This fortnight, I have been mostly working like a navvy, but also reading:

• Neither Elizabeth Warren Nor Other Congressmen Have a Plan for the COVID-19 Depression — Ted Rall: Kicking the can down the road with suspended debt collection and eviction moratoriums and putting off utilities shut-offs is a guaranteed ineffective, massively counterproductive wallop of magical thinking that pretends not only that everything is about to be fine, but that everyone is going to win the lottery and be able to use their newfound winnings to pay off their coronavirus debts. It’s ridiculous and stupid and unworthy of discussion by serious people.
• I Am Using My Free Time to Not Write a Novel — Scott Bolohan in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: They say the best way to not write a novel is to not write every day. When you first wake up is a particularly good time to not write. But as I join billions of others around the world in quarantine, I worry my newfound free time is going to get in the way of not writing a novel.
• The Financial Literacy Delusion — Agata Soroko in Public Seminar: An analysis I conducted of curriculum documents across the United States and Canada showed that financial literacy standards frame economic well-being primarily as a personal practice, overlooking the various mechanisms that generate inequalities. They ignore the role of Wall Street, the lack of government financial regulation, and a financial system in which crises are par for the course. Financial literacy standards extol the virtues of attaining personal wealth but in forty-one of the forty-three curriculum frameworks I examined, the word “capitalism” does not appear. Financial literacy is silent about the need for decent working conditions, unemployment insurance, paid leave, a living wage. It also leaves unmentioned the subject of rising economic inequality marked by income volatility and unaffordable housing. Mounting student loan bills are presented as a problem of financial smarts, not skyrocketing college tuition. Instead, a financial literacy narrative endures which maintains that people are in debt because they spend their money on luxuries like lattes and avocado toast.
• Scenes from a Multiverse — Jon Rosenberg:
  
• Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty? — Claire Kelloway in the Washington Monthly: Farmers increasingly raise foods on contract for one dominant buyer that can dictate what they grow and how (Heinz, for instance, has their tomato farmers use Heinz crafted seeds). Large swaths of foods may be raised for one specific plant that serves just one purpose, such as bottling milk for grocery stories or processing cheese for restaurants. While highly specialized products and plants create consistency, these rigid supply chains cannot easily redirect their products to different uses if things go awry. Take the case of eggs. Farmers such as Kerry Mergen in Minnesota raise laying hens on contract. Mergen’s 61,000-bird operation was specifically designed to supply eggs for pre-cracked fluid-egg mixes, used almost exclusively in food service. Most of what they produced went to one Cargill plant that temporarily shut down this week due to lost restaurant and food-service customers. Even though grocery stores report egg shortages, grading eggs for retail requires special equipment and likely new contracts with a different large buyer. Instead, the corporation that Mergen raised hens for, Daybreak Foods, decided to euthanize his flock and sell the birds to a rendering plant to become pet food.
• Did you ever wonder what you'd be doing during an apocalypse? — Frankie Boyle in the Overtake: 2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year. Remember at the beginning of the year when Rod Stewart lamped a security guard and Justin Bieber announced that he had Lyme disease? Dizzying times: it genuinely felt like the world was a wonderful place to be. For many of you, it will have been surprising to learn what was expected of you during an apocalypse. You always wondered whether you would be fleeing; fortifying a bunker; or camping on a motorway roundabout. Turns out you’re working from home. Trying to get a spreadsheet about bodybags finished before the provisional deadline of your own death. Mistakes have been made in the handling of the crisis. Like flying the Buckingham Palace flag at half mast when the Queen’s not in, which is just an advert for burglars. In my local park, someone has tried to cheer people up by chalking “You Got This!” on the ground. Literally the last thing you want to hear in a pandemic.
• To our brothers and sisters of popular movements and organizations — Pope Francis: My hope is that governments understand that technocratic paradigms (whether state-centred or market-driven) are not enough to address this crisis or the other great problems affecting humankind. Now more than ever, persons, communities and peoples must be put at the centre, united to heal, to care and to share. […] Moreover, I urge you to reflect on “life after the pandemic,” for while this storm shall pass, its grave consequences are already being felt. You are not helpless. You have the culture, the method, and most of all, the wisdom that are kneaded with the leaven of feeling the suffering of others as your own. I want all of us to think about the project of integral human development that we long for and that is based on the central role and initiative of the people in all their diversity, as well as on universal access to those three Ts that you defend: Trabajo (work), Techo (housing), and Tierra (land and food) . I hope that this time of danger will free us from operating on automatic pilot, shake our sleepy consciences and allow a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money and places human life and dignity at the centre.
• Tom Toles:
  
• Home Alone at the White House: A Sour President, With TV His Constant Companion — Katie Rogers and Annie Karni in the New York Times: Aides said the president’s low point was in mid-March, when Mr. Trump, who had dismissed the virus as “one person coming in from China” and no worse than the flu, saw deaths and infections from Covid-19 rising daily. Mike Lindell, a Trump donor campaign surrogate and the chief executive of MyPillow, visited the White House later that month and said the president seemed so glum that Mr. Lindell pulled out his phone to show him a text message from a Democratic-voting friend of his who thought Mr. Trump was doing a good job. Mr. Lindell said Mr. Trump perked up after hearing the praise. “I just wanted to give him a little confidence,” Mr. Lindell said.
• Bye, Amazon — Tim Bray: May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
• Why CO2 Isn’t Falling More during a Global Lockdown — Benjamin Storrow in E&E News, via SciAm: The numbers illustrate just how intertwined oil is with the global economy. Cars and planes can be parked en masse, and yet widespread oil consumption continues. “The crisis shows how challenging decarbonizing the economy purely through behavioral adjustment would be,” Houser said, noting that individual decisions about not driving or flying deliver only limited emissions reductions. “What we need are technological solutions that allow our economy to operate at 100% with 5%-8% annual reductions going forward,” he said.
• The “marshmallow test” said patience was a key to success. A new replication tells us s’more. — Brian Resnick in Vox: It was the follow-up work, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that found a stunning correlation: The longer kids were able to hold off on eating a marshmallow, the more likely they were to have higher SAT scores and fewer behavioral problems, the researchers said. The results were taken to mean that if only we could teach kids to be more patient, to have greater self-control, perhaps they’d achieve these benefits as well. But the studies from the ’90s were small, and the subjects were the kids of educated, wealthy parents. In fairness to Mischel and his colleagues, their findings, as written in 1990, were not so sweeping. In the study linking delay of gratification to SAT scores, the researchers acknowledged the possibility that with a bigger sample size, the magnitude of their correlation could decrease. They also mentioned that the stability of the home environment may play a more important role than their test was designed to reveal. It also wasn’t an experiment. The results also didn’t necessarily mean that teaching kids to delay their gratification would cause these benefits later on. “The findings of that study were never intended to be prescriptions for an application,” Yuichi Shoda, a co-author on the 1990 paper linking delay of gratification to SAT scores, says in an email. “Our paper does not mention anything about interventions or policies.” […] Yet their findings have been interpreted to be a prescription by school districts and policy wonks. “If you’re a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you’re just dancing around with proxy issues,” the New York Times’s David Brooks wrote in 2006. It’s not hard to find studies on interventions to increase delaying gratification in schools or examples of schools adopting these lessons into their curricula. Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster has even been used to teach the lesson.
• 30 million Americans are unemployed. Here’s how to employ them. — David Roberts interviews Pavlina Tcherneva in Vox: One big confusion is that people think the job guarantee is going to replace some must-do, ongoing, critical programs. But we are not replacing EPA inspectors or FDA inspectors, who have to be there at all times. If you have a care project — environmental care, community care — you could add a lot more hands, a lot more people to shadow teachers or nurses to do on-the-job training. These programs can be a buffer that absorbs unemployed people, and then, as they are ready to move on to better jobs, they leave. In recessions, social needs become more acute. We need extra helping hands for the food kitchens or the homeless shelters. It is the nature of the job guarantee that whenever there are more needs, there are more people to do them. Essentially it is a coordinating mechanism.