The multipolar financial world is here. The United States can survive it – but only with major political and economic changes at home. It's time to start thinking about what those need to be.
As Costabile (2022) points out, the dollar has by now been de facto the primary world reserve asset for over a hundred years, first because of US preeminence in the holding of gold and its creditor position with respect to the European belligerents in the Great War. In 1944 US military and industrial power, soon to be backed, in the shadows, by a monopoly over the atomic bomb, were the foundations of the gold-exchange standard established at Bretton Woods.
A brief history of the neoliberal era
On August 15, 1971, the curtain came down on the gold-exchange standard, and it rose – though we did not know it yet and thought otherwise at the time – on the neoliberal era. Devaluation, export controls, the wage-price freeze, and fiscal stimulus à outrance – these were Keynesian and even wartime measures that seemed to signal a mass conversion of Richard Nixon's coterie to full employment, price stability, and managed trade. My father, John Kenneth Galbraith, the World War Two price control chief, was called by The Washington Post for a comment. “I feel like the streetwalker,” he replied, “who has just been told that not only is her profession legal, but the highest form of municipal service.”
The impression held through the explosive growth year of 1972, ensuring Nixon's re-election with full employment at the highest real median wage of all time. But it fell apart in 1973 when the stimulus ended, controls were weakened or lapsed, oil prices spiked, and the resulting general inflation was met by high interest rates, spurring a new slump in 1974. At that point pre-Keynesian dogmas re-emerged in an updated toga. The Phillips Curve was declared vertical, so that unemployment was fixed at a “natural” rate, while the central bank was vested (by academics, though not yet in practice) with control of prices through control of the money supply. The consequence of any attempt to improve real performance – except by removing “rigidities” such as union wage contracts, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs, would be hyperinflation and the collapse of the dollar. Capitalism was thus a child of beauty, natural health, and balance – but prone to fits of hysteria or depression if fed either slightly too much or slightly too little, by its monetary Momma.
Exchange rate theory in the 1970s, as the Smithsonian agreement enshrining floating took hold, generally complemented domestic doctrine. In an extension of David Hume's specie-flow model, deficits would force devaluations and surpluses would bring appreciations. If the Marshall-Lerner conditions held, then the realignment of relative prices would bring the current account back into balance. And for a while, all seemed to follow the plan: US trade deficits brought the dollar down, corresponding surpluses drove the Deutschemark and the yen up.
But the Marshall-Lerner conditions did not hold, and trade balances did not return to equality of exports and imports. Instead, the US issued Treasury bonds, while Japan and Germany accumulated financial assets. And in the Third World, ex China and India, the balance depended largely on the presence or absence of oil. Demand for oil, it turned out, is notably invariant to price. So as prices went up, for producers it was the best of times. And so long as oil importers wished to grow, they were obliged to cover the bill with borrowings from commercial banks, on terms that the bankers controlled, and at rates governed in the final analysis by the policy of the Federal Reserve.
In this way the abolition of the Bretton Woods system set in motion the final defeat of New Deal banking law and of balanced international financial governance, in the end restoring the financiers to the center of American and world economic power. For forty years that genie had been bottled up, internally by regulation, deposit insurance, and the Glass-Steagall Act, so that in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s banks were largely adjuncts to the large industrial corporations and under the fairly-effective discipline of the state. There were, accordingly, no financial crises from 1934 to 1974, when Franklin National Bank failed, followed in 1975 by the “fiscal crisis” – really a bankers' crisis – of the City of New York. On the international side, capital controls and the IMF had provided (in principle) a similar damper. After 1971 and especially 1973, the currency casinos were open again.
The 1970s were nevertheless an apparently prosperous time in much of the Third World for oil exporters and most importers alike; credit flowed on easy terms and the bills could still be paid. There was therefore no tendency, in either the global North or the global South, for trade imbalances to self-correct. And as balance sheets grew, banks also prospered, while a latent power built in the hands of the agency charged with managing the interest rate.
The specific conditions of the United States in the 1970s were of economic goals that were, if not intrinsically incompatible, then unachievable with the tools on hand in the circumstances of the moment. These goals included high employment in the face of industrial encroachments from – at the time – most notably Germany and Japan; reasonably stable prices in the face of peak domestic conventional oil production, rising imports, and rising prices; and a strong international dollar, central to the power, prestige, and worldview of the bankers. The choice, ultimately, was to sacrifice labor and industry, while breaking the back of commodity prices, industrial wages, and therefore prices, all the while driving the dollar back into the global driver's seat. This choice was made by Paul A. Volcker, appointed chair of the Federal Reserve Board by President Carter in the summer of 1979.
The rest is, so to speak, history. Volcker's actions, redoubled in 1981 with the arrival of President Reagan, achieved their purposes on inflation, wages, unions, and the dollar. Exorbitant privilege got a new lease on life, one that has yet to expire, notwithstanding the later advent of the euro. Autonomous development strategies in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia were forcibly abandoned; the new mantra was “export-led growth” and incorporation into global value chains, specifically the sweatshop element thereof. Books balanced, if at all, via austerity, unemployment, curtailed imports, and the sale of public assets and mineral rights. When Mexico went to the brink of default in 1982, the squeeze was relaxed but only slightly and only enough to ensure the survival of the money-center banks. In the aftermath they would rule, almost undisturbed, for twenty years. The opening of Eastern Europe in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in late 1991 cemented the new order.
In short, with the end of Bretton Woods and the associated abandonment of capital controls by most countries, exchange rates became, to an overwhelming degree, an artifact of capital flows, asset transactions and relative rates of return, and thus substantially under the influence if not the control of private financial power. A period of orthodoxy, confidence and capital inflow would bring on the simulacra of prosperity, accompanied by Dutch Disease and deindustrialization. Asymmetric bets, as against Mexico in 1994 and Thailand in 1997, could precipitate a crisis. When crises hit, funds would flee to the safety of US Treasury bonds, inefficiencies, excesses, and “crony capitalism” would be duly discovered, and the IMF would be called in with ritual purgatives. No longer concerned with exchange-rate stabilization, still less with financing a development plan, the Fund and Bank became enforcers of an austerian and neoliberal code of conduct – the “Washington Consensus.”
What backed the dollar-based system?
Thus, one may say that after 1981 the US returned to the 1920s system, but without the backing of a stranglehold over gold or the industrial and military superiority of the early and mid 20th century. It was the pull of high interest rates, the debt vulnerability of the Global South, and the accelerating decay of the Global East that combined to establish the dollar-based system under which we have lived ever since. From 1989 and especially 1991, this position was reinforced by the ideological and political collapse of the USSR and its socialist allies, with no corresponding gain in the underlying strength of the US position. On the contrary, the US camouflaged the consequences of deindustrialization and the moral effects of its defeat in Vietnam with a series of minor wars against apparently trivial opponents – in which sustained victory nevertheless proved elusive.
As recent crises make clear, up to now the dollar-based order has been supported mainly by instability elsewhere and the lack of a credible alternative or compelling reason to create one, or where such reasons are felt, the ability to do so. With a large and liquid market for debt, the US Treasury bond remains the refuge of first resort even when a financial upheaval originates within the United States, as was the case with the sub-prime debacles of the 2000s and even today. The system has been held up, in short, by confidence in itself, and not, so far as one can see, by much of anything else. This however did not necessarily portend collapse on its own in the immediate or even foreseeable future.
Had neoliberal hegemony been entirely complete, the doctrine of TINA – “there is no alternative” – could never have been refuted. But in fact, even in the West the doctrine was never universally or fully applied, and differences in economic and social performance could be noted. Egalitarian Scandinavia, industrially-integrated Germany, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, generally speaking, liberalized less and performed better. In the US itself, the stabilization and social insurance programs of the New Deal and Great Society largely endured, and the country benefited from the compulsive Keynesianism of its political elites, of both parties when crises hit. However this pragmatism was obscured by a dogmatic rhetorical commitment to free-market doctrines, and the industrial base continued to wither while, in each crisis, first and foremost, the banks were saved.
The triumph of neoliberal capitalism, the global hegemony of the United States in a dollar-based monetary world, and the end of history itself were, therefore, not firmly founded. The illusion could persist only so long as there emerged no clearly different, functionally superior economic development model. Had the victory of the neoliberals been complete, they might have put off that day indefinitely. But it wasn't. And they couldn't. Enter China.
China's Challenge to the Neoliberal World.
The “rise” of China is an uncontested fact. As such it poses a lethal threat to neoliberal ideology, even though the Chinese themselves have made little effort to brand their experience and none whatever to export it as a competing economic model. China simply is, and as such it poses an interpretive challenge that neoliberalism cannot handle.
Consider the options. According to one, once popular but somewhat fading in recent years, China has made a successful “transition to capitalism” and owes its success to having applied the principles of the free market. But if that were the case, how can the West complain? It is unsportsmanlike to kvetch if bested at one's own game.
A fall-back is to assert that while China has indeed played the capitalist game, it has gained an unfair advantage by bending “the rules” – for instance by appropriating “intellectual property,” manipulating the RMB, or running a low-wage industrial system. But this claim merely exposes the rules for what they are: an effort to preserve the monopolies and privileges of the already-rich. Such rules have been broken by every rising power going back to the 17th century at least; in the 19th century the practice of systematic violation of “the rules” even had a name: “The American System.”
The third option, taken up avidly by voices as disparate as Mike Pompeo and Robert Kuttner, is to slime China as a “totalitarian” state, an aggressive economic power, ruthlessly driven forward by its Communist Party. But this solution amounts to conceding the superiority of communism and the inferiority of capitalism andof democracy in the economic sphere. It thus completely negates the triumphalist posing that gave neoliberalism its legitimacy forty years ago.
The China that one sees with trained but unfiltered eyes does not so easily fit into these simple boxes. It has the following key characteristics:
it is a very large, administratively decentralized, internally-integrated economy, regaining in these respects attributes that were already familiar to Adam Smith;
it has a plethora of organizational forms – public, private, joint venture, state, provincial, municipal, township and village.
These are financed by a state-owned banking system that provides elastic support to activity in the interest of maintaining social stability, a paramount goal, and that has a large portfolio of non-performing loans to show for it.
The state at various levels enjoys substantial control of the land, hence has the capacity to earn land rent, and is capable of spurring and directing major investment projects, in urban construction, water management, electrical power and mass transportation, including roads, air travel and most recently high-speed rail.
The larger economy is capable of absorbing technologies from the West as well as of creating its own, and of meeting the standards of Western markets, thus having solved the consumer goods quality-control problem of historical socialism, and, finally,
China remains somewhat insulated from the predations of international finance by a large foreign currency reserve and the continued application of capital controls.
The Chinese model has succeeded, by trial and error, over a bit less than 50 years, in eliminating mass poverty, in creating an urban world that is largely secure, with an educated, healthy population. In 2020 it succeeded in mobilizing that population to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic – so far, anyway – as no Western society, except New Zealand, was able to do. It now offers its engineering services as an export to the developing world on favorable financial terms and with no ideological or diplomatic baggage. It has no need of advertising this; the success of the model and the appeal of the offerings speak for themselves. For this reason, the public-relations counteroffensive from the West focused on flaws and allegations both real and imaginary, is necessarily intense.
Will the Chinese engine, now increasingly tied to a reconstructed Russia and the gravitational pull of the world's largest demographic, productive, and trading region – the emerging Eurasian Economic Union and Shanghai Cooperation Organization – spell the end of the end of Bretton Woods? Is the writing on the wall, at long last, for the dollar-based international order?
The answer to this question depends not only on the size, productivity, and technical development of the Chinese nation and its economy but also on the role of Chinese financial assets in the world at large, in relation to the incumbent role of the financial assets of the United States, Europe, and other “Western” nations and international institutions, including the IMF.
China is now the world's largest economy by purchasing power measures. It is the world's greatest trading nation. But it plays neither the global financial nor the security role and has no evident ambitions to do so. Indeed, one may argue that to take on such roles would be antithetical to the Chinese development model, which rests on construction and production rather than finance, and which is entirely defensive militarily and reliant on international institutions, law, and cooperation for the preservation of world peace. China moreover protects its internal assets and limits the external reach of its economic actors with capital controls; it does not run current account deficits that would make obligatory the large-scale expatriation of financial claims, and to do so would be quite incompatible with its position in the structure of world production systems, and risk leading to internal instabilities that the Chinese state cannot afford. Finally, China holds over a trillion dollars in US government bonds, and cannot easily divest these, even if it wished to do so, without affecting either the price of the bonds or the exchange rate of the dollar, and so devaluing its own holdings.
What China can do, over time, is to take two steps that are evidently on the agenda. First, it can arrange for bilateral or multilateral payment mechanisms, with willing partners, that bypass the conventional medium of the US dollar. It can for example pay in RMB for Iranian oil and accept them back for Chinese goods. This works so long as trade in the non-dollar sector is reasonably balanced, so that the partner in the surplus position does not end up with large holdings of a financial asset it may not want, entirely trust, or be able to use in other transactions. But when trade is unbalanced for an extended period, one party or another may find themselves with financial assets denominated in units that are perceived to be insufficiently stable or liquid. And so the question of an alternative to the dollar-denominated reserve asset is, inevitably, raised.
The evident solution to this problem lies in a common reserve asset for the emerging non-dollar trading area. This is the historical role, of course, of gold bullion. In the modern world, gold is unlikely to play this role in full, given the extreme instability of its market price, while other commodities are subject to depletion through use as well as to speculative instabilities originating in activities outside the common reserve zone. The logical approach is therefore an international financial asset, comprised of a weighted set of the national bonds of the participating countries, as in recent schemes for a Eurobond, backed by the joint commitments, in proportion to size and capacity, of China, Russia, Iran and other participating countries, such as Kazakhstan and Belarus. In the realities of Eurasia, this means a predominantly RMB-based bond backed predominantly by China. The durability of such an instrument against the US Treasury bond can only be tested over time.
These are the basic conditions for the emergence of a non-dollar financial zone. It is easy to see that they are quite stringent. Efforts by one country or another to move in this direction may be deterred by the threat of sanctions, or thwarted (as in the case of Iraq in 2003) by war. Big changes in the world financial order appear to happen only under extreme circumstances.
The World Crisis and the Financial Future
The world crisis that erupted on February 24, 2022, with the outbreak of open warfare between Russia and Ukraine has already radically reorganized trade and financial relations. In short order Russian banks were disconnected from SWIFT and withdrew from Europe, many Western firms withdrew from Russia, NordStream 2 was “suspended,” airspace was closed, and the NATO countries froze Russian central bank assets while moving to confiscate the private property of Russian nationals alleged to be close to the Russian state. The freezing of central bank reserves constitutes, in effect, a technical default of the West toward Russia, even if interest on the blocked assets will continue to accrue. At first, the ruble fell and the dollar rose, as did the prices of oil and gas, Russia's major, and continuing, export commodities.
In this test of wills and power, Russia starts from a strong position. She is nearly self-sufficient in every essential, including energy, food, heavy machinery, and weapons. The loss of familiar Western consumer goods and services can be made up through local initiative – not lacking in today's Russia, compared to Soviet times – or from China. Russia's financial assets greatly exceed her debts, even after the loss of foreign-held reserves. In reaction to the blocking of Russian banks, Russia set up ruble accounts in those banks, to which Russian debtors could make payments to Western creditors – who would thus be blocked from accessing those payments, not by Russia, but by the action of their own governments. This gives Russia's commercial creditors at least a modest vested interest in the stability of the ruble. This interest has been bolstered by the Russian decision to demand payment for gas in rubles, effectively forcing Europe to work around its own sanctions or forego up to forty percent of its gas supply. So far, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria have agreed to pay in rubles, and Germany seems headed to the same decision. The ruble, at current writing, is trading above pre-war values.
The strategy of the United States was to pressure the Russian government through its oligarchs, Westernized elites, and urban upper classes, hoping to affect the internal politics of the Russian state. This approach appears based on a view of Russia formed in the Yeltsin era, and a view of the attractions of the liberal West to powerful Russians, that is quite remote from the present realities, both social and political, and from the balance of power inside Russia. The departure in late March of Anatoly Chubais from his last official post and from Russia is a clear sign of this fact. The apparent failure of US officials to grasp this point in recent years has to rank among the greatest intelligence disasters of modern times.
In short, Russia has been effectively excluded from the world of Western global finance, in ways that do not affect the foundations of her economy in very serious ways and are sure to strengthen the industrial-military elements of her political order. The driving force for this new division of the world is not Russia herself, but the asymmetric, mostly financial/economic response of the NATO powers to Russian actions in Ukraine. Russia has therefore been obliged to take steps that the Western-oriented elements of her own government, notably at the central bank, would not have otherwise contemplated. With the backing of China, Iran, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the studied neutrality of India, a new international financial system is in the process of being created. It is the creation in a real sense, not of Russia herself, but of top policymakers and strategic thinkers in the United States.
That said, Russia's global economic reach is limited. Her whole population is only a quarter of that of the United States and the European Union, her GDP (a measure that is not appropriate to the current test of strength) is much smaller, and her currency is historically unstable. So while Russia's military position is very strong, her contribution to a new financial order on the world stage is secondary to that of China – which as we have seen, remains and wishes to remain an integral part of the world economy and a large trading partner of both Russia and of the United States and Europe. While aligned with Russia in support of the latter's security goals, China is not yet trading its existing dollar reserves in bulk for something less prone to political interference but at the same time less liquid and less stable. India, parts of Africa, and Latin America will, no doubt, find ways to cooperate with the new system, but with exceptions such as Venezuela and Nicaragua (as well as Cuba), this is unlikely to bring on a breach of their existing relationships to the dollar and the euro.
Conclusion: A Dual System Has Arrived
A tentative conclusion is that the dollar-based financial system, with the euro acting as a junior partner, is likely to survive for now. But there will be a significant non-dollar, non-eurozone carved out for those countries considered adversaries by the United States and the European Union, of which Russia is by far the present leading example – and for their trading partners. China will act as a bridge between the two systems – the fixed-point of multi-polarity. Should similar harsh decisions be taken with respect to China, then a true split of the world into mutually-isolated blocs, akin to the coldest years of the Cold War, would become a possibility. However the consequences for the Western economies in their current state of dependence on Eurasian resources and Chinese production capacity would be exceptionally dire, so it seems unlikely (though who knows?) that policy-makers in the West would push matters that far.
In the present crisis, political leaders in the West have been under the most extreme pressure to wield powers that they do not have, in order to display a resolve that they may not feel. Their reactions must be judged through the prism of this pressure and the requirements of political survival. They have, so far, managed to refrain from taking fatal military risks, while deploying the full force of information-war assets, and concentrating on a sanctions regime that is part of a well-worn toolkit, demonstrably more costly in the Russian case to its designers than to its target. The evolution of political pressures is difficult to predict, and a catastrophic turn, leading toward general war, would not be without precedent. Threats to Transnistria or, even more, to Russia proper at Kaliningrad, are portents of the catastrophic possibilities.
But, for sake of argument, let's assume that the end of the world does not happen, and that relative restraint prevails until the fighting dies away in Ukraine. It appears that the next turn of the global financial screw will occur in Europe, most notably in Germany, as the implications of high energy prices and perpetually short supplies become clear. Germany's competitiveness is tied to Russian resources and Chinese markets; its politics and financial links are with the Atlantic alliance. Though stranger things have been known, it is hard to believe that Germany would permanently subordinate its industry, technology, commerce, and general welfare to Washington and Wall Street, even for the sake of the high principles now being so eloquently stated by her politicians and press. The tension between economic and political forces can only grow over time, leading either toward deindustrialization or toward a new relationship with the Eurasian East – a new Ostpolitik, so to speak. The advocates of this approach on the German Left have been crushed, which means that the policy itself can be taken up, after an interval – perhaps quite short – in some other part of the political spectrum.
That being so, while the dollar/euro-based global financial order is unlikely to fall immediately or in a single cataclysm, it seems plausible that it will lose exclusive hold over at least one more major participant and her economic satellites – perhaps sooner rather than later. And then there is another, in the background, ever-quiet, that almost-forgotten third-largest economy in the world, Japan. While anti-Russian sentiment there appears strong, what will happen, as time moves on, is anyone's guess.
Can the United States survive the rise of a multi-polar world? The question is absurd: of course it can. But not without a political upheaval, spurred by inflation and recession and a falling stock market in the short term and eventually by demands for a realistic strategy consonant with the actual global balance of power. The ultimate threat is not to the living possibilities of the country so much as to its political elites, based as they are on global financial rents and domestic arms contracts. A world moving away from exclusive reliance on the dollar will clip the wings of US finance. A multi-polar world requires multi-lateral security arrangements, incompatible with the present extent of US military power projection; adding more money to a dysfunctional force structure will not make the country safe or secure, and it will make inflation worse. On the other hand, a lower dollar would help revive domestic self-reliance on critical goods, an industrial strategy can begin the necessary process of reconstruction, while investments in infrastructure and new technologies can work to offset the impact of higher energy costs. The latter are necessary, in any case, to combat climate change, so that what is necessary for adjustment in the short run aligns, for once, with what is necessary for survival later on.
Multi-polarity, in short, could be bad for oligarchy but good for democracy, sustainability, and public purpose. From these points of view, it would come not a moment too soon.
References
Costabile, Lilia, 2022. “Continuity and Change in the International Monetary System: The Dollar Standard and Capital Mobility,” Review of Political Economy, published online March 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/09538259.2022.2038438
James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr, chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He drafted the first legislative plan to rescue New York City in 1975 and served as Chief Technical Adviser for Macroeconomic Reform to the State Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China from 1993 to 1997.
This paper will appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Political Economy. Adapted and used here by permission.
MIT economic historian Peter Temin discusses his new INET-CUP book, Never Together: The Economic History of a Segregated America, in which he shows how efforts to bridge the gap between races were always undermined, resulting in constant economic hardship for Black people.
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I'm here on the podcast for the second time with Dr. Peter Temin, who is a great influence in my life as an undergraduate at MIT, and have known him and one of my other mentors, our research director, Tom Ferguson, and he have been co-authors many things. I remember particularly papers on the 1930s, '20s and '30s in Germany as being very, very powerful. He's the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus in the economics department at MIT. He's done a number of extraordinary books over the years, but more recently, The Vanishing Middle Class has been... How do I say? It's almost like the talking points of INET. It's the guiding... When you travel, you buy a folder's guide, but when you talk about what INET's supposed to do, you read The Vanishing Middle Class and you get you off the... At least in the Global North that tells you what to do.
He's obviously written this new book, Never Together, about the problems of race in the United States. I remember him being a very profound speaker at our 2016 conference in my home city of Detroit, where we experienced firsthand in my upbringing, a lot of the problems and challenges that you underscore. This book is part of the studies in New Economic Thinking at Cambridge University Press, which is the INET series on what we think is at the cutting edge or the most important things to feature. So, Peter, thank you for being here and thank you for being part of our efforts to illuminate the challenges that we face.
Peter Temin:
Thank you. And I'm delighted to be here with you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
Well, we have a lot to cover today. A lot of very, very powerfully historic, sometimes uncomfortable historical experience, but sometimes you got to take the medicine in order to heal. I'm just curious, from your inner experience, how did you become inspired to write this book? Is there an aha moment or is it just the culmination of things? You're very good at economic history, analytic history, they're wonderful table charts, references to historical episodes that make your point. This book is... It's how I wish an economist was able to integrate all of these things. But I'm just curious, what triggered your setting off on this course?
Peter Temin:
Well, a couple of years ago when the American Economics Association was meeting in Atlanta, I figured who would I like to talk to. And that was Trevon Logan, a black economic historian that I like very much. And we talked and out of that talk came a paper that I wrote with Trevon, which is now up on the INET website. And then someone who knows the field said it looked very much like the outline of a book. And by that Trevon had been promoted to a time-consuming job at Ohio state. So I wrote the book on my own. So it grows out of the racial comments in The Vanishing Middle Class. And it starts with the constitution and the notion that when they said all men, that meant all white men.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I think I remember at the outset of your book.
Peter Temin:
Yeah.
Rob Johnson:
Just to create an example. I think you created something that echoed throughout the book. It was from the Statue of Liberty and a quote was, "Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless tempest-lost, to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Now, how would I say? Practice what you preach is what comes to my mind. The old-
Peter Temin:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
... Old song by Barry White. It feels like the vision we created in America to inspire people to believe in it and follow it is not what we've been doing.
Peter Temin:
Right. Well, at that point it meant both European and African immigrants. And the African immigrants were slaves and the European immigrants had farms and they used these slaves to farm their grounds. So on, and that led to inequality of income. So there were two attempts to include blacks in the mainstream economy. Reconstruction followed the civil war and Lyndon Johnson's grave, great society followed World War I and World War II, excuse me. This right. And the first one eliminated slavery, but it did not grant freedom for freedmen 40 acres and a mule. And the effects wore off by the end of the 19th century. Lyndon Johnson's great society followed World War II, promised black voting and education, but it ended more quickly under Reagan and Clinton.
And when trade hurt rural whites in the 1990s, whites reacted badly to both [inaudible 00:07:41] and that's because Gilded Ages increased racism. The Gilded Age followed Reconstruction. White south was secured by the 1876 Presidential Compromise. It brought the south into the US by excluding blacks. Then Jim Crow followed in the 1890s, which restricted black education and program, which lasted until World War II again. Our Gilded Age followed Johnson's great society. Rich people do not want to pay taxes and they want to reduce services to workers, blacks, Latinos, and other poor people. They imprisoned blacks and the other poor people.
Now the Jim Crow laws... The north industrialized and expanded west, the south remained agriculture and focused on crops. Jim Crow laws segregated blacks. Southern labor markets were not linked to Northern ones and Freedmen earned less than whites. And that continues until today. Laws and lynching discouraged black voting peaked in the 1880s and continued into 1920s. A great migration started in World War I when skilled blacks went north. Southern wages fell, all Northern wages rose. So Nixon started the war on drugs. He demonized blacks who opposed Vietnam and replaced Johnson's poverty war with his drug war.
The US now has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. [One out of] Three in black men go to prison during their lives. And drug laws are new Jim Crow laws. Blacks are 12% of population and 40% of prisoners. Incarceration is now stable in high levels, no releases or very few releases. I've read about a couple for COVID despite prison illnesses. Nixon's racism is shown from the few of his top advisors. John Ehrlichman said that Nixon had two enemies, antitrust left, and the black people. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the coming news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff confirmed this. The whole problem is really the blacks.
Okay. So the US, to repeat, has 5% of the world population and 25% of the world's prisoners. Mass incarceration is hardly mentioned in policy discussions. How many people know that one out of three African Americans men go to prison at today's incarceration rates. These are problems that urgently need to be addressed. America was in turmoil in the '60s through the 1980s. The urban riots spread in the late 1960s. The war on drugs started by Nixon expanded by Reagan. 1986 and 1988 laws at minimum jail terms for drug crimes. The penalty for crack cocaine was a hundred times the penalty for powder cocaine. Blacks used crack cocaine. Whites used powdered.
The Kerner commission issued in 1968... The commission clearly stated that the problems were societal. Riots were started by blacks trying for equality with whites. But Nixon created the war on drugs, crimes on individuals. He wanted to condemn blacks who oppose the Vietnam war. He wanted individual crimes to demonize blacks, which they still do, creating a new Jim Crow. That's from Michelle Alexander's book. Race and income were important. Race described mass incarceration incidents. Blacks are more imprisoned than whites. The differences increase with family incomes. More than three times higher for Morris blacks than white blacks.
Poor black boys are destroyed by prisons. No education, no workplace skills, unable to form families. Crime and prison are a way of life. Black men remain a permanent underclass. So rebel relief rule is narrowly nearly complete in many states. Frederick Douglas said in 1894, and these words of an escaped slave are true again now. And Stacey Abrams formed fair fight in 2019 a century later to get blacks to vote. Do we need another war to try again to desegregate our economy?
Rob Johnson:
That's an ominous thought. So let me ask you a little bit about the chart. So it shows that among the poor, the likelihood of blacks being incarcerated is much greater. It shows among the wealthy it's still a lot more, but it's diminished in proportion. But the thing that's not shown in the graph when I looked at it, is how hard it is for a black person to go from that lower level to that affluent level within a lifetime when there is incarceration, demonization, difficulty, getting jobs and difficulty getting education that's of the quality that would allow you to move up that path. So it's not all good news because not everybody has migrated out into the household rank of the wealthy. And that still isn't good news there. Coming back to your thought, we have to fight another war, there was a sense.
I remember reading things about Eleanor Roosevelt after her husband died and talking to Harry Truman about these people were there defending our Republic. They deserve access to all the things. They were kept out of certain universities. They were kept out of the social security system. If they were agriculture workers, there were all kinds of things still going on, but the pressure and the consciousness of leadership was changing. So you think right now, if we went and fought a war that we could make an irreversible change, or do you think it would be just another dice bun of gestures and then a counter-reaction puts right back where we've been?
Peter Temin:
Yes. Well, we may be approaching another civil war because the Southern Labor Association said that there was a tremendous amount of violence in 1921. So who knows where this is all going?
Rob Johnson:
Well, in reading your book, I could see this, which you might recall, oscillation. It was almost like a pendulum. People could see things that were wrong. The famous basketball player, Isaiah Thomas, who played with the Detroit Pistons for years, I saw him on a... His wife used to... Excuse me, his daughter used to work with my wife and I saw him on a show. It was like a video show with a woman named Laura Johnson in Los Angeles. And he said, "It's very frustrating to see the government resisting when you're talking about human rights. But what we really need is not human rights. What we need is birthrights. If you are a human being, you get the same portfolio as everyone else." And I thought that was a kind of how we get there is a different question, but I thought that was a very powerful sense.
And I, myself, I've studied a lot of how music reflects the stress in a society. And people talk about... Oh, the spirituals. My favorite writer on music is theologian, the late James Cone, who I used to interact with quite frequently at Union Theological Seminary. And he said, "The spirituals are about the afterlife. Nothing you can do in this life. But the blues are from the Jim Crow era when you are allegedly free, but you're not free. Blues is about defiance in code in the here and now." So they'd go in to the juke joint, knowing there were people with guns and nooses and they would sing in code. My baby left me, my baby left me. And sometimes even the boss man would say, "My baby is mean to me too." And they'd enjoy the performance. But what they didn't realize is the baby that left him.
The baby that was treating him bad, was code for their professional life, for working in the field for working in the cotton area. And so there was a rallying point from these different types of music that interacted with the social conditions. But what I keep seeing is, and as I read your book, I see it codified so nicely is... I won't say nicely, that's probably not right. It's daunting to read, but it's skillfully done. Is, we seem to have this urge to do the right thing as humans, to abide by the principles said of our founding documents, declaration of independence, bill of rights.
And then we don't do it. And sometimes it's for commercial reasons, sometimes just based on historic fear and we back off. And then we see an episode like lots of black people fighting in World War II and we back off. Then we do the civil rights movement. I remember James Baldwin being concerned when Dr. King was murdered, that the black Panthers would frighten people and create a counter-revolution, which as someone said, turn the war on poverty into the war on drugs. And you seem to bring these things to the surface over and over again, that it's almost like an oscillating pendulum, but the fulcrums not really moving very far.
Peter Temin:
That's right. That's very good. And I've written on that. There's a kind of equilibrium and you can derive that mathematically that says we're in a stable position. I was helped by Bob Solow, Nobel prize winner, who I'm still in contact with at Brook Haven, so on. And there's a PBS station special on the people going on the coming to the outcome of jail and trying desperately to get to be part of the white economy and jobs and so on. So I recommend that to everyone. And I told Bob about that and he was interested good.
Rob Johnson:
I'm grinning because Bob Solow was my faculty advisor when I was an undergraduate at MIT. And so I learned a lot from him and I'm very grateful for his support and guidance throughout my life. But when you talk about that, people emerging from prison and how to reconnect with the world. I remember something that you gave in a talk that I wanted to bring up. I do believe it's in the book. You talked about the kinds of behavior that economists might talk about. One would be customary behavior, doing what you did yesterday. And one was, I don't know, I'll call it inspired behavior. And the third was subjecting yourself to command behavior.
And that the people in the prison aren't allowed to grow that inspired behavior, that thinking about a better future, that support in regenerating. If you believe in redemption, somebody in prison might feel bad about what they did in an impulsive moment and want to learn and become a better person. And that's not on offer, but the command behavior is fiercely there, which probably wounds and scars people that makes it harder to come out of prison and regain trust in humanity.
Peter Temin:
Yes. Well, well, professor of Freeman at Harvard calls those the black elite, which are the residue of the great society of President Johnson. And they've done well and have been expected. If you get education, you can fit within the kind of education you need. And when I visited my eldest child, my daughter, Liz, who was coming to visit me this afternoon as the various books on there. And she said, "Do you realize that Colin already has more books than most people have in their lifetimes?" And that's why Pre-K Adventure, which is still in the bill, but the bill hasn't been passed say, "Because of opposition to this, which still keeps because the unemployment has come back, the power is very cautiously working for this. So he can try and avoid a recession at the end of the inflation." But the volatility has come for all these people that the Republican Party now embraces of violence. And so it's very hard to know where we're going to go from here.
Rob Johnson:
Let me explore that for just a second. Coming from Detroit, seeing the Midwest, obviously it's a black majority city, but what I've also seen is what I'll call the Trumpian reaction in outstate, Michigan, as the old saying, the rising tide raises all boats. Well, when the tide goes out, all the boats go down. And what I saw in Michigan, particularly, and it's been vivid since George Floyd's murder, is that these white people there are saying, "Wait a minute, the ship's sinking on me too." And they get, if you will, jealous that people are trying to talk about uplifting. And I don't mean doing it. I mean, talking about uplifting black people in 400 years of woundedness, and they use the phrase reparations. And these people say, "We're getting trashed as well." And they are very large numbers. And so I don't think, and you've talked about this and others have, I know John Paul who's on my board at Berkeley. It is that when the economy suffers, insecurity goes up, diseases of despair go up and racial animosity goes up. The blaming of others is a disease associated with despair.
Peter Temin:
Yes. And in Flint, Michigan, a Republican or governor sent supervisors to go on who wanted to cut money. And so he went off the river from getting food, water, and had illnesses, which is still continuing for this. Their settlements going on. And they have impaired the younger blacks in Flint. So it's a kind of Republicans doing what they wanted with the black population of Flint. And they're now back on the river, but they haven't had their pipes replaced even now.
Rob Johnson:
And these were lead pipes that created the toxins that created the disease. Right? I remember the Flint water crisis. And there was a woman there who's mentioned in your book-
Peter Temin:
Right. In Berkeley.
Rob Johnson:
... Who said, "What a tragedy it is that they aren't learning the lesson of those lead pipes and replacing them all over the country urgently." Tolerating the poisoning in this case, particularly of black people, is just horrid. And the irony too-
Peter Temin:
[crosstalk 00:29:31] very slowly. Like the infrastructure program that Biden did pass is only slowly getting started, which you can notice by the potholes in Cambridge. So, I remind that to my class. Okay.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And the irony in Michigan, whether it's Detroit Water and Sewage or Flint is you're sitting there... When I was a kid, my dad was a sailor. When you were on Lake Huron, when I was a kid, if you were thirsty, you could take a ladle and stick it into water and drink it. The good quality fresh water in Lake Huron is plentiful and not far from Flint, Michigan. The idea that happened there is just horrific.
Peter Temin:
Yes, it is. It is horrible.
Rob Johnson:
And you could almost say because of the rivalry between Detroit and what I'll call outstate, I wonder if the governor thought he was doing something to rally the enthusiasm by being cruel to the black people in Flint. That's just a hypothesis. I can't project onto the individual, but it seems awfully hideous.
Peter Temin:
Well, he was the man who reported the supervisor of Flint. So you can blame him.
Rob Johnson:
And the Detroit bankruptcy was an anomaly too, because if you have a company that goes bankrupt, it has no revenue to pay people. The state of Michigan had a tax base. So that I'll just say women that worked in Detroit for 45 years in the Municipal Public Service had their pensions caught in half in their healthcare removed. That's a choice. That's not bankruptcy. That's a distributional choice. It's a really ugly thing that they did with the...
Peter Temin:
And it's like mass incarceration. Nobody talks about it anymore in the policy grounds. It's just not changing at the moment.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I know where-
Peter Temin:
Not continuing.
Rob Johnson:
Heather Ann Thompson, who's a professor at University of Michigan and she's written books on Attica Prison and so forth, did some studies on when prisons were privatized and built in upstate Michigan. What happened is lots of fathers got arrested in and around Detroit and put in those prisons. And the performance in schools deteriorated because of the emotional turmoil of the children. And then teachers who were being assessed based on things like multiple-choice tests started to migrate out of Detroit because they were being penalized for something they had no control over. And so the entire social disintegration associated with accelerating the building of prisons and having them fully occupied was just ripping that culture apart. And I know that's been true. I've heard similar stories about Cleveland parts of Illinois, Atlanta, and-
Peter Temin:
And many people have gone back when the prejudice got to be too much, but even there they're put out for the prisoners, put them out for mining activities, for which famously they die often. And that's in my book. And an illustration of that. Yes and so on. Yes. I report all of these things that have done from Freedom's Day in Pittsburgh that made Trump reschedule his rally there to the problems elsewhere and other places where that had been done under blacks given equal rights then driven out of the city. Yes. So it's a continual process and we're by no means out of it today.
And people often write about prisons, often say that the incomes of blacks or the imprisonment of blacks is done by consultation with other people, and they often give the blacks. That's to avoid the minimum sentence there. And so they give them car theft or violent activity and send them back to prison, much more the blacks than the whites. And there's now a movement among policemen to end the traffic stops, which led one more black woman to commit suicide to end. And so let's hope that they carry this forward on a national plane.
Rob Johnson:
I have a friend who works on a television series called Law and Order. And I went for a walk with him, his name's Fred Berner. And he said to me that, as he studies what's happening in society, say since the time of George Floyd's murder, is a very deep conflictedness among people in the mid-career in law enforcement. In essence saying, and what I'll call PTSD symptoms, are occurring because these people thought they were coming in to play a role stabilizing society. Then you have an extremely unjust society, which is in unstable, and then they feel they have to escalate. And I'll add one other dimension. The Fred didn't say this. The absence of gun control in America makes law enforcement officers very frightened compared to those in other countries. And so, what I'll call meltdown emotionally of people in law enforcement who are caught in this cauldron actually tends to make them out of fear, even more aggressive.
Peter Temin:
Yes. And so we don't know where it's going to go yet, but it is dangerous. And so we are really very offended by it. Yes. And so we'll see what happens. But given the inequality of income, if or when the Republicans get there, get into power, most likely at this coming election, they'll try and turn back all of the progress that Biden has tried to think.
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, let's move from, I guess what I'll call... I'm a doctor's son. From diagnosis to remedy. Let's say a bipartisan commission from the United States Congress came to you and I, and they said, "We're really scared. The wheels are spinning off this vehicle called the United States of America. And we know we got to change course. So, Dr. Temin, what do you and Rob Johnson say is what we have to do to get back on track consistent with our founding principles and move away from this pendulum, which is what you might call a hideous equilibrium for many, many years."
Peter Temin:
Well, the way I end my new book is that you have to promote the education of blacks, which is why the Pre-K is still part of the reconciliation bill. Let's hope it lasts through the passage of it. Okay. And they need to give blacks the vote and make sure that they can vote so that they can express their views. And the Republicans are very fact getting the vote and reconfiguring the voting populations so that they can ensure them of getting a Republican.
Rob Johnson:
So you're talking about gerrymandering and voter suppression activities?
Peter Temin:
Organization is opposing on them. Yes. So they have become the party of violence too. Yes. So we'll see what happens with that.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But education is a key and voter suppression. And then I guess I was going to ask you, because we've alluded to it, when a person is in prison, I understand like Jim Heckman would talk about Pre-K, teaches you how to work with other people and exists in a school and by the time you're seven and your brain develops you are emotionally comfortable and you thrive. And all of society saves from having basically everything from prenatal nutrition to early childhood education. But what if somebody is in prison in midstream, say 26 years old and in prison, what do you do to take them out of that command behavior and have which you might call a rehabilitation or augmentation of their skills in a way where they can start to feel a confidence that they can live a better life when they leave prison? How do we put that together?
Peter Temin:
Very hard. And there are a number of private and tax-exempt organizations that try and give these prisoners a chance to reorient themselves. But the national government doesn't do anything, but give them a close back, send them on a bus home. So that's pointing out what you can do with the fringes, but it's not pointing out what's needed. And education at this point is dying at the moment in the United States because the teachers are so ill pay that you need to raise them. A few states have done so on, but the inflation is just keeping them even with the cost of living. So it's very hard at the moment.
Rob Johnson:
So are you hopeful that we might be, because of this suffering, whether it's climate or pandemic or racial... How would I say? Hideousness that you have documented in this book? Sometimes they say it's darkest before dawn. Are you at all hopeful that the stress now is going to propel us into a different direction than we've been on say since 1970?
Peter Temin:
Well, there were lots of demonstrations against the blacks. But after that, the budgets of the police were regained. So we're going to change, but I don't know how quickly and so on. And unless we can tax the Republicans and Piketty has a new book saying that for that and advocating taxes, but that's not going to come about very soon either.
Rob Johnson:
So, there may be light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a pretty long tunnel.
Peter Temin:
Yeah. That's what I'm saying.
Rob Johnson:
Okay. Well, Peter, I want to say to you... I mentioned at the outset that I've learned from you for many, many years. But I want my young scholars to understand how vital you are, how determined you are, how you've set yourself on a course. And it's not what you might call hiding in the apron strings of conventional wisdom. You've taken a path. You've seen things that concern. Historically, you've studied them in data and you've elevated and illuminated a very, very painful aspect of the country in which you live. That's what I call courage. And that's been in short supply within academic social science for a very long time.
Peter Temin:
It has been.
Rob Johnson:
I want to applaud and I want to thank you for that because when you set that example, my young scholars can watch an episode like this, or read a book like Vanishing Middle Class or Never Together. And it gives them inspiration. And when you said to me, the tunnel's long, I agree with you. But those young people are going to be at that end of that tunnel. And if they follow your example, I'm more optimistic.
Peter Temin:
Okay. Well, good for you. And let's hope it turns out your way, rather my pessimistic way.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But what I'm saying is, through your courage and your effort, ever so slightly perhaps, but you're changing the probabilities in my direction.
Peter Temin:
Sure.
Rob Johnson:
And so actions speak louder than words and your actions are contributing to a better outcome.
Peter Temin:
Thank you very much.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Thanks for being with me today. And thank you for writing this wonderful book and challenging us all to think about... How you say, never have to go back to being never together. And we put things back together.
Peter Temin:
That was my wife who has since died, made that title. Yes. And I agree with her. Yes. So let's hope that the book does promote your view of what's going to happen.
Rob Johnson:
Excellent.
Peter Temin:
Okay.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you.
Peter Temin:
Okay. My pleasure.
Rob Johnson:
We'll talk again. I'm sure you got more ideas bubbling up and I'm sure she's looking and down on you, grinning right now for this success. So I'll just wait for the next chapter whenever you're ready.
Peter Temin:
Okay. Thank you.
Rob Johnson:
Thank you. Bye-bye and check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
Moderna is seeking to be the first to offer a COVID-19 vaccine for the youngest American children, as it asked the Food and Drug Administration Thursday to clear low-dose shots for babies, toddlers and preschoolers.
Frustrated families are waiting impatiently for a chance to protect the nation’s littlest kids as people shed masks and other public health precautions while highly contagious coronavirus mutants continue to spread. Already about three-quarters of children of all ages have shown signs they’ve been infected at some point during the pandemic.
Moderna submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration that it hopes will prove two low-dose shots can protect children younger than 6, although the effectiveness wasn’t nearly as high in kids tested during the omicron surge than it was earlier in the pandemic.
“There is an important unmet medical need here with these youngest kids,” Dr. Paul Burton, Moderna’s chief medical officer, told The `. Two kid-size shots “will safely protect them. I think it is likely that over time they will need additional doses. But we’re working on that.”
FILE – Hudson Diener, 3, peeks into a cabinet during an appointment for a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine trial in Commack, N.Y., Nov. 30, 2021.
Moderna said two kid doses were about 40% to 50% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19, not a home run, but for many parents, any protection would be better than none.
That effectiveness is “less than optimal. We were hoping for better efficacy, but this is a first step,” said Dr. Nimmi Rajagopal of Cook County Health in Chicago. She’s anxiously awaiting vaccinations for her youngest patients and her own 3-year-old son, who’s ready to enter preschool.
“It gives me such peace of mind to know that hopefully by fall I’ll get him in school and he’ll be fully vaccinated,” she said.
Now, only children age 5 or older can be vaccinated in the U.S., using rival Pfizer’s vaccine, leaving 18 million younger tots unprotected.
Moderna’s vaccine isn’t the only one in the race. Pfizer is soon expected to announce whether three of its even smaller-dose shots work for the littlest kids, months after the disappointing discovery that two doses weren’t quite strong enough.
Evaluation process
Whether it’s one company’s shots or both, FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said the agency will “move quickly without sacrificing our standards” in deciding if tot-sized doses are safe and effective.
While questions are swirling about what’s taking so long, Marks pointedly told lawmakers earlier this week that the FDA can’t evaluate a product until a manufacturer completes its application. In a statement Thursday, the FDA said that it would schedule a meeting to publicly debate Moderna’s evidence with its independent scientific advisers, but that the company still must submit some additional data. Moderna expects to do so next week.
“It’s critically important that we have the proper evaluation so that parents will have trust in any vaccines that we authorize,” Marks told a Senate committee.
If the FDA clears vaccinations for the littlest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would next have to recommend who needs them — all tots or just those at higher risk from COVID-19.
“It’s very important to get the youngest children vaccinated,” but “moving quickly doesn’t mean moving sloppily,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and public health expert at Boston College. The FDA must “see if it’s safe. They need to see if it’s effective. And they need to do so swiftly. But they won’t cut corners.”
Many parents are desperate for whichever vaccine gets to the scientific finish line first.
“We’ve been kind of left behind as everybody else moves on,” said Meagan Dunphy-Daly, a Duke University marine biologist whose 6-year-old daughter is vaccinated and whose 3-year-old and 18-month-old sons are part of Pfizer’s trial.
The family continues to mask and take other precautions until it’s clear if the boys got real vaccine or dummy shots. If it turns out they weren’t protected in the Pfizer study and Moderna’s shots are cleared first, Dunphy-Daly said she’d seek them for her sons.
“I will feel such a sense of relief when I know my boys are vaccinated and that the risk of them getting a serious infection is so low,” she said.
FILE – A health worker administers a dose of a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine during a vaccination clinic in Norristown, Pa., Dec. 7, 2021.
The FDA will face some complex questions.
In a study of 6,700 kids ages 6 months through 5 years, two Moderna shots — each a quarter of the regular dose — triggered high levels of virus-fighting antibodies, the same amount proven to protect young adults, said Burton of Moderna. There were no serious side effects, and the shots triggered fewer high fevers than other routine vaccinations.
But depending on how researchers measured, the vaccine proved at best about 51% effective at preventing COVID-19 cases in babies and toddlers and about 37% effective in the 2- to 5-year-olds. Burton blamed the omicron variant’s ability to partially evade vaccine immunity, noting that unboosted adults showed similarly less effectiveness against milder omicron infections. While no children became severely ill during the study, he said high antibody levels are a proxy for protection against more serious illness — and the company will test a child booster dose.
“That’s not totally out of the realm of what we would have expected,” said Dr. Bill Muller of Northwestern University, who helped with Moderna’s child studies. “Down the road I would anticipate it’s going to be a three-shot series.”
Another issue: So far in the U.S., Moderna’s vaccine is restricted to adults. Other countries have expanded the shot to kids as young as 6. But while Moderna has filed FDA applications for older kids, too, the FDA hasn’t ruled on them. Months ago, the agency cited concern about a rare side effect, heart inflammation, in teen boys, a concern that hasn’t been reported in much younger children.
It’s not clear if the FDA will consider Moderna’s vaccine for children of all ages now or focus first on the littlest. But Muller already has had lots of parents ask why shots were being tested in tots before older kids were vaccinated — and says pediatricians and pharmacists must be ready with answers.
Burton said safety data from millions of older children given Moderna vaccinations abroad should help reassure parents.
While COVID-19 generally isn’t as dangerous in youngsters as adults, some do become severely ill or even die. About 475 children younger than 5 have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic’s start, according to the CDC, and child hospitalizations soared at omicron’s peak.
Yet it’s not clear how many parents intend to vaccinate the youngest kids. Less than a third of children ages 5 to 11 have had two vaccinations, and 58% of those ages 12 to 17.
Athens —
Greece lifted COVID-19 restrictions on Sunday for foreign and domestic flights, its civil aviation authority said, ahead of the summer tourism season that officials hope will see revenues bouncing back from the pandemic slump.
To fly in or out of the country, travelers were previously required to show either a vaccination certificate, a certificate saying they had recovered from coronavirus or a negative test.
From May 1, passengers and crew will need only to wear a face mask, the civil aviation authority said.
The summer tourism season typically begins after the Greek Orthodox Easter, which was on April 24. Greece is expecting high numbers of visitors this year, with officials predicting revenues reaching 80% of 2019 levels. That was a record year before the pandemic brought travel to a halt.
With infections waning, restaurants and retail shops returned to 100% capacity on Sunday, allowing customers in without proof of vaccination but with a mask.
Taipei, Taiwan —
China’s lockdowns to control the spread of COVID-19 are “cruel” and Taiwan will not follow suit, Premier Su Tseng-chang said on Sunday.
Having controlled the pandemic with tough border controls and quarantines, Taiwan has been dealing with a surge in domestic infections since the start of this year, with some 75,000 infections driven by the omicron variant.
But with more than 99% of those having mild or no symptoms, a handful of deaths so far and high vaccination levels, the government has moved to ease restrictions as it seeks normalcy and to gradually reopen the island of 23 million people to the outside world.
Taiwan’s giant neighbor China, by contrast, has enacted tough lockdowns in Shanghai and tightened controls in capital Beijing.
Speaking during a visit to Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control, Su said their pandemic-containment measures had been “praised by the world.”
“We will not lock down the country and cities as cruelly as China,” he said, adding Taiwan’s methods were “gradual.”
“We have a plan, and there is a rhythm to it.”
China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, and the two have rarely missed an opportunity to exchange barbs during the pandemic.
Last week, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said Taiwan’s new model of handling the pandemic would lead to many deaths.
Life has continued mostly as normal in Taiwan, though there has been disruption to some schools, and the government is eyeing further easing of quarantine rules.
All arrivals into Taiwan have to isolate for 10 days, rules that large parts of Asia have already ditched.
