Latest news with #Keynes
Scoop
19-05-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Trump Is Trying To Reverse The New Deal
After the end of World War II, the U.S. employer class—the capitalists—faced overlapping threats, both domestic and foreign. On the domestic side, a coalition of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), two socialist parties, and a communist party had grown large and powerful during the 1930s Great Depression. Together, they pushed hard and successfully for domestic policies collectively known as the New Deal. These policies included the establishment of the Social Security system, the unemployment compensation system, the nation's first minimum wage, and a federal jobs program that employed millions. Along with several other programs, the New Deal represented a leftward shift of state priorities. For the employer class, worse than those spending shifts were the corresponding changes in federal revenue sources. Sharply raised taxes on (and borrowing from) corporations and the rich funded the New Deal's massive program for the employees. This reallocated the nation's income and wealth from the top to the middle and bottom. As against the dominant trickle-down economic policies that were in place before and soon after it, the New Deal represented an experiment in trickle-up economic policies. Once World War II was over, the employer class wanted nothing more than to undo the New Deal, and to bring back trickle-down polices. A second domestic problem threatened the U.S. economy after 1945: the risk of backsliding into depression. Five years of huge wartime deficit finance finally lifted the U.S. economy out of the 1930s depression. When 1945 put demobilization of troops and redeployment of resources to peacetime production on the agenda, it also provoked fears of a reversion to depression. Leading U.S. politicians and academics, more or less influenced by Keynes's work, looked urgently to government interventions to prevent that. The U.S. employer class also perceived foreign threats. Chief among these was the USSR, the wartime ally of the United States. In service to the U.S. employer class, President Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) transformed perceptions about the USSR from a close wartime ally into a fearsome enemy bent on 'overthrowing the U.S. by force and violence.' Despite having suffered enormous wartime destruction, the USSR was quickly rebranded by U.S. mainstream politicians, media, business, and academic leaders as an extreme danger. Communists and their 'fellow travelers' were notoriously purged by what has ever since been called McCarthyism. Western European leaders also feared and turned against the USSR as Europe's eastern countries became the USSR's postwar socialist allies. These countries also became closer to the USSR as it supported and assisted successful revolutions against an already weakened European colonialism. At the same time, Europe's employer classes acutely feared their domestic communist parties that were by then strongly entrenched in their anti-Nazi resistance movements and organized labor movements. The 1930s depression strengthened them all (as it had in the United States). In Europe, labor movements, communist and socialist parties, and many of their supporters mobilized, trained, equipped, funded, and coordinated several anti-fascist resistances. By 1945, that resistance work led to the immense popularity of these parties and movements. Western European employers in each country feared the economic demands their domestic socialists, communists, and labor unions would make. Those demands would be backed by their workers' domestic political power and gain more support due to the USSR's geopolitical proximity. These conditions in the United States and Western Europe resulted in a shared commitment by their capitalist classes, leading to an alliance, which would embrace U.S. dominance—defined as 'free-world leadership'—in military matters and in mobilizing resources internationally against the USSR (NATO, IMF, and World Bank). The employer class in each of these countries focused their resources, along with those of their governments, to purge communists, socialists, labor militants, and their supporters as thoroughly as conditions allowed. The actions ranged from imprisonment and deportation to loss of jobs, income, and social influence. The alliance's central theme was to declare and wage a Cold War against both the USSR and its 'agents' inside the United States and European countries. The purges inside the United States included the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as Soviet spies. Those actions also entailed loudly favoring (and secret CIA funding) many of Europe's 'pro-Western' politicians and parties, media outlets, and student groups. The U.S.-European alliance added Canada and Japan to their bloc. The U.S. dollar and its global position lubricated everything this alliance was and did. The central ideological and political problem for the U.S. employer class after 1945 was how to accomplish the undoing of the New Deal and the United States' wartime alliance with the USSR. The solution it found was a well-coordinated, well-funded campaign featuring cohesive arguments articulated by institutions that could saturate global public opinion. Nothing less than a total turnaround in public opinion and policy would rescue U.S. capitalism from what its employer class saw as an existential crisis. There lie certain similarities with what Trump faced when he took office in 2025. In both cases, the employer class felt deeply threatened, especially due to the escalation of the political and economic dangers. Today, that class worries about crippling social divisions and tensions. The deepening inequalities of the distributions of income, wealth, and political influence have caused the promised American dream to be out of reach for the majority, which has angered them. The employer class also fears the deepening indebtedness of its government, its corporate sector, and the majority of households amid the worrisome decline of the nation's geopolitical position. China's growth over recent decades positions it as the first serious global economic competitor of the United States in a century (the USSR was too small an economy to ever achieve this status). Among the many consequences of China's growth, the fading global position of the U.S. dollar ranks high. As in the case of Truman taking power in 1945, Trump's second term is also defined by heavy cumulated pressures prioritizing breaking from dangerous and declining situations. The U.S. employer class's solution in 1945 was to destroy the domestic left and transform the USSR from ally to enemy. Trump's solution for the employer class is similarly to try to destroy the left but to transform Russia from an enemy to an ally. Despite important differences in time and global conditions—the United States left in 1945 was far more radical than it became later and is now—the similarities here are suggestive. In 1945, employers commenced undoing the New Deal. They eventually succeeded, but only partly. They managed an upward redistributive state, but they had to accept the shift to a regulatory state. Today, Trump seeks to complete burying the New Deal legacy by going further and undoing the regulatory state. The class politics of Trump carry forward the actions of his predecessors across the last century. The details, not the goals, vary with the circumstances. The transition from the USSR to Russia facilitated Trump's changed policy stance toward the country. The decline of the United States' organized labor movement over the last 70 years facilitated Trump's electoral appeal to the employee class. On the other hand, China's continuing rise as an economic competitor reinforces the employer class's worries about its status and security. More deeply, what disturbs the U.S. employer class now is the intertwined decline of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalism's global position. After 1945, the employer class reasserted its social dominance. It refocused the federal government on the twin tasks of purging supporters of the New Deal from the government, unions, and other social institutions and demonizing and containing the USSR as the evil global enemy. Anti-communism became the main ideological weapon to achieve this. The purge demanded that all those who supported the deal not only denounce communism but also show sympathy to such dogmas as 'state interference in the economy' is inefficient, wasteful, and inferior to what private 'free' enterprises could and would achieve. Communists, socialists, unionists, liberals, Democrats, and others associated with the New Deal got purged as believers in bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. At best, they were seen as agents of Moscow's crusades against democracy and individual liberty. Putting domestic communists first among its targets let the employer class link the domestic purge quickly and seamlessly with the Cold War struggles against the USSR. These actions against communists at home while waging the Cold War abroad aimed to defeat two evils at the same time. Over the last 80 years, the employer class, directly and through its power over governments, undertook a massive program of ideological change. It made the struggle between more versus less government intervention in the 'private enterprise economy' and 'the free market' an important issue in economics and public policy. Professional economists debated between Keynesianism and neoclassicism. Moderate politicians rallied around slogans that defined the struggle as being between 'meeting people's needs' versus suffering a 'authoritarian bureaucracy.' Extremist politicians called the state evil (often using communist, socialist, liberal, Democrat, and even terrorist as synonyms). The global 'free market' established after 1945 enabled the United States, which became dominant after the wartime destruction of all potential economic rivals (Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and Italy), to sustain that position through NATO on the one hand and demonizing the USSR on the other. Fighting communism abroad justified sustaining that dominance. Fighting communism at home justified destroying the New Deal coalition and thereby undoing the policy. Cold War leaders in the United States, representing both major political parties, carried out these policies consistently. The Heritage Foundation's 2025 report updates and expands them into a plan that Trump's regime is largely following. That plan targets what little remains of the New Deal: removing 'regulatory' state apparatuses. Trump's regime also accepts implicitly what it denies explicitly: that the U.S. empire and U.S. capitalism are in decline. Tariffs are the magic bullet to reverse all that and fast. Above all, they are implemented with the hope that they will return manufacturing to the United States. (This was promised by each of the presidents this century, but none of them delivered on it.) The tariffs might, at best, slow the decline, but their political, economic, and ideological costs and the retaliations by many nations will make the magic bullet fail. Much the same happened to many empires earlier that failed to stop their decline with their magic bullets. Tariffs will likely function much like the proposal of 'taking back' the Panama Canal or Greenland and loudly squeezing symbolic gains from Canada and Mexico. These plans are aggressive disguises and over-advertised offsets for the painful reality of the declining empire and economy. It is worth remembering that in all empires, when their rise inevitably turns into decline, those who accumulated the greatest wealth and power use these resources to retain their position. They thereby offload the costs of decline onto the middle and lower classes. The latter suffer more and face the consequences first. Trump's first budget proposals starkly exhibit this offloading. For most empires, such offloading proves socially divisive and ends very badly. Recent national election results in Canada and Australia suggest that those classes are beginning to grasp the Trump regime's larger goals and have voted against politicians seen to be insufficiently opposed to them. Some polls in the United States point in similar directions. Europe's leaders are worried too. Most of them have been long and deeply complicit with the United States' goals and methods. Voters may punish them for failure to resist the repeated anti-European policies and attitudes flowing from the Trump regime. European leaders risk voters finding them guilty by association. So many break away from Trump by exaggerating support for Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine and demonizing Russia. The roots of resistance expand and deepen. Author Bio: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff's weekly show, 'Economic Update,' is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.
Coin Geek
08-05-2025
- Business
- Coin Geek
The cost of having the world's reserve currency
Homepage > News > Finance > The cost of having the world's reserve currency Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Back in the 1960s, French Finance Minister Valéry d'Estaing once referred to the United States' ability to issue the world's reserve currency as an 'exorbitant privilege.' What did he mean by that? Being the reserve currency issuer has allowed the U.S. to borrow cheaply, run trade deficits indefinitely, and dominate global finance virtually unchallenged for the better part of a century. Yet, there's a flip side; few consider the costs of having the world's reserve currency. In this article, we'll look at those costs, how they drive geopolitics and economics today, and whether there could be an alternative to the almighty USD. The birth of the dollar's dominance—Bretton Woods In July 1944, the Allies, led by the United States, designed a new financial system at Bretton Woods. According to the terms, the U.S. dollar would be pegged to gold at $35 per ounce, and all other currencies would be pegged to the dollar. However, not everyone in attendance favored this system. Aside from the Soviet Union, which openly opposed it, economist John Maynard Keynes thought it was flawed and offered an alternative: the bancor. This was to be a supranational currency, not issued by any specific country, that would be used only for international trade. Keynes also proposed the creation of a global institution called the International Clearing Union (ICU) to handle trade balances, a set of rules to penalize those running persistent trade surpluses, a mechanism to adjust and stabilize exchange rates, temporary overdraft facilities for countries to use, and national currencies would be pegged to the bancor. However, it wasn't to be. Due to its leverage, namely gold and industrial might, the United States' proposal won out; the rest is history. Triffin's dilemma means guaranteed instability While the USA gained many advantages from having the global reserve currency, there are always tradeoffs in economics. Having a national currency act as the reserve currency introduces Triffin's dilemma, named after Robert Triffin, who introduced it in the 1960s. Triffin's dilemma means that the United States has to run trade deficits to supply the world with dollars to use for reserves and trade. However, doing so guarantees long-term instability by undermining confidence in the USD's value. In short, the world needs lots of dollars to trade with, so to provide liquidity, the USA runs trade deficits (exporting dollars). However, persistent U.S. deficits undermined confidence in the dollar in the long term as foreign countries began to doubt gold convertibility, which ended in 1971 with the Nixon Shock, or that the dollar would maintain its purchasing power. The hidden price the USA has paid While having the world's reserve currency allows the USA to dominate global finance and borrow cheaply, this comes at a cost. The financialization of the American economy, rising levels of personal, corporate, and public debt, and the hollowing out of the American manufacturing base are just some of the downsides. The consequences of all of this can be seen very clearly today. As this system enters its later stages, political destabilization increases, and populism rises. The anti-globalization nationalist movements and the trade war with China are some signs that the system is breaking down and is no longer serving a large segment of the American people. The U.S. record debt levels and the interest paid on them are also becoming an unavoidable fiscal and political problem. But let's not forget the benefits Of course, having the world's reserve currency comes with lots of benefits. If it were all downsides, the U.S. never would have agreed to it in the first place. The main benefit is being able to borrow at low rates. Global demand for USD and Treasuries means the U.S. can borrow at lower interest rates than almost any other country. Economists correctly say the USA has the strongest companies and the biggest consumer market, but both are due, in part, to the low interest rates that finance both. Having the reserve currency also means that U.S. imports are cheaper. This increases the standard of living, allowing Americans to buy an abundance of goods from all over the world at a relatively affordable price. The goods may not be made in America, but they are cheaper, and most of the people who lost their manufacturing jobs have been absorbed into other, higher-paying industries further up the value chain. It also allows Wall Street to dominate global finance. Much of the surplus other countries earn by trading with America is recycled into Treasuries, corporate bonds, equities, and other assets. Essentially, America buys goods with cheap credit, and the world recycles the profits back through Wall Street, allowing it to dominate the global financial industry. All of this combined gives the United States unrivaled geopolitical leverage. In addition to political power and influence, it can sanction enemies via SWIFT and even seize their USD central bank reserves. So, we could say having the global reserve currency is a Faustian bargain with tremendous advantages and costs. Nonetheless, it's an advantage many countries would grab in a heartbeat. Signs of stress—de-dollarization and rivals It's no secret that the USD system is under stress: the President of the United States has said so. While America's 47th President doesn't say it directly, he has identified the trade deficits as unsustainable and has expressed a desire to close them and deal with the debt. Other signs that the monetary order is under stress include de-dollarization, with oil contracts in yuan with BRICS nations pushing de-dollarization, digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum offering alternatives, and the financial position of the United States itself; few would call it good. Of course, this is somewhat inevitable; no reserve currency has lasted forever. While the USD is ubiquitous and could not be abandoned without anything short of a new Bretton Woods convention, there are increasing numbers of competitors and calls for independence from the American system, and there's increasing concern about the financial and political stability of the USA itself. Scalable Bitcoin could potentially act as a new bancor Where does all of this leave us? Are we doomed to go from one reserve currency to the next, burning through one monetary system after another with inevitable turbulent transitions as they come to an end? Not necessarily. It's worth considering how Bitcoin (the scalable version) could be an alternative to Keynes' bancor idea. It has the following qualities to make it suitable: It's neutral, not tied to any particular nation-state. The limited supply of 21 million means it is truly sound money. It's decentralized, governed by a fixed protocol and distributed nodes. This means that Bitcoin cannot be manipulated for political advantage by any nation-state and cannot be debased. Bitcoin could also act as an automated version of Keynes's International Clearing Union: countries with persistent deficits would simply run out of Bitcoins. Likewise, countries that ran persistent surpluses would be incentivized to spend them or face deflationary pressures (HODLing would not be good). Essentially, this means a Bitcoin-based monetary order would have market-driven self-corrective rules that balance trade. Unlike the current system, which the United States can wield as a political weapon, Bitcoin transactions cannot be controlled by any one party. There's no need for correspondent banking networks and the power they put in the hands of a few elites; transactions are peer-to-peer, and anyone can participate. Bitcoin would also avoid Triffin's Dilemma by eliminating the need for any country to supply it. It could serve as a neutral, apolitical, sound unit of account for international trade used by central banks, corporations, and people. However, to serve this purpose, Bitcoin must scale. BTC's throughput capacity of seven transactions per second won't cut it, and second-layer solutions like the Lightning Network destabilize the economics of the system and introduce security vulnerabilities. Scalable versions, such as BSV, allow central banks and corporations to use it for settlements while making retail payments, remittances, and micropayments possible. This is not to say Bitcoin is the sole answer or that the current dominant player would allow it without a fight. However, should the world look to the scalable electronic cash system Bitcoin was designed to be rather than the quasi-investment it has become, it could be a part of a potential solution to the current system's woes and could act as a neutral currency in the style of Keynes's bancor but with many other features, he couldn't have imagined back in 1944. Watch | Mining Disrupt 2025 Highlights: Profitable trends every miner should know title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">
Wall Street Journal
02-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Trump Is Right About Trade Imbalances. Does He Know How to Fix Them?
In early September 1941, John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, retreated to his country house to try to think. The U.K. was at war with Germany, and bombs were falling on London with devastating monotony. But Keynes was trying to think about peace, not war. Hitler had already come up with a plan for how he would restructure the world economy under the Third Reich, raising the question: What would the Allies do if they won? The short answer was: No one really knew. There was no plan. But there were urgent reasons to come up with one. The conventional wisdom was that the economic mess following World War I had helped to bring about World War II. So how would the Allies keep history from repeating itself?
Time of India
30-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Should India manage UK? Two decades or so from now, the idea may not look outlandish
"...Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back". John Maynard Keynes said that. Keynes was British, and possibly the world's most famous economist ever. He was also the man 'who saved capitalism from itself'. It was his idea that govts can spend their way out of recession that overturned the dangerous orthodoxy of balanced budgets. Modern capitalism owes the idea of a welfare state to Keynes and to Marx, who wasn't English but did all his world-changing writing in London. Back to Keynes' quote: what he was saying is that policymakers get stuck on old ideas, and therefore fail to spot new opportunities. That's true of academics and journalists, too, by the way. They grow up with what they think are fundamental ideas about organising human affairs, and stick to them. One such idea is the sovereign nation-state. Most take this to mean that the boundaries of a nation-state must remain frozen forever, and that no nation-state must ever surrender the right to govern itself. Think about it for five minutes, though. Nation-states are a very new thing in human history. Most of human history is defined by the absence of the modern notion of nation-state. And even in modern, pos-war times, neither the idea of a nation-state nor the concept of sovereignty remain unchallenged. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 3 Reasons to Plug This Into Your Home Today elecTrick - Save upto 80% on Power Bill Learn More Undo New nations have come out of old nations, within some nations, some parts are all but sovereign. Borders are still being challenged. Immigration has challenged and will continue to challenge ethnic/cultural uniformity within nation-states. A century back, the world-spanning British empire seemed unbreakable. Ten years from now, Britain itself may break up. Point is, as Keynes said – don't get fixated on old notions. That's why, say what you will about Trump - and there's plenty to say – you must credit him with questioning the fixed idea of nation-state and sovereignty. He was crude and jingoistic when he said he wants Canada and Greenland. But he was also pointing to the possibility that today's boundaries and sovereignties needn't last forever. So, here's an idea – a few years, or perhaps a couple of decades down the line, India should offer to manage Britain. Ok, most people reading that bit would think this is the voice of a mad scribbler, to paraphrase Keynes. But let's not get our knickers in a twist – as Brits would say. Instead, let's try to think this through. First, this idea doesn't imply anything as terrible and unaesthetic as a military venture. Not at all. The idea is that India, sometime in the future, will offer to run Britain, to mutually beneficial outcomes. Second, this idea is based on what can be reasonably extrapolated from current economic trends. India will be, a few decades from now, a seriously big economy. PwC projections, and those by others, say by 2050 – that's just 25 years from now – in PPP terms, India's GDP will be $44.1 trillion (second largest after China). Britain, most likely, is in irreversible economic stagnation. Already, minus London, its economic stats look a lot worse than they do on standard GDP tables. Most pundits don't see any serious prospect of this changing. One sign of this is the flight of capital from UK – many reports point to wealthy individuals decamping, the calculation being that their wealth is better invested in geographies with better growth prospects. PwC data projects Britain's GDP will be $5.4 trillion 25 years from now. So, India will be roughly 9 times bigger than UK in GDP terms. Therefore, third, the idea that a heavyweight economy like India can manage Britain isn't as outlandish as it seems now. Fourth, since this will be a utterly non-military, non-violent arrangement – unlike imperial Britain's management of India – there will be no question of desecrating British national honour. Fifth, think of how much the two nation-states share already. The obvious ones are: English language, India keeping the English game, cricket, alive, Indians' passion for England's football league, Brits' love for curry, Indians' love for whisky. More fundamentally, perhaps, both nations govern themselves via Westminster style electoral democracy. Sixth, and this is a point not appreciated by even those looking at Indo-British relations now, Indian immigration into Britain and the huge success of the Indian diaspora across professions, mean that Brits are already used to the idea of Indians running big things in their country. Indian-origin people figure prominently in UK's rich list, PIOs run big firms, you can't imagine the British healthcare system without them, academia is full of PIO professors. And 'Indians' are now handsomely represented in British politics. Seventh, companies from India are already big players in UK. Not just Tatas , the most frequently cited example. Reliance bought Hamleys, Taj hotel group owns St James Court, Infosys bought Capco. Grant Thornton estimated that in 2024, there were 971 Indian-owned UK businesses. These numbers will inevitably rise. Eighth, it all ultimately boils down to economic self-interest. British imperialism didn't last in India because it looted India – that, along with demands for sovereignty, is what motivated pre-independence Indian nationalists. If Brits had made India a prosperous colony, popular anger may have been less. So, when India, a big, robust economy, tells Britain, a small, struggling economy, it's interested in managing British affairs, with the promise to revitalize growth and incomes, logic dictates the proposal will have merit. Even more so, if India guarantees that the British political system will remain as is, with no interference from India. Ninth, some might ask, what's India's payoff? Answer: A strong presence in the Atlantic and, via Britain, quick access to European markets. Tenth, some may ask, what about the British royals? Well, what about them? Assuming they last another 25 years, they can be exactly as decorative as they are now. To end where we began, the silliest response to radical new ideas is to dismiss them outright. The least we can do is to think through them.
Time of India
26-04-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Warmer planet makes social mobility harder
Warmer planet makes social mobility harder By the end of this century, sea levels will be a foot higher than in 2000. The average person is 31 years old today, and given that global life expectancy is 73.5 years, they may be dead by 2068. So, why should we worry? Didn't Keynes say, 'The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs'? But climate change is affecting us now. It has a bearing on your mood, your income, and your children's grades. University of Pennsylvania economist R Jisung Park drives home these points in his book Slow Burn. Take income first. It's an acknowledged fact that income inequality is rising. The rich, who live, travel and work in air-conditioned spaces, are getting richer, but the poor have stagnated in a hot and sweaty place. A study by University of Chicago economists found that worker productivity in India declined 2-4% for every degree Celsius rise in temperature above the comfortable level. If the 'mean temperature' at the workplace crossed 25°C, which could mean day temperature of 30°C and night temperature of 20°C, output fell 32%, or almost a third. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Trade Bitcoin & Ethereum – No Wallet Needed! IC Markets Start Now Undo Now, people who make bricks, weave cloth, etc, get paid per piece of product made, so while they suffer in the heat, their daily earnings drop. That's not fair, but they can't stop working because they aren't qualified for white-collar work. Their children could break out with good education, but as Park shows with data, heat is making this harder. When researchers correlated 4.5mn exam results of students in New York City schools with the temperature on exam day, they found that student performance fell by 3-4 points on days when the temperature exceeded 32.2°C. This is a small penalty for someone who usually scores 95%, but a setback for a child who passes with low marks. Park says 'average' students are 10% less likely to pass on a hot day than on a cool day. Now, poorer students – children of those poor labourers – typically are at a disadvantage because their homes are crowded, noisy, lack ventilation, and get hot and stuffy. So, passing exams with good marks and getting into good colleges with scholarships, indirectly, stalls upward mobility. Generally speaking, leaving out exceptions like Singapore and UAE have 8% lower per capita income for every 1°C rise in average temperature, within US, hotter municipalities tend to be poorer. That's because places like Mumbai will have 100 extra days of mean temperature over 32.2°C by 2060, relative to the pre-industrial age. Beyond income and education, heat makes us more error-prone. Data from 150,000 tennis matches shows players were 7% more likely to double-fault on hotter days. Analysis of 500 helicopter crashes showed a strong correlation between temperature and human error. And a British navy experiment in the 1950s revealed that errors in reading Morse code jumped from 11-12 per hour in the 29.4-32.2°C temperature range to 95 per hour at 40.5°C. Oh, and people start honking sooner at traffic lights on hotter days, and rates of rape and murder inch up with heat too. A warming planet clearly isn't a good place for your average Joe and Jane.
