Opinion | The Restaurant Industry Is Undergoing a Badly Needed Revolution | Opinion | Why Big Money Can't Easily Change Campus Politics | What to read to understand how economists think | An enduring "fact" about the 1918 flu might be wrong

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Opinion | The Restaurant Industry Is Undergoing a Badly Needed Revolution - The New York Times    Like so many other chefs, I was drawn to the restaurant business because it is exciting. I ignored its dysfunction and accepted that I’d forgo higher education, financial stability and holidays with family in order to share my craft with others. All it took was a pandemic, an enormous wave of inflation and an impossibly tight job market to force me and many others to burrow to the very core of what a restaurant does for its guests, workers and community and redefine it from the ground up. This is the silver lining of the pandemic and the never-ending economic uncertainty that has ensued: More places are finally figuring out how to make this business an actual business. Continued here Opinion | Why Big Money Can't Easily Change Campus Politics - The New York Times    But the ongoing donor revolts at a few notable schools — following administrative temporizing over the proper response to Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians and pro-Hamas statements by certain student groups — offer an opportunity to be constructive and prescriptive, not just critical. So for any rich person or rich foundation currently reconsidering the way they give to elite academia, here are some thoughts about the modern university landscape and what money can and can’t accomplish therein. First, Jewish donors probably can’t win the identity politics game. This point is made effectively by Jason Willick in The Washington Post, responding to those donors who seem primarily upset by the delay in official recognition of Israeli suffering and whose main desire seems to be that schools like Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania “acknowledge a cause near to their hearts as readily as they acknowledge other causes.” The problem, Willick points out, is that neither Israeli nor American Jewish interests have a strong position in the inverted hierarchy that dominates academic discourse. The State of Israel is too powerful, notwithstanding its cruel enemies, and broadly speaking American Jews are too materially successful to fit neatly on the “oppressed” side of the oppressor/oppressed binary. And the conspiratorial side of contemporary progressivism, its constant focus on “the domination of the powerless by the powerful,” can blur into old-fashioned antisemitic narratives, with the specter of Jewish privilege lurking behind the language of “white privilege.” (A recent study in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics found that Hispanics and African Americans agreed with antisemitic statements at rates similar to white Americans who identify with the alt-right — not an ideal indicator for the Jewish position within the circle of progressive allyship.) Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium What to read to understand how economists think - The Economist    Economics has a reputation as a dry, heartless subject, full of boring equations. The reality is much more interesting. Thinking like an economist, as I see it, comprises two main features. The first is always to think about trade-offs. There is no such thing as a free lunch, as Milton Friedman said. When someone gets something, they almost always give something up in return. If you go out with your friends, you won’t have time to go to the gym. If an economy’s wages go up, dividends might go down, or inflation might go up. And so on. The second is to try, when possible, to put numbers on things. When we say that China’s lockdowns are “strict”, what do we actually mean? If you think “job quality is getting worse every year”, how are you going to measure that? Sometimes it is not easy to quantify ideas, but it’s always good to try. In The Economist’s coverage we always try to remember these two lessons. Here are five books that should help you think in this way. Capitalism and Freedom. By Milton Friedman. University of Chicago Press; 272 pages; $18 and £15 Ignore the fact that Friedman was ultra-libertarian. It does not matter. Very often his arguments were plain wrong. That does not matter either. This book is perhaps the best way to learn to think about trade-offs, because that was how Friedman always thought about the world. For instance, consider minimum wages. Friedman accepts that the people who receive them take home more money. But then the trade-offs come steaming in. What, he asks, about the people who are now priced out of the labour market? Or take regulation of medicines. Unnecessary, he says. Yes, you may save some lives by insisting that pharmaceutical companies jump through hoops before taking a drug to market, as fewer dangerous drugs are sold. But those reviews will also cost lives, he says, by delaying the delivery of safe drugs to patients. (In 2006 we published this article on Friedman and his legacy.) Continued here An enduring "fact" about the 1918 flu might be wrong - Big Think    The 1918 flu pandemic (which lasted from February 1918 to April 1920) infected an estimated 500 million people and killed 25 to 50 million, representing between 1.3% and 3% of the global population. These numbers make the COVID-19 pandemic seem benign by comparison: As of July 2023, COVID-19 had killed an estimated 6.95 million people, representing roughly 0.09% of the global population. Researchers have proposed an explanation for the 1918 flu’s brutal impact on the young and healthy. They suggest that the generation of young adults during the 1918 flu was exposed to a very different H3N8 flu virus as infants between 1889 and 1892, which shaped their immune systems in a way that made them more vulnerable to the H1N1 1918 flu. But when Amanda Wissler and Sharon N. DeWitte, anthropologists respectively based out of McMaster University and the University of Colorado, searched for hard evidence to back the notion that the 1918 flu was disproportionately deadly to young adults, they came up mostly empty. The historical literature is filled with anecdotal accounts, but hard data was difficult to find. A 2013 paper claimed to find evidence of increased young adult mortality from the 1918 flu in historical registers from various cities across the U.S. and Canada, but methodological limitations make the findings difficult to accept. Continued here

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