Renationalising Thames Water would be a gamble – but there is another way to help clean up the industry

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.

Not for profit

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.

The Supreme Court Just Blocked Student Loan Forgiveness. Now What?

In a conclusion to one of the most consequential Supreme Court sessions in many years, the Court released an opinion today on the Biden administration’s proposed plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. After dismissing one case due to lack of standing from the plaintiffs, the Court voted 6-3 to block forgiveness in the second case (giving standing based on the servicer MOHELA).

This decision will have major implications for higher education policy. Here are the things that I will be looking for in the coming months and years:

Restarting student loan repayment was already going to be a nightmare, and this creates additional challenges. The first challenge is the sheer number of borrowers re-entering repayment. Roughly 43 million Americans have federal student debt, and the Biden administration estimated that about 20 million would have their loans completely forgiven by their proposal. I have little confidence that the Department of Education, student loan servicers, and colleges can smoothly handle 23 million borrowers that would have remained, let alone 43 million. Federal Student Aid badly needed additional resources to manage a return to repayment, but Republicans were only willing to provide the funds if it came with a rider blocking its use on debt relief. Since both parties agreed on no riders in last year’s omnibus spending bill, no additional funding was provided.

In an overlooked item due to yesterday’s important decision on college admissions, the Department of Education released information about how they plan to manage the return to repayment. ED plans to give a 90-day grace period for missed payments and is considering future grace periods. Needless to say, Republicans are not happy and may go to court to stop grace periods based on the agreement in this summer’s debt ceiling legislation.

How many borrowers are willing to start making payments? There is going to be a group of people who are livid about having to resume payments after not getting the loan forgiveness they were expecting. I am expecting a substantial group of borrowers to not make any payments until they get to the brink of default—which could take a while. These borrowers may still hold out hope for another forgiveness effort (more on that in the next section) and they may not proactively reach out to servicers to update their information if they have moved since March 2020. A particularly interesting group is the 20 million students who would have received complete forgiveness, as the frustration factor is likely higher among this group than among students who knew they would still have a balance remaining under this plan.

As a note, with income-driven repayment, students at least in theory should be able to start making some payments. But adding an expense back to the monthly budget is painful and income-driven repayment is still complicated to navigate. So there will be challenges even among people who are not as upset about this decision.

How will Democrats respond? The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been pressuring the Biden administration to forgive all student debt and immediately pivot to using the Higher Education Act instead of the HEROES Act. That is likely not happening given today’s court decision. But a few moderate Democrats voted in favor of a Republican-led resolution disapproving of debt forgiveness and ending the repayment pause. The Biden administration will point to its expanded income-driven repayment plan, which could also face legal challenges in light of this decision. Free college and debt forgiveness were key issues in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and they will continue to be key issues in contested Democratic primaries for the next several years.

How will Republicans respond? By the time you read this, there will be plenty of press releases from Republican politicians celebrating the discussion. But there are still concerns about a future administration trying another avenue to forgiveness, particularly through income-driven repayment. There are some thoughtful efforts among Republicans to maintain income-driven repayment while reversing most of the Biden administration’s proposed changes. But Republicans are also seeking to limit borrowing for graduate students, which is something that I have been expecting for years.  

This week’s Supreme Court decisions are likely to influence the direction of American higher education for years to come, and some of the influences are not going to be immediately obvious. But the items discussed above are going to play an outsized role in policy discussions for a good while.

COVID: how incorrect assumptions and poor foresight hampered the UK's pandemic preparedness

Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, has told the recently opened COVID-19 Inquiry that the UK’s pandemic planning was “completely wrong”. According to Hancock, the doctrine was “to plan for the consequences of a disaster” rather than stopping or containing the virus in the first place.

While there is truth in this claim, it doesn’t give us the whole picture. Hancock was repeatedly asked during his appearance about something called Exercise Cygnus. In 2016, the UK government engaged in a series of exercises including Cygnus to assess their preparedness and response to a pandemic outbreak of influenza.

As the global scale of the COVID pandemic was starting to become apparent in the first half of February 2020, the UK applied the lessons from these exercises to plan for a wide range of scenarios. Based on the scientific evidence available at that time, they anticipated that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” could involve up to 80% of the UK population being infected (with only 50% of those infected showing symptoms). However, it was hoped that the majority of cases would have relatively mild disease.

This information was contained in planning assumptions labelled “officially sensitive” that were shared between a range of healthcare authorities and that I had access to at the time. Some of the figures were also published in the media.

The concept of “herd immunity” played a key role in the existing mathematical models. Herd immunity is the idea that once a sufficiently large proportion of the susceptible population is infected and subsequently acquires immunity, the whole population becomes protected. The thinking was that herd immunity for COVID might be achieved once 80% of the UK population had been infected, or perhaps even earlier.

Underlying all this was the assumption that, in the absence of effective vaccines at that time, the case fatality rate from the new virus (the proportion of infected people who end up dying) would not be so high that herd immunity could only be achieved at the cost of many lives.

Unfortunately, the actual COVID mortality figures – first from China, then other east and southeast Asian countries, and by the second half of February 2020 also from Italy – showed that the initial case fatality rate of COVID was much higher than had been modelled in the UK scenarios.

Without effective vaccines, any attempt at herd immunity had to be abandoned as too many people would have died in the meantime.

Flawed assumptions

The assumption that any new viral pandemic would develop along similar lines as previous influenza pandemics was arguably the key flaw in the UK’s planning doctrine.

Countries that had been significantly affected by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2002–2004 – principally China but also other Asian countries – didn’t make the same mistake. Those countries recognised important biological similarities between COVID (or SARS-CoV-2) and SARS (or SARS-CoV-1) and quickly took action against COVID by means of intensive testing and quarantine policies.

In contrast, the UK lost valuable time between mid-February and mid-March while COVID cases and subsequent deaths were rapidly beginning to rise. The effect on older adults and other vulnerable people in UK care homes was especially severe.

In the end, the UK’s first wave of COVID was only slowed and eventually stopped by the introduction of a lockdown in the fourth week of March 2020.

Poor planning

Hancock’s statement raises a key question about the extent to which errors in the UK’s pandemic planning could have been foreseen at the time. Notably, the UK’s healthcare planning authorities could have taken a wider view of the potential nature of viral pandemics.

The earlier Sars outbreak had been largely confined to China, although it spread to more than 20 other countries through worldwide air travel, and was contained within a few short months. Therefore, the risk of future outbreaks of this type in the UK was regarded as relatively low. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to include the global re-emergence of a Sars-type virus as one of the possible, albeit more extreme, pandemic scenarios analysed in the UK’s planning exercises in 2016.

Even given the wrong assumption regarding the nature of the new virus, some issues could have been anticipated better. For example, it was well known that the supply chain for personal protective equipment (PPE), which is vital for health and care staff, had become increasingly dependent on low-cost suppliers in China. If the UK’s pandemic planning exercises had taken a more global perspective, the breakdown in the PPE supply chain in the spring of 2020, which caused huge financial waste (and apparent corruption), could have been better anticipated.

Other questions, such as when effective COVID vaccines would become available, were much harder to predict.

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Read more: How to prepare for a pandemic

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In sum, no planning exercise can cover all eventualities. But a key requirement for policymakers should be to learn as fast and effectively as possible while events unfold.

The business concept of “dynamic capability” – that is, an organisation’s ability to configure and reconfigure its assets, processes and capabilities so as to respond effectively to rapidly changing external circumstances – is useful here. Building and strengthening this capability should be a prerequisite for policymakers and planners in government.

In regards to Hancock’s comment that the planning was “completely wrong”, one could say that the UK plans were indeed flawed in their key assumption (of an influenza rather than a coronavirus pandemic), but also that policymakers should have learned the true nature of the new virus more quickly than they did.

Robert Van Der Meer receives funding from NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Golden Jubilee and the Scottish Government.

Hummingbirds get a bit of alcohol with their food

New research digs into how much alcohol hummingbirds consume.

Your backyard hummingbird feeder filled with sugar water is a natural experiment in fermentation—yeast settle in and turn some of the sugar into alcohol.

The same is true of nectar-filled flowers, which are an ideal gathering place for yeast—a type of fungus—and for bacteria that metabolize sugar and produce ethanol.

To biologist Robert Dudley, this raises a host of questions. How much alcohol do hummingbirds consume in their daily quest for sustenance? Are they attracted to alcohol or repelled by it? Since alcohol is a natural byproduct of the sugary fruit and floral nectar that plants produce, is ethanol an inevitable part of the diet of hummingbirds and many other animals?

“Hummingbirds are eating 80% of their body mass a day in nectar,” says Dudley, professor of integrative biology at University of California, Berkeley. “Most of it is water and the remainder sugar. But even if there are very low concentrations of ethanol, that volumetric consumption would yield a high dosage of ethanol, if it were out there. Maybe, with feeders, we’re not only [feeding] hummingbirds, we’re providing a seat at the bar every time they come in.”

During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it became difficult to test these questions in the wilds of Central America and Africa, where there are nectar-feeding sunbirds, he tasked several undergraduate students with experimenting on the hummers visiting the feeder outside his office window to find out whether alcohol in sugar water was a turn-off or a turn-on. All three of the test subjects were male Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna), year-round residents of the Bay Area.

The results of that study, which appears in the journal Royal Society Open Science, demonstrate that hummingbirds happily sip from sugar water with up to 1% alcohol by volume, finding it just as attractive as plain sugar water.

They appear to be only moderate tipplers, however, because they sip only half as much as normal when the sugar water contains 2% alcohol.

“They’re consuming the same total amount of ethanol, they’re just reducing the volume of the ingested 2% solution. So that was really interesting,” Dudley says. “That was a kind of a threshold effect and suggested to us that whatever’s out there in the real world, it’s probably not exceeding 1.5%.”

When he and his colleagues tested the alcohol level in sugar water that had sat in the feeder for two weeks, they found a much lower concentration: about 0.05% by volume.

“Now, 0.05% just doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not. But again, if you’re eating 80% of your body weight a day, at .05% of ethanol you’re getting a substantial load of ethanol relative to your body mass,” he says. “So it’s all consistent with the idea that there’s a natural, chronic exposure to physiologically significant levels of ethanol derived from this nutritional source.”

“They burn the alcohol and metabolize it so quickly. Likewise with the sugars. So they’re probably not seeing any real effect. They’re not getting drunk,” he adds.

The research is part of a long-term project by Dudley and his colleagues—herpetologist Jim McGuire and bird expert Rauri Bowie, both professors of integrative biology and curators at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. They seek to understand the role that alcohol plays in animal diets, particularly in the tropics, where fruits and sugary nectar easily ferment, and alcohol cannot help but be consumed by fruit-eating or nectar-sipping animals.

“Does alcohol have any behavioral effect? Does it stimulate feeding at low levels? Does it motivate more frequent attendance of a flower if they get not just sugar, but also ethanol? I don’t have the answers to these questions. But that’s experimentally tractable,” he says.

Part of this project, funded by the National Science Foundation, involves testing the alcohol content of fruits in Africa and nectar in flowers in the UC Botanical Garden. No systematic studies of the alcohol content of fruits and nectars, or of alcohol consumption by nectar-sipping birds, insects, or mammals, or by fruit-eating animals—including primates—have been done.

But several isolated studies are suggestive. A 2008 study found that the nectar in palm flowers consumed by pen-tailed tree shrews, which are small, ratlike animals in West Malaysia, had levels of alcohol as high as 3.8% by volume. Another study, published in 2015, found a relatively high alcohol concentration—up to 3.8%—in the nectar eaten by the slow loris, a type of primate, and that both slow lorises and aye-ayes, another primate, preferred nectar with higher alcohol content.

The new study shows that birds are also likely consuming alcohol produced by natural fermentation.

“This is the first demonstration of ethanol consumption by birds, quote, in the wild. I’ll use that phrase cautiously because it’s a lab experiment and feeder measurement,” Dudley says. “But the linkage with the natural flowers is obvious. This just demonstrates that nectar-feeding birds, not just nectar-feeding mammals, not just fruit-eating animals, are all potentially exposed to ethanol as a natural part of their diet.”

The next step, he says, is to measure how much ethanol is naturally found in flowers and determine how frequently it’s being consumed by birds. He plans to extend his study to include Old World sunbirds and honey eaters in Australia, both of which occupy the nectar-sipping niche that hummingbirds have in America.

Dudley has been obsessed with alcohol use and misuse for years, and in his book, The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol (University of California Press, 2014), presented evidence that humans’ attraction to alcohol is an evolutionary adaptation to improve survival among primates. Only with the coming of industrial alcohol production has our attraction turned, in many cases, into alcohol abuse.

“Why do humans drink alcohol at all, as opposed to vinegar or any of the other 10 million organic compounds out there? And why do most humans actually metabolize it, burn it, and use it pretty effectively, often in conjunction with food, but then some humans also consume to excess?” he asks.

“I think, to get a better understanding of human attraction to alcohol, we really have to have better animal model systems, but also a realization that the natural availability of ethanol is actually substantial, not just for primates that are feeding on fruit and nectar, but also for a whole bunch of other birds and mammals and insects that are also feeding on flowers and fruits,” he says. “The comparative biology of ethanol consumption may yield insight into modern day patterns of consumption and abuse by humans.”

This work received support from the National Science Foundation and UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program.

Source: UC Berkeley

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Robert Mason on Leon Fink’s *Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II*

In the historiography of the United States, studies of the relationship between liberalism and the political arena usually focus on the domestic—on movements and parties, on public policy and electoral Read more

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My 2023 Higher Education Finance Reading List

I have the pleasure of teaching my PhD class in higher education finance again at Tennessee this summer. Our students take classes year-round, and I am offering the class in a condensed five-week format this summer to best meet the needs of our students. That means a lot of reading for all of us in a short period of time, but I’m excited as always for this class.

The last three times that I taught the course (spring 2022, spring 2020, and fall 2017), I shared my reading list for the class on this blog. I do not use a textbook for the course because the field is moving so quickly and there are more topics to cover than a textbook could ever include. Instead, I use articles, working papers, and other online resources to provide a current look at the state of higher education finance. As a result, the reading list for my class changes considerably each time.

Here is the reading list I am assigning my students for the course. I link to the final versions of the articles whenever possible, but those without access to an academic library should note that earlier versions of many of these articles are available online via a quick Google search.

The higher education finance landscape and data sources

Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Saez, E., Turner, N., & Yagan, D. (2017). Mobility report cards: The role of colleges in intergenerational mobility. Working paper. (link)

Schanzenbach, D. W., Bauer, L., & Breitwieser, A. (2017). Eight economic facts on higher education. The Hamilton Project. (link)

Webber, D. A. (2021). A growing divide: The promise and pitfalls of higher education for the working class. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 695, 94-106. (link)

Recommended data sources:

College Scorecard: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ (underlying data at https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/)

Equality of Opportunity Project: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/college

IPEDS: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data

NCES Data Lab: https://nces.ed.gov/datalab/index.aspx

Postsecondary Value Commission’s Equitable Value Explorer: https://www.postsecondaryvalue.org/equitable-value-explorer/

ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

Urban Institute’s Data Explorer: https://educationdata.urban.org/data-explorer/colleges/

Institutional budgeting

Barr, M.J., & McClellan, G.S. (2010). Understanding budgets. In Budgets and financial management in higher education (pp. 55-85). Jossey-Bass. (link)

Jaquette, O., Kramer II, D. A., & Curs, B. R. (2018). Growing the pie? The effect of responsibility center management on tuition revenue. The Journal of Higher Education, 89(5), 637-676. (link)

Rutherford, A., & Rabovsky, T. (2018). Does the motivation for market-based reform matter? The case of responsibility-centered management. Public Administration Review, 78(4), 626-639. (link)

University of Tennessee System’s FY2023 budget: https://finance.tennessee.edu/budget/documents/

University of Tennessee System’s FY2022 annual financial report: https://treasurer.tennessee.edu/reports/

UTK’s Budget Allocation Model website: https://budget.utk.edu/budget-allocation-model/

Higher education expenditures

Archibald, R. B., & Feldman, D. H. (2018). Drivers of the rising price of a college education. Midwestern Higher Education Compact. (link)

Cheslock, J. J., & Knight, D. B. (2015). Diverging revenues, cascading expenditures, and ensuing subsidies: The unbalanced and growing financial strain of intercollegiate athletics on universities and their students. The Journal of Higher Education, 86(3), 417-447. (link)

Commonfund Institute (2021). 2021 higher education price index. (link)

Griffith, A. L., & Rask, K. N. (2016). The effect of institutional expenditures on employment outcomes and earnings. Economic Inquiry, 54(4), 1931-1945. (link)

Hemelt, S. W., Stange, K. M., Furquim, F., Simon, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2021). Why is math cheaper than English? Understanding cost differences in higher education. Journal of Labor Economics, 39(2), 397-435. (link)

State sources of revenue

Chakrabarti, R., Gorton, N., & Lovenheim, M. F. (2020). State investment in higher education: Effects on human capital formation, student debt, and long-term financial outcomes of students. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 27885. (link)

Gándara, D. (2020). How the sausage is made: An examination of a state funding model design process. The Journal of Higher Education, 91(2), 192-221. (link)

Kelchen, R., Lingo, M., Baker, D., Rosinger, K. O., Ortagus, J. C., & Wu, J. (2023). A typology and landscape of state funding formulas for public colleges and universities from 2004 to 2020. InformEd States. (link)

Kunkle, K., & Laderman, S. (2023). State higher education finance: FY 2022. State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. (link)

Ortagus, J. C., Kelchen, R., Rosinger, K. O., & Voorhees, N. (2020). Performance-based funding in American higher education: A systematic synthesis of the intended and unintended consequences. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(4), 520-550. (link)

Shaw, K., Asher, L., & Murphy, S. (2023). Mapping community college finance systems to develop equitable and effective finance policy. HCM Strategists. (link)

Tennessee’s outcomes-based funding formula: https://www.tn.gov/thec/bureaus/ppr/fiscal-policy/outcomes-based-funding-formula-resources/2020-25-obf.html

Federal sources of revenue

Bergman, P., Denning, J. T., & Manoli, D. (2019). Is information enough? The effect of information about education tax benefits on student outcomes. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 38(3), 706-731. (link)

Black, S. E., Turner, L. J., & Denning, J. T. (2023). PLUS or minus? The effect of graduate school loans on access, attainment, and prices. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 31291. (link)

Graddy-Reed, A., Feldman, M., Bercovitz, J., & Langford, W. S. (2021). The distribution of indirect cost recovery in academic research. Science and Public Policy, 48(3), 364-386. (link)

Kelchen, R., & Liu, Z. (2022). Did gainful employment regulations result in college and program closures? Education Finance and Policy, 17(3), 454-478. (link)

Ward, J. D. (2019). Intended and unintended consequences of for-profit college regulation: Examining the 90/10 rule. Journal of Student Financial Aid, 48(3), Article 4. (link)

The financial viability of higher education

Ducoff, N. (2019, December 9). Students pay the price if a college fails. So why are we protecting failing institutions? The Hechinger Report. (link)

EY-Parthenon (2018). Transitions in higher education: Safeguarding the interests of students. (link)

Kelchen, R. (2020). Examining the feasibility of empirically predicting college closures. Brookings Institution. (link)

Massachusetts Board of Higher Education (2019). Final report & recommendations. Transitions in higher education: Safeguarding the interest of students (THESIS). (link)

Sullivan, G. W., & Stergios, J. (2019). A risky proposal for private colleges: Ten reasons why the Board of Higher Education must rethink its plan. Pioneer Institute. (link)

Tarrant, M., Bray, N., & Katsinas, S. (2018). The invisible colleges revisited: An empirical review. The Journal of Higher Education, 89(3), 341-367. (link)

College pricing, tuition revenue, and endowments

Baker, D. J. (2020). “Name and shame”: An effective strategy for college tuition accountability? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3), 1-24. (link)

Baum, S., & Lee, V. (2018). Understanding endowments. Urban Institute. (link)

Cheslock, J. J., & Riggs, S. O. (2023). Ever-increasing listed tuition and institutional aid: The role of net price differentials by year of study. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. (link)

Hatch, B., Myskow, W., & Trivedi, I. (2022, August 15). Stopping the enrollment slide. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/stopping-the-slide.

Kramer II, D. A., Ortagus, J. C., & Lacy, T. A. (2018). Tuition-setting authority and broad-based merit aid: The effect of policy intersection on pricing strategies. Research in Higher Education, 59(4), 489-518. (link)

Ma, J., & Pender, M. (2022). Trends in college pricing and student aid 2021. The College Board. (link)

Webber, D. A. (2017). State divestment and tuition at public institutions. Economics of Education Review, 60, 1-4. (link)

Financial aid policies, practices, and impacts

Anderson, D. M., Broton, K. M., Goldrick-Rab, S., & Kelchen, R. (2020). Experimental evidence on the impacts of need-based financial aid: Longitudinal assessment of the Wisconsin Scholars Grant. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 39(3), 720-739. (link)

Bird, K., & Castleman, B. L. (2016). Here today, gone tomorrow? Investigating rates and patterns of financial aid renewal among college freshmen. Research in Higher Education, 57(4), 395-422. (link)

Dynarski, S., Page, L. C., & Scott-Clayton, J. (2022). College costs, financial aid, and student decisions. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 30275. (link)

Guzman-Alvarez, A., & Page, L. C. (2021). Disproportionate burden: Estimating the cost of FAFSA verification for public colleges and universities. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 43(3), 545-551. (link)

Kelchen, R., Goldrick-Rab, S., & Hosch, B. (2017). The costs of college attendance: Examining variation and consistency in institutional living cost allowances. The Journal of Higher Education, 88(6), 947-971. (link)

Student debt and financing college

Baker, D. J. (2019). When average is not enough: A case study examining the variation in the influences on undergraduate debt burden. AERA Open, 5(2), 1-26. (link)

Black, S. E., Denning, J. T., Dettling, L. J., Goodman, S., & Turner, L. (2020). Taking it to the limit: Effects of increased student loan availability on attainment, earnings, and financial well-being. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 27658. (link)

Boatman, A., Evans, B. J., & Soliz, A. (2017). Understanding loan aversion in education: Evidence from high school seniors, community college students, and adults. AERA Open, 3(1), 1-16. (link)

Ritter, D., & Webber, D. (2019). Modern income-share agreements in postsecondary education: Features, theory, applications. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Discussion Paper 19-06. (link)

Scott-Clayton, J. (2018). What accounts for gaps in student loan default, and what happens after. Brookings Institution Evidence Speaks Report #57. (link)

Returns to education

Darity, Jr., W. A., & Underwood, M. (2021). Reconsidering the relationship between higher education, earnings, and productivity. Postsecondary Value Commission. (link)

Deterding, N. M., & Pedulla, D. S. (2016). Educational authority in the “open door” marketplace: Labor market consequences of for-profit, nonprofit, and fictional educational credentials. Sociology of Education, 89(3), 155-170. (link)

Doyle, W. R., & Skinner, B. T. (2017). Does postsecondary education result in civic benefits? The Journal of Higher Education, 88(6), 863-893. (link)

Ma, J., & Pender, M. (2023). Education pays 2023: The benefits of higher education for individuals and society. The College Board. (link)

Webber, D. A. (2016). Are college costs worth it? How ability, major, and debt affect the returns to schooling. Economics of Education Review, 53, 296-310. (link)

Apostles of Life: Remarks on Receiving the Evangelium Vitae Medal

Evangelium Vitae: the gospel of life. What is that gospel—that good news?

It is the good news—the very good news—that each and every member of the human family, as a creature fashioned in the image and likeness of the divine Creator and Ruler of all, is the bearer of profound, inherent, and equal dignity.

It is the astonishing news that, in the human family, everyone’s life is inestimably precious; there are no inferiors and no superiors in essential worth and basic rights.

It is, of course, true that people are different and, indeed, unequal in myriad ways. People are far from alike or equal in strength, intelligence, beauty, skill, dexterity, deftness, wit, and charm, as well as in wealth, power, influence, and social status. But the gospel of life relativizes all those differences and inequalities.

As creatures made in the image and likeness of God, every member of the human family is entitled to be treated with dignity and have his or her fundamental rights—beginning with the most fundamental and foundational of all rights, the right to life—honored, irrespective of such things as race, sex, and ethnicity, to be sure, but also irrespective of age, size, location, stage of development, or condition of dependence.

As children of the common Father, in whose image we are made, we human beings are a family. We are quite literally, and not merely metaphorically, brothers and sisters. Our bonds are familial bonds; our obligations to each other, familial obligations.

Injustices—above all, the unjust taking of human life—are not and can never be “none of our business,” for we are, again literally and not merely metaphorically, “our brother’s keeper.” And so our obligations—and let me be clear, our duties as a matter of justice to others—are not confined to not unjustly taking life. They extend to protecting others from those who would unjustly take their lives. When we fail in those duties, we commit injustices against those to whom the duties are owed.

Today, in the case of the precious child in the womb, justice demands not only that we refrain from taking his or her life, or directly cooperating in his or her destruction; justice requires that we, especially in our role as citizens, protect our unborn brothers and sisters and resist those who would expose them to the lethal violence of abortion. It is our fundamental duty in justice to demand that they—and everyone else—be afforded the full and equal protection of the laws. Those holding public office and exercising political power who sin against unborn babies, by exposing them to violent attack, commit a grave injustice. This injustice is intensified, not mitigated, when they claim to be people of faith and rationalize their wrongdoing by averring that they are simply declining to impose their religious beliefs on others.

 

The very same principles require that we reach out in love and compassion to the precious mothers of unborn children—mothers who sometimes are indeed in gravely difficult, dangerous, even dire situations; mothers who are often under intense pressure from boyfriends, husbands, parents or other relatives, or employers—intense pressure to, in those shockingly callous but all too familiar words, “get rid of it.” Our motto—“Love them both”—is more than a slogan. It is more than a pledge. It is not something “beyond the call of duty.” It is our duty. And it is a duty that the pro-life movement, contrary to the vile slanders of the pro-abortion movement and the chorus that echoes its talking points in the media, has been fulfilling for the more than five decades of its existence.

Can our movement do still more? Should we do more? Yes and yes. We can. We should. And we will. What we will never do is offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment. We have done this for fifty years. We will continue to do it.

 

The Pro-Life Movement, before and after Roe

My own mother recruited me into the pro-life movement when I was a young teenager. This was before the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Our movement formed in response to legislative efforts to weaken the protection of unborn children in states like Colorado, California, and New York. Those efforts were the work of a new movement that viewed abortion as the solution to two types of problems, the personal problems of women whose pregnancies were undesired and unwelcome, and the social problem of poor—and let’s not hide this fact—often minority children being born, children who, the pro-abortion movement said, would end up on the welfare rolls at taxpayer expense. The pro-abortion movement was further animated by the liberationist ethic, especially the sexual liberationist ethic, of the 1960s, and the belief—a ridiculous belief, as it turned out, but one widely held by elites at the time—that a so-called “population bomb” was on the verge of creating massive worldwide famines in which hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of people would die.

The pro-abortion movement claimed, knowingly falsely, that abortion needed to be legalized because tens of thousands of women each year in the United States were dying as a result of illegal, so-called “back alley” abortions. I repeat, and emphasize, that the pro-abortion movement made this claim while knowing it was false. We know that they knew, because the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder and leader of the movement, and himself a prominent abortionist, later in his life embraced the pro-life cause and revealed to the public that he and his colleagues knew the claims they made about death rates from illegal abortions were untrue—indeed, wildly untrue—when they made them. Nathanson also revealed that the movement he helped to found and lead, deliberately appealed to and stoked anti-Catholic prejudice to advance their cause, portraying opposition to abortion as nothing more than a reflection of Catholic dogma, and making the Catholic Church and faithful Catholic people out to be villains, who would rob others of their basic liberties, by imposing on them with the force of law their essentially sectarian religious precepts.

On the afternoon of Monday, January 22, 1973, I finished classes in the early afternoon and drove across town from my high school to join some women from my mother’s pro-life group in working a table at the West Virginia University student center, known as the Mountain Lair. As we were handing out our literature, a student walking past our table said to us, “Hey, there’s been a big decision from the Supreme Court on your issue.” “What is it?” we anxiously asked. “I don’t know” he said, “but it’s been on the news.” Well, we scurried off to find a radio—there being no internet or quick source of breaking news in those days. Then we waited for the hour, because there were no all-news channels; news was delivered “every hour on the hour.” We held out the hope that perhaps it was a big pro-life victory. But it was, of course, the very reverse of that. A constitutional atrocity and a moral catastrophe: Roe v. Wade.

To say that we were stunned would be the understatement of the century. After all, even non-lawyers knew that there was nothing in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution that could provide a basis for the Court to declare a right to abortion, much less the sweeping right that was proclaimed in Roe v. Wade. It was clearly an illegitimate decision—in the words of dissenting Justice Byron White, an “exercise of raw judicial power.” On that day, our little group in West Virginia, like pro-lifers all across the country, vowed: “This will not stand.” We committed ourselves—our lives—to the project of overturning Roe. We didn’t know if it would be a five-year project, a ten-year project, or a twenty-year project. None of us, I suspect, thought that it would be a project that would take forty-nine years, five months, and two days. But we were determined to work as hard as we could for as long as it would take, even knowing that success in overturning Roe would only enable us to begin the next project—working through the mechanisms prescribed by the Constitution to secure for children in the womb actual legal protections, a project that would require us to persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill America’s promise of liberty and justice for all by bringing the unborn under the mantle of the law’s protection.

 

That, of course, is the challenge we face today. It is a challenge made even more difficult by the nearly fifty-year reign of Roe v. Wade. That is because, as Aristotle observed long ago, the law is, among other things, a teacher, a giver of moral instruction, a former of consciences. For forty-nine years, five months, and two days, our law taught a gross moral untruth. It taught generations of our people that the choice to destroy a child in utero is a basic liberty—indeed, a fundamental right. It taught that that the child himself or herself is as nothing—a blob of tissue, a meaningless mass, a mere object, a piece of property, rather than a person with dignity and a right to life. That is a false lesson that it is our job to help people to unlearn. And that will take effort … and time. We will, as Ryan Anderson, who leads the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has recently pointed out in an excellent Wall Street Journal essay, need to go step by step, moving forward with determination and with prudence toward our goal of an America where every child is protected by law and welcomed in life. Victory will not come all at once, but each legislative achievement will plant the seeds of the next one.

A Dozen Pro-Life Heroes

I’m keenly aware that this is the first awarding of the Evangelium Vitae medal since the overturning of Roe v. Wade—an achievement that many people, those sympathetic to our cause as well as those unsympathetic to it, thought was not possible. After all, our opponents had everything going for them: power, money, prestige, control of the leading institutions of education, culture, philanthropy, entertainment, the economy, and, of course, the news media. We had, and have, none of those things. And yet, the reversal of Roe was made possible because pro-life people all over the country, people like my mother, never lost faith, never gave themselves permission to give up. Even in the face of devastating disappointments and betrayals, such as the grievous 1992 decision of the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, they kept hope alive and soldiered on.

It is on their behalf that I accept the Evangelium Vitae medal. I am not worthy of such recognition. They are. And I would like this evening to mention just a few heroes of our movement who did not live to see Roe fall, though they worked their hearts out to bring down that dishonorable decision. I hope that you will always regard them as the true recipients of the 2023 Evangelium Vitae medal. A complete list would include many more names than I will be able to mention and briefly profile. By no means am I diminishing the contributions of heroes I do not mention. But I would like to say a word about some of my personal pro-life heroes, people I knew and in some cases had the privilege of working closely with.

Dr. Mildred Jefferson was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to graduate in surgery from Harvard. She worked tirelessly to defend unborn babies and, after Roe was handed down, to overturn it. She was an implacable foe of the dehumanization of anyone, anywhere. She served three times as President of the National Right to Life Committee. She was my friend. I drew inspiration from her.

Congressman Henry Hyde labored tirelessly, year in and year out, to protect unborn babies and overturn Roe. He was our champion in the fight to ensure that taxpayer dollars were not used by the federal government to fund elective abortions. He too was my friend, and I had the honor of working with him on many occasions.

Mrs. Nellie Gray was the indomitable, unstoppable founder and leader of the annual March for Life. It is simply impossible to exaggerate the role of the March, and thus the importance of Nellie’s work, in keeping the flame of hope burning in the pro-life movement. Nellie was the living embodiment of our movement’s determination to prevail, no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifices, no matter how long it took. The March was for Nellie quite literally a labor of love. And she taught all of us in the movement to see our work in precisely that way. Love for babies. Love for mothers. Love as the answer to the violence of abortion.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was a mentor and one of my dearest friends in the world. As a young Lutheran pastor, he had been a leader in the anti–Vietnam War movement and in the civil rights movement, where he marched literally arm-in-arm with Rev. Martin Luther King. A gifted thinker and a brilliant speaker and writer, he was poised to become America’s next great religious public intellectual, the successor to Reinhold Niebuhr. But then the liberal establishment opted, tragically, to embrace abortion. Pastor Neuhaus had to choose whether to make himself acceptable to the cultural, educational, and economic elite—an elite that would, if he yielded on the question of abortion, confer upon him the highest forms of status, recognition, and worldly honors—or stand with unborn babies and their mothers. For Neuhaus, it was an easy choice, and required not even a moment’s deliberation. He became our movement’s intellectual and, in many ways, its spiritual leader. His vow, that we will “never weary, never rest” until all our nation’s children are protected in law and welcomed in life, became our rallying cry.

Governor Robert P. Casey, the last of the great pro-life Democrats, was one of the most principled men I ever had the honor to know. I had the privilege of working with him as an advisor and speechwriter on pro-life issues. When he was told, by no less than James Carville, who was running his campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania in 1986, that unless he “softened” his opposition to abortion he would lose, he simply responded, “then I will lose.” He won. Then, after pushing major pro-life legislation through the Pennsylvania legislature, he won again in 1990—this time over a pro-abortion Republican opponent and by a landslide of historic proportions. Governor Casey showed other pro-life politicians that leaders lead, and that by proclaiming and defending pro-life principles, pro-life candidates can win elections despite polling suggesting that the pro-life position is a “political loser.” Pro-life politicians need to be reminded of that message today.

Notre Dame’s own Professor Charlie Rice was one of the intellectual architects and leaders of the pro-life movement. A Marine lieutenant colonel and a legal scholar, he taught generations of Notre Dame law students—and lots of us who were not formally his students—how to make the legal case against Roe and for the child in the womb. He brought together reason and passion in a way I found remarkable and inspiring. He knew how to be tough in making an argument without being a bully. That’s because he was genuinely devoted to the truth, and in that way was a truly exemplary scholar and teacher.

Mr. Joe Scheidler, whom I had the honor of meeting on one or two occasions, was an advertising executive who took our nonviolent movement to the streets in the way that Martin Luther King took the civil rights movement to the streets. The New York Times, an organ that is scarcely sympathetic to the pro-life cause, acknowledged Mr. Scheidler’s effectiveness, noting that he “became a leading figure in the anti-abortion movement by marrying media savvy with confrontational tactics.” That, indeed, he did. A graduate of Notre Dame, Scheidler was known not only for his willingness to be confrontational, but also for his ability to be in dialogue and even friendship with abortion advocates, such as Bill Baird. His pro-life convictions were born of love, a love so great that it would not only prompt him to bear enormous personal risks and make profound sacrifices on behalf of the babies, but also enable him to regard even his most determined adversaries as friends to be loved and cherished, not enemies to be hated and destroyed. For Mr. Scheidler, no one was beyond redemption.

Germain Gabriel Grisez was my intellectual godfather. His 1970 book Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments remains one of the greatest works of scholarship on the subject ever produced. Were the expression of truth by itself capable of resolving disputed questions, the debate over abortion would have ended in a grand pro-life victory three years before Roe v. Wade was decided. In our world, though, truth, even when stated plainly and defended decisively, can be obscured, or ignored, and shunted aside. Still, Grisez’s work enabled the pro-life movement to proceed with profound confidence in the intellectual integrity and soundness of its convictions—and this was no small thing. To this day, it is in many ways unsurpassed.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in 1994, literally petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States in an amicus curiae brief to “reverse Roe v. Wade and declare the unalienable right to life of the unborn child.” Due to the kindness of my friend, pro-life attorney Harold Cassidy, I had the honor to be Mother’s lawyer as lead counsel (what is known as “counsel of record”) on the brief—a brief whose principal draftsman was not me, but was rather my beloved friend William Porth, with whom I worked.

Dr. Hymie Gordon was a deeply observant Jew, the son of a rabbi in South Africa, who came to the United States to make his career in medicine, first at Johns Hopkins and then at the Mayo Clinic, where he established a pioneering program in medical genetics. Known as “the father of fetology,” Dr. Gordon was a profound believer in the sanctity of human life, and a physician and teacher who dedicated himself to the Hippocratic oath and the principles of Hippocratic medicine. He was appalled by the decision of medical school after medical school to remove from the oath its express prohibition on physicians inducing abortions. When medicine, as a profession, began heading down the wrong path, he spoke as a prophet—an Elijah, a Jeremiah—reminding his colleagues that the presence of a human being from conception forward was an established scientific fact, not a matter of metaphysical speculation or religious dogma, and calling out academic medicine for compromising its most basic values and abandoning its vocation to heal the sick and infirm and preserve human life.

John Cardinal O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, above all others, stood up to those politicians who, while professing to be “personally opposed” to abortion, supported its legal permission and even its public funding, ostensibly on the ground that to do otherwise would be to impose their religion on other people, in violation of the Constitution. This argument was absurd on its face, since the science of human embryogenesis and intrauterine development is clear, and unanimous, and has been for more than fifty years. It was never—I repeat, never—made in good faith, not by Mario Cuomo or Geraldine Ferraro in Cardinal O’Connor’s time, not by Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or anyone else today. At a time when many religious leaders, for whatever reasons, were unwilling to call these people out for their bad faith and manifest injustice toward the most defenseless and vulnerable members of the human community, Cardinal O’Connor publicly confronted them and held them to account.

Nat Hentoff (who, as it happens, wrote a splendid, appreciative biography of Cardinal O’Connor), was the jazz music critic for the Village Voice newspaper, as well as its leading writer on civil liberties. He was an atheist, an old-school liberal, and a longstanding member and board member of the ACLU. Initially, he was fully onboard with abortion “reform.” But then he learned about “Baby Doe,” an infant diagnosed with a cognitive disability who was left by the parents and hospital staff to die. Outraged, he made a national issue of the Baby Doe case, only to find that his fellow liberals were all for abandoning the baby. If abortion was okay, they reasoned, what could be wrong with the infanticide of an infant whose life allegedly “wasn’t worth living’”? My friend Nat was shocked and scandalized by their reaction, and it made him think. If infanticide is not okay, how can elective abortion be okay? A man of unflinching intellectual honesty and moral integrity, he suddenly found himself in a place he never imagined being. He was a convert to the pro-life cause, and a passionate defender of the lives of all children, especially those most vulnerable—the unborn and disabled newborns. He wore his excommunication from the ACLU—which came, as you can imagine, in short order—as a badge of honor.

The Battle Ahead

Well, there you are. A dozen pro-life heroes, twelve apostles of life—from the atheist liberal Nat Hentoff to the Catholic saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We in the pro-life movement owe each of them an enormous debt of gratitude and we can and should continue to draw inspiration and strength from their work and witness.

 

And we will need that inspiration and strength, because, as I suggested a moment ago, now we face an even more daunting challenge than reversing Roe v. Wade. With Roe gone we are finally on the field of battle, but powerful forces are arrayed against us.

Nevertheless, “with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.” It will be hard. We will have moments of disappointment. We will experience setbacks and, alas, betrayals. But we will not lose heart. We will not lose faith. We will not abandon hope. For we know that “He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat. He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. Oh, be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet, for God is marching on!” And under His hand of blessing, trusting that He will never leave unaided those who in a righteous cause call upon His help, we shall overcome.

These remarks were delivered at the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture on April 29, 2023.

How to Create Notion Buttons to Automate Your Workflow

If you’ve been around here at all, it’s no surprise to you that I am excited about Notion’s newest update to the button feature. As soon as it came out, I was already trying to figure out how to create Notion buttons to help automate my workflow and the workflow of my teammates.

Previously, Notion’s button feature was, well, pretty lame. I didn’t even bother using them. They weren’t worth the effort. But now with their latest update, you can add new tasks to your task database, change properties on different pages, create an actually helpful quick capture feature and more with just the click of a button.

Components of a Notion Button

At first glance, the configuration for the new buttons can be a bit confusing and daunting. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to create Notion buttons for everything.

To create a button in Notion, just type /button and hit enter. You will see these options:

Start by giving the button a name and an icon. Then you have to decide what you actually want the button to do. Here’s a brief description of all the options:

Insert blocks: You can create a block (full of whatever you want) and have it be added to the page when you click it. All the formatting options are available in this block, i.e. toggles, headings, lists, etc.

Add page to: You can choose a database and add a new page to it. So you could hit the button and have a page added to your Task List Database.

Edit pages in: This allows you to edit properties in pages that already exist. So you can change the assignee or status on a specific page.

Show confirmation: This will add a confirmation step when you hit the button like “you sure you want to do this?”

Open page: Pretty self explanatory. You push this button and it opens any page you want.

The real gold about these new buttons? You can add multiple steps to each button. You can change the order of the steps. You can even duplicate different steps.

For example, you can create a Notion page, edit the page you just created, have a confirmation page, and have the newly created page open in a side-peek. Or you can add 20 tasks to your task list at once. Legitness.

Let’s look at some specific use cases.

Using Notion’s Button for Quick Capture

I wrote about using buttons for quick capture a few weeks ago. One of my complaints about Notion has been its lack of quick capture options. If I ever want to just jot something down, it takes a few steps to actually get where I want to go. Buttons speed up this process.

I created a quick capture button on my personal dashboard (along with a few others).

With this button, I can easily add an idea or note to my personal Note’s Database. Here’s how I configured it:

I chose Add a page and selected my notes database. Then I added a step to open the newly created page in a side-peek so I can add my note or idea right then and there.

Create tasks

When I first found out about this new feature, I was most excited to figure out how to quickly add tasks. Once I figured it out, I added the button in a few different places, then created one for everyone on our team. Cause you know, why not.

For this button I selected Add a page and chose our master task database. But what help would that be if it’s not assigned to anyone? You can edit properties and assign it to a specific person (in this case, me) and change the status. Or whatever property you want to change.

I also added a step to open the task in a side-peek so I can add all the relevant information quickly.

I also created a synced block with four more buttons. A button adding a task for each member of our team and dropped the synced block into our meeting notes template. So every time we have a meeting and a task comes up, we can quickly assign it to someone.

Button inside of a Notion Template

Notion has a lot of things going for it. One of those things is templates. They have literally saved me hours of work. We use them in our editorial calendar, meeting notes, projects, and many other places.

But there was always a frustrating component. It was a bit of a headache to add any default tasks to any database template. This was a bummer for us. We have a lot of projects that we do multiple iterations of (like Focus Academy, Digital Planner, or Plan Your Year), and we already know some of the tasks required.

We had to either add them manually each time or create a to-do list of basic tasks and drag them into the task database once the project was created.

But not anymore. Muhahaha (maniacal laugh).

For our most common projects, we created a button in the project template so we can add a bunch of tasks (and update their properties) with the push of a button.

One of our recurring projects is Focus Academy. We also know most of the tasks required to pull it off, so we added them to a button in our Focus Academy project template.

Isaac (the Director of Focus Academy) and I added the main and already known tasks to the button. Oh, and you can create tasks using the parent-task and sub-task feature 😎

So now when we start working on Academy, we already know most of the tasks that need to be done to knock it out of the park.

Changing Assignee

Our articles and newsletter go through a lot of hands before they get published. Once an article has been finished, it gets passed to our editor. Once an email is ready to go out, it gets passed to Marcela to schedule it.

So why not automate this process?

I added a button on our Newsletter template that automatically changes the assignee to Marcela and changes the status to Review. All I had to do was choose Edit a page and choose This page. The This page setting is dynamic, so it changes whatever page the button is on.

Once I hit this button, it notifies Marcela. I also then leave a comment letting her know it’s ready to be scheduled. I do wish buttons could automatically post comments, because that would be amazing.

I created a similar button for our article template. When everything is done, we just smash the button and it gets assigned to our editor-extraordinaire Jeff, and changes the status to Review.

Honorable mentions

There are a lot of little things you can do with buttons. You can create a button to simply open another page. I do this for my Learning Dashboard. I click the button from my personal dashboard and it opens my Learning Dashboard. There are other ways to do this, but buttons are more fun.

You can add confirmation steps to your buttons. Although not always necessary, it’s helpful when you’re wanting to do something major.

I showed you how to add a page to a task database already, but you can add a page to any database. You could create a button called Bug Report that would add an entry to a software bug report database. The possibilities are endless.

The goal of buttons is to automate your workflow, and so far it’s doing just that for me.

Wrap up

Notion just announced some new Project Management features. Their new project home base template includes some updated features such as an improved timeline view, Sprint databases, and Wikis.

They are also coming out with more automations. It seems that this new button feature is just the beginning. The new automation update is rumored to be able to do if/then statements, which would take workflow automations to a whole other level. Pretty exciting!

Although the new automations update is still TBD, the new button feature is a huge step towards automated workflows. Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to create Notion buttons. There are countless ways to use them to streamline your workflow.

Your imagination is the limit. Well there are a few limitations. But you get my point.

How We Created our Master Resource Database

A couple of months ago, we were in a Blanc Media staff meeting and we were talking about one of our resources, an e-book called Procrastinator’s Guide to Progress. And I asked, “Do we have a central place to easily find all of our resources with source files and links?” Well, the answer was…. “um, I don’t think so”. So then I had the idea to track down all of our resources, PDFs, slide decks etc. and drop them into one place. So our Master Resource Database in Notion was born.

Just for a little bit of context, The Sweet Setup and The Focus Course have been around for a minute. Shawn has created dozens of PDFs, courses, and e-books and hosted even more webinars and workshops. We have A LOT of content floating around in the ether. So I wanted to create a place where we could easily access and share it without digging around our site for 20 minutes.

Why use a Notion Database?

For those who might be new to Notion or unfamiliar with relational databases, here is a brief intro (feel free to skip ahead if you’re already a pro). Using Notion’s databases are a great way to store important information that you want to find quickly.

A Database is essentially a dynamic spreadsheet. You can create different views of the same information. For example, you can see it as a simple spreadsheet (similar to what you might see in Google sheets), calendar view, Kanban view etc. The secret sauce of Notion’s databases is that they can talk to each other. I can easily reference information from several data sources in one place. If you want to learn more, check out this article we wrote on relational database.

We do all of our project management inside of Notion. It just made sense to build this master resource database inside Notion. Plus, it connects to all of our projects.

Problems it had to solve

If this whole thing was going to work, it had to solve a few problems for us. We needed a place to store the links to PDFs, source files, Keynote slide decks. We also needed the link where the PDFs “lived” on our site. If it’s part of a course, where is the sales page in case asked about the resource?

We wanted this database to be helpful, but not so complex that it becomes rigid and unusable. Thanks to the versatility of databases and their properties, I think we figured it out.

Database properties

First off, don’t be alarmed by the amount of properties we created. They all serve a purpose, and luckily we can hide the ones we don’t want always displayed.

Here’s a list of all the properties we have:

Name: This is pretty self explanatory. This is the name of the resource, like A QuickStart Guide for going Paperless or Margin Assessment.

Resource Type: This is for noting the file type, i.e. PDF, Slide Deck, Pages File… We used a select property for this one (a select property is basically a dropdown).

Content Type: Similar to resource type, we used a select property to distinguish what type of resource it is, i.e. Worksheet, Assessment, Guide, etc.

Content Category: Also a select property. We can add the category for each resource, like “Time Management”, “Margin”, “GoodNotes” etc. This is helpful in case we want to see all the resources that we have on a certain topic, like PKM.

PDF Version: Next we have a file property. Here is where we upload the actual file. So for our Focus Method Checklist, we can upload the PDF file and add the link to find it on our site.

Link to Access Resource: This is where we save the link where the resource lives on our site. So if someone asks us where they can find our Goal Setting worksheet, we can just send them the link to the resource (like when you click on a link and it opens the PDF in your browser or downloads it onto your computer).

Location on site: This is different than the link to access resource. Let’s say that someone wants the workbook for our Focus Like a Boss program. We can send them the actual PDF or we can send them to the page where they can download it themselves, like a course page. In a more common scenario, we have a few dozen of our most popular resources on a dashboard for our Accelerator members. So, we can easily point them to what we call “The Vault” where they can pick and choose what they want to download. So we may not always need the Location on site property, but it’s helpful in some cases.

Editable Source File: This is another file property. We only use this property for slide decks or the Pages version of our workbook. With these source files, we can make quick edits or only export certain sections, if needed.

Notes: Well, this is pretty self explanatory. An example of a note that we’ve written is “Also available in the All the Things Course,” which means that one of our resources is available in multiple places on the site, including the All The Things Course.

Sales Page: This, again, is pretty self-explanatory. In some instances, it’s helpful to know where we sell certain resources, like our Day One in Depth Guide. Sometimes people ask us where they can find certain resources and thanks to this property, we can quickly send them the right sales page to buy the resource.

Site: This is another select property where we can distinguish what site it lives on, The Focus Course or The Sweet Setup.

Related to another resource?: This is a relational property. You create a relational database by simply connecting two databases together using a property called relation. This tells one database to pull in information from another database. But in this case we are pulling in information from itself. I created this to connect resources to each other, if needed.

For example, “A QuickStart Guide for going Paperless”, “A Kick Butt Cheatsheet for Getting Your Email Inbox Calm”, and “Setting up a Distraction Free Mac & iPhone” are all part of a bundle called Workflow Essentials. It makes sense to connect them together, but what’s great about connecting them to each other is that once I connect one to another it shows up for each of them. Lost? Check out the screenshots below.

Created by: Again, self-explanatory. This property automatically captures who created the new database entry. This is using a property called “Created by”.

Projects: This is another relational property. Except instead of relating to this page, it relates to our Projects database. If a resource is relevant to a particular project, we can easily connect them. This is helpful in the case of course workbooks. Like the “Focus on Time Workbook” connects to the Focus on Time project.

Use cases

We don’t use every property for every resource. It’s just not necessary. But we still created all of them because it’s pretty handy for some resources.

The main view (the spreadsheet view) might seem a bit overwhelming at first glance. So we created a second gallery view. It only displays a few properties, such as site, content type, and resource type.

But if I ever want to see all the properties for a resource, I just have to click on it and it will open for me.

This might seem like a lot, but what actually took the longest was hunting down all the resources across our sites. Let me assure you, this has already come in handy, especially in our Accelerator membership. Our members get access to everything, and they ask about certain resources or recommendations. I can easily jump into this database and grab what I need without needlessly looking on our sites.

Robert J. Zimmer, Who Promoted Free Speech on Campus, Dies at 75

A mathematician, he was for many years the president of the University of Chicago, where he argued that civility was not a reason to silence discussion.

Examining Trends in Debt to Earnings Ratios

I was just starting to wonder when the U.S. Department of Education would release a new year of College Scorecard data, so I wandered over to the website to check for anything new. I was pleasantly surprised to see a date stamp of April 25 (today!), which meant that it was time for me to give my computer a workout.

There are a lot of great new data elements in the updated Scorecard. Some features include a fourth year of post-graduation earnings, information on the share of students who stayed in state after college, earnings by Pell receipt and gender, and an indicator for whether no, some, or all programs in a field of study can be completed via distance education. There are plenty of things to keep me busy for a while, to say the least. (More on some of the ways I will use the data coming soon!)

In this update, I share data on trends in debt to earnings ratios by field of study. I used median student debt accumulated by the first Scorecard cohorts (2014-15 and 2015-16 leavers) and tracked median earnings one, two, three, and four years after graduating college. The downloadable dataset includes 34,466 programs with data for each element.

The below table shows debt-to-earnings ratios for the four most common credential levels. The good news is that the average ratio ticked downward for each credential level, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees showing steep declines in their ratios than undergraduate certificates and associate degrees.

Credential	1 year	2 years	3 years	4 years
Certificate	0.455	0.430	0.421	0.356
Associate	0.528	0.503	0.473	0.407
Bachelor’s	0.703	0.659	0.569	0.485
Master’s	0.833	0.793	0.734	0.650

The scatterplot shows debt versus earnings four years later across all credential levels. There is a positive correlation (correlation coefficient of 0.454), but still quite a bit of noise present.

Enjoy the new data!

Notion Quick Capture Hacks

Why does Quick-Capture matter?

If you’ve been around here at all or are a fan of the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) world, you’re no stranger to the term “Quick-Capture”. Quick Capture is an essential component of a good PKM system. Since Notion is my go-to app for pretty much everything, I’ve worked out a few ways to create a good system for quick capture in Notion.

New to Notion? Check out our Beginners Guide to Notion here.

A few months ago, Mike Schmitz (our resident Obsidian and PKM expert) hosted a PKM workshop for our January cohort of the Focus Academy. He talked about the important components of a good PKM system and how no single app will be a complete PKM system. It is a collection of apps that allow you to disseminate ideas from note-taking to quick capture to creative output. You might collect and organize your ideas in Notion, write about them in Ulysses, and drop your projects back in Notion, but having ideas and making sure you capture them is a key first step.

In this article, we are going to focus mostly on how to quickly capture ideas and notes into Notion.

What is Quick Capture?

Quick-capture simply means that you can easily capture or record an idea or task for later so you don’t forget about it. Sometimes you are out and about and don’t have time to pull out your computer and write down three paragraphs about your latest epiphany, but you still want to record a simple idea for later.

The idea here is to reduce as much of the friction as possible so that you can record the idea when inspiration strikes.

Quick Capture from my iPhone

Often when I am on the go, I have an idea that I want to make sure I remember. The easiest way for me to jot it down quickly is from my iPhone. I used to just write things down in the Apple Notes app, but it got messy. I would also drop an idea or two down in Ulysses, but that was an even worse idea for me since I only use Ulysses to actually write my articles — not brainstorm or store ideas.

So I created a widget on my main home screen that sends me straight to my Notion Personal Dashboard. I can quickly add an idea or a task to my databases using Notion’s fancy buttons that run automations (more on this in a minute).

Here is how you create and add a Notion widget to your home screen:

1. Make sure you have a dashboard created in Notion (or another page or database that you want to link your widget to).
2. Go to your Home Screen and long-press on an app to bring up the contextual menu, then tap Edit Home Screen. You can also long-press anywhere on the Home Screen to enter jiggle mode.
3. Tap the + button in the top left corner, and search for Notion.
4. Choose the first widget called Page (you can also swipe and see all the different kinds of Notion widgets you can add).
5. Tap + Add Widget.
6. Move the Widget around until you find the perfect spot for it on your Home Screen (I put mine on the first page front and center so it’s easy to access).
7. The widget will say Tap and hold to set up. Tap and long-press on the widget to bring up the contextual menu and tap Edit Widget.
8. Choose the correct Notion Workspace and Page you want to link (in my case the name of the page is Chloe’s Dashboard), tap back on the Home Screen and voila, you can now easily access your dashboard to add tasks and ideas throughout your day!

Web Clipper

When you come across an interesting idea or article, there’s an easy way to quickly save it to Notion. Since I find the native “Reading list” for both Chrome and Safari a pain, Notion’s Web Clipper is much more my speed.

Just add it as an extension to your browser, and it will add the article as a new card in your database. It doesn’t just add the link to the card, it actually pastes the content of the article in the card.

Quick capture from my Mac

I work mostly from my Mac. My Mac is pretty much my most prized possession. I do most of my work from it, and while I’m working I regularly have ideas about other projects or think of tasks that I need to do later. I want to jot those things down without having to get off track from what I’m doing.

I created a shortcut using Shortcuts and a custom keyboard shortcut using BetterTouchTool to open Notion with the command command + Shift + 6. There’s a lot of different ways to do this — most of the people here at The Sweet Setup use Alfred, but I use BetterTouchTool because it’s a part of SetApp (one of the best subscriptions I pay for).

When Notion opens or when I change workspaces, it automatically opens up on the top page in my sidebar, which is my top Favorited page — my personal dashboard.

Creating fancy shortcuts is definitely not my forte. There is probably a way to set up a shortcut or automation that always opens the page you want using a keyboard shortcut, but I didn’t want to spend hours going down a rabbit hole to figure it out. So this is what I came up with.

When I land on my personal dashboard, I have two buttons that I click that add a new task or new note / idea. Notion’s newest update to their buttons is pretty amazing. It runs simple automations, so I can create tasks and new pages faster than ever — elevating my Notion quick capture system significantly.

Using Notion’s Buttons to Capture Ideas and Tasks

Once I land on my personal dashboard, either from my iPhone or my Mac, I have two buttons that I can use to quickly allow me to either add a new note / idea or a new task.

When I first saw a video talking about the updated buttons and the automations they can run, I probably could have cried. This makes it easy to add tasks from anywhere in Notion, add new ideas, and it takes templates to a whole other level. It’s fantastic. It also sparks major joy when there’s a Notion new feature I can “play” with.

They can only run simple automations at this point, but we’re looking forward to updates in the future that will allow them to run some more complicated automations.

But enough of me nerding out. The first button I created was to add a task for myself. I called the button Gotta do something?. This button creates a new task in our Master Task Database and assigns it to me, and opens it in a side peek so I can add more information.

The second button I created I named New Idea / Note. This automation creates a new page in my personal database called “Chloe’s Notes”. This database is full of tons of different notes, ideas, and personal SOPs (Standardized Operating Procedures) for myself. When it creates the new page, it also opens it in a side peek so I add the note right away.

The Task database and my Notes database also live on my dashboard so I can see all my tasks and notes, but this is a quick way to create new entries.

How to Create a Button

To create a button, type /button. Name the button and add an icon. Then, create the automation you want it to run. You have a few different options, such as inserting blocks, add a page, or edit a page.

To create a new task or add a note, you would select Add page to. Then you would select the database to which you want the page added. You can name the new page and change the properties (like the status property or who it would be assigned to). You can also add more steps, like a confirmation message or to open the newly created page in a side peek (highly recommend this so you can add more detail to your newly-created task or note).

There are lots of different use cases for buttons, but so far my favorite is quickly capturing tasks and notes.

Buttons in synced blocks

We (at Blanc Media) have also incorporated buttons for quick capture on a few other pages in Notion. We added them to our weekly meeting notes. In our weekly staff meetings, we often need to assign tasks to ourselves or each other while we discuss our projects, etc.

So I created four different buttons — one for each team member that attends our staff meetings. I added them to a synced block and dropped the synced block inside of our meeting notes template. Now every time we jump into our meeting notes for that day and need to assign a task to someone, say Shawn, we just smash the button for assigning a task for Shawn.

Wrap up

Quick capture is one of the foundational stones for a successful PKM system. Capturing your ideas, notes, and tasks on the go is a critical component of creating. The more ideas you have, the more ideas you create.

As Mike Schmitz shared a couple of months ago, the perfect app is not the goal. The goal is to capture your ideas and make something out of them. I use Notion to help me capture my ideas so I can then create something out of them.

A dictionary of the manosphere: five terms to understand the language of online male supremacists

Thot. White knight. Red pilled. Cuck. Beta. Soyboy. Unicorn. Chad.

To many people, these words won’t mean much. To others, they are a core part of the vocabulary of the “manosphere” – a collection of websites, social media accounts and forums dedicated to men’s issues, from health and fitness to dating and men’s rights.

Many (though not all) manosphere communities have become spaces where explicit anti-women and anti-feminist sentiment abound. These include incels, men’s rights activists, red-pillers, pick-up artists and male separatists.

I’m interested in how men use language, especially in the media and online, and what this tells us about contemporary masculinity and gender relations. In my recent book, I show how the language of the manosphere creates a culture of exclusion, denigration (mainly of women, but also of other men), male power and entitlement.

Understanding what manosphere terms mean can help teachers and parents start conversations with young men who are engaging with manosphere and male supremacist content. Recognising how language and ideology are connected can help with deradicalisation efforts, or ideally prevent radicalisation in the first place. And for young men and boys themselves, this awareness can improve their digital literacy and help them resist manipulation.

For police and other authorities, language can be an early warning system to identify men at risk of carrying out male supremacist violence. Tragedies in Isla Vista, Oregon, Toronto, Tallahassee and Plymouth were all prefaced by the perpetrators publishing male supremacist and incel content.

It is difficult to give a comprehensive overview of every instance of manosphere language. It is a constantly evolving collection of terms, sometimes in response to new issues that emerge, or in an attempt to subvert social media moderation efforts (abbreviations and acronyms are good examples of this). Here are some key terms to know.

Red and blue pill

The cyberpunk blockbuster The Matrix is the source of a key symbol in the manosphere – the red pill. In the film, protagonist Neo is offered a choice of two pills. If he takes the blue pill, he will continue to exist in the world as he knows it, which is actually a simulation controlled by sentient machines who have enslaved humanity as a power source. If he takes the red pill, he will be released into the “real world”, where the curtain is pulled back and the truth is revealed.

In the manosphere, those who have been “red-pilled” see the world as it really is, understanding the so-called “real” nature of women’s behaviour and dating preferences. As researchers Megan Kelly, Alex DiBranco and Julia DeCook write:

Red pillers awaken to the “truth” that socially, economically and sexually, men are at the whims of women’s (and feminists’) power and desires.

The pill symbolism has also been taken up by the alt-right and cuts across a variety of conspiracy theories, from the claim of feminism controlling the world to shadowy global elites influencing public opinion.

Alphas and betas

The manosphere is obsessed with status, power, prestige and hierarchy. The idea of alphas and betas is central to this. Originally developed by biologist David Mech in his early work on wolf packs, the “alpha” was argued to be the most socially dominant male. Mech has since refuted this account as overly simplistic.

The concept was co-opted by the seduction community, a community organised around sharing tips and guidance for attracting and seducing women, before making its way to other parts of the manosphere.

Becoming an alpha is an aspirational goal for many men who engage with manosphere content. Alphas are in charge, have their pick of sexual partners and have ultimate control, both of themselves and others. Betas are the polar opposite: physically and psychologically weak, sexually unattractive, timid, submissive, meek and generally lacking in the qualities necessary to attain “real” manhood.

Chads and Stacys

The hierarchy of the manosphere, and the claimed primacy of looks over personality, can be clearly seen in the caricatures of Chads and Stacys.

Chads are the “ultimate alpha” – the ultra-masculine, virile, powerful and sexually attractive man to whom Stacys and other women flock. The term “gigachad” refers to the most alpha of alpha males.

Stacys are an idealisation of femininity – a hyper-attractive, sexually desirable, promiscuous but vapid woman. She is ultimately unobtainable, especially to men who are not Chads. Simultaneously the objects of disdain and desire, Chads and Stacys highlight a clichéd view of men and women, rooted in stereotypes and pigeonholes rather than in reality.

Cuck

Shortened from cuckold, meaning a man whose wife has been unfaithful (a term first used as early as 1250), cuck is widely used in the manosphere and alt-right spaces.

The term is strongly associated with a subgenre of “humiliation pornography”, in which a man derives sexual pleasure from watching his female partner have sex with another man. Cuck is often used as an insult, especially since the idea of allowing one’s partner to have consensual sex with other men goes against heteronormative notions of male sexuality, control and ownership.

In some cases, such pornography also has an interracial dimension, contributing to racist stereotypes of Black men’s hypersexuality and hyperphysicality. Linguist Maureen Kosse has written about how cuck is used to “spread covertly racist online discourse by cloaking medieval sexual logic and racial anger in misogynistic humor”.

(N)awalt

(N)awalt means “(not) all women are like that”. The more common form “Awalt” is typically used to ascribe negative stereotypes to women. Denying their individuality, Awalt is used to suggest women are all vapid, insincere, sexually promiscuous, driven by emotions rather than rationality, motivated by financial gain and more. Awalt is also deployed to emphasise the claim that men are everything women are not – moral, rational, intelligent, loyal, honourable and individualistic.

It is clear that manosphere language is contributing to an increasingly politicised and fractious form of gender relations. By understanding this language, we can better counter it.

Robert Lawson is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.

How to make lithium extraction cleaner, faster and cheaper — in six steps

Nature, Published online: 06 April 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00978-2

Demand for lithium for batteries and other green technologies is exploding. The industry must develop sustainable methods to remove and process the element from ores and brines to avoid environmental damage.

Bonus Daily Cartoon: Back to Barbie

“If we leave now, we’ll make it just in time to see the Barbie movie!”

Why you should care about bumper bank profits

The Bank of England has raised interest rates 11 times since December 2021 but, while this may boost bank profits, it is less likely to boost many people’s bank balances.

Alongside the sharp spike in interest rates over the past year, many big names in the UK banking business have been reporting bumper 2022 profits. NatWest made £5.1 billion in 2022 before tax, up 33% and the highest since the 2008 global financial crisis. Fellow high street bank Lloyds made nearly £7 billion before taxes in 2022.

Much like the energy companies that have experienced huge increases in profits as gas and electricity prices soared over the past year, the same is now happening at the UK’s large retail banks as Bank of England interest rates have done the same.

These increases have little to do with CEO performance (although top executives took home significant pay packets for 2022) or increases in efficiency within these banks. But they have everything to do with how retail banks make their money and the domination of the market by several key players.

Retail banking income has two main sources: interest income from lending or fee income from non-interest business (and sometimes a little trading income). Retail banks also earn interest on the billions they hold in reserves with the Bank of England – this income has of course increased recently as the central bank has hiked its main rate.

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Read more: Interest rates: why your mortgage payments are going up but your savings aren't – and how better monetary policy could help

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In the past 12 months there has been quite a steep rise in interest income, in particular net interest income. This is the amount banks pay out in interest (to savers, for example) versus the amount they make in interest from lending. So, for example, during 2022 NatWest Banking Group achieved a 30.6% increase in net interest income and Lloyds Banking Group an increase of nearly 50%.

Growth in net interest income

There is some history behind these recent profits. In the mid-1980s, the “big bang” began the deregulation of banking in the UK. This led to a change in the traditional banking business model towards riskier activities.

Rather than making money from getting and holding on to deposits and loans (a strategy known as “originate and hold”) banks started to package up their loans and sell them on to further boost their profits (“originate to distribute”). The resulting rise in this business and the focus on non-interest income such as fees for non-traditional business ultimately led to the largest financial crisis the world has ever seen.

A new era in banking

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, some retail banks have retrenched into older-style banking. NatWest, for example, now makes over 60% of its revenue from deposits and lending, for Lloyds this figure is about 70%. But others, including HSBC and Barclays, have continued to make over 60% of their total revenue from non-interest income sources, according to their latest financial reports.

The latter strategy makes sense in the very low interest rate environment that the UK was in up until 2022. When the central bank base rate is low, there is little money to be made from lending and holding deposits so banks can make more money from non-interest income. But when interest rates start to rise, the big winners are those focused on the deposit and lending markets.

This is because even though the Bank of England raises the bank rate to influence other interest rates, large retail banks get to choose when they feed these rate changes on to savers and borrowers.

Loans make up 70% or more of total assets at some high street banks. This alone helps to boost revenues when rates rise. Many banks also charge a much higher rate on lending than they pay out for retail deposits and have been criticised in recent months for failing to pass on savings rate increases as quickly as they’ve boosted mortgage costs.

This means that, at the same time banks are seeing increases in their interest income from loans (and their reserves at the Bank of England), the amount they are paying out in interest to depositors in some accounts can remain the same for a longer period – sometimes at 0%. Shockingly, the Bank of England estimates that UK households have a massive £265 billion sitting in non-interest-bearing deposits, up from £118 billion a decade ago.

UK household savings not earning interest (£ millions)

Even then, research suggests retail banks tend to be much slower at increasing deposit rates than lending rates. Policymakers seem to have noticed this as the CEOs from four major UK retail banks – Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds and HSBC – were called to appear at a Treasury Committee hearing in February 2023 to discuss rapid increases in loan and mortgage rates versus limited rate rises for savers and depositors, among other issues.

“Customer choice” was cited as the main reason for the difference. All of the CEOs pointed out recent increases in rates on some savings products. However, research shows savers often don’t switch into these higher-paying accounts, people simply do not manage their deposits in such a dynamic way.

Since large retail banks dominate the deposit and lending market in the UK, they are unlikely to change this aspect of their operations on their own. Some kind of regulation could help to force banks to pass on rate rises more quickly, of course. Introducing a windfall tax could also help.

But both of these solutions seem unlikely to happen in light of the government’s recent banking reforms and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (although this was not linked to net interest income). The fear of another banking collapse, alongside the new reforms, will only reinforce the perceived importance of bank profits and shareholders over consumers – even during a cost of living crisis.

Robert Webb 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.

Blinded, randomized trial of sonographer versus AI cardiac function assessment

Nature, Published online: 05 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05947-3

The impact of artificial intelligence in cardiac function assessment is evaluated by a blinded, randomized non-inferiority trial of artificial intelligence versus sonographer initial assessment of the left ventricular ejection fraction.

Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Annie Callanan

Robert Harington talks to Annie Callanan, Chief Executive of Taylor & Francis, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.

The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Annie Callanan appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Quick Tip: Using Hazel to Auto-File Your Documents

Years ago, Shawn embarked on his journey to go “paperless” in his personal and work life. Inspired by David Sparks’ Paperless Field Guide, he incorporated three important components:

1. iPhone Scanning App
2. Doxie Go Scanner
3. Hazel

In this Quick Tip, we are mostly going to focus on Hazel, but the scanners are worth a brief mention. Office scanners are great if you have a decent amount of stuff to scan and you want good-quality scans. iPhone scanning apps are ideal for scanning things quickly on the go. As digital as the world has become, we still have to scan stuff (receipts, medical bills, important documents — no matter how many times you “opt-in for paperless post”).

But the main star of the show is Hazel. Scanning stuff into your computer is a good first step, but then you have to put it in the right spot. Otherwise, your desktop and downloads folder becomes the Wild West — vast and chaotic.

Enter Hazel. You set up some rules once and it does crazy cool stuff for you. Set it and forget it. Amiright?

Filing Bills

Let’s look at a few examples. One of the reasons Shawn got into his journey for going paperless was to organize his monthly bills. In Hazel, you can set up rules (that all run in the background) that rename, move, and organize your files (and much more).

Every time Shawn’s utility bill hits his download folder, it gets added to his Utility Bills folder.

This rule states that any document that lands in Shawn’s downloads file that contains the words “Gas” and the numbers “555555” Hazel then renames to “Gas Utility Bill – DATE ADDED” and moves it to his “Utility Bills” folder. Cool right?

You could use this same logic to file your tax documents, expense receipts, PDFs, screenshots etc. The list is pretty much endless.

Organizing Screenshots

There are about a million use cases for Hazel (MacSparky has a whole field guide on Hazel), but one that I have that helps me write articles for The Sweet Setup is organizing my screenshots I take. Currently, whenever I take a screenshot using CleanShotX (is there even any other way?), it gets dropped on my desktop. In the past, I’ve tried to name and save all the screenshots to the right folder as I go, but sometimes I lose track or just want to move quickly and rename and move them around later. Also, I tend to take an absurd amount of screenshots and only use half of what I take, so I usually don’t want to take the time to edit, name, and save things I might not use. But then, Hazel.

I set up a rule to take all screenshots that land on my desktop that contain the word “article” in them and that are a PNG image and drop them in a “Pending Screenshot” sub-folder inside of my Articles folder. So when I am ready, I can easily find and pick the screenshots I need and upload them straight to WordPress instead of rummaging through my (embarrassingly) cluttered Desktop. It basically holds all my screenshots in a “holding area” until I am ready for them.

Once you set up your rules in Hazel, it runs in the background and you don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s the missing piece to paperless organization and helps put your mind at ease knowing that everything is being put in its rightful place.

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We have more helpful tips right here.

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Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Ziyad Marar

Robert Harington talks to Ziyad Marar, President of Global Publishing at SAGE, and author of "Happiness Paradox" and "Intimacy", and most recently “Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood"

The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Ziyad Marar appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.