacks. For example, allies might provide explosives, vehicles or recruits. Cooperative relationships with other rebels can also contribute to heinous attacks because groups learn tactics from each other, and they might pressure each other to use extreme tactics.
This seems to be the case with the group behind the recent Uganda attack, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). It has been cooperating with IS since 2017 and has received funding from it. The funds and propaganda support seem to have enabled ADF to carry out increasingly vicious attacks. Additionally, other IS-affiliated groups have attacked schools, so it is possible that the main IS encourages this, or that the groups are learning from each other.
We found that groups that had recently been subjected to government crackdowns were more likely to subsequently target schools, while groups that had recently received government concessions didn’t attack schools the following year. This is consistent with other research finding that government repression of religious freedom seems to lead to terrorist attacks on school.
The Uganda school attack, where boys and girls were killed and buildings set alight with people inside, was apparently intended to send a message to the government and its president Yoweri Museveni. Victims reported that the attackers said: “We have succeeded in destabilising Museveni’s country.”
Interestingly, in our research, we did not find that religiously oriented groups, such as Islamist groups, were more likely than other types of groups to attack schools. Certainly, some Islamist groups have carried out these attacks – such as the recent Uganda school killings.
IS-K’s attacks are intended to intimidate the mostly Shia Hazara minority community, consistent with IS-K’s extreme religious views. But non-religious groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Communist Party of India (Maoist), have also repeatedly attacked schools.
Overall, attacks on schools occur because militant organisations see that they bring a great deal of attention – including from international news media – to their cause. Terrorism is fundamentally violent propaganda, and groups that use terrorism constantly innovate, seeking new tactics to help them stand out. They also hope the increasingly extreme methods will pressure governments to give up.
It seems likely that terrorist attacks against schools are going to continue. Governments should prioritise safeguarding educational institutions, and the international community should work harder to prevent these kinds of attacks.
Brian J. Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It was just published yesterday, HERE. The issue consists of interviews about Heidegger with a number of people, myself included.
doctorzamalek
Thames Water is reportedly on the brink of collapse. The UK’s largest water company, well known for its high levels of water leakage, sewage spills, executive pay and dividend payments, now appears to be flooded with debts that it cannot afford to pay.
Those debts have reached more than £14 billion, leading to fears the government – or UK taxpayers to be precise – may have to bail the company out.
The news of Thames Water’s difficulties may have shocked some of its 15 million customers. But as someone who has researched the finances of water companies, I was not entirely surprised. These issues have been a long time in the making, and I raised concerns publicly over five years ago.
When the water and sewage companies of England and Wales were privatised in 1989, the intention was to bring fresh finance and innovation to create efficiency. But in the 2000s, a new kind of financial investor began to dominate the sector.
Our recent research found that by 2021, of 15 English water and sewage companies, nine were owned by “special purpose companies”. These are organisations set up for the purpose of buying water utilities, with owners consisting of a range of private equity funds, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
These kinds of investors were then able to use water company revenue to generate significant returns to shareholders. And one way this happens is by hiking up company debts.
Newly privatised water companies had started out with zero debt in 1989. Yet by the end of March 2022, total debt in the sector was at £60.6 billion. In part, the increased debt was used to refinance the companies so that investors could repay themselves part of the original cost of buying the water utility.
Our research shows that Thames Water was the archetype of this model. When it was taken over in 2007 by a consortium led by Macquarie, an Australian investment bank, debts increased over the next ten years from £3.2 billion to £10.7 billion. The proportion of assets funded by borrowing increased to over 80%, while the company paid out dividends of £2.5 billion. The company has previously said that it has a “strict, performance-linked dividend policy monitored by Ofwat”.
But such high debts are problematic for a water company. First there is the issue of inequality, where customers’ water bills are used to pay down debts that have increased to pay dividends to its owners. And second, as we see with Thames Water, these highly indebted companies are potentially unstable in the event of cost pressures.
What we have now is a perfect storm in which Thames Water’s finances may collapse. A key pressure is inflation, which is pushing up the value of some of the company’s debt at the same time as it pushes up costs. More than half of Thames Water’s debt is linked to inflation, contributing to the uplift in debt value.
Then there is the cost of improving performance. This has become more urgent after Ofwat, the water company regulator, was given new powers (effective from April 2025) to prevent companies paying dividends if these weaken financial resilience or are not linked to performance.
In 2022, the government set out a plan to tackle the rapidly growing issue of sewage discharge in a £56 billion investment plan. All of this adds up to intense pressure on the company’s finances.
If those finances do unravel, it is likely that the company will be underwritten by the government to keep the taps flowing while a rescue package is put together (as happened with the energy company Bulb).
However, this situation also creates the opportunity for a new public model of water supply, one that treats water not as a private commodity but as part of the wider ecosystem, providing social equity as well as environmental sustainability.
Public ownership need not be a step back to the 1970s. In fact, it would bring the UK into step with most of the modern world, including most of Europe. In Paris, where water provision was made public in 2009 after years of outsourcing, the change is widely considered a success story.
The last 34 years have revealed the fundamental problems with the current system. This crisis is a chance to direct England’s water in a new direction.
Kate Bayliss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter’s work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, still exudes a vitality today.
And he left behind not just those 9,000 pieces of art (not counting the hand puppets he made for his son), but plenty of writings as well, the best known of which came out in English as Paul Klee Notebooks, two volumes (The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature) collecting the artist’s essays on modern art and the lectures he gave at the Bauhaus schools in the 1920s.
“These works are considered so important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance,” says Monoskop. Their description also quotes critic Herbert Read, who described the books as “the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton’s in the realm of physics.”
More recently, the Zentrum Paul Klee made available online almost all 3,900 pages of Klee’s personal notebooks, which he used as the source for his Bauhaus teaching between 1921 and 1931. If you can’t read German, his extensively detailed textual theorizing on the mechanics of art (especially the use of color, with which he struggled before returning from a 1914 trip to Tunisia declaring, “Color and I are one. I am a painter”) may not immediately resonate with you. But his copious illustrations of all these observations and principles, in their vividness, clarity, and reflection of a truly active mind, can still captivate anybody — just as his paintings do.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Archaeologists digging in Pompeii have unearthed a fresco containing what may be a “distant ancestor” of the modern pizza. The fresco features a platter with wine, fruit, and a piece of flat focaccia. According to Pompeii archaeologists, the focaccia doesn’t have tomatoes and mozzarella on top. Rather, it seemingly sports “pomegranate,” spices, perhaps a type of pesto, and “possibly condiments”–which is just a short hop, skip and a jump away to pizza.
Found in the atrium of a house connected to a bakery, the finely-detailed fresco grew out of a Greek tradition (called xenia) where gifts of hospitality, including food, are offered to visitors. Naturally, the fresco was entombed (and preserved) for centuries by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
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Otávio Maciel writes:
“On Friday, July 7th at 14:00, there will be a conversation with me, with Thiago Pinho and André Lemos about the translation and publication of the book “The Quadruple Object: A Metaphysics of Things After Heidegger” by Graham Harman
The event will be broadcast on YouTube and will have the virtual presence of Harman himself for our conversation. The meeting is public and open to all!
For more info: http://www.lab404.ufba.br/lab404-promove-lancamento-de…/
Access Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJrUwGDjLE4
Now available on the EdUERJ website! https://eduerj.com/…/o-objeto-quadruplo-uma-metafisica…/ “
doctorzamalek
Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. In his early paintings of peasant homes and fields, his figures’ muscular shoulders and hands interact with sturdy walls and gnarled trees. Later country scenes—whether curling and delicate, like Wheatfield with a Reaper, or heavy and ominous, like Wheatfield with Crows (both below)—give us the sense of the landscape as a single living entity, pulsating, writhing, blazing in brilliant yellows, reds, greens, and blues.
Van Gogh painted interior scenes, such as his famous The Bedroom, at the top (the first of three versions), with an eye toward using color as the means of making space purposeful: “It’s just simply my bedroom,” he wrote to Paul Gauguin of the 1888 painting, “only here color is to do everything… to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.”
So taken was the painter with the concept of using color to induce “rest or sleep” in his viewers’ imaginations that when water damage threatened the “stability” of the first painting, Chicago’s Art Institute notes, “he became determined to preserve the composition by painting a second version while at an asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889,” then demonstrated the deep emotional resonance this scene had for him by painting a third, smaller version for his mother and sister.
The opportunity to see all of Van Gogh’s bedroom paintings in one place may have passed us by for now—an exhibit in Chicago brought them together in 2016. But we can see the original bedroom at the yellow house in Arles in a virtual space, along with 1,500 more Van Gogh paintings and drawings, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam’s site. The digitized collection showcases a vast amount of Van Gogh’s work—including not only landscapes, but also his many portraits, self-portraits, drawings, city scenes, and still-lifes.
One way to approach these works is through the unifying themes above: how does van Gogh use color to communicate space and place, and to what effect? Even in portraits and still-lifes, his figures compete with the ground. The scored and scalloped paintings of walls, floors, and wallpaper force our attention past the staring eyes of the painter or the finely-rendered fruits and shoes, and into the depths and textures of shadow and light. We begin to see people and objects as inseparable from their surroundings.
“Painting is a faith,” Van Gogh once wrote, and it is as if his paintings ask us to contemplate the spiritual unity of all things; the same animating flame brings every object in his blazing worlds to life. The Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of the artist’s work in the world. On their website you can read essays about his life and work, plan a visit, or shop at the online store. But most importantly, you can experience the stunning breadth of his art through your screen—no replacement for the physical spaces of galleries, but a worthy means nonetheless of communing with Van Gogh’s vision.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
In 1978, the University of Chicago Press journal Signs published a short essay introducing Mary Wollstonecraft’s lost anthology of prose and poetry she had published “for the improvement of young women.” Wollstonecraft’s anthology reproduced edifying fables and poetry; excerpted from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton; and included four Christian prayers Wollstonecraft had authored herself. Among the last is a lengthy “Private Morning Prayer” which reads, in part:
Though knowest whereof I am made, and rememberest that I am but dust: self-convicted I prostrate myself before thy throne of grace, and seek not to hide or palliate my faults; be not extreme to mark what I have done amiss—still allow me to call thee Father, and rejoice in my existence, since I can trace thy goodness and truth on earth, and feel myself allied to that glorious Being who breathed into me the breath of life, and gave me a capacity to know and to serve him.
Though Wollstonecraft is now regarded a canonical thinker in the fields of history, political science, and gender studies, secular feminist scholars still struggle to make sense of her religiosity. Many suggest, as Moira Ferguson did in her 1978 Signs essay, that Wollstonecraft’s own skepticism grew as she crafted her more influential political work. Meanwhile, religious thinkers tend to ignore her religiosity, subscribing to the selfsame interpretation of her as a duly secular proto-feminist.
Enter Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford) by Emily Dumler-Winckler, the first adequately theological treatment of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical, social, and political thought. In a beautifully written, deeply learned, and insightful book, the St. Louis University theologian maintains that there is far greater continuity throughout Wollstonecraft’s work than scholars realize. The imitatio Christi commended in her early publications, including the Female Reader, is the key that unlocks her entire corpus. Deftly employing knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, but also Burke, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Paine, Dumler-Winckler situates Wollstonecraft in the Western canon as the seminal philosophical and theological thinker she rightly is.
In a beautifully written, deeply learned, and insightful book, the St. Louis University theologian maintains that there is far greater continuity throughout Wollstonecraft’s work than scholars realize.
Dumler-Winckler is at her best in revealing the kinship between Wollstonecraft and the pre-moderns, and distinguishing her from contemporaries like Kant. Such scholarly care helps Dumler-Winckler show how Wollstoncecraft’s thinking about virtue, justice, and friendship can inform those who resist various racial and economic injustices today.
However, Dumler-Winckler is less convincing in her efforts to distinguish Wollstonecraft’s pre-modern insights from those she dubs (and derides) “virtues’ defenders,” namely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Brad Gregory. Certainly, their thought—like the “virtue despisers” she more charitably challenges—would be well served by the rich encounter with Wollstonecraft that her book offers. But given Dumler-Winckler’s own judicious critiques of our modern ills, these “defenders” (especially Gregory) may be more friends than the foes she imagines.
Cultivating the Virtues through the Moral Imagination
Given Wollstonecraft’s sharp critique of Edmund Burke’s (prescient) condemnation of the French Revolution—as well as her Enlightenment-era claim of “natural rights” for women—Wollstonecraft has long been regarded a paradigmatically liberal thinker: akin to a female Thomas Paine, a feminist John Locke, a proto-Kantian. However, some scholars in recent decades have rejected these inapt comparisons, with most now placing her, rightly in my view, in the civic republican tradition that dates to Cicero. This reexamination of Wollstonecraft’s thought has also allowed for greater scrutiny of her argument with Burke over the French Revolution, with some now seeing far more affinity between the two English thinkers than was previously thought.
Dumler-Winckler’s 2023 book deepens these insights by foregrounding Wollstonecraft’s early pedagogical texts as the key that unlocks her account of the virtues, which itself is the prism through which to view her entire corpus. Throughout Modern Virtue, Dumler-Winckler strongly contests the view that Wollstonecraft’s account of virtue resembles that of the rationalist Kant, or the “naked” rationalism of the French revolutionaries Burke rightly scolds. Early on, Wollstonecraft writes: “Reason is indeed the heaven-lighted lamp in man, and may safely be trusted when not entirely depended on; but when it pretends to discover what is beyond its ken, it . . . runs into absurdity.” As Dumler-Winckler shows, respect for the ennobling human capacity for reason and its limits can be found throughout her work.
It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds dynamic resources to bear on her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular).
But Dumler-Winckler also ably distinguishes the proto-feminist from the “sentimentalism” of Hume, the “voluntarism” of some Protestant contemporaries, and the “traditionalism” of Burke. Dumler-Winckler finds the golden mean by looking beyond the moderns with whom Wollstonecraft is too hastily classified to show her kinship with ancient and medieval thinkers, especially Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds dynamic resources to bring to bear on her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular)—even as the late-eighteenth-century thinker refines the tradition for the “revolution in female manners” she seeks to inspire. Thus, the seemingly incongruous subtitle: “a Tradition of Dissent.”
“The main business of our lives is to learn to be virtuous,” the pedagogue wrote in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). For Wollstonecraft as for Aristotle and especially Aquinas, argues Dumler-Winckler, one learns to be virtuous through the gradual refinement of all the faculties in a dynamic engagement of the imagination, understanding, judgment, and affections—especially through imitating the patterns of Christ-like moral exemplars. “Teach us with humble awe to imitate the divine patterns and lure us to the paths of virtue,” Wollstonecraft writes. One “puts on righteousness,” then, not ultimately as a rule obeyed, a ritual practiced, or a philosophical tenet held, even as obedience, rituals, and understanding are, for Wollstonecraft, all essential components.
Rather, one “puts on righteousness” as a kind of “second nature,” which is the refinement and cultivation of raw, unformed appetites (i.e, “first nature”). Wollstonecraft artfully employs Burke’s metaphor of the “wardrobe of the moral imagination” to depict the way in which cultivation of the virtues refines one’s “taste” in particular matters. “For Wollstonecraft, nature serves as a standard for taste, only insofar as the passions, appetites, and faculties of reason, judgment, and imagination are refined by second natural virtues. . . . [I]t is never the gratification of depraved appetites, but rather exalted appetites and minds . . . which are to govern our relations.”
In imitating Christ-like exemplars from an early age, we develop the the moral virtues that perfect our relation with God and others—being crafted and crafting oneself, in turn. “Whatever tends to impress habits of order on the expanding mind may be reckoned the most beneficial part of education,” Wollstonecraft writes in the introduction to the Female Reader, “for by this means the surest foundation of virtue is settled without struggle, and strong restraints knit together before vice has introduced confusion.” Pointing to this dialectical design, Dumler-Winckler shows how Wollstonecraft wished for Scripture and Shakespeare to “gradually form” girls’ taste so that they might “learn not ‘what to say’ but rather how to read, think, and even pray well, and how to exercise their reason, cultivate virtue, and refine devotional taste.” Schooling the moral imagination through imitation was the key to acquiring virtue for both Aristotle and Wollstonecraft—but so was making virtue one’s own: “[W]e collectively inherit, tailor, and design [the virtues] as a garb in the wardrobe of a moral imagination.”
Wollstonecraft’s argument with Burke, then, concerns not the evident horrors and evils of the Revolution itself (in which she agrees with him) but the causes of such evils. For Wollstonecraft, the monarchical French regime Burke extols had become deeply corrupt, with rich and poor loving not true liberty but honors and property. The French peasants (and the revolutionaries that emboldened them) thus lacked the virtues that would allow them to respond to injustice in a virtuous way: “The slave unwittingly becomes the master, the tyrannized a tyrant, the oppressed an oppressor.” “Absent virtue,” Dumler-Winckler insightfully writes, “protest unwittingly replicates the injustice it protests. For Wollstonecraft, true virtue is revolutionary because it enables one to justly protest injustice, and so not only to criticize but to embody an alternative.” Throughout the text, Dumler-Winckler exhorts those who would critique various injustices today to showcase, in their particular circumstances and unique oppressions, virtuous alternatives.
Women’s Rights for the Cause of Virtue
Just as Augustine distinguished true Christian virtue from its pagan semblances, Dumler-Winckler tells us, Wollstonecraft distinguishes true virtue from its “sexed semblances,” especially in the thought of Burke and Rousseau. For the latter two, human excellence was a deeply gendered affair. For Wollstonecraft, however, virtue is not “sexed”—even as men and women, with distinctive procreative capacities and physical strength, clearly are. Dumler-Winckler yet again turns to Aristotle and Aquinas as those who “supply the material” for Wollstonecraft to call upon women to imitate Christ and live according to their rightful dignity as imago Dei. Dumler-Winckler’s own words could summarize her important book: “The affirmation of women’s ability to recognize, identify with, and even emulate the divine attributes has been so crucial for the affirmation of their humanity and equality, it may be considered a founding impetus for traditions of modern feminism.”
Wollstonecraft knew that women’s education and role in society needed to be reimagined. Dumler-Winckler writes that “unlike most of her predecessors, premodern and modern alike, . . . Wollstonecraft could see that growing in likeness of God would require a ‘revolution in female manners’ and a rejection of ‘sexed virtues.’” Mrs. Mason, the Christ-like protagonist in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, taught her female pupils to think for themselves “and rely only on God.” Mason’s advice did not commend the Kantian autonomy so often extolled today, but rather “virtuous independence.” Mason taught: “[W]e are all dependent on each other; and this dependence is wisely ordered by our Heavenly Father, to call forth many virtues, to exercise the best affections of the human heart, and fix them into habits.”
And thus we come to the rationale behind Wollstonecraft’s late-eighteenth-century appeal for women’s rights. It was an appeal “for the cause of virtue,” as Dumler-Winckler quotes the proto-feminist again and again. Wollstonecraft grounded rights in the imago Dei, viewing them as both important protections against arbitrary and unjust domination, and specifications of justice’s demands: “what is due, owed, or required to set a particular relationship right,” as Dumler-Winckler nicely puts it. Unlike the Hobbesian Jacobins, Wollstonecraft recognized that “liberty comes with attendant duties, constraints, and social obligations at every step.”
Recognizing how Wollstonecraft advocated rights on the basis of Christian theological anthropology, not secular Enlightenment ideals, it is odd then that Dumler-Winckler picks a fight with the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and especially Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory. It is true that in his 2012 Unintended Reformation, Gregory laments, in Dumler-Winckler’s words, “the eclipse of an ethics of virtue with a culture of rights,” but unlike MacIntyre and Hauerwas, who reject rights as a quintessentially liberal phenomenon, Gregory endorses an older grounding for rights. But this is precisely what Dumler-Winckler has shown Wollstonecraft offers: the good and right held together, just as, both happily acknowledge, Catholic social teaching does today.
Wollstonecraft grounded rights in the imago Dei, viewing them as both important protections against arbitrary and unjust domination, and specifications of justice’s demands.
Unfortunately, however, modern rights theories have followed not Wollstonecraft or CST but the “conceptions of autonomy and self-legislation” that both reject. Though Wollstonecraft’s view of “liberty is not, as Burke fears, a license to do whatever one pleases or as Gregory fears ‘a kingdom of whatever,’” that surely is a prevailing view of liberty today. Indeed, it manifests itself (in Gregory’s view) in acquisitive consumerism, “an environmental nightmare,” “exploitative (and often brutally gendered)” impact on workers, the decline in the “culture of care” and much, much more, about which Dumler-Winckler and Gregory (and I) agree! But more crucial, perhaps, is a common solution: if “disordered loves are at root, Wollstonecraft suggests, a matter of idolatry,” the remedy depends, according to Dumler-Winckler, on “their reordering, on the cultivation of what Wollstonecraft considers ‘the fairest virtues,’ namely benevolence, friendship, and generosity. . . . Not to banish love and friendship from politics, . . . but to refine earthly loves.”
Dumler-Winckler and I disagree about some of the practical implications of Wollstonecraft’s vision today. She sees unjust essentializing in the TERF movement; I, in the gender ideology against which TERFS rally. She hails Kamala Harris as an exemplar, I, Justice Barrett. But that we share a common understanding—and indeed an intellectual framework—that each person “learning to be virtuous” can transform a society for the common good is itself a great advance from the MacIntyrian lament. It is one for which she and I can both happily thank an inspiring and insightful eighteenth-century autodidact, one who should be more widely read—and carefully studied—today.
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*Disclaimer - This email is to acknowledge citations of current AAEA members and/or their research in any public media channel. AAEA does not agree nor disagree with the views or attitudes of cited outside publications. David Ortega, Michigan State University “Pasta Producers In Hot Water Over Soaring Prices” By: Financial Times – June 21, 2023 “Food prices tended to be sticky given the range of costs beyond those of their basic ingredients. They rise very fast when there is a shock and then they take longer to come down. We see the price of commodities like wheat come down quite substantially. But wages are still up, and some of the raw materials for packaging and others are still high. The pressure from grocers on food producers was likely to continue. But I don’t think they’re going to particularly lead to a lot of action. The increase in prices are because of an increase in costs all along the supply chain.”’ (Continued...) Lee Schulz, Iowa State University “Walmart to Build Case-Ready Beef Plant” By: Progressive Farmer – June 14, 2023 "It's a continuation of Walmart's strategy as they highlight to be end-to-end business operations in the beef supply chain. Cost may be another driver for Walmart as well, as beef prices have increased about 15% in the last couple of years. Beef prices are expected to continue to rise because of the smaller national herd. It's going to hit us like a ton of bricks next year. Beef production is forecast to be down 7 (to) 8%. So, prices are going to start to increase." (Continued...) Chad Hart, Iowa State University “Renting Iowa Farmland Has Reached a 10 Year High” By: Siouxland Proud – June 8, 2023 “A lot of it is related to the higher corn and soybean prices we’ve experienced over the past couple of years. You combine that with some additional government support flowing into agriculture, especially after covid, all lending itself to agriculture continuing to reinvest in itself. And typically when we reinvest in land that means those land prices do tend to go higher.” (Continued...) Joshua Rosenbloom, Iowa State University “Cities Where Inflation is Rising the Most” By: Wallethub – June 13, 2023 “Americans are still dealing with sky-high inflation, which hit a 40-year high last year. Though inflation has started to slow slightly due to factors like the Federal Reserve rate hikes, the year-over-year inflation rate was still a whopping 4.0% in May.” (Continued...) Jayson Lusk, Purdue University ·
“Climb
In Consumer Food Spending Signals Continued Inflationary Pressure” ·
“Survey
Finds Consumers Spending 6.9% More On Food” Gary Schnitkey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “Higher Interest Rates Present New Risks For Farmers” By: Seeking Alpha – June 15, 2023 “On average, Illinois farmers who plant corn after soybeans could see a return of $58 an acre, needing a breakeven price of $3.96 a bushel when figuring in non-land costs, but $5.33 if land costs are included. Farmers who plant soybeans after corn could see a return of $51 an acre. Their breakeven price for non-land costs is $7.98 a bushel, but $12.62 if land costs are included.” (Continued...) Sarah Low, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “Study Aims To Identify U.S. Meat Processing Plant Survival Factors” By: National Hog Farmer – June 22, 2023 “Our goal was to understand what factors are associated with plant survival, so we could better inform policymakers who want to invest in these plants." (Continued...) Brian Briggeman, Kansas State University “Farmers Need To Prepare For Rising Interest Rates” By: Farm Progress – June 15, 2023 “We have a lot of pent-up demand. American families want to get out and travel, and they’ve seen real wage growth; both are stimulating the demand side of the inflation picture. Additionally, there have been low interest rates for a number of years. The Federal Reserve is responding by raising interest rates in response to try to cool inflation and boost the economy.” (Continued...) Daniel Sumner, University of California, Davis “Food and Ag Summit Tackles Water, Farm Bill” By: Vegetable Growers News – June 20, 2023 “The No. 1 challenge affecting farmers is dealing with regulations.” To be successful, farmers must be given flexibility to innovate and adapt. A domestic food supply needs to be fortified. As California farmers face a shrinking supply of employees, some have advocated for increased automation.” (Continued...) Gary Schnitkey, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “Nitrogen Prices Remain Historically High” By: Country Journal – June 20, 2023 “In early June, retail nitrogen prices in Illinois were $1,116 per ton for anhydrous ammonia, $532 per ton for liquid nitrogen (28%), and $623 per ton for urea. Those prices are down from late fall 2022 but are still well above prices for recent years. Nitrogen fertilizer costs per acre will be near record levels for 2023 on many farms. Fundamental factors suggest nitrogen fertilizer prices will decline into fall 2023. Time will tell if, in fact, these declines happen.” (Continued...) Bradley Rickard, Cornell University “What’s Really Happening With Grocery Prices?” By: Prime News Print – June 22, 2023 “We’re seeing grocery price hikes slow as the factors that pushed them higher relax—like livestock diseases, and overall inflation. “We’ve started to see, more recently, a relaxation in most of these pressures on cost: machinery, fuel, labor, and cost of feed, in the case of animal products. And so we’re starting to see these new prices, most noticeably for eggs, fall.” (Continued...) Lee Schulz, Iowa State University
Peter Orazem, Iowa State University "How Will Economy, Iowa Borrowers Be Affected By Impending Supreme Court Decision On Student Loan Forgiveness" By: The Gazette - June 19, 2023 "Not having to pay loans for the last three years was essentially a net transfer of wealth because the monthly payment could be used for other things, and interest was not accruing. Assuming that they incorporated this into their planning they should be in a better position now to repay debts because there's all these payments that they didn't have to make. So that was sort of a net increase in their income. Now their income is going to return to what it would have been.” (Continued...) Amit Batabyal, Rochester Institute of Technology "The Importance of Restoring Hope Where There Is None" By: Rochester Business Journal - June 16, 2023 "Economists routinely measure human well-being with the time-honored concept of utility or happiness. However, just because a metric is time-honored does not make this metric an appropriate measure of well-being" (Continued...) Wendong Zhang, Cornell University "Market to Market" By: PBS Iowa - June 23, 2023 "If we are looking at primary agricultural Corn Belt regions like Iowa, that we're only talking about less than, a little over 1% owned by, has any ownership rights that is by a foreign buyer, right. And a lot of those are actually wind farms that has had the leasing rights for the either have bought the easement rights or bought that land for East for wind turbine development, or they have the leasing rights.” (Continued...) Jada Thompson, University of Arkansas "Bird Flu Has Ravaged U.S. Poultry. Now A Vaccine Could Be On The Way" By: KCUR - June 23, 2023 “If you’re adding anything to a production system, the costs are going to go up. There’s no margin of room to eat that cost. a lot of this is hypothetical. As the outbreak diminishes, a vaccine may not arrive fast enough to address the current bird flu strain." (Continued...) |
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Know another AAEA Member who has made statewide, national, or international news? Send a link of the article to Austin Sparbel at [email protected]. What research and topics are you working on? Want to be an expert source for journalists working on a story? Contact Allison Ware at [email protected]. |
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