As I explained on CNBC: Even the most optimistic assumptions are unlikely to change the trend of weak global growth.
David A. Price interviews Emmanuel Farhi in Econ Focus (Regional Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Second/Third Quarter 2019, pp. 18-23). Here are some tidbits:
The US had 50,000 opioid-involved overdose deaths in 2019. This is similar to the number of people who died of AIDS at the peak of that crisis in 1995. For comparison, total deaths in car crashes is about 40,000 per year. My dark suspicion is that the opioid crisis gets less national media attention because its worse effects are concentrated in parts of Appalachia, New England, and certain mid-Atlantic states, rather than in big coastal cities.
Several decades ago, the most common ways of thinking about problems of poor people in low-income countries involved ideas like the "poverty trap" and the "dual economy." The "poverty trap" was the idea low-income countries were close to subsistence, so it was hard for them to save and make the investments that would lead to long-term growth. The "dual economy" idea was that low-income countries had both traditional and a modern parts of their economy, but the traditional part had large numbers of subsistence-level workers. Thus, if or when the modern part of the economy expanded, it could draw on this large pool of subsistence level workers and so there was no economic pressure for subsistence wages to rise. In either case, a common policy prescription was that low-income countries needed a big infusion of capital, probably from a source like the World Bank, to jump-start their economies into growth.
"Neuromyths are false beliefs, often associated with education and learning, that stem from misconceptions or misunderstandings about brain function. Over the past decade, there has been an increasing amount of research worldwide on neuromyths in education." The Online Learning Consortium has published an International report: Neuromyths and evidence-based practices in higher education by the team of Kristen Betts, Michelle Miller, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Patricia A. Shewokis, Alida Anderson, Cynthia Borja, Tamara Galoyan, Brian Delaney, John D. Eigenauer, and Sanne Dekker.
Our mental images of "global trade" are usually about goods: cars and steel, computers and textiles, oil and home appliances, and so on. But in the next few decades, most of the action in terms of increasing global trade is likely to be in services, not goods. More and more of the effects of trade on jobs is going to involve services, too. However, most of us are not used to thinking about countries import and export across national borders transportation services, financial services, tourism, construction, health care and education services, or many others. The 2019 World Trade Report from the World Trade Organization focuses on the theme, "The future of services trade." Here are some tidbits from the report (citations and references to figures omitted):