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Why is America punching below its weight on happiness?
It's a good time to be alive in America. The wealthiest nation on earth, though, is full of unhappy people, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.
"The United States is the anomaly because it's rich. It's more or less democratic, but it has lower life expectancy. It has poor scores on math tests, has more obesity, more drug addiction, more violence," Pinker tells Ian Bremmer. So you'd think Americans would be fat and happy, but it turns out they are fat and unhappy.
Compared to its wealthy counterparts, the United States punches well below its weight in terms of happiness and quality of life given its wealth. Pinker offers many reasons for that anomaly, seen through the lens of his approach to measuring the state of human progress.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Is life better than ever for the human race?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld and on US public television. Check local listings.
After a summer from hell, will voters embrace climate action?
Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, is having a pretty good summer. He’s holding well-attended “Axe the tax” rallies across the country, promising to get rid of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his unpopular carbon tax, which is hitting drivers at the pumps.
This week, though, Poilievre had to postpone rallies in British Columbia and the Yukon because of wildfires that have forced tens of thousands to flee their homes and burned 15 million hectares of bush, leaving an area the size of Illinois in ashes. Since the carbon tax was designed to reduce the emissions that contributed to these catastrophic fires, it was bitterly ironic that Poilievre’s campaign against the tax was interrupted by the fires, but he is not changing course.
In both Canada and the United States, this has been a hellish summer, with so much climate-related extreme weather that it is hard to keep track. The summer started with wildfires and floods in typically temperate Nova Scotia. Heat records have fallen in Arizona. Ocean water the temperature of a hot tub has killed coral in the turquoise waters of the Florida Keys. A deadly fire laid waste to tropical Maui. A hurricane hit L.A.
Have voters been listening?
For decades, climate scientists have been warning these disasters would come if we don’t reduce the emissions that are warming the planet. Now that the disasters have started, will people recognize the urgency of the problem?
“That is the multi-trillion dollar question,” says Shari Friedman, Eurasia Group’s managing director for climate and sustainability, who has been working on climate since the 1990s.
“When I started on climate change, the assumption was that people weren't believing this, but that when people saw the effects, they would start to see it .. Now, I think the question is a little bit different because we're seeing the effects – it's pretty clear. And the question now is, what is going to change these trajectories?”
Climate scientists have done heroic work on a massive scale to understand and describe the processes that are causing extreme weather. But this has failed to convince voters to do what is necessary to bring down the emissions that are causing ecosystems to dissipate heat in ways that threaten human existence.
People are not wising up. The Pew Research Center, which tracks attitudes toward climate around the world, has observed a decline in the number of Americans who consider it a major threat, from 59% in 2018 to 54% in 2022.
The role of disinformation
Canadian pollster Frank Graves, of EKOS Research Associates, observed the same decline in Canada over the last three years, which he attributes to online disinformation. To many people, he says, climate change “is fake news. This is made up. This is a plot by the woke left to collect their useless carbon tax.”
In his most recent poll of Canadians, this month, while wildfires were top of mind, Graves observed that a growing number of people — mostly conservatives — blame arson, not extreme weather, for the blazes. (This is a pattern of misinformation found wherever there are wildfires.) Voters who believe fires are caused by arson, not a warming globe, will not support policies to reduce emissions.
“The patterns of who gets this disinformation are very, very similar in Canada and the United States,” Graves says, “because they are emanating from the same sources. And those sources are now telling people climate change is a hoax, and these forest fires are either just bad luck or, more pointedly, they are being produced by arsonists, saboteurs, activists.”
The issue, in both countries, is divided along partisan lines, with conservatives less willing than liberals to accept the views of climate scientists.
Riley Dunlap, emeritus professor at Oklahoma State University, has been studying American attitudes about environmentalism since the first Earth Day in 1970. He watched as the issue, which used to be of concern across partisan lines, became polarized in the 2000s. Now, he notes, opposing climate policy is an identity issue for Republicans – it’s up there with “God, guns, gays, and abortion.”
He has watched with dismay as opinions got harder, with Trump followers going against anything liberals support. Some 40% of Americans do not believe humans are causing climate change.
Researchers at American universities have found that attitudes about personal experiences of extreme events appear “socially constructed and interpreted through ideological lenses, rather than driven by individuals’ objective experiences of changes in weather and climate.”
Researchers found that hot, dry days — as opposed to sudden, extreme weather events — seem to convince some people that climate change is real.
“So far, actual experience doesn't seem to have had a significant effect,” Dunlap said. “But I'm open to the possibility that personal experiences and media coverage could be really shaking people up.”
If you thought this summer was bad …
Gerald Butts, vice chairman of Eurasia Group, who helped Trudeau implement Canada’s carbon tax, points out that researchers will have more opportunities to carefully study the effect of extreme weather on public opinion.
“This is the hottest summer of your life, but it's going to be one of the coolest of the rest of your life. Sure it's weird that the remnants of a hurricane are flooding the California desert while the northern part of the continent is burning. But we're going to see versions of that in every northern hemisphere summer for the rest of our lives.
“I think the deeper question is — because human beings are nothing if not adaptable — and part of that adaptation mechanism is, how do we tune out the things we don't want to see or hear? I mean, as these things get weirder and weirder, what is the new normal for what people can absorb, or will absorb, and react to?”
OPEC+ vs. the US
Oil prices soared Monday — and continued rising Tuesday — after a group of OPEC+ members (unexpectedly) announced that they'd slash production voluntarily by more than 1 million barrels per day. It’s the crude cartel’s response to expected sluggish demand for crude triggered by the recent financial turmoil in the US and Europe as well as China’s weak economic recovery.
The lion’s share of the slash — which follows a bigger cut of 2 million bpd in October — will come from Saudi Arabia, which pledged a 500,000-bpd reduction until the end of the year, matching an earlier promise by Russia.
Why are the Saudis doing this? Officially, Riyadh says it aims to balance markets, but it clearly wants to stop the price of crude from plunging further as the global economic slowdown hurts oil demand, says Eurasia Group expert Raad Alkadiri.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has ambitious spending plans, and he wants to get ahead of the curve before prices drop too much. (Indeed, the price of benchmark Brent oil hit just $73 per barrel last month compared to over $120 in the summer of 2022.)
But there's also a US angle. The Saudis resent the Americans for dragging their feet on replenishing the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the Biden administration has tapped into several times since late 2021 to bring down domestic gasoline prices from a whopping $5 a gallon to today's average $3.50.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, for his part, has been itching for a chance to get back at the US for leading the charge to enforce a $60 per barrel price cap on Russian oil among G-7 and EU nations. The cap is finally starting to hurt Russia's economy, although perhaps not as much as the West expected.
Japan's recent move to carve out an exemption to buy some Russian crude above the $60 limit is the first semblance of a crack in Western unity against Moscow. And the more expensive oil gets, the harder it’ll become to enforce the price cap — not to mention that US Republicans will jump at the chance to blame high gas prices on President Joe Biden.
Are the OPEC+ cuts a good or bad thing? As usual, that depends.
If you're in the US, you're probably thinking: Yikes, that’s pretty awful now that gas prices have stabilized. Even though they likely won’t reach last year’s levels, high energy costs are the last thing that Western central banks need as they fight to bring down inflation, which is extremely sensitive to wild swings in energy prices.
Yet, if you're MBS or Putin, you must keep prices above a certain level to keep your oil-dependent economy humming. We all know that the Russians will do whatever they can to push back against the $60 price cap, but Alkadiri says that "the Saudis are now showing that they are determined to keep prices up too — Washington be damned."
Thousands gathered at the Place de la Concorde to denounce the government’s use of a constitutional loophole to pass the pension reform, raising the retirement age without a vote in the National Assembly.
What We’re Watching: France’s fiery response, Poland’s first big step, Israeli president’s “civil war” warning
Macron bypasses the legislature on pension reform
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday made the risky call to bypass the National Assembly, France’s powerful lower house, and push through a very unpopular pension reform scheme.
As expected, protesters responded with anger. More than 300 people were arrested overnight, and on Friday morning demonstrators halted production at a fuel refinery and briefly blocked traffic on a highway outside Paris.
(A brief recap on the proposal that’s sent France into a tailspin: Macron’s government wants to incrementally raise the national retirement age by two years to 64 by 2030. Starting from 2027, workers will need to have worked for 43 years, up from 41, to access a full pension.)
Why’s he doing this? Macron has long said that France's public spending, 14% of which goes toward its pension scheme – the highest of any OECD country after Greece and Italy – is crucial to addressing its growing debt-to-GDP ratio. But this approach is very unpopular in France, where retirement is sacred and government interference is abhorred.
Fearing he wouldn’t have the votes in the lower chamber, Macron triggered a constitutional loophole to get the bill through (it had already passed in the upper chamber). But by taking this route – which his political opponents say renders the bill illegitimate, though it is legal – Macron now opens himself up to serious political blowback.
On Friday, a group of opposition centrist lawmakers — backed by the far-left NUPES coalition — filed a no-confidence vote against the government, while far-right leader Marine Le Pen announced she'll table her own. But any vote would need to pass by an absolute majority to topple the government – meaning PM Élisabeth Borne and the cabinet, not the president. Still, that’s very unlikely to happen, analysts say.
But Macron, who cannot run again after 2027 due to term limits, is not out of the woods. Unions have vowed to make the government pay, and prolonged strikes are expected. Meanwhile, far-left and far-right factions say they’ll intensify efforts to topple the French government.
Bibi rejects judicial compromise. What now?
It’s been another dramatic 24 hours in Israel as the country moves closer toward a constitutional crisis over judicial reform. President Isaac Herzog, whose role is largely ceremonial, came out with a compromise proposal to placate both the government — pushing to limit the power of the courts — and opposition factions that dub the move a judicial coup. Crucially, Herzog warned that the prospect of “civil war” looms large.
Five (out of six) opposition party leaders now say they support Herzog’s proposal, which they can live with despite not being perfect. But Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who’s increasingly powerless as he tries to appease a discordant far-right coalition, rejected the pitch, calling it “one-sided.”
Meanwhile, anti-government protests continued to sweep Tel Aviv and elsewhere, and scores of army reservists said that they will not show up for training in protest.
As the government moves ahead with its plans, the future looks more and more uncertain. What’ll happen if the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passes a law which then gets struck down by the Supreme Court? Would citizens — and the military — obey the legislature or the courts? When asked what to expect, Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli justice and foreign minister, said: "Anarchy.”
Polish fighter jets for Ukraine
Ukraine finally got its wish — sort of. On Thursday, Poland announced that it’ll supply Kyiv with MiG-29 fighter jets, the first NATO member to do so. That sounds like a big deal, right? Yes and no.
For months, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has been begging the US and its European friends for warplanes to fight Russia. But NATO allies have been slow-walking him because that might push the Russians to escalate on the battlefield. Yet, the Soviet-era MiGs — of which Ukraine has a few dozen relics — are hardly the modern warplanes Zelensky wants, and they’re no match for Russia’s Su-27s.
Still, perhaps Poland's gambit will encourage other NATO countries to follow suit — and maybe even force a rethink on sending Ukraine more high-tech warplanes in the future. After all, that's exactly what happened weeks ago with heavy tanks until the US and Germany changed their mind.A U.S. soldier watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein fall in central Baghdad, Iraq, in April 2003.
Was Iraq a success or failure?
On a visit to Iraq in the spring of 2021, I was chatting with a group of Iraqi and western friends – all current or former advisors to the Iraqi, US, or UK governments – when the conversation turned to whether the 2003 US-led war to depose Saddam Hussein’s regime had been worthwhile. The dogmatism, divisiveness, and emotion that characterized the debate in the run-up to the war were still evident. For some, ending the murderous brutality and atrocities of Saddam’s rule superseded any other concern. Others were more equivocal, pointing to the corruption, violence, and misrule of the US-bequeathed, post-2003 political order and the toll it has taken on the country.
On the 20th anniversary of the war, the question of whether Iraq is better or worse off and whether the cost in coalition lives and money was worth it is, almost inevitably, being revisited. But it is a feckless one. The reality of Iraq’s experience since 2003 cannot be captured by a simplistic dichotomy; the country is — as it always was — more complicated than that.
Some things are undoubtedly better. Representative politics has been entrenched. Elections — former President George Bush’s measure of democracy and freedom — are genuine contests that are seen as important to political legitimacy. Power has been transferred peacefully across seven successive governments.
The Iraqi media is one of the freest in the Middle East, with rival viewpoints on full display, and criticism of the political elite — unthinkable and deadly in Saddam’s era — is now common. And, after a disappointing first decade and a half, there are signs of economic stirrings underpinned by oil production that is now almost 50% above immediate pre-war highs.
Still, Iraq has fallen far short of the hopes and promises of the war’s proponents. While the country never became a failed state, it has flirted with it at times, especially during the 2005-2008 civil war and at the height of the Islamic State threat, when large swathes in the northwest of the country were beyond Baghdad’s control. Iraqi society still bears the scars of ethnosectarian violence and the divisions it bred.
Development and reconstruction have been slow and stunted. Corruption is endemic, and state services are shoddy at best. Islamist Shia militias act with impunity, answering to their own leaders and increasingly dominating government and state institutions. Meanwhile, the Kurdish region, beloved by its amply rewarded and vocal cheerleaders in the West, is increasingly divided between two warlord factions running what has long amounted to personal fiefdoms.
Washington (and London) bear a lot of responsibility for the outcome. The ignorance and hubris that guided pre-conflict planning and all that followed made for an occupation that was insufficiently resourced and lacked the most basic understanding of the country (or even its language). Hunkered down and detached in the heavily protected Green Zone, the US-led endeavor rested on feet of clay from the get-go, and Washington’s aversion to state building, combined with the disbanding of the Iraqi army and evisceration of the civil service, left Iraq without the tools for effective governance and administration.
Worse still, US post-war policy quickly fell prey to domestic political imperatives and the growing popular disaffection with the occupation at home, leaving the imperial timetable at odds with, and largely dismissive of, conditions on the ground in Iraq.
But the most corrosive aspect of US policy was the ethnosectarian political system it enshrined, dominated by a narrow coterie of identity-based parties that have ruled ever since. Bereft of any real understanding of Iraq or its society, and impatient for signs of “progress,” Washington officials took their cue from their nominal allies in the pre-war Iraqi opposition, turning a blind eye to their failings, and never quite realizing — or at least acknowledging — that, beyond ousting Saddam, their agendas were not the same.
Occupation on the cheap and on the run was never going to establish the foundations for the stable, prosperous Iraq that proponents of the war envisaged, but the kleptocratic, militia-dominated state that has emerged 20 years later is not wholly Washington’s fault.
The zenith of US imperial power, when its ambassadors chose governments, dictated laws, and forced through constitutions, is a distant memory. If the US built the exclusive political fortress that was and remains the Green Zone, the factions that it empowered have manned the ramparts to ensure their exclusive access and control would never be challenged. Power and privilege are what matters to this parasitic elite, not freedom and democracy, and they have taken full advantage of what they inherited to that end.
Iraq’s ethnosectarian factions have fractured over time, and newer faces and groups have come to the fore, but the underlying players and the political equation have remained largely unaltered. The current prime minister, Mohammed Shi’a Sudani, is the first since 2003 not to have been in exile, but most major party leaders such as Nouri al-Maliki, Hadi al-Amiri, Masoud Barzani, or Ammar Hakim are either remnants of the former opposition or their offspring.
Elections determine the relative balance of power among the main players, but successive Iraqi coalition governments have been broad affairs, no matter who leads them, allowing the oligarchy to protect their exclusive power while feeding from the trough. Political opposition, even within the protected confines of the elite, is still regarded as an existential threat. Meanwhile, the real opposition to the corrupt system is brutally repressed, as the government’s deadly response to the 2019-2020 demonstrations starkly illustrated.
Change in the near term is unlikely. Every new Iraqi government talks about reform, but the preservation of the system will remain the number one priority for Iraq’s leaders and their various regional and international benefactors. After over 40 years of war, sanctions, deprivation, and domestic violence, the majority of the population is exhausted, increasingly detached from politics, and largely resigned to the state of affairs.
There are pockets of opposition activism on the “Iraqi street,” especially in the Shia-majority center and south, the heartland of real power in Iraq. But it is disorganized, unfunded, and largely powerless relative to the leviathan that is the US-bequeathed Iraqi state. Good men do not last long in Iraq, either neutralized or co-opted, and the seeds of systemic change are few and far between.
Maybe this was always the most likely outcome. The flourishing liberal democracy that US neo-conservatives imagined would catalyze regional change was never in the cards. A poor vegetable vendor in Tunisia did more to bring about a democratic revolution in the Middle East than the US adventure in Iraq ever did, and the eventual outcome was greater authoritarianism across the region.
Thus, Iraq will likely remain a mismanaged, kleptocratic, violent, and underdeveloped state governed by a political elite that is consumed with self-interest and sustained by oil revenue, the force of arms, and regional and international powers that see the country through the narrow focus of their national security priorities.
Not the worst outcome that could have been imagined in 2003 or since, but certainly less than the Iraqi people deserve.
Raad Alkadiri is the managing director of Energy, Climate & Resources for Eurasia Group. He served as assistant private secretary to the UK Special Representative in Iraq from 2003-2004.
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Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt poses with the budget box at Downing Street in London, Britain March 15, 2023.
A new attitude and a new budget: Can the Tories make a comeback?
Weeks after the International Monetary Fund forecast that the UK will be the worst-performing advanced economy this year, British Chancellor Jeremy Hunt on Wednesday handed down a fresh national budget. (Though the independent Office for Budget Responsibility now says that the economy will only contract by 0.2% this year, an improvement on previous forecasts of 1.4%.)
Budgets can have a massive impact on politics. You’ll likely remember that ephemeral PM Liz Truss’ “mini” budget last fall caused the markets to nosedive, leading to her swift resignation.
As the UK grapples with a dire cost-of-living crisis and a sky-high annual inflation rate of 10.1%, Hunt tried to convey that the government will address falling living standards without overspending while also stimulating growth after years of sluggish economic performance. For context, real household disposable income, a key standard-of-living metric, is expected to drop 5.7% between 2022 and 2024.
Indeed, the budget laid out public spending measures opposed by some Tory hardliners, including a £4 billion additional investment in free childcare and an extension until the end of June of a £2,500 annual energy price cap to offset rising energy costs as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What's more, the Tories will stick to an earlier plan to raise the corporate tax rate by 6 percentage points to 25%, a move unpopular with fiscally conservative Tories. A significant budgetary development is the abolition of limits on the amount workers can build up in their pension funds before paying tax, which is aimed at keeping some professionals in the workforce for longer. There are also some tax breaks offered to businesses to boost investment.
Much of Hunt’s budget focuses on the need to plug a hole in the labor market and boost productivity after years of sluggish growth. Crucially, while the economies of other advanced countries including the US, Canada, Japan, and the EU now exceed their pre-pandemic levels, Britain’s GDP remains stagnant. This trend started after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and was further exacerbated by the Brexit fallout, which raised trade barriers and created a climate of uncertainty and chaos.
The challenge is now on Labour leader Keir Starmer to recast his party’s opposing message. Love him or hate him, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a mild-mannered technocrat who is on a mission to mend relationships around the globe, can hardly be accused of the gross incompetence that plagued his predecessors.
With general elections slated for next year, can Starmer maintain the 20-point advantage Labour currently enjoys after the implosion of the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson – or is this the beginning of the Tories’ comeback?The Graphic Truth: How does El Salvador's prison rate stack up?
El Salvador made headlines in recent days after President Nayib Bukele released photos of gang members being corralled into the country’s new mega-prison – a sprawling complex that will eventually hold 40,000 inmates. It’s the latest development in Bukele’s massive – and very popular – crackdown on gangs, in which Salvadoran authorities have locked up almost 2% of the adult population. (Never mind that US officials have recently accused Bukele of colluding with the very gangs he says he’s trying to stamp out!) El Salvador now has the highest prison rate per 100,000 people in the world – but how does that compare globally? Here we take a look at the countries with the highest official prison rates.
The Graphic Truth: How much it costs to supply Ukraine
As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, proponents of continued military aid to Kyiv say it’s a cut-rate investment for security while others wonder whether the cost is worth it. We look at how much the biggest suppliers spent on military aid to Ukraine as a percentage of their defense budgets last year.